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What do you think of when you hear Manga? I think of fun, comics, and large-eyed, cute characters. The Ultimate Book of Trace-and-Draw Manga by Christopher Hart has all of that. The book is an instruction book for kids on how to draw Manga, with step-by-step instructions. The book offers a lot of fun, even while teaching–encouraging imagination, creativity, fine motor coordination, and developing self-confidence. I think it will especially appeal to any creative types; to anyone who enjoys cartoons, manga, or drawing; and to parents who want their children to use their minds while having fun, not just placidly sitting in front of a TV or playing video games.

Xtreme Art: Ultimate Book of Trace-and-Draw Manga

written and illustrated by Christopher Hart
Watson-Guptill/Random House (June 2009), ISBN-13: 978-0823098064
Ages: 9-12 and up

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

For eager dive-in readers, Ultimate Book of Trace-and-Draw Manga provides almost instant gratification, with each character drawing divided up into 4 step-by-step drawings on the left hand page, and the final drawing on the right hand page. For readers who want to hone their drawing skills and understanding of drawing a magna form, there are detailed written instructions teaching each part of the process–how to draw a face in different directions, how to draw hands, eyes, hair, and more.

The book text is encouraging and easy to follow, reminding readers that they don’t have to get it perfect on the first try, and that they can start out with light lines (including guidelines), and then erase the lines they don’t need at the end, going over others to make them darker. These are important techniques for any budding artist to learn.

The step-by-step drawings make it particularly easy to learn to draw a character–the reader can either trace or draw step one, and each new step is shown in orange lines in the following three steps. The book starts with characters that are easier to draw, and gradually gets a little more complicated.

The book is broken up into three major sections–drawing people commonly found in manga (including those with superpowers); drawing chibi-style characters (short, round, like younger children), and drawing manga monsters. It’s like getting three manga-drawing technique books in one.

The book doesn’t “just” teach a reader how to draw manga; it will also teach a young artist that the placement of eyes, nose, and mouth on a face changes according to how the head is situated (looking up, down, sideways, straight on); some awareness of anatomy; etc. This book should involve a young reader for hours; it looks like a LOT of fun. Recommended!

The Bears We Know


by Brenda Silsbe, illustrated by Vlasta van Kampen
Annick Press
(February 2009)
ISBN-10: 1554511666; ISBN-13: 978-1554511662
Ages: 4-8 (and up)

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Silliness and imaginative play are an important part of being a child–perhaps of being human. It’s important to have fun. The Bears We Know is a great way to add some silly playfulness to your day. An unseen narrater talks about the bears they’ve never seen who live in a house at the end of the street, and all the things the bears do all day. How do they know what the bears are up to? They just KNOW.

Silsbe’s text is funny and playful. The story is like an analogy of people who assume something about others when they don’t actually know anything about them (such as kids and a spooky house at the end of the street).

Silsbe’s playful, over-the-top imaginings of what the bears could be up to are fun, while at the same time they poke gentle fun at people who make assumptions. The things the bears do (according to the unseen narrater) are the kinds of things that kids and adults might love to do while playing hooky, such as sleep in late, jump on couches, eat lots of junk food, watch cartoons and tv shows, etc. The story also encourages childrens’ natural curiosity and imagination, while showing that gossip and speculation is easy to spread.

I love the playful, funny things the unseen narrater imagines the bears are up to–such as bringing home couches from the dump to jump on until the springs are gone. Some of the things the narrater imagines the bears are up to are very silly, like the bears wearing tight bathing suits in the sauna and singing, while others feel more like what a kid or adult might really want to do. Others feel like an attempt to get into the character of what a bear might do (such as dumping sawdust on the floor, or napping before the fire)–those ones didn’t work as well for me.

Silsbe uses specific details, such as making hot buttered toast and hot chocolate, which help bring the reader more into the story. The book isn’t so much a story as an episodic, connected list of things that could happen. The ending has a great punch line that works–the narrater says that people ask them how they know so much about the bears when they’ve never seen them–and the narrater replies: “Well…some thing you just KNOW.” Very funny!

van Kampen’s watercolor illustrations are playful, happy, and gentle, with soft colors and soft, rounded edges. The illustrations really add to the fun of the book, bringing the text alive. (There was a previous version of this book with older illustrations–and these illustrations are far more fun and powerful.) The bears look very happy, fluffy and comfortably plump, and most objects also look comfortably plump. van Kampen makes great use of fun details that show the messiness of the bears in most illustrations, such as open chip bags with spilled chips, take-out containers and pop cans on the floors. These details are combined with many warming details, such as a patchwork quilt, flowered pillows, a wooden bed, a red wagon–all of which work to reassure and comfort the reader, and bring a sense of happiness.

A lot of white space helps give the illustrations a light feeling, and adds to the sense of happiness. Great fun foreground details, along with a lack of background detail and clutter also add to this sense of lightness. The illustrations also move through emotion, from happiness to brief sadness to back to being happy again, finding happiness through singing, making buttered toast, and having a good time together.

The reader never sees the narrater–only the bears and what the bears are supposedly doing. The bears are humanized to some degree in funny, cute ways, with each bear wearing one or more items of clothing (such as one wearing yellow boots, one wearing a red vest, one wearing a green winter hat and a polka dotted purple tie), and by their behavior, such as eating chips, sitting or jumping on couches, and sleeping in bed.

The illustrations add to the playfulness and the story, showing things the text doesn’t, such as the bears catching the toast that pops up by using a net.

This is a fun, silly, playful book. Recommended!

Adventurous Deeds of Deadwood Jones


by Helen Hemphill

Front Street (November 2008)

ISBN-10: 1590786378, ISBN-13: 978-1590786376

My rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Prometheus Jones, a young boy who has a talent with horses, breaks a horse for two racist brothers who refuse to pay him. Instead, they give him a raffle ticket for a horse. But when Prometheus’ ticket wins, the two brothers rile up the crowd against Prometheus and his cousin, Omer, and try to steal teh horse away from him. Prometheus and Omer escape on the horse with an angry, racist crowd of white boys and men after them–men who can kill them. So Prometheus and Omer keep riding–to Texas, to look for Prometheus’ father who was sold as a slave. Along the way, they get hired as cowboys, and undergo adventure and strife.

Adventurous Deeds of Deadwood Jones is an entertaining story. I found myself interested in Prometheus’ adventures and scrapes, and wanting to know what happened to him. I cared about the characters–Prometheus and Omer, especially–and wanted them to get through everything safely. The book is a kind of survival story; there was so much that threatened Prometheus’ survival, from extreme racism, to stampeeding buffalos, to Native Indians angry at their land being invaded. Prometheus faces all of these challenges with courage.

Prometheus is a likable character. He repeatedly stands up for others even though it means great risk to himself, even his life, because he is an African American in a time when there’s a huge amount of racism. He also repeatedly stands up for his own rights, fights for what is his, and does the right thing. He is hard working, skilled at what he does, and repeatedly gains the respect of others. I loved how Prometheus is so good at what he does–calming crazed horses and shooting with such accuracy. All of those things gave him hero-like qualities, and helped me care about him.

However, there was a distance between Prometheus and the reader. It didn’t feel like we were fully in him; I wanted more emotion, more character involvement, more sensory information–more of Prometheus, and who he really is, not just what he does. I also wanted to see more of Prometheus’ relationship to his horse. We’re told that he ends up caring for her, but I didn’t see any of that relationship, and I expected to because he was so good with horses.

Prometheus was the most well drawn character, and then Omer and a few of the cowboys. Some of the other characters felt flat or not fully drawn; I would have liked to see more sides of them. At times it felt like sensory detail was dumped in a few places–too many different details all at once–and then long stretches where there was nothing.

Hemphill included great details of life in the west that helped it seem believable, such as that the cowboys sang not to each other, but to the cattle to calm them down.

When Prometheus starts having a number of things go wrong for him (spoiler alert)–he loses his precious horse, and his cousin is killed–and Prometheus himself loses hope and his upbeat way of looking at the world, the story starts to lose me. It felt like it changed the whole tone of the book, from a lighter adventure story to a more depressing story.

I found it upsetting that Omer, Prometheus’ cousin, was suddenly killed. Omer was important to Prometheus, and Prometheus was protective of him. The book took a depressing turn after that, especially since Prometheus and Omer had planned to go to Texas together and that goal brought both hope and forward momentum, and because Omer was such an innocent. Granted, I always have a hard time when good characters die in books–but if there’s more emotional working it through and hope, then it feels like there’s more reward for the reader for sticking through that hard period. And I didn’t get that from this book. Still, I kept reading. And I had no problem with the abusive and horrible characters dying.

I also didn’t find the ending satisfying enough. Throughout the book, Prometheus’ drive is to find his father, who was sold as a slave in Texas. But once Omer dies, Prometheus doesn’t care about it, and we never see whether he finds his father though we’re led to believe that that won’t work out. We also don’t see him gaining a replacement or happiness, though he does stay on with the cowboys.

Still, I wanted to read about Prometheus’ adventures, and the adventure and the setting should appeal to readers who like adventure. This would be a good book to give to boys who don’t like to read, since there’s adventure, danger, and a hero who stands up for what is right. It may spark their interest, especially because it doesn’t shy away from some of the bad things that could happen in that time period. The book is an excellent way to help readers deeply understand racism and the unjustness of it. It also shows readers that there were African American and Mexican cowboys, not just Caucasian cowboys–something that does not seem to be widely known. For that reason, it might be useful in school as supplemental material for history or English projects. At the back of the book there is an author’s note with a little more information.

Recommended.

For a fun book talk of the book, see the video below.

Other reviews:

Reading YA: Readers’ Rants “An energetic read for ages 10 and up, this is a surprisingly accurate, gritty portrayal of life in the Old West, telling it like it was for hundreds of young boys who left their homes and plantations after the Emancipation Proclamation and struck out for the untamed West.”

BookMoot “Wait a minute, I’m only on the second page of the story and I am totally and utterly committed to this young man and his predicament. How did Hemphill do that?”

Children’s Book Page “Hemphill lassos readers with her gift for dialogue and nail-biting scenes of danger, and holds them with fascinating descriptions of cowboy life and clever historical references….”

Author Interview:
GuysLitWire

Maw Books Blog “I had no idea that cattle driving could be so exciting, but it’s not hard when you have Prometheus Jones as a main character.”

Dog Lost is a warm, moving, uplifting, and inspiring book. It’s what I would call a comfort book–a book I know I’ll want to read again and again over the years, bringing a feeling of comfort like a warm blanket wrapped around you on a cold night, and, when you’re finished it, a feeling of satisfaction and hunger eased. It’s one of those reads that I want to pass on to everyone.

Dog Lost

by Ingrid Lee

The Chicken House/Scholastic (September 2008)

ISBN-10: 0545085780, ISBN-13: 978-0545085786

Ages 9-12

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

11-year-old Mackenzie lives with his abusive father–but his father does something wonderful when he brings Mackenzie home a pit bull puppy he won after gambling. Mackenzie and Cash quickly bond and provide comfort to each other–until Mackenzie’s father takes Cash away in the trunk of his car and dumps her somewhere. Mackenzie and Cash both try to find each other, each going through their own trials. The situation gets more desperate when the city decides to outlaw all stray pit bulls and put them to sleep. Cash has a good and big heart, and this helps her be just where she needs to be.

Dog Lost has bits of pain, abuse, and trauma mixed into the story, but there is so much hope, so many kind acts, and so many people coming together in the end, that the good feeling is what a reader will take away with them. Also, even in some of the painful descriptions there is beauty in the writing, which may help the reader get some distance.

Lee starts off with Mackenzie’s first meeting with his new dog, Cash, and the lovely way they get to know each other, finding comfort in each other. This relationship builds, and we see the love between them, and believe it. This bond helps offset Mackenzie’s abusive father–until his father throws Cash away. Then we want Cash and Mackenzie to find each other again–and this desire, also woven into the text, propels the story forward at a fast pace as we race to see whether Mackenzie and Cash will have a happy ending.

Mackenzie and Cash are both likable characters. Cash only fights back to try to protect his boy, Mackenzie, and later works to protect others. Cash clearly has a big heart. Mackenzie does his best to try to protect Cash, and later to find Cash. Most of the characters are likable, even ones that don’t play a huge roll.

Lee ingeniously pulls characters from all over and slowly draws them together through small acts of kindness (or, in a few cases, cruelty) towards key moments where many of them intersect. You can actually see the characters and events coming together, little clues and scenes pulling the characters forward, as if inevitably. It is so well crafted, and brings a sense of community, hope, and the feeling that the world is a good place. When Lee changes viewpoint and takes us to another character, she often eases us into it by linking things from the last scene, or the setting, so that the reader is eased into the new voice, follows, and wants to read on.

Lee takes us into Cash’s–the dog’s–point of view and story, as well as Mackenzie’s and some of the other characters, and this increases our caring about the characters and wanting a happy ending. It also helps the reader care immensely about Cash–a pit bull–and to want to defend her against the characters who judge her solely by her breed.

Lee sprinkles backstory into the text–just enough to help us understand why things are important. She also uses foreshadowing a few times to draw the reader forward, or to help the reader feel like they know something about the scene coming up, which works well.

One small thing that bothered me after reading–I thought that Abi, the girl on the train, was young, perhaps Mackenzie’s age; i didn’t realize, til near the end, that she was older. Also, a few times the story felt like it was teaching us–a little too hard–that pit bulls are good animals, and that it’s only when they’re taught to attack that they might attack, and that it’s people’s misconceptions that are the problem. I would have liked this toned down just a little. Sometimes, especially in the section with the “newspaper articles”, it felt preachy, and in the section with the Humane Society statement, we lost the character over the message. But that was quite brief.

Lee uses language beautifully, and at times poetically–drawing the reader in and saying so much at the same time through vivid metaphors. I love her use of language. There are two villains in the story, and it is satisfying that neither of them win and neither of them have happy endings.

The bond between the boy and the dog are so strong, and ultimately this helps save one of their lives–perhaps both–which is moving. So many threads are pulled together nicely–side or background characters that we still care about are given their own happy endings, and things come together in a way that seems perfect. The ending is moving and feel-good, and all the characters come together in a beautifully orchestrated way. To me it was like reading genius.

Dog Lost is a story that’s sure to become a favorite. Highly recommended!

Chicken, Pig, Cow is a warm, sweet story with great humor that captures a child’s imagination.

Chicken, Pig, Cow

by Ruth Ohi

Annick Press (September 2008)

ISBN-10: 1554511569, ISBN-13: 978-1554511563

My rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

–Chicken, Pig, Cow by Ruth Ohi, p. 2-4.

Chicken, Pig, and Cow are toys that live in a Popsicle-stick barn a young girl created. They love it there, and think it’s perfect–aside from the dog that drips drool on them. But one day when the girl’s gone out, Chicken and Pig climb out, leaving Cow who can’t–and then Dog comes to play. At first Cow’s afraid of Dog, but in the end they all become friends.

I love the way Ohi writes as if the toys are alive and can do things on their own–the way young children imagine they might. Chicken, Pig, Cow has a playful child-like quality and innocence. There’s also a great warmth and a soothing quality about the story, which comes through Ohi’s word choices (”warm and cozy an smelled just right”) and voice, as well as through her sweet illustrations.

Ohi weaves humor throughout the story. The humor feels fresh and young, the way a child might think (though adults may read some of the humor as dry humor) “‘I thought it didn’t rain indoors,’ said Chicken”, when the dog was drooling on them. Ohi also uses exaggeration as humor “Cow fainted” (in response to seeing dog). The humor works beautifully, and adds to the good feeling. I loved the humor.

Young children may enjoy knowing that there is no threat to Cow, even though Cow thinks there is. It will be clear to the child from the text that Dog is friendly and wants to play, from his wagging tail, his lying down, and his wrapping his body around cow. Ohi’s illustrations also reflect this.

The dialogue is short, interesting, and helps move the story forward quickly. The story moves nicely from cozy situation, to problem, to solving the problem. Characters are simply called by what they are (the cow is Cow, the girl is Girl) and this may help readers to more easily relate to the characters and identify them.

One thing that didn’t work for me was suddenly being told close to the end that Dog had made a door in the barn. I wanted to see the door being made–the Popsicle sticks flying off, hear about cow’s reaction. Surely cow would have noticed. The absence of the mention when it happened took away, for me, some of the satisfaction of the ending, since the new door was part of that ending.

I also would have liked to see a sentence or two more that showed us the friendship that developed between Cow, Pig, and Chicken, and Dog, and how it came about, instead of just being told that they became friends. (I didn’t think they were becoming friends, exactly, when they were trying to save Cow.) But the book still left me with good feeling.

Overall, the story is pleasing, warming, and sweet. It’s a book I’d give any child, and especially one needing comfort or uplifting.

Ohi’s gentle illustrations build on and enhance the text. The soft watercolor feels warm and soothing, and the rounded curves of the characters add to this feeling. The characters are sweetly colored, and stand out on the page; Cow is white with purple spots and has a pink snout, pig is pink, and chicken is yellow with orange feet, beak, and comb. The browns–found in the Popsicle-stick barn and Dog, feel warm.

The characters don’t just look like toys, they look like little animated creatures. They remind me a bit of Sandra Boyton’s illustrations. They’re cute and appealing to look at.

The illustrations feel light and airy, which is increased by the amount of white space on each page, and the lack of backgrounds. Characters appear with a few necessary setting details or with a small bit of shadow to ground them on the page; this ensures that the focus is on them. The shadows are a light purple, which reminds the reader of Cow, who is an important character.

There is a bonus illustration in the front matter shows the girl creating the animals out of modeling clay, revealing that the girl brought them to life in more ways than one. This adds to the story, and is fun for the reader to discover.

This is a light-hearted, warm, feel-good book. Highly recommended!