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Ice
By Arthur Geisert
Enchanted Lion Books
$14.95
ISBN: 978-1-59270-098-1
For ages 5 and up
On shelves now

Me and Arthur Geisert, Arthur Geisert and I . . . I wouldn’t say we’ve ever connected, exactly. Over the years I’ve had a hard time getting a grasp on his particular brand of picture book creation. I’m a librarian. I like categories and slots and easy ways to organize my thoughts on one person or another. Geisert sort of rejects that whole idea. His picture books work in and of themselves, but they don’t pander. You don’t pick up a work by the man and feel that it’s trying to ingratiate itself with you. There’s something vaguely unnerving, almost European, about this. We Americans are used to books dipped in glitter and outrageous characters that scream across crowded bookstores and libraries, “PICK ME!!! PICK ME!! I’M THE ONE!!!!” Arthur Geisert books, in comparison, sit quietly in amongst themselves playing a hand of Pinochle or, if they’re feeling particularly daring, maybe a round of Hearts. Should you choose to pick one up to read, it will tip its hat politely to you but make no attempt to smoother you with its marvelousness. All this came to mind when I read one of Geisert’s latest creations. Ice is a simple story focusing on pigs and glaciers.

On long horizontal pages, our wordless tale begins with a look at an island. The sun sits big and low over a series of adapted huts. At one end of the island sits a kind of pit or pool, low on water, where the resident pigs fill up their buckets. That night a conference is called and next thing you know the pigs are hoisting the rigging on their one and only ship. Not content with mere sails, a balloon is inflated and off go the pigs. Soon enough they locate some enormous glaciers. Enterprising to the last, they connect their ship to one such ice chunk (sails are added to help drag it along) and when they return home the ice is put to use. The bulk is added to the pool, but even smaller squares can be put to good use when they become impromptu air-conditioning aids. By the end, the pigs are happy yet again, and the hot days are tempered at last.

Periodically I’ll get folks in my library looking for wordless picture books. There are a number of ways of meeting that need. For my part, I’ve whipped up a little list of our best wordless books (Mirror by Jeannie Baker, The Red Book by Barbara Lehman, Flotsam by David Wiesner, etc.). If I knew Geisert better I could attest as to whether or not he is accustomed to visual narratives. If I were to take a guess though, I’d say he’s done this before. This isn’t one of the easier wordless books, though. It makes you work. When first you see the deep pool, low in its water supply, it’s not immediately apparent what is going on. The pigs throughout the story are pretty good natured about things. When they decide to set out for some ice, there’s aren’t folks who object to this notion. It seems the logical next step, though the reader doesn’t know what’s going on until much later. Geisert makes it evident that if you stick with the story, all will be revealed in time. That�

The Penderwicks at Point Mouette
By Jeanne Birdsall
Knopf (an imprint of Random House)
$16.99
ISBN: 978-0-375-85851-2
Ages 7-12
On shelves May 10th

When Jeanne Birdsall’s first middle grade novel The Penderwicks was published in 2005 it committed a crime. A crime shared, I might add, by books written by authors like Dr. Seuss, J.K. Rowling, and even Jeff Kinney. They say no good deed goes unpunished. Well, the creation of The Penderwicks was a good deed to children across the world in need of great fiction that’s homey and familiar without being cloying. Books that are touching a meaningful but never saccharine. In creating such a book Ms. Birdsall followed in her predecessors’ footsteps and did something unforgiveable: she made it look easy. Nothing could be worse. Imitators weren’t immediate, but as time has gone by they’ve cropped up like so many unwanted dandelions. Now librarians must wade through the lot of them in the desperate hope that maybe one or two will be worth recommending. It’s no good to say a book is “the next Penderwicks” or “Penderwicks meets [blank]”. Nothing quite compares to the original and that stands true with this, the third Penderwick chapter. The Penderwicks at Point Mouette takes readers slightly out of their comfort range but not so far that they feel adrift. Everything you expect out of a Penderwick novel is here. It just happens to be done better by this author than any other you might name.

“The Penderwick family was being torn apart.” Nuff said. Maybe torn apart is a bit of an exaggeration. You see, with the recent marriage of their father to that perfectly nice Iantha, the family suddenly finds itself going in three different directions. The parental Penderwicks are going to England on a honeymoon for two weeks while Rosalind goes to New Jersey during that time with a friend. That leaves the remaining three girls to join their Aunt Claire at Point Mouette, in a lovely little coastal cottage. Their pleasure at the thought is daunted somewhat by the discovery that their best honorary brother Jeffrey will not be joining them. More shocking still, with Rosalind out of the picture, Skye is automatically the OAP (Oldest Available Penderwick) and she is not pleased with the responsibility that entails. Fortunately there are enough dog related mishaps, skateboarding cool guys, musicians, golf balls, moose, and more to distract the remaining Penderwicks from their problems. Particularly when a friend needs their help.

Part of the lure of the Penderwick books is the fact that when you dive into one of them you are verily engulfed in a kind of instantaneous flood of words that feel (forgive me but there’s no other way of saying this) classic. You could read a Penderwick novel after a book by Elizabeth Enright, say, or Maud Hart Lovelace and the sole blip on your radar might be to notice that the language in the Penderwick book sounds less outdated than in the others. There is no effective way of replicating this feel in a novel. Lord knows it’s been attempted before and the results are almost always lamentable (the acoustical equivalent of celebrities trying to write picture books that sound like Dr. Seuss). Ms. Birdsall pulls it off without ever sounding forced or precious. And yet you never feel like the bo

Inside Out and Back Again
By Thanhha Lai
Harper Collins
$15.99
ISBN: 978-0-06-196278-3
Ages 9-12
On shelves now

Thinking about the most memorable of children’s novels, one trait in all of them has to ring true in order for them to click with their readers. The books must contain some kind of “meaning”. Even the frothiest Charlie and the Chocolate Factory-type offering isn’t going to remain long in the public’s brain if there isn’t at least a little “meaning” slipped in there. Now when I use the term “meaning” I’m being purposefully vague because it’s not the kind of thing you can easily define. What is meaningful to one person might strike another as trite or overdone. I personally believe that adult novels contain this saccharine faux-meaning a lot more often than their juvenile contemporaries, and why not? Adult books can get away with it while children’s books are read by the harshest of all possible critics: children. As a librarian and a reviewer, I’m pretty tough too. I get mighty suspicious of prose that gets a little too lyrical or characters that spout the book’s thinly disguised premise on every other page. All this is leading up to the fact that when I turned my jaded suspicion-filled toxic eyeballs on Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out and Back Again I found nothing to displease me. Lai’s debut novel speaks with a natural voice that’s able to make salient points and emotional scenes without descending into overly sentimental goo. This author makes a point to draw from her own life. The result is a novel that works in every conceivable way.

“No one would believe me but at times I would choose wartime in Saigon over peacetime in Alabama.” Ha has known both in her life, actually. Born in Vietnam during the war, Ha lives with her mother and three older brothers. Her father disappeared years ago on a navy mission when Ha was just one. Today the family doesn’t even know if he’s alive, but when the chance comes to flee Saigon and make a new life in America, Ha’s mother doesn’t hesitate. Once they’re settled in Alabama, Ha has a whole new set of problems ahead of her. She’s homesick, mad that she’s no longer the smartest girl in class, and tormented after school by some of the boys. Yet the solution, it seems, is not to become someone different but to take what she is already and find a way to make her new life work.

In a way Inside Out and Back Again kind of marks the second coming of the verse novel. A couple years ago this style of writing for children was hugely popular, helped in no small part by Newbery Award winning books like Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust. For some it represented the perfect way to get to the heart of a story without unnecessary clutter. Unfortunately, others regarded it as a quick and easy way to write a novel with a word count only slightly higher than your average picture book. The market was saturated and finally verse novels began to peter out. It finally got to the point where I became convinced that the only way a verse novel wo

Me . . . Jane
By Patrick McDonnell
Little Brown and Company
$15.99
ISBN: 978-0-316004546-9
Ages 4-8
On shelves April 5^th

Pity the picture book biographer. Theirs is not an easy lot. Seems to me that if you want to introduce a six-year-old to a famous person there are two ways of going about it. The first way is the David Adler method. He’s the fellow behind all those “A Picture Book of” books. Adler’s specialty is synthesizing a person into 32 or 40 odd pages. Along the way he has to boil down a human life into as pure and simple a telling as possible. Sometimes this method works well, and sometimes it doesn’t, but it used to be the only way of creating children’s biographies. Then there’s method #2: You take your subject and select just a moment from their life. Which is to say, you give them breadth and depth and meaning, then do the whole summary of who they actually were in the Endnotes. The advantage to this method is that you can actually explain a concept to a kid, by making the biographical subject into a kind of literary character. Biographies of famous people that limit their focus almost entirely to their subjects’ childhoods are actually kind of rare. Famous people do not necessarily arise out of interesting, cheerful childhoods, after all. So really, one of the many things that I admire about Patrick McDonnell’s first foray into non-fiction is that his subject, Jane Goodall, presents him with early years that were practically custom made to be relayed. The result, Me . . . Jane is the rare picture book biography that manages to please biography fans, fiction fans, and chimpanzee fans (albeit, stuffed) alike.

Young Jane noticed things. Outdoorsy things. With her stuffed chimp Jubilee at her side, there were lots of mysteries to notice too. Jane was the type to climb tall trees on sunny days, or to hide in the chicken coop to uncover the source of eggs. When she read her Tarzan she’d want to be in Africa with all the animals just like him. And when she got older, her dreams really did come true. Backmatter include a short section “About Jane Goodall” and a “A Message from Jane” herself.

Odds are that McDonnell’s a familiar name on the comics page of your local newspaper. Known primarily as the man behind the MUTTS comic strip, I think it’s fair to say that McDonnell wasn’t the obvious person to write this book. I say that, even though I’m aware that animal rights are his passion. We’re talking about a guy that’s a member of the Humane Society’s board of directors and who has used MUTTS as a way of drawing attention to everything from The Wildlife Land Trust to New Jersey’s animal population control fund. However, I have seen his previous picture books. They have names like Just Like Heaven and Hug Time and for my desiccated, not to say sardonic, heart and soul they do nothing for me. Animal cuteness is not one of my weaknesses. So when I discovered that McDonnell was tackling a real person and a real life I approached the idea with more than a mite bit of trepidation. Jane Goodall, let’s face it, would be easy to cutesy up (all the more so when you learn about her life). Though it was his idea in the first place, was McDonnell the right guy to tell her tale? Answer: Yup. This isn’t to say that I wouldn’t like to see her life de

Okay for Now
By Gary D. Schmidt
Clarion Books (an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
$16.99
ISBN: 978-0-547-15260-8
Ages 10-14
On shelves April 18^th

There are three kinds of literary sequels for kids out there. First, you have the sequel that is so intricately tied into the plot of the first book that not a page goes by that you don’t feel you’re missing something if you skipped Book #1. The second kind of sequel nods to the first book and brings up continual facts from it, but is a coherant story in its own right. The third kind of sequel makes mention of facts and/or people in the first book but if you read the story on your own you might not even be aware that there was previous book in the first place. Okay for Now by Gary D. Schmidt would be the third type of sequel, I think. Ostensibly a sequel to his Newbery Honor winning title The Wednesday Wars, the hero of Okay for Now, Doug Swieteck, was a bit part character in the first book, and now has come entirely into his own in the second. For fans of the first, you will enjoy the second. And for people who begin with the second, you won’t miss a thing really if you haven’t read the first. All you’ll know is that you have a great book on your hands. A great great book.

“You’re not always going to get everything you want, you know. That’s not what life is like.” It’s not like the librarian Mrs. Merriam needs to tell Doug that. If any kid is aware that life is not a bed of roses, it’s Doug. Stuck in a family with a dad that prefers talking with his fists to his mouth, a sweet but put upon mom, a brother in Vietnam, and another one at home making his little brother’s life a misery, it’s not like Doug’s ever had all that much that’s good in his life. When he and his family move to Marysville, New York (herein usually referred to as “stupid Marysville”) things start to change a little. Doug notices the amazing paintings of birds in an Audubon book on display in the public library. The boy is captivated by the birds, but soon it becomes clear that to raise money, the town has been selling off different pages in the book to collectors. Between wanting to preserve the book, learning to draw, solving some problems at school, the return of his brother from Vietnam, and maybe even falling in love, Doug’s life in “stupid” Marysville takes a turn. Whether it’s a turn for the better or a turn for the worse is up to him.

It’s such a relief sometimes to read a great writer for kids. Not a merely good writer, but a great writer. Mr. Schmidt is one of the few. You haven’t gotten even two pages into the story of this book before Doug tells you about his brother hitting him. He writes that he, “Pummeled me in places where the bruises wouldn’t show. A strategy that my . . . is none of your business.” Beautiful. Right there we know that not only is our narrator telling us his story, but he’s also hiding secrets along the way. In fact, throughout the book Doug will repeat ideas or thoughts or phrases that he’s been ruminating over, seemingly unaware that he’s working those same thoughts into the narrative. Doug isn’t so much an unreliable narrator to us as he is an unreliable narrator to himself.

Schmidt’s dialogue is also always on point and interesting, but of pa

Queen of the Falls
By Chris Van Allsburg
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
$18.99
ISBN: 978-0-547-31581-2
Ages 4-9
On shelves April 4^th

The word “daredevil” conjures up different images for different people. Speaking for myself, when I hear it I instantly picture someone like Evel Knievel leaping over cars on a motorcycle. I do not picture sixty-two year old charm school matrons climbing into barrels. The name “Chris Van Allsburg” also conjures up a variety of interesting images. A person might think of his books The Mysteries of Harris Burdick or The Sweetest Fig (or, my personal favorite, The Stranger). And until now, they also would probably not picture sixty-two year old charm school matrons climbing into barrels. Yet now both the word and the author/illustrator have become inextricably linked to one another, and it is all because of a little old lady who died nearly one hundred years ago. For the first time, Chris Van Allsburg has put aside the fantastical for something infinitely more intriguing: Real world history with just a touch of the insane. And it all begins with the first person to ever go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

The facts about the Niagara Falls are well known. “The water drops from a height that is as tall as a seventeen-story building.” Fact of the matter is, you’d have to be nutty to even consider going over such falls. Yet that was the idea that appealed so much to Ms. Annie Edson Taylor. A former charm school teacher, Annie was sixty-two years old and in real need of money. In a flash it came to her: Go over the edge of Niagara Falls in a barrel and reap the rewards that come. Efficient, Annie commissioned the barrel she would travel in, and found folks willing to help her carry out the plan. When the time came, everything went without a hitch and best of all Annie lived to tell the tale. Unfortunately, fame and fortune were not in the cards. Folks weren’t interested in hearing an old woman talk about her death-defying adventure, and on more than one occasion she found her barrel stolen or folks taking credit for her own deed. Ten years later a reporter found her and asked for her story again. Annie confessed that she didn’t become rich like she wanted to, but as she said, “That’s what everyone wonders when they see Niagara . . . How close will their courage let them get to it? Well, sir, you can’t get any closer than I got.”

This is not the first time I have encountered Ms. Taylor’s story. I’m a fan of the podcast Radio Lab, which makes science palatable to English majors like myself. One such podcast told the story of Annie Taylor, and it was a sad tale. So sad, in fact, that when I picked up Queen of the Falls I naturally assumed that Van Allsburg would sweeten, cushion, and otherwise obscure some of the difficulties Annie faced after her fateful trip. To my infinite delight, I found the man to be a sterling author of nonfiction for kids. He doesn’t pad the truth, but at the same time he finds that spark in a true-life story that gives it depth and meaning. On the surface, what could we possibly learn from the depressing reminder of