Children's Book Reviews: Week of  9/17/2007

Fierce mythical beasts find a helpmate in this visually striking but ultimately saccharine children's debut by a prominent comics artist. When a teacher asks her pupils about their goals, a pigtailed girl peeks from behind a stack of books. “ 'I want to be a doctor to the shy creatures,' said the shy girl. Or she would have, if she wasn't so shy.” If she would only talk, the girl would describe how she imagines bandaging Bigfoot's stubbed toe, repairing a unicorn's broken horn (“so he wouldn't be forlorn”) or treating a phoenix for heat rash. Mack, in a radical departure from his Kabuki graphic novels, salutes Dr. Seuss (by way of creep-meister Charles Burns) in his art and layouts. When the introvert balances on a tower of drinking glasses and introduces her “very shy fish,/ who lives in a very high dish,” Yertle the Turtle and The Cat in the Hat are points of reference. Yet the Seussian grace is missing. Mack's mostly polished ink line drawings, tinted with opaque colors against a white ground, occasionally look clumsy, and the girl imagines her unspoken wishes being greeted by mechanical scorn: “ 'Ha ha ha!' the class would laugh.” Mack pairs a gentle soul with misunderstood monsters, but his cloying whimsy and flatfooted rhymes suggest that he has yet to find the right voice. All ages. (Sept.)

With snappy internal rhymes and pared-down illustrations, Schertle (All You Need for a Snowman) and Phelan (The New Girl... and Me) chronicle the yearly cycle of “a boulder-big bear with shaggy, raggy, brownbear hair everywhere... except on his no-hair nose.” With his ultra-bushy coat to protect him and a naked nose to guide him, the bear happily eats his way from spring through fall: snapping up salmon from a river; raiding a honey-filled tree despite the bees; lolling in a blueberry patch, gobbling “the berries and the bushes, too” until his nose turns blue. Winter presents the one serious challenge to his untroubled sybaritic existence (“A very hairy bear DOES care about ice cold air on his no-hair nose”), but with a little ingenuity, that worry is put to bed—literally and figuratively. Phelan's easy-does-it, fluid draftsmanship on sepia-toned pages reflects the text's low-key humor, gaining energy from splashes of riveting color (the scene in the blueberry patch merits a look). It's fun to see the many ways the illustrator fits his beguiling behemoth of a hero onto a page or spread, always conveying the sense that the fellow is as cushy (and about as soigné) as an unmade king-size bed. Ages 3-7. (Sept.)

In this wisp of a tale, the cutie-pie protagonist is “ordinary in every way”—with one major exception: while other goats are content to chomp on garbage and clothes, she loves anything that grows in an orchard. Then, having chowed down on apples, pears and cherries, she does what readers probably wish they could do, if it weren't for the constraints of polite society: she simply spits out the pits and seeds—“Plippety plip!” —as she trots back to the barn. Little Apple Goat doesn't think twice about the long-term impact of her actions until a storm destroys her beloved fruit trees, and all the seeds and pits she's been unintentionally planting create a brand-new orchard every bit as fecund and pretty as its predecessor. Church's (One Smart Goose) cartoon animals and cheery rural scenes, rendered in boldly outlined collages and watercolors, exude a happy, toy-like charm. But kids may be bothered by the way time passes—it takes years for the orchard to establish itself, and Little Apple Goat is still the same spunky kid she was in the opening pages. Ages 3-7. (Sept.)

Mark Twain would have approved of this tall tale, which posits that the Loch Ness monster began life as a “tiny sea worm... no longer than your thumbnail.” Luckily for the worm, an American girl named Katerina-Elizabeth travels to Scotland on an ocean liner in 1925. “Katerina-Elizabeth found, sadly, that her parents had ordered oatmeal for her every day,” and she prefers other provisions. Under the baleful eye of a Charles Addams–ish waitress, the picky girl jettisons bowls of oatmeal into the sea, and the worm enjoys many hearty breakfasts. Magoon (Hugo and Miles in I've Painted Everything!) renders these scenes in a '20s palette of sepia brown, murky gray and briny green, showing the worm becoming a large, snakelike creature that ripples alongside the ship. At the destination, Loch Ness, the monster-to-be misses Katerina-Elizabeth but gets a pleasant surprise: “All along the lake the next morning, the worm heard the plop of oatmeal being hurled by children out the windows of their thatched cottages.” (Just wait 'til the tourists try haggis.) A neurologist, Flaherty (The Midnight Disease) spins her debut children's yarn in a deadpan voice that gives added oomph to her hyperbole (Nessie grows “as long as the main hall of an elementary school”). Her wry tone and Magoon's droll watercolors lend unexpected charm to the mystery monster, so fond of good nutrition and so helpful to finicky eaters. Ages 4-8. (Sept.)

Sunny the Meerkat lives in the Kalahari Desert, where it is “VERY dry and VERY hot,” writes Gravett (Wolves), winner of the U.K.'s Kate Greenaway Medal. What's more, his large family is “VERY close. Sometimes Sunny thinks they are TOO close.” He sets out to see if his Mongoose family relatives inhabit more salubrious digs, sending home postcards that are tipped into the pages like flaps. “Dear Mum, Dad and Everyone,” reads a postcard from the rainforest, where he visits his Liberian Mongoose cousins. “It is raining. QUITE HARD. Hope the weather is better at home. Loads of love from Sunny Rainy... P.S. Great Aunt Maureen was right. I should have packed an umbrella.” Finally realizing that there's no place like one's natural habitat, Sunny returns home to a joyous celebration. The book's novelty can't quite conceal that the humor is stretched—at least in the text; the pictures of the meerkat blend naturalist observations with nutty anthropomorphic details (e.g., an adult meerkat rests under a beach umbrella while giant ants perform acrobatic stunts before his electric fan). The handsome watercolor and ink illustrations make the most of the elongated horizontal format; Gravett conveys not just how a landscape looks, but also how its lighting and climate feels to a very small mammal. The scenes among Sunny's nocturnal cousins are particularly striking. And there's no denying that her meerkat have tons of animal magnetism. Ages 4-8. (Sept.)

Lili, the heroine of this perceptive classroom drama, is so reticent that her teacher marks her absent even when she's there. When it's time to buddy up, “Lili's stomach twisted and her mouth froze closed,” and Lili goes partnerless. Lili seems willing to accept the consequences—there's a scene of her contentedly reading alone in the classroom during recess—until a bossy girl named Cassidy gloms onto her and takes advantage of her shyness. But when Cassidy tries to mistreat the class guinea pig, Lili finds both her voice and a true best friend. Schindler (The Snow Globe Family) is a good match for Choldenko's (How to Make Friends with a Giant) restrained but deeply empathetic writing; his cartooned characters and soft, penciled textures convey all the real-life angst of school without feeling maudlin or overwhelming. Readers will identify with Lili's authentic triumphs as she vanquishes not only the bully, but her own anxieties as well. Ages 4-up. (Sept.)

The “notorious cheese thief Fingers McGraw,” drawn as a pale-pink rat in a bandit mask, absconds with his favorite dairy product in this mixed-media spoof of the hardboiled genre. His nemesis is “ace lawman detective Jumbo Wayne Jr.,” a stern elephant in a bobby's blue-black gear (this book originated in the U.K.), and Fingers enlists readers' help in avoiding capture. Expository captions, printed in an uneven typewriter font, chart the crime Dragnet-style: “11:00 a.m. It's a race against time.” Colored voice bubbles, superimposed on photographs of gritty sidewalks, give Fingers's perspective. “Hey, kid! Yeah, you! Listen, you gotta do me a favor!” the rat hisses, whizzing by on a yellow moped. In an adult-friendly homage to Bogart and Bacall (almost certainly unappreciated by children), he instructs collaborators to signal if they see an elephant: “You know how to whistle, don't you? Just put your lips together and blow!” During the getaway, two flat gray feet imply the jig is up—but a turn of the page reveals a rhino. A long flexible schnozzola sniffs out the rat—but the nose belongs to an anteater. Vere (the Tag-along Tales board books) takes his cues from the photos-plus-comics sequences of Mo Willems's Knuffle Bunny and from the mock-naïve magic-marker drawings and collages of Lauren Child. Newspaper-clipping endpapers supply a backstory and postscript, reinforcements of the book's old-fashioned cops-and-robber parody. Ages 5-7. (Sept.)

In his kinetic interpretation of Carroll's famous verse, Myers (Jazz) gives the poem a contemporary urban setting and a basketball theme. As the book begins, a girl looks over her shoulder while jumping rope with two others. A flip of the page shows what has distracted her: the dread Jabberwock, a towering, dark figure holding a basketball, flashing ominous-looking teeth (“The jaws that bite”) and displaying enormous, seven-fingered hands (“The claws that catch!”). A boy takes on the task of besting the beast, donning stark white shoes (“his vorpal sword”) and wordlessly challenging the Jabberwock to a game of one-on-one. Electric hues in the backdrops set off Myers's stylized figures and large multicolored font. While the merit of imposing a narrative logic on a work celebrated for its nonsense remains debatable, Myers's version will expose the Carroll classic to kids who otherwise may not encounter it. Ages 5-9. (Sept.)

How a young Paul Gauguin copes with grief—finding solace in art—is the subject of this French-Canadian work, which can be somewhat unsettling in its imagery and themes. After his father dies on the family's ocean voyage from Europe to Peru, Paul “sees” his father being carried away by a big orange balloon whose surface bears a crude line drawing of an anatomical heart (other passengers see only a setting sun). First-time illustrator Arsenault paints Paul's vision as well as his spry-looking imaginary dog in ruddy hues that stand out against the predominantly subdued grays and blues, bright spots that speak to Paul's innocence and resilience. Though some might find the ghostly white, disproportionately large faces of Paul's family disturbing, their paleness echoes the story's solemn tone and the jarring subject of a parent's death. When an older gentleman passenger befriends Paul and teaches him that with art “you can bring things to life… or prolong the life they had,” Paul paints the huge sun over the ocean (which viewers incorrectly interpret as the Japanese flag). Croteau's lengthy text gracefully relates these events, but without the presence of any historical notes, readers will be left wondering how much poetic license the author has taken. Ages 6-9. (Sept.)

Lewin's (Peppe the Lamplighter) stunning, realistic watercolors are the highlight of this otherwise muddled WWII home front story. The young narrator's father has been sent overseas, and the world feels scary—even the placid horses that pull the trade wagons through the streets look intimidating. But when an itinerant salesman offers to take the boy's picture on a pony for 50 cents, the boy realizes that he's been given the opportunity both to confront his fears and to create special birthday present for his father. Unfortunately Chaconas (Dancing with Katya) never achieves a convincing voice for her hero. The prose feels ponderous and self-conscious; it's hard to believe that a kid would use a word like “nicker” when talking about a horse that frightens him. The story's epiphany is delivered with an equally heavy hand: even the rent-a-pony is saddled with the name Freedom (“Dad went away to the war to fight for freedom,” notes the boy). But Lewin's illustrations compensate for many of the story's shortcomings. The intensity of the lighting, the cinematic compositions and the emotional nuances of the characters' expressions steer clear of sentimentality as they summon up a vanished past. Ages 6-10. (Sept.)

Spreads of brawny figures and armored knights endow this retelling of a Grimm Brothers' tale with epic dimensions. The story concerns a prince who helps a king win a decisive victory with the magical assistance of Iron Hans, a shock-headed giant. Mitchell (The Nightingale) spins the German original into a tale of inner awakening, conferringon his young prince the insight of a spiritual seeker; the boy recognizes that his adventures are a trial before they even start. “He knew also that part of this new test was learning how to be poor and powerless. He would have to keep his identity hidden and let no one guess that he was a prince.” Mitchell's ascetic reading sits a little oddly next to Tavares's ('Twas the Night Before Christmas) strapping figures, as Tavares seems to locate the source of the story's charm in outer strength, not inner search. Clamoring knights, galloping steeds and scenes of palace splendor crowd the pages, which rise in a vertical format as if to stress Iron Hans's nine-foot stature. Iron Hans's mane sticks out like a wire brush, and the prince's hair, turned golden in Iron Hans's magic spring, shines like light. Complex and muscular, this is a good bet for readers who demand lots of action. Ages 6-10. (Sept.)

colorfully adorned with intricate designs that loosely recall illuminated manuscripts, Newbery Medalist Creech's (Walk Two Moons) protracted fairy tale traces how two orphaned peasants come to rub elbows with royalty. “Long ago and far away,” Pia and her younger brother, Enzio, discover a leather pouch marked with the king's seal. Before they can understand the meaning of the objects inside, the two children are whisked off to the Castle Corona to become “tasters” for a king fearful of being poisoned. There Pia and Enzio become acquainted with a spoiled princess and two young princes (one dreams of being a poet; the other wants to become a mighty warrior). As befits the genre, the author uses broader strokes than usual to define her characters. Members of the royal family are hopelessly out of touch with their subjects and busy themselves with tradition. Country folk and castle servants are more grounded and resourceful. Nonetheless, as royalty and peasant children intermingle inside the castle walls, perspectives broaden and the complexity of individual personalities comes to light. The playful tone and gentle criticism of aristocracy can be engaging, in much the same way that Creech's warmth and easy humor work well in her slice-of-life novels, but the fairy-tale genre raises expectations that go unmet. Readers may pine for a liberal sprinkling of magic and a more exciting climax before the conventional happily-ever-after ending. Ages 8-12. (Oct.)

The tantrum-prone protagonist of this multi-layered debut novel seems a smidge spoiled at first glance, but underneath eight-year-old Isabel's fits-and-starts temper lies a very ordinary need for attention. Unfortunately for her, the people whose notice she yearns for are justifiably preoccupied. Her father works around the clock while Isabel's four-month-old sister, Rebekah, keeps their mother perpetually busy. To Isabel, the baby is a huge disappointment: Rebekah doesn't feel like a sister but like “some grunting animal that wasn't potty trained.” While the novel works on this basic level, it becomes more noteworthy for Pearce's graceful weaving of a larger and more difficult subject into the narrative: Isabel's mother has had cancer (explaining why her mother's friends dub Rebekah a “miracle baby”), and although the illness is in remission, the fear of its return is never far from Isabel's mind. Learning how to share her mother with the baby and with the “sick ladies” (her mother's cancer support group), much less how to gain some optimism, Isabel realizes that adults as well as kids can grow from their mistakes. Pearce stays true to Isabel's young perspective even as she conveys the character's complicated discoveries about growing up. Ages 8-up. (Sept.)

In a novel generously laced with humor, Hite (Dither Farm) departs from his usual folksy style and rural settings to explore the inner workings of a disgruntled urban teen's mind, structuring his work as the journal of 16-year-old New Yorker Max Whooten. In one of the characteristically deadpan entries, Max writes, “I don't know how I'll make it through the summer. Hope it's just a phase.” For a while Max stews in his angst, then three things occur. His ancient cat, whom Max calls Crappy due to his inability to hit the litter box), finally dies. Max travels upstate to bury the cat at his aunt's place near Woodstock, and there he meets a girl who “might actually like me.” From that point on, surprises seem to lie around every corner. The novel moves from morose to downright optimistic, winningly capturing the roller-coaster emotions typically felt by teens as they confront new situations or tire of old ones. Max's predicaments will win laughs and evoke empathy for an underdog who eventually learns to grab opportunities to turn his life around. Philosophical queries, common in the author's previous works, make an appearance here, too, as Max ponders (none too rigorously) the meaning of his existence and invents “coolism” (“It's the philosophy of not thinking too much and just cooling out”). Readers will relate to Max's growing pains, his unharnessed longing to find a purpose and his glee in jumping back in “the game” and ending up a winner. Ages 10-14. (Sept.)

A Boston teenager whose idea of adventure comes from computer gaming finds himself at the center of cosmic struggles between ancient Maya gods within the jungles of Central America, in this husband-and-wife team's first installment of the Jaguar Stones trilogy. Max Murphy's archeologist parents leave him behind, as usual, when they rush off to excavate an ancient Maya temple, and so he is surprised to be summoned to join them a week later. By the time he arrives, however, they have gone missing, and Max can tell that people are holding back the details. Despite his lifelong lack of interest, Max finally has to learn about Maya culture, especially when his parents' disappearance seems to have to do with the five “jaguar stones” used by the ancient ruler-gods and said to confer ultimate powers. This elaborate genre-bender involves ruthless smugglers; family estrangements; a helper in the form of a teenage Maya girl named Lola; two ancient Maya rulers brought to life (and given the bodies of baboons); Maya culture, past and present; zombies; and the Maya gods' eternal conflicts. That Max has somehow been chosen (presumably by the gods) to play the hero goes unresolved here, but between the exotic settings and themes and the breakneck pace, readers may not even notice the thin characterizations and motivations. A detailed appendix surveys the Maya world. Ages 11-up. (Oct.)

As in her earlier Agent Orange, Cooney deftly weaves events from the wider world into the warp and woof of everyday upper-middle-class life. High school student Jared Finch is cranky and skeptical when his mother decides to host their church-sponsored family of four African refugees in their well-appointed Connecticut home. Drawn in (just as readers will be) by the drama of the refugees' acclimatization to American suburbia, Jared soon warms to the Amabos, despite a growing suspicion that they aren't exactly who they say they are. Cooney keenly conveys the various motivations—an ever-changing blend of generosity and self-congratulation—of the family's hosts and church sponsors: “The committee loved hearing how good and generous they were. They sat tall. They took lemon bars as well as double-chocolate brownies.” Breathless urgency arises from a plot twist that would seem far-fetched if it wasn't so convincingly narrated: the Amabos are being tracked by a merciless villain who will stop at nothing to recover the diamonds he has forced the Amabos to smuggle into the U.S. Further underscoring the concept that many shades of gray lie between absolute good and evil is a subplot about funds that have been embezzled from the Finches' church. Crackling language and nailbiting cliffhangers provide an easy way in to the novel's big ideas, transforming topics that can often seem distant and abstract into a grippingly immediate reading experience. Ages 12-up. (Sept.)

Staub (the College Life 101 series) returns to the scene of her bestselling adult thriller In the Blink of an Eye for the slick opener of the Lily Dale series. Readers meet Calla the summer before her senior year of high school as she attends her mother's funeral, devastated by her mother's accidental death. While her father looks for a rental in California, where he has earned a sabbatical, Calla opts to stay with a grandmother she barely knows in small (and real) Lily Dale, N.Y. (also the site of this summer's The Secret Life of Sparrow Delaney, reviewed 7/30). Upon arrival, she discovers that the town is a Victorian throwback—a spiritualist community populated by mediums, among them her grandmother Odelia. As Calla slowly warms up to offbeat Odelia and recovers from her dismay at the quaintness of Lily Dale (no e-mail and no cell-phone reception), figures invisible to others begin appearing to her, and a recurring nightmare afflicts her as well. Could she, too, share her grandmother's powers? Calla is doubting but open-minded, and her BFF Lisa, who comes to visit near the end, provides a vivid foil with her open disdain for the town. The sympathetic protagonist and the trendy paranormal premise make up for the loose development of the plot, which is slowed by several predictable story lines involving romantic rivals. When the ending wraps up one mystery only to intensify another, readers will be impatient for the next installment. Ages 12-up. (Sept.)

Shortly after her widower father announces he is remarrying, 13-year-old Evyn and her older brother move with him from their house in Maine to the Boston brownstone of their soon-to-be stepmother and six stepsiblings. For solace, Evyn confides in her dead mother, who died when Evyn was a baby, even though she admits she is really just talking to herself; in these conversations her mother advises her to let the bad stuff “bounce” off her, but it's hard. Evyn misses her best friend—who seems to have moved on very quickly, acquiring a new best friend and boyfriend—and she hates both her too-eager stepmother and her private girls' school, where she becomes a target of the popular clique. Friend (Lush) throws in plenty of plot lines, including Evyn's crush on her oldest stepbrother and her belated discovery that the school's mean It girl is constantly criticized by her mother; some of these developments feel more convenient than organic. But the author has an unmistakable gift for exploring family dynamics, and even though Evyn doesn't immediately understand such exchanges as the constant bickering of the twins whose bedroom she shares, they will be instantly recognizable to many readers. The tender scenes have a genuine poignancy, as when Evyn and her dad share a heart-to-heart in the middle of night, or when Evyn's stepmother tells her about her own mother's death. In the end, these moving moments make for a story that's both real and heartfelt. Ages 12-up. (Sept.)

A revised version of Moriarty's adult novel, I Have a Bed Made of Buttermilk Pancakes (not published in the U.S.), this whimsical though rigorously plotted novel offers an intellectual puzzle that may engage YA readers, but the lengthy, adult-centered narrative may test the patience of its target audience. The central mystery—discussed every Friday night by the Zing adults, behind the closed doors of a garden shed—has to do with a carefully guarded family secret that (as readers gradually learn) necessitates the constant surveillance of a young elementary-school teacher named Cath Murphy. Meanwhile, Listen Taylor, a motherless seventh-grader who lives with her father and his girlfriend Marbie Zing, discovers a book of magic spells. Casting spells intended to achieve such feats as make a vacuum cleaner break, Listen works her way through almost half the book before she notices the tiny promise on the back cover: “This Book Will Mend Your Broken Heart.” The results of Listen's magic deliciously spike trenchant scenes that shift among the various (adult) couples and the role of the Zing Family Secret. Teens will easily relate to Listen's conflicts (intensified when her friends cast her out of their clique). However, Listen acts mostly as a supporting player; the perspectives remain mainly those of adults, and the heavy focus on extramarital affairs has more to do with midlife crises and discontent than adolescent issues. With its colorfully camouflaged themes of regret, this well-crafted novel may strike a less resonant chord with teens than with their parents. Ages 14-up. (Sept.)

Peters's (Luna) short stories focus mostly on young lesbians but also take in teens struggling with other gender and sexuality issues. Their conflicts range from commonplace (Mariah tries to summon the nerve to attend a Gay/Straight Alliance meeting; Kat wonders if the cellist she likes at music camp returns her feelings) to extreme (Cammie, sexually abused by her father almost nightly, worries that she will never feel pleasure; transgendered Vince, née Eva, is assaulted by a group of guys after work). Regardless of the intensity of the characters' struggles, girls of any sexual orientation will feel quickly drawn into the lives glimpsed here, thanks to the authenticity of Peters's voices. However, many of the stories feel like the beginnings of intriguing novels rather than standalone works, and endings can seem arbitrary. On the other hand, teens searching for a fast read, especially in an underserved subject, will be gratified to find this collection, and the author's ability to bring such a diverse cast to life is impressive. Ages 15-up. (Sept.)

As an intern with UNICEF in Latin America and the Caribbean, Bush, the daughter of the president, was assigned to document the lives of poor children; in a preface, she writes about how impressed she was to hear a 17-year-old single mother resolutely announce, in a group for people with HIV/AIDS, “We are not dying with AIDS; we are living with it.” For more than six moths, Bush met with the mother, Ana, and later interviewed others, inspired by Ana's resilience. Here, in what she terms narrative nonfiction, she creates “a mosaic of [Ana's] life, using words instead of shards of broken tile to create an image of her past and a framework for her future.” Short segments reveal Ana's scarred childhood. Ana is orphaned, told never to reveal her HIV status lest she be ostracized, sexually abused by her grandmother's boyfriend, beaten and sent to reform school. Not until she lands in a group home for people with HIV/AIDS do things begin to look up, and then only temporarily: Ana falls in love with a boy resident, gets pregnant the one and only time they don't use a condom, and the boy grows too sick to be of much help (the thought of terminating the pregnancy never comes up). Despite unexceptional, sometimes awkward writing (“The passion, the attraction, the butterflies had flown away”), Bush's compassion for her subject comes through clearly. Even (and maybe especially) when Ana behaves imperfectly or questionably, Bush focuses on Ana's pain and ability to transcend it, helping readers to avoid judging Ana and to feel strong empathy. Back matter includes information on HIV/AIDS and abuse, notes on ways to help others and a discussion guide; the final art, which includes color photos, was not seen by PW. A portion of the proceeds will benefit the U.S. Fund for UNICEF. Ages 14-up. (Sept.)