unadulterated.us

Guys Read: Funny Business, edited by Jon Scieszka - review

Guys Read: Funny Business, edited by Jon Scieszka, with stories by Mac Barnett, Eoin Colfer, Christopher Paul Curtis, Kate DiCamillo (admitted to the clubhouse on the condition that her contribution be epistolary in nature), Paul Feig, Jack Gantos, Jeff Kinney, David Lubar, Adam Rex, and David Yoo

Hummunah-DANG that is some lineup of writers, huh?! And each has contributed something that will make a modern boy laugh right out of his tighty-whities. It's like an old-fashioned hippie potluck, but with a big sack of Halloween candy where you'd expect the tabbouleh salad to be. But JEEZ I have been having trouble writing this review! I start off all right, I'm all, "Oh, I love guys, don't you love guys? Yeah, guys. Guys are gonna love this book," but then I get into having to give examples of why they're gonna love this book and all of a sudden the thing sounds just APPALLING.

So I'm not going to give any examples. Nope. Ok, here: in Christopher Paul Curtis's story "Iron John," the title character tricks his young children into thinking that he is so cold that his nipples have frozen, and he pretends to rip them off. And then his oldest son eats them.

See?

Feeding the Sheep by Leda Schubert, pictures by Andrea U'ren - review

You know what I love for first and second graders? I love a good process book. Whether it's baking a cake or sculpting a clay pot, any book that starts with raw materials and ends with a manufactured item, and shows us the steps in between already has a leg up in my esteem.

Unfortunately, some process books can be - how do I say this - boring.

Not Feeding the Sheep (and not either of the other two books I linked to).

Subway by Christophe Niemann - review

NOT just for New Yorkers, this swingy rhyming book follows a daddy and his two little kids on a subway adventure on a rainy day. They take the A train from jazzy Harlem all the way to sleepy Far Rockaway. They savor the view as the Q crosses over the East River. They have fun with the map - why take the 1 straight from the southern tip of Manhattan to the southern end of Central Park... when you could take the 3 to the 5 to the N to the B to the C to the 7 to the 6 to the E to the D and end up at the same point?

The Chicken Thief by Beatrice Rodriguez - review

I had to check the copyright date on this suave wordless sliver of an epic tale over and over again. You see, like many French things (and it somehow seems important to point out that when I use the word "French" I always pronounce it "Fronsh" because of an ancient mocking nickname my friend Jaime and I once habitually applied to a perfectly nice person - the nickname now seems absurd and petty, but my inability to say the word "French" without sounding like a spastic drunk lives on, which only proves my point about French things), uhhh, like many French things - Fronsh things - The Chicken Thief, with its timeless one-joke story, well-crafted loosey-goosey pen and ink and watercolor art, and enigmatic title... could have come from any age.

A lot of French pen and ink illustration (and Belgian) has a gestural quality, a breezy confidence that works particularly well with energetic stories. Think Asterix. Spirou & Fantasio. Bob de Groot. And this story, being wordless, is told entirely through action and expression. The arc of a smile is just a tiny line, 5 millimeters, but in that 5-millimeter line, Beatrice Rodriguez tells us whether her character is smiling in triumph or embarrassment, with joy or with anticipation.

I love it when something so brief and easy is treated with respect, and this edition is printed on good paper, in a binding size that is fairly common in Europe but less so here. The Chicken Thief goes on my list of superior wordless books for a child to savor.

Scott Pilgrim by Bryan Lee O'Malley - review

Dear Internet,

I thought you were looking out for me! How have you not forced me to read Scott Pilgrim before now?

I ask again: HOW has someone not held me down, pried my eyes open, and shoved Scott Pilgrim into my face?

Reading on the radio

Everyday I read the book. (Well ok this isn't me, this is Elvis Costello, but still. I wanted to use this picture.)

It was a lot of fun, and very interesting, to record a segment at Baltimore's NPR station, WYPR, about summer reading for kids. I was happy to proselytize a bunch of books that I think will have wide-ranging appeal this summer to a variety of readers.

The audio of my interview with Tom Hall, culture editor of Maryland Morning with Sheilah Kast, is on the WYPR website. After the break is the complete list of books that I mentioned, plus a few we didn't have time to talk about.

The Search for WondLa by Tony DiTerlizzi - review

Epic science fiction for kids, sumptuously illustrated, as one might expect from the breathtakingly talented Tony DiTerlizzi. Long but somehow a very fast read - I wouldn't have believed it, it's not like the margins are extra-wide or the typeface extra-big, but my 8-year-old read 120 pages between dinner and bedtime one night last week.

The main character, 12-year-old Eva Nine, is seemingly the only human on a strange planet, the indigenous population of which includes large grazing animals, birds, and plant/animal chimeras of varying degrees of intelligence. These species bear some resemblance to animals and plants that exist at the very edge of weird in current zoology - lichen that travel, protists that seem to think, microscopic carnivorous plants. Pretty cool.

SEASONS by Blexbolex - review

You are familiar with this creature Blexbolex, non? This French illustrator who works in line and silk screen?

Me neither, and Oh My God how have I missed this guy? But wait - I see that he did the illustrations for the recent edition of I Know How to Cook, and that was one big honkin doorstop of a cookbook (and it is French) but I almost had to have it anyway, because of those illustrations.

boom! by Mark Haddon - review

Mark Haddon gets the best book designers ever, doesn't he? The cover of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was plain red with that little silhouette of a dog upside-down, and that told you that the book was possibly old-fashioned but definitely unexpected on the inside. The cover of boom! is the friendliest orange linen, with big lower-case letters spelling out the title and the author's name, and a cute lil' rocket done in nice thick lines. You just want to pick it up and put it in your pocket. Of course, I said the same thing about Mac Barnett after meeting him at BEA, so maybe I'm just a sucker for a linen jacket. (Parenthetically, does Adam Rex every go anywhere without his bag strapped across his chest? What's he got in there?)

The School of Possibilities by Seita Parkkola - review

I'm staring at the cover of this book and wondering what to say about it. The cover is awfully busy, in its overly geometric way - a giant factory looms over a little red brick schoolhouse, smokestacks rising into the gray clouds, from which descend feathers, like snow. Below the school, stairs descend into a darkness in which half-lidded yellow eyes lurk.

Also, the O's in the word "School" are eyes. And there's a... you know what? I'll quit with the cover. Except to point out the one enticing element of it, the one element that you should pay attention to and use as your barometer when you consider whether you need it for your kids, or your library.

"SEITA PARKKOLA"

The Amanda Project Book 1: invisible i, by Melissa Kantor

Let's dispense with the disclosure right away - Melissa Kantor, the author of this, the first Amanda Project book, is an old friend of my husband's. Am I letting that influence my review? Absolutely not. Did that influence the fact that I opened this book in the first place? For sure.

I am guilty - more than most - of judging books by the cover, and this one has a cover that I might not have been able to get past. It's hot pink. There's a picture of a slender white girl on the front, her back to the camera. Yes, it's the faceless girl again.

On the other hand, the typography and illustrated doodads on that cover are original and hip. A key, a bird, some vine-y floral stuff - despite the fact that it seems like EVERY teen girl novel is embellished with vine-y floral stuff right now, the vine-y floral stuff in invisible i manages to look classy and fresh. That, as it turns out, is because it was drawn by a young man by the name of Brian Floca (Moonshot, Lightship).

And this, dear friends, is the crux of my review. You can put together a book whose premise has been done before, load it up with ancillaries and gimmicks, clothe it in hot pink and put a faceless girl on the cover, and if the writer is amazing and the web designers are the best and the illustrator is multi-award-winning Brian Floca, you will have a fantastic book.

The Amanda Project shows us how it's done.

Dark Life by Kat Falls - review

Oh my heavenly biscuits, I haven't been grabbed by a book the way Dark Life grabbed me in I don't know how long. I am going to give you an excerpt and let see for yourself:

I slammed the entry button. Like a dilating eye, the hatch opened and seawater filled the small chamber. Plunging into the air lock, I whirled to see sharks streaking toward me from all sides. I hit the interior button whole-handed. As the hatch clinched shut, the sharks plowed into it like mini torpedoes. From inside, they sounded like Death pounding at the door. I slumped against the chamber wall and grinned. Nothing put a buzz in my blood like escaping predators.

What do you say? Exciting enough for you? For your child aged 8 to 13? Heck, just those verbs would make me a brand-new fan of author Kat Falls - Slamming! Dilating! Plunging! Whirling! Whew!