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How Many Jelly Beans?: A Giant Book of Giant Numbers!
By Andrea Menotti
Illustrated by Yancey Labat
Chronicle Books
$18.99
ISBN: 978-1-4521-0206-1
Ages 4-8
On shelves February 29th

Boy, I tell you. You get a kid and suddenly you find yourself scheming all these crazy schemes. “I’m going to get my kid to like vegetables!” “I’m going to get my kid to appreciate classical music!” “I’m going to get my kid to like math!” Crazy, right? I mean the first two seem doable, but the third? I’m an English major, guys. What are the chances that I’m even capable of instilling a math love in my offspring? To the rescue comes a new generation of picture books for kids with math-centric concepts. I’m not talking about books that take a math problem, turn it into a story, and somehow that’s going to magically get kids excited about integers. No, I’m talking about math books that practically dare kids to deny the pleasure of counting, estimating, etc. Such books most certainly exist, though it takes some digging to locate them. Now at long last we’ve a book that not only encourages kids to count on their own, but hits them over the head with a number they may hear all the time but could never quite comprehend. Until now.

Emma and Aiden. They like their jelly beans, they do. When Emma is asked how many she’d prefer she opts for a standard “Ten!” Not to be outdone, her brother Aiden asks for “Twenty!” So naturally Emma asks for twenty-five, and Aiden sees her twenty-five and raises the number to fifty. At a certain point, of course, Emma points out to her bro that when it comes to numbers like five hundred jelly beans (and you can see all five hundred on the table in front of them) there’s no way a person could eat that many. Aiden points out that in a year he could eat as many as a thousand. Up and up and up the numbers go, with more and more jelly beans filling the pages until at long last you reach the thrilling conclusion. Turn the page and you find some folded pages. On one side the kids are suggesting a MILLION jelly beans. Well, as it just so happens, that’s how many fill these folded pages. And finally, at long last, Aiden concedes that maybe a million, just maybe, might be too much.

It’s nice when you can imagine how a book’s going to be used. Author Andrea Menotti also happens to be a Senior Editor at Chronicle Books (whatta coincidence!). Her goal here was to give the book the barest outline of a skeleton of a plot on which to hang the art and those images of copious delicious colorful sugar bombs that appear on every page. The ending, I’ll tell you right now, relies on the shock of the number rather than the interaction between the two kids. Basically the dare at the end of the book that one number or another is “too many” is finally accepted. So there you go. When you first open it up you come to a two-page spread where Emma is being offered ten jellybeans. At this point a certain strain of child is going to insist on counting those beans, just to make sure the author and illustrator got it right. They’ll probably be the same kids that count the twenty an

Fangbone! Third Grade Barbarian
By Michael Rex
G.P. Putnam’s Sons (an imprint of Penguin)
$5.99
ISBN: 978-0-399-25521-2
Ages 6-10
On shelves now

Michael Rex has made a career of sorts out of spoofing classic children’s books of yore. As such, Goodnight Moon becomes Goodnight Goon, Runaway Bunny is Runaway Mummy and Curious George is the stellar Furious George Goes Bananas. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery but parody ain’t nothing to sneeze at. Now Mr. Rex switches gears a little. You can go on spoofing picture books until the cows come home but why limit yourself? If you’re going to rework a classic go big or go home. Go for the gold. Take on a classic in the best sense of the term. You don’t need to have read Conan the Barbarian to enjoy Mr. Rex’s new graphic novel series Fangbone! Third Grade Barbarian but knowing the books won’t hurt your appreciation either. Basically, if you’ve been waiting around for a series about third graders with swords and deadpan deliveries your prayers have been duly answered.

A warrior never shirks from danger, even if that warrior is just a kid. When the fate of the world (universe?) depends on Fangbone!, a pint-sized expert at arms, to take a supernatural object (a baddie’s big toe) to another dimension (our own) he literally leaps at the chance. Finding himself at Eastwood Elementary School he immediately attaches himself to a good-natured if slightly ADD kid named Bill and places himself in class 3G. There he begins his plan to defend the toe from supernatural baddies and to build an army. Neither task is easy, but with Bill at his side every step of the way Fangbone quickly becomes a force to reckon with in a world gone weird.

Recently small one-color graphic novels have been making a mint. The credit goes entirely to Babymouse, a series whose pink and black (sometimes orange and black, sometimes red and black) interiors changed the game. Sudden

The Mighty Miss Malone
By Christopher Paul Curtis
Wendy Lamb Books
$15.99
ISBN: 978-0-385-73491-2
Ages 9-12
On shelves now.

*Spoilers Included!*

Fact: It is a truth universally acknowledged that a new book from Christopher Paul Curtis is a great good thing.

Fact: There is a new book out there. It is by Christopher Paul Curtis.

Opinion: It doesn’t work.

When you hand a kid a Christopher Paul Curtis novel you can rest safe and secure in the knowledge that the book you’re handing over is going to have humor leavened with little moments of surprising heart and clarity. You know that the title is going to make an era from the past more real to the child reader than any number of history textbooks at school. You know this. And the remarkable thing about The Mighty Miss Malone, Mr. Curtis’s newest novel, is that it manages to accomplish all these things, and accomplish them well, without being a particularly good book. There are times when Mighty Miss Malone sparkles and crackles and comes to life on the page. Of course there are. This is Christopher Paul Curtis we’re talking about here. But those moments are buried deep beneath a plot that is at times quite slow, a protagonist that is passive, and a plot twist that seemed so nice he used it twice. Mr. Curtis is one of our finest writers for young people working today and this is not his finest work. It’s fine. Not great.

If you were paying close attention to the book Bud Not Buddy then you might have caught a glimpse of a girl named Deza Malone when Bud stopped in a Hooverville for a while. Turns out that there’s more to her situation than meets the eye. A formidable student and smart gal, Deza spends much of her time defending her older (yet shorter) troublemaking brother Jimmie. But when their father has a horrible accident out on Lake Michigan everything changes for the worse. The man who returns to them seems like their dad but there’s something different about him. Before they know it he’s left town to find work, their landlord kicks them out of their home, and their mother is determined to go to Flint, Michigan to find Deza’s dad as well as some work of her own. Sometimes the biggest plans are the most difficult to carry out, though. And sometimes help comes from the most unexpected of places.

A quick note: If ever you heard the words “Spoiler Alert” you are hearing them now. I have every intention of giving away every plot twist, every surprise ending, every little secret Mr. Curtis has tucked away in the folds of this novel. Should you wish to be surprised by ANYTHING in the book, cease and desist with reading this review right now. Seriously, I don’t want to ruin something for you that you might really enjoy. Go. Shoo. Scat. Off with you unless you’re fine with that (or have read the book already). All gone? Then let’s begin.

I think the key to the novel lies in its creation. In a note to the reader, Mr. Curtis recounts how the idea for this book came into being. He was invited to speak to an African American mother-daughter book club in Detroit about Newbery winner Bud Not Buddy. “Big mistake”. According to him the minute he walked in he was confronted by some of the moms wondering what exactly happened when that random girl in the Hooverville kissed B

Jazz Age Josephine
By Jonah Winter
Illustrated by Marjorie Priceman
Atheneum (an imprint of Simon & Schuster)
$16.99
ISBN: 978-104169-6123-9
Ages 6 and up
On shelves now

When we try to name the biggest and best picture book biography authors out there, two names spring immediately to mind. The first is David Adler. Mr. Adler specializes in picture books that go by the straightforward titles of “A Picture Book of [Enter Name Here]“. It makes him easy to spot on a shelf. All his books look pretty much the same with stories that reduce their subjects to a couple key points. They are serviceable in the best sense of the term. They serve a purpose. They also couldn’t be more different from the works of the great picture book biographer Jonah Winter. Where Mr. Adler is all white borders and straightforward fonts, Mr. Winter’s books leap off the shelf and make a dive for your jugular. They pop and smack and wrest your attention away from the glittery fictional pack. His latest, Jazz Age Josephine, is no different. A witty and glam look at a person rarely seen in picture book bios, Winter uses his storytelling skills to spin the tale of a fine lady, never told in quite this way before.

“Well, she was born up in St. Louis, and she grew up with those St. Louis Blues / Yes, she was born in old St. Louis, and she grew up singin’ nothin’ but the blues, / She just had one old ragged dress and a pair of worn-out old shoes.” That was Josephine Baker back in the day. Fortunately, the kid had pep. She could move and goof off and her dancing was so good that it earned her some money from time to time. Little wonder that when her home was burned by angry racists she headed straight for New York City. There Josephine was able to get some roles on the stage, but the minstrel parts were particularly galling. So off she flew to Paris and once she got there, “Paris, France – instant fame! / Everybody knows her name!” And though she missed her home, she was a jazz age baby and a hit at long last.

I did a cursory check of the reader reviews of this book online and saw that some folks were a bit peeved that Mr. Winter dared to mention hot topic issues like racism and minstrel shows. I think that highlights why it is that this is the first time such a biography for kids has been attempted (there was Ragtime Tumpie by Alan Schroeder in 1989 but that just looked at Josephine’s youth). The story of Ms. Baker is more difficult than your average Rosa Parks / Frederick Douglass bio. If you’re going to talk about Josephine then you have to talk about why she left America. You have to talk about what the state of the country was at that time, and why she felt she couldn’t return there. Then there are other issues as well. For one thing, is it possible to talk about Ms. Baker without mentioning the banana skirt? Winter doesn’t talk about the costume (six-year-olds are notoriously bad at pronouncing the word “burlesque”) but illustrator Marjorie Priceman does include a subtle glimpse of it from the side in two separate pictures. Meanwhile Mr. Winter does a good job of making it clear that Josephine was sad to be away from the States but that to become a star she had to go elsewhere. Interestingly the book ends at about that point, leaving the Author’s Note to explain her work with t

Fake Mustache: how Jodie O’Rodeo and Her Wonder Horse (And Some Nerdy Kid) Saved the U.S. Presidential Election From a Mad Genius Criminal Mastermind)
By Tom Angleberger
Illustrated by Jen Wang
Amulet Books (an imprint of Abrams)
$13.95
ISBN: 978-1-4197-0194-8
Ages 9-12
On shelves April 1, 2012

I said it about Laini Taylor. I said it about Jeff Kinney. Heck, I even said it about J.K. Rowling and now, my friends, I’m saying it about Tom Angleberger: I was into him before it was cool. Seriously, a show of hands, how many of you out there can say that you read his first middle grade novel The Qwikpick Adventure Society written under the pen name of Sam Riddleberger? See, that’s what I though. I did and it was hilarious, thank you very much. The kind of thing you read and love and wish more people knew (plus it involved a poop fountain. I kid you not). Years passed and at long last Tom got his due thanks to a little unassuming title by the name of The Strange Case of Origami Yoda. By the time Darth Paper Strikes Back came out, Mr. Angleberger was a certifiable hit with the 9-12 year old set. Fortunately for all of us he hasn’t rested on his laurels quite yet. He’s still willing to stretch a little and get seriously wacky when he wants to. Case in point, Fake Mustache. Just your average everyday twelve-year-old-takes-over-the-world title, Tom’s desire for total and complete goofiness finds a home here. I was into Tom before everyone else was, but considering how much fun Fake Mustache is I guess I’m willing to share him a little.

If he hadn’t lent Casper the measly ten bucks then it’s pretty certain that Lenny Flem Jr. wouldn’t have found himself pairing up with famous television star and singer Jodie O’Rodeo to defeat the evil genius Fako Mustacho. You see, Casper wanted to buy a mustache. And not just any mustache, mind you, but the extremely rare (and luxurious) Heidelberg Handlebar #7. A mustache so powerful, in fact, that when Casper puts it on he’s capable of convincing anyone of anything. Now Casper, posing as Fako Mustacho, has set his sights on the U.S. presidency and only Lenny and Jodie are willing and able to defeat him.

To read this book, kid or adult, you need to have somewhere to safely place your disbelief. I recommend storing it in the rafters of your home. Failing that, launch it into the stratosphere because logic is not going to be your friend when you read this. Literal-minded children would do well to perhaps avoid this book. The ideal reader would be one who reads for pleasure and who enjoys a tale that knows how to have a bit of fun with its internal logic. Once that’s taken care of you’ll be able to really get into Angleberger’s wordplay. He throws in just a ton of fun details that are worth repeating. Things like the fact that the state legislature tends to meet in the local Chinese buffet restaurant because

Forgive Me, I Meant to Do It: False Apology Poems
By Gail Carson Levine
Illustrated by Matthew Cordell
Harper (an imprint of Harper Collins)
$15.99
ISBN: 978-0-06-178725-6
Ages 5-10
On shelves March 13th

I tend to run my bookgroup for kids between the ages of 9-12 like a gentle dictatorship. I choose the books, the kids vote on them, and so it goes. Now if the kids had their way we’d be reading fantasy novels day in and day out every single week. With that in mind, I like to try to make them read something a little different once in a while. For example, one week I might try to get them to read a Newbery winner. The next I would try to encourage them to dip into some nonfiction. One type of book I haven’t had the nerve to attempt for years, though, is poetry. Finding a really good, really interesting, really smart book of poetry for kids of that age is tricky stuff. Poetic tastes vary considerably, so it’s best to start with a book with a hook. And by hook or by crook, Forgive Me, I Meant to Do It is basically the answer to my prayers I’ve been seeking all these long and lonely years. It has everything. Humor, engaging illustrations, a clever premise, potential (and very fun) applications, and a passive aggressive streak that’s nearly a mile long.

Do you know that old William Carlos Williams poem about the plums in the icebox? The one that calls itself “This is Just to Say”? When you think about that poem, I mean really think about it, it’s just the most self-satisfied little number you ever did see. Williams is clearly not sorry, though he included the words “forgive me” in there. With that as her inspiration, Gail Carson Levine has penned forty-five or so false apology poems modeled on Williams’. The rules are simple. “The first stanza states the horrible offense. The second stanza describes the effect of the offense. The last stanza begins with ‘Forgive me’ and continues with the false apology, because the writer is not sorry at all.” Mixing together fairy tales and silly situations, Levine’s poems span the gamut, from the cow in Jack and the Beanstalk taking issue with her monetary worth to a girl’s pets asking pseudo-forgiveness for enjoying her diary’s contents. Saying sorry without meaning it has never been this charming.

On the book’s dedication page read the words “To Susan Campbell Bartoletti, who led me down the poetry path.” I am currently in the process of putting in an order with FTD in the hopes of sending Ms. Bartoletti some flowers of my own. Whether intentionally or not, she has been at least partly responsible for helping to bring to this world a poet of undeniable talent. We all know Ms. Gail Carson Levine for her fantasy novels. Her Newbery Honor winning Ella Enchanted is probably her best known work. But when I saw that she had gone into the poetry business I couldn’t suppress a groan. Great. An author who thinks they can write. Whooptie-doo. Can’t wait to see what recycled trope makes its 100th appearance on the printed page yet again. Imagine my surprise then when I saw not only the idea behind the book (snarky in its mere conception, which is no easy task when you work in the world of juvenile literature) but the poems themselves. Ladies and gentlemen if I blame Ms. Levine for anything it is for denying the world her drop dead gorgeously twisted poin

The Great Cake Mystery: Precious Ramotswe’s Very First Case
By Alexander McCall Smith
Illustrated by Iain McIntosh
Anchor Books
$12.99
ISBN: 978-0-307-94944-8
Ages 7-10
On shelves April 3rd

There was once a time, best beloved, when the early chapter book section of your local lending library was a veritable wasteland of white characters. Oh, every once in a while you might be able to get your hands on Stories Julian Tells or My Name is Maria Isabel but by and large they were it, man. Then, in the last ten years or so, something changed. Suddenly there was an influx of great books starring kids of a diverse range of backgrounds and races. Different nationalities would sort of come up too (Younguncle Comes to Town, The White Elephant, Rickshaw Girl, etc.) but they remain, to this day, far less common. Then, two years ago, the amazing and delightful Anna Hibiscus by Atinuke hit American shores and the masses did rejoice. The series was remarkable, not just for the great writing and art, but because until that moment the idea of reading about a girl living in contemporary Africa was a dear and distant dream. Maybe that’s what helped to convince American publishers to bring over Alexander McCall Smith’s enjoyable early chapter book The Great Cake Mystery: Precious Ramotswe’s Very First Case. An early chapter book of a mystery starring his most famous character during her childhood, Smith isn’t entirely comfortable writing for a young audience, but this mini mystery and its jaw-dropping illustrations will please proto-detectives, both large and small.

Some people are good at noticing things. Take Precious Ramotswe. She’s the kind of girl who will seriously consider when someone might be lying or telling the truth. Prompted by her father to consider a future as a detective, Precious likes the idea but figures it’ll be years before she gets her first case. As it turns out, it happens a lot faster than she might think. At school a boy is accused of stealing sweets from his fellow students. Refusing to accept circumstantial evidence, Precious discovers the true culprits and devises a delightful solution to the sticky fingered thief problem.