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By:
Betsy Bird,
on 9/30/2011
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A Fuse #8 Production
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Ghetto Cowboy
By G. Neri
Illustrated by Jesse Joshua Watson
Candlewick Press
$15.99
ISBN: 978-0-7636-4922-7
Ages 10 and up.
On shelves now.
Fun Fact: Parents these days speak in code. As a New York children’s librarian I had to learn this the hard way. Let’s say they want a folktale about a girl outwitting a witch. I pull out something like McKissack’s Precious and the Boo Hag and proudly hand it to them. When I do, the parent scrunches up their nose and I think to myself, “Uh-oh.” Then they say it. “Yeah, um . . . we were looking for something a little less . . . urban.” Never mind that the book takes places in the country. In this day and age “urban” means “black” so any time a parents wants to steer a child clear of a book they justify it with the U word, as if it’s the baleful city life they wish to avoid (this in the heart of Manhattan, I will point out). Any black author or illustrator for children that you meet will probably have stories similar to this. Maybe part of the reason I like Greg Neri so much is that he’s not afraid to be as “urban” as “urban” can be. He does all the stuff these parents cower from. He writes in dialect, sets his stories in cities, talk about gangs and other contemporary issues, and produces stories that no one else is telling. That no one else is even attempting to tell. Street chess? Try Chess Rumble. Graphic novels discussing how the media portrays black youth? Yummy. And how about black cowboys living in big cities like Philadelphia or Brooklyn? For that you’d have to find Ghetto Cowboy (not “Urban Cowboy”) and read it in full. Because if there’s one thing Neri does well it’s tell a tale that needs to be told.
Cole’s been in trouble plenty of times before, but this is different. This is worse. After getting caught after skipping school for large swaths of time, Cole’s mother has had all that she can take. Next thing he knows they’re barreling out of Detroit, the only home he’s ever had, straight for Philadelphia. There, Cole’s father, a guy he’s never met before a day of his life, lives a peculiar life. Cole’s heard of cowboys, sure, but whoever heard of cowboys in Philly? Turns out that his dad helps run an urban stable where he works to get neighborhood kids interested in helping care for and ride the local horse population. But with a city intent on carting the horses away, it’s going to take more than good intentions to keep these modern day cowboys up and running. It’s going to take Cole’s help.
2 Comments on Review of the Day: Ghetto Cowboy by G. Neri, last added: 10/3/2011
By:
Betsy Bird,
on 9/9/2011
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Wonderstruck
By Brian Selznick
Scholastic Press
$29.99
ISBN: 978-0545027892
Ages 9 and up
On shelves September 13, 2011
Hype. What’s the point? A publisher believes that a book is going to be big so they crank up the old hype machine and do everything in their power to draw attention to it long before its publication date. That’s what they did for Brian Selznick’s Wonderstruck and I was sad to see it. As far as I was concerned, Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret was too tough an act to follow. Here you had a book that managed to get hundreds of librarians across the nation of America to redefine in their own minds the very definition of “picture book”. Cabret was remarkable because it combined words and pictures in a manner most closely resembling a film. Indeed the whole plot of the book revolved around filmmaking so what would be the point of writing another book in the same vein? If Cabret credits its success in part to its originality, doesn’t that give his Wonderstruck a handicap right from the start? You’d think so, but you might also forget something about Cabret. While the art was spectacular and the plotting just fine, the writing was merely a-okay. By no means a detriment to the book, mind you. Just okay. And maybe that’s partly why Wonderstruck works as well as it does. The art is just as beautiful as Cabret’s, the plotting superior, and the writing not just good, but fantastic. Where Cabret wowed readers with spectacle, Wonderstruck hits ‘em where it hurts. Right in the heart. For once, we’re dealing with a book that is actually worth its own hype.
Ben: Gunflint Lake, Minnesota, June 1977. Rose: Hoboken, New Jersey, October 1927. Ben’s Story – written: Newly orphaned when his mother dies, Ben comes to believe that he has a father, hitherto unknown, living in New York City. When an accident involving a telephone and a bolt of lightning renders him deaf, he sets out for the big city in search of clues to who his father really is. Rose’s Story – seen almost solely in pictures: A seeming prisoner in her own home, Rose too sets out for New York City to see the actress Lillian Mayhew for reasons of her own. The two children both end up in The American Museum of Natural History and both discover something there that will help to give them what they need to solve their own problems. And in that discovery, they will find one another.
I’ll just state right here and now that you could probably tell from the opening paragraph of this review that it’s extraordinarily difficult to talk about Wonderstruck without invoking Hugo Cabret in the same breath. This is mostly because of the unique written/image-driven style Selznick utilizes in both of these books. It’s not an unheard of technique, alternating written passages with visual ones, but it’s rarely done this well. What strikes me as significant, though, is that the style is chosen f
By:
Betsy Bird,
on 8/22/2011
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The Unforgotten Coat
By Frank Cottrell Boyce
Photographs by Carl Hunter and Clare Heney
Candlewick Press
$15.99
ISBN: 978-0-7636-5729-1
Ages 9-12
On shelves September 13th.
Contemporary Mongolia doesn’t have all that many English language children’s novels to its name. And if you asked me to name everything I knew about Mongolia today, I’d probably find myself referring to key scenes in that recent documentary Babies more than anything else. I don’t think I would have selected author Frank Cottrell Boyce to shed any light on the country or its inhabitants. Heck, I’ll take it one step further. With books like Millions and Cosmic under his belt I wouldn’t have even thought he’d want to write a book about immigration, cultural identity, fitting in, and having your assumptions wrecked. Shows what I know because write such a book he has and the result is a svelte little novel that may be his best. The Unforgotten Coat is the kind of book you get when an author gets an original idea and works it into something memorable. This is one story kids will read and then find difficult to forget.
Julie first sees the boys on the playground during break. When the class returns inside the boys follow and suddenly there they are. Chingis and Nergui, two brothers from Mongolia. Almost immediately Chingis identifies Julie as their “Good Guide” who will show them around and tell them everything they need to know. Julie embraces her role with gusto, but as she helps the boys out she wants to know more and more about them. Where do they live? Why do they insist that Nergui is being tracked by a demon that will make him “vanish”. What’s their real story? The trouble is, the moment Julie realizes what’s going on it is far too late.
The book is great. No question. But it’s the Afterword that deserves just as much attention. In it the reader learns where Boyce got the inspiration for this story. Turns out, during the very first school visit Mr. Boyce ever did, he sat with a group of kids that included a Mongolian girl by the name of Misheel. Then one day the Immigration Authorities took her away in the night and Boyce was left with the image of Misheel’s abandoned coat. He wanted to make a documentary with the kids of going to Mongolia to return the coat but that fell through. So it was he wrote this story instead with new characters and, at its core, an abandoned coat. Again.
The best works of protest are those that don’t harangue you but softly win you over to their point of view. Boyce is not a fan of some of the actions taken by the U.K.’s immigration authorities, that’s for sure. In his Afterword he even goes so far as to say, “I do know that a country that authorizes its functionaries to snatch children from their beds in the middle of the night can’t really be called civilized.” And he could have made the characters of Chingis and Nergui adorable moppets who win your heart with a smile and a wink. He doesn’t. Chingis is demanding and Nergui isn’t far off. You do grow attached to them, but not because they’re cute or anything. If you like them it’s because you got to know them a little better, just
Hound Dog True
By Linda Urban
Harcourt Children’s Books (an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
$15.99
ISBN: 978-0-547-55869-1
Ages 9-12
On shelves September 20th
There’s identifying with a work of children’s fiction and then there’s wondering if the author of the work has somehow discovered time travel and was able to observe your younger self. Such were my feelings upon picking up and reading Hound Dog True, the lastest from A Crooked Kind of Perfect’s Linda Urban. I don’t want to cast aspersions on Ms. Urban, and if she wants to use her highly developed time travel technology to spy upon my elementary years that is her business. Of course I appreciate that she changed the names in this book to protect the innocent (which is to say, me). It occurs to me now that there may be a chance that Ms. Urban wrote this book with another child in mind. Indeed, after having finished the title I can see sheer hoards of kids who were exactly like me when they were young picking up this book and finding in its heroine Mattie a kindred spirit. It won’t be hard for them to do. She’s the underdog’s underdog.
She has it all worked out, you see. The plan is perfect. It can’t possibly fail. After traveling from place to place with her mother for years, Mattie and mom have finally moved in with mom’s brother. Uncle Potluck is exactly the kind of uncle you’d want to have around too. He tells great stories, and talks to the moon, and best of all he lets Mattie tag along as he fixes up the local elementary school for the coming year. In fear of the kids in her new class, Mattie has determined that if she’s a good enough assistant to Uncle Potluck in the summer then she’ll be able to assist him over her lunch and recess period every school day and avoid her compatriots. She’s sure she’ll be able to convince him, but when she meets the niece of her new next door neighbor, Mattie starts discovering that maybe other kids aren’t entirely frightening.
There are books for kids out there where the protagonist is supposed to be shy. They almost never ring true. Sure, the kid will act hesitant to do one thing or another, but eventually they’ll have these moments where they go out of their way to be brave and they lose me. I was a shy kid. I understand the crippling fear a person can feel when they encounter a potentially hostile fellow student. And Linda Urban gets all of that. She gets how you can worry about being babyish one moment and then fall into old habits the next. She gets how a person could view lunch and recess as “the lawless times” when the safety of adults lessens and kids are allowed to pick on one another openly. It doesn’t take much to instill in a child a fear of their fellow man. Hound Dog True understands.
One remarkable aspect of the book is the fact that Urban manages to create a passive protagonist that doesn’t drive you up the wall. Generally when a writer conjures up a character that is afraid of basic human interactions the reader’s response is a uncontrollable urge to shake the hero for all they’re worth. You don’t feel that way with Mattie, though. This is remarkable when you realize that it’s when Mattie attempts to be proactive that she gets herself in the biggest messes. Her plan to become a janitorial assist
By:
Betsy Bird,
on 7/1/2011
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Hidden
By Helen Frost
Frances Foster Books (Farrar Straus & Giroux)
$16.99
ISBN: 978-0-374-38221-6
Ages 10 and up
On shelves now.
If poems had been introduced to me as a child as puzzles, maybe I would have taken to them a little more. A poem is a kind of puzzle, isn’t it? Depending on the kind of poem you have to make the syllables and words conform to a preexisting format. Unless it’s free verse, of course. Then all bets are off. That’s what you do when you’re writing a poem, but can reading one be an act of puzzle-solving as well? Earlier this year I reviewed Bob Raczka’s Lemonade: and Other Poems Squeezed from a Single Word which required the reader’s eyes to leap around the page, piecing together the words. Hidden by Helen Frost requires relatively less work to read, but the reader willing to seek out the messages hidden (ho ho) in some of the poems will be amply rewarded. The result is that “Hidden” manages to be both a book of poetry and a wholly original story of two girls bound together by a singular, accidental crime.
When you go to a new summer camp you usually have to deal with not knowing anyone. That’s not Darra’s problem though. Her problem is that she does know someone and, worse, that person knows her too. Years and years ago Darra’s father accidentally kidnapped a young girl by the name of Wren Abbot. He didn’t mean to, of course. He was carjacking, unaware that Wren was hidden in the back of the car, frightened out of her mind. Years later Darra, who once helped Wren, runs into the girl that, she is convinced, led the cops back to her home and got her dad arrested. Now they have no idea how to act around one another, and in the midst of the usual tween summer camp dramas they need to return to the past to clarify what happened and to figure out if they both can recover from the experience.
I’ve been a fan of Frost’s for years. Lots of authors write verse novels (stories written in free verse) and most of them are little more than just a series of sentences broken up without much reason except to pad out the pages. Frost is never like that. When she writes a verse novel she commits. Her books are written in various forms for a reason. In The Braid she created an intricate braid-like form of poetry that twisted and turned on itself. In Diamond Willow her poems were diamond shaped with special messages hidden inside. Hidden take a different tactic. Wren’s voice is straight up free verse, while Darra’s requires a little more work. As Frost puts it, “The last words of the long lines, when read down the right side of the page, give further insight into her story.” Well when I read that I had to flip the book back to the beginning to see if it was true or not. Sure as shooting, each and every one of Darra’s sections yields a new side of her story. The words behind her words, you might say. The experience of discovering this is akin to a small treasure hunt. When pitching this book to kids, make sure you play up this aspect. Some children will immediately decode the m
Betsy –
Thank you so much for writing about this book – I just sent it along to the rest of the children’s literature team at MSU. In addition to your notes about the story, I really appreciate two specific points: the way that parents talk in code about what they want – particularly the use of the word urban. I have heard similar language from pre-service and practicing teachers and it is a topic that we discuss in our children’s literature courses.
I also love that your observation that when vernacular is used in adult books it is artistic but that everyone freaks out about it in children’s books. I definitely want to get my hands on this book, particularly because you note that the vernacular supports the theme & character. We offer a multicultural children’s literature course where we specifically have conversations about the use of cultural vernacular and what it means for us as readers when we are not from this culture. It is awkward to talk about at first – particularly for those of us who are white – but the more we discuss why we may feel that language is either dumbed down (or too complicated) the more we reveal about ourselves and our own language preferences.
(I’m also excited to have a new horse book to pass along to my daughter that doesn’t have glitter or tiaras involved.)
- Kristin
G. Neri’s novel sounds important for the readers it targets but important for us all.
Once again, many thanks Fuse #8