Children's Book Reviews

Elffers (Food Play) teams up with Curious Pictures, producer of such TV shows as Little Einsteins, to introduce Snuzzles. Amorphous and solid-colored, the Snuzzles look a lot like rubber squeak toys, with their heads defined only by protrusions for noses and ears and by googly eyes, but they seem destined for the big time, given that an animated video series is in pre-production. A series of exchanges between Snuzzles big and small, the gentle, rhyming text is the straightforward stuff of bedtime rituals. But while the questions are expected, the answers feel fresh (“Would you leave me?/ Never ever./ Do you want me?/ Only forever”). Set against high-contrast, single-color backgrounds, the action takes place at close range, so that just their heads, or parts of their heads, are visible. Some Snuzzles clearly resemble rabbits or elephants, while others merely have bulbous pseudo ears or noses. The flap copy says that the Snuzzles “express their love by putting nose to nose”; readers are likely to follow their example and “snuzzle closer” themselves. Ages 2–5. (Dec.)

Using the most minimal text, this novelty book engagingly explores adjectives and adverbs in their absolute, comparative and superlative forms. Each spread incorporates a gatefold flap: at first, readers see only a single word, e.g., “deep,” which accompanies a scuba diver in an underwater setting. This particular flap unfolds from the bottom of the page, once to show the diver swimming “deeper” and again to show him “deepest.” A skyscraper grows tall, taller, tallest at the top of a page, a cat pursues a mouse heading fast for an initially concealed mousehole, etc. The concept is inventive and SAMi's familiar bold colors and clever gatefolds will attract the eyes of very young readers, especially the spectacular last page, in which the “biggest” giant is four times the size of the book. However, this is not a board book, and the toddlers who will appreciate it the most are also likely to maul it. Ages 2–5. (Dec.)

In the opening pages of this buoyant picture book, Willems (Knuffle Bunny) informs readers that “for this story” they need only know three things about naked mole rats: “1. They are a little bit rat. 2. They are a little bit mole. 3. They are all naked.” The exception to point number three, however, is Wilbur, who revels in a wardrobe that ranges from a turtleneck and beret to an astronaut suit—infuriating his brethren. When the naked mole rats complain to their leader, Grand-pah, he gathers the colony and issues a proclamation. Happily for Wilbur, it's a call for tolerance. Willems is fully aware that nudity = comic gold for this audience, and his legion of emotive, square-headed rodents—far cuter than in real life—are paired successfully with droll prose (“Grand-pah did look heroic. Grand-pah did look regal. But he would also look heroic and regal in a casual shirt and some summer slacks”). Straightforward and engaging. Ages 3–up. (Jan.)

Perkins subtly explores friendship in this understated, appealing picture book. Debbie (an older version appears in Perkins's All Alone in the Universe and the Newbery Medal–winning Criss Cross) and Tina spend their days “doing beautiful wonderful things”—playing dress up, making tents from bedspreads and talking. Debbie wants to share her piano lessons, too, and because Tina doesn't have a piano, Debbie painstakingly crafts a keyboard from cardboard so they can both practice. But she is sad when Tina loses interest. After questioning their friendship, Debbie ultimately concurs that a cardboard piano is missing the “best part,” realizing that she and Tina share enough already. Perkins's dialogue, shown in speech bubbles, is spot on, and her watercolors reveal a range of underlying emotions in everyday moments. An animated DVD narrated by Perkins is also included. Ages 4–7. (Nov.)

When a line mysteriously vanishes from his favorite drawing, Tommaso hunts it down, and he discovers that while lines are indeed everywhere, it's the significance and sensibility he infuses in his line that make it all his own. Or, to put it another way, Tommaso discovers what it means to be an artist. As in previous books, Pericoli (The True Story of Stellina) demonstrates remarkable draftsmanship and a vivid eye for detail and perspective; the mostly black-and-white pictures combine the elegant extravagance of architectural engravings with the playfulness and spontaneity of a great doodle. The Italian setting adds to the charm, and children will enjoy seeing the foreign-language store signs, the Roman columns, etc. The design is striking: initially, as Tommaso searches for the missing line, Pericoli asks readers to join in Tommaso's quest—and experience his heightened awareness—by highlighting one line in bright orange (the curling line of a cat's tail, the springy line of car antenna), the same color that Tommaso has drawn with. Facing each illustration, the text drops out from solid orange; the effect is eye-popping. Ages 5–8. (Dec.)

“The many ways to make a wish wherever home may be” come in for lighthearted yet respectful exploration in this attractive square-format book. Thong (Red Is a Dragon) entices readers with consistently well-rhymed verses (“We puff on dandelions/ with their fluff as white as milk—/ our wishes sail through the breeze/ on parachutes of silk”), following up each with a brief description of a national custom. Some may be familiar—throwing coins into Rome's Trevi Fountain or offering prayers at Jerusalem's Western Wall—but many will be new to most readers: in India children make secret wishes on peacock feathers and save them in notebooks or diaries. Rendered in Kleven's (The Paper Princess) kaleidoscopic style, many of the full-bleed spreads nearly shimmer, as in the picture of Brazilian children jumping waves on New Year's Day. The book ends with a multiethnic group of American children blowing out birthday cake candles, inviting readers to look at their own practices from a newly broadened perspective. Endnotes include more information along with an invitation to find 15 lucky symbols hidden in the pictures. Ages 5–9. (Nov.)

Textural folk art paintings visually exude Mexico in this abecedary. Two- to four-line verses introduce topics from A to Z; wide sidebars for each are packed with interesting facts and anecdotes conveying different aspects of the nation's history, landscape, traditions and beliefs. The format is a good one, allowing readers to focus on Parra's (My Name Is Gabriela) dynamic pictures of birds (e.g., the quetzal), ancient deities, stylized landscapes, iconic figures. The text, however, can be inconsistent. A particularly sappy verse—“O is for Olympic Games/ The world went to Mexico, held hands in brotherhood,/ and for one shining moment knew peace”—is contradicted in the sidebar, which refers to the “bloody result” of a student demonstration before the games. Some verses are meaningless without the sidebar explanation: “N is for Netzahualcóyotl/ There was a golden time once/ when men lived dreams/ and poems bloomed like flowers.” The sidebars themselves, fortunately, cover a broad range, including cooking directions for prickly pears and a poem written by Netzahualcóyotl, who turns out to have been 15th-century Texcoco's answer to Leonardo da Vinci. Ages 6–10. (Dec.)

Guevara's (Chato's Kitchen) gentle acrylics temper 26 poems about war by Johnston (P Is for Piñata, reviewed above), whose imagery pulls no punches. Many of her poems are set squarely in the middle of combat, addressing victims (“Child on the other side of the world.../ I am calling”) or describing their surroundings. The poet sharply invokes the products of war: poverty (of a dog: “His ribs are the slats of a small ark”), violence (“The body remains,/ crumpled in the street”) and grief. Guevara, painting on rough canvas, declines to show the most frightening scenes. Instead of the child on the other side of the world “in your little torn shirt,” she paints a small girl clinging to the back of a flying dove; instead of the crumpled body, she paints an angel. Quick brushstrokes and pastel shades soften the blow, and the images register as memories or dreams. The final poems pray for peace, but Johnston's sobering portraits make forgiveness unexpectedly difficult to imagine. Ages 10–up. (Dec.)

The term “suburbia” may conjure visions of vast and generic sameness, but in his hypnotic collection of 15 short stories and meditations, Tan does for the sprawling landscape what he did for the metropolis in The Arrival.Here, the emotional can be manifest physically (in “No Other Country,” a down-on-its-luck family finds literal refuge in a magic “inner courtyard” in their attic) and the familiar is twisted unsettlingly (a reindeer appears annually in “The Nameless Holiday” to take away objects “so loved that their loss will be felt like the snapping of a cord to the heart”). Tan's mixed-media art draws readers into the strange settings, à la The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. In “Alert but Not Armed,” a double-page spread heightens the ludicrousness of a nation in which every house has a government missile in the yard; they tower over the neighborhood, painted in cheery pastels and used as birdhouses (“If there are families in faraway countries with their own backyard missiles, armed and pointed back at us, we would hope that they too have found a much better use for them,” the story ends). Ideas and imagery both beautiful and disturbing will linger. Ages 12–up. (Feb.)

Ambitiously structuring her stylish novel as alternating narratives and interspersing these with black-and-white photos, Lane (The Secret Life of It Girls) focuses on two half-Japanese, half-American girls who forge an unusual bond over their blogs, loneliness and fascination with the gothic Lolita subculture. Chelsea is in L.A. and Miya is in Japan; they've never spoken or even exchanged messages—they simply read each other's blogs. Their lives mirror each other's in their tragedies: when Miya's mother killed herself, her father abandoned her and her brother to an orphanage; Chelsea has not blogged for three years, since her brother disappeared). A manga that the girls love and the photographs add a surreal layer, as do the many mystical elements. There is even a suggestion that the girls have twin souls: Miya's grandmother consoles her about the twin who died in utero by saying that she was born immediately to someone else. Readers will find themselves quickly engrossed. Ages 12–up. (Nov.)

Class, identity and friendship are the intersecting subjects of this intelligent novel. Now that she's a sophomore and boarding on campus, daughter of privilege Lily Noble wonders if she's outgrown the Vaughan School—she feels restless with students, administration and even her boyfriend, who assume they know everything about her. With the entrance of scholarship student Hazel Tobias, raised by her much older photographer brother and his male partner, Lily finds both a new friend and a way to demonstrate her new subversiveness. Besides reliably recreating the dynamics of teen-girl friendship, Koja (Kissing the Bee) relays this story with her usual insight and, through her lightning-fast characterizations, an ability to project multiple perspectives simultaneously. The narrative jumps between the ongoing academic year and its end, a fractured chronology that shades each early encounter with extra significance. Brief reports or memos, mostly from various members of faculty and staff, remind readers that Lily is not always the best judge of her own behavior, and that it is up to the audience to fill in the openings that Koja shrewdly leaves. Ages 14–up. (Nov.)

A sense of foreboding permeates the first half of this powerful novel, which opens with an allusion to a lynching: in the Deep South, says an unidentified narrator, the oldest trees “do not speak because they are ashamed.” Lester (Pharaoh's Daughter) begins the action proper in the summer of 1946, homing in on Ansel Anderson, being trained to take over his father's business at the age of 14—old enough, his father, Bert, thinks, “to understand what it meant to be white” and for shop assistant Willie, whom Ansel treats like a brother, “to understand what it meant to be a nigger.” After Willie's father is falsely accused of raping and murdering the preacher's daughter—by the man demonstrably guilty—the townsmen clamor for a hanging. Ansel demands that Bert back up Willie's testimony; Bert silences him and makes him help get the rope from the family store, then watch the lynching. Focusing on the repercussions of white guilt, the author's understated, haunting prose is as compelling as it is dark; if the characterizations tend toward the extreme, the story nonetheless leaves a deep impression. Ages 14–up. (Nov.)

Signature

Reviewed by Megan Whalen Turner

If there really are only seven original plots in the world, it's odd that “boy meets girl” is always mentioned, and “society goes bad and attacks the good guy” never is. Yet we have Fahrenheit 451, The Giver, The House of the Scorpion—and now, following a long tradition of Brave New Worlds, The Hunger Games.

Collins hasn't tied her future to a specific date, or weighted it down with too much finger wagging. Rather less 1984 and rather more Death Race 2000, hers is a gripping story set in a postapocalyptic world where a replacement for the United States demands a tribute from each of its territories: two children to be used as gladiators in a televised fight to the death.

Katniss, from what was once Appalachia, offers to take the place of her sister in the Hunger Games, but after this ultimate sacrifice, she is entirely focused on survival at any cost. It is her teammate, Peeta, who recognizes the importance of holding on to one's humanity in such inhuman circumstances. It's a credit to Collins's skill at characterization that Katniss, like a new Theseus, is cold, calculating and still likable. She has the attributes to be a winner, where Peeta has the grace to be a good loser.

It's no accident that these games are presented as pop culture. Every generation projects its fear: runaway science, communism, overpopulation, nuclear wars and, now, reality TV. The State of Panem—which needs to keep its tributaries subdued and its citizens complacent—may have created the Games, but mindless television is the real danger, the means by which society pacifies its citizens and punishes those who fail to conform. Will its connection to reality TV, ubiquitous today, date the book? It might, but for now, it makes this the right book at the right time.

What happens if we choose entertainment over humanity? In Collins's world, we'll be obsessed with grooming, we'll talk funny, and all our sentences will end with the same rise as questions. When Katniss is sent to stylists to be made more telegenic before she competes, she stands naked in front of them, strangely unembarrassed. “They're so unlike people that I'm no more self-conscious than if a trio of oddly colored birds were pecking around my feet,” she thinks. In order not to hate these creatures who are sending her to her death, she imagines them as pets. It isn't just the contestants who risk the loss of their humanity. It is all who watch.

Katniss struggles to win not only the Games but the inherent contest for audience approval. Because this is the first book in a series, not everything is resolved, and what is left unanswered is the central question. Has she sacrificed too much? We know what she has given up to survive, but not whether the price was too high. Readers will wait eagerly to learn more.

Megan Whalen Turner is the author of the Newbery Honor book The Thief and its sequels, The Queen of Attolia and The King of Attolia. The next book in the series will be published by Greenwillow in 2010.