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Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat
By Javaka Steptoe
Little, Brown & Co.
$17.99
ISBN: 978-0-316-21388-2
Ages 5 and up
On shelves October 25th

True Story: I’m working the children’s reference desk of the Children’s Room at 42nd Street of New York Public Library a couple years ago and a family walks in. They go off to read some books and eventually the younger son, I’d say around four years of age, approaches my desk. He walks right up to me, looks me dead in the eye, and says, “I want all your Javaka Steptoe books.” Essentially this child was a living embodiment of my greatest dream for mankind. I wish every single kid in America followed that little boy’s lead. Walk up to your nearest children’s librarian and insist on a full fledged heaping helping of Javaka. Why? Well aside from the fact that he’s essentially children’s book royalty (his father was the groundbreaking African-American picture book author/illustrator John Steptoe) he’s one of the most impressive / too-little-known artists working today. But that little boy knew him and if his latest picture book biography “Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat” is even half as good as I think it is, a whole host of children will follow suit. But don’t take my word for it. Take that four-year-old boy’s. That kid knew something good when he saw it.

“Somewhere in Brooklyn, a little boy dreams of being a famous artist, not knowing that one day he will make himself a KING.” That boy is an artist already, though not famous yet. In his house he colors on anything and everything within reach. And the art he makes isn’t pretty. It’s, “sloppy, ugly, and sometimes weird, but somehow still BEAUTIFUL.” His mother encourages him, teaches him, and gives him an appreciation for all the art in the world. When he’s in a car accident, she’s the one who hands him Gray’s Anatomy to help him cope with what he doesn’t understand. Still, nothing can help him readily understand his own mother’s mental illness, particularly when she’s taken away to live where she can get help. All the same, that boy, Jean-Michel Basquiat, shows her his art, and with determination he grows up, moves to Manhattan, and starts his meteoric rise in the art scene. All this so that when, at long last, he’s at the top of his game, it’s his mother who sits on the throne at his art shows. Additional information about Basquiat appears at the back of the book alongside a key to the motifs in his work, an additional note from Steptoe himself on what Basquiat’s life and work can mean to young readers, and a Bibliography.

Javaka Steptoe apparently doesn’t like to make things easy for himself. If he wanted to, he could illustrate all the usual African-American subjects we see in books every year. Your Martin Luther Kings and Rosa Parks and George Washington Carvers. So what projects does he choose instead? Complicated heroes who led complicated lives. Artists. Jimi Hendrix and guys like that. Because for all that kids should, no, MUST know who Basquiat was, he was an adult with problems. When Steptoe illustrated Gary Golio’s bio of Hendrix (Jimi: Sounds Like a Rainbow) critics were universal in their praise. And like that book, Steptoe ends his story at the height of Basquiat’s fame. I’ve seen some folks comment that the ending here is “abrupt” and that’s not wrong. But it’s also a natural high, and a real time in the man’s life when he was really and truly happy. When presenting a subject like Basquiat to a young audience you zero in on the good, acknowledge the bad in some way (even if it’s afterwards in an Author’s Note), and do what you can to establish precisely why this person should be mentioned alongside those Martin Luther Kings, Rosa Parks, and George Washington Carvers.

There’s this moment in the film Basquiat when David Bowie (playing Andy Warhol) looks at some of his own art and says off-handedly, “I just don’t know what’s good anymore.” I have days, looking at the art of picture books when I feel the same way. Happily, there wasn’t a minute, not a second, when I felt that way about Radiant Child. Now I’m going to let you in on a little secret: Do you know what one of the most difficult occupations to illustrate a picture book biography about is? Artist. Because right from the start the illustrator of the book is in a pickle. Are you going to try to replicate the art of this long dead artist? Are you going to grossly insert it into your own images, even if the book isn’t mixed media to begin with? Are you going to try to illustrate the story in that artist’s style alone, relegating images of their actual art to the backmatter? Steptoe addresses all this in his Note at the back of the book. As he says, “Instead of reproducing or including copies of real Basquiat paintings in this book, I chose to create my own interpretations of certain pieces and motifs.” To do this he raided Basquiat’s old haunts around NYC for discarded pieces of wood to paint on. The last time I saw this degree of attention paid to painting on wood in a children’s book was Paul O. Zelinsky’s work on Swamp Angel. In Steptoe’s case, his illustration choice works shockingly well. Look how he manages to give the reader a sense of perspective when he presents Picasso’s “Guernica” at an angle, rather than straight on. Look how the different pieces of wood, brought together, fit, sometimes including characters on the same piece to show their closeness, and sometimes painting them on separate pieces as a family is broken apart. And the remarkable thing is that for all that it’s technically “mixed-media”, after the initial jolt of the art found on the title page (a full wordless image of Basquiat as an adult surrounded by some of his own imagery) you’re all in. You might not even notice that even the borders surrounding these pictures are found wood as well.

The precise age when a child starts to feel that their art is “not good” anymore because it doesn’t look realistic or professional enough is relative. Generally it happens around nine or ten. A book like Radiant Child, however, is aimed at younger kids in the 6-9 year old range. This is good news. For one thing, looking at young Basquiat vs. older Basquiat, it’s possible to see how his art is both childlike and sophisticated all at once. A kid could look at what he’s doing in this book and think, “I could do that!” And in his text, Steptoe drills into the reader the fact that even a kid can be a serious artist. As he says, “In his house you can tell a serious ARTIST dwells.” No bones about it.

How much can a single picture book bio do? Pick a good one apart and you’ll see all the different levels at work. Steptoe isn’t just interested in celebrating Basquiat the artist or encouraging kids to keep working on their art. He also notes at the back of the book that the story of Basquiat’s relationship with his mother, who suffered from mental illness, was very personal to him. And so, Basquiat’s mother remains an influence and an important part of his life throughout the text. You might worry, and with good reason, that the topic of mental illness is too large for a biography about someone else, particularly when that problem is not the focus of the book. How do you properly address such an adult problem (one that kids everywhere have to deal with all the time) while taking care to not draw too much attention away from the book’s real subject? Can that even be done? Sacrifices, one way or another, have to be made. In Radiant Child Steptoe’s solution is to show Jean-Michel within the lens of his art’s relationship to his mother. She talks to him about art, takes him to museums, and encourages him to keep creating. When he sees “Guernica”, it’s while he’s holding her hand. And because Steptoe has taken care to link art + mom, her absence is keenly felt when she’s gone. The book’s borders go a dull brown. Just that single line “His mother’s mind is not well” says it succinctly. Jean-Michel is confused. The kids reading the book might be confused. But the feeling of having a parent you are close to leave you . . . we can all relate to that, regardless of the reason. It’s just going to have a little more poignancy for those kids that have a familiarity with family members that suffer mental illnesses. Says Steptoe, maybe with this book those kids can, “use Basquiat’s story as a catalyst for conversation and healing.”

That’s a lot for a single picture book biography to take on. Yet I truly believe that Radiant Child is up to the task. It’s telling that in the years since I became a children’s librarian I’ve seen a number of Andy Warhol biographies and picture books for kids but the closest thing I ever saw to a Basquiat bio for children was Life Doesn’t Frighten Me as penned by Maya Angelou, illustrated by Jean-Michel. And that wasn’t even really a biography! For a household name, that’s a pretty shabby showing. But maybe it makes sense that only Steptoe could have brought him to proper life and to the attention of a young readership. In such a case as this, it takes an artist to display another artist. Had Basquiat chosen to create his own picture book autobiography, I don’t think he could have done a better job that what Radiant Child has accomplished here. Timely. Telling. Overdue.

On shelves October 25th.

Source: F&G sent from publisher for review.

• Like This? Then Try:
• A Splash of Red by Jen Bryant
• Jake Makes a World by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts
• It Jes’ Happened: When Bill Traylor Started to Draw by Don Tate

Professional Reviews:  A star from Kirkus

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The Wild Robot
By Peter Brown
Little, Brown & Company
$16.99
ISBN: 978-0-316-38199-4
Ages 9-12
On shelves now

There are far fewer robot middle grade books out there than you might expect. This is probably because, as a general rule, robots fall into the Data from Star Trek trap. Their sole purpose in any narrative is to explain what it is to be human. You see this all the time in pop culture, so it stands to reason you’d see it a bit in children’s books too. Never you mind that a cool robot is basically a kid’s dream companion. Take away the kid, put the robot on its own, and you have yourself some philosophy lite. Maybe that’s why I liked Peter Brown’s The Wild Robot as much as I did. The heroine of this book is mechanical but she’s not wrestling with the question of what it means to feel emotions or any of that. She’s a bit more interested in survival and then, after a bit of time, connection. Folks say this book is like Hatchet or My Side of the Mountain. Maybe so, but it’s also a pretty good book about shedding civilization and going wild. In short, living many a city kid’s dream.

The first thing she is aware of is that she is bound in a crate by cords. Once those are severed she looks about. Roz is a robot. She appears to be on an island in the sea. Around her are the shattered remains of a good many other robots. How she has gotten here, she doesn’t know, but it doesn’t take long for her to realize that she is in dire need of shelter and allies. Roz is not a robot built for the outdoors, but part of her programming enables her to adapt. Learning the languages of the denizens of the forest, Roz is initially rebuffed (to put it mildly) by the animals living there. After a while, though, she adopts a gosling she accidentally orphaned and together they learn, grow, and come to be invaluable members of the community. And when Roz faces a threat from the outside, it’s her new friends and extended family that will come to her aid.

They say that all good stories can be easily categorized into seven slots. One of the best known is “a stranger comes to town”. Roz is precisely that and her story is familiar in a lot of ways. The stranger arrives and is shunned or actively opposed. Then they win over the local populace and must subsequently defend it against an incoming enemy or be protected by it. But there is another kind of book this conjures up as well. The notion of going from “civilized” to “wild” carries the weight of all kinds of historical appropriations. Smart of Brown then to stick with robots and animals. Roz is a kind of anti-Pinocchio. Instead of trying to figure out how to fit in better with civilization, she spends the bulk of her time trying to figure out how to shed it like a skin. In his career, Brown has wrestled continually with the notion of civilization vs. nature, particularly as it relates to being “wild”. The most obvious example of this, prior to The Wild Robot, was his picture book Mr. Tiger Goes Wild. Yet somehow it manages to find its way into many of the books he does. Consider the following:

• My Teacher Is a Monster! (No, I Am Not) – A child sees his teacher as a creature best befitting a page in “Where the Wild Things Are” until, by getting to know her, she is humanized in his sight.

• Children Make Terrible Pets – A bear attempts to tame a wild human child with disastrous results.

• The Curious Garden – Nature reclaims abandoned civilization, and is tamed in the process.

• Creepy Carrots – Brown didn’t write this one but it’s not hard to see how the image of nature (in the form of carrots) terrorizing a bunny in his suburban home could hold some appeal.

• Even the Chowder books and his first picture book The Flight of the Dodo had elements of animals wrestling with their own natures.

In this book, Brown presents us with a robot created with the sole purpose of serving in a domestic capacity. Are we seeing only the good side of nature and eschewing the terrible? Brown does clearly have a bias at work here, but this is not a peaceable kingdom where the lamb lays down next to the lion unless necessity dictates that it do so. Though the animals do have a dawn truce, Brown notes at one moment how occasionally one animal or another might go missing, relocating involuntarily to the belly of one of its neighbors. Nasty weather plays a significant role in the plot, beaching Roz at the start, and providing a winter storm of unprecedented cruelty later on. Even so, those comparisons of this book to Hatchet and My Side of the Mountain aren’t far off the mark. Nature is cold and cruel but it’s still better than dull samey samey civilization.

Of course, you read every book through your own personal lens. If you’re an adult reading a children’s book then you’re not only reading a book through your own lens but through the lens you had when you were the intended audience’s age as well. It’s sort of a dual method of book consumption. My inner ten-year-old certainly enjoyed this book, that’s for sure. Thirty-eight-year-old me had a very different reaction. I liked it, sure I did. But I also spent much of this book agog that it was such a good parenting title. Are we absolutely certain Peter Brown doesn’t have some secret children squirreled away somewhere? I mean, if you were to ask me what the theme of this book truly is, I’d have to answer you in all honesty that it’s about how we see the world anew through the eyes of our children. A kid would probably say it’s about how awesome it is to be a robot in the wild. Both are true.

If you’re familiar with a Peter Brown picture book then you might have a sense of his artistic style. His depiction of Roz is very interesting. It was exceedingly nice to see that though the book refers to her in the feminine, it’s not like the pictures depict her as anything but a functional robot, glowing eyes and all. Even covered in flowers she looks more like an extra from Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky than anything else. Her mouth is an expressionless slit but in her movements you can catch a bit of verve and drive. Alas, the illustrations are in black and white and not the lovely color of which we know Brown to be capable. Colored art in middle grade novels is a pricey affair. A publisher needs to really and truly believe in a book to give it color. That said, with this book appearing regularly on the New York Times bestseller list, you’d think they’d have known what they had at the time. Maybe we can get a full-color anniversary edition in a decade or so.

Like most robot books, Brown does cheat a little. It’s hard not to. We are told from the start that Roz is without emotions, but fairly early on this statement is called into question. One might argue quite reasonably that early statements like. “As you might know, robots don’t really feel emotions. Not the way animals do.” Those italics at the beginning of the sentence are important. They suggest that this is standard information passed down by those in the know and that they believe you shouldn’t question it. But, of course, the very next sentence does precisely that. “And yet . . .” Then again, those italics aren’t special to that chapter. In fact, all the chapters in this book begin with the first few words italicized. So it could well be that Brown is serious when he says that Roz can’t feel emotions. Can she learn them then? The book’s foggy on that point, possibly purposely so, but in that uncertainty plenty will find Brown’s loving robot a bit more difficult to swallow than others. Books of this sort work on their own internal logic anyway. I know one reader who seriously wondered why the RECO robots had no on/off switches. Others, why she could understand animal speech. You go with as much as you can believe and the writer pulls you in the rest of the way.

I’ve read books for kids where robots are in charge of the future and threaten heroes in tandem with nature. I’ve read books for kids where robots don’t understand why they’re denied the same rights as the humans around them. I even read a book once about a robot who tended a human child, loving her as her parents would have, adapting her to her alien planet’s environment over the years (that one’s Keeper of the Isis Light by Monica Hughes and you MUST check it out, if you get a chance). But I have never read a robot book quite as simple and to the point as Peter Brown’s. Nor have I read such comforting bedtime reading in a while. Lucky is the kid that gets tucked in and read this at night. An excellent science fiction / parenting / adventure / survival novel, jam packed with robotic bits and pieces. If this is the beginning of the robot domination, I say bring it on.

On shelves now.

Source: Final copy sent from publisher for review.

Like This? Then Try:

• Iron Giant by Ted Hughes
• Robot Dreams by Sara Varon
• Keeper of the Isis Light by Monica Hughes

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Jacky Ha-Ha Written by James Patterson and Chris Grabenstein Illustrated by Kerascoёt* Jimmy Patterson Books    3/21/2016 978-0-316-26249-1 380 pages    Ages 8—12 “Hey, bet I can make you laugh! “With a name like Jacky Ha-Ha, that’s what I was born to do! You could say I am an expert on wisecracks, pranks, gags, and …

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In this day and age it is prudent of the self-sufficient blogger to warn readers when they may encounter something that will affect the rest of their day, nay, week. And so I say unto you, BEWARE! Be Wary! For in today’s book trailer premiere video for Sing and Dance in Your Polka-Dot Pants (words by Eric Litwin, art by Scott Magoon) you may find the dreaded earworm. The dreaded catchy catchy earworm. Apparently earworms like nuts. Who knew?

Don’t say I didn’t warn you. And many thanks to Little, Brown for the link.

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Finding Winnie: The True Story of the World’s Most Famous Bear
By Lindsay Mattick
Illustrated by Sophie Blackall
$18.00
ISBN: 978-0-316-32490-8
Ages 4-7
On shelves October 20th

What is it with bears and WWI?  Aw, heck.  Let’s expand that question a tad.  What is it with adorable animals and WWI?  Seems these days no matter where you turn you find a new book commemorating a noble creature’s splendor and sacrifice on the battlefields of Europe.  If it’s not Midnight, A True Story of Loyalty in World War I by Mark Greenwood or  Stubby the War Dog: The True Story of WWI’s Bravest Dog by Ann Bausum, it’s Voytek, the Polish munitions bear in Soldier Bear or,  best known of them all, the inspiration for Winnie-the-Pooh.   With the anniversary of WWI here, the children’s literary sphere has witnessed not one but two picture book biographies of Winnie, the real bear that inspired Christopher Robin Milne and, in turn, his father A.A. Milne.  The first of these books was Winnie: The True Story of the Bear That Inspired Winnie-the-Pooh by Sally M. Walker.  A good strong book, no bones about it.  But Finding Winnie has an advantage over the Walker bio that cannot be denied.  One book was researched and thought through carefully.  The other?  Written by one of the descendants of the veterinarian that started it all.  Add in the luminous artwork of Sophie Blackall and you’ve got yourself a historical winner on your hands.

Now put yourself in Harry’s shoes.  You’re suited up. You’re on a train. You’re headed to training for the Western Front where you’ll be a service vet, aiding the horses there.  The last thing you should do is buy a baby bear cub at a train station, right?   I suppose that was the crazy thing about Harry, though.  As a vet he had the skills and the knowledge to make his plan work.  And as for the bear, she was named Winnipeg (or just Winnie for short), and she instantly charmed Harry’s commanding officer and all his fellow soldiers.  During training she was great for morale, and before you knew it she was off with the troop overseas.  But with the threat of real combat looming, Harry had a difficult decision to make.  This little bear wasn’t suited for the true horrors of war.  Instead, he dropped her off at The London Zoo where she proceeded to charm adults and children alike.  That was where she made the acquaintance of Christopher Robin Milne and inspired the name of the world’s most famous stuffed animal.  Framed within the context of author Lindsay Mattick telling this story to her son Cole, Ms. Mattick deftly weaves a family story in with a tale some might know but few quite like this.

Right from the start I was intrigued by the book’s framing sequence.  Here we have a bit of nonfiction for kids, and yet all throughout the book we’re hearing Cole interjecting his comments as his mother tells him this story.  It’s a unique way of presenting what is already an interesting narrative in a particularly child-friendly manner.  But why do it at all?  What I kept coming back to as I read the book was how much it made the story feel like A.A. Milne’s.  Anyone who has attempted to read the first Winnie-the-Pooh book to their small children will perhaps be a bit surprised by the extent to which Christopher Robin’s voice keeps popping up, adding his own color commentary to the proceedings.  Cole’s voice does much the same thing, and once I realized that Mattick was playing off of Milne’s classic, other Winnie-the-Pooh callbacks caught my eye.  There’s the Colonel’s surprised “Hallo” when he first meets Winnie, which struck me as a particularly Pooh-like thing to say.  There are the comments between Harry’s heart and head which reminded me, anyway, of Pooh’s conversations with his stomach.  They are not what I would call overt callbacks but rather like subtle little points of reference for folks who are already fans.

I was struck my Mattick’s attention to accuracy and detail too.  The temptation in these sorts of books is to fill them up with fake dialogue.  One might well imagine that the conversation with Cole is based on actual conversations, possibly culled together from a variety of different accounts.  Since Mattick isn’t saying this-happened-like-this-on-precisely-this-date we can enjoy it for what it is.  As for Harry’s tale, you only occasionally get a peek into his brain and when you do it’s in his own words, clearly taken from written accounts.  Mattick does not divulge these accounts, sadly, so there’s nothing in the back of the book so useful as a Bibliography.  However, that aside, the book rings true.  So much so that it almost makes me doubt other accounts I’ve read.

As for the text itself, I was mildly surprised by how good the writing was.  Mattick makes some choices that protect the young readers while keeping the text accurate.  For example, when little Cole asks what trappers, like the one who killed Winnie’s mother, do, Lindsay’s answer is to say, “It’s what trappers don’t do. They don’t raise bears.”  Hence, Harry had to buy it.  She also has a nice little technique, which I alluded to earlier, where Harry’s heart and mind are at odds.  The heart allows him to buy Winnie and take her overseas.  The mind wins in terms of taking her to The London Zoo in the end.

I like to put myself in the place of the editor of this book.  The manuscript has come in.  I like it.  I want to publish it.  I get the thumbs up from my publisher to go ahead and then comes the part where I find an illustrator for it.  I want somebody who can emote.  Someone just as adept at furry baby bear cubs as they are soldiers in khaki with teeny tiny glasses.  But maybe I want something more.  Maybe I want an illustrator who puts in the rudimentary details, then adds their own distinctive style to the mix.  I’m willing to get an artist who could potentially overshadow the narrative with visual beauty.  In short, I want a Sophie Blackall.

Now I’ve heard Ms. Blackall speak on a couple occasions about the meticulous research she conducted for this book.  The Canadian flag she initially mistakenly placed on a ship of war has been amended from an earlier draft (the Canadian flag wasn’t officially adopted until 1965).  She researched The London Zoo for an aerial shot that includes everything from the squirrel enclosure to Winnie’s small block of concrete or stone.  Blackall also includes little visual details that reward multiple readings.  A scene where Harry departs on the train, surrounded by people saying goodbye, is contrasted by a later scene where he returns and far fewer people are saying hello to their loved ones.  One soldier has lost a leg.  Another greets his much larger son and perpetually handkerchief clutching wife.  Another doesn’t appear at all.  And finally, Blackall throws in beautiful two-page spreads for the sake of beauty alone.  The initial endpapers show an idyllic woodland scene, presumably in Canada.  Later we’ve this red sky scene of the ship proceeding across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe.  For a book about WWI, that red is the closest we come (aside from the aforementioned missing leg) to an allusion to the bloody conflict happening elsewhere.  It’s beautiful and frightening all at once.

In the world of children’s literature you never get a single book on the subject and then say, “There! Done! We don’t need any more!”  It doesn’t matter how great a book is, there’s always room for another.  And it seems to me that on the topic of Winnie the bear, friend of Christopher Robin, inspiration to a platoon, there is plenty of wiggle room.  Hers is a near obscure tale that is rapidly becoming better and better known each day.  I think that this pairs magnificently with Walker’s Winnie.  For bear enthusiasts, Winnie enthusiasts, history lovers, and just plain old folks who like a good story.  In short, for silly old bears.

On shelves October 20th.

Source: F&G sent from publisher for review.

Like This? Then Try:

• The Journey That Saved Curious George by Louise Borden

• Stubby the War Dog: The True Story of WWI’s Bravest Dog by Ann Bausum

• Christian, the Hugging Lion by Justin Richardson

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I’m a sucker for a good time travel story.  By my count only a few have ever won the Newbery (is it two or three? You decide).  Fewer still have won the National Book Award in the youth category.  Even so, they live in a special place in my heart.  So to hear that a book has the title The Book That Proves Time Travel Happens . . . well that’s a near impossible title to resist, is it not?  This week on Fuse #8 TV I interview Henry Clark, but only after I tell you the terrible secret lurking in your copy of Go, Dog, Go.

By the way, this episode was very fun to record.  Too fun, in fact.  Under normal circumstances I can remember to thank my sponsor and to place their title card at the end of each episode.  This time I was so wowed by the prospect of coffee cups and what have you that it completely skipped my mind.  So a big hearty THANK YOU to Little, Brown for Mr. Clark’s presence.  Here is the slide I forgot to project:

And here is SLJ’s info:

As you can see, all the Fuse #8 TV episodes are archived here.

A tip of the hat to all parties involved!

 

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*sniff sniff*

Smell that?  That’s the smell of Fall 2014, my friends.  Yes yes, I know you thought we’ve only just turned the corner into spring, but we’ve no time for that now.  The future is where it’s at, babies!  And right now the future is all about the fall/winter/spring books.  Such was my thinking when sitting down at the latest Little, Brown & Co. librarian preview.  After informing my unfortunate table that my pregnant self was going to drink ALL the water placed there so they should be warned (and I would’ve gotten away with it too had it not been for those meddling / remarkably attentive waiters too) we got ready for a day of books, editors, and super secret special guests.  Oh, and peanut butter cookies.  For some reason they were serving the best peanut butter cookies I’ve ever eaten in my life.  No idea what was in those things.  Crack cocaine would be my best bet.

By the way, before I begin with my recap, a word to the wise.  If you are an author or illustrator and you ever say something nice about your publishing company or editor, be warned that it is entirely possible that this information will be recited loud and wide at a librarian preview in New York City for the various assembled librarians to hear and digest. Just FYI.

And we’re off!

Gus & Me: The Story of My Granddad and My First Guitar by Keith Richards, illustrated by Theodora Richards

First off, a celebrity picture book that by all rights shouldn’t work.  And yet . . . okay, let’s face facts.  Nine times out of ten when a celebrity suddenly decides to write a picture book for children it’s awful.  That’s just how the universe works.  The subpar words are paired alongside a decent illustrator who needs to make some quick cash and then loads and loads of the doggone books sell.  We’ve seen it a million times before.  And even worse?  When the celebrity walks in with a friend and wants THEM to do the art (see: I Am a Rainbow by Dolly Parton).  So what are we supposed to do when the enterprise actually works?

Here’s what happened.  Keith Richards wanted to write a picture book.  Sounds ludicrous, right?  And worse, he wanted his own daughter to do the art.  So you’re thinking about the train wreck this will be and then you see the book.  Editor Megan Tingley pointed out that Little, Brown isn’t exactly a celebrity picture book publisher but that this book actually appealed to them for a number of reasons.  As Theodora (the daughter) has “the inside track on all things Keith” she was uniquely positioned to work with him.  The book itself is actually just based on his own life and story, so it’s not one of those didactic slogs through “lessons” and “morality”.  Just a small, still story about a boy and his grandfather and finding something he loved.  And the craziest thing is that the art is good.  I mean really good.  Like this Theodora Richards person should be doing other books without her father involved good.  Whodathunkit?

Diamond Boy by Michael Williams

Generally speaking I sort of eschew YA recaps in this previews, since that’s not really my bag.  I will make the occasional exception here and there, however, and this book fits the bill.  Much of that has to do with the book jacket itself.  With art from illustrator Edel Rodriguez, it reminds me of nothing so much as one of those old timey paperback mystery novels where innocuous objects form skulls.  This particular book was written by the Managing Director of the Capetown Opera.  Williams, however, is also a human rights activist, and this book looks closely at the blood diamond industry.  Keep an eye peeled for it, then.

The Nuts: Bedtime at the Nut House by Eric Litwin, illustrated by Scott Magoon

Switching gears possibly as far as those gears can conceivably be switched, we come across a familiar name.  Which is to say, the name “Eric Litwin” will certainly be ringing bells for a few of you out there.  Does the name “Pete the Cat” mean anything to you?  Well, then you know Litwin.  Having moved on from the sneakered kitty (the illustrator seems to be the one behind the books these days) rhymesmith Litwin finds himself at a brand new publishing house with a brand new series under his belt.  Apparently selling 1.8 millions copies of Pete can’t keep a good man down.  Much like Pete, this book has an accompanying song that you can download.  In the tale Mama Nut wants to get the little nuts off to bed.  Their thoughts on the matter are not all that positive, though.  As editor Connie Hsu put it at one point, “Nuts are the new legume.”  I’m not entirely certain what that means but I liked it as a capper.  Multitalented Scott Magoon is behind the art as well, so that’s nice.  He’s good people.

Bad Magic by Pseudonymous Bosch

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was getting the world to regularly pronounce the name Psudonymous Bosch.  So I don’t have a book jacket for this particular title, and that is because the one that you’ll find online right now isn’t the final.  In fact, with its 9/16/14 release date, I don’t think it has a final jacket at all.  Ah well.  The important thing to know is that Bosch, the fellow behind that massively successful Secret Series, has started a new series entirely.  In this book 13-year-old Clay is given an assignment to fill a journal with information on Shakespeare’s classic play The Tempest.  Clay’s magician brother disappeared years ago, causing Clay to hate the stuff.  Then, somewhere in the course of his adventures, he’s sent to a discipline camp on an island with an active volcano, an abandoned mansion, and multiple llamas (each kid gets his or her own).  Add in the fact that one kid’s a kleptomaniac, another an anarchist, and another a gambler and you get a sense of the book.  The meets?  “A middle grade LOST meets The Tempest with some Lord of the Flies.”  Nice.

The Truth About Twinkie Pie by Kat Yeh

First of all, just take in that cover for a moment.  That is a pie made entirely out of Twinkies.  And depending on how you view the immortal apocalyptic-defying food (question: Is there a YA dystopian novel out there anywhere where they devour Twinkies?) that’s either a good or a bad thing.  The image, for the record, is by the author herself.  This little book actually isn’t due onto shelves until February 10, 2015, but no harm in letting you know about it a touch early.  In this story two sisters live together in a trailer park.  When one of them wins a million dollar recipe contest it’s time for them to reinvent themselves.  I think editor Alvina Ling described this book as being about “food that pretends it’s something it’s not,” which is a great line in and of itself.

A Perfectly Messed-Up Story by Patrick McDonnell

Anyone who saw my recent review of The Most Magnificent Thing by Ashley Spires knows that I’ve a weakness for books that acknowledge the beauty of clutter, mess, and messing up.  Well, Patrick McDonnell is back and he’s tackling the same dang thing it seems, though his focus is a bit more on helping kids move beyond mere frustration.  After having wowed the world with Me . . . Jane he scales back his seriousness with something a little more along the lines of his Krazy Kat influences.  With mixed-media (!) we watch as a jelly and peanut butter sandwich’s remains start to “destroy” a character’s story.  Think “Duck Amuck”.  The trick to the book is of course the fact that by the end the character has learned that it’s okay if your story is a bit messed up.  For my part, I’m pretty sure this book is going to be embraced by librarians doing introductory welcome to the library readings for kids on how to treat their books.  McDonnell may be talking about ideas like the use of frustration, but for we the librarians the lesson is clear: Don’t Eat When You Read!

Pirate, Viking & Scientist by Jared Chapman

So, y’know.  Right there.  Awesome.  The premise of this little picture book is so charming that one is inclined to just love it on sight.  Drawn in a kind of Brian Biggs-type style (or Hanna-Barbera, if you prefer) the plot follows a little boy scientist and his two best buddies.  One is a pirate and one is a viking.  You would think the three would be besties for all time, but it turns out that the viking LOATHES the pirate and the pirate simply cannot STAND the viking.  The scientist, true to his nature, sets up a series of scientific experiences to prove that these two can become friends.  So, basically, this is a book about utilizing the scientific method.  A lot of hypotheses go down in the course of this story and there’s even a little Venn diagram on the title page and graph paper used in the backgrounds.  We’re always looking for fictional scientific tie-ins in our picture books.  Seems to me like this is an excellent case of problem solved!

Kenny Wright, Superhero by James Patterson and Chris Tebbetts, illustrated by Cory Thomas

Promoting a James Patterson book is sort of a moot point.  It’s like watching a Coca-Cola commercial.  You half wonder why anyone bothers since the product is so ubiquitous.  But since we’ve just seen the #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign take off like wildfire, I can’t help but think it’s a good thing when hugely popular authors write books starring African-American boys like Kenny here.  Filled with comic panel sequences, the book concerns young Kenny Wright and his dreams of transforming himself into the superhero Stainless Steel.  Patterson, for the record, has another work of fiction coming out just prior to Kenny (who isn’t on shelves until March 16, 2015) called House of Robots: My Brother the Robot.  That book stars a boy who appears to have the name Sammy Hayes-Rodriguez.  A Latino boy character?  Could be the case.

If You Find This by Matthew Baker

“Goonies meets Holes” (which I briefly misheard as “Grease meets Holes” so somebody get on THAT book stat).  With the recent announcement that there really and truly is going to be a Goonies 2 there’s really never been a better time to invoke its name in the cause of children’s literature.  Basically what we’re looking at here is a big adventure story without any magic but plenty of smuggler’s tunnels to make up for the fact.  Nicolas’s dad has lost his job so the family must leave their current house.  Which wouldn’t be a huge problem except that Nicholas’s dead brother’s tree, planted in his memory, is currently in the backyard.  Meanwhile, the boy’s now senile grandfather is saying he buried some priceless heirlooms and made a map of where to find them.  So really, when you think about it, what choice does Nicholas have except to break his grandpa out of a nursing home with his two best friends?  In an interesting twist, musical dynamic notations appear throughout the text above certain words, reflecting how Nicholas sees the world.  These may or may not prove distracting to readers.  It’ll be interesting to see the kid reactions to this, but don’t expect that to happen anytime soon.  This book isn’t slated for release until March 17, 2015.

The Red Pencil by Andrea Davis Pinkney, illustrated by Shane W. Evans

And now the book that I am most excited to read next.  Because, quite frankly, Sudanese children’s literature isn’t exactly cropping up on my shelves every day.  In this book our heroine, Amira, is growing up in war-torn Sudan.  She loves her sheep and her dad but when she and the family are forced to flee she ends up in a refugee champ.  The trauma of the event causes her to lose her voice, but with the help of some paper and a pencil she’s improves.  Inspired by true stories, Ms. Pinkney interviewed countless Sudanese refugees to get Amira’s voice right.  It’s a verse novel well.  As for the art by Shane W. Evans, it’s mostly spot illustrations, which is a form that’s new to him.  The greatest selling point in some ways is the fact that the book is capable of making the horrors of war accessible to young readers.  And as editor Kate Sullivan said of the art, Shane was her first, second, and third choice.

The Map to Everywhere by Carrie Ryan and John Parke Davis

You must forgive me for not recognizing Ms. Ryan’s name at first.  When you work almost exclusively in the world of children’s literature, the big YA names sort of pass you by at times.  When folks started mentioning that this book was by a married team where we’ve all heard of the wife but maybe not so much the husband, I just assumed she was a celebrity of some sort.  Took me a while to realize we were talking about the woman behind The Forest of Hands and Teeth.  Now I was initially very excited to see this book because the art is clearly by one of my favorite new illustrators, one Mr. Todd Harris.  Those of you who have seen his work on The Hero’s Guide to Saving Your Kingdom and its subsequent sequels will understand my cheer.  In this dual perspective book, a girl gets caught up in something called The Pirate Stream.  Meeting an orphan by the name of Finn, the two form a bond.  You see, usually no one can remember meeting Finn five minutes after they’ve done so.  The girl, it seems, is an exception.  On the ship The Enterprising Kraken (which is a GREAT name right there) all the girl wants is to get home and all Finn wants is his mom.  So really, it’s just natural that they’d pair with a crazy wizard and a sailor.  They described it as Terry Pratchettesque and future installments are indeed in the works.

Love, Lucy by April Lindner

I won’t say much about this YA novel except for this fact: It’s an update of E.M. Forester’s A Room With a View.  What more do you need to know?

Finally, all that was left was to reveal the super secret guest of the day.  You never really know with a Little, Brown preview whom you might get at any given time.  Sometimes it’s someone local like a Peter Brown and sometimes it’s someone from overseas like Darren Shan.  In this case, we had a guest who was not local in the least.  One that turned down a Creative Director job at Google to continue doing what he loves most – making children’s books.  You hear that and you suddenly realize who it might be.  I’ve only ever known one person to turn down Google and that was none other than the inestimable Dan Santat.  And sure as shooting, twas he!  In town, he was, to celebrate his latest picture book Beekle.  From him we heard that the book is almost a kind of metaphor for the birth of Santat’s own son.  At the same time, the book really would work well for those kids going to a new school, wondering if they’ll find the right person to be their friend.  I hadn’t looked at the book in that way before, but it made a lot of sense when I did.

In other news, it appears that Mr. Santat is working on a book right now called Are We There Yet? about a kid so bored on a road trip that he actually manages to make time go backwards.  Love that idea.

And in case you missed Beekle’s trailer, here it is for your viewing pleasure:

That’s all she wrote, folks.  Thanks to the good folks of Little, Brown for hosting us.

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Mr. Tiger Goes Wild
By Peter Brown
Little, Brown and Company
$18.00
ISBN: 978-0-316-20063-9
Ages 3-7
On shelves now.

Here’s a fun exercise to liven up a gloomy day. Find yourself a copy of the picture book Mr. Tiger Goes Wild. Now turn to the publication page. It’s the green one opposite the title page at the beginning of the book. Now scroll down until you find the Library of Congress subject headings for this title. The very first one reads, “Self-actualization (Psychology)”. I am no cataloger, nor do I particularly mind it when they attribute terms of this sort to picture books, but anyone can see that this is a pretty amusing way to describe a book about a tiger with issues with civilization. It is rare to find a picture book this easy to love on sight, but author/illustrator Peter Brown is beginning to perfect his form. Hard to believe that the man who started out with Flight of the Dodo and Chowder has figured out how one goes about writing and illustrating modern day classics. With influences as diverse as Rousseau and 1960s Disney animators, Brown creates a wholly believable universe in a scant number of pages. Now prepare to turn said pages over and over and over again.

No one expected Mr. Tiger to be such a troublemaker. At first he was like everyone else. Sporting starched collars and silk top hats. Attending dignified tea parties and engaging in the usual chitchat about the weather that day. But Mr. Tiger is bored. “He wanted to loosen up. He wanted to have fun. He wanted to be… wild.” But wildness is not tolerated in the city, a fact Mr. Tiger discovers when his explorations into wildness involve pouncing across the rooftops, roaring in public, and going au naturel. It’s that final sin that has him dismissed from the city to the wilderness, where he gets to completely let go. It’s great for a time, but soon Mr. Tiger misses his friends and his home. When he returns he finds more comfortable clothes and the fact that the people there have loosened up a bit themselves, thanks in no small part to his influence.

Now I know there are folks out there for whom The Curious Garden is the top of the pops and Brown will never be able to make anything that good again. And that was a very nice book, no question but here is a book where Brown has hit his stride. First off, he has tackled the old anthropomorphic animal question; If you put a tiger in a suit, is he even a tiger anymore? Kids are very used to seeing animals wearing clothes and fulfilling human roles. I’ve always said that if you ever want to write a book about adults for kids, all you need to do is turn those adults into furry woodland creatures (hey, it worked for Redwall!). The idea that an animal might want to return to its wilder roots is a novel one for them. Imagine if Donald Duck tore off his sailor suit to peck at bread on the water, or Mickey Mouse removed those red shorts and started hunting down some cheese rinds. It’s almost, but not quite, obscene. Brown taps into that seeming obscenity, and uses it to give kids a mighty original tale.

2013 was a very good year for picture books with wordless two-page spreads. When used incorrectly, such spreads stop the action dead. Used correctly, they make the child reader stop and think. In a particularly Miss Rumphius-ish two-pager, Mr. Tiger walks alone in a wide-open field. He isn’t prancing or running or leaping anymore. His expression is utterly neutral. It’s just him and the flowers and the scrub bushes. Little wonder that when you turn the page he’s lonely once more. Brown uses this spread to bridge the gap between Mr. Tiger’s catharsis and his desire for company. Without it, the sudden shift in mood would feel out-of-character.

It’s hard to find folks who dislike this book but occasionally one comes out. The only real criticism I’ve seen of it was when I heard someone complain that Brown’s style is just like a lot of books coming out these days, particularly those of Jon Klassen. Hardly fair, though you can see what they mean when you hold this up next to This Is Not My Hat. But Brown is quite capable of manipulating his own style when he sees fit. Compare this book to others he’s made and you’ll see the difference. The noir feel of Creepy Carrots or the folksy faux wood border of Children Make Terrible Pets are a far cry from Mr. Tiger’s Rousseau-like setting. Brown has culled his influences over the years, and in this particular book he flattens the images purposefully, emulating the backgrounds of 1960s Disney films like Sleeping Beauty. The colors here are particularly deliberate. There’s the orange of Mr. Tiger (and his speech balloons), the green of the wilderness, and the orange of the sun. Beyond these and the blue of Mr. Tiger’s new shirt and the water of the fountain/waterfall, the palette is tightly controlled. And that doesn’t feel like anyone’s choice but Mr. Brown’s.

Another criticism I encountered came from someone who felt that the ending didn’t make sense to them. The animals all criticize Mr. Tiger then emulate him in his absence? But I have read and reread and reread again this book to my 2-year-old enough times that I know precisely how to answer such questions. Look closely and you’ll see that while some animals are very vocal in their disapproval of Mr. Tiger’s free-to-be-you-and-me ways, others are less perturbed. For example, in one scene Mr. Tiger is leaping from rooftop to rooftop. As he does so a bevy of onlookers comment on his actions. True, a bear shakes his fist and declares the tiger to be “Unacceptable” but look at the rhino and bunny. One is saying “Wow” and one “Hmm.” Then there’s the nude sequence (perhaps the only picture book centerfold shot in the history of the genre). First off, the pigeons are riveted. I loved that. And yes, a bunch of animals are pointing out of town, indicating that he should leave. But there’s a young fox that is absolutely enthralled by his actions, you can tell. It’s clear he has a far-reaching influence. I wasn’t surprised at all by the changes in his absence then.

Every child is a battlefield. In them rage twin desires, compelling in different ways and at different times. One desire is for the wildness Mr. Tiger craves. To run and yell and just go a little wild. The other desire is for order and organization and civilization. What Mr. Tiger Goes Wild does so well is to tap into these twin needs, and then produce a kind of happy medium between them. To entirely deny one side or another (or to entirely indulge one side or another) is an unhealthy exercise. We’ve not many books that touch on the importance of balance in your life, but let me just say that the lesson Mr. Tiger learns here would probably be greatly appreciated by large swaths of the adult population. Kiddos aren’t the only ones that chafe under their proverbial starched collars. A grand, great book with a lot of very smart things to say. Listen up.

On shelves now.

Source: Final copy sent from publisher for review.

Like This? Then Try:

• Four Legs Bad, Two Legs Good by D.B. Johnson
• Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed by Mo Willems
• Wild by Emily Hughes
• You Forgot Your Skirt, Amelia Bloomer by Shana Corey
• Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney

Misc:

• Click here to download the Mr. Tiger Goes Wild printable activity kit.
• You can’t help but love Elizabeth Rose Stanton’s version of Mr. Tiger.

Videos:
Peter Brown introduces his book to you:

And here he talks about his process:

Author and Illustrator Peter Brown On His Process from School Library Journal on Vimeo.

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The Dark
By Lemony Snicket
Illustrated by Jon Klassen
Little Brown & Co.
$16.99
ISBN: 978-0-316-18748-0
Ages 4-8
On shelves April 2nd

You do not know the temptation I am fighting right now to begin this review with some grandiose statement equating a fear of the dark with a fear of death itself. You have my full permission to slap me upside the head if I start off my children’s books reviews with something that bigheaded. The whole reason I was going to do it at all is that after reading a book like Lemony Snicket’s The Dark I find myself wondering about kids and their fears. Most childhood fears tap into the weird id (see, here I go) part of our brains where the unknown takes on greater and grander evils than could possibly occur in the real world. So we get fears of dogs, the color mauve, certain dead-eyed paintings, fruit, and water going down the drain (or so Mr. Rogers claimed, though I’ve never met a kid that went that route), etc. In the light of those others, a healthy fear of the dark makes perfect sense. The dark is where you cannot see and what you cannot see cannot possibly do you any good. That said, there are surprisingly few picture books out there that tackle this very specific fear. Picture books love to tackle a fear of monsters, but the idea of handling something as ephemeral as a fear of the dark is much much harder. It takes a certain kind of writer and a certain kind of illustrator to grasp this fear by the throat and throttle it good and sound. Behold the pairing of Lemony Snicket and Jon Klassen. You’ll ne’er see the like again (unless they do another picture book together, in which case, scratch that).

“You might be afraid of the dark, but the dark is not afraid of you.” Laszlo is afraid but there’s not much he can do about it. Seems as though the dark is everywhere you look sometimes. Generally speaking it lives in the basement, and every morning Laszlo would open the door and say, “Hi . . . Hi, dark.” He wouldn’t get a reply. Then, one night, the dark does something unprecedented. It comes into Laszlo’s room and though he has a flashlight, it seems to be everywhere. It says it wants to show him something. Something in the basement. Something in the bottom drawer of an old dresser. Something that helps Laszlo just when he needs it. The dark still visits Laszlo now. It just doesn’t bother him.

There is nothing normal about Lemony Snicket. When he writes a picture book he doesn’t go about it the usual route. Past efforts have included The Composer Is Dead which effectively replaced ye olde stand-by Peter and the Wolf in terms of instrument instruction in many a fine school district. Then there was 13 Words which played out like a bit of experimental theater for the picture book set. I say that, but 16 copies of the book are currently checked out of my own library system. Besides, how can you not love a book that contains the following tags on its record: “cake, depression, friendship, haberdashery, happiness”? Take all that under consideration and The Dark is without a doubt the most normal picture book the man has attempted yet. It has, on paper anyway, a purpose: address children’s fear of the dark. In practice, it’s more complicated than that. More complicated and better.

Snicket does not address a fear of the absence of light by offering up the usual platitudes. He doesn’t delve into the monsters or other beasties that may lurk in its corners. The dark, in Snicket’s universe, acts almost as an attentive guardian. When we look up at the night sky, it is looking back at us. In Laszlo’s own experience, the dark only seeks to help. We don’t quite understand its motivations. The takeaway, rather, is that it is a benign force. Remove the threat and what you’re left with is something that exists alongside you. Interestingly it almost works on a religious level. I would not be the least bit surprised if Sunday school classes started using it as a religious parable for death. Not its original purpose but on the horizon just the same.

It is also a pleasure to read this book aloud. Mr. Snicket’s words require a bit of rereading to fully appreciate them, but appreciate you will. First off, there’s the fact that our hero’s name is Laszlo. A cursory search of children’s books yields many a Laszlo author or illustrator but nary a Laszloian subject. So that’s nice. Then there’s the repetition you don’t necessarily notice at the time (terms like “creaky roof” “smooth, cold windows”) but that sink in with repeated readings. The voice of the dark is particularly interesting. Snicket writes it in such a way as to allow the reader the choice of purring the words, whispering them, putting a bit of creak into the vocal chords, or hissing them. The parent is granted the choice of making the dark threatening in its initial lures or comforting. Long story short, adults would do well to attempt a couple solo readings on their own before attempting with a kiddo. At least figure out what take you’re going for. It demands no less.

The most Snicketish verbal choice, unfortunately, turns out to be the book’s Achilles heel. You’re reading along, merry as you please, when you come to a page that creates a kind of verbal record scratch to the whole proceeding. Laszlo has approached the dark at last. He is nearing something that may turn out to be very scary. And then, just as he grows near, the next page FILLS . . . . with text. Text that is very nice and very well written and perhaps places childhood fears in context better than anything I’ve seen before. All that. By the same token it stops the reading cold. I imagine there must have been a couple editorial consultations about this page. Someone somewhere along the process of publication would have questioned its necessity. Perhaps there was a sterling defense of it that swayed all parties involved and in it remained. Or maybe everyone at Little, Brown loved it the first time they read it. Not quite sure. What I do know is that if you are reading this book to a large group, you will skip this page. And if you are reading one-on-one to your own sprog? Depends on the sprog, of course. Thoughtful sprogs will be able to take it. They may be few and far between, however. The last thing you want when you are watching a horror film and the hero is reaching for the doorknob of the basement is to have the moment interrupted by a five-minute talk on the roots of fear. It might contain a brilliant thesis. You just don’t want to hear it at this particular moment in time.

Canadians have a special relationship to the dark that Americans can’t quite appreciate. I was first alerted to this fact when I read Caroline Woodward’s Singing Away the Dark. That book was about a little girl’s mile long trek through the dark to the stop for her school bus. The book was illustrated by Julie Morstad, whose work reminds me, not a little, of Klassen’s. They share a similar deadpan serenity. If Morstad was an American citizen you can bet she’d get as much attention as Mr. Klassen has acquired in the last few years. In this particular outing, Mr. Klassen works almost in the negative. Much of this book has to be black. Pure black. The kind that has a palpable weight to it. Laszlo and his house fill in the spaces where the dark has yet to penetrate. It was with great pleasure that I watched what the man did with light as well. The colors of a home when lit by a flashlight are different from the colors seen in the slow setting of the evening sun. A toy car that Laszlo abandons in his efforts to escape the dark appears as a dark umber at first, then later pure black in the flashlight’s glow. We only see the early morning light once, and in that case Klassen makes it a lovely cool blue. These are subtle details, but they’re enough to convince the reader that they’re viewing accurate portrayals of each time of day.

The dark is not visually anthropomorphized. It is verbally, of course, with references to it hiding, sitting, or even gazing. One has to sit and shudder for a while when you imagine what this book might have been like with an author that turned the dark into a black blob with facial expressions. It’s not exaggerating to say that such a move would defeat the very purpose of the book itself. The whole reason the book works on a visual level is because Klassen adheres strictly and entirely to the real world. An enterprising soul could take this book, replicate it scene by scene in a live action YouTube video, and not have to dip into the film budget for a single solitary special effect. This is enormously important to children who may actually be afraid of the dark. This book gives a face to a fear that is both nameable and not nameable without giving a literal face to a specific fear. It’s accessible because it is realistic.

When dealing with picture books that seek to exorcise fears, one has to be very careful that you don’t instill a fear where there wasn’t one before. So a child that might never have considered the fact that nighttime can be a scary time might enter into a whole new kind of knowledge with the simple application of this book. That said, those sorts of things are very much on a case-by-case basis. Certainly The Dark will be a boon to some and simply a well-wrought story for others. Pairing Klassen with Snicket feels good when you say it aloud. No surprise then that the result of such a pairing isn’t just good. It’s great. A powerhouse of a comfort book.

On shelves April 2nd.

Source: F&G sent from publisher for review.

Like This? Then Try:

• Creepy Carrots by Aaron A. Reynolds, illustrated by Peter Brown

• Singing Away the Dark by Caroline Woodward, illustrated by Julie Morstad

• Bob & Co by Delphine Durand

• Go Away, Big Green Monster by Ed Emberley

Professional Reviews:

• A star from Publishers Weekly
• Kirkus

Interviews:

• Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Snicket) speaks to Terry Gross at NPR about, amongst other things, this book.

Misc:

• Read an excerpt here.

• And yes, the rumors are true.  Neil Gaiman is reading the audiobook.

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Reviewed by Aline Pereira:

Grace Lin,
Starry River of the Sky
Little, Brown, 2012.

Ages: 8-12

Grace Lin’s new middle-grade fantasy, Starry River of the Sky, is a gem every bit as compelling as its companion, Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, and cut from the same bedrock too: it masterfully weaves Chinese folklore into a richly textured yarn about magic, unexpected connections and the power of stories to shape our lives.

When Rendi finds a job as a helper at an Inn after running away from home in anger, he finds the small, in-the-middle-of-nowhere village of Clear Sky and its inhabitants mysteriously odd and out of sorts. For starters, the moon seems to be missing…

Read the full review

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All the Wrong Questions: “Who Could That Be at This Hour?”
By Lemony Snicket
Illustrated by Seth
Little, Brown and Company
$15.99
ISBN: 978-0-316-12308-2
Ages 9-12
On shelves October 24th

Last year I was running a bookgroup for kids, ages 9-12, when the subject of children’s books adapted into films came up. We talked about the relative success of Harry Potter, the bewildering movie that was City of Ember, and the gorgeous credit sequence for A Series of Unfortunate Events. Then one of the younger members, probably around ten years of age, turned to me and asked in all seriousness, “Do you think they’ll ever make a movie out of The Spiderwick Chronicles?” I was momentarily floored. It’s not often that kids will remind me that their memories of pop culture are limited to their own experiences, but once in a while it happens. This girl couldn’t remember back five years to that very film adaptation. And why should she? She was five then! So when I see a new Lemony Snicket series acting as a kind of companion to the aforementioned A Series of Unfortunate Events I wonder how it will play out. The original series was popular around the time of that Spiderwick movie. Does that mean that the new series will founder, or will it be so successful that it brings renewed interest to the previous, still in print and relatively popular, books? Personally, I haven’t a clue. All I know is that the latest Lemony Snicket series All the Wrong Questions is a work of clever references, skintight writing, and a deep sense of melancholy that mimics nothing else out there on the market for kids today. That’s a good thing.

To be a success in Snicket’s line of work it’s important to know how to ask the right questions. And this is a problem since Snicket finds it difficult doing precisely that. He was supposed to meet his contact in the city. Instead, he finds himself whisked away to the country to a dying town called Stain’d-by-the-Sea. Once a bustling harbor, the town’s water was removed leaving behind a creepy seaweed forest and an ink business that won’t be around much longer. With his incompetent mentor S. Theodora Markson he’s there to solve the mystery of a stolen statue. Never mind that the statue wasn’t stolen, its owners don’t care who has it, and their client isn’t even a real person. When Snicket finds a girl looking for her father and learns the name of the insidious Hangfire things start to get interesting, not to mention dangerous. Can multiple mysteries be solved even if you keep following the wrong paths? Snicket’s about to find out.

What is more dangerous: Evil or stupidity? It’s a trick question since there’s nothing “or” about it. If there’s one lesson to be gleaned from the Snicket universe, it is that while evil is undesirable, stupidity is downright damaging. Many is the Series of Unfortunate Events book that would show clear as crystal that while stupid and ignorant people may not necessarily be evil in and of themselves, they do more to aid in evil than any routine bad guy ever could hope for. In All the Wrong Questions the adults in charge are still inane, but at least the kids have a bit of autonomy from them. Our hero, the young Snicket, is still omnipotent to a certain degree, and only cares to share personal information with the reader when the plot requires that he do so. And because the book is a mystery, he’s almost required to move about at will. He just happens to be moving between stupid people much of the time.

Of course the trouble with having Lemony himself as your protagonist is that the guy is infamous for never giving you good news. If adult Snicket is the kind of guy who warns off readers (in a voice that I’ve always connected to Ben Stein) because of his own sad worldview, reading this series means that we are going to see failure at work. We saw failure at work with the Baudelaires but with them it was always the fault of the universe using them as punching bags more than their own inadequacies. That means that the author’s trick with this book is to keep it from disintegrating into depression even as its hero ultimately screws up (yet seems to be doing the right thing the whole time). How do you pull this dichotomy off? Humor. Thank god for humor. Because like other post-modern children’s mysteries (Mac Barnett’s The Brixton Brothers, most notably) being funny is the key to simultaneously referencing old mystery tropes while commenting on them.

I always had a certain amount of difficulty figuring out how exactly to describe A Series of Unfortunate Events. The term “Gothic” just didn’t quite cut it. PoMo Gothic, maybe. Or Meta-Gothic. Dunno. The All the Wrong Questions series makes it much easier on me. This book is noir. Noiry noir. Noiry noirish noirable noir. As if to confirm this the author drops in names like Dashiell and Mitchum, which like all of Snicket’s jokes will fly over the heads of all the child readers and 82.5% of the adult readers as well (I kept a tally for a while of the references I knew that I myself was not getting, then just sort of stopped after a while). There are dames, or at least the 12-year-old equivalent of dames. There are Girl Fridays. There are mistaken identities and creepy abandoned buildings. There are also butlers who do things, but that’s more of a drawing room murder mystery genre trope, so we’re going to disregard it here.

Let us talk Seth. The man comes to fill the shoes left by Brett Helquist. He’s a clever choice since there is nothing even slightly Helquistian to this comic legend. This is, to the best of my knowledge Seth’s first work for children, though there may well be some obscure Canadian work of juvenilia in his past that I’ve missed. His work on the cover is remarkable in and of itself, but in the book he works primarily in chapter headings and the occasional full-page layout. The author must have relayed to Mr. Seth what images to do sometimes because there is a picture at the beginning and a picture at the end that continue the story above and beyond the written portions. As for the spreads inside, Seth does an admirable job of ever concealing young Snicket’s face. He also lends a funny lightness to the proceedings, not something I would have expected walking into the novel.

There is a passage in the book where Snicket reflects on his life that just kills me. It comes a quarter of the way through the novel and is the clearest indication to the reader that the action in this novel happened a long time ago. It goes on for a while until finally ending with, “Stretched out in front of me was my time as an adult, and then a skeleton, and then nothing except perhaps a few books on a few shelves.” Put another way, this isn’t your average mystery novel for kids. It’s not even your average Lemony Snicket novel. It is what it is, the first part in a new series containing a familiar character that need not be previously known to readers. I have no idea if kids will gravitate towards it, but if you’ve a hankering to recommend a beautifully written if uncommon mystery to kids that ask for that sort of thing (and they do, man, they do) hand this over. Worse case scenario, they don’t like it. Best case scenario it blows their little minds. Blew mine anyway. Good stuff.

On shelves October 24th

Source: Final copy sent from publisher for review.

Like This? Then Try:

• The Brixton Brothers: The Case of the Case of Mistaken Identity by Mac Barnett

• Griff Carver: Hallway Patrol by Jim Krieg

• The Third Stall by Chris Rylander

Notes on the Cover: Recall if you will Mr. Snicket’s The Beatrice Letters. Was a book, or whatever the heck that was, ever more frustrating and enjoyable all at once? If there are any similarities to that cluster of documents and this book it lies in Seth’s art. I dare say the pictures you’ll see on this jacket may show scenes we are never privy to in the book itself. Note the shadow of the screaming woman. We know what that picture leads to, but we never see it in the book itself. Note now the spine. There’s a gorgeous little call number there that will undoubtedly get covered up by real call numbers in libraries throughout this great nation (oh, irony). For the record it reads, “LS ATWQ ?1” which makes sense when you think about it. But the thing that really made me give a deep sigh of contentment was under the jacket entirely. Look at the actual cover of the book here. Look at the spine and the cover. If I were to take this book and shelve it without its jacket next to my Nero Wolfe titles, and it would fit in like a dream.

Professional Reviews: Kirkus

Misc: Not to disparage the fine work of the Australian and New Zealand publishers of this book, but when you’ve hit gold why keep digging? Put another way, when handed the world’s most beautiful book jacket, why replace it with this?

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There are many reasons to love Little, Brown but at the moment the company has my heart because their last librarian preview consisted of less than thirty books in total.  And when you’re dealing with less than thirty books, typing up what they have is much easier on the old post-natal still-carpal-tunnely digits.  So it was that we hopped on over to The Yale Club (conveniently located a mere 2.5 blocks from my workplace), sat down to tiny sandwiches involving salmon, brie, and what looked suspiciously like apple slices, and listened to the upcoming roster of what can only be deemed “goodies”.  Goodies ah-plenty, goodies galore.

But before all of that, there were several other things to check out.  Unlike some publishers, LB & Co. isn’t afraid to display around the room art from books that due out in the distant future.  In this way I saw art from the fall 2012 Julie Andrews Edwards / Emma Walton Hamilton number Celebrate the Seasons: A Collection of Poems and Songs, illustrated by Marjorie Priceman.  I also saw art from September 2012’s Ten Tiny Toes by Todd Tarpley, illustrated by Marc Brown.  There was other art as well, but I don’t want to give away what those books were quite yet.

And then there were the special guests to contend with.  Guests, yes.  Plural.  Sometimes Little, Brown will manage to snag one of their biggies as they hop through town.  In the past Darren Shan would come early on, for example.  This time it was an author I’d been hoping to see at a preview for some time.  Really, ever since I heard that he and his editor were now part of the LB&Co family.

If you read my Video Sundays then you may have seen that Mr. Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) was on Rachel Maddow’s program last month.  Before he spoke with her, though, he took some time to pop over to The Yale Club to read us a selection from his YA novel Why We Broke Up.  It was good.  I’ve seen him talk about the book several times now and with him there’s not that horrible repetition there that you sometimes get when an author clings to a set script and refuses to deviate from it so much as a word.  Well played, sir.  Well played.

All right.  Now the books.  First up, a lady who had never done one of these previews before but was just ducky:

Pam Gruber
(Some discussion was made as to whether or not she has the same name as the woman who played Mindy in Mork & Mindy, but it was determined that we were thinking of Pam Dawber).

And we begin today with the award for Best Authorial Name.  And no, this is not a pseudonym.  Galaxy Craze (I’m just going to sit here and savor that name for a while before I write anything else . . . annnnnnd, we’re done) is a former actress who may or may not be the offspring of English hippie parents.  You may have seen her in Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives.  With her name on the cover like that, I suspect that some kids may mistake her moniker for the book’s title, but that’s fine with me since “Galaxy Craze” would make an awesome title too.  So here we have a book that combines two passions that, to the best of my knowledge, have

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Ed Young, author-illustrator, text as told to Libby Koponen,
The House Baba Built: An Artist’s Childhood in China
Little, Brown and Company, 2011.

Age 4-8 and up

Born in 1931 the fourth of five siblings, Ed Young spent the years of the great depression, Japanese occupation, and World War II in a magnificent environment thanks to his father’s building skills and negotiating acumen. The esteemed Young, a senior talent in the world of children’s literature, celebrates his baba’s loving care and his extended family’s safe passage through terrible times in this collage-illustrated memoir.

In exchange for building the house on a Shanghai property he couldn’t afford to buy (a safe suburb of embassy housing), Baba secured use of the home for 20 years. He designed a substantial two-story edifice with many outdoor spaces and even a swimming pool. (Empty most of the time, the pool was used for riding bikes.) Young’s large-format book with several fold-out pages incorporates many old family photographs, sketches of siblings and relatives, and detailed diagrams of the house that Baba built. At the close of the story, double foldout pages display a layout sketch of both floors of the house, with tiny images of people pasted in the various rooms. Thirteen rooms are depicted, plus outdoor decks and a rooftop playground.

Koponen shapes Young’s words into a lyrical account of family life, repeating the phrase “the house that Baba built” to poetic effect. Text is interspersed scrapbook-style amongst cutouts of Young’s sketches–household members on a see-saw, roller-skating on the rooftop, dancing in the large ground floor living room. Baba, who had received a graduate degree from the University of Michigan in 1917, was cultured and somewhat westernized, but like everyone in Shanghai, the family suffered food shortages and overcrowded conditions for many years. Bombs fell nearby towards the end, but the house withstood the attacks, thanks to Baba’s sturdy construction.

Back matter includes the location of the house on a contemporary map of Shanghai, a family time line from 1915-1947, and an author’s note describing his 1990 visit to the house and how this book came into being. A fascinating window into Shanghai history, Young’s heartfelt tribute to his baba will endear children yet again to his stunning visual imagery and, this time, to his personal story as well.

Charlotte Richardson
November 2011

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Release Date: September 27, 2011
Series: Trilogy TBA
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Buy: Amazon | Barnes & Noble

Around the world, black handprints are appearing on doorways, scorched there by winged strangers who have crept through a slit in the sky.

In a dark and dusty shop, a devil's supply of human teeth grown dangerously low.

And in the tangled lanes of Prague, a young art student is about to be caught up in a brutal otherwordly war.

Meet Karou. She fills her sketchbooks with monsters that may or may not be real; she's prone to disappearing on mysterious "errands"; she speaks many languages--not all of them human; and her bright blue hair actually grows out of her head that color. Who is she? That is the question that haunts her, and she's about to find out.

When one of the strangers--beautiful, haunted Akiva--fixes his fire-colored eyes on her in an alley in Marrakesh, the result is blood and starlight, secrets unveiled, and a star-crossed love whose roots drink deep of a violent past. But will Karou live to regret learning the truth about herself?

Daughter of Smoke and Bone is a rich, imaginative tale of magic and monsters, war and heartbreak. The world-building in this novel is breathtaking, the backstory a tapestry woven with strands of legend and otherworldly secrets. Laini Taylor's style is beautiful and intelligent, bewitching in its elegant flair. The pacing is perfect with never a dull moment, whether the intensity comes from the heat of battle, the awe of discovery or the mystery of Taylor's monsters.

Laini Taylor's imagination knows no bounds. This is the most creative, original story I have ever read. Daughter of Smoke and Bone is a book that cannot be easily defined. It is a long history of war and senseless hate, otherworldly races and ancient magic. It is a fantasy and a tragedy and a romance. It is all these things and more. The descriptions are lush and vivid, the characters terrifying and oddly compelling, the lines between good and evil hopelessly blurred. It is a tale of self-discovery and irrepressible love, a coming-of-age story like no other.

Karou is such a compelling heroine, the kind of girl that shouldn't be crossed. She is quirky and mysterious -- from her naturally blue hair to her bullet-scarred belly -- a complex character who is alive and engaging from page one. Her mental life runs deep as she struggles with a lifelong sense of emptiness, and the constant frustration of vague answers from the only family she's ever known. Karou is smart and skilled, and she knows there's more to the story than she's been told. She is fearless when she needs to be, but vulnerable at heart. It's impossible not to fall in love with this one-of-a-ki

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Previews, previews!  Lovely little previews!

And we find ourselves back at the Yale Club, across the street from Grand Central Station, and a whopping 10 minutes away, on foot, from my library.  There are advantages to living on a tiny island, I tell ya.

As per usual, Little Brown pulled out all the stops for the average children’s and YA librarian, in order to showcase their upcoming season.  There were white tablecloths and sandwiches consisting of brie and ham and apples.  The strange result of these previews is that I now seem to be under the mistaken understanding that Little Brown’s offices are located at the Yale Club.  They aren’t.  That would make no sense.  But that’s how my mind looks at things. When I am 95 and senile I will insist that this was the case.  Be warned.

A single day after my return from overseas I was able to feast my eyes on the feet of Victoria Stapleton (the Director of School and Library Marketing), bedecked in red sparkly shoes.  I would have taken a picture but my camera got busted in Bologna.  I was also slightly jet lagged, but was so grateful for the free water on the table (Europe, I love you, but you have to learn the wonders of ample FREE water) that it didn’t even matter.  Megan Tingley, fearless leader/publisher, began the festivities with a memory that involved a child’s story called “The Day I Wanted to Punch Daddy In the Face”.  Sounds like a companion piece to The Day Leo Said “I Hate You”, does it not?

But enough of that.  You didn’t come here for the name dropping.  You can for the books that are so ludicrously far away in terms of publication (some of these are January/February/March 2012 releases) that you just can’t resist giving them a peek.  To that end, the following:

Liza Baker

At these previews, each editor moves from table to table of librarians, hawking their wares.  In the case of the fabulous Ms. Baker (I tried to come up with a “Baker Street Irregulars” pun but it just wasn’t coming to me) the list could start with no one else but Nancy Tafuri.  Tafuri’s often a preschool storytime staple for me, all thanks to her Spots, Feathers and Curly Tails.  There’s a consistency to her work that a librarian can appreciate.  She’s also apparently the newest Little Brown “get”.  With a Caldecott Honor to her name (Have You Seen My Duckling?) the newest addition is All Kinds of Kisses.  It’s pretty cute.  Each animals gets kisses from parent to child with the animal sound accompanying.  You know what that means?  We’re in readaloud territory here, people.  There’s also a little bug or critter on each page that is identified on the copyright page for parents who have inquisitive children.

Next up, a treat for all you Grace Lin fans out there.  If you loved Year of the Dog and Year of the Rat then you’ll probably be pleased as punch to hear that there’s a third

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The story of Dave the Potter by Laban Carrick Hill, illustrated by Bryan Collier (Little, Brown and Company, 2010) combines two great loves of mine — poetry and pottery — so I was absolutely delighted to have been introduced to this recently published book by Myra at Gathering Books.   The historical ‘Dave’ was an unusual combination of talent in an age where such talents would not have only been under-appreciated but potentially dangerous.  Dave was a skilled and literate slave of the mid 1800′s in South Carolina.  His legacy is a collection of large pots and urns, some of which have lines written into them.  The lines are short and cryptic, reminiscent of Dickinson.  For example, on one of his earliest known pots — a large one for which Dave had a reputation for creating — are inscribed these lines:

put every bit all between
surely this Jar will hold 14

This particular pot could hold fourteen gallons, and these short lines conveyed the volume capacity in rhyme.  Other couplets also appear, giving more of a sense of Dave’s personality and of his vocation.  Particularly moving was this couplet:

I, made this Jar, all of cross
If, you don’t repent, you will be, lost

Dave the Potter is a picture book, sumptuously illustrated by Bryan Collier, who has captured well the nature of the man and his art. There’s a lovely fold-out panel of illustrations showing the process of pot-making which is visually affecting. My daughter and I really enjoyed Dave the Potter; it is a wonderful book telling a little known story of — as the book’s  subtitle indicates — an ‘artist, poet and slave’ of the American south.

This week’s Poetry Friday host is Doraine at Dori Reads.

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“I’m feeling very refreshed because I just washed my hands with the mouthwash in the bathroom.”

When one finds oneself invited to a librarian preview at the Yale Club for the Little Brown Spring/Summer 2011 season, it is useful to remember the following:

- Do not appear in jeans. I know it is your day off. They make you feel more relaxed, sure. But you will find that you are, in fact, quite scruffy when the fellow at the front desk calls you on them and you have to explain that you are a guest of Little Brown, thereby possibly casting aspersions on that venerable institution. I confess, I got a small thrill out of it anyway. Jeans in the Yale Club! Woo-hoo!

- Do not mistake the mouthwash in the ladies room (yes, it really is mouthwash) for the hand soap. Fortunately, the Yale Club does not outfit that room with an attendant. Otherwise you might have some ’splaining to do.

Instead, Megan Tingley, the Senior Vice President and Publisher of Little Brown Books explained how she had herself mistaken one item for another, thereby allowing her guests the opportunity to avoid the same mistake (which, in the past, I too have made). And as we were feted with brie/ham/apple sandwiches and coffee baked desserts, we got to hear about a new season with a real twist on the expected.

By the way, rather than end this round-up with the usual info, I’m going to play with fire and tell you right off the bat that if you would like a galley of anything you see here today, you need only contact Victoria Stapleton at [email protected] with the title(s) you desire.  Be sure to include your full contact info.  Sadly, if you have a P.O. Box you are out of the running.  Little Brown isn’t allowed to ship to them.

Now the first, and maybe most unexpected, book of the day comes to us via Patrick McDonnell. See, I’ve always like McDonnell’s look. I like how his artistic style (the one he uses to make that Mutts comic strip) mimics that of Krazy Kat. However, I’ve never taken to his picture books. They tend to be pet-centric, or the kinds of books that go for the warm fuzzy feeling crowd. I am not a member of the fuzzy feeling crowd. That said, McDonnell has made a recent departure with his book Me…Jane that will interest non-Mutts reading folks like myself as well as his stalwart fans. The book is based on the childhood of Jane Goodall, and adapts rather beautifully to the old 40-page picture book format. As a child, Jane was given a stuffed chimpanzee (not a real one) as a toy. She kept extensive notes about the great outdoors (which are reproduced in the book). Mostly, though, the story just shows Jane climbing trees and hanging out in nature. The fact that she read Tarzan as a child is almost too perfect for words. And when you get to the end . . . I’m not a member of the fuzzy feeling crowd at all, but even just looking at the galley for this book for the first time, I admit . . . I welled up a little. I won’t spoil it for you. You’ll just have to find this little biography for yourself. And apparently a significant portion of the proceeds of this book goes to Jane’s foundation. Nicely done.

10 Comments on Librarian Preview: Little Brown and Company (Spring 2011), last added: 12/1/2010