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So happy to recommend our rgz Circle of Stars, Nikki Grimes' new release, Words with Wings. The verse novel poetically explores protagonist Gabby's propensity to daydream. Amidst the turmoil of her parent's separation and a move, escape through thoughts is easy. Gabby preserves her memories and protects herself in her new situation by slipping away in her mind.

Stuck in Dreamland

Maybe something
is wrong with me,
all this fancy dancing
in my mind.
Where I see red and purple
and bursts of blue,
everybody else sees
black and white.
Am I wrong?
Are they right?
Too bad
I can't ask Dad.

When the daydreams interfere with life, Gabby learns to find power in her ability. The step from daydreaming to writing is made with the aid of a perceptive teacher and a new friend.

With succinct, vivid words, Nikki brings to light the thoughts and aims of two opposite characters, mother and daughter. The reader gains sympathy and understanding for both points of view.

Find Words with Wings and take the challenge to find the strength in what some see as your weakness.

Words with Wings
by Nikki Grimes
WordSong, 2013

Cowboy Up!: Ride the Navajo Rodeo
By Nancy Bo Flood
Photography by Jan Sonnenmair
Wordsong (an imprint of Highlights)
$17.95
ISBN: 978-1-59078-893-6
Ages 8-12
On shelves now

Sometimes I think half my job simply consists of making lists. Not that I’m complaining. I love lists. I love making them, and checking them, and adding to them. Lists let the organizational part of my frontal lobe feel needed and wanted. Still, once in a while you get stuck on a list and it’s hard to move. For example, just the other day I was asked to come up with a list for Kindergartners of books that talk about Native American tribes. Some of the books, I was told, would also have to talk about American Indians living today. Now I don’t know anything about you. I don’t know if reading this review you’re a teacher or a librarian or an interested parent or my mom. Whosoever you might be, you are still probably very aware that asking for nonfiction titles for very young children on Native Americans is akin to asking for the moon and the stars above. Half the stuff on library and bookstore shelves is woefully out-of-date and offensive while the other half is written for kids ten-years-old and up. The pickings for small fry are slim. Enter Cowboy Up! Ride the Navajo Rodeo. The rare book that is both poetry and fact, with content for both big and little, here we have a title that finally fills that gap. Best of all, you don’t have to be looking for school or specialty fare to enjoy this one. Like wild bucking stallions and bulls that could impale you without so much as a snort? Welcome to the world of Navajo rodeo.

“Can’t sleep. Can’t eat. Mind keeps figuring, figuring, figuring – how tight to hold, how far to lean, how hard to squeeze to stay on top.” That’s just a sample of the thoughts going through a person’s head before the Navajo rodeo. Though it has its roots in places like Arizona and Texas, rodeos can be found all over the Navajo Nation and are family affairs. Setting her book during the course of a single rodeo day, author Nancy Bo Flood plunges readers into what might be an unknown world. We see children near bucked from woolly riders (sheep), adults flung from broncos, women who sweep the barrel racer events, steer wrestlers, and, best of all, bareback bull riders. Saturating her text with facts, background information, and tons of photographs, this is one title that will prove tempting to kids already familiar with the rodeo world and those approaching it for the very first time.

It’s a challenge facing any work of standard nonfiction for kids: How do you prefer to present your material? In this particular case, Ms. Flood has a wealth of information at her fingertips regarding the Navajo rodeo circuit. Trouble is, you can fill your book to brimming with the brightest and shiniest photos that money can buy, but if you’ve long blocks of nonfiction text you might lose your readership before you’ve even begun. Now in this book Ms. Flood presents her material over the course of a single rodeo day. It’s a good format for what she has to say, but the downside is that there are sections at the beginning that aren’t all that thrilling. If kids are coming to this book to see some high-flying riders, they’ll have to first wade through explanations about the announcer and the arena. That’s where the poetry comes in. Sure, there are big blocks of explanatory text before the action begins, but Flood tempers each two-page spread with not just photos and explanations but also poems. The advantage then is that younger children can read the poems while older ones get something out of the nonfiction sections. Win win!

It sounds strange to say but in many ways the book that to me feels the closest to the format of Cowboy Up! is Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices from a Medieval Village by Laura Amy Schlitz. Both books find that the best way to get kids to swallow a spoonful of nonfiction is with a bit of first person narration. With that in mind, the poems in Cowboy Up! offer great promise. Each one is written in the first person and could easily be considered short monologues. The small child auditioning or the teacher who wants to do a theatrical presentation with readily available material would do well to take these poems and use them freely. Now granted, the poetry can be touch-and-go at times. I’ve a friend who personally cannot stand free verse in children’s books because to her it just looks like the author took a paragraph and broke it up into arbitrary lines. I happen to like free verse, insofar as I like any poetry, but I admit that the ones found here varied widely in terms of quality on a case-by-case basis.

Much like the poetry, the photography in this book can vary. Some of the shots (created by photographer Jan Sonnenmair) are brilliant. I’m quite fond of the image on the jacket as well as shots of riders mid-air (one hand waving freely about their heads), the portraits (love those endpapers, though the decision to flips the images was a poor one when you consider library processing techniques), and even one of a rainbow rising behind the honor guard. On the other hand, there are times when it feels as though the book ran out of the good photographs and had to rely on some of the lesser variety. For example, there’s a shot of an announcer that looks like it appears twice in two pages, only flipped. This is a rare occurrence, but it happens early enough in the book that a reader could be forgiven for wondering if more duplication is bound to happen.

When I think of books that talk about contemporary Native Americans today, the pickings for kids are slim. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian isn’t exactly meant for the 12 and under crowd. Walking on Earth and Touching the Sky is pretty good, if a bit poetic (this might have something to do with the fact that it’s a book of poetry). And the book Native Americans: A Visual Exploration by S.N. Paleja covers a lot of ground, but only in brief. No, the whole reason Cowboy Up! even works is because it’s not trying to be about anything but how particularly cool this kind of rodeo is. This is Navajo life in the 21st century. So forget depressing texts that cover the past with all the interest of a phone book. Flood and Sonnenmair have culled together a look at the just-as-interesting present, and given it a format that will stand it in good stead. Cowboys and cowboys-to-be everywhere, stand up and rejoice. Your rodeo is here.

On shelves now.

Source: Final copy sent from publisher for review.

Like This? Then Try:

• Bill Pickett: Rodeo-Ridin’ Cowboy by Andrea Davis Pinkney, ill. Brian Pinkney

• Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village by Laura Amy Schlitz, ill. Robert Byrd

• Walking on Earth and Touching the Sky: Poetry and Prose by Lakota Youth at Red Cloud Indian School. Edited by Timothy P. McLaughlin. Illustrated by S. D. Nelson.

• Bull Rider by Suzanne Williams

• The Cowgirl Way: Hats Off to America’s Women of the West by Holly George-Warren

Professional Reviews: Kirkus

Interviews: ReaderKidz

Misc:

• A lesson hard learned.  When searching for this book on any online site, I advise you to search via the ISBN 978-1-59078-893-6 rather than typing in the words “Cowboy Up”. Let’s just say that the bulk of titles you’ll find with the same title are a bit . . . ah . . . saucy.

• Download a free activity guide here.

On walking my daughter to school this week, we went past this bare branched tree with a pink mitten on it.  “Oh look!” I said, pointing it out to my daughter.  “Yes,” she said excitedly, “it looks like a pink rose, Mommy!”  Taking this response as an opportunity to teach her about poetics, I replied, “Yes, it does look like a rose.  Do you know when you compare an object to another using the word ‘like,’ you are using what is called a simile?” I went on further.   The pink mitten looks like a rose, so you are right to say that, but you can also say ‘The pink mitten is a rose.’  That would be using what is called a metaphor.”  My daughter paused in her tracks, squinted at me hard and said,  “But the mitten isn’t a rose, Mommy.”  Ah, yes, perhaps the metaphor was a little too hard for her to grasp quite yet.

Thinking about poetics is part of my job as a creative writing teacher, so I was very glad that day when my daughter’s teacher lent me the book called Inner Chimes: Poems on Poetry, selected by Bobbye S. Goldstein with illustrations by Jane Breskin Zalben.  (Wordsong/Boyds Mills Press, 1992).   Inner Chimes contains poems about writing poetry.   Here’s an excerpt of a poem by Eleanor Farjeon that reminded me very much of my daughter’s poetic encounter with the pink mitten rose:

What is Poetry?  Who knows?
Not a rose, but the scent of a rose;
Not the sky, but the light in the sky;
Not the fly, but the gleam of the fly
Not the sea, but the sound of the sea

Not a pink mitten, but a pink mitten rose, I’d somehow like to add!  When I paused later in the day to take a picture of the pink mitten, my daughter put her green gloved hand over it and said, “And now it’s coming out of its bud — take a picture, Mommy!”  Well, despite her initial confusion over metaphor, she certainly picked up the notion of the extended metaphor pretty quick!

If you’d like to read more poems for kids about writing poetry, I’d certainly recommend Inner Chimes.   There are some thoughtful poems about the creative process and inspiration in this book.

This week Poetry Friday is hosted by Tricia at the Miss Rumphuis Effect.

Please select the correct answer from below as it applies to the following sentence:

Highlights Magazine . . .

(A) Still exists and is popular (and not just in dentist offices either)

(B) Owns the publisher Boyds Mills Press

(C) Sponsors writing retreats and cool projects

(D) Should totally publish a Goofus and Gallant book.

If you answered “all of the above” you’d be correct (always assuming that you knew you could choose more than one option).

Recently I was given an offer I couldn’t refuse.  Carolyn Yoder, editor of Calkins Creek Books, basically gave me a chance to exchange a night in my grimy city for a night in the Poconos instead.  You see Boyds Mills Press (Calkins Creek Books is one of its imprints) runs a few writing workshops in Honesdale, Pennsylvania for the Highlights Foundation (a bit more info here, if you’re interested).  So it was that I was invited to speak as an invited guest for a night at a week-long writer’s retreat for seasoned children’s authors, most working in the field of non-fiction. I would get to talk about whatever I wanted.  They would feed me good food.  I’d get my very own cabin (woot!).  And best of all they’d pick me up from work and drop me off at work so that all I’d have to do was sit in a car for two and a half hours each way.

Yeah.  So basically I jumped all over that offer.  Next thing I knew I was in a car with a huge Suzanne Bloom decal on the side (think A Splendid Friend Indeed) which was fantastic.  Children’s literature cars are the best (I’m adding this one to the list that includes The Knight Bus, the Wimpy Kid ice cream trucks, and the Eric Carle Museum bug).  And that night I talked for long periods of time on topics that I can handle (read: not football).

But the most interesting part of all this was getting a glimpse into the inner sanctum of Highlights Magazine.  I wasn’t a subscriber as a kid (I had Owl Magazine and that was pretty much it) but I still knew what Highlights was.  Who didn’t?  If you were a child it was fairly ubiquitous.  As it happens, Highlights has been around for over a whopping 60 years, and has pretty much been kept within the same family all that time.  In fact, I saw a framed copy of the original June 1946 edition of Highlights that began everything.  The mag was begun by Garry Cleveland Myers and Caroline Clark Myers and the retreat I attended was actually held around the Myers’ own house.

The crazy part for me is that I had no idea that Highlights owned 10 Comments on Highlights Magazine, Boyds Mills Press, and How Not to be Eaten by a Bear, last added: 9/3/2010