Children's Book Reviews

Shea (New Socks) makes a hilarious commentator as his hero, a small red dinosaur, elevates everyday encounters into a series of matches worthy of the WWF. “Dinosaur versus... a bowl of spaghetti!” announces Shea and, with a trio of bold typographic roars (and two chomps), the bowl is vanquished. “Dinosaur wins again!” declares Shea, as Dinosaur coolly acknowledges his triumph. Again and again, Dinosaur proves unbeatable—the foes he defeats include a pile of leaves, a big slide and “talking grown-ups”—but the title hints at his Achilles heel. Dinosaur may not resemble anything found in a paleontology textbook, but he's a terrific surrogate. Incorporating paper, paint, photo collage and quick strokes of crayon, Shea's freewheeling compositions convey both a beguiling spontaneity and a preschooler's sense of invincibility. Kids will be only too happy to capitulate to this irresistible package. Ages 2–6. (Sept.)

Vegetarian vampire Dagmar, who prefers cherry juice to blood, “tend[s] to his moonlit vegetable patch” rather than prowl. Dagmar also adores candy, and when his crops grow slowly, he craves sugary snacks, prompting a skeleton in a pirate hat to recommend a certain human holiday involving scary costumes and free treats. Seibold (the Mr. Lunch books) and Vivian (A Little Friendly Advice) revisit time-tested Halloween formulas, freshening them with Seibold's quirky all-digital art, complementary palette and whimsically distorted shapes. Once the Halloween theme kicks in, however, they lose sight of Dagmar's vegetarianism and focus on sweets; likewise, except for a remark from Dagmar's mother, the title's stylized accent is absent from the wordy prose. Yet Dagmar himself is sympathetic, and he has a charming habit of turning into a bat when startled. Like Seibold's heroine in Olive, the Other Reindeer, he makes a promising holiday icon. Ages 4–8. (Oct.)

Niemann (The Police Cloud) introduces readers to 33 Chinese characters via an ingenious, breezy tale about a spunky heroine named Lin who's searching for her runaway pet dragon. Throughout Lin's quest, Niemann superimposes bold, black Chinese characters over key images or other elements in his super-smooth digital graphics. When Lin herself is introduced, for example, the character for “person” is overlaid on her figure, allowing readers to see how it evokes the outline of a body and two legs. Unlike authors of conventional primers, Niemann doesn't try to directly incorporate the special vocabulary into his story (the text doesn't refer to Lin as a “person”). Nor does he adhere to the expected icon-to-object correspondence every time: as he notes in his genial introduction, some of the match-ups reflect his own imagination at play (the character for “work” takes the shape of an I-beam at a construction site). As a result, the pages reflect not only Niemann's cleverness, but also his sense of discovery and his enthusiasm. Ages 4–8. (Sept.)

When does a child lose faith in make-believe? How does the power of imagination fade? Haseley (Twenty Heartbeats) and Nolan (The Castle Builder) explore these questions in their quiet tale of a boy's evolving relationship with his toy airplane and the dollhouse figures that fly it. As Charles grows older, the voices of his toys grow fainter, until one day he can no longer hear them and throws away the playthings. But their hold on his imagination remains, and he rescues them from the trash to pass on to his soon-to-be-born brother. The toys speak among themselves when alone on the page, lending a subtle truth to Charles's pretend. Especially effective are the occasional intersections of imagination and reality—an airplane in the sky dips its wings in farewell when Charles can no longer hear his toys speak. Haseley's poetic, restrained language pairs well with Nolan's representational illustrations, which are softened by a mixed-color sepia wash. The sensibility and scope, however, may be too adult; children may find the paucity of action combined with the muted illustrations less than compelling. Ages 4–8. (Sept.)

With characteristic irreverence, Delessert's oversize introduction to color theory takes what in lesser hands is often a didactic lesson and carries it into the realm of the fantastical. Bulbous-headed creatures energetically embody the colors of the rainbow and, through simple similes, demonstrate the appearance of color in nature: “Orange like flames” and “Violet like a tulip.” The use of broad white space enhances the intensity of colors, as does the enlarged scale and the eye-level perspective. As the creatures interact, palettes blend. A timid handshake between yellow and blue makes green. Red and blue fuse into purple via a friendly kick in the derriere and, when the players commingle like Cirque du Soleil acrobats, they result in brown. While concrete thinkers may search for a familiar creature in the shape-shifting species, others will appreciate their ambiguity and their joie de vivre. Ages 7–up. (Sept.)

Setting this adventure in the future, Lynch (Inexcusable) plays on themes dear to middle-schoolers: the bond between children and animals, the mistrust of authority, the double edge of technology that offers shortcuts but erodes independence. Zane, the narrator, lives surrounded by monitors, and he wears an anklet at all times: “[It] connected into the very me with a wire that goes right under my skin and on into the who knows what depths of me.” So he feels sympathetic when his dog, Hugo, returns from the vet implanted with a chip that lets people “read [his] heart and mind,” and then engineers a trip to the WildArea, the one place where nature is still allowed to take its course. Convinced by Hugo, Zane sets about trying to free the animals in thrall to the vet. The action doesn't let up long enough for readers to start questioning some plot holes; perhaps these will be closed in a planned sequel. Ages 9–12. (Sept.)

In his debut novel, picture book author/artist Kirk (Library Mouse) delivers a complicated magical tale, the first installment of a projected trilogy. The veil between the elfin world and the human world has grown thin, and with humans cutting down forests to build houses and subdivisions, the elf community begins to lose its battle to keep its secrets. Two children, Matt and Becky—whose developer father is poised to destroy the trees that protect the elfin city of Alfheim from discovery—stumble upon a long-lost sacred wedding shoe that elfin royalty desperately wants back. The fate of the elves becomes intertwined with that of Becky and Matt, who must decide if they are willing to risk everything to save this magical realm. Without sacrificing plot for message, Kirk offers a subtle critique of the ways humanity mistreats the planet. His illustrations add an otherworldly beauty to what is otherwise a light, playful (if not a tad long) tale. Ages 10–up. (Oct.)

Readers as yet unfamiliar with Link (Magic for Beginners) will be excited to discover her singular voice in this collection of nine short stories, her first book for young adults. The first entry, “The Wrong Grave,” immediately demonstrates her rare talents: a deadpan narration that conceals the author's metafictional sleight-of-hand (“Miles had always been impulsive. I think you should know that right up front”); subjects that range from absurd to mundane, all observed with equidistant irony. Miles, hoping to recover the poems he's buried with his dead girlfriend, digs up what appears to be the wrong corpse (“It's a mistake anyone could make,” interjects the narrator), who regains life and visits her mother, a lapsed Buddhist (“Mrs. Baldwin had taken her Buddhism very seriously, once, before substitute teaching had knocked it out of her'). Other stories have more overtly magical or intertextual themes; in each, Link's peppering of her prose with random associations dislocates readers from the ordinary. With a quirky, fairytale style evocative of Neil Gaiman, the author mingles the grotesque and the ethereal to make magic on the page. Ages 12–up. (Oct.)

Green melds elements from his Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines— the impossibly sophisticated but unattainable girl, and a life-altering road trip—for another teen-pleasing read. Weeks before graduating from their Orlando-area high school, Quentin Jacobsen's childhood best friend, Margo, reappears in his life, specifically at his window, commanding him to take her on an all-night, score-settling spree. Quentin has loved Margo from not so afar (she lives next door), years after she ditched him for a cooler crowd. Just as suddenly, she disappears again, and the plot's considerable tension derives from Quentin's mission to find out if she's run away or committed suicide. Margo's parents, inured to her extreme behavior, wash their hands, but Quentin thinks she's left him a clue in a highlighted volume of Leaves of Grass. Q's sidekick, Radar, editor of a Wikipedia-like Web site, provides the most intelligent thinking and fuels many hilarious exchanges with Q. The title, which refers to unbuilt subdivisions and “copyright trap” towns that appear on maps but don't exist, unintentionally underscores the novel's weakness: both milquetoast Q and self-absorbed Margo are types, not fully dimensional characters. Readers who can get past that will enjoy the edgy journey and off-road thinking. Ages 12–up. (Oct.)

In her extraordinary and often dark first novel, award-winning story writer Lanagan (Red Spikes) creates two worlds: the first a preindustrial village that might have sprung from a Brueghel canvas, a place of victims and victimizers; the second a personal heaven granted to Liga Longfield, who has survived her father's molestations and a gang rape but, with one baby and pregnant again, cannot risk any further pain. As she raises her two daughters, placid Branza and fiery Urdda, she discovers that her universe is permeable: a dwarf or “littlee man,” in Lanagan's characteristically knotted parlance, slips in and out of her world in search of treasure; and a good-hearted youth also enters, magically transformed into a bear in the process. A less kind man-bear follows, and then a teenage Urdda, avid for a richer life with the “vivid people,” figures out how to pass through the border, too. Writing in thick, clotted prose that holds the reader to a slow pace, Lanagan explores the savage and the gentlest sides of human nature, and how they coexist. With suggestions of bestiality and sodomy, the novel demands maturity—but the challenging text will attract only an ambitious audience anyway. Ages 14–up. (Oct.)

Fans of Scott's YA romances Perfect You or Bloom may be unprepared for the unrelieved terror within this chilling novel, about a 15-year-old girl who has spent the last five years being abused by a kidnapper named Ray and is kept powerless by Ray's promise to harm her family if she makes one false move. The narrator knows she is the second of the girls Ray has abducted and renamed Alice; Ray killed the first when she outgrew her childlike body at 15, and now Alice half-hopes her own demise is approaching (“I think of the knife in the kitchen, of the bridges I've seen from the bus... but the thing about hearts is that they always want to keep beating”). Ray, however, has an even more sinister plan: he orders Alice to find a new girl, then train her to Ray's tastes. Scott's prose is spare and damning, relying on suggestive details and their impact on Alice to convey the unimaginable violence she repeatedly experiences. Disturbing but fascinating, the book exerts an inescapable grip on readers—like Alice, they have virtually no choice but to continue until the conclusion sets them free. Ages 16–up. (Sept.)

Talk about mad genius—from conception to execution, padded red cover with 3-D effect to the up-close-and-personal images inside, this anatomy book is as engrossing as any science fiction. Dr. Frankenstein, shown in a sepia photograph standing in a laboratory, gazing at a skull he holds in one hand, invites readers to join him as he creates a human being (“Don't look so startled,” he chides the meek). From there it's on to atoms and the skeletal system, tissues and organs, and so on, presented on visually rich spreads. The story line is sustained with brief, pun-happy journal entries (“Day 11 [on eyes]: Assistant has seen the light”), and the theme reinforced with remarkable design. Gothic fonts and engraved illustrations and vignettes (in red and black and also hand-colored) blend with state-of-the-art images from MEG scans, gamma scans and other advanced technology. Clear explanations broken into easily assimilable captions and text blocks encourage the reader. The only flaw: the subject most likely to interest the target group, the reproductive system, receives such timid mention as to be almost nonsensical (“Male and female reproductive systems differ in structure, but both are involved in producing special cells that join up to make babies”). Ages 10–up. (Sept.)

Eight years in the making, this anthology of White House history convenes an all-star roster of 108 children's authors and illustrators, as well as a few scholars and former White House employees and residents—and it is a blue-ribbon choice for family sharing during an election year. Chronologically ordered, the entries range from poems to presidential speeches, satirical cartoons to stately portraits; despite the talents of the literary contributors (Kate DiCamillo offers a poem about Lincoln's death, Patricia MacLachlan describes Eleanor Roosevelt's rescue of a cat belonging to a young girl), perhaps the most striking writings are those that most closely adhere to the historical record. Barbara Kerley details Thomas Jefferson's passion for paleontology, and M.T. Anderson describes White House ghosts (Churchill, visited by a spectral Lincoln, “tapped the ash off the end of his cigar and said, 'Good evening, Mr. President. You seem to have me at a disadvantage' ”). But few of the writers create the same impact as the occasional document: Robert Kennedy addresses the nation after Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated, and Richard Nixon bids farewell to the White House staff. (That young readers will react to these documents is in no small part due to the writers' success in establishing the contexts for them.) Among the most provocative entries are works by artists who “look in” on the White House with a demonstrably personal vision: David Small shares color sketches of “backstairs at the White House,” a study in contrasts; Bob Kolar arranges the presidents as if on a board game, with clever annotations (who knew President Arthur held a yard sale while in office?); Peter Sís supplies 37 characteristically enigmatic portraits to illustrate freedom to worship. Although a few entries seem formulaic, the volume makes the invaluable point that history does not have to be remote or abstract, but a personal and ongoing engagement. Ages 10–up. (Sept.)