How to use this Page

Tao, the Little Samurai #1: Pranks and Attacks!

by Laurent Richard & Nicolas Ryser, illustrator

translated by Edward Gauvin

Graphic Universe      1/14/2014

978-1-4677-2095-3

Age 7 to 11       64 pages

.

“Tao is studying martial arts at the famous Master Snow’s school. But no matter how hard he concentrates on his lessons, mischief gets in the way! Tai plays pranks and jokes around with his friends Ray, Lee, and Kat. He also struggles to get to school on time, learn new moves, and—most importantly—avoid doing his chores.”

Opening

“Ohboyohboy . . . this is gonna be tight. If I’m late, I’m gonna get chewed out! Hurry, hurry, hurry . . . home stretch . . .”

Review

Tao attends Master Snow’s martial arts school along with three friends, Ray, Lee, and his “not-girlfriend” Kat. Try as he might, Tao is late for school, and when there, has a hard time following Master Snow’s teachings. Each graphic novel page begins with a title, which is more like an oriental proverb. The second page is title “Showing off Can Spoil Dessert.” Tao is home and decides to practice annihilating blocks with a karate chop. He stacks three sets of two blocks to his right, left, and directly in front. Quickly, Tao chops with great force. “Bash! Bash! Bash!” Tao disintegrates every block, but his papa is unhappy with his son’s accomplishment—Tao used graham crackers as his cement blocks.

Kids, especially boys, will love Tao and his goofy ways. Tao tries but what he touches never goes right for him. I think reluctant readers will also like Tao. Rather than a 64-page story, there are 64 stories, one per page. Needing to stop is easy letting the reader–reluctant reader–go at their own pace, without becoming overwhelmed, or stressed. Remembering what happened is not necessary. If you don’t like the page where Tao is late for school, turn the page and a new situation will present itself. The stories have recurring characters that hang out with Tao, teach him, or guide him. So there is consistency in the Tai series.

The graphic novel is easy to following. The illustrations are bright and white lines mark each scene by placing them in boxes to divide the action. I found it was like reading a paragraph per block then moving on to the right for the next paragraph—only the blocks contained pictures not words. Some blocks do have a voice bubble with words, but those mostly set up or complete the joke on each page. Tao is completely for laughs and he succeeds. Needing help to put on his fencing outfit, not-my-girlfriend Kat helps and ties Tao up in bows—pretty pink bows—but Tao has no idea this is why his opponent is laughing.

A few pages I thought were especially good. Those included:

He Who Spies Gets a Black Eye

 He Who Cannot Fly Must Avoid Falling

 He Who Climbs Too Fast Falls Flat on His Face

The last involves Master Smith. Any page involving the Master is hilarious as he usually shows that age means nothing while performing some unusual human feat. After playing out all of the sage advice, the author takes readers “behind the scenes.” Here the author gives a short lesson on how Tao comes to life. The lesson includes writing voice bubbles, sketching characters and scenes, and colorizing the final images followed by black inking highlights so they stand out from the scene. The very last page lists the currently available editions of Tao. The color is light, almost like a transfer, which is what I thought it was. But, alas, it is not a transfer, so put those t-shirts away. Maybe next time.

Tao is a new graphic novel from Graphic Universe and rivals those published by Papercutz, the reigning king of graphic novels for kids. Tao is understandable and involves many situations most kids will face at some point in their life, karate not needed.

TAO THE LITTLE SAMURAI #1: PRANKS AND ATTACKS! Text copyright © 2011 by Laurent Richard. Illustrations copyright © 2011 by Nicolas Ryser. Translation copyright © 2014 by Edward Gauvin. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Graphic Universe, Minneapolis, MN.

Buy Tao the Little Samurai #1: Pranks and Attacks at Amazon—B&N—Lerner Publishing—your local bookstore.

.

Learn more about the Tao the Little Samurai series HERE

Meet the author, Laurent Richard, at his website:   http://www.laurent-richard.com/

Meet the illustrator, Nicolas Ryser, at his website:

Meet the translator, Edward Gauvin, at his website:   http://www.edwardgauvin.com/

Find more graphic novels at Graphic Universe. blog:  http://graphicuniverse.wordpress.com/

Graphic Universe is an imprint of Lerner Publishing Group

.

Also by Laurent Richard & Nicolas Ryser

Tao, the Little Samurai #2: Ninjas and Knock Outs!

Tao, the Little Samurai #3:  Clowns and Dragons! 

Tao, the Little Samurai #4: The Championship!

Tao, the Little Samurai #5: Wild Animals!

Also by Edward Gauvin

Mr. Badger and Mrs. Fox 3: What a Team!

Reviewed (#30) HERE.

Little White Duck: A Childhood in China
By Na Liu
Illustrated by Andres Vera Martinez
ISBN: 9780761365877
Graphic Universe (an imprint of Lerner)
$29.27
Ages 9-12
On shelves now.

It’s funny to think about, but the fact of the matter is that we’re still in the early days of the graphic novel memoir for children. Adult graphic novel memoirs are capable of winning top literary awards, like the Pulitzer or the National Book Award. On the kid side of things the options are far more limited. The top literary prize for kids, the Newbery, has never been handed to a comic work, nor does the American Library Association have a prize for comics of any sort. All this comes to mind when I pick up a book like Little White Duck. Couched in the memories of its author, this groundbreaking work is perhaps the finest marriage of world history and comic art for kids I’ve seen in a very long time. A must read for young and old alike.

Told in eight short stories, the book follows Da Qin the middle class daughter of two parents, living in the late 1970s/early 80s. Through her eyes we see a number of small stories about growing up in a post-Mao China. There’s the tale of how she and her younger sister attempted to emulate their nation’s heroes by helping some thirsty chicks (to an unfortunate end, I’m afraid), or the one about having to bring in rat tails to prove she was great at pest control. There’s the story of how Mao’s death affected the nation, and useful facts about China during this era. Most impressive is the titular story about Da Qin and what happened to the white velvet duck on her jacket when she and her father visited the village where he was born. Honest, sometimes funny, and unusually touching, this glimpse into another life in another world rings distinctly true.

This book has been a reason for serious debate amongst the librarians of my system. Some wondered about the seemingly unconnected stories and whether or not they gelled properly. Others fretted that there wasn’t enough context given about growing up in China during the post-Mao era. Still others wondered about the authenticity. The book was then handed to a co-worker of mine who grew up in China during the same time period as Na Liu she was floored. The details of the book were straight out of her own childhood. She held up one picture to me of popped rice, explaining what it was and how she had never seen it portrayed in a book before. So on the reality front the book certainly ranks an A.

Actually, when I asked my Chinese co-worker to read the book in the first place she was hugely reluctant. Turned out, she just didn’t want to read yet another kid’s book about the Cultural Revolution, and who could blame her? I would say that the vast swath of books for kids set in China are solely interested in Cultural Revolution stuff (stuff that my poor co-worker would be forced to vet time and time again). Part of what makes Little White Duck work is that without didacticism it simply tells a true story about some of the people who were helped by Mao’s rule. Da Qin’s parents were poor and thanks to changes were able to get an education and treated for polio. The book makes no bones about the hungry times under Mao, but it’s rare to get a nuanced view in a work for youth. Heck, the first story in the book is about the massive weeping that occurred in Da Qin’s village when Mao died and about her very realistic child response of crying because everyone else was crying around her. That’s honestly Liu’s greatest strength with this book. She creates universal stories from her youth that anybody can enjoy, even as she sets them in a very specific time and place. That’s why the fact that they are individual stories rather than one overarching storyline work for me. Each one is like a little glimpse into a realistic kid’s life.

Not to mention the fact that the book deals with class in a remarkable way. I’ve a real penchant for children’s books that know how to deal with class differences. Bad works of children’s literature will usually feature a poor kid hating a rich kid and then inevitably discovering “Gee whiz, we’re not so different after all.”. Smart books for kids handle this enormously complex idea in candid, thoughtful ways. Anna Hibiscus could do it by showing the difference between middle and lower classes in contemporary Nigeria. Little White Duck is the same, using its titular story to tell the tale of Da Qin and her father visiting the poor village where he grew up. Reading that story I went into it confident that I knew how it would work. When Da Qin’s father tells her to go play with the village kids I was sure they’d be mean to her and she’d learn something. Instead they’re perfectly cordial. They are, admittedly, fascinated by the little white velvet duck on her coat and the dirt on their hands coat it black with all their petting. Then for fun, because they can’t afford books like she can, they put sticks up buzzing insects and run about. The next shot is a shell-shocked Da Qin sitting on a train seat while her father asks obliviously, “Did you have a good time?” I loved that. I loved seeing her encounter kids with less at such a young age and coming to an understanding of how lucky she was.

One librarian I spoke too worried that because there are so few books for kids out there, children reading this book today might assume that it shows contemporary China and not the China of the past. Honestly I don’t think that’s a huge danger. It’s possible that will happen, sure, but Liu covers her bases for the most part, and the brown palette of the art gives everything a historical taste. Now the art poses an interesting question. Created by Texan artist Andres Vera Martinez, this is at least his second foray into graphic novels for kids. The style is perfect for the story too. Filled with details realistic, but also fun, it’s a properly moving tone for a book that is sometimes thoughtful, sometimes sad, sometimes funny, and always interesting. Now that brown palette I alluded to earlier could potentially prove detrimental. There is an understanding out there that kids will not read black and white comics. True. There is also and understanding that kids will not read books with brown covers. Also true. So what do we make of books that are comics colored in a lot of brown? I’m not quite sure but I’m confident that any kid who reads a story or two in the book will be hugely inclined to continue to do so. Good art and writing win out.

Liu says in the book that she wrote it so that her daughter might get a glimpse into what it was like growing up. Sometimes family stories just aren’t enough. You’ve gotta show, not tell. Even now, when I show a book like this to adults, some of them will say to me, “But what kid would ever read it?”. There’s this continuing perception that unless a comic has superheroes or manga characters it, no kid will want to read it. This does kids a serious injustice. We don’t ask why kids would ever pick up a memoir like Diary of a Young Girl even when there are copies of Harry Potter available. The wonderful thing about kids and comics is that some readers will pick up anything, just so long as there are panels and speech balloons to be had. In other cases you have kids that like comics but aren’t big fiction and fantasy readers. For them we hand over this book. Perhaps the strongest graphic novels for kids of the year and undoubtedly unique, this is one way of teaching world history through a lens that cannot be matched. Thoroughly and entirely remarkable.

On shelves now.

Source: Reviewed from galley sent from publisher.

Like This? Then Try:

• To Dance by Sienna Siegel

• Alia’s Mission by Mark Alan Stamaty

• Kampung Boy by Lat

• Drawing from Memory by Alan Say

A to Z Challenge Day 14: N Netgalley is a blogger’s dream.  Whether you are beginning, or just cannot get the books you need to review, NetGalley is the best place to join.  Anyone who runs a book review site, any genre or age group, will find the books they need. Netgalley and Lerner Publishing [...]

This super cute pink haired girl just about jumped off the galley table at the Lerner Publishing preview during BEA. I wanted to read it, for no other reason than the super cute Nola and her friends on the cover. I wasn't disappointed. (note: the US cover is slightly different from this one...Nola's hair is longer, the title is different and there is a blue wash to the whole thing)

Nola lives home with her uber busy Mom and her cat in the town of Alta Donna. In Nola's words, "This is my hometown, my world, a peaceful and pleasant little paradise. In a word...absolutely boring." (p. 3) Her days are filled with trying to get to school on time, and trying not to be disappointed when her mom shows up late again. All of that is about to change thanks to classmate Damiano.

Nola helps him save face during math one day, and as they walk down the hall together they run into Damiano's sister Ines, who is being *incredibly* rude to a teacher. After Damiano excuses himself to talk to Ines, Nola does a bit of eavesdropping and shorting becomes obsessed with the sibs. Are they spies? Runaways? Witness Protection kids? Add to that the fact that the school librarian has just been attacked, and Nola has herself a full blown mystery to solve.

She starts trailing Damiano to see what she can find, and soon becomes enchanted with Ines' beguiling ways. Nola's bff Pumpkin is a bit worried, and hopes that her friend will be alright.

Just when Nola is starting to get the answers that she originally set out to find, the book comes to a crashing, cliff-hangering stop which may me cry, "Noooo! I need book 2!!!!"

Just the way I like it!

The art has a manga edge, but it's not too much. There is lots of movement in the panels as well, but what makes the book sing are the colours. Incredibly vibrant (in the Magic Trixie vein), just looking at the pages is bound to make readers happy.

Fun, fun, fun!

So...I'm going out on a limb here, waiting to here the wrath of those readers that looove this genre, but I am not typically a graphic novel fan. I didn't read comic books when I was a kid and to me, graphic novels are just thick comic books, making me shy away. This series, however, though it may not be my cup of tea, seems perfect for those readers that do enjoy graphic novels and want to learn something through the reading process.

Graphic Universe is a series put out by Lerner Publishing that includes 22 different books covering a huge span of myths and legends. At my library, myths are an extremely popular category, as are graphic novels and until this series came along, I can't say we ever had a combination of the two. From Atalanta, a Greek myth to The Hero Twins, a Mayan myth the series spans a ton of different countries and includes many of the most popular myths and legends, as well as some I had never heard of. There is the popular Jason and King Arthur and the not-so-well known Sunjata and Yu the Great.

Each book includes a glossary and word pronunciation guide, further reading and website lists, an index, and just how the author created the graphic telling of famous myths and legends. As I've said, I'm not a huge fan of graphic books, but I know these will circulate well at our library, have a high interest level in kids and teens, and are educational as well, making it quite the successful series.

Grown mainly in Asia and India, these long, slender, and smoky Cayenne Peppers are a good source of instant heat. Cayenne Peppers, like Chi-Chi, are most often used in Cajun cooking and appears, in whole, in asian dishes. Seeds and veins are often removed in cooking because of its heat. Cayenne Peppers are thin-fleshed, acidic, and mainly used in powdered form (simply called Red Peppers).