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With new friend Echo. Do I have to give her back?

It seems as though all of my friends have new kittens and want to torture me by constantly posting pictures, resulting in a serious case of kitten envy. For various reasons (#1 being my neurotic adult cat), introducing a kitten to my life is not the best plan at the moment, so I’m contenting myself — for now — with a few kitty-centric books.

On the cute-overload side…

I Knead My Mommy and Other Poems by Kittens by Francesco Marciuliano (Chronicle, August 2014)
The latest in Marciuliano’s series of pet-perspective poetry books (I Could Chew on This, I Could Pee on This) features a kitten’s-eye view of the world. Although the brief poems admittedly aren’t great literature, they are frequently funny or touching; one of my favorites is “Not Goodbye”:

I still smell the older cat
On his favorite chair
On his favorite blanket
On his favorite toy
On me
I still smell the older cat
But I can’t find him anywhere
And now his dish is gone
And now his bed is gone
And now you are crying
But I still smell the older cat
So tomorrow I will look again

The poems are accompanied by many super-cute (stock) photos of kittens in all their fuzzy, bobble-headed glory. A good gift book for the crazy cat person on your list.

The Itty Bitty Kitty Committee: The Ultimate Guide to All Things Kitten by Laurie Cinotto (Roaring Brook, March 2014)
Part photo album, part how-to book, this paperback inspired by “kitten wrangler” Cinotto’s blog of the same name introduces several dozen of her previous foster cats as well as basic kitten care and the responsibilities kitten-fostering entails. Instructions for DIY kitten accoutrements, an advice column “written by” adult cat Charlene, comics created with photos and speech bubbles, kid-oriented tips on keeping kittens happy and healthy, and suggestions for helping shelter cats round out this offering. The kitty pics are definitely the main attraction, though; just try not to squee at this one.

On the bizarre-but-kinda-awesome end of the spectrum…

Downton Tabby: A Parody by Chris Kelly (Simon & Schuster, December 2013)
Cats make a weirdly appropriate (re)cast for the Edwardian-era BBC drama about an entitled family and their servants: “A Code of Conduct for Cats and Gentlefolk” offers advice such as “Never do anything for yourself that someone else can do for you,” “Communicate disapproval [and affection] with a withering glare,” and “Loaf in a decorative and highly charming manner.” This is a strange and not entirely successful little volume, but the well-dressed hairless cat as the acerbic “Dowager Catness” is pretty spot-on. (Another gem: a diagram of a formal place setting indicating the “mouse fork,” “vole fork,” etc.)

Pre-Raphaelite Cats by Susan Herbert (Thames & Hudson, May 2014)

Possibly even stranger (/cooler) is this collection of cat-ified Pre-Raphaelite portraits. Thirty works by Pre-Raphaelite founders Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais and their followers are reimagined with a variety of anthropomorphized kitty subjects. Some highlights: homages to Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix, John William Waterhouse’s Ophelia, and Edward Burne-Jones‘s The Golden Stairs. Each painting on the recto is accompanied by a few lines of contextual information or a short quotation on the verso; about half the versos include spot line-art of the featured felines. Black-and-white thumbnail reproductions of the original art are appended.

The post Kitten envy appeared first on The Horn Book.

Hipster teens rejoice! Here is your new poster child (though she would probably reject the title — which is, of course, the hipster thing to do).

With The Isobel Journal: Just a Girl from Where Nothing Really Happens (Switch Press, August 2014; first published in her native UK by Hot Key Press, 2013), nineteen-year-old art student Isobel Harrop shares her journal of quirky drawings accompanied by obvious, but often hilarious, observations about life. (Sometimes she likes to play “Pretend I am Beyoncé.” Don’t we all?) Imagine Amelia of Amelia’s Notebook growing up and going to the Rhode Island School of Design. If you love the grungy and odd, vintage clothes, championing music no one else has heard of, rhapsodizing about tea, and ironically listening to ’90s girl bands, meet your new best friend!

A few of my favorite entries:

I can empathize — I, too, fear of being “one of those people.”

Here’s a link to a soundtrack compiled by Isobel to listen to while perusing the book.

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The Undertaking of Lily Chen (First Second, March 2014), Danica Novgorodoff’s latest graphic novel, begins with an excerpt from an article published by The Economist in 2007:

Parts of rural China are seeing a burgeoning market for female corpses, the result of the reappearance of a strange custom called “ghost marriages.” Chinese tradition demands that husbands and wives always share a grave. Sometimes, when a man died unmarried, his parents would procure the body of a woman, hold a “wedding,” and bury the couple together… A black market has sprung up to supply corpse brides[…] At the bottom of the supply chain come hospital mortuaries, funeral parlors, body snatchers — and now murderers.

The epigraph — taken from an article published within the last decade about a real phenomenon — sets a grisly tone for this noteworthy paperback from First Second.

After Deshi accidentally kills his unmarried older brother during an altercation on a military base, he is tasked (by his grieving parents) with acquiring a corpse bride to accompany his brother to the afterlife. With a large sum of money, Deshi hires an unscrupulous “marriage broker” to help him find a fresh body, but they get interrupted and separated before they can finish the job.

As Deshi tracks down his lost pack mule, he happens upon Lily Chen, a modern girl living in old fashioned township who wishes to escape her rural surroundings, her overbearing father, and a potential arranged marriage. Free-spirit Lily forces charms her way into running away with Deshi, believing they’re heading toward Beijing, while Deshi, desperate to fulfill his obligation to his parents (who always favored their eldest son), contemplates murdering Lily as a last resort. Complications arise as he ends up falling in love with her.

Aspects of modern-day China collide with ancient Chinese traditions in both content and artistic style. Deshi and Lily struggle to reconcile their own personal aspirations with their responsibilities to family traditions. Novgorodoff underscores this struggle in her art. She uses soft watercolor brushwork for rolling landscapes and strong black ink outlines for mountain-scapes effectively calling to mind classical Chinese painting techniques, while the presence of modern technology, contemporary clothing, and typical comic book onomatopoeia contrast with that aesthetic.

The grim subject matter is skillfully balanced with keen humor, genuine sentiment, and humanizing struggle.

The post ‘Til death do we part? The Undertaking of Lily Chen appeared first on The Horn Book.

The model made popular by the Choose Your Own Adventure middle-grade books comes to a teen audience in two new paperback series with massive appeal for reluctant-reader girls.

Bridie Clark’s Snap Decision series, which debuted last summer with Maybe Tonight? (Roaring Brook, August 2013), places the reader in the driver’s seat to navigate life at a prep school. In breezy second-person narration rife with timely pop-culture nods, “your” choices involve glamorous friends, glitzy parties, hot guys, and fabulous trips. The second installment, You Only Live Once­­ (is “YOLO” still everyone’s favorite acronym?), publishes this month.

In Summer Love (Speak/Penguin, May 2014), first in her Follow Your Heart series, Jill Santopolo takes the formula on a summer beach trip during which readers (fresh from a sweet sixteen party “six — no, seven — days ago”) flirt, date, and look for love at every turn. Ideal for fans of Sarah Dessen and Gayle Forman (included on the “other books your may enjoy” list in the opening pages), this is a diverting prescription for summer-vacation reading.

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We recently received the (adult) graphic novel biography Andre the Giant: Life and Legend by Box Brown (May 2014, First Second). As any Princess Bride fan will know, Andre the Giant is the professional-wrestler-turned-actor who played Fezzik in the movie.

Born Andre Rene Roussimoff, he grew up in rural Molien, France, where he was too large to ride the school bus and his father was friends with Samuel Beckett (who knew?). He moved to Paris, became a wrestler, went to Tokyo, and was diagnosed (in Japanese) with acromegaly (“He’ll age prematurely. His brow and jaw will grow more pronounced. His heart and organs won’t be able to keep up with his body. His joints, too. He’ll be a cripple. Then the doctor said he wouldn’t live past forty…”). He made his way to North America, wrestled professionally, drank a ton, got in a lot of fights, was kind of an ass (used the n-word against another wrestler; turned his back on his young daughter), and died at 46. There’s some hero worship on the author’s part (from the intro: “Andre the Giant represents all that is good in professional wrestling”), but the subject’s failings are never sugar-coated. Black-and-white panel illustrations depict all the rock-’em, sock-’em action.

The book is mostly based on anecdotes from friends and colleagues, and there’s a brief section on the Princess Bride filming. Christopher Guest — the six-fingered man — enjoys shaking Andre’s gigantic hand; Andre drapes his huge hand over Robin Wright/Princess Buttercup’s entire head to warm her up; director Rob Reiner balks at a giant $40,000 bar tab. Mandy Patinkin (Fezzik’s brother-from-another-mother Inigo Montoya) is blurbed on the book jacket: “A giant of a man in every way. I am thrilled to see his story finally told!” Princess Bride fans might— and ’70s- and ’80s-professional-wrestling fans will definitely — find a lot to like in this book.

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Following the Great East Japan Earthquake, editor Holly Thompson, a YA author (Orchards, a 2012 YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults book) and a longtime resident of Japan, became especially concerned about teen survivors of the quake and tsunami. She decided to collect YA short fiction from writers and translators connected to Japan either by heritage or experience, offering stories that would allow readers worldwide to “visit” Japan.

The thirty-six stories of Tomo: Friendship Through Fiction—An Anthology of Japan Teen Stories (Stone Bridge Press, March) cover a wide range of genres (prose, verse, graphic narratives) and feature nine stories translated from the Japanese. With the exception of Graham Salisbury and Alan Gratz, most of the authors, many of whom write for adults, will be new to American teens. The book was published in March to mark the one-year anniversary of the disaster, and proceeds will go to Hope for Tomorrow, which provides educational expenses, mentoring, tutoring, and foreign language support to high school students in the hard-hit area of Tohoku.

Is it too early to get excited about the Summer Olympics? I’m not really a sports person, but I do get excited about my two favorite events: the 400 meter Drool-Over-Michael-Phelps relay and women’s gymnastics.

I was eleven years old when the Magnificent 7 dominated the 1996 summer games—the perfect age to marvel over the mysterious creatures that are competitive gymnasts. So tiny. So powerful. So much glitter hairspray. My favorite Olympian was thirteen-year-old Dominique Moceanu. I read and re-read her autobiography (Dominique Moceanu: An American Champion) so many times that I ran my paperback copy quite ragged.

Lucky for young fans, Moceanu is back in the book business with a new middle-grade series, The Go-for-Gold Gymnasts (Disney-Hyperion, April), co-written with Alicia Thompson. Seemingly created specifically for eleven-year-old me, this series follows four young gymnasts who train together at a fictional elite gym in Texas, with each girl taking turns as protagonist, Babysitter’s Club style. In the first title, Winning Team, Britt is the new girl at the gym. Her new teammates give her the cold shoulder because she is a show-off with a perfect full double-twisting somersault—don’t you hate those? But with life lessons gleaned from To Kill a Mockingbird, Britt avoids becoming the Boo Radley of the Texas Twisters by taming her sassy, self-centered ways.

Along with the inner emotional struggles of tweendom, Winning Team also reveals those coveted details of gymnast-life that only Moceanu could provide: the superhuman training schedules, the bizarre and disgusting athletic rituals, the catty in-fighting. The characters also speak in thick gymnast-dialect—you might need to spend some time on YouTube learning the difference between a “full-in” and a “half-in, half-out”. And let’s not forget the requisite eating disorder plotline! Don’t worry: by the end of the book, everyone has regained health and attained a sense of team spirit, and you’ll be more than prepared to cheer on the newest pack of little 2012 USA competitors this summer.

About eleven years ago, I fell in love with Miss Agnes. Kirkpatrick Hill’s The Year of Miss Agnes is one of my first-weeks-of-school read-aloud books. Miss Agnes’s loving but no-nonsense teaching methods inspire me every time I read it, which is just about every year. Now, more than a decade since that book was published, readers can see how Miss Agnes’s second year at the one-room schoolhouse in rural Alaska turns out.

Having spent the summer in her native England, Miss Agnes  returns, this time with a ginger cat. Miss Agnes and the Ginger Tom (CreateSpace, December) is also told in eleven-year-old Fred’s straightforward prose, so again we see the school year through her eyes. This year, the focus is not the fear that Miss Agnes will leave the community and never return. The children and parents have another worry: will the gifted Jimmy Sam pass the challenging entrance test to a boarding school that will allow him to use these intellectual gifts?

This sequel will appeal most to people like me: people who loved the community and characters of the first book. The first installment painted a marvelous picture of life in the fish and hunting camps and gave a peek at the challenges of life in post-WWII Alaska, and this offering provides more of the same. There is a fair amount of repeating the life stories of the children, because, like life in rural Alaska, little changes in a few months.

I don’t know very much about the publishing industry or why this little volume is self-published. I wish it had had the tender touch of an editor who would have tightened it up, fixed the typos, and added characters and some plot twists to help keep young readers engaged. I was hoping that someone new would move in or Miss Agnes might have a love interest or the community might face threat from weather or encroaching development… Something. But no matter. I still loved reading more about these children on the Koyukuk River. And I love sharing the lives of Fred and Jimmy—and even the surprising ginger tomcat—with their modern counterparts.

Now that March has finally arrived, we’re officially in the “T-minus” phase for The Hunger Games movie adaptation, hitting theaters on March 23.

In anticipation, I’ve been perusing several pieces of fine literature, to wit: The Hunger Games: The Official Illustrated Movie Companion (Scholastic, February), Stars in the Arena: Meet the Hotties of The Hunger Games (Simon Pulse, February), and The Hunger Games Tribute Guide (Scholastic, February).

The Official Illustrated Movie Companion is fairly comprehensive, with bios, behind-the-scenes photos, and making-of trivia. We hear from author Suzanne Collins herself, the director, the producer, all the cast members, set designers, costume designers… it’s a big love-fest. There are also lots of huge, shiny pictures of prettiness. The takeaway: the people in the Capitol are going to be fun to look at. And keep an eye out for Wes Bentley’s beard. You’ll know it when you see it.

Speaking of things that are fun to look at, in Stars in the Arena: Meet the Hotties of The Hunger Games, we discover the answers to such questions as “Could Jennifer Lawrence survive in the wild like Katniss?”, “Is Josh Hutcherson as romantic as Peeta?”, and “Is Liam [Hemsworth] in love with Jen in real life?” …Wait, is he?

Sadly, they’re just friends, but I was totally whipped into a frenzy of fandom right there.

There’s obviously a conflation of the actors and their characters in all of these books, but it reaches a whole new level in the Tribute Guide, which begins with a sinister “Citizens of Panem, are you ready?” Now we’re the audience both in the real world and in the story? Not sure how I feel about that. The rest of the meta-exercise is essentially a program for viewers watching the book’s reality TV show, The Hunger Games.

Ooh, when are they going to make the TV show?

Yup, it’s definitely T-minus time.

As an urban twenty-something with a CSA farm share, a crush on Michael Pollan, and the occasional yearning to dangle tomato plants from my third-story apartment windows, I think a bit too much about where my food comes from. I often wonder how much of my insanity I will impart upon my future offspring. Will I blend my own baby food? Withhold McDonald’s? Send my kids into my jungle of a garden to weed and bring back dinner?

With the increasing momentum of the local food movement, a bevy of conscientious young parents are likely seeking media to further educate/indoctrinate their children. What better way to instruct your urban children in the true origins of their local, organic chicken dinner than with artist Julia Rothman’s Farm Anatomy: The Curious Parts and Pieces of Country Life (Storey, October)? Although published for adults, Farm Anatomy is little more than a hefty, hipster-friendly visual dictionary with a dash of farmer’s almanac, making it a good choice for the whole family to share. Rothman’s pen and ink illustrations are heavily hand-labeled, detailing every part of farm life from soil composition to the twenty-six distinct styles of rooster combs.

Rothman’s images can be a bit pastoral and rosy, but the book’s content doesn’t sugarcoat the realities of a working farm. One glance at the double-page spread full of archaic, frightening-looking “tools of the trade” makes me grateful that my urban existence does not require something called an “ear-notcher”.