Children's Book Reviews: Week of 8/13/2007

Stein's (Cowboy Ned and Andy) pen-and-ink illustrations conjure a place readers will wish they could visit, a tiny island that pokes up out of a bay. Drawn in mossy greens and golds, the island is home to a very young bear—so young that when the leaves start falling in the autumn, he's a little shocked: “He tried to catch them and put them back on... but it was not the same.” The bear doesn't despair; he grows sleepy, goes off to hibernate and wakes in the spring. This set of events is depicted in a series of panels trained on the entrance to the bear's den; the single tree above it loses its leaves, is blanketed by snow, and receives visits first by a rabbit and then by a pair of cardinals.) Eventually the bear sticks his head back out to greet the spring sunshine and spies the tiny buds on the trees. “ 'Welcome!' he cried. And, he thought, the leaves welcomed him.” Many things contribute to the success of Stein's tale: the joyously colored panels that hang on the pages like paintings—more intimate, somehow, than double-page spreads—the island's eight trees and their leaves, which seem lively and animate and entirely worthy of friendship; the innocence of the bear; and Stein's willingness to let the story assume its own haiku-like shape. His autumnal pictures seem to glow, while the bear himself has the irresistible appeal of a well-loved toy. All ages. (Aug.)

Using a two-in-one-format for his first outing as an author, Fischer (illus. of Peter Pan in Scarlet) interprets the song “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” from the perspectives of an earthling boy and his alien counterpart. After reading one version, readers can flip the book over and enjoy the other. The two stories converge at a “pop-open” center that extends the height of the spread (younger children will require assistance managing this bit of paper engineering). The parallel narratives open with each boy launching himself into space: the earth boy uses a tricycle tied to helium balloons and a skateboard ramp, while the alien blasts off in a sailing ship. When meteors pummel the two spacecraft, the boys discover each other adrift with their respective pet dogs; the center spread reveals that they have somehow managed to jerry-rig a two-man vessel from the debris. The digitally rendered pictures have the slightly smeared textures and bouncy colors of graffiti, and there are plenty of nifty details—the game-but-dubious pooches, one of which is a robot, are especially fun to follow. But the wide-eyed characterizations are an oleaginous cross between anime and kitschy Keane paintings; despite their surplus of energy, the renderings have a flat quality that makes it hard to know where to focus. All in all, a bumpy voyage. Ages 2-6. (Aug.)

Pfister (the Rainbow Fish books) introduces an inquisitive duckling who leaves his mother and siblings to explore the area surrounding their pond. He encounters several animals (none of which the text identifies by name) before a cow (a “brown monster” who has accidentally licked the napping Charlie with her alarmingly large tongue) tells him about a nearby zoo. Charlie decides he wants to go there and dons a baseball cap emblazoned with the word “zoo,” which is inexplicably lying in the reeds. The narrative then switches gears and becomes more factual, providing information about the habits and habitats of animals at the zoo. The graphics carry the book, with elaborately die-cut pages offering a partial glimpse of the animal being described before its identity is revealed. Some visual effects are mildly jarring, among them the anthropomorphized Charlie's resemblance to a stuffed animal, a startling contrast to the realistically rendered zoo animals. But the work is classic Pfister, and his fans will be tickled to accompany Charlie on his first visit to the zoo. Ages 3-up. (Sept.)

When all of his classmates are able to name their special talents during first-day-of-school introductions, Jack's lack of a stand-out specialty makes him feel left out. With Alex good at building sand-castles, Candace good at drawing cats, and so on, a forlorn Jack declares, “I am not good at anything.” His perceived want of a childhood forte is even reflected in his attire: he wears a telling white stripe across his shirt, while his fellow pupils all have motifs on their tops corresponding to their talents, e.g., Victoria—good at dog training—sports a picture of a white pooch on her red blouse. Cocca-Leffler (Clams All Year) employs her characteristic cartoon-styled characters. With their large, round heads, wide-set eyes and pencil-thin necks and limbs, they set a perky and cheerful tone. The teacher (who's good at gardening and wears flower earrings) winds up saving the day for Jack. After he rattles off all the children's names and talents (“I am not good at spelling like Michael... I am not good at bug catching like Olivia”), Miss Lucinda points out that he is good at remembering. Although the tale presents an almost-too-perfect scenario, it does provide a springboard for discussions about the many ways kids can think of themselves as talented. Ages 4-8. (Aug.)

Nash's (Flat Stanley) irresistible retro-inspired illustrations light up this fantasy about a toy that magically comes to life. When Jed finds his father's toy farmer in the attic, his father says, “Craziest toy I ever had!” Then his dad puts on “a secret little smile and winked at Jed as if he knew something that he wasn't telling.” When Jed awakens in the morning, his green bedroom rug has become a brown dirt field, which the farmer is plowing in his red tractor. Crops spring up; instead of fairytale, Jack-in-the-Beanstalk vines, this farmer's sprouts are like mechanized sculptures, looking as if they were formed of pipes decorated with scrolling vines. A pumpkin sports an old-fashioned skate key instead of a stem, and when it grows to gargantuan proportions, wheeled ladybug toys crawl over it. Keeping the story within Jed's fantasy world, Nash depicts the “people” the boy interacts with as toys also—a robot, a stuffed dog, wooden dolls—and eventually they convince Jed to enter the pumpkin in the county fair, where he wins a grand champion blue ribbon. When the toy farmer and all his transformations disappear, Jed's father consoles him by showing Jed his own grand champion ribbon, and says, “That Toy Farmer will show up again. He always does!” While Pelletier (The Amazing Adventures of Bathman!) describes Jed's imaginative adventure competently, the overused ending undercuts the book's effectiveness. Ages 4-up. (Aug.)

What you have heard before is nothing.” So begins this strikingly illustrated adaptation of Beowulf. Restricting his vocabulary almost exclusively to words with Anglo-Saxon origins, Rumford (Seeker of Knowledge) fashions a type of epic language: “It was then that Wiglaf showed his true heart-strength. Shieldless, with seared hands, he stuck his gleaming sword into the dragon. This freed Beowulf, who drew a knife from his belt and buried it deep inside the fire-snake.” Rumford's own “heart-strength” comes through in his art, pen-and-ink and watercolor illustrations that convey the ninth-century action with 21st-century immediacy. Large panels offer detailed views of pivotal scenes, and Rumford's expert use of line generates an almost visible degree of motion; when Grendel's mother menaces Beowulf, he seems virtually to fall as she advances with her ominously curved knife. Behind the art and text panels in the first two sections lurks the dragon that is to prove so crucial in the end; in the concluding section, increasing numbers of crows foreshadow Beowulf's death. A very skillful presentation. Ages 9-12. (Aug.)

Robots, ducks, melting snowmen and other mute creatures, all rendered in sweet and simple drawings, go through some very big, very human ordeals in Varon's (Chicken and Cat) elegiac and lovely graphic novel about friendship. Dog buys a build-your-own-robot kit and assembles a new best friend for himself. But a day at the beach leaves Robot's joints rusted and immobile, and Dog is obliged to abandon him there. While Dog spends the next year trying to fill the hole in his life left by Robot—and assuage his guilt—Robot lies inert on the beach, dreaming of rescue and escape. Dog's episodic stories are particularly poignant in the way they mirror the human tendency to “try things out” in the hopes of meeting some emotional need; Robot is an avatar for all children who wonder why they aren't receiving the love they think they deserve. In a conclusion both powerful and original, Robot ends up reworked into a radio by a raccoon grateful for the music, and forgives Dog, even if Dog doesn't realize it; for once characters don't have to wind up back together to find happiness. Tender, funny and wise. Ages 8-up. (Aug.)

A rowdy group of students and their eccentric teacher star in Fleming's (Muncha! Muncha! Muncha!) collection of determinedly loopy vignettes, each of which ends with an Aesop-like moral. On the day before school opens, the frantic principal still has not found a teacher for the notoriously unruly fourth graders. In walks Mr. Jupiter, whose credentials include working as a translator for Bigfoot, discovering the lost city of Atlantis and studying at the Coochie-Coochie Institute for Misbehaved Monkeys; he is hired on the spot. When he refuses to react to his students' misbehavior, they think up pranks guaranteed to rile him, but no one dares to pull them off (moral: “It is one thing to talk about it, another to do it”). In another tale, a boy who is struggling with math wishes he were back in kindergarten, where tasks were easier, but then is forced to participate in humiliating activities when he goes to help out with the younger class (“Be careful what you wish for—it might come true”). Packed with puns of varying cleverness, the fables range from pithy to protracted, the morals from spot-on to strained. Even with the inconsistencies, there's plenty to laugh at and even to ponder. Ages 7-11. (Aug.)

In her first stand-alone book, Applegate (the Animorphs series) effectively uses free verse to capture a Sudanese refugee's impressions of America and his slow adjustment. After witnessing the murders of his father and brother, then getting separated from his mother in an African camp, Kek alone believes that his mother has somehow survived. The boy has traveled by “flying boat” to Minnesota in winter to live with relatives who fled earlier. An onslaught of new sensations greets Kek (“This cold is like claws on my skin,” he laments), and ordinary sights unexpectedly fill him with longing (a lone cow in a field reminds him of his father's herd; when he looks in his aunt's face, “I see my mother's eyes/ looking back at me”). Prefaced by an African proverb, each section of the book marks a stage in the narrator's assimilation, eloquently conveying how his initial confusion fades as survival skills improve and friendships take root. Kek endures a mixture of failures (he uses the clothes washer to clean dishes) and victories (he lands his first paying job), but one thing remains constant: his ardent desire to learn his mother's fate. Precise, highly accessible language evokes a wide range of emotions and simultaneously tells an initiation story. A memorable inside view of an outsider. Ages 10-14. (Sept.)

Doyle (The Meanwhile Adventures) intertwines two story lines about children in search of missing mothers in an intriguing if hard to categorize novel. Gráinne's mother, Rosemary, left her marriage, her daughter, and Dublin for America 13 years earlier, when Gráinne was five, and hasn't contacted the girl until now. Reacting to Rosemary's announcement that she's coming back to Ireland to meet her daughter, Gráinne's stepmother, Sandra, decides to take her two sons—Gráinne's half-brothers—to Finland on a “wilderness safari,” to escape the tense reunion. Chapters alternate between the two disparate settings, not always to good effect. Gráinne, perhaps understandably, is angry and unlikable, “a terrorist”; in an opening scene, Sandra and Frank, the children's father, clean up shards from the cup of coffee Gráinne has hurled at Sandra. The girl's tentative rapprochement with her long-lost mother comes too easily, at least in Doyle's restrained, shorthand-like exposition, and neither character seems fully developed. On the other hand, the boys' sojourn in the Finnish woods crackles with excitement as the two befriend the huskies that pull their sleds and learn enough to launch a daring rescue mission when their mother fails to turn up at a station one night. Fans of Gary Paulsen's survival stories will enjoy bouncing alongside Tom and Johnny as they head out into the frigid darkness in search of their beloved Mam, but these readers won't go for the Gráinne story line. Parents might find the revelations and narrative parallels more poignant than the target audience will. Ages 12-up. (Sept.)

Oh, crap, don't swat me.” Those are the first words spoken by Elizabeth, a six-inch-tall, sarcastic “Little,” upon meeting 14-year-old T.J., a soft-spoken goody-two-shoes. T.J. feels depressed because she has to give up her beloved horse when her family moves to the suburbs of De Lint's (The Blue Girl) mythical town of Newford. Elizabeth has family troubles of her own—she has run away, and shortly after she meets T.J., her parents and siblings disappear. Together, the girls set out to speak with Sheri Piper, a local children's book author who has written about Littles (and who previously appeared in De Lint's short story collection, Triskell Tales 2). But their plan is interrupted when a gang of bullies steals T.J.'s backpack with Elizabeth inside. The narrative alternates between the girls' perspectives, as Elizabeth uncovers information about her family history and T.J. attempts to connect with Sheri Piper. Although the two protagonists could not be more different in terms of temperament (not to mention size), by book's end they've both matured into winsome heroines. A sprinkling of pop culture references can feel jarring, as though the book were trying strenuously to be contemporary. However, on the whole, De Lint's latest—which he based on a short story that appeared in last year's Firebirds Rising anthology—adeptly braids the fantastic and the everyday. Ages 12-up. (Sept.)

Australian picture-book author and middle-grade novelist Shanahan's first book for teens is an uproariously funny, surprisingly intense read; a savvy blend of sharp wit and weight grounds its otherwise over-the-top humor. As 14-year-old Gemma Stone explains, “In our family, when anyone starts riding the big wave of their emotions, we say they're chucking a birkett,” Birkett being the name of her older sister Debbie's last “disastrous” boyfriend. Most of the birketts are thrown by Dad and Debbie, Gemma's soon-to-be-married older sister. But now that Gemma's getting older and trying to figure out who she is and what she wants, her propensity for blowing an emotional circuit have increased exponentially—especially in matters of love. When she's cast as Miranda in her school's production of The Tempest, along with handsome, popular Nick Lloyd as Prospero, Gemma can hardly contain her excitement, even when troublemaker Raven De Head is cast as Caliban. Shanahan goes to town with no-holds-barred caricatures. Debbie's fiancé proposes on his knee in the spice department of the supermarket (“Will you spice up my life and be my wife?”), the opening salvo in the author's sendup of brides (and grooms) who ought to be blushing. The heavier side of the story, in which Gemma realizes just how wrong her impressions of Nick and Raven are, comes close to predictability, but thoughtful characterizations of the De Heads (and gleeful views of the Lloyds) save it. An unexpectedly painful showdown ends the novel with Gemma achieving emotional clarity. Ages 12-up. (Aug.)

Raging hormones, angsty rants and reckless behavior fuel this accomplished black comedy about coming of age in middle-of-nowhere Kansas in 1988. Debut author Uhlig brings the quintessential stuck-in-Hicksville atmosphere to idiosyncratic life by drawing plenty of small-town details. Arthur Flood, the narrator, can't wait to graduate high school and leave—that is, assuming he can get past the sheriff, who has effectively blackmailed Arty into dating his daughter, the unlovely Geraldine, and she can't wait to lose her virginity and press Arty into marriage. Then there's Mrs. Kaye, Arty's high school English teacher, who has been conducting an affair with him in the back of the Floods' hearse (yes, the family business is undertaking, and it's dying, pun surely intended, thanks to aggressive competition from the new Golden Rule chain). As the residents tune in to Dallas on TV, the local soap operas include arson, lots of alcoholism and the de rigueur beautiful, mysterious girl from out of town who changes the protagonist's perspective. Giving Arty a Sister Carrie and his town a Main Street (and another character the dialogue to shore up the references), Uhlig lets readers know that the stereotypes are intentional, occasions for jokes as well as insights. With all of his propensity for exaggeration, the author manages to portray Arty as someone readers can identify with: his ambitions to make a future for himself and his desires loom at least as large as the outrageous situations that bedevil him. Ages 14-up. (Aug.)

Hopkins's hard-hitting free-verse novel, a sequel, picks up where Crank left off. Kristina now lives in her mother's Reno home with her baby, but constantly dreams of “getting/ high. Strung. Getting/ out of this deep well/ of monotony I'm/ slowly drowning in.” When her former connection turns her on to “glass”: “Mexican meth, as/ good as it comes. maybe 90 percent pure,” Kristina quickly loses control again. She gets kicked out of her house after her baby gets hurt on her watch, starts dealing for the Mexican Mafia (“No problem. I'll play straight/ with them. Cash and carry”) and eventually even robs her mother's house with her equally addicted boyfriend. The author expertly relays both plot points and drug facts through verse, painting Kristina's self-narrated self-destruction through clean verses (“My face is hollow-/cheeked, spiced with sores”). She again experiments with form, sometimes writing two parallel poems that can be read together or separately (sometimes these experiments seem a bit cloying, as in “Santa Is Coming,” a concrete poem in the shape of a Christmas tree). But in the end, readers will be amazed at how quickly they work their way through this thick book—and by how much they learn about crystal meth and the toll it takes, both on addicts and their families. Ages 14-up. (Aug.)