Children’s Book Reviews

With a lot of imagination and some creative contortions, a little girl pretends that she and her adored stuffed monkey fit right in with tribes of penguins, kangaroos, bats, elephants and... monkeys. A catchy refrain sets up each scenario: “Monkey and me,/ Monkey and me,/ Monkey and me,/ We went to see....” Readers can take a moment to guess which species the feisty pigtailed narrator, a Pippi Longstocking in the making, is miming before a turn of the page shows the relevant animals at their antic best. To evoke a mama kangaroo and her joey, for example, the girl stuffs Monkey under her shirt; to become an elephant, she bends at the waist, makes one of her arms a trunk and turns the other into a prehensile tail that pulls Monkey-as-calf behind her. Working in pencil and watercolor, with a palette limited to red, black and brown, Gravett (Orange Pear Apple Bear) portrays the action in a series of exuberant spot sketches set against a white sweep. This approach not only gives the pictures the momentum and spontaneity of roughed-out animation, it also provides readers with step-by-step instruction for recreating at least some of the fun in their own homes. A final spread has girl and toy going “zzzzzzzz”—but the game has not ended: a real monkey watches them, a huge and contagious grin on his face. Ages 2-6. (Mar.)

Davey and his pioneer parents may live on the Red Planet, but conditions are far from rosy. “The nights were very cold. The dust storms were terrible.... 'I’m bored!’ Davey shouted one day.” Davey and his leaky robot dog glumly explore the dry, rocky terrain, where they dig up “an old toy”—a six-wheeled object that space buffs will recognize as a long-lost NASA Rover. All Davey’s activities emphasize the lack of water (and the promise of it): He climbs a desiccated tree and plays with amphibious-looking Martians who “had not been able to take a bath in a very long time, and... smelled worse than skunks.” Davey accidentally stumbles upon a gushing water source, thereby alleviating his boredom and radically changing his planet. Gall envisions Mars’s surface as an austere Sedona landscape, carved with rust-red, pumpkin-orange and wheat-gold canyons. He produces his linocut-style compositions with hand-engraved, clay-coated boards, and the smooth results are striking but impersonal. Where these stylized images imply an almost corporate aesthetic, the endpapers present “Davey Martin’s Mars Journal (Top Secret!),” in a chalky white scrawl on terracotta paper; ironically, the comic first-person approach here tells more about Davey’s personality than the story itself does. Ages 3-6. (Feb.)

In characteristically accomplished pen-and-ink and watercolor illustrations and a heavily metaphorical text, McPhail (Sylvie & True) relates a tale about feeling safe and protected, no matter what. Searcher, a raccoon, makes his home in Old Tree, whose trunk is distinguished by eyes, nose and mouth. Vignettes show Searcher scavenging for food at night, then ambling back to Old Tree at dawn, falling asleep just before a terrible storm wreaks its havoc: “The wind shrieks. The waves explode. Old Tree holds firm. The Searcher sleeps on.” McPhail’s art gradually expands to fill the entire spread to show the storm at its worst, then recedes back to vignettes as “the wind and waves relent” and the Searcher wakes up and goes forth for the evening, oblivious to the past day’s tempest until he notices the wetness of the grass and the presence of broken branches; when he turns back to look at his sanctuary, Old Tree “waves” to him comfortingly. Developmentally, this story seems a little off-base; kids might not want to identify with a protagonist who snoozes through the most exciting, if scary part of the story; and, ironically, they might find the while-you-were-sleeping problem-solving more disconcerting than reassuring. Ages 3-6. (Feb.)

Mayer (A Walk in the Rain with a Brain) creates a ’20s-style travel poster for each letter in this elegant abecedary. Working in grainy airbrush gouache to mimic the steely blue, velvety gold and crimson of classic lithography, he creates a 26-piece design showcase while reproducing certain static, monumental elements of art deco. Mayer’s cover image and letter-A page, “All Aboard!,” pictures a docked steamship. Upon closer inspection, readers see that the ship’s hull, a diagonal gangplank and a supporting beam discreetly form a slant-sided A. “Landing” pictures silvery prop planes cruising on a floodlit runway that forms a wide L; “Tour” pictures the T-shaped red handlebars of a stylized black bicycle. The final page provides thumbnail versions of all the images, with broad white strokes that emphasize the letterforms within each composition. Some are obvious, like a railroad “X-ing.” Others require scrutiny, like the I (“Island”) formed by a beachgoer’s skinny legs. Mayer successfully evokes the glamour of the Roaring Twenties, although his travel ABCs never quite get under way. The designs are consistent and uniform, but so self-contained they do not generate momentum; that said, individual images will attract their share of admirers. Ages 3-7. (Feb.)

Pinto (The Alphabet Room) plays at “going bananas” by giving unexpected answers to outwardly obvious questions. For example, after “How are an apple and an orange alike?” readers turn the page to discover an offbeat response: “They both don’t wear glasses.” Straightforward illustrations of such twosomes as a bird and a kite, a starfish and an octopus, or a spoon and a fork, each grouped on a beige background, continue the game by emphasizing what the objects have in common. Each answer, however, continues to take the unexpected direction. Pinto’s ink-and-watercolor sketches give full play to what “they both don’t” do—e.g., they picture a mug and a teacup riding in the rodeo or trousers and underpants as hats for two ladies in a Parisian restaurant (the Eiffel tower can be glimpsed from a window). As in untutored art, Pinto’s detailed scenarios stint on perspective and primarily underscore punch lines. An open-ended conclusion (“How are you and I alike?/ We both don’t...”) transfers the author’s unpredictable comedy into the audience’s hands, inviting a different outcome with every reading. Ages 3-7. (Jan.)

At first glance, Ed and Ted seem cut from the same cloth: they are both “thinking, speaking, fully clothed, house-dwelling monkeys.” But Ed is a lucky monkey. When he meets a strange dog, it is friendly and playful; when he finds a treasure chest in the woods, an elf praises him. Ted, however, is unlucky. The dog he encounters chases him right into a gang of even fiercer animals, and a violent troll accuses him of stealing his treasure chest, forcing Ted to take refuge in a swamp. Kaczman’s (A Bird and His Worm) acrylic paintings, set up as pairs of tableaux—one idyllic, the other gloomy—feature nattily attired animals and give the book the feel of a wry, winking primer. At the bottom of several pages, woodland creatures offer such reality-check observations as: “In children’s stories, elves often live in mushrooms.... This does not quite make sense if one thinks about it. A mushroom would actually be a rather unpleasant place to live, because mushrooms are damp and mushy inside.” By mirroring each monkey’s adventures in both text and art, Kaczman plays up the contrast as the monkeys’ fortunes continue to diverge over the course of the day. An epilogue reveals luck’s fleeting nature by switching the monkeys’ fates the following morning. A well-executed exercise in irony, this seems better aimed to hipster parents than to kids. Ages 4-8. (Mar.)

Brannen’s debut stars a strong-willed guinea pig whose favorite uncle announces he is marrying his partner, Jamie. Everyone is thrilled except for Chloe, who tells Uncle Bobby that she doesn’t think he should get married, since “You have me! We can keep having fun together, like always.” Her uncle promises, “You’ll always be my Chloe,” and tells her they will continue to have fun together. He and Jamie escort Chloe to the ballet and take her sailing, and she warms to the idea of having two uncles, especially when she is asked to be their flower girl. She proclaims the garden ceremony “the best wedding ever”—and even takes credit for planning it. Though the story makes an easy springboard for adult-child dialogue, the issue of same-sex marriage is incidental to the plot, which straightforwardly addresses the fear of being replaced when a loved one marries. Featuring a sunny palette, Brannen’s delicately outlined watercolors convey the characters’ varied emotions—the guinea pigs’ eyes are particularly expressive—and the mutual affection of the heroine and her uncle. The final scene, which depicts Chloe between her uncles in the light of a full moon, underscores Brannen’s reassuring message. Ages 4-up. (Mar.)

Henrietta’s older sisters are such expert teasers that they’re able to convince her that she is really a chicken, obtained at birth from the local egg farm. “You grow feathers every night,” says the oldest sister, “and we have to pluck them out before you wake up.... It’s why we get more allowance than you do.” But being a chicken may not be a terrible fate, as Henrietta discovers when she runs away to the farm in search of “her real family.” The setting is idyllic, the farmer is nice (“Always got room for another free-ranger,” he tells her), and she’s readily accepted by her feathered relatives (they are marvelously imagined with googly eyes, dazed smiles and fork-like legs). Even when the older sisters ’fess up after being dispatched to the farm by their angry parents, Henrietta isn’t sure she wants to believe them. “You would never call me a dumbhead, would you?” she coos to her new “little sister,” a doting brown hen. Accused of exacting revenge by playing the fool, she replies, “I’m just a chicken. What do I know about trouble?” Amato’s (Please Write in This Book) Seinfeldian storytelling is set off brilliantly by Durand’s (Beetle Boy) off-kilter, kid-like cartooning. Packed with funny details and small plots (the farmer’s fat cat is apparently besotted with a chick), the art, like the story, delivers grade-AA comedy. Ages 4-up. (Feb.)

In his first book New Zealander Galbraith puts an eco-twist on the classic goats vs. troll smackdown: the bridge becomes the threatened sea, a guardian Minke Whale replaces the troll, and the three goats become three “mean, prickly-faced” fishermen named Anglo, Anvil and Angora Gruff. Having overfished their own home waters of Poverty Bay, the brothers despoil the nearby Bay of Plenty. Then, in a move straight out of Moby Dick, Minke Whale rams the brothers’ boat, sending all three to a well-deserved briny end. Working very much in the vein of Lane Smith, Galbraith produces a book both visually hip and handsome. His digitally collaged illustrations are marvelously mordant and often ingenious (several pages, for example, feature cleverly incorporated die-cuts). Quirky, hand-press-styled typography and side quips by marine inhabitants add to the urbanity. Unfortunately, the irony and sophistication are strictly for appearances—as a writer, Galbraith lets his earnest environmentalist fervor get between the reader and the story. The ending is positively preachy: “The people of both towns had learnt a lot. No more did they dirty the water with oil or rubbish and they were careful never to be greedy.” But with a little more maturity and seasoning—the book sprang from Galbraith’s senior project at design school—he might turn out a story worthy of his art. Ages 4-up. (Feb.)

In his picture book debut, Jackson (a film production designer whose credits include Shrek) puts on a cowboy drawl to tell a very tall tale. Danny Diamondback, a naïve young rattler, does not realize he is a venomous snake. His attempts to befriend jackrabbits and birds come to naught until he happens upon Pablo, a nearsighted prairie dog. Pablo invites Danny into his burrow and plays him some Latin jazz on the trumpet: “Downright dazzled, Danny wanted to clap, but since he couldn’t, he unfortunately did something else. He rattled his tail.” After Pablo fends off an attempted intervention by his horrified grandmother, Danny ends up joining the family’s music-making, and before long he—wearing a huge sombrero to put the audience at ease—is playing maracas (i.e., his tail) in Pablo’s interspecies band, the Hoppin’ Jalapeños. Jackson’s hyperreal illustrations of slightly anthropomorphized animals resemble digital-animation stills, with crisp foreground images, glossy black shadows and gauzy, out-of-focus backdrops. His panoramic desert scenes suggest holograms, with blurred details when Danny rattles his tail or startles furry mammals. Fans of Happy Feet and Ice Age won’t mind suspending disbelief for the outlandish story, with its cinematic visuals and stereotypical Tex-Mex situations. All ends happily, with the snake cozy in the prairie dog colony, although one question remains: What in tarnation does Danny eat? Ages 5-7. (Jan.)

Reassembling the cast of The Mysterious Matter of I.M. Fine, Stanley delivers another humorous and thoroughly enjoyable mystery, this time set at a too-good-to-be-true school. When Franny Sharp’s younger sister, Zoë, is recruited to attend Allbright Academy, a prestigious boarding school founded by two famous scientists, she refuses to attend unless her twin, J.D., and Franny can come, too. That’s how Franny, who believes herself solidly ordinary, finds herself starting eighth grade surrounded by the best-looking group of overachievers she’s ever seen. Intimidated at first by her award-winning classmates, she quickly bonds with fellow new students Cal (short for Calpurnia) and Brooklyn, and starts to flourish. In fact, Franny’s never felt smarter, looked better or worked harder in her life. But when Cal falls sick and has to leave the campus for a few weeks, she stumbles upon an unsettling discovery. Just what do the ever-present Allbright brownies have to do with making Allbright students so painfully perfect in every way? With sympathetic Franny as narrator and a time-tested premise, Stanley hooks readers from the start, and she keeps them going with characters whose names hint at their true natures (besides the Salinger-inspired Sharp kids, the players include Martha Evergood, Prescott Bottomy and Dr. Horace Gallow). And although some answers to the mystery are obvious early on, the conclusion does not disappoint. Ages 8-12. (Jan.)

Propelled by eccentric characters and mysterious events, Blume’s (Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset Sisters) lush novel set during the Depression portrays a Southern family haunted by its ancestors’ sins. When her mother runs away from their remote home, Innisfree, to become a writer, 11-year-old Tennyson and her younger sister are sent to Aigredoux, the dangerously dilapidated estate now owned by their father’s sister, Henrietta, and her husband, Uncle Twigs, aristocratic Southerners on the brink of bankruptcy; their father, who has broken with Henrietta, plans to find their mother. Soon Tennyson begins dreaming of disturbing, real-life scenes that occurred at Aigredoux when it was a grand Louisiana plantation and also during the Civil War, and she realizes that the history that Henrietta is so proud of is entwined with slavery and complicated acts of betrayal. Inspired, Tennyson fashions stories out of the dreams and sends them to the publisher her mother most reveres; she is certain that she can infiltrate her mother’s “dream” of being a writer in order to call her back. Despite the plot’s strong suggestion of Southern gothic and of early Truman Capote, the writing offers its own hypnotic montage of poetic images, turning stereotypes into archetypes. The abruptness and abstraction of the ending, which leaves Tennyson with less immediate happiness than she might deserve, may disappoint the target audience; older readers are likelier to appreciate the bittersweet aftertaste. Ages 8-12. (Jan.)

Griffiths’s (The Day My Butt Went Psycho!) book opens with a warning: “If you are a parent or a teacher, or even if you’re just over eighteen, put this book down now!... You will be totally grossed out by it.” Close enough. Text and line art describe forms of “butt life” that lived hundreds of millions of years ago, during the “Crappian,” “Triarssic,” “Jurarssic” and other eras. Among the Inverterbutts profiled is Trilobutt, “a hard, triple-cheeked bottom feeder,” which could grow to “enormarse” proportions; the Stenchtiles include Turdle, which, when in danger “would pull in its arms, legs, neck, and head so it would appear to be just a piece of poo”; and the Buttornithid group features Fartosaurus, “capable of descending on its prey and smothering it whole in a silent but deadly manner.” While some readers will tire of the one-note humor, Griffiths fans will happily snigger their way to the end. Ages 8-12. (Jan.)

Paying homage to such favorites as Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes and the ballet film par excellence The Red Shoes, this first novel starts off strong but implodes about halfway through. The conceit has plenty of oomph: Daphne, a 13-year-old orphan raised in a 1920s-era London institution, sustains her spirits by dancing, and is rewarded for her pluck by an anonymously sent parcel containing a book entitled How to Teach Yourself Ballet, a pair of scarlet stockings and a five-line riddle that begins, “First, you must find me.” Before long, Daphne is adopted by greengrocers with hearts of gold, welcomed into a troupe of street performers—and rejected from ballet school. It takes her far longer than it will take readers to realize that the stockings themselves are enchanted and that wearing them will turn her into the finest ballerina of her generation. Of course, there is a price, and readers once again will see it being exacted well in advance of Daphne, who flits from one generous benefactor to the next with barely a backward glance. It’s hard to stay invested in Daphne’s progress. While the author talks about Daphne’s hard work, she doesn’t do so with much authenticity, saving her relish instead for Daphne’s growing haughtiness and for the nasty schemes she and others devise. When Daphne suffers her inevitable fall, the audience may not stick around to watch her get back on her feet for the equally inevitable happy ending. Ages 8-up. (Jan.)

Big ideas are an essential part of the fun in this sparkling tour de force. Back at her elite boarding school after a summer vacation in which she has grown from duckling to swan, sophomore Frankie starts dating cool, gorgeous senior Matthew and instantly becomes a part of his charmed social circle. Hanging with Matthew and his crowd is a thrill, but Frankie begins to chafe as she realizes that the boys are all members of the secret society to which her own father belonged, the Loyal Order of the Basset Hound, and that not only will they never let her join, Matthew will not even tell her about it. Lockhart (Dramarama; The Boyfriend List) dexterously juggles a number of smart and tantalizing themes—class and privilege, feminism and romance, wordplay and thought, friendship and loyalty—and combines the pacing of a mystery with writing that realizes settings and characters, large and small, with an artist’s sure hand. Inspired by a class called Cities, Art and Protest, Frankie concocts a brilliant plan to infiltrate the Bassets and has them carry out a series of pranks that wittily challenge the politics of the school. Girls especially will be interested in this unusual portrait of a heroine who falls in love without blurring her sense of self, even if none of her friends understands her, and in Lockhart’s fresh approach to gender politics. An exuberant, mischievous story, it scores its points memorably and lastingly. Ages 12-up. (Mar.)

Maya Naravadee, a high-achieving senior works nights at her parents’ Thai restaurant and dreams of escaping Michigan with a scholarship to Stanford. But when she is left in charge of the restaurant for a weekend, she ends up with a $10,000 fine from the health department. Rather than 'fess up, she cooks up a scheme with the most popular guy at school, lazy, arrogant and rich Camden King, to do his homework for him and his friends, and then recruits her own friends to join her—and skims their pay. In her first novel, Cheva, a writer for the TV show Family Guy, proves herself adept at relaying the dynamics of Maya’s family: the scenes set at the restaurant show Maya under stress but nevertheless silently proud of her hardworking, traditional parents. Maya also gets off some pretty smart lines (“All I could think about was how happy it would make me to add convenience to your life by doing your homework for you,” she deadpans to Camden when setting up their arrangement). The plot takes a brief respite from implausibility so that Maya can register the inevitable lesson about honesty, then spins right back into fantasyland with a blatantly jerry-rigged happy ending. But if Cheva can find a topic as vital as her best writing here, her work will bear close watching. Ages 12-up. (Feb.)

High school senior Jamie Carcaterra is not just fat; as she puts it, “I am THE Fat Girl, baby.” In an attempt to enlighten fellow classmates about the indignities and injustices she faces daily, Jamie writes a weekly feature for her high school paper and calls it the Fat Girl Manifesto. The manifesto could land her a journalism scholarship for feature writing, which she desperately desires. Vaught (Trigger) upends stereotypes about fat girls via Jamie’s bracing, take-no-prisoners columns and in Jamie’s first-person account of her year. The supremely confident Fat Girl persona is hard to resist, and more believable than many of the situations the author piles on: the fat boyfriend who undergoes risky gastric bypass surgery and suffers complications; the overblown media reaction to Jamie’s columns; the blossoming romance with the handsome high school paper’s editor-in-chief. The novel reads in places more like a rant than an emotionally involving story, and much of the Fat Girl Manifesto will be familiar (vanity sizing, the ineffectiveness of fad diets, etc.). But teens who persevere will be rewarded with some priceless scenes, such as Jamie and friends going undercover to document the discriminatory behavior of sales clerks in a clothing boutique; and with carefully prepared revelations, especially Jamie’s eventual awareness that she may be more limited by her anger than by her weight. Thought-provoking and, frequently, vigorous. Ages 12-up. (Jan.)

Delivering far more than a conventional biography or baseball book, this graphic novel reveals the sport as an agent of hope in the Jim Crow South. Sturm (cofounder and director of the Center for Cartoon Studies, which partnered with Hyperion for this title) and Tommaso create a fictional African-American sharecropper who turns to Negro League baseball to support his family (“I’ll be makin’ more money than her daddy and my daddy put together. Ain’t braggin’ if it’s true”). The narrator hits a pitch off of Satchel Paige, but his career is cut short by injury and he returns to sharecropping. When he sends his son to school rather than have him work the fields, two white land-owning brothers mercilessly beat the boy; the book’s only full-spread art eschews the traditional square and rectangular panels used everywhere else and, devastatingly, shows father and son the next day, laboring in an endless field of cotton. The story culminates with Paige’s team coming to play against the all-white hometown favorites: the final score is less important than the chance to see Paige make quick work of the opposing batters. The narrative and duotone art are largely understated, with stark exceptions: among them, a lynching victim hanging from a tree and an epithet, directed at Paige, which roars across the infield. By emphasizing Paige’s influence and mythos rather than focusing on details about his life or career, Sturm and Tommaso offer a powerful and unique testimony to his legacy. Ages 10-up. (Dec.)

In his first outing as author as well as illustrator, Nelson (Ellington Was Not a Street) delivers a history of the Negro Leagues in a sumptuous volume that no baseball fan should be without. Using a folksy vernacular, a fictional player gives an insider account of segregated baseball, explaining the aggressive style of play (“Those fellows would bunt and run you to death. Drove pitchers crazy!”) and recalling favorite players. Of Satchel Paige, he says, “Even his slow stuff was fast.” As illuminating as the text is, Nelson’s muscular paintings serve as the true draw. His larger-than-life players have oversized hands, elongated bodies and near-impossible athleticism. Their lined faces suggest the seriousness with which they took their sport and the circumstances under which they were made to play it. A gatefold depicting the first “Colored World Series” is particularly exquisite—a replica ticket opens from the gutter to reveal the entire line-ups of both teams. And while this large, square book (just a shade smaller than a regulation-size base) succeeds as coffee-table art, it soars as a tribute to the individuals, like the legendary Josh Gibson, who was ultimately elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame without ever playing in the major leagues. As Nelson’s narrator says, “We had many Josh Gibsons in the Negro Leagues.... But you never heard about them. It’s a shame the world didn’t get to see them play.” Ages 8-up. (Jan.)

In this engrossing memoir, college senior Rhodes-Courter chronicles her hardscrabble childhood in foster care, detailing glitches in the system and infringements of laws that led to a string of unsuitable—and sometimes nightmarish—placements for her and her younger half-brother, Luke. Using a matter-of-fact tone at times laced with bitterness, the author recounts how she was wrenched away from her teenage mother at age three and was later removed from her unstable grandfather’s home to live in cramped quarters with strangers. She acknowledges that there may have been legitimate reasons for her and Luke’s placement in foster care but pointedly criticizes the manner in which she was repeatedly uprooted. She also blames the ineptitude of social workers who, more often than not, acted as advocates for foster parents rather than the children they were assigned to protect. The girl’s frequent moves and sporadic mental and physical abuse left emotional scars that affected her even after she was adopted by a loving family (the “three little words” that change her life are her guarded consent to legal adoption, “I guess so”). The author’s ability to form intelligent, open-minded conclusions about her traumatic childhood demonstrates her remarkable control and insight, and although there are plenty of wrenching moments, she succeeds not in attracting pity but in her stated intention, of drawing attention to the children who currently share the plight that she herself overcame. Ages 14-up. (Jan.)