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There are few holidays I enjoy celebrating more than Banned Books Week. To me, banning a book is just such a brilliant way of acknowleging its power and encouraging young people to read it.

People challenge books in school and public libraries all the time, everywhere. bannedbooksweek.org, in addition to their list of Banned Book Week events, now has a map of book challenges in the United States. Here's what they say about it:

There are hundreds of challenges to books in schools and libraries in the United States every year. According to the American Library Association (ALA), there were at least 513 in 2008. But the total is far larger. 70 to 80 percent are never reported.

I took a look through the ALA's list of challenged and banned books for 2008-09 and I was happy to see books that I've reviewed on this blog, and more importantly, books that I've bought for the two school library collections that I manage.

Here is just a sample of the books that people have felt most threatened by in the past year. If I've reviewed it, the link is on the title. Get threatened! Read these books!




Alexie, Sherman. Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian.




Brannen, Sarah. Uncle Bobby's Wedding





Colfer, Eoin. Supernaturalist. This book had me on the edge of my seat, though I never reviewed it here. Dystopic YA fiction oh yeah!




Green, John. Looking for Alaska. Nobody writes realistic teen stories, with all their real drama and real humor, like John Green. Apparently somebody objected to all the real.




Kaysen, Susanna. Girl, Interrupted. Oh sure, it's harsh. It's graphic. But for any girl going through mental torment, it is a warm port in the storm.




Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. ...but remember, it's a sin to ban a classic.




de Haan, Linda and Stern Njiland. King and King.





Harris, Robie. It's Perfectly Normal. It's perfectly predictable for a book with the word "sex" in the subtitle to get some people's panties in a twist. Reading the word isn't going to give your kids chlamydia, you know.




Pullman, Philip. The Golden Compass




Parnell, Peter. And Tango makes three. Gay! Gay penguins! Indoctrinating our children with their cuddly gayness! AAAGH!




Myers, Walter Dean. Fallen Angels. One of the very few books about modern war for teens, and people complain about the language.




Salinger, J.D. Catcher in the Rye. Yup, people are still objecting to the depiction of nosepicking in this book.




Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Every year. Every year somebody gets worked up about it. As if our children would never learn the n-word if it weren't for that rascal Huck.

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The Very Silly Mayor by Tom Tomorrow
You know what? This is not bad! Bright colors, readable artwork, cops in clown costumes... yeah, I'm giving this the thumbs-up.

The worry, of course, with a kid book written by uber-snarkmeister cartoonist Tom Tomorrow, is that Mr. Tomorrow is writing for the parents - that the very silly mayor is in fact a member of the Bush family and Sparky the Penguin is doing his usual emperor-has-no-clothes schtick, and kids will find it amusing but parents will nod smugly. "That George Bush," they'll smirk internally. "What a dorkus."

But that is not what Tom Tomorrow has done here. Sure, you could read the very silly mayor, with his pronouncements that firefighters should use peanut butter to put out fires instead of water, and that everyone should paint their houses purple and green, as George Bush. But you could read the very silly mayor as just about any authority figure that people follow without question. Your third-grade teacher, for example.



The book is, in the end, about dissent. It's about speaking up when you don't understand something, or when you have an opinion, or when you think that cops can't possibly catch robbers when they're wearing clown shoes. Plus - silly!

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You are the first kid on Mars by Patrick O'Brien

2009 is the fortieth anniversary of the first manned mission to land on the moon. Did you know that? Yeah maybe the astounding array of commemorative books tipped you off. We've had books by everyone from Buzz Aldrin to Norman Mailer hit the shelves this year. Many, if not most, of these books have been inspiring and beautiful. Many, if not most, have made me cry.

But while I am fully aware of the importance of the Apollo 11 mission as a concrete example of the highest heights that can be achieved - by man and by mankind - I have wondered just how engaging this story is for young people. My own children are mystified and a little alarmed when I get all choked up reading them Brian Floca's atmospheric and detailed Moonshot or try to explain to them the unique perspective represented by former astronaut Alan Bean's paintings in Mission Control, This is Apollo.

That's why I think Patrick O'Brien's work of "speculative non-fiction" is so important this year. For my kids, and for their friend Alex, who is the model for the kid in the book (disclosure: Pat's family and mine have been friends since our 3rd-grade boys were barely walking, much less traveling through space), space travel is not something that happened on a tiny black-and-white TV set in the kitchen forty years ago. Space travel is not even the - let me take a deep breath and try to use an adjective that is not pejorative - somewhat tepid space shuttle program.

Space travel is "huge ships shaped like pine cones with lots of little sonar devices and everyone wears goggles that can switch from night vision to underwater vision to sunglasses." (I asked.) They think the future will involve "a permanent space colony on the Moon as big as Texas." "Or maybe at one of the Lagrange points!"

But ok, that's my kids. Not every kid knows that the gravitationally stable Lagrange points are good spots for a space station. But will argue that my kids are representative of many kids when they think that space travel is part of THEIR future. And Patrick has done them a service by writing and illustrating, with his usual blend of meticulous research and stunning art, a reasonably plausible conception of travel to Mars. His journey includes a space elevator up to a geosynchronous orbit point, a nuclear thermal ship that gradually accelerates to 75,000 miles per hour as it covers the 35,000 miles to Mars, and a Mars lander that bombs through the Mars atmosphere before parachutes drop it gently to the dusty red surface.

The friendly, explanatory second-person narration contrasts nicely with the giant grin on the face of the kid as he bounds across the Martian surface. The impression is that of a teacher chaperoning a really good field trip, trying to keep from letting on that she is just as excited as the kids are.

Anyone familiar with Pat's previous books (on sailing ships, extinct mammals, knights, and, er, dinosaurs in space) will know that the man researches like a maniac. Marianne Dyson, herself an author of numerous kids' books on space, picked apart every fact presented in You Are the First Kid On Mars when she reviewed the book, but revised her opinion when the author emailed her, addressing her objections and supporting his every phrase. It is really nice to know that the book stands up to that kind of scrutiny.

The artwork in this book was done on a computer, a departure for O'Brien, who, in addition to illustrating his own books, paints large oils of ships under sail. His mastery of the software and techniques involved is impressive - many of the illustrations look like they could be photos, which is important for those kids who want things to be above all else "real".

We had the delightful O'Brien family over for dinner this weekend, and after my husband's excellent fish tacos, I had the chance to ask Pat some questions about the book.

Your Neighborhood Librarian: What was your inspiration for writing You Are the First Kid on Mars?

Patrick O'Brien: My editor, Tim Travaglini, was really into the whole space idea. It was his idea to do a speculative book about going to Mars. My books usually come from my ideas, but this one came from him.

YNL: Was there anything different about writing about future science vs. your usual subjects?

PO: All of my other books were about historic and prehistoric nonfiction subjects. It is fiction, because it hasn't actually happened, but I was treating it as a nonfiction book. The reason that it’s in the second person is I read some books like that as a kid. You will go to the Moon is the one that I remember most clearly. And they had it all wrong, it’s really funny to see all that. Presumably, my stuff will be all wrong.

YNL: What was your research process? Do you regularly read science periodicals like Wired or Scientific American? Or was this a new area for you?

PO: I’ve always been a science guy, I was a biology major in college, but my son is really into space. We watch a lot of space stuff on TV. When Alex was really young, he liked real space more than the fictional movies. We'd watch NOVA together, and his toys were Apollo models, not Star Wars toys. I read a lot about space with him, and on my own.

I used the most up to date, most accurate information that I could find about what it would take to get to Mars. I went through the NASA website, books on space travel.

YNL: Is this your first work created digitally?

PO: This is the first book I illustrated on the computer.

YNL: You're such an accomplished painter though - why did you decide to do it using techniques that are new to you?

PO: Well, for fun, as a change. It was different, and I just thought it was appropriate to the subject matter. The thing about using the computer to do the art, a lot of people who don’t do it think you just push the spaceship button and you get a spaceship. You push the astronaut button, and you get an astronaut, and then you make it do what you want. But you still have to draw it, you still have to paint it. It’s just one more medium. When they invented watercolors, it didn’t put the oil painters out of business.

But there are advantages. You can make infinite changes - with watercolors, pretty much once it's down, it's there. You can make a certain amount of changes with oils, but with the computer, you can keep tweaking it until it's just what you want. I used Corel Painter X and a tablet, so it’s a lot like painting. It wasn't hard to learn.

YNL: Did you find it hard to stop making changes? Was it tempting to keep touching it, trying out variations?

PO: No. A little. I know what I’m going for, I have a picture in my mind, and when I've made that, it’s done.

There you go, folks. I made it, it's done. You will go to the Moon was, not surprisingly, on my shelf as a kid too.

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Today I Will Fly! by Mo Willems
It is obviously completely superfluous for me to review this book. I have lauded the Elephant & Piggie series frequently on this blog. I have personally handed Elephant & Piggie books to dozens of parents, some of whom have actually sought me out later to tell me that little Susie didn't think she was "a reader" until Gerald and Piggie showed her that she was. Heck once I even hired a skywriter to fly over a teaching convention and spell out "GERALD & PIGGIE TAUGHT ME TO READ!!"

But today, my six year old son sat down and read this book to me, cover to cover, sounding out the words. I didn't know he knew how to read. When I told him that, he said, "Neither did I!" We are so proud, and so is he. When I asked him what he wanted to read next, he instantly responded, "Percy Jackson and the Olympians".

In all fairness, I did hear him sort of struggle through Time to Pee! last night with his dad, but I was half-asleep and literally thought I had dreamt it.

What do you hear in your dreams? If it's not a six-year-old reading Mo Willems, you're doing it wrong.

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Guttersnipe by Jane Cutler, pictures by Emily Arnold McCully
Interesting.

Ben is a young Jewish boy in Canada in the early part of the twentieth century. Determined to help make ends meet for his fatherless family, he takes a job as a delivery boy for a hatmaker. On his first run, he stops by the workplace of each of his family members: sister Rose selling tickets at the movie theater, brother Max setting pins at the bowling alley, and his mother, singing in Yiddish as she sews as fast as she can.

And then something terrible happens. Hitching a ride on a streetcar, he loses control of the bike and is thrown to the ground, the silk hat linings he was to deliver scattered among the trash of the street and ruined. What I find interesting is this: Ben's failure is not a picture-book failure: a ripped-drawing mishap, an ill-tempered word, a dropped pie. This is a truly spectacular failure, a failure in real-world terms - Ben is going to lose his new job, he may be actually injured, and he will be in trouble if the bicycle is broken. One speculates Mr. Green is going to try to get him to pay for those hat linings, too. This is the kind of screw-up that freezes the blood of even an adult with many years of screw-ups behind her.

But lying there in the street, Ben realizes: "His body would heal. There would be other bicycles, other jobs, and other chances. He was only a boy, just starting out, and he had many things left to learn and to experience."

Perspective. Is it something you can communicate to a kid? Can you read this story now, and then next week, when that kid steps on his brother's meticulously-constructed LEGO masterpiece, can you invoke Ben's perspective on failure? I guess we'll see.

"This was not the end. This was only the beginning."

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My mom is trying to ruin my life by Kate Feiffer, illustrated by Diane Goode
She looks pretty sweet on the outside, with her rosy shirtwaist dress and practical ponytail, green flats and matching purse, but watch out! she'll never let you do anything fun, eat anything yummy, and she talks too loud. Yikes. That last one hits pretty close to home.

So the little girl in this book fantasizes about running away (with mom's assistance), getting the cops on her side when mom reports her missing ("And they'll look at her and ask, 'Is it because you were ruining her life?'"), and ending up with the perfect life. Perfect, that is, except for the no dinner, no story, no bedtime kiss, nobody to fix her bad dream aspects of independent life.

The story is cute, and executed in a kind of contemporary first-person, slightly attitudinal voice. The illustrations are clean and lively. The limited watercolor palette is bright and friendly. I think the book maybe over-dwells on the little girl's fear and discomfort when she is parentless, but by the end, mom and dad and little girl are all together and happy.

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Orangutan Tongs by Jon Agee
You know, I claim to not like poetry. In fact, I claim to have a vicious poetry allergy - this gets me out of poetry night at school and my friends' readings, including the dreaded Open Mic part of the evening. It is this allergy, paradoxically, that I think makes me extra qualified to review poetry books for children.

You see, I have observed that most kids require their poetry to work. If it's supposed to rhyme, it has to rhyme. The meter should march. You shouldn't have to rearrange where in a line you think the natural stress should fall in order to make the line come out even at the end. You should not (John Lennon) throw extra syllables in there just because you like them. "Klutzy" does not make it, in poetry for small(ish) children.

And this is why I can read four lines like "Undies" without my throat closing up and my eyes crossing.

Undies
There are lots of holes in Andy Bundy's undies.
His mom should get some thread and try to stitch 'em.
When Andy's at the beach, he's always cranky and upset,
'Cause Andy Bundy's sandy undies itch him.

(Of course, if you can work underpants into a poem, even better.)

I heard my 2nd grader reading this book aloud to his kindergarten brother, and they were beside themselves giggling. Later, in the car, they tried making up their own tongue twisters. I'd call Orangutan Tongs a must-have for the school library on that basis alone.

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My Uncle Emily by Jane Yolen, illustrated by Nancy Carpenter
Now how about that? A picture book about an American poet. An imagined anecdote from her life, about one of her nephews, who lived next door. Heck, I'd buy it just to have a non-run-of-the-mill opening to talk about poetry... but as it turns out, My Uncle Emily is also a sparkling little story in its own right. The Talented Jane Yolen has incorporated much of the high drama of a small boy's day, from the dread he feels when he knows he has to do something that might get him laughed at, to the exhilarated relief of having thrown a punch. You're in trouble now, boy, might as well enjoy it.

Our Ned picks a flower for his eccentric Uncle Emily, spends some time in a dunce cap (because of that punch), eats cake with the family, and thinks about flies. It's a fine, keenly observed, neatly worded story. It is atmospherically Emily Dickinson.

As are Nancy Carpenter's pen and ink illustrations. I have observed before that Nancy Carpenter (17 Things I'm Not Allowed to Do Anymore, Apples to Oregon) combines an old-fashioned, E.H. Shepard-y technical prowess with a talent for lively expression. And it may be an old-fashioned thing to compliment, but Nancy Carpenter's draftsmanship - her skill with perspective and composition - gives each of her illustrations an unusually precise spatial feel. I like it.


This is what Nancy Carpenter's illustration style makes me think of. I have no more economical way of saying it. Good day to you - sir, ma'am.

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The Moon over Star by Dianna Hutts Aston, pictures by Jerry Pinkney
Give me a second. I am a mess. Let me get a Kleenex.

Wow.

I was four years old when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon (while their shorter, funnier counterpart, Michael Collins, circled the block in the car), and I still feel privileged to have witnessed that moment. Hell, my husband and I named a cat Buzz Aldrin, we're still so impressed with this human feat. So I guess I should have expected that this book would give me goosebumps.

But my goodness - this is one damn fine book. I summarized it to a jury of my (younger) peers later in the evening, and just my synopsis made them all choke up.

Dianna Hutts Aston gives us that day in 1969 as experienced by an eight-year-old girl (who may or may not be Mae Jemison) on her grandfather's farm in a town named Star. Mae and her cousins pray for the astronauts in church in the morning and build a rocket ship out of scraps from the barn in the afternoon. Mae is the oldest, so she gets to pretend to be Armstrong as they count down to liftoff together. Later, they watch Cronkite on TV and hear those immortal phrases, "The Eagle has landed," and even later, "One small step for man..."

In between times, Mae thinks about the astronauts' children and whether they are proud but also scared, and about President Kennedy, who did not live to see this dream attained, and about her own grandfather, who does not approve of the space program. "Why spend all that money to go to the moon when there's so many folks in need right here on Earth?"

When I googled this title, I learned that President Obama read this book aloud to a group of second graders at a charter school in D.C. two weeks into his presidency. Well. If I wasn't impressed by this man before (and I was), I am now. If I tried to read this thing aloud, I do not think I could manage it. Which, given the class of second graders I know best, would still be a fine thing, because they would want to know why, and I would have the opportunity to tell them.

Or I might just show them the back cover of this book, with Jerry Pinkney's freakin' masterpiece of a full moon, and then open to his two-page spread of the Apollo 11 rocket clearing the launch pad. When I see that image, I always think of my dad explaining to me, "The U.S. space program was miserable in the beginning. People used to say, 'Our rockets always blow up.'" (Tom Wolfe quoted the exact same line in The Right Stuff.)

But hundreds, thousands of people believed that we could do it, and in the end, that rocket didn't blow up, and those astronauts had the courage to strap themselves into it, and we went to the damn moon. And if all that can happen, and if Jerry Pinkney can paint the Moon just as beautifully if not more beautifully than he has always painted people and trees and birds... well, then, an eight-year-old black girl in the town of Star can do anything with her life, and that's the message of this book, and now I'm snifflin' again.

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The Day-Glo Brothers: The true story of Bob and Joe Switzer's bright ideas and brand-new colors, by Chris Barton, illustrated by Tony Persiani

One of the things I do, as I state in my sidebar over there, is manage the collection for my kids' school library. I buy the books. The school is opening a new school next year, and they've asked me to select all the books for the new school's library. It's a labor of love, believe me. It may sound like fun, spending $30 grand on kid books, but when you think about covering the entire span of human knowledge, for children aged 5 to 14, it's kind of brain-melty. Just when I think I have assembled a nice, even collection, I smack myself on the forehead and go, "I FORGOT ANCIENT CHINA!" or "CRAP! THE CIVIL WAR!"

There's also the problem of picking lots of nonfiction without relying too heavily on series books. Now, lots of fine authors write series books, and I'm not saying that all series suck... but it's a fact that all series should be scrutinized carefully before purchase. Publishers do not always put their best design teams on series books, for one thing. For another, the pictures on the cover may be, er, AWFUL.



AAAA!

Which is why, when possible, I will always snatch up stand-alone juvenile biographies instead of series biographies. I read 94 series biographies this winter for an assignment - and exactly 8 of them made me say, "Oooh!". (I will not count the number that made me go, "Aaack!") For example: there are 176 biographies of Ella Fitzgerald written for children, but I will pick the one by Andrea Davis Pinkney every time - because I believe that Andrea Davis Pinkney sat around and thought about Ella Fitzgerald while she wrote the book, that Brian Pinkney had some Ella playing in the studio while he did the paintings, that they put a little heart and soul into that book.

The Day-Glo Brothers is another of these books. Chris Barton's author's note reminds me of that scene in Working Girl when Melanie Griffith hauls out a Page Six clipping to explain just how she got the idea that the Big Investor might be interested in buying a radio station. Barton read Bob Switzer's 1997 New York Times obituary and realized that the story of Day-Glo paint was one that he wanted to tell.

You get the feeling that he had to explain that in some detail to the publisher when he proposed this, his first book. I would bet that Day-Glo, to most people, is just kind of an annoyance that we've learned to live with because it saves lives, and as long as we avoid Spencer Gifts, we don't have to deal with it much. Just saying: it might not seem like the most captivating subject at first blush.

And there we would be wrong. Not only is this biography chock-full of arresting details: a fluorescent angel food cake, a headless Balinese dancer, a flaming billboard, and a terrible accident involving a railcar full of ketchup, but also... oh come on, do I really have to finish this sentence? With facts like that, who needs skill?

But. If I had a checklist of Things To Look For In Kid Nonfiction (and I kind of do), every box would be checked (except for the "photo" box - I think kids always want an author photo and a subject photo, just to prove it's really nonfiction).

Barton sets the context swiftly, helps us distinguish Bob from Joe with a few easy-to-remember character illustrations, documents the process of discovery, provides lots of examples, and follows through on the applications of their inventions. As befits a mid-century success story, the illustrations are swingy and hep. The color palette is all black and white and grey at the beginning of the book, and as Bob and Joe embark upon their lurid journey, the colors get more and more intense - clever! Back matter and web content expand the science documentation, and Barton shares his own process of discovering the Switzer family story, in the above-mentioned author's note.

Of the things that I want the students at our school to take away from a book, this last may actually be the most important to me.

The Day-Glo Brothers is a real winner. Assignments for Chris Barton: the story of Mike Nesmith's mom, the lady who invented Liquid Paper; and the story of Hedy Lamarr - seriously? the screen siren who invented a torpedo guidance system? I want our new friend Chris to be the one to tell those stories.

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Mungo and the Spiders from Space by Timothy Knapman and Adam Stower
Well, looks like Your Neighborhood Librarian has a new artist boyfriend. Sigh. The beginning of a relationship is always so magical, n'est pas? My previous secret husbands of children's illustration have included Adam Rex, William Joyce, and Oliver Jeffers (who gets extra points for being Irish). Plus Antoinette Portis and Emily Gravett.* I have no gender hangups.

I read and enjoyed Two Left Feet when it came out, but I don't think I reviewed it. I remember liking the artist's strong but delicate line, old-timey fashion sense, and bangin' colors, all of which Mungo and the Spiders from Space has, times twenty. It has a steampunk vibe, very like Chris Riddell's work, but more energetic. My colleague TinkerCinderBelleAhontas finds it busy, but that's just because her son is still a baby and they like soft colors and one visual idea per page. Which is cool. But my sons, my boys who are 6 and 7? Jeez, my sons craaaave "busy". They want extra bonus cartoons, they want books within books. They want trompe-l'œil effects and they want marginalia and detail-alia and backgroundalia and illustrated endpapers and extra jokes on the back cover.

All of which, not coincidentally, Mungo and the Spiders from Space - has. Plus: a plot that keeps the reader hanging, slime, goop, a butt joke, and robots. Sigh. It's love, in point of fact.

Think I'll go gaze at the cover of The Shadow World for a little while.

*And David Roberts and Marla Frazee and David Shannon and Kadir Nelson and LeUyen Pham and a few others...

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You're a bad man, Mr. Gum! by Andy Stanton, read by the author

"'I am glad you asked me that,' said Friday, 'because the universe is my specialist subject and I am the winner of quizzes where that's concerned.'

This audio book had our whole family giggling all the way up Interstate 95 from Georgia when we came home from Spring Break. Really. Now, I don't want to take away from the print edition, which is certainly a funny book, with hip little illustrations and a chapter entitled "Mr. Gum Has a Cup of Tea" whose entire text is "Mr. Gum had a cup of tea," but on audio...

Let's put it this way. The other audio book that we really enjoyed on that trip, Neil Gaiman's The Neil Gaiman Audio Collection, included an interview with the author as a Special Bonus Feature. The interview is conducted by Gaiman's daughter Maddie, who asks good questions, including: "Why do you like audio books?" Neil answers this (and all the other) questions with his accustomed brevity, saying, (and I am paraphrasing here - that thing about Gaiman's brevity was me lying) that he likes audio books because he as an author can read the book as he first heard it in his head when he wrote it. Funny voices and all.

So, Andy Stanton apparently had choirs of lunatics speaking in his head when he was writing You're a Bad Man, Mr. Gum!. Or maybe just Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, and the entire Monty Python ensemble, including the dead guy who wanted to be a doctor. His characters are by turns terrible and silly, mystical and silly, adorable and silly, crabby and silly, and... silly. PLUS we get extremely Adams-y silly stuff like"

"She ran past a cat's ears that were lying on the pavement and a cat's nose and whiskers that were lying on the pavement and a cat's body and tail and legs and eyes and claws that were lying on the paveme -- in fact it was all just one cat, lying on the pavement."

And don't look for any Special Bonus Features on this CD, or in the book, because there AREN'T ANY.

Or... that's me lying again.

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Tsunami! by Kimiko Kajikawa, illustrated by Ed Young
Breathtaking. Pass-around-the-workroom-and-marvel-at-it gorgeous. Intense. Gripping. A terrific story. I seem unable to describe this book except in tiny movie-blurb phrases. It's that good.

Gazing upon the illustrations in Tsunami!, I could feel the thunder of the great wave in my chest. I felt the pressure of the silence before the wave, and I heard its hissing retreat. The two-page spread of the wave hovering over the village is the best work that Ed Young has ever done, and the story is just as strong. He depicts scale so masterfully here - the temple gate, in pieces, tiny against the crashing wave... the villagers so small as to look like confetti on the exposed beach.

I am grateful that the story is set "long ago" in Japan. If this book had been about the more recent tsunami, it would have been too emotionally wrenching for me, and possibly for younger readers too.

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Marveltown by Bruce McCall
When I plucked this big sunny square off the Professional Review shelves at work and surveyed the faux- Fifties Futurist paintings, I flashed back to pulling old books on rocket science off my Dad's shelves when I was a kid. The illustrations in those books were so intriguing - immense curved structures with impossibly thin floors and spires, a few tiny humans scratched in to give them scale; cratered surfaces and craggy mountains; big control rooms stocked with banks of giant flanged capacitors and oversized dials... but the books would always disappoint. I would expect breathless stories full of firecracker surprises, but... there was a lot of nonfiction in our house. Those books would actually be about rocket science. Lots of parabolas and charts.

I shook my head paging through Marveltown, thinking that Bruce McCall had a lot of fun creating a catalog of outscale inventions, and thinking that just drawing lots of cool stuff does not make a book.

What a fantastic surprise, therefore, to turn a page and, beneath a painting of a huge control room with banks of flanged capacitors and oversized dials, see the words, "Until one quiet midnight..." A story! A robot rebellion! Yeah!!

I couldn't wait to get Marveltown home to my boys. I wanted to see whether my enthusiasm was purely based on my retro-futurist nostalgia - ideas of the future that were old when I was a kid: Helmut Karl Wimmer's paintings from the old Hayden Planetarium, which came down when I was working at AMNH; the illustrations of Frank Tinsley and Chesley Bonestell; the villain's control room in old Bond movies; silly stuff from very old MAD magazines. There's a picture in Marveltown of a terrified guy in a hat, his pipe flying from his mouth as he runs screaming, that I think is a direct quote from a Kelly Freas painting.

The interesting thing about Bruce McCall, in this context, is that Wikipedia says the man is 73 years old - same age as my Dad. These illustrators that I am all nostalgic over... their careers overlapped his. These ARE his visions of the future. Makes Marveltown extra-sweet to me.

So let's hear from our panel. Here's what the boys said as Mao read the book aloud:

"It's supposed to be the kids are the run-away-ers and the grownups are the stayers, but it's the opposite!"

"How about they don't make living robots, they just make working robots?"

"Whoa, that's what somebody invented?" (about a tall crack-the-whip Maypole kind of thing that... ok yeah I can't describe it)
"That is totally better than a big robot."

"The ripple-rug was my favorite invention."
"The metal dog who ate everyone's homework was my favorite, because he was a great guard dog."

Does it make you want to invent things?
"Makes me want to want to turn our LEGOtown into Marveltown! With giant robots! With a couple different things, with the robots only attacking three grownups - bad guy grownups - not Skeletor, because he's dead. They would attack Larry Jenkins, 50-foot Spreitel, and The Boss."

Ok, so... any questions?

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Ricky Ricotta and his Mighty Robot by Dav Pilkey
Magic Pickle by Scott Morse
Korgi by Christian Slade
Little Vampire by Joann Sfar
Knights of the Lunch Table by Frank Cammuso
Kaput & Zosky by Lewis Trondheim with Eric Cartier
Stinky by Eleanor Davis



YNL: Well, hello guys.
Prosper (8), Mao (7), Zhou (5), and Wendy Darling (5): Hello.
YNL: Happy Professional Development Day to you.
Prosper: Thank you.
YNL: So, you guys have been reading ALL DAY. Anything you've noticed about the books you've been reading?
Wendy Darling: They're comic books.
Prosper: They're all chapter books.
Mao: ANNND... the Ricky Ricotta books, all of them have the last line "That's what friends are for"!
Zhou: I noticed that they're all good. Magic Pickle is good.
YNL: Which one did you like the best?
Zhou: All the Ricky Ricotta books that we read.
Wendy Darling: The Ricky Ricotta.
Mao: I'd really say Ricky Ricotta's Might Robot vs. the Jurassic Jackrabbits.
Zhou: I would say two things: Ricky Ricotta's Might Robot vs. the Jurassic Jackrabbits and Magic Pickle.
Prosper: I kind of liked Kaput and Zosky.



YNL: What do you think about the art?
Prosper: The what?
Wendy Darling (his little sister): The pictures!
Mao: The art in Magic Pickle is really good. Because it's like comics and I like comics because they have like little squares of action.
YNL: Do the little squares do anything for you?
Mao: It's just like saying "Here's this, here's that, in this order."
Prosper: I like it because it really looks like a pickle.
YNL: So more realistic is better?
Mao: Speaking of pickles, can we have one?
Prosper: The drawings in Kaput & Zosky are pretty good but they're not perfect, but they don't have to be perfect to be a really good comic. I think the words have to be perfect.
YNL: So the words in Kaput & Zosky are perfect?
Prosper: Kind of. [lost reading again]



YNL: Hey, [Prosper], that page doesn't have words at all!
Prosper: Actually doesn't have to have words to be great. Look at this, [Mao] - he's walking along he meets this guy he shoots him, he's walking along he meets this guy he shoots him, he's walking along he meets this guy he shoots him, he's walking along he meets this guy he shoots him, he's walking along he meets this guy he shoots him...
Boys: Aww haww haww! That's great!
YNL: And that's funny.
Mao: Yeah
Prosper: Uh huh
YNL: How come?
Mao: Because it's like he keeps on shooting people and then someone else shoots HIM. that's the funny part.
Prosper: Look at this: [narrates a wordless page] Yay! Ha la lala, and then he gets out and he's like 'What the?' and dee dee dee, BLAM [hee hee hee] and then Oooh! Weee!



YNL: Ok guys. Here's Korgi.
Wendy Darling: I liked Korgi.
YNL: What did you like about it, little girl?
Wendy Darling: Because the girl was brave.
YNL: What about they way she's drawn? here's Kaput & Zosky, which art do you like better?
Wendy Darling: Kaput & Zosky. I like the color.



Mao: Little Vampire was good, because he threw up the guy that the monsters ate when he wanted to do kung fu to him, and in the end he was brung back to life and he was giant.
YNL: So you liked that there was a lot of surprises?
Mao: And I liked that there was chemicals involved, and the chemicals, they made him forget about what's happened, and they made him normal size again.
YNL: Do you wish you had a chemical like that?
Mao: Yeah!
Prosper: Why?
Mao: So I could make people forget everything and become tiny.
Prosper: What about if you shrunk somebody who was only this big, then they'd be a milliperson!
YNL: Hey, Kaput & Zosky: It seems like these guys are kind of mean.
Prosper: Why?
YNL: Why? Because they shoot everyone all the time?
Prosper: Heh heh
Mao: Actually that never occurred to me, because the red guy is always like SHOOT SOMEBODY! and the other guy is always like 'Wait, first we have to make sure nobody's around' - so they're really opposite!
YNL: Is that opposite?
Mao: Wellll, they THINK opposite but they have the same goals.
YNL: What's their goal?
Mao: Their goal is to go in charge of every single planet.



YNL: How about Stinky: did you like it?
Everyone: Yes.
YNL: There's no shooting in it...
Mao: No. But there is trying to get rid in it.
[And they're lost again. Prosper has Stinky, Wendy Darling is reading Korgi, Zhou has Ricky Ricotta, and Mao is into Kaput & Zosky]
YNL: Should I leave you guys alone to read?
Prosper: Yes.
Mao: Yes.
Zhou: Yes.

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Too Many Toys by David Shannon
You definitely get the feeling that David Shannon wrote this one because he wanted to draw a lot of toys. Toys like a friendly-looking pink pig with round specs. A blue octopus with a purple bowler hat. SOMETHING with extremely hairy feet and only three toes per. Davey Crockett. A suspiciously Linux-y penguin. The Mach 5, a squadron of biplanes, a striped rubber ball, a gooseneck lamp with a face on it... spaceships, LEGOs, racecars, and nearly buried in the middle of it all, a happy kid named Spencer with an astronaut helmet and sliding-off socks.

And that's just the first page - there's more!

Every page, in fact, is jammed with dozens of toys - colorful, fun-looking, sometimes familiar toys. I saw a Scuba Steve, and Fergus, a Dumbledore action ficture, Bigfoot, a troll doll with a pencil up its butt, an old-style Cootie, Mike Mulligan's steam shovel Marianne, and that damn popcorn-popper thing with two wheels and a stick. I thought we'd never get that thing out of our house.

There are also toys I've never seen before, toys that, I'll admit... I now want. I want the three-eyed lion thing with the clown nose, the pointy teeth, and the protruding tongue. I want the one-footed, one-eyed green alien honker in the hula skirt. I want the flying saucer inscribed with real alien characters.

In fact, I appear to have the same problem that Spencer does. He LOVES this stuff, and the toys have taken over the house. If I squint my eyes and think real hard, I can maaaybe identify with Spencer's house. If I bought every plastic bin from every Target in the country, it would not be enough plastic bins to contain the toys in our house.

And you know, what I like best about Too Many Toys (besides David Shannon's superb paint handling and candy-colored palette), is that it's just a story about getting rid of some of the toys. It's not judgemental. Spencer's family is a happy, fun family. His dad is just like me - when Mom, at her wits' end, encounters a malfunctioning pirate Weeble kind of thing and suggests it be added to the Going Out box, Spencer gives it right up, saying, "That's Dad's." Oops. David Shannon is blowing all our parental secrets. One of the perks of being a parent is you get to buy and play with toys, and not just coolio made-for-grownups toys like that kidrobot stuff - dumb crap like Transformers and Spider-man action figures.

The upshot is: Too Many Toys isn't a parable about consumption. Spencer isn't spoiled, and he doesn't need to learn An Important Lesson about What's Important. He's just a regular kid who can have fun with anything - a headless ninja alien or a cardboard box. I kind of wish the mom didn't actually scream at Spencer when the box of carefully selected Reject Toys ends up scattered all over the upstairs hall - that's getting a little too close to reality - but I am taking this book home to my kids... because sometimes it's fun to just read a book that looks like life. Well, life, with better colors.


Aaaand... what happened when I shared this book with my boys? Why, they woke up the next morning, found a cardboard box in the basement, and attacked it with scissors and markers and stickers until they turned it into a rocket ship. Life, with better colors.

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Big Kicks by Bob Kolar
Biggie the Bear (seriously, we have a picture book character named Biggie now. I am relieved to note that the only attribute he appears to share with the Notorious B.I.G. is his size, and possibly an interest in midcentury modern decor) is kind of a solitary guy. He likes his stamp collection, and jazz, and peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches, and so, when the soccer team knocks on his door because they are down a player, he is a little hesitant.

Rightfully so. Poor Biggie - the first time he tries to kick the ball, he falls flat on his butt.

You know, there are never enough books about kids being nervous about sports. There are REALLY never enough books about kids sucking at sports. Roasted Peanuts by Tim Egan is the only one I can come up with off the top of my head. I mean... sports! It's so fraught! Failure at sports resonates well into adult life - I just asked around the workroom, and both Dances With Chickens and The Admiral's Daughter remembered specific childhood incidents involving softball, field hockey, and in my case, the 400-meter hurdles - that had kind of scarred them for life.

So I like to see books like this, in which the kid doesn't succeed on the playing field, and the sky doesn't fall as a result. He doesn't become a better player through dedication and practice. A patient mentor doesn't materialize to drill him until he can return to the playing field triumphant. He doesn't all of a sudden discover a special skill that makes him a star (although in fact Biggie's clumsiness does win the game). No. Biggie has no skills, but he gives it a shot, and the other kids don't ridicule him, and he ends up joining the team - as a fan.

If only the late, great Biggie Smalls could have learned to sit on the sidelines too.


Oh, wait: also it's funny! When the team comes a-knockin', this is how it goes:

"I can't ask him," said Chicken Rabbit. "I'm too afraid."
"I can't ask him," said Twirly Squirrel. "I'm too little."
"I can't ask him," said Smelly Smell Skunk. "I'm too stinky."
"I forgot what to ask him," said Fluff the Duck.

Chicken Rabbit! that's funny!

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Manfish: A story of Jacques Cousteau by Jennifer Berne, illustrated by Eric Puybaret
I read this picture book biography of the original too-tan diver/explorer/conservationist/documentarian guy-who-made-that-watch-cap-look-GOOD out loud to my two boys yesterday and I have these things to say:

1. Who knew that Jacques Cousteau was such a genius? I didn't know he invented the aqualung! I didn't know the research vessel Calypso was a surplus French Navy ship! And I didn't know he was such a film guy!
2. My kids were captivated.
3. My kids kept begging me to quit with the Marseilles accent.

My friend Molly picked it up this afternoon and enjoyed it just as much as I did. But she said, "I was a little disappointed with the illustrations," and I concur.

I just adored the turn-the-book-90-degrees foldout spread... the reader descends through three pages of undersea illustration as the text describes the "strange and shimmering ocean land of swaying plants and ocean creatures" (and just try reading that out loud without the Sunday night Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau accent!); and I love the endpapers, illustrated with paintings of strips of film. But I would expect a biography of Jacques Cousteau, especially one that emphasizes the role of photography in his life, to be more... vividly illustrated. What we got as kids, watching National Geographic specials, besides a sense of the impact of white as a fashion statement and a strong visual reminder to always wear sunscreen, were images of fantastic creature after fantastic creature looming out of the undersea murk. The illustrations in Manfish are just a bit... tamer than that.

This book is nominated for a Cybils award, and rightly so.

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Boys of Steel: The Creators of Superman, by Marc Tyler Nobleman, illustrated by Ross MacDonald
Oh, this is charming. I mean it. It's a kids' biography of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the writer and artist of Superman, and it got me all choked up.

We meet Jerry Siegel as a shy, lonely, grieving boy in Cleveland (Cleveland! Where all true underdogs come from!) who is mad for pulp fiction and movie serials. Short and bespectacled, he meets his match in Jerry Shuster, who spends as much time drawing as Jerry spends writing. They partner up, rejection rejection, and then, in a flash of wishful thinking, Jerry dreams up Superman, a superhuman alien, masquerading among ordinary humans as shy, four-eyed Clark Kent.

If you've never seen David Carradine's Superman monologue from Kill Bill Volume Two, this is your moment to do so. We'll wait.

Ross MacDonald is the perfect, the ONLY choice to have illustrated this biography. His rounded faces, golden light, and old-fashioned compositional devices cement this book to the era it depicts. I've always liked Ross MacDonald, even after I realized that he was NOT the guy who wrote all those salacious crime novels my dad liked so much in the seventies.

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Walt Disney's Alice in Wonderland, retold by Jon Scieszka, pictures by Mary Blair
Now here's a coincidence worthy of Lewis Carroll: I just last night finished reading the AMAZING graphic novel Alice In Sunderland by Bryan Talbot, an encyclopedic look at the history of Sunderland, in the northeast of England, informed by the lives of Charles Dodgson and Alice Liddell. It is loaded with information both interesting (George Washington's family crest was stars and stripes) and trivial (Bilbao's football team was founded by emigre Sunderland factory workers). History braids together like a slow river in that book.

Talbot is, among other things, something of a collector of versions of Alice. Toward the end of Alice in Sunderland, there must be four pages with tiny thumbnail representations of the covers of those books, and he is alarmed and amazed when he hears a rumor that Kelly Osbourne (Ozzy's daughter) is coming to Sunderland to film something called Malice in Sunderland.

The book is so dense and so layered that it left me feeling a little spacy. Good graphic novels do that to me - I get so caught up in the narrative and the drawn world of the novel that I walk around preoccupied and ditzy for a little while.

So I was a bit suspicious when I saw the above book on the shelf. It's not another retelling of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, no, it's a retelling of the Disney movie "Alice in Wonderland." "How meta," I thought to myself. "And just when you've finished, like, a meta Bible on Alice. You are making this up."

But no. What it is, though, is another labor of love based on Alice. Mary Blair, creator of the freaky character designs for "It's a Small World," did the original concept work for the Disney movie. These paintings, full of movement and drenched with color, have been resurrected for this edition, with a fine story condensation by National Ambassador for Young People's Literature Jon Scieszka, whose name I can finally spell correctly on the first try. "Salaam, Mr. Ambassador! Please continue to use your great power for good!"

(Although I really have to admit, I never liked Alice in Wonderland. Freaked me right out.)

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Mattland, story by Hazel Hutchins and Gail Herbert, art by Dušan Petričić

What's different about Mattland?

Well, first, there's the cover. Drawn from Matt's point of view, all we see is the muddy ground and the kid's arm holding a stick. There's something a little more intimate, maybe something a little reminiscent of an introspective grownup graphic novel about that cover.

Then there's the fact that we never really get a good look at Matt. We see his shadow, his reflection, his feet or legs or arms, all drawn from his point of view... and yet the book is written in the third person. Gives the book a cinematic quality - a European cinematic quality, to be precise.

Not to forget the text: Matt has moved into a pretty drab-looking neighborhood, and when he goes outside to play, he finds mud and rocks and a stick. Wow. But he starts creating a landscape out of the bits of junk he finds, and as he does so he talks to himself, just a little, naming things. The narrative, and his landscape, gather mass and momentum, and by the end of the book he has attracted the attention of the kids that you just know are going to be his friends.

Not goopy. Not sticky. But not ignoring Matt's emotions either, Mattland is a true-to-its-core portrait of a boy, a vacant lot, and his imagination.

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If I weren't already promised to Brendan Fraser after my current husband, er, meets with an unfortunate fate, I mean, in case he does, well anyway, next on the list would be Adam Rex.

Ladies and gentlemen, Frankenstein Takes the Cake.



Frankenstein's first book, Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich, I foist upon anyone I find wandering in the 811s. I met a 8th grader the other night whose assignment was to find a poem that expressed something about himself. I shoved Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich into his mitts and said, "Seriously. You're a monster. A hungry, hungry monster." His ma looked at me in respect as he opened randomly, read a poem, and giggled. 8th grade lacrosse-playing BOY. Reading and enjoying poetry.

I'm good, sure, but I'm only as good as the material - and Adam Rex gives us the best. I had the good fortune to get my hands on an advance copy of Frankenstein Takes the Cake, but I have to give it back. Yeah, come and get it - if you think you're hard enough.

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Mrs. Muddle's Holidays by Laura F. Nielsen, pictures by Thomas F. Yezerski
I read this a while ago, liked it quite a bit, kept it out for a good while thinking I'd get to reviewing it soon, but never felt like I had a nice chunk of time and attention that I could devote to it.

I still don't.

But whatever. I just have to sack up and review the book: Mrs. Muddle's Holidays is great. I have to remember to buy it for the school library. It's all about inclusiveness, and community, and being outside.

Mrs. Muddle brings life and color and fellowship to the street by celebrating such things as the Birthday of the Inventor of the Roller Skate and Let's Pretend It's Summer Day. The multicultural neighbors (Hassan, Jen-Mei and Rosa, along with Alicia, Katie, Jim and Tony live in Mrs. Muddle's street) are drawn in semi-realistic, friendly watercolors and pen and ink. Especially engaging are the big spreads with lots of detail. You really want to live on Mrs. Muddle's street, and I'm tempted to try to think up a few seasonal traditions of my own.

There, I didn't have any time, and this review kind of sucks, but I think I said what I wanted to. The book is good.

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Grace for President written by Kelly DiPucchio, pictures by LeUyen Pham
A picture book that explains the electoral college? Gimme!

Like Katie in Madam President, Grace considers her gender (and race, by the way) no barrier when it comes to her desire to hold the highest position in the land.

In Grace for President, we are witness to her first campaign - for president of 5th grade. Each 5th grader represents a U.S. state, and a corresponding number of electoral votes, so while Grace holds rallies and researches the needs of her constituency, her wily opponent, Thomas, tallies the demographics of the electoral college and discovers that boys hold a slim majority of the electoral votes. If everyone votes true to their party, he will win!

How do you think that's going to work out for old Thomas?

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The Secret Olivia Told Me by N. Joy, illustrations by Nancy Devard
Here's another book that must have crept right past me. A simple story about gossip and trust, it is brilliantly illustrated in black and white silhouettes, with a transparent red balloon representing the secret.

An excellent book to have on hand when some hurtful rumor runs rampant through 2nd grade. And I will be looking for more from Nancy Devard - those silhouettes are full of personality and life. Using this old, old technique, she has captured gesture and attitude to give us the very kids I see in the children's section every day.

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