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Planting the Trees of Kenya: The Story of Wangari Maathai
by Claire A. Nivola
(Frances Foster Books; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008)

 
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• So the big news this week was that a writer at Slate decided that now was an ideal time to take a potshot at adults reading young adult books.  And, as you might expect, everyone got quite hot under the collar about it.  To arms!  To arms!  Considering that this sort of thing happens pretty much every time a new YA book hits the mainstream I wasn’t quite as upset as some.  Honestly, I thought Roger Sutton’s piece Why Do We Even Call It YA Anymore? was much more along my own thinking.  I could not help but enjoy Marjorie Ingall’s response as well.

• It’s one of those stories that’s just so crazy you don’t quite believe it at first.  So about a year ago I attending a lovely dinner for Stephan Pastis, author of the book Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made (as well as the other Timmy books that would follow).  Stephan was one of those fellows just filled to the brim with stories.  And, as luck would have it, his stories were about syndicated cartoonists; one of my favorite things in the world to talk about!  I heard him wax eloquent on the subject of Gary Trudeau, Berkeley Breathed, you name it.  He even had ties to Charles Schulz (a fact that served me well when I interviewed Sparky’s wife Jean).  But when I dared to ask if he’d ever met the elusive Gary Larson or Bill Watterson (of Far Side and Calvin & Hobbes fame respectively) he confessed he had not, though Watterson had once sent him a nice note about one of his comics.  Well bust my buttons, but recently Pastis got a lot more out of Watterson than a mere note.  He got three illustrated comic strips!  Read this post to learn how he did it and why this is as extraordinary a fact as it is.  Wowza!

• I was very sad to hear about the recent death of legendary children’s book editor Frances Foster.  Read this remarkable interview with her from Horn Book, conducted by Leonard Marcus to get a sense of the woman we just lost.  PW provided a very nice obituary for her here.

• Essentially, this is kind of a real world case of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, but with a dark dark twist.

• The voting may be over, but I can’t help but love the collection of different Penguin Random House logos that dared to combine the publishing behemoth.  My personal favorite?  Right here:

• I’ve oohed and cooed to you about the fact that Shaun Tan’s rather brilliant picture book Rules of Summer has an accompanying app with music by the amazing and fantastic Sxip Shirey.  However, when I mentioned this fact before the app was not available for purchase.  Now it is.  Go get that thing then.  You can even hear a selection of Sxip’s music for it here.

• Speaking of Rules of Summer, did you see Travis Jonker’s predictions of what he thinks will win the New York Times Best Illustrated Awards?  Sort of a brilliant list to predict (and I think he’s completely and utterly dead on with his selection).

• Brain Pickings recently featured a selection of photographs of fictional meals from your favorite books.  The photos are from the book Fictitious Dishes: An Album of Literature’s Most Memorable Meals.  Though not strictly limited to children’s literature, it contains a handful of tasty treats worth noting.  Be sure to check out the meals of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Secret Garden, Heidi, and a Chicken Soup With Rice that will knock your socks off.

• Just a quick shout out to my fellow metropolitan librarian Rita Meade who just sold her first children’s book.  Go, Rita, go go go!

• Lindgren wins Lindgren! And around and around it goes.

• One minute he’s winning a Tony.  The next minute he’s turning The Dangerous Book for Boys into a television show.  Wait . . . say what now?

• Did you guys happen to see Grace Lin’s rather remarkably good Cheat Sheet for Selling Diversity?  Selling, heck.  This should be disseminated into all the MLIS programs in the States.  Future children’s librarians should be memorizing it by heart.  THIS is how you handsell to a kiddo or a parent, guys.  And Grace did all the work for you!

Daily Image:

Fairly brilliant!

Thanks to Marci for the link.

Hidden
By Helen Frost
Frances Foster Books (Farrar Straus & Giroux)
$16.99
ISBN: 978-0-374-38221-6
Ages 10 and up
On shelves now.

If poems had been introduced to me as a child as puzzles, maybe I would have taken to them a little more. A poem is a kind of puzzle, isn’t it? Depending on the kind of poem you have to make the syllables and words conform to a preexisting format. Unless it’s free verse, of course. Then all bets are off. That’s what you do when you’re writing a poem, but can reading one be an act of puzzle-solving as well? Earlier this year I reviewed Bob Raczka’s Lemonade: and Other Poems Squeezed from a Single Word which required the reader’s eyes to leap around the page, piecing together the words. Hidden by Helen Frost requires relatively less work to read, but the reader willing to seek out the messages hidden (ho ho) in some of the poems will be amply rewarded. The result is that “Hidden” manages to be both a book of poetry and a wholly original story of two girls bound together by a singular, accidental crime.

When you go to a new summer camp you usually have to deal with not knowing anyone. That’s not Darra’s problem though. Her problem is that she does know someone and, worse, that person knows her too. Years and years ago Darra’s father accidentally kidnapped a young girl by the name of Wren Abbot. He didn’t mean to, of course. He was carjacking, unaware that Wren was hidden in the back of the car, frightened out of her mind. Years later Darra, who once helped Wren, runs into the girl that, she is convinced, led the cops back to her home and got her dad arrested. Now they have no idea how to act around one another, and in the midst of the usual tween summer camp dramas they need to return to the past to clarify what happened and to figure out if they both can recover from the experience.

I’ve been a fan of Frost’s for years. Lots of authors write verse novels (stories written in free verse) and most of them are little more than just a series of sentences broken up without much reason except to pad out the pages. Frost is never like that. When she writes a verse novel she commits. Her books are written in various forms for a reason. In The Braid she created an intricate braid-like form of poetry that twisted and turned on itself. In Diamond Willow her poems were diamond shaped with special messages hidden inside. Hidden take a different tactic. Wren’s voice is straight up free verse, while Darra’s requires a little more work. As Frost puts it, “The last words of the long lines, when read down the right side of the page, give further insight into her story.” Well when I read that I had to flip the book back to the beginning to see if it was true or not. Sure as shooting, each and every one of Darra’s sections yields a new side of her story. The words behind her words, you might say. The experience of discovering this is akin to a small treasure hunt. When pitching this book to kids, make sure you play up this aspect. Some children will immediately decode the m

Popeye is ready to spend yet another day in his regular life, with his bedroom ceiling dripping rusty water and listening to his grandmother Velma recite British royalty in order of reign to prevent herself from cracking up. It's been raining for a week, and Popeye feels like he is the one who is going to crack up!

Once the rain finally stops, Popeye takes the opportunity to get out of the house. He is walking down the road, pitching stones into the ditch when he sees it – a big motor home that is “tilted precariously to the side, one of its giant wheels sunk deep down into the gloppy red mud of the road”. (p.12)

Popeye’s summer, and his life, are about to change.

The owners of the motor home are a family with a passel of rag tag kids who quickly induct Popeye into their Spit and Swear club. The eldest, named Elvis, takes an interest in Popeye and soon the two are inseparable -- having small adventures for at least as long as the motor home is stuck in the mud. They spit and swear, discover Yoo-Hoo boats filled mysterious notes and soon Popeye has dreams of hopping on the motor-home and finding adventures that are even bigger. Each day Popeye hopes that his Uncle Dooley, who is supposed to dig the motor home out, will stay true to his nature and not get it done!

On the surface, this book penned by Barbara O'Connor seems to be simply about a summertime adventure that happens to blow into town, but dig a little deeper. Popeye, who has always listened to Velma before, tries on defiance for the first time, not just for the sake of making trouble either. In the name of adventure, he is willing to risk Velma’s wrath. After Popeye and Elvis meet Starletta (a girl who lives through the woods and down the creek) readers can feel Popeye’s inhibitions and apathy peeling away. Dreams start to seed, and readers will believe that Popeye will not end up like his Uncle Dooley…he’s made of bigger stuff.

How to Steal a Dog by Barbara O'Connor. Frances Foster Books (an FSG imprint). $16.00

Lure ‘em in with a cute dog and then hit ‘em hard and fast with a realistic story about how it feels to be homeless. It’s the old bait n’ switcheroo. Not that Barbara O’Connor’s book, “How to Steal a Dog” plays anything but fair with her young audiences. After all, the first line in this book is the incredibly memorable, “The day I decided to steal a dog was the same day my best friend, Luanne Godfrey, found out I lived in a car.” Bam! Right in the kisser. There’s not a child alive, boy or girl, who isn’t going to want to know more after those twenty-four words hit the page. O’Connor has created a nice little novel here with an ending that could have stood a little more padding. But while I feel that there were a couple off moments here and there, on the whole this is a new take on the question of whether or not a person can justify a wrong if they see no other way out of a predicament.

First of all, Georgina is not a bad person. If you saw her in school you might think she was a kind of unkempt and dirty person, but that’s just because she, her little brother Toby, and their mom have been living in their car ever since their dad up and left them. It hasn’t been easy for Georgina, of course. Her best friend Luanne has been distancing herself lately. The family’s never safe and Georgina’s having a really hard time getting her schoolwork done. If only there were some way she could get a lot of money for the rent of a new apartment. Then Georgina sees a MISSING poster for a dog offering $500 and it all comes together. Of course! The perfect solution! All she needs to do is find a rich dog, steal it, wait for the reward posters to go up, and then collect the money for her family. But every perfect plan, no matter how well executed, is bound to run into some unexpected mishaps along the way. Georgina is not a bad person, but she is a confused person. One that’s going to have to make a choice between what is right and what is easy.

The ironic thing here is that, in a way, Georgina is exceedingly talented at what she does. O’Connor has her heroine writing dog stealing rules in her notebook that supplement the narrative beautifully. Her rules regarding finding a dog (avoid barkers and dogs that don’t look loved) and ways in which a person should scout out a potential dog-stealing location are on the ball. And when those same rules come back to bite her in the butt later on in the story, you can see why. Planning is one thing. Executing, another entirely. Georgina is so good at her planning, in fact, that my credulity was stretched just a tad when she fails to remember to get the dog food and water. Still, with a myriad of things on her mind it’s not impossible that when planning out her details she’d miss some of the more obvious needs.

The book essentially asks the readers whether or not extraordinarily bad circumstances are an excuse for bad behavior. It’s a morality tale for fifth graders. Throughout “How to Steal a Dog” you definitely identify with Georgina. Little brothers are always annoying, but no more so than when they’re sharing a backseat with you, rather than a bedroom. Now for the sake of the story, Georgina holds off on returning Willy longer than either her character or the book itself can really justify. I mean, once it becomes clear that the money is not forthcoming, there’s no reason to put her through any additional mental anguish. Eventually Georgina and Toby meet and semi-befriend a homeless man that stands in as a kind of Thoreau-esque conscience. In him, Georgina is able to examine her own actions and assess the damage she’s done. Really though, the character that I thought received the most interesting story arc was the woman Georgina stole the dog from in the first place. Known here as Carmella, she’s overweight and not particularly attractive, but her love of her dog Willy is instantly recognizable. I liked O’Connor’s decision not to have Georgina seriously befriend this woman after her dog mysteriously “disappears”. She doesn’t grow overly attached, though she does come to worry about how her actions have affected another human being.

Still, there were other things I didn’t understand. Georgina constantly looks worse in school due to her circumstances. She apparently wasn’t able to salvage her hairbrush when the family got booted out of their apartment. As the book goes on she gets nastier and nastier. How hard is it to locate another hairbrush? And wouldn't her mother want her kids to look halfway decent so that the authorities in the school didn’t get suspicious and start calling the authorities? Then again Georgina’s mom seems to be under a great deal of stress. She might not even be able to see past herself to notice her kids’ increasing sloppiness. I did feel that the ending skidded to a halt without tying up a lot of loose ends though. It’s a quick finish and then you wonder exactly whether or not the peaches and cream ending is really going to be as happy dappy as Georgina implies.

It’s a bit of a tangled book, but that isn’t to say that it doesn’t make for a good read. Personally, I feel a revision here or there wouldn’t have been out of place, but as it stands I hope kids discover and read it. Books about homeless kids have basically ground to a halt since the heyday of the Reagan era. Looking at the selection of children’s fiction sitting on our bookstore shelves you’d swear that homelessness had been entirely eradicated in this day and age. This book puts a problem into perspective with a clever premise and a rewarding story. It isn’t a perfect creation, but it may well be a necessary one. I appreciated the effort.

Notes On the Cover: Bravo. Bravo Farrar, Straus & Giroux. You’ve managed to create the most adorable cover featuring a canine since last year’s Sheep by Valerie Hobbs. This is almost too perfect in execution. Nitpickers might point out that this scene never happens in the book, but I say pah. Pah, I say! First of all, this dog looks exactly like the one in the book, down to the black circle around one eye. He’s the right size and his little body is just adorable. I love the use of yellow as a background as well. It really allows the book to pop. Then there are the aesthetics to consider. The black and white of the dog match the black and the white of the spine. This book is one of those rare covers that will lure in an equal amount of boys AND girls. It’s a magic combination, and I just want to credit jacket designer Barbara Grzeslo for a bang-up job. Getty Images strikes again. THIS is a cover.

First Lines Worth Remembering: “The day I decided to steal a dog was the same day my best friend, Luanne Godfrey, found out I lived in a car.”