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Henry and the Incredibly Incorrigible, Inconveniently Intelligent Smart Human
By Lynn Messina
Tater Tot Books
$7.99
ISBN: 978-0984901845
Ages 9-12
On shelves now.

Every year I swear to myself that I’ll review at least one self-published book written for kids. And every year I manage to do it, but only after sifting through countless manuscripts. The process is as close as I ever come to living the swanky life of an unpaid publishing company intern. Your slush piles ain’t got nothin’ on my slush piles. Why do I do it? Because every once in a great while I hit gold. Pure, uncut, rarified gold, my friend. I find a book that really is remarkable. Really is worth reading. Finding a picture book that falls into that category is hard enough. Chapter books for middle grade readers can be even trickier. The last time it happened was back in 2008 when I reviewed B.B. Wurge’s Billy and the Birdfrogs. Now at the tail end of 2012 I find the remarkable, hilarious, exciting, and downright diamond-in-the-rough worthy Henry and the Incredibly Incorrigible, Inconveniently Intelligent Smart Human. A smart little novel with a catchy hook I’ve not seen in a book for kids before, hand this one to the next kid who comes you whining that their teacher told them to read something “science fiction”. They’ll moan no more, guaranteed.

They say the 13th upgrade is the hardest. Insufficient comfort for a robot like Henry, though. Because of a bug in his system Henry just can’t keep up with the other kids in his class. Things seem pretty gloomy until good news arrives. Henry’s dad has just received a fantastic new appliance. It’s the HueManTech ETC-420- GX-2, a top of the line human meant to do menial tasks around the home. Trouble is, the human’s good. Too good. And the more time Henry spends with it, the more he comes to suspect that this human might be so smart it could be used as a weapon by the government itself. What’s a kid to do when his best friend’s an appliance? Save the day, of course.

The basic premise that robots are the productive members of society and humans merely their appliances is a joke that by all rights should get old fast. What’s remarkable is that not only does Messina pull it off, she turns it into world building. Slowly you begin to envision the fields where wild consoles are harvested and turned into video games. Where prisons are kept at ridiculously high temperatures to keep rogue robots in check. Where fire isn’t a concern but water can be death itself. To make the idea of robots human and humans robots, Messina had to be extraordinarily clear from page one onward about where Henry lived and what his world was like. At the same time, she sets him in a space that’s familiar to many a kid reader. What child can’t relate to being called on in class and unable to conjure up the correct answer at a moment’s notice? That’s the sly trick of the novel. It couches the strange in the familiar and ends up the stronger for it.

If the child reader is anything like myself then they’ll begin the book by trying to figure out if this is an entirely alternate reality, or if it’s some kind of post-apocalyptic world where robots have taken over and humanity has long since been forgotten. I kept wavering between the two possibilities for the better part of the book. This feeling was fed into by little hints Messina posed from time to time. For example, at one point E asks Henry where original ideas come from if robots are programmed to replicate only the same ideas over and over again. Henry finds this to be an impossible paradox, suggesting perhaps that robots aren’t the be all and end all. Later it becomes clear that there may be a conspiracy surrounding the creation of humans in the first place. I won’t ruin for you whether one theory or another was correct. Regardless, it satisfies sufficiently.

There are some distinct horrorific elements to the tale, but they’re told as matter-of-factly as if this were everyday fare. Humans that fail in their programming are sent to be compacted, easy peasy. It sort of has a slow creeping horror when you hear that. And really it isn’t until E is on the precipice of his own compaction that it’s drilled home to the reader. I had visions of the song “Worthless” from The Brave Little Toaster as all this happened. Or maybe Soylent Green. The funny thing is that though Messina ratchets up the tension, you don’t get a clear sense of the bloody process involved. And that is a-okay with me.

Alas, due to the number of times the book repeats the human’s official name of HueManTech ETC-420- GX-2, I’m afraid this won’t exactly be a readaloud, unless the reader is willing to shorten the little human’s name “E” or “ETC” for the bulk of the book. Aside from that it’s a pretty compact, smart bit of a novel. The kind of book that’ll make kids question the ease with which they treat their own iPads, iPods, and other handy dandy devices like things without feelings. A great discussion topic would be a thought about a next generation tablet so smart it has opinions of its own. Hey, man. Stranger things could happen. Just read this book if you don’t believe me.

On shelves now.

Source: Copy sent from author for review.

Like This? Then Try:

• The Iron Giant by Ted Hughes

• Eager by Helen Fox

• Brother From a Box by Evan Kuhlman

Videos:

There is a book trailer that I particularly like…

Pickle: The (Formerly) Anonymous Prank Club of Fountain Point Middle School
By Kim Baker
Illustrated by Tim Probert
Roaring Brook Press (a division of Macmillan)
$15.99
ISBN: 978-1-59643-765-4
Ages 9-12
On shelves now

When I was in college I took a course in journalism to fulfill an English credit. I had no real desire to report the news in any way, shape, or form so when the time came to write an article for the paper I had to find something that would be in my wheelhouse. Ultimately I decided to write a piece on the history of pranks at my alma mater. It was a fun piece to write and instilled in me not a love of reporting but rather a love of pranking and all it entails. A good prank, a true prank, does no harm aside from a minor inconvenience for the poor schmuck who has to clean it up. It does not destroy school property, causing only joy for those innocents who witness it. And pranks, the really good ones, are almost impossible to think up. Now it’s hard enough to think up a prank for a liberal arts college in eastern Indiana. Imagine how much more difficult it is to think up a whole roster of pranks for a fictional elementary school. That is the task Kim Baker gave herself and the end result is a book that I simply cannot keep on my library shelves. Kids eat this book up with a spoon.

What would you do if you found out your favorite pizza joint was getting rid of all the balls in their ball pit for free? If you’re Ben Diaz, the answer is simple. You make several trips with the balls to your elementary school, dump the lot in your classroom window, and then sit back and enjoy the show. It’s an auspicious beginning for an up-and-coming prankster, and once Ben gets a taste of the havoc (and admiration) his act garners, there’s no stopping him. Next thing you know he’s started a prank club with school funds. Okay… technically the school thinks that he’s started a pickle club, but that shouldn’t be a problem, right? Trouble is, once you’ve started something as silly as a prank club, it’s hard to know when you’ve crossed a line and gone a little too far.

There’s been a lot of talk in the press and the general public about the fact that when it comes to Latino characters in children’s books you may as well be asking for the moon. They exist, but are so few and far between when compared to other ethnicities that one has a hard time figuring out who precisely is to blame. Pickle, I am pleased to report, stars a Hispanic kid who is featured on the cover front and center, no hiding his race or getting all namby pamby on who he is. And let me tell you now that the only thing rarer than a children’s book starring a Latino boy is finding a children’s book starring a Latino boy that’s hilarious and fun. The kind of book a kid would pick up willingly on their own in the first place. It’s like a little diamond on your bookshelf. A rara avis.

Now the key to any realistic school story, no matter how wacky, is likable characters. Not everyone in this book is someone you’d like to hang out with (personally I wouldn’t cry a tear if Bean took a long walk off a short pier) but for the most part you’re fond of these kids. Ben himself is a pretty swell guy. I don’t think anyone’s going to accuse Baker of failing to write a believable boy voice. Best of all, he’s a can do kind of kid. He takes charge. His solution to the pickle problem is well nigh short of inspired, and a nice example of a protagonist using their special skills to problem solve. And though the true antagonist of the book is the principal, it’s clear that his best friend Hector is a likable but lowly worm that serves as the emotional antagonist to our hero. You can’t help but like the fact that Hector is such a stoolie/squealer that he will not only confess crimes he and Ben have committed but crimes they NOT committed as well. There is no better way to get a reader on your side than to tap into their sense of injustice and unfairness. It is a pity that the only girls in the group are the only people incapable of really good pranks. Or, rather, one is incapable of coming up with a good prank and the other is perfectly good but goes rogue with it.

Baker distinguishes nicely between pranks that merely annoy and pranks that upset and destroy. Undoubtedly there will be adults out there that worry that by reading this book kids are going to immediately go out and start putting soap in their own school’s fountains/drinking fountains/what have you. Aside from the fact that most of the pranks in this book would be difficult to pull off (unless your kids have access to abandoned ball pits, I think you’re pretty safe) the book distinguishes nicely between those pranks that do good and those that do harm. I’m sure there are adults who believe that there is no “good” prank in the world. Those are the folks who should probably steer clear of this one.

Pranking requires a certain set of requisite skills. You need to be smart enough to figure out what the pranks should be and how to make them work. You need to have the guts to pull them off, regardless of the consequences. And you need to know when you’ve gone two far. Include only the first two requirements and leave off the third and you’ve got yourself one heckuva fun book like Pickle. Celebrating the kind of anarchy only pranking can truly inspire, this is one of those books for kids that are truly FOR kids. Gatekeepers need not apply. Show one to a kiddo and watch the fun begin.

On shelves now.

Source: Galley sent from author for review.

Like This? Then Try:

• Double Dog Dare by Lisa Graff

• M3: Sir John Hargrave’s Mischief Maker’s Manual by John Hargrave

• The Bad Apple (The Merits of Mischief #1) by T.R. Burns

• The Fourth Stall by Chris Rylander

Other Blog Reviews:

• There’s a Book
• Teaching My Baby to Read
• Teen Reading Reviews

Professional Reviews:

• Kirkus
• Publishers Weekly

Misc:

• The faux pickle related website that “Ben” created is pretty fun.  Hard not to love a site that promotes popsicles made out of pickle juice.  Mmm mmm!

• Read an excerpt of the first chapter here.

Videos:

One hot and piping book trailer, just ready for you!

The Hero’s Guide to Saving Your Kingdom
By Christopher Healy
Walden Pond Press (an imprint of Harper Collins)
$16.99
ISBN: 978-0-06-211743-4
Ages 9-12
On shelves now.

Since when did fairytales become the realm of the girly? I blame Disney. Back in the days of Grimm your average everyday fairytale might contain princesses and pretty gowns and all that jazz, but it was also just as likely to offer its own fair share of dragons and murderers and goblins as well. Once the Disney company realized that princesses were magnificent moneymakers, gone was the gore and the elements that might make those stories appealing to the boy set. If you actually sat down and watched the films you’d see plenty of princes fighting beasts (or fighting beast princes) but the very idea of “Sleeping Beauty” or “Snow White” or any of those films has taken on a semi-sweet and sickly vibe. By the same token, it’s hard to find fractured fairytale children’s novels that can be loved just as much by boys as by girls. The great equalizer of all things is, to my mind, humor. Make something funny and gender is rendered irrelevant. There are certainly a fair number of funny fairytale-type stories out there, but to my mind none are quite so delightful and hilarious as Christopher Healy’s newest series. Starting with The Hero’s Guide to Saving Your Kingdom (and followed by The Hero’s Guide to Storming the Castle), Healy takes that most maligned of all fairytale characters and finally gives “him” a voice. You heard right. Prince Charming is finally getting his due.

Meet Princes Liam, Frederic, Duncan, and Gustav. If their names don’t ring a bell with you, don’t be too surprised. Known better by their pseudonym “Prince Charming” the princes are a bit peeved at the lousy P.R. their adventures have garnered. The bards have found that their stories tell better when the girls get all the credit (and actual names) and it isn’t just the princes that are peeved. A local witch is more than a little upset, and that anger may have something to do with the slow disappearance of the bards themselves. Now it’s up to our four heroes, brought together through the strangest of circumstances, to band together to defeat an evil witch, strike down a giant or two, outwit bandits, and generally find a way to make their faults into strengths.

I take a gander at debut author Christopher Healy’s credentials and I am oddly pleased. A reviewer of children’s books and media he has written for Cookie, iVillage, Parenting, Time Out New York Kids, and Real Simple Family. In short, he’s from the parenting sphere. Clearly he’s taken what he’s learned and applied it here because it’s his wordplay that stands out. For example, he might list the jobs Cinderella has to perform as using “every waking hour performing onerous tasks, like scrubbing grout or chipping congealed mayonnaise from between fork tines.” By the same token, the sneaky sidenote is a delicate beast. It requires of the author a bit of finesse. Go too far as a writer for children and you end up amusing only the adults who happen to pick up your book. With this in mind, Healy is a sneaky sidenote master. He’ll give away a detail about the future and then say, “Oops, sorry about that. I probably should have said, `Spoiler alert’.” That’s 21st century foreshadowing for you. Or he might sneak in a Groucho Marx reference like “Captain Spaulding” once in a while, but it works within the context of the story (and amuses reviewers like myself in the meantime). Or he’ll mention that part of the witch’s plan is shooting bears at people out of cannons. It’s hard not appreciate a mind that comes up with that kind of thing.

In his New York Times review of the book Adam Gopnik took issue with the sheer enjoyment one can have with the book, going so far as to say, “Each page offers something to laugh at, but it can be an effort to turn each page.” His objections were steeped in the world building happening here, unfavorably comparing it to The Princess Bride (an unfair comparison if ever there was one) and even shooting quite low when he dared to invoke the name of the Shrek films. Oog. The fact of the matter is that if you’re looking for deep insightful probes into the human psyche, this is not the book for you. If you are looking for a perfectly fun story that meanders a bit but always stays on its feet, here’s your book. The princes are broad portraits, stereotypes that break out of their chosen roles, if reluctantly. They are also fellows you would follow from book to book to book. They have on-page chemistry (my wordier version of on-screen chemistry). You believe in these guys and you want them to succeed and not get beaten up too badly. It’s a fun and funny book and though it won’t win huge children’s literature awards it will be adored by its readership and discussed at length on the playgrounds of this good great nation. And that is just fine and dandy with me.

Considering how many contemporary updates to fairytales there are in pop culture right now (Once Upon a Time, Grimm, Snow White & The Huntsman, etc.) it’s strange to me that I can’t think of a book to quite compare with this one. A book that takes standard fairytales and familiar characters, renders them unfamiliar but human, and then loads the storyline up with bucketfuls of humor. I mean, books like A Tale Dark and Grimm and In a Glass Grimmly are newfound looks at old standards but they haven’t the light bouncy breezy quality of Healy’s work. These are fairytales for folks who love Disney, hate Disney, love fractured fairytales, love the original fairytales, and/or just like a good story in general. It’s perfect bedtime fare and ideal for those kids who want something amusing to read on their own. You know when a kid walks up to you and says they want a “funny” book? This is for them as well. Basically it’s for everyone, fantasy fans and fantasy haters alike. If ever you feel sick of the sheer seriousness of some fantasies (*cough* Eragon *cough*), this is a book for you too. Put it on your To Read list and pronto.

On shelves now.

Source: Galley sent from publisher for review.

Like This? Then Try:

• The Sisters Grimm: The Fairy-Tale Detectives by Michael Buckley

• Fairest of All by Sarah Mlynowski

• Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine

• Into the Wild by Sarah Beth Durst

• Of Giants and Ice by Shelby Bach

First Sentence: “Prince Charming is afraid of old ladies. Didn’t know that, did you?”

Book Jacket Nattering: Love it. It’s nice when a cover artist makes it clear that they actually read the book. And Todd Harris must have read this puppy several times because not only are his cover illustrations dead on, the interior ones are great as well. Mind you, I have had a lot of kids complain to me about the fact that though the four princes do appear on both the front and back covers of this book, if you look just at the front cover only two of them made the cut with Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella thrown on there as well. This problem has been fortunately remedied with the sequel where you will find all four of our heroes front and center. Here’s the full front and back of the first book’s cover:

Oh.  And love that British cover, I do.  Just not as much.

Other Blog Reviews:

• The Book Smugglers
• Scattered Pages
• Katie’s Book Blog

Professional Reviews:

• The New York Times
• The Los Angeles Times
• A star from Publishers Weekly
• The Wall Street Journal
• A star from Kirkus

Misc:

• The movie rights have indeed already been picked up.

• The official website is here.

Video:

• A book trailer!  Huzzah!

• And here’s an interview with the author, who is rather charming himself.  Clearly he writes what he knows.

• And a Vlog Review.  Awwwww.

Splendors and Glooms
By Laura Amy Schlitz
Candlewick Press
$17.99
ISBN: 978-0-7636-5380-4
Ages 10 and up
On shelves now.

Do you remember that moment in the film version of The Princess Bride where the grandfather is trying to convince his stubborn grandson that the book he’s about to read is fantastic? He lures the kid in by saying the book contains, “Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles.” If I had a kid standing in front me right now looking at Splendors and Glooms with equal suspicion I would probably tell them that the book has a witch, an evil puppet master, transformations, a magical amulet, small dogs, orphans, lots of blood, and Yorkshire pudding. And just as the grandfather’s description fails to do The Princess Bride justice, so too does this description just wan and pale in the presence of Laura Amy Schlitz’s latest. This is a book infused with such a heady atmosphere that from page one on you are so thoroughly sucked into the story that the only way to get out is through.

The witch is dying. The girl is lonely. The children are hungry. Four people unconnected until the puppet master Grisini brings them, in a sense, together. Lizzie Rose and Parsefall are orphans who have lived with the man for years, doing his puppet work with him, received almost nothing in return. When they perform for Clara Wintermute, a rich little girl who requests a performance for her birthday, they are unprepared when the next day policeman come around asking questions. Clara has disappeared and Grisini is under suspicion. When Grisini himself disappears, Lizzie Rose and Parsefall find something that makes Clara’s fate seem out of the ordinary. All the more so when they are summoned by a witch to a beautiful distant estate and everyone, even Grisini, is reunited once more for a final showdown.

As odd as it is to say, what this book reminded me of more than anything else was A.S. Byatt’s Angels & Insects. To be fair, I felt that way about Ms. Schlitz’s previous novel A Drowned Maiden’s Hair too. Though written for adults, Byatt’s novel consists of two short stories, one of which concerns séances and a woman with multiple dead children in her past. Thoughts of that woman came to me as I read more about Clara’s story. At first glance a spoiled little rich girl, Clara is cursed in a sense to be the one child that survived a cholera epidemic that wiped out her siblings when she was quite young. Forced to honor them at her birthday (not to mention other times of the year) she is understandably less than in love with their figurative ghosts. Like Byatt, Schlitz taps so successfully into a time period’s mores that even as you wonder at their strangeness you understand their meaning. You may not agree with them, but you understand.

Where A Drowned Maiden’s Hair was a self-described melodrama, Splendors and Glooms is Victorian Gothic. It brings to mind the dirty streets of London and books by authors like Joan Aiken. In Lizzie Rose and Parsefall’s world you can get dirty just by walking through the yellow fog. Never mind what you encounter on the street. The first three chapters of the book are split between three different characters and you go down the class ladder, from upper-upperclass to kids who feed only when they can get away with it. It’s a distinctive period and Schlitz is a master and plunging you directly into that world. I am also happy to report that her ear for language is as pitch perfect as ever. She’s the only author for kids that I know of that can get away with sentences like, “Lizzie Rose corrected him, aspirating the h.”

At the same time no one acts the way you would expect them to. You walk into the novel thinking that orphans Lizzie Rose and Parsefall will be perfect little pseudo-siblings to one another and you’re repeatedly surprised when Parsefall rejects any and all affection from his devoted (if not doting) friend. In fact he’s a fascinating character in and of himself (and at times I almost had the sense that he knew himself to BE a character). He has only one love, one devotion, one obsession in this world and it’s difficult for anything else to make a dent in it. Likewise, when Lizzie Rose interacts with the witch you expect the standard tale where she melts the old woman’s heart against her will. Schlitz doesn’t go in for the expected, though. You will find no schmaltz within these pages. Though the characters’ expectations may line up with the readers’, beware of falling too in love with what somebody on the page wants. You might find your own heart breaking.

Even as a child I had a strange habit of falling in love with storytime’s villains. Captain Hook most notably, but others followed suit. That was part of what was so interesting about the villain Grisini in this book. By all logic I should have developed a crush on him of some sort. Yet Schlitz manages to make him wholly reprehensible and just kind of nasty to boot. He actually doesn’t appear in all that many pages of the book. When he does you are baffled by him. He’s not like a usual villain. He’s almost impotent, though his shadow is long. He also suffers more physically than any other bad guy I’ve encountered in a book for kids. If you’ve ever worried that a no goodnik wasn’t paying sufficiently for their crimes you shall have no such similar objections to Splendors and Glooms. The wages of sin are death and perhaps a bit of bloodletting as well.

I admit (and I’m ashamed to say so now) that when I first read this book I thought to myself, “Well that was delightful but I’m sure I’ll have a hard time persuading other folks to like it as much as I do.” Chalk that one up to my own snotty little assumptions. I’m sure the underlying thought was that I was clearly the right kind of reader and therefore my superior intellect was the whole reason I liked what I had read. Fortunately I was to find that I was nothing more than a snobby snob when it became clear that not only did other librarians love it (librarians who would normally eschew most forms of fantasy if they could possibly help it), kids were enjoying it too! As of this review there are twelve holds on my library’s print copies of Splendors and Glooms and six holds on our two ebook editions! So much for lowered expectations. It is exceedingly rare to find an author who hits it out of the park, so to speak, every single time she writes. Ms. Schlitz has written six published works for children and not one has been anything but remarkable. As adept at fairy stories as fairytales, at straight biographies or melodramatic ghost stories, at long last we see what she can do with a Dickensian setting. Result: She does wonders. Wonders and splendors with just a hint of gloom. The sole downside is sitting and waiting for her next book. If it’s half as good as this one, it’ll be worth the wait.

On shelves now.

Source: Finished copy sent from publisher for review.

Like This? Then Try:

• The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne Valente

• The Lost Conspiracy by Frances Hardinge

• The Eyeball Collector by F.E. Higgins

• The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken

First Sentence: “The witch burned.”

Notes on the Cover: Hands down brilliant.  Bagram Ibatoulline (the artist behind it) spends so much time being sweet and meaningful that it’s almost a relief to watch him doing something adequately creepy.  Be sure to spot that wonderful skeleton marionette on the back cover.  Worth discovering, certainly.

I was also unaware of the British change to both the cover and the book’s very title:

Other Blog Reviews:

• The Book Smugglers
• slatebreakers
• Ciao Bella
• Book Nut

Professional Reviews:

• A star from Kirkus
• The New York Times
• The Wall Street Journal

Misc:

• This book appears on New York Public Library’s 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing 2012.

• Read a sample chapter here.

• What are it’s Newbery chances? Heavy Medals has an opinion on the matter.

Goblin Secrets
By William Alexander
Margaret K. McElderry Books (an imprint of Simon & Schuster)
$16.99
ISBN: 978-1-442434523
Ages 9-12
On shelves now

I think it is time to declare the birth of the clockwork children’s novel. If you have been watching the literary trends over the last decade or so, you will note that amongst adults there has been a real rise in interest in a form of pop culture labeled “Steampunk”. The general understanding is that as the 21st century grows increasingly reliant on electronics, there is a newfound interest in books/movies/video games/costumes (etc.) that incorporate steam, gears, and other accoutrements of the visual mechanical past. This is, I should note, almost exclusively an adult fascination. I have never encountered a single child who walked up to a reference desk and asked, “Do you have any more Steampunk?” That said, there’s no reason it shouldn’t work as a genre. The trouble comes when an author tries to shoehorn a Steampunk story into a fantasy mold. The best writers know that if you’re going to incorporate odd mechanical details, the best thing to do is to set up your own odd mechanical internal logic. I think that’s probably what I like best about William Alexander’s “Goblin Secrets”. It’s not the first story I’ve read about a boy joining a troupe of traveling performers. And it’s not the first middle grade Steampunk adventure I’ve come across. Yet there’s something definitely one-of-a-kind going on in this book. An originality that you only find once in a pure blue moon. And that’s worth reading, you betcha.

Rownie’s life hasn’t been worth much since the disappearance of his older brother Rowan. Living with “grandmother”, an old witch named Graba who holds a Fagan-like power over the orphans in her sway, Rownie runs various errands until one day he finds that goblins have come to his city of Zombay. They are conducting theatrical performances, an act forbidden to humans, so it’s as much a surprise to Rownie as to anyone when he joins their little troupe. Rownie is also still determined to track Rowan down, but that may mean using extraordinary means to escape from Graba’s all-knowing, all-seeing ways.

It’s little wonder that the book was nominated for a National Book Award when you take into account the writing. In terms of description, the book has a wonderful and well-developed sense of place. At one point this is what you read, “All roads to the docks ran downhill. They wound and switchbacked across a steep ravine wall, with Southside above and the River below. Some of these streets were so steep narrow that they had to be climbed rather than walked on. Stairs had been cut into the stone or built with driftwood logs lashed together over the precarious slope.” With a minimal amount of words you get a clear sense of the location, its look, its feel, its dangers, and perhaps its beauties as well.

The details found within this strange Steampunk world are delicious, and that is in the book’s favor. You hear about “small and cunning devices that did useless things beautifully.” From gears in mechanical glass eyes to the fact that a river is something that can be bargained with, there’s an internal logic at work here that is consistent, even if Alexander is going to leave the learning of these rules up to the reader with minimal help. For example, there is the small matter of hearts and their removal. To take out a heart is not a death sentence for a person, but it can leave them somewhat zombiefied (the city’s name “Zombay” could just be a coincidence or could not, depending on how you want to look at it). And goblins aren’t born but are changed humans. Why are they changed and for what reason? That’s a story for another day, but you’re willing to wait for an answer (if answer there ever is).

Exposition. It can be a death knoll in a book for kids. Done well it sucks the reader into an alternate world the like of which they may never have seen before. Done poorly they fall asleep three pages in and you’ve lost them forever. And done not at all? That’s a risk but done right it pays off in fine dividends. “Goblin Secrets” takes place in Zombay, a fact you find out five pages in. It’s a city that contains magic, a fact you find out on page three. There are goblins in this world (page twelve) but they didn’t start out as goblins (page . . . um . . .). Facts are doled out at a deliberate but unexpected pace in this book. There are no long paragraphs of explanation that tell you where you are and what to expect. It’s only by reading the story thoroughly that you learn that theater is forbidden, Rownie’s brother is missing, Graba is relentless (but not the only villain in the story), and masks are the book’s overriding theme. In the interest of brevity Alexander manages to avoid exposition with something resembling long years of practice. Little wonder that he’s published in multiple magazines and anthologies on the adult fantasy (not that kind) side of things. Many is the adult writer who switches to writing for children that dumbs down the narrative, giving too little respect to the young audience. I think Mr. Alexander’s gift here is that he respects his younger readers enough to grant them enough intelligence to follow along.

Alexander makes his own rules with this book, and not rules I’ve necessarily seen before. With that in mind, with as weird a setting as you have here, it can be a relief to run across characters you like and identify with. They act as little touchstones in a mad, crazy world. Rownie is particularly sympathetic right from the get-go. He has a missed beloved older brother, an independence that’s appealing, but he’s not a jerk or anything. Nor is he a walking blank slate that more interesting characters can use to their own ends. Rather, Rownie is the kind of character who keeps trying to talk himself into bravery. He does it when performing and he does it on his own (“Rownie tried to summon up the feeling that he was haunting the Southside Rail Station and that other sorts of haunting things should be afraid of him…”). That’s why Alexander’s use of masks and theater is so effective. If you have a protagonist who just needs a little push to reach his potential, what better way than through performance? On the flipside, the bad guys are nice, if perhaps a little two-dimensional. Graba is nothing so much as a clockwork Baba Yaga, mechanical chicken legs and all. By extension the Mayor is a good power hungry villain, if stock and staid. There is no big bad in this book quite worthy of the good folks they face down. Graba comes close, but she’s just your typical witch when all is said and done. A little gearish. A little creaky. But typically witchy, through and through.

By turns beautiful and original, it’s a testament to Alexander’s skills that the book clocks in at a mere 200-some odd pages. Usually worlds of this sort end up in books with five hundred or six hundred pages. The end result is that when a kid is looking for a good fantasy in a new world, they are inclined to be scared off by the thick tomes gathering dust on library shelves and instead will find friends in old classics like The Black Cauldron or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Add to that list William Alexander’s latest then. A smart piece of writing that conjures up a new world using a new method.

On shelves now.

Source: Galley sent from publisher for review.

Like This? Then Try:

• The Clockwork Three by Matthew Kirby

• The Nine Pound Hammer by John Claude Bemis

• Foundling (The Monster Blood Tattoo) by D.M. Cornish

Last Line: “His fingers twitched and his mouth watered, but he waited for his supper to cool.”

Notes on the Cover: The unfortunate hardcover will happily be replaced with a far more kid-friendly paperback.  As you can see, the previous incarnation showed a Frankenstein’s monster-esque goblin juggling.  Alas the shot made it look as if the lit torch in hand was impaling him.  It was a bit of odd CGI.  The new cover is a traditional illustration and show Rownie hiding from his possessed former bunkmates.  If I were to go with a good cover seen I might go with fighting the possessed masks, but I suspect they wanted to avoid the goblins entirely with this particular jacket.

Other Blog Reviews:

• A Chair, a Fireplace, and a Tea Cozy
• The Book Smugglers
• Fantasy Matters
• Book Nut
• Heavy Medal
• Becky’s Book Reviews

Professional Reviews:

• A star from Kirkus

Interviews:

• The Enchanted Inkpot
• Nerdy Book Club

Misc:

• Good news for fans.  The sequel, Ghoulish Song, is already scheduled to be released next year.  Happiness all around.

• Make one of the masks from the book.

Goblin Secrets
By William Alexander
Margaret K. McElderry Books (an imprint of Simon & Schuster)
$16.99
ISBN: 978-1-442434523
Ages 9-12
On shelves now

I think it is time to declare the birth of the clockwork children’s novel. If you have been watching the literary trends over the last decade or so, you will note that amongst adults there has been a real rise in interest in a form of pop culture labeled “Steampunk”. The general understanding is that as the 21st century grows increasingly reliant on electronics, there is a newfound interest in books/movies/video games/costumes (etc.) that incorporate steam, gears, and other accoutrements of the visual mechanical past. This is, I should note, almost exclusively an adult fascination. I have never encountered a single child who walked up to a reference desk and asked, “Do you have any more Steampunk?” That said, there’s no reason it shouldn’t work as a genre. The trouble comes when an author tries to shoehorn a Steampunk story into a fantasy mold. The best writers know that if you’re going to incorporate odd mechanical details, the best thing to do is to set up your own odd mechanical internal logic. I think that’s probably what I like best about William Alexander’s “Goblin Secrets”. It’s not the first story I’ve read about a boy joining a troupe of traveling performers. And it’s not the first middle grade Steampunk adventure I’ve come across. Yet there’s something definitely one-of-a-kind going on in this book. An originality that you only find once in a pure blue moon. And that’s worth reading, you betcha.

Rownie’s life hasn’t been worth much since the disappearance of his older brother Rowan. Living with “grandmother”, an old witch named Graba who holds a Fagan-like power over the orphans in her sway, Rownie runs various errands until one day he finds that goblins have come to his city of Zombay. They are conducting theatrical performances, an act forbidden to humans, so it’s as much a surprise to Rownie as to anyone when he joins their little troupe. Rownie is also still determined to track Rowan down, but that may mean using extraordinary means to escape from Graba’s all-knowing, all-seeing ways.

It’s little wonder that the book was nominated for a National Book Award when you take into account the writing. In terms of description, the book has a wonderful and well-developed sense of place. At one point this is what you read, “All roads to the docks ran downhill. They wound and switchbacked across a steep ravine wall, with Southside above and the River below. Some of these streets were so steep narrow that they had to be climbed rather than walked on. Stairs had been cut into the stone or built with driftwood logs lashed together over the precarious slope.” With a minimal amount of words you get a clear sense of the location, its look, its feel, its dangers, and perhaps its beauties as well.

The details found within this strange Steampunk world are delicious, and that is in the book’s favor. You hear about “small and cunning devices that did useless things beautifully.” From gears in mechanical glass eyes to the fact that a river is something that can be bargained with, there’s an internal logic at work here that is consistent, even if Alexander is going to leave the learning of these rules up to the reader with minimal help. For example, there is the small matter of hearts and their removal. To take out a heart is not a death sentence for a person, but it can leave them somewhat zombiefied (the city’s name “Zombay” could just be a coincidence or could not, depending on how you want to look at it). And goblins aren’t born but are changed humans. Why are they changed and for what reason? That’s a story for another day, but you’re willing to wait for an answer (if answer there ever is).

Exposition. It can be a death knoll in a book for kids. Done well it sucks the reader into an alternate world the like of which they may never have seen before. Done poorly they fall asleep three pages in and you’ve lost them forever. And done not at all? That’s a risk but done right it pays off in fine dividends. “Goblin Secrets” takes place in Zombay, a fact you find out five pages in. It’s a city that contains magic, a fact you find out on page three. There are goblins in this world (page twelve) but they didn’t start out as goblins (page . . . um . . .). Facts are doled out at a deliberate but unexpected pace in this book. There are no long paragraphs of explanation that tell you where you are and what to expect. It’s only by reading the story thoroughly that you learn that theater is forbidden, Rownie’s brother is missing, Graba is relentless (but not the only villain in the story), and masks are the book’s overriding theme. In the interest of brevity Alexander manages to avoid exposition with something resembling long years of practice. Little wonder that he’s published in multiple magazines and anthologies on the adult fantasy (not that kind) side of things. Many is the adult writer who switches to writing for children that dumbs down the narrative, giving too little respect to the young audience. I think Mr. Alexander’s gift here is that he respects his younger readers enough to grant them enough intelligence to follow along.

Alexander makes his own rules with this book, and not rules I’ve necessarily seen before. With that in mind, with as weird a setting as you have here, it can be a relief to run across characters you like and identify with. They act as little touchstones in a mad, crazy world. Rownie is particularly sympathetic right from the get-go. He has a missed beloved older brother, an independence that’s appealing, but he’s not a jerk or anything. Nor is he a walking blank slate that more interesting characters can use to their own ends. Rather, Rownie is the kind of character who keeps trying to talk himself into bravery. He does it when performing and he does it on his own (“Rownie tried to summon up the feeling that he was haunting the Southside Rail Station and that other sorts of haunting things should be afraid of him…”). That’s why Alexander’s use of masks and theater is so effective. If you have a protagonist who just needs a little push to reach his potential, what better way than through performance? On the flipside, the bad guys are nice, if perhaps a little two-dimensional. Graba is nothing so much as a clockwork Baba Yaga, mechanical chicken legs and all. By extension the Mayor is a good power hungry villain, if stock and staid. There is no big bad in this book quite worthy of the good folks they face down. Graba comes close, but she’s just your typical witch when all is said and done. A little gearish. A little creaky. But typically witchy, through and through.

By turns beautiful and original, it’s a testament to Alexander’s skills that the book clocks in at a mere 200-some odd pages. Usually worlds of this sort end up in books with five hundred or six hundred pages. The end result is that when a kid is looking for a good fantasy in a new world, they are inclined to be scared off by the thick tomes gathering dust on library shelves and instead will find friends in old classics like The Black Cauldron or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Add to that list William Alexander’s latest then. A smart piece of writing that conjures up a new world using a new method.

On shelves now.

Source: Galley sent from publisher for review.

Like This? Then Try:

• The Clockwork Three by Matthew Kirby

• The Nine Pound Hammer by John Claude Bemis

• Foundling (The Monster Blood Tattoo) by D.M. Cornish

Last Line: “His fingers twitched and his mouth watered, but he waited for his supper to cool.”

Notes on the Cover: The unfortunate hardcover will happily be replaced with a far more kid-friendly paperback.  As you can see, the previous incarnation showed a Frankenstein’s monster-esque goblin juggling.  Alas the shot made it look as if the lit torch in hand was impaling him.  It was a bit of odd CGI.  The new cover is a traditional illustration and show Rownie hiding from his possessed former bunkmates.  If I were to go with a good cover seen I might go with fighting the possessed masks, but I suspect they wanted to avoid the goblins entirely with this particular jacket.

Other Blog Reviews:

• A Chair, a Fireplace, and a Tea Cozy
• The Book Smugglers
• Fantasy Matters
• Book Nut
• Heavy Medal
• Becky’s Book Reviews

Professional Reviews:

• A star from Kirkus

Interviews:

• The Enchanted Inkpot
• Nerdy Book Club

Misc:

• Good news for fans.  The sequel, Ghoulish Song, is already scheduled to be released next year.  Happiness all around.

• Make one of the masks from the book.

All the Wrong Questions: “Who Could That Be at This Hour?”
By Lemony Snicket
Illustrated by Seth
Little, Brown and Company
$15.99
ISBN: 978-0-316-12308-2
Ages 9-12
On shelves October 24th

Last year I was running a bookgroup for kids, ages 9-12, when the subject of children’s books adapted into films came up. We talked about the relative success of Harry Potter, the bewildering movie that was City of Ember, and the gorgeous credit sequence for A Series of Unfortunate Events. Then one of the younger members, probably around ten years of age, turned to me and asked in all seriousness, “Do you think they’ll ever make a movie out of The Spiderwick Chronicles?” I was momentarily floored. It’s not often that kids will remind me that their memories of pop culture are limited to their own experiences, but once in a while it happens. This girl couldn’t remember back five years to that very film adaptation. And why should she? She was five then! So when I see a new Lemony Snicket series acting as a kind of companion to the aforementioned A Series of Unfortunate Events I wonder how it will play out. The original series was popular around the time of that Spiderwick movie. Does that mean that the new series will founder, or will it be so successful that it brings renewed interest to the previous, still in print and relatively popular, books? Personally, I haven’t a clue. All I know is that the latest Lemony Snicket series All the Wrong Questions is a work of clever references, skintight writing, and a deep sense of melancholy that mimics nothing else out there on the market for kids today. That’s a good thing.

To be a success in Snicket’s line of work it’s important to know how to ask the right questions. And this is a problem since Snicket finds it difficult doing precisely that. He was supposed to meet his contact in the city. Instead, he finds himself whisked away to the country to a dying town called Stain’d-by-the-Sea. Once a bustling harbor, the town’s water was removed leaving behind a creepy seaweed forest and an ink business that won’t be around much longer. With his incompetent mentor S. Theodora Markson he’s there to solve the mystery of a stolen statue. Never mind that the statue wasn’t stolen, its owners don’t care who has it, and their client isn’t even a real person. When Snicket finds a girl looking for her father and learns the name of the insidious Hangfire things start to get interesting, not to mention dangerous. Can multiple mysteries be solved even if you keep following the wrong paths? Snicket’s about to find out.

What is more dangerous: Evil or stupidity? It’s a trick question since there’s nothing “or” about it. If there’s one lesson to be gleaned from the Snicket universe, it is that while evil is undesirable, stupidity is downright damaging. Many is the Series of Unfortunate Events book that would show clear as crystal that while stupid and ignorant people may not necessarily be evil in and of themselves, they do more to aid in evil than any routine bad guy ever could hope for. In All the Wrong Questions the adults in charge are still inane, but at least the kids have a bit of autonomy from them. Our hero, the young Snicket, is still omnipotent to a certain degree, and only cares to share personal information with the reader when the plot requires that he do so. And because the book is a mystery, he’s almost required to move about at will. He just happens to be moving between stupid people much of the time.

Of course the trouble with having Lemony himself as your protagonist is that the guy is infamous for never giving you good news. If adult Snicket is the kind of guy who warns off readers (in a voice that I’ve always connected to Ben Stein) because of his own sad worldview, reading this series means that we are going to see failure at work. We saw failure at work with the Baudelaires but with them it was always the fault of the universe using them as punching bags more than their own inadequacies. That means that the author’s trick with this book is to keep it from disintegrating into depression even as its hero ultimately screws up (yet seems to be doing the right thing the whole time). How do you pull this dichotomy off? Humor. Thank god for humor. Because like other post-modern children’s mysteries (Mac Barnett’s The Brixton Brothers, most notably) being funny is the key to simultaneously referencing old mystery tropes while commenting on them.

I always had a certain amount of difficulty figuring out how exactly to describe A Series of Unfortunate Events. The term “Gothic” just didn’t quite cut it. PoMo Gothic, maybe. Or Meta-Gothic. Dunno. The All the Wrong Questions series makes it much easier on me. This book is noir. Noiry noir. Noiry noirish noirable noir. As if to confirm this the author drops in names like Dashiell and Mitchum, which like all of Snicket’s jokes will fly over the heads of all the child readers and 82.5% of the adult readers as well (I kept a tally for a while of the references I knew that I myself was not getting, then just sort of stopped after a while). There are dames, or at least the 12-year-old equivalent of dames. There are Girl Fridays. There are mistaken identities and creepy abandoned buildings. There are also butlers who do things, but that’s more of a drawing room murder mystery genre trope, so we’re going to disregard it here.

Let us talk Seth. The man comes to fill the shoes left by Brett Helquist. He’s a clever choice since there is nothing even slightly Helquistian to this comic legend. This is, to the best of my knowledge Seth’s first work for children, though there may well be some obscure Canadian work of juvenilia in his past that I’ve missed. His work on the cover is remarkable in and of itself, but in the book he works primarily in chapter headings and the occasional full-page layout. The author must have relayed to Mr. Seth what images to do sometimes because there is a picture at the beginning and a picture at the end that continue the story above and beyond the written portions. As for the spreads inside, Seth does an admirable job of ever concealing young Snicket’s face. He also lends a funny lightness to the proceedings, not something I would have expected walking into the novel.

There is a passage in the book where Snicket reflects on his life that just kills me. It comes a quarter of the way through the novel and is the clearest indication to the reader that the action in this novel happened a long time ago. It goes on for a while until finally ending with, “Stretched out in front of me was my time as an adult, and then a skeleton, and then nothing except perhaps a few books on a few shelves.” Put another way, this isn’t your average mystery novel for kids. It’s not even your average Lemony Snicket novel. It is what it is, the first part in a new series containing a familiar character that need not be previously known to readers. I have no idea if kids will gravitate towards it, but if you’ve a hankering to recommend a beautifully written if uncommon mystery to kids that ask for that sort of thing (and they do, man, they do) hand this over. Worse case scenario, they don’t like it. Best case scenario it blows their little minds. Blew mine anyway. Good stuff.

On shelves October 24th

Source: Final copy sent from publisher for review.

Like This? Then Try:

• The Brixton Brothers: The Case of the Case of Mistaken Identity by Mac Barnett

• Griff Carver: Hallway Patrol by Jim Krieg

• The Third Stall by Chris Rylander

Notes on the Cover: Recall if you will Mr. Snicket’s The Beatrice Letters. Was a book, or whatever the heck that was, ever more frustrating and enjoyable all at once? If there are any similarities to that cluster of documents and this book it lies in Seth’s art. I dare say the pictures you’ll see on this jacket may show scenes we are never privy to in the book itself. Note the shadow of the screaming woman. We know what that picture leads to, but we never see it in the book itself. Note now the spine. There’s a gorgeous little call number there that will undoubtedly get covered up by real call numbers in libraries throughout this great nation (oh, irony). For the record it reads, “LS ATWQ ?1” which makes sense when you think about it. But the thing that really made me give a deep sigh of contentment was under the jacket entirely. Look at the actual cover of the book here. Look at the spine and the cover. If I were to take this book and shelve it without its jacket next to my Nero Wolfe titles, and it would fit in like a dream.

Professional Reviews: Kirkus

Misc: Not to disparage the fine work of the Australian and New Zealand publishers of this book, but when you’ve hit gold why keep digging? Put another way, when handed the world’s most beautiful book jacket, why replace it with this?

A Boy and a Bear in a Boat
By Dave Shelton
$16.99
ISBN: 978-0-385-75248-0
Ages 9 and up
On shelves now

First off, I like it.

I think it’s important to make that note right upfront. Particularly since I’m probably going to break out terms like “bizarre”, “peculiar”, “odd”, “weird”, and “eerily strange” (or “strangely eerie” depending on my mood) when describing this book. I will undoubtedly be simultaneously inclined to warn you off of the whole enterprise while luring you in with terms like “artful writing” and “deft turns of phrase”. I think that it is safe to say that A Boy and a Bear in a Boat is a study in contrasts. A uniquely British import with an internal logic so fixed and solid that you’re willing to go along with it, even when it goes against everything you’ve come to expect in juvenile fiction. It’s Waiting for Godot for kids. Life of Pi for the grade school set. A bit of big picture fiction that dares to challenge reader expectations, even if that reader happens to be nine. It’s brilliant and flawed and pretty much the most interesting chapter book fare for children you’ll read this year, even when it strikes you as dull. One thing’s for certain. There is nothing else quite like it on your library or bookstores shelves.

“Will it take long?” “A little while.” A boy steps into a boat captained by a rather large bear. His destination? The other side. At first all appears to be going well. The sea is calm and the sky clear. The boy even takes a nap, only to wake up to find that he has not reached his destination after all. After a couple days pass it seems fairly clear that the bear has gotten the two of them hopelessly lost. Their survival on the high seas takes the form of many small adventures, from teatime to sea monsters, and everything in-between. In the end, the boy and the bear reach a kind of peace and a desire to keep going, no matter what.

Big picture fiction is what I called this book earlier and I stand by that phrase. Once in a great while you’ll encounter a novel for children that selects the road less taken, for better or for worse. These tend to be books that try to make child readers really sit down and think. They also tend to be imports. Nothing against American writers or publishers, but the market these days is not exactly inclined to give much space to the more speculative and philosophical titles out there. Not today anyway. In the era of Russell Hoban’s The Mouse and His Child I’m certain an American writer could have gotten away with A Boy and a Bear in a Boat easy peasy. These days, not so much. Unless you are dealing with an independent publisher, most big publishers would much rather put out surefire hits than titles where two nameless characters go nowhere for pages on end.

It’s the journey, not the destination that counts. Now try telling that to an eight-year-old when you’ve decided to take the scenic route on any trip. I’ll tell you true that I would have hated this book as a child. But then, I was a pretty unimaginative person. I have distinct memories of reaching the end of Stuart Little only to be appalled and disgusted with its ending. And yes, I am about to discuss the ending of A Boy and a Bear in a Boat so consider this your spoiler alert warning, such as it is. I think Shelton’s intent here is to make the book so engaging and the small adventures so enticing that kids will root less for the characters to find their way and more for them to continue having adventures. Their quixotic quest, however, may make the mistake of starring two characters so loveable that in spite of the enjoyment you derive from watching them on the page, your desire to see them safe and sound trumps all. And when that happens, expect some serious middle grade reader fury to manifest itself when they reach the last page.

So why stick with it at all? Well it’s hard to put in so many words but I suspect it has something to do with the character development. Here you have a boy and a bear, and we don’t find out much of anything about them, not even their names. Where’s the boy going and does he have a family waiting for him? No idea. Why is the bear the captain of his boat and who was the “Harriet” he named it after? Not explained. Actually, this is sort of a feat of writing in and of itself. Try writing a 294-page story without delving into a character’s background even once. Now at the same time, find ways to really highlight what makes these two people tick anyway. Begin their meeting with a low-level animosity that climbs as things go from bad to worse. Now build a believable friendship between them and make it so that you’re rooting for them both. Go boy! Go bear! Find that land! Find it, I say!

And the writing . . . oh the writing. It excels, it soars, it flies. Most important of all, it’s funny. Shelton has a mad genius for squeezing large drops of humor out of what would otherwise be pretty bleak fare. Starving to death on the high seas is nothing to laugh at, but you’d think otherwise when you read some of the man’s lines. For example, when the boy finds some biscuits on a boat the book says, “It was very hard and dry and tasted almost of nothing at all, only not as nice.” There are also moments so sad and funny all at once that you end up hooting rather loudly as you read the book on your morning subway ride. The part where the bear has constructed a rather perfect raft with which to save himself and the boy, then proceeds to lose it all thanks to a stiff gust is this pitch perfect moment of clarity that I would hold up as one of the finest funniest bits of humor writing for kids this year.

I was admittedly a little surprised to find that the illustrations were by Shelton himself. Apologies to Mr. Shelton but when I think of long books written by great artists I think of works of nonfiction (We Are the Ship), illustrated novels that rely as much on visual storytelling as narrative (Wonderstruck), or cute animal tales (A Nest for Celeste). What I do not think of is grade school ennui. Shelton’s illustrations, by the way, are a godsend in a book such as this. You find yourself relying on them to a certain extent. Sequences that feature bored characters in books are always in danger of boring the readership as well. Shelton’s pictures, however, keep eyeballs wide open. They’re just the right combination of cartoonish and classic. And for the record I was hugely impressed with a faux Eastern European comic book sequence that takes place after the boy finds an impossible to decipher comic under his seat, left there by a previous passenger. That two-page spread is worth the price of admission alone.

One librarian of my acquaintance put it far better than I ever could when she said that “the ending is both perfect and slightly infuriating.” You may as well say the same for the book itself. If the book is some kind of allegory then it’s pushing its lesson so lightly you won’t be disturbed in the slightest. To put it another way, this is the book that a decade from now college freshmen will hand prospective mates saying (somewhat untruthfully), “This was my favorite book as a kid,” so as to test their lovers’ resolve. Not the worst fate a book ever suffered. If you wish to feel the kind of frustration that ages like fine wine, here is the answer to your prayers. Guaranteed to, at the very least, put a kink in your brain.

For ages 9-12.

Source: Copy borrowed from fellow librarian for review.

Like This? Then Try:

• Stuart Little by E.B. White

• The Book of Everything by Guus Kuijer

• The Swan’s Child by Sjoerd Kuyper

• The Mouse and His Child by Russell Hoban

Other Blog Reviews:

• Library Mice
• Bookwitch

Professional Reviews:

• The Guardian
• Kirkus

Notes on the Cover: To say that the American version ramps up the action is accurate. The British jacket was more in keeping with the tone of the book itself.

With a jacket like that you cannot say the readership wasn’t warned.

Video:

Finally, here’s Mr. Shelton himself reading aloud from his book.

Liar & Spy
By Rebecca Stead
$15.99
ISBN: 978-0-385-73743-2
Ages 9-12
On shelves now.

Rebecca Stead is the M. Night Shyamalan of children’s literature, and I mean that in a good Sixth Sense way, not a lame The Happening one. It’s funny, but when I try to compare her other authors I find myself tongue-tied. Who else spends as much time on setting up and knocking down expectations in such a surefire manner? Now Ms. Stead has created the most dreaded of all books: The one you write after you’ve won a major award. Which is to say, she won a Newbery Medal for When You Reach Me and now comes her next book Liar & Spy. Like all beloved authors who don’t follow up their hits with sequels, Ms. Stead is contending with some critics who expected more science fiction. Instead, what they’re getting is a jolt of realistic fiction housed in a story that feels like nothing so much as Rear Window meets Harriet the Spy. Though opinions on it vary widely, in the end I think it’s safe to call this a fun novel with a secret twist and a strong, good heart. Who could ask for anything more?

Don’t call him Gorgeous. Georges has had to live with his uniquely spelled name all his life (gee THANKS, namesake Georges Seurat) and it’s never been anything but a pain. You know what else is a pain? Moving from your awesome home where you had a loft made out of a real fire escape to an apartment with an unemployed dad and an absentee albeit loving mom. When Georges meets the similarly oddly named kid Safer in the new apartment building he becomes enmeshed in the boy’s spy club. Is there someone up to no good in the complex? How far will the boys go to learn the truth? As things escalate and George finds himself facing fears he didn’t even know he could have, he discovers that everything in his life boils down to this question: when it comes to his relationship with Safer, who really is the liar and who really is the spy?

If a book has a twist to its ending but you don’t know that a twist will be coming in the first place, is it a spoiler to mention the fact in a review? I’m counting on the answer to that question to be no since I’d like to talk about the twist a tad. As an adult reader of a children’s book text I did pick up on the fact that throughout the book adults kept looking at Georges in a concerned way. I think it’s fair to say that an intelligent kid with a good eye for detail might also notice as well. Would they think it weird that these looks aren’t explained or would they just write it off as the author’s literary fancy? I haven’t a clue. All I really know at this point is that for probably 96% of the child readership of this book, the ending is going to come flying at them from out of nowhere. In all likelihood.

I’ve had a lot of debates with adults about this novel and it’s funny how diverse the opinions of it range. Some folks think it’s a natural continuation of When You Reach Me. Others take issue with Stead’s use of geography or pacing. But the sticking point that comes up the most when people discuss this book is the fact that Georges is a boy. For a some readers, it isn’t until a good chunk of the story has passed that they suddenly realize that the voice they’ve been hearing is a boy’s voice and not a girl’s. For some, the shock is too much and they deem the speaker to be an inauthentic take on how guys talk. Stead is the mother of two boys, as I recall, so they are not (to cop a phrase) “unknown quantities” to her. Anyway, for my part this was not the problem that it’s proved to be for some readers. I was more concerned about the nature of the taste test. In this book Georges has a science class where a taste-related test will determine whether or not he’s an outcast for good. I loved how the test fit in within the context of the greater story. What I couldn’t quite feel was Georges’ dread of this test. It’s described in such a blasé matter-of-fact way early on that when we are told that he worries about the test it’s just that. We’re told how he feels. We don’t feel how he feels. It’s a fine line.

That said, when it comes right down to it Stead’s writing is stellar. She fills the book with these little insights and conjectures that could only come from a unique brain. I love it when kids speculate about weird things in books, so Georges’ thoughts about his dad as a boy are just great, particularly when he says, “I wonder whether Dad and I would have been friends, or if he would have been friends with Dallas Llewellyn, or Carter Dixon, or what. It’s kind of a bummer to think your own dad might have been someone who called you Gorgeous.” Similarly I was very fond of the characters in this book. Safer was a perfect noir hero, complete with backstory and shady intentions. And seriously, how can you resist a kid that keeps insisting that he’s drinking coffee from his flask? Minor characters are just as interesting too. Bob English, a classmate of Georges, is a redeemed class freak along the lines of Dwight from The Strange Case of Origami Yoda. I’m a sucker for that kind of creation.

Unlike her previous novel When You Reach Me, Liar & Spy is set firmly in the 21st century. In an era of helicopter parenting, this book got me to wonder whether or not the economic downturn would create an abundance of latchkey children with parents who work more and more jobs to make ends meet. If so, we may see more characters like Georges free to wander the streets while their parental units exist in absence. Something to chew on. Regardless, the book has engendered a lot of discussion and undoubtedly folks will continue to talk about it and debate it for years to come. The best way to summarize it? It’s about an unreliable narrator who meets an unreliable narrator. It’s also fun. And that, really, is all you need to say about that.

On shelves now.

First Sentence: “There’s this totally false map of the human tongue.”

Source: Galley borrowed from friend for review.

Like This?  Then Try:

• Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh

• The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner

• Dani Noir by Nova Ren Suma

Other Blog Reviews:

• crunchings & munchings
• The Book Smugglers
• There’s a Book
• Random Musings of a Bibliophile
• Confessions of a Bibliovore
• Ms. Yingling Reads

Professional Reviews:

• The New York Times
• A star from Kirkus
• A star from Publishers Weekly

Interviews:

• Kirkus
• GeekMom

Video:

And here’s a fun 60-Second Recap video as well.

Robin Hood
By David Calcutt
Illustrated by Grahame Baker-Smith
Barefoot Books
$12.99
ISBN 978-1-84686-799-6
Ages 6 and up
On shelves October 1st

Robin Hood has, for years now, been the bane of my existence. And yes, I’m well aware that this statement makes me sound like nothing so much as the Sheriff of Nottingham. That doesn’t make it any less true. There I’d be, sitting merrily at my reference desk in the children’s room of the library when someone, adult or child, would wander up and ask “Where’s your Robin Hood?”. Then I’d be stuck. Stuck explaining that unless you wanted some long extended version by Howard Pyle you were pretty much up a tree. Robin Hood related picture books, easy readers, or early chapter books are, were, and evermore shall be in short supply. Into this gaping lack comes one of the finest editions ever to grace a library’s shelves. With slam bang writing, all the Robin Hood related hits (The Friar! Maid Marian! Little John!) are included and I think it safe to say that any library or literary collection worth its salt would be well advised to grab this ultimate Robin Hood tome forthwith if not sooner. At long last we’ve a RH we can all enjoy.

You say you think you know the story of Robin Hood? Sure you may have some vague particulars in mind, but sit ye back and hear the tale of a man who fought the odds. Targeted by the Sheriff of Nottingham’s corrupt foresters, the bloke known as Robin Hood quickly became an outlaw, living in the woods, recruiting like-minded fellows to be part of his band. Chapter by chapter we learn of his adventures with Little John, Friar Tuck, Alan-a-Dale, and even Maid Marian. Tales like “Robin and the Widow” and “The Golden Arrow” lead to a climax with the King’s men. Robin and friends escape but “Robin’s Last Battle” shows how the hero of the woodland met his final end. Backmatter includes a note on research and a complete Bibliography with many useful websites.

As I mentioned earlier, for all his cultural cache why is the man in green as elusive in children’s literature as, say, King Arthur (a different rant for a different day)? The trick may lie in the source material. Which is to say, there isn’t any. When parents would ask me for “the original Robin Hood” book for their kids, I am without resources. The closest thing I can come up with would be an edition illustrated by N.C. Wyeth. Part of the problem lies in the story itself. To make an ultimate Robin Hood book you’d have to do a crazy amount of research into old sources. That’s where Calcutt really shines. Explaining that the first Robin Hood ballads weren’t even collected until the 19th century, Calcutt explains in the Research and Bibliography section of the book that his stories come from an amalgamation of several sources. Combining them expertly alongside ballads translated into modern English the final product feels like a Robin Hood designed to please purists and those of us raised on Hollywood’s vision of the man alike.

That’s the upside. There is a downside to faithful renditions, though. After all, it’s not as if the original stories were written or told with young readers in mind. As such there are some distinctly amoral moments here and there in old Robin Hood’s wanderings. The book itself begins with a story called “Robin Hood Becomes an Outlaw” where Robin’s surefire shooting skills systematically pick off and kill a whole slew of men from a tree. Similarly later in the book we learn that the Merry Men are in trouble with the law because they found some dozing members of the king’s guard and kinda sorta slaughtered them in their sleep to get their clothes. There’s something oddly refreshing about a story for kids that isn’t sanitized within an inch of its life, but readers would be well-advised to know beforehand that there’s a fair share of corpses strewn about the pages before you get to the end. I had the distinct impression as I read this book that Calcutt was doing his darndest to play it both ways too. For example, a storyline where Robin and his men decide to rob an abbot on some pretty shaky grounds is quickly justified by going into the abbot’s head and showing that he’s a greedy guts who has it coming. Parents may raise an eyebrow on some of the morality here but kids won’t notice a thing.

Granted the book is not a picture book, so itty bitties trying to get their Robin Hood fixes may be out of luck. On the other hand, it’s not as if this edition lacks for illustrations. Artist Grahame Baker-Smith’s style incorporates a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Says the book, “The artwork was painted in acrylic, painted in watercolor, and drawn in pen and ink, then combined, blended and composed in Photoshop.”. The end result is a book with art on almost every page. It’s full and lush and green with the occasional double page spread for a big scene, like the fight between Robin and Little John. There is a mild CGI flavor to the proceedings but it doesn’t overwhelm the senses.

If it’s any additional incentive, it can’t hurt matters any that the World Wide Robin Hood Society placed their own seal of approval on this book saying, “A twenty-first-century classic where author and artist have woven their individual magic to breathe new life into the popular story of the world’s most famous outlaw.” Interestingly, though the king is mentioned in the book we never hear his name. So while this is undoubtedly the most complete Robin Hood you’ll encounter, there will still be the occasional naysayer. Fortunately for all of us they’ll be few and far between. Calcutt and Baker-Smith have met a need and a gap in library collections nation, nay, worldwide. A lovely object, a rip-roaring adventure tale, and fun to its core. A necessary purchase.

On shelves October 1st.

Source: Advanced readers galley sent from publisher for review.

Professional Reviews: A star from Kirkus.

Misc: Get a glimpse behind-the-scenes into the book and the art with this Barefoot Books blog post.

Freaky Fast Frankie Joe
By Lutricia Clifton
Holiday House
$16.95
ISBN: 978-0-8234-2367-5
Ages 9-12
On shelves now

Realistic fiction for kids has more baggage than other fictional genres for that age group. Fantasies and comedies and science fiction get to rely on the extraordinary to weave their tales. Historical fiction, meanwhile, has the nice veil of history in place to aid the writer in making their point. What does realistic fiction have? Reality. Cold, cruel, dead dogs and incurable disease-ridden reality. When people think of middle grade realistic fiction their minds sometimes go to deeply depressing works where horrible things happen to perfectly nice kids. Blame schools that equate misery with learning for that crime. My favorite works of realistic fiction move beyond obvious metaphors and big honking deaths to make their points in subtler, more amusing ways. No one’s going to necessarily accuse Lutricia Clifton’s Freaky Fast Frankie Joe of being a laugh riot, admitted. But with its appealing hero, recognizable cast of characters and strong plot this is one subtle little novel that wins you over before you even realized you needed convincing. Consider discovering it.

Here’s a basic rule of thumb. Anytime you run into four boys named Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, odds are you’re going to find them less than saintly individuals. That’s bad. What’s worse is if you suddenly discover you’re their big brother. Frankie Joe always led a life that he liked. He had lots of folks in the trailer park to watch over him and a mom that’s a lot more fun than the ones that make their kids go to school every day. Everything was just ducky until she went and got herself arrested. Now Frankie Joe’s father, a guy he’s never even met, appears out of the blue and takes the boy to middle-of-nowhere Plainview, Illinois. The deal is that Frankie Joe will stay there for the ten months his mom’s in the hoosegow, but ten months is too long for this boy. Not only are his newfound younger brothers a bother (particularly alpha male Matt) but his father’s some kind of stickler for self-improvement. That’s when a brilliant idea occurs. Frankie Joe’s fast on a bike. Really fast. Freaky fast. What if he started a delivery service and earned the money he needed to buy the stuff he’d use to get back to the old trailer park to wait out his mom? It’s a crazy plan but he’s sure it’ll work. That is, if he can just harden his heart to Plainview and the people who are in it.

Foster boys of the The Great Gilly Hopkins ilk are, as far as I can ascertain, less common than foster girls in middle grade literature. For every Frankie Joe you’ll find a dozen Home, and Other Big, Fat Lies or The Road to Paris titles. Why is it that foster girls are appealing but foster boys aren’t? To be perfectly frank, Frankie Joe isn’t really a foster kid either. He has a loving father and new family just sitting there waiting for him. The kind of situation many a kid would kill for . .

Summer of the Gypsy Moths
By Sara Pennypacker
Balzer & Bray (an imprint of Harper Collins)
$15.99
ISBN: 978-0-06-196420-6
Ages 9-12
On shelves now

Spoiler Alert – I am giving away every little detail about this book in this review. You have been warned.

As a librarian I’m always on the lookout for good middle grade books I can booktalk to kids. Often you don’t need an exciting cover or title to sell a book to kids. Heck, sometimes you don’t even need to show the book at all. Yet in the case of Sara Pennypacker’s debut middle grade novel Summer of the Gypsy Moths I fully intend to show the cover off. There you see two happy girls on a seashore on a beautiful summer’s day. What could be more idyllic? I’ll show the kids the cover then start right off with, “Doesn’t it look sweet? Yeah. So this is a book about two girls who bury a corpse in their backyard by themselves and don’t tell anyone about it.” BLAMMO! Instant interest. Never mind that the book really is a heartfelt and meaningful story or that the writing is some of the finest you will encounter this year. Dead bodies = interested readers, and if I have to sell it with a tawdry pitch then I am bloody selling it with a tawdry pitch and the devil take the details. Shh! Don’t tell them it’s of outstanding literary quality as well!

Convinced that her free floating mother will return to her someday soon, Stella lives with her Great-aunt Louise and Louise’s foster kid Angel. The situation is tenable if not entirely comfortable. If Stella is neat to the point of fault then Angel’s her 180-degree opposite. They’re like oil and water, those two. That’s why when Louise ups and dies on the girls they’re surprised to find themselves reluctant allies in a kind of crazy scheme. Neither one of them wants to get caught up in the foster care system so maybe that’s why they end up burying Louise in the backyard, running her summer cottages like nothing’s wrong. They can’t keep it up forever, but in the process of working together the two find themselves growing closer, coming to understand where they’re both coming from.

I always knew Pennypacker could write, of course. She cut her teeth on the early chapter book market (Clementine, etc.), which, besides easy books, can often be the most difficult books to write for children. The woman really mastered the form, managing with as few words as possible to drive home some concrete emotions and feelings. In Summer of the Gypsy Moths she ups the proverbial ante, so to speak. Now that she has far more space to play with, Pennypacker takes her time. She draws Stella and Angel into a realistically caring relationship with one another that overcomes their earlier animosity. By the end of the story you understand that they really do like one another, differences of opinion and personality aside.

Then there’s the writing itself. First and foremost, Pennypacker knows how to write some stellar lines. Things like, “Angel stared at me, looking like she was caught between snarling and fainting.” She’s also ample with the humor, as when Stella goes to school after the incident and reports, “Nobody seemed to notice the big sign I felt sure I wore, the one th

Three Times Lucky
By Sheila Turnage
Dial (an imprint of Penguin)
$16.99
ISBN: 978-0-8037-3670-2
Ages 9-12
On shelves May 10th

The Southern Girl Novel. It’s pretty much a genre in and of itself in the children’s literary world. Some years produce more of them than others but they all tend to follow the same format. Sleepy town plus spunky girl equals mild hijinks, kooky townspeople, self-awakening, etc. After a while they all start to blend together, their details merging and meshing and utterly impossible to separate. I’m just mentioning all this as a kind of preface to Three Times Lucky. Sure, you can slap a Gilbert Ford cover on anything these days and it’ll look good. It’s how the insides taste that counts. And brother, the one thing I can say with certainty about Three Times Lucky is that you will never, but ever, mistake it for another book. We’ve got murder. We’ve got careening racecars. We’ve got drunken louts and amnesia and wigs and karate and all sorts of good stuff rolled up in one neat little package. I’ve read a lot of mysteries for kids this year and truth be told? This one’s my favorite, hands down.

It was just bad timing when you get right down to it. Dale just wanted to borrow Mr. Jesse’s boat for a little fishing and his best friend Mo LoBeau would have accompanied him if she hadn’t been working the town’s only café while her two guardians (the elegant Miss Lana and the amnesia-stricken Colonel) were unavailable. Then Mr. Jesse offered a reward for the boat, and that seemed worth taking advantage of. That was before he ended up dead. Caught inadvertently in the middle of a murder mystery, Mo decides to help solve the crime, hopefully without making Detective Joe Starr too angry in the process.

A good first page is worth its weight in gold in a children’s novel. I always tell the kids in my bookgroup to closely examine the first pages of any book they pick up. That’s where the author is going to clue you in and give you a hint of how splendid their writing skills are. Heck, it’s the whole reason I picked up this book to read in the first place. I had finished my other book and I needed something to read on the way home from work. Deciding amongst a bunch o’ books, I skimmed the first page and was pretty much hooked by the time I got to the bottom. It was this sentence that clinched it: “Dale sleeps with his window up in summer partly because he likes to hear the tree frogs and crickets, but mostly because his daddy’s too sorry to bring home any air-conditioning.” Aside from the character development, I’m just in awe of the use of that term “too sorry” which sets this book so squarely in North Caroline that nothing could dig it out.

Turnage’s writing just sings on the page. Naturally I had to see what else she’d created and the answer was a stunner. Mostly she’s done standard travel guides to places like North Carolina (no surprise) and some haunted inns. The kicker was her picture book Trout the Magnificent. It was her only other book for kids so I checked to see if my library had a copy. We most certainly do . . . from 1984. To my amazement, Ms. Turnage has waited a whopping twenty-eight years to write her next book. The crazy thing? It was worth the wait. I mean, I just started dog-earring all the pa

The One and Only Ivan
By Katherine Applegate
Illustrated by Patricia Castelao
Harper Collins
$16.99
ISBN: 9780-06-199225-4
Ages 9-12
On shelves now

All right, the topic is Famous Ape Books of Children’s Literature. And . . . go. Care to name any? Well there’s Curious George, of course (often mistakenly called a monkey in spite of his lack of tail). He’s the most famous but after that it gets harder. Eva by Peter Dickinson might count (also a chimp). Or a book like Hurt Go Happy by Ginny Rorby (chimp). Gorillas appear to be much rarer, which is funny when you consider it. I would think an animal as big and impressive as a gorilla would be a no brainer children’s book hero. As it happens, Ivan of The One and Only Ivan is a rarity, and not just because his story covers ground that few other books have (with the exception of the odd Good Night Gorilla). Katherine Applegate’s title is a cry for animal rights that works on its reader in slow subtle steps. You will find no screeds or speeches or long lengthy lamentations. Instead, it’s just a gorilla living what life he can, until the day he can stay silent no longer. Thanks to its restraint the book ends up being a gem. One of the best of the year, no doubt.

Basically what we have here is Charlotte’s Web if you took that tiny spider and replaced her with a 300-pound gorilla. Which, to be frank, would normally bode badly for said gorilla. And certainly badly is how Ivan, the titular hero of this tale, bodes when you consider that he is trapped in an off-highway mall circus. Ivan’s never questioned his fate seriously, considering that he’s been there for twenty-seven years. Then one day Mack, the owner of the mall, decides that the only way to drum up more business will be to buy a new resident. There’s already Ivan and Stella, the elephant with an injured foot that doesn’t seem to be getting better. To this mix comes Ruby, a baby elephant not long captured from her home in the wild. Thanks to Ruby, Ivan sees that this is no place for a baby of any sort and he must use all his brains and intelligence to find a way to save not just her but himself as well.

It is the temptation of every author, bad or good, to simplify ethics when they write for kids. Bad guys are bad, good guys are good, and never the twain shall meet. This is particularly true of animal abuse stories. After all, who wants to go about digging up a heart of gold in a character that kicks puppies? Yet the best books for kids are often the ones that allow for at least a glimpse of the human inside the villain. It’s the reason Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s 6 Comments on Review of the Day: The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate, last added: 3/7/2012