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The Enemy by Charlie Higson - review

It happens to just about everyone. Sometime in your early to mid-teen years, you wake up one day and realize that, gradually, every adult you know has become a stranger to you. You have begun to understand the fears, jealousies, and appetites that really motivate grownups, and you are appalled. They in turn suddenly do not recognize you as the child they have harbored lo these many years. And so your life becomes a series of surreptitious forays punctuated by skirmish - if your paths cross, there will be conflict, so you do your best to skirt their presence, to avoid their taint. You forge alliances with your friends or toughen up and go it alone, hoping against hope that you will make it.

Hmm. Maybe I'm overstating it. It's been a while, after all - all I can remember is being truly freaked out when my father threw my Kings of the Wild Frontier LP down the stairs because, I think, he was afraid I was on drugs. And my own kids won't be prompting me to mystifying moments of violence for a good 5 years yet.

Charlie Higson certainly sees adolescence that way, though. In The Enemy, all the grownups have turned into zombie-like cannibals. Some plague or something. The kids live in fortified big box stores and send out foraging parties to look for food and weapons. Yup. It's excellent.

The ink garden of Brother Theophane by C.M. Millen, illustrated by Andrea Wisnewski - review

What do you like best about illuminated manuscripts? Do you like following the twiny knotted ornament in the borders, challenging your eye to discover whether it's all one strand? Do you enjoy identifying the flowers and plants, so precisely rendered that botanists have used medieval manuscripts as evidence for geographic occurence? Do you glimpse the freezing monks in their freezing sweatshops, laboriously copying out texts just as if they were handstitching counterfeit Fendi handbags?

Or is it that the pages of 500-year-old manuscripts, so tightly closed for so long that they have forgotten light, still glow with color and life?

Alphapets by Shiho Ishikawa and 100 Shapes by Nao Sugimoto - review

These two are gift books - not suitable for the library, because they are consumed as they are enjoyed. Thus, they're a little off my usual beat, but I couldn't resist.

Clear, happy color palettes and kicky patterns make these two little art activity books catnip for the design-inclined. Which I am. AlphaPets is a book of big block letters, each of which can be punched out, and with a few folds and a few tab A / slot A insertions, turned into a little origami-esque animal that corresponds to the letter. That is, M turns into a winsome mouse, O is a very cleverly-designed ostrich, W is a wallowing whale. We had three generations punching and bending and folding at one point, making all the animals that corresponded to our names.

Maybe a little tricky - my seven year old only managed to make a couple without help, and my mom gave up pretty quickly. Trifocals can only help so much. Also, as with plenty of origami, some animals benefited by a little dab of glue. But there are additional step-by-step photos plus videos available online (currently in Japanese but still very helpful).

100 Shapes may look like a simple book of stencils, but the suggestions for how to use them are quite sophisticated, as are some of the shapes themselves. Of course there is a tree, a house, and an elephant, but also the book includes stencils of the Eiffel Tower, a seated woman, fish, and electric guitar, and a cruise ship. Of the two books, this is the one that has longer legs. Kids are encouraged to combine the shapes to make scenes, color them in using patterns, and use them to cut shaped pictures out of colored paper or old magazines.

Available for a pretty good price, too. Just the thing for those late-summer and back-to-school birthdays!

For the Win by Cory Doctorow - review

I am not a teacher, but I used to do a lot of training - I taught museum staff how to use the database software that helped them keep track of all their stuff. Because of that experience, I now feel comfortable addressing any group not actually armed with edged weapons. Let me put it this way: you ever read From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler? Of course you have. How would Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler react to having her files transcribed into database entries, so that they could be searched, shuffled, and read... by strangers?

Yeah. These were people who had avoided anything that even faintly smelled of maths or science since, sometimes, freshman year of undergrad. Many used a computer for email, but plenty affected a contemptuous and disdainful attitude, and considered it unfair that now, in addition to being profoundly knowledgeable about, say, Heian period sword guards, they were expected to operate machinery.

Not unlike teaching social studies to high school students, I'm thinking.

Dirty little secrets by C.J. Omololu - review

Lucy's mom is a compulsive hoarder, and Lucy is sixteen years old. Think how embarrassed you were about your parents when you were sixteen, and then think about how Lucy must feel.

Luckily, nobody at her school knows that Lucy's house looks like those houses on that show, and Lucy is bent on keeping it that way. She's keeping her head down, avoiding close friendships, checking to make sure her clothes don't smell when she leaves the house, waiting out the year and a half until she can get out of that hellhole like her older brother and sister, and hoping nobody ever, ever sees past her front door.

And listen, that may sound like a metaphor, but in Lucy's case it's just true. I swear, poor kid.

Dave the Potter by Laban Carrick Hill, illustrated by Bryan Collier - review

You are going to want this book.

This is a rare story, beautifully told, illustrated with power, and it has ties to things that children can touch and do.

What, you want more?

Heh, just kidding. Of course you do. How about you want a story that will help educate children about the time when slavery was legal in the United States, that does not flinch from the tragic inequities of that period, but which nonetheless is not unremittingly bleak? A story that celebrates a person whose skill and artistry transcended status and transcends time? Now you know. You want this book. I knew you would. 

Kindergarten Diary: as told to Antoinette Portis by me, Annalina - review

Check out this quote from Kindergarten Diary:

We are Room 2K.
We are fine!

Assertive. Clear-eyed. Defiant-like. Almost... anthemic. And, written as it is beneath a drawing of three little kids hanging upside-down, big smiles on their faces and their belly-buttons showing, "fine" begins to assume a whole bunch of meaning:

• First kid (subtext): "Not only are we 'fine,' we are happy and fine!"
• Second kid (subtext): "And we're just going to get fine-r!"
• Third kid (subtext): "Not only did we have nothing to worry about, you parents can quit your hand-wringin' too!"

You mocked me once - never do it again! A few trends in children's books

Oh my sweet Westley it's hot. North of a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, they say, too hot to turn pages, almost too hot to think.

Too hot to use a computer. I'm going to the pool. I'll finish this later.

Hi, it's tomorrow! Yep, I did that. Left the house at noon, got back from the pool EIGHT HOURS later, and then overnight the Magic Husband Fairy put in all of our window units, sealed up the house, and now it's cool! Ish. Cool-esque. Cool enough to do ONE load of laundry, vacuum the downstairs if I take it slow, and write this post about a couple of trends I've noticed lately in children's and YA books.

Spaceheadz! by Jon Scieszka, with contributions by Francesco Sedita and illustrations by Shane Prigmore

We are of two minds about this book in my house. I enjoyed the gag-a-minute writing, while my eight-year-old thought it was too much silly, with no non-silly parts to make the silly parts seem sillier. That's almost verbatim. I should give up this book reviewing hobby of mine, when an 8-year-old does it at least as well as I do. Well. We have it out for a third opinion, and I'll be very interested to hear what that kid has to say.