Children's Book Reviews

It’s hard to imagine a picture book biography that could better suit its subject than this high-energy volume serves young Alice Roosevelt. Kerley (The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins) knows just how to introduce her to contemporary readers: “Theodore Roosevelt had a small problem. It wasn’t herding thousands of cattle across the Dakota badlands. He’d done that. It wasn’t leading the Rough Riders.... He’d bagged a grizzly bear, captured outlaws, governed the state of New York, and served as vice president of the United States, and still he had a problem. Her name was Alice.” Debut illustrator Fotheringham creates the perfect mood from the start: his stylish digital art sets a fast pace, making use of speed lines (rendered in dots, these earn their names) and multiple vignettes to evoke characters in perpetual motion. His compositions wittily incorporate headlines, iconic images and plenty of Alice blue, too. Kids will embrace a heroine who teaches her younger stepsiblings to sled down the White House stairs (“Alice tried to be helpful,” Kerley writes soberly as Fotheringham shows her in action), entertains dignitaries with her pet snake and captivates a nation with pranks and high jinks. Ages 4-8. (Apr.)

Trailed by his yes-man sidekick (a mynah bird), a boy trumpets his ambitiousness. “I got big plans! Big plans, I say!” he shouts repeatedly, in display type that dominates the pages (no mean feat, considering the hyperthyroid trim size). Despite his brashness, the boy is stuck in a time-out corner (the reason for his punishment is not given). Yet this temporary condition does not crush the boy’s imagination. He envisions himself marching into Manhattan and reading the riot act to lookalike bald men at a board meeting (“You! Take a memo!... You! Ready my helicopter!”). He sees himself elbowing out the mayor and then the president. Finally, he anticipates rocketing to the moon to spell out his “big plans” slogan in gigantic rocks. Shea, whose New Socks also features hyperbolic repetition, gives readers a bold and funny motto to proclaim against small setbacks. Smith’s (John, Paul, George & Ben) punchy collages and grainy wallpaper patterns, along with emphatic typefaces, reinforce the speaker’s unquenchable spirit. On the other hand, not everyone will get the satire involved in countering authoritarian ways with more of the same. All ages. (Apr.)

If the Velveteen Rabbit first had to overcome a horror of being handled, that classic could become this more didactic and sentimental tale. Writing in spare prose, from the point of view of a “very grand” white stuffed bear with a music box inside him, Shields (The Starlight Baby) emphasizes the old cliché that “it’s what’s inside us that’s important.” Blythe’s (The Whale’s Song) astonishingly realistic oil paintings leaven the misty-eyed story. He subtly changes the bear’s expressions as his owner, a girl, breaks and then discards his music box and sews up his fur with black stitches. The three-hankie plot, on the other hand, can go over the top: lamenting his now-shabby appearance, the bear’s “brown eyes [gleam] as if they had tears in them.” In the end, the bear is lost and reunited with “his girl”: “He had the oddest feeling in the empty place where his old music box had been. It was... love.” Many readers will lap this up. Ages 4-8. (Mar.)

Folkloric illustrations perk up this sister team’s (Here Comes Grandma) otherwise modest tale about the value of community. Decked out in plaid shirt and overalls and sporting a snowy white beard that Santa might envy, Albert fixes Mr. Jensen’s truck, fastens Akiko’s clothesline and repairs Mrs. Peabody’s leaky faucet; no job is too small. When Albert catches cold and takes to his bed, Mr. Jenkins drives the neighbors to Albert’s house, where he is served beans from the garden he fenced, mint tea in the cup he mended and an apple pie covered with a cloth from the clothesline. Visual details enhance the story: the characters are of various ages and races; many different kinds of tools are put to use. Animals, including Albert’s spotted gray cat, romp freely throughout. Paschkis favors flat shapes filled with decoration, using geometric patterns to adorn curtains, tablecloths and dresses, for example, and presenting plants and foliage as stylized ornaments. Readers will appreciate the warm portrayal of neighbors taking care of one another. Ages 4-8. (Mar.)

Gathering 22 short tales from religious sources and the far-flung communities of the Diaspora, Schram (The Magic Pomegranate) assembles a surprisingly pallid collection. The larger-than-life figures who drive many of the narratives—tricksters, the wise ones, the legendary King Solomon—barely register as personalities. Jewish humor is puzzlingly absent; among the exceptions is “A Trickster Teaches a Lesson,” in which Hershele the beggar is temporarily able to convince a greedy rich man that his valuables are capable of reproducing. De Conno’s (The Steadfast Tin Soldier) burnished, sculptural illustrations exude an iconic handsomeness—he’d make a great Haggadah illustrator—but he also underscores the stories’ emotional distance from the audience (it doesn’t help that characters who are supposed to be clever or wily or simply engaged all share the same blank stare). Ages 8-12. (Mar.)

Matt Lanchester, newly transplanted to a small Welsh town, is out biking when he imagines a near-collision with a car, only to land next to a roadside memorial to a boy with his own initials. Matt begins to experience the dead boy’s ghostly presence as he confronts several puzzles involving the missing son of a local farmer, a turn-of-the-century legend of a lost boy named Tommy Jones and the circumstances surrounding the vehicular death of Martin Lloyd. Newbery (Set in Stone) seamlessly interleaves Tommy Jones’s tale among the larger narrative’s own levels of suspense—chiefly, whether Matt will succumb to the bullying of the town punks, who claim to want revenge for Martin’s death, before he figures out the connections among the three lost boys. With its imaginative melding of present-day concerns, good storytelling, lush descriptions of the landscape and even a faithful dog, this novel will ensnare readers. Ages 8-12. (Mar.)

Levine’s (Ella Enchanted) original mythological tale works as romance, adventure and exploration of faith. Kezi is the only daughter of a wealthy, devout family in a vaguely ancient, vaguely Middle Eastern city, where the established religion revolves around one god, Admat. When Kezi’s mother falls deathly ill, her father vows to sacrifice the first person who congratulates him on his wife’s recovery, if only Admat will let her live. Through adroit plotting, this person turns out to be Kezi, who has 30 days before she must be delivered to the sacrificial altar. Meanwhile, Olus, the god of wind from a family of Greek-like deities, has been watching the horror unfold; out of loneliness (the brother closest to him in age is 412 years older), he has disguised himself to mix with mortals and fallen in love with Kezi. Braided throughout the well-paced action are doubts raised by Kezi’s new-found knowledge of Olus and his clan: “How can Admat be the one, the all, if Olus is a god too?” Is her sacrifice without reason? Levine conducts a riveting journey, offering passion and profound pondering along the way. Ages 10-up. (May)

Tautly constructed, metaphorically rich, emotionally gripping and seductively told,Schmidt’s (The Wednesday Wars) novel opens in the 300-year-old ancestral home of Henry Smith, whose father has raised him to believe that “if you build your house far enough away from Trouble, then Trouble will never find you.” With such an opening, it is inevitable that Trouble does find the aristocratic Smiths: Henry’s older brother, Franklin, is critically injured by a truck. A Cambodian refugee named Chay, who attends the same school as Franklin, acknowledges responsibility, but over the course of Chay’s trial it occurs, to Henry at least, that it was Franklin who sought Trouble: the racism he directed toward Chay specifically and Cambodian immigrants generally has been so widely shared in the community that no one challenged it. Twin sequences of events plunge the Smiths and Chay into further tragedy, also revealing the ravages of Chay’s childhood under the Khmer Rouge. At the same time, a storm exposes a charred slave ship long buried on the Smiths’ private beach: it emerges that their house has been close to Trouble all along. For all the fine crafting, the novel takes a disturbingly broad-brush approach to racism. Characters are either thuggish or willfully blind or saintly, easily pegged on a moral scale—and therefore untrue to life. Ages 12-up. (Apr.)

Readers who loved Evil Genius will find this sequel as gripping, devilish and wonderfully dark as its predecessor. What made that first book so good was the author’s delivery of a complex, layered protagonist in the young Cadel Piggot and the world of criminal masterminds in which he lives and learns, a world he eventually destroys. From these ashes rises another imaginative and just slightly less villainous cast of characters, the Genius Squad of the title, to tempt Cadel’s vulnerable conscience. Cadel and his multiply-disabled best friend, Sonja Pirovic—a central figure this time around—land themselves among a new gang of superhuman brainiacs, who help populate this story with fresh twists and eyebrow-raising, technologically over-the-top antics. Cadel may be a genius, but is he smart enough to overcome his evil upbringing to land himself squarely on the side of good? Between Cadel’s touching concern and growing feelings for Sonja, and the help of a few kindhearted adults, there’s hope for Cadel. As readers keep their eyes on Cadel, however, Jinks stays busy, gradually setting up her audience for a stunning climax. Ages 12-up. (May)

DeKeyser’s debut novel begins with a sticky moral dilemma that will have readers questioning what they would do under similar circumstances. On the train to New York City to visit her father, 15-year-old Victoria sees a mother abandon her toddler son in the bathroom and rush off to meet the boyfriend she’s been talking to on her cell phone. At that moment, Victoria decides to take the boy and find him a home—something she herself has been longing for since her parents’ recent divorce. Events quickly spiral out of control: the police want Victoria on kidnapping charges and the boyfriend, too, is after her—believing she stole his drug money. DeKeyser convincingly portrays Victoria’s struggle to understand what happened to her once-perfect family and to protect the small boy. But the other characters seem like stereotypes: the down-on-her-luck single mom, the well-meaning but absent father, the scary drug-dealing boyfriend (at one point he calls Victoria on her cell: “I want my money without any funny stuff, or the kid ends up in the river”). The cartoon quality of the villain undercuts everything else. Ages 13-up. (Mar.)

The trick to getting hooked on this highly satisfying first novel is to look past its disjointed opening. The initial chapters consist of flashbacks into which are woven a series of repetitive scenes wherein Janie Hannagan is unwillingly sucked into others’ dreams and nightmares, and suffers debilitating side effects. But as soon as McMann establishes Janie’s strange skill, she throws just the right teen-centric ingredients into the story to propel it forward and grab readers. Tough and strong Janie, now 17, seems totally independent, charting a future that will lead away from her welfare mother’s alcoholism. Her turbulent relationship with Cabel, the unwashed stoner boy-turned-handsome, pulsates with sexual tension—problematized by Janie’s knowledge of his insistent dreams about killing a man. But then Cabel learns to communicate his desires to Janie through lucid dreaming at just about the same time that Janie finds out that she can influence the dreams she enters. The plot twists keep coming, even if one or two are shopworn, and the writing has a Caroline Cooney—like snap that’s hard to resist. Ages 14-up. (Mar.)

The multi-volume Flight anthology series has introduced a group of young cartoonists influenced more by animation than by American comics; this work is its new sibling, featuring 10 Flight artists writing and drawing short, whimsical stories aimed at middle-graders. Kibuishi leads it off with the two strongest stories: a cheerfully surreal episode of his own boy-and-his-dog series, Copper, in which the heroes traverse a chasm by jumping on giant mushrooms that turn out to be the heads of threatening creatures, and Johane Matte’s “Perfect Cat,” a little fable written and drawn in the style of mod ’60s animation, about a grouchy alley cat in ancient Egypt who learns that feline perfection has its downside. The rest are more hit-and-miss: Kean Soo’s “First Snow,” an episode of his girl-and-her-monster series, Jellaby, is nearly plotless, and Jake Parker’s “Missile Mouse: The Guardian Prophecy” is pro forma sci-fi. Some pieces start with a funny premise (Ben Hatke’s “If Wishes Were Socks” concerns a girl, her robot and a magical wishing sock), but then spin their wheels. The book’s full-color art is consistently stylish—Matthew Armstrong’s “Snow Cap” stands out visually—but readers may find themselves wishing for better developed tales. Ages 8-up. (Apr.)

If bedtime books were dances, this one would be a pas de deux: prose and pictures partner each other effortlessly all the way to the last page. At first, Alice doesn’t look like a candidate for bed; she’s in her nightgown, but she has leapt into midair, her blue blanket a billowing parachute, her room a pleasant mayhem of dolls and crayons. “ 'Blue is my favorite,’ ” Alice announces as Mama, robed and slippered, carries in a vase of flowers. “ 'And those—aren’t—blue,’” Alice adds, punctuating each word, the reader senses, with a bounce (by now, only the bottom of Alice’s nightgown and her stockinged feet are visible as the rest of her jumps out of view). “ 'Ah... but smell,’ ” Mama counters. Mama offers Alice more ritual things: tea to taste (“ 'Blue tea?’ says Alice, 'There’s no such thing’ ”), a quilt to feel, bells to listen to. They’re not blue, either, Alice protests, but she’s fading; in each successive painting she looks sleepier, her toys floppier, her bed snugglier. The rhythm of the words soothes: “In a blue room, orange tea cools in a brown cup”; “In a blue room, a quilt of red and green feels warm and cozy.”

These references to a blue room are a little odd: Alice’s walls are yellow. “ 'The moon... Mama,’ ” Alice murmurs, and Mama whispers, “ 'Here it comes.’ ” Click! The lamp goes off, and Alice’s room is transformed, bathed in the blue light of a full moon. Tusa’s (Mrs. Spitzer’s Garden) pictures, on single pages before, now expand to fill both. Alice’s room is blue, and so are the flowers, the tea, the quilt, the bells, all just as Alice said. The stars and planets on Alice’s blue blanket travel out the window and up into the sky; everything merges. Tusa appears to have breathed in first-time author Averbeck’s text and then breathed it out as pictures. The final appearance of the blue room, which sounded so impossible at first, will feel to children like a promise kept. Ages 3-7. (Apr.)

What kid could resist this title?

Sized for handy stashing in the inside pocket of a jacket, this primer for merry-prankster wannabes starts out with the obligatory request that readers play safe, and not damage property nor hurt anyone, neither psychically nor physically. After this, King takes off the brakes. From the smorgasbord of tricks: instead of TP’ing someone’s house at night, sprinkle the lawn with instant potato flakes (the dew will puff them up). And a tip: a pencil or pen clamped between the teeth effectively disguises one’s voice. From the historical record: forced into a duel, Abraham Lincoln named, as the choice of arms, cow manure. From the sports ledger: the mascots of Ohio’s Bryan & Stratton College are the Lemmings. Kids will also go for the Oxford Dictionary insults—e.g., “cockalorum”—recommended as replacements for “cuss words”; the detailed guide to shooting rubber bands; and the many scatological jokes. Ages 8-up. (Mar.)