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The Marbury Lens by Andrew Smith - review

What is this?

I know about teen novels with alternate worlds. Usually those worlds are carefully mapped out, explained, lovingly explored by the author.  And I know what is a book with a teenage protagonist who endures a terrible, traumatic experience. Although usually those are girls. It can be rough these days to be a girl in a YA non-fantasy novel. You might get buried alive, or raped, or raped a lot, or accidentally kill your parents, or be in a coma or die, and you will almost certainly be kidnapped. I even know horror. I have read a lot of horror, especially when I was a very young person, and very unsure about things.

So I think The Marbury Lens is horror. But it is non-cheap, un-easy horror.

Sleepover at Gramma's House by Barbara Joosse, illustrated by Jan Jutte - review

Ok my kids may be only 7 and 9, but after reading this book I want them to get right on having some grandchildren! Barbara Joosse scripts a syncopated, swingy, stop-start love song for a granddaughter and her grandma. They have a tea party, they paint, they listen to a thunderstorm snuggled on the front porch. They know, "the very best way to fall asleep is inside a hug."

HOW long til my boys start dating, settle down, and give me a granddaughter?

Toothy, bold ink lines give the illustrations an almost woodcut quality, while the color palette, done up in watercolors, is jaunty and varied. It's the composition and details that I like best, though - penguins and other birds, many wearing hats, observe the action... the little girl's apartment is littered with some very suave midcentury modern, and Gramma's comfy little house is cheerfully eclectic. Dutch illustrator Jan Jutte also illustrated Barbara's Roawr! (see image below), and I am looking forward to see more from him on this side of the ocean. And of course, I am always happy to see anything from Barbara Joosse. Her sense of rhythm and her insight into what's fun about childhood make her books small daily treasures to share with little kids.

 

Songs of innocence and experience - adult weirdness for teens

Well, not just any teen. Teens with a taste for... for the unusual, let's say. Teens who are not satisfied with sports novels and vampire boarding school melodramas. Teens who have read Janne Teller's Nothing, who enjoy truly odd stuff like The Love Curse of the Rumbaughs and Madapple and then wonder why there aren't more books like those.

There are, of course - there are plenty of challenging novels in the YA section, but there's no shame in walking a kid through the adult section, and there's nothing immoral in handing a book about a serial killer to that kid.

With all your power / what would you do?

Is it just me, or is this The Year of the Superhero in middle-grade and YA books?

I'm all up in the Michael Owen Carroll right now of course, having just reviewed Super Human here on Pink Me; and The Rise of Renegade X is sitting on my to-read pile; I just finished Michael Grant's The Magnificent 12: The Call last night: plus we're listening to Mike Lupica's Hero in the car, and holy god - not since I took one for the team and listened to The Da Vinci Code have I been more appalled by an author's lazy writing, glacial pace, disrespect for the reader...

...oh wait, where was I? Ahead of myself, that's where. That's what happens when you try to write book reviews while listening to The Flaming Lips. "The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song", off At War With The Mystics, is what inspired the title of this post. By the way, if you have food issues, don't click that link, just watch them perform on Letterman, below.

 It is also apparently The Year of Superhero Books Written by Guys Named Michael. Weird. Take that, trend trackers.

100 Ways to Celebrate 100 Days by Bruce Goldstone - review

100 things I like about this 100th day book:

Ok not. What, come on, do you really need a hundred? Would you even sit still to read a hundred? Yeah one would think not. One would need to have written a book as appealing and clever and also thoughtful as Bruce Goldstone's new book in order to get a reader to actually sit still to read 100 of virtually anything. Or so one might think...

Ergo. A few things I like about this 100th day book:

Monsters Eat Whiny Children by Bruce Eric Kaplan - review

I am not sure I even need to write about this book, given that title. You are either going to think that's the funniest thing that has ever entered your house, or you are going to think that's appalling.

Wait, I have 4 elementary school boys around my dining room table right this second. Lunchtime poll:

YNL: Look at the cover of this book. Would you read this book?

Secondo: No.

YNL: No? Too scary?

Secondo: No. I just won't say yes to anything you ask me ever.

YNL: Always suspected as much. Zhou?

Zhou: Yeah, sure, I would read it!

Prime: Looks good to me!

Mao: Ehhh... I'd rather read LEGO Star Wars.

YNL: Like, not right now... would you read it ever at all?

Mao: I've already read it and it's really funny.

 

Well that wasn't very satisfying. Maybe I'll ask a followup question.

YNL: If you were to eat whiny children, how would you prepare them?

Secondo: With pepper and salsa - a lot of salsa!

Zhou: I would bake them and then I would put them with a little bit of bacon, one egg, and all the materials for making a burrito except the tortilla.

Prime: I would probably chop them up, donate them to a restaurant, go to the restaurant, and order something good.

Zhou: With them in it.

Prime: That's what I mean.

Mao: I'd put them in a burrito with salsa, a lot of cheese, and some beef.

Zhou: But that makes you fart.

Better! Me, I would braise those whiny children. I like a slow braise. But there is no actual cooking in this book, although the oven does get preheated preparatory to baking the whiny children in a cake, which doesn't happen because somebody spills the flour. Sorry if I gave away a plot point. I thought it was maybe important to note that no children are actually consumed in this book. You'd be surprised what parents sometimes don't take for granted. Although, come to think of it, almost anything can happen in a picture book. That one book that I thought was about classroom manners and turned out to be about sexual abuse of a child? I have never gotten over that book. And this book is written and illustrated by a New Yorker cartoonist, and some of those guys have an odd sense of what is funny. There was a whole Seinfeld episode about that. And in fact, the guy who wrote that Seinfeld episode wrote this book. Huh.

Endpaper bonus: funny endpapers.

Super Human by Michael Carroll - review

This is the time. The time is now. Michael Carroll's Quantum Prophecy series has zipped beneath the radar like a low-flying caped crusader for far too long.

The Quantum Prophecy trilogy describes a world in which superheroes and supervillains were once a natural part of the world order, keeping the peace, trying to take over the world, doing their stuff. But ten years ago, one supervillain's dastardly plan went tragically awry, and all the superhumans disappeared. Now, a few young people are beginning to exhibit unusual abilities - only to discover that a world of peril and plots has been waiting for them. Dun dun DUNNN!

A flapjack stack of picture books

Here's what can happen when a family gets inspired by picture books, in this case Arthur Geisert's Lights Out (with just a touch of Wayne White I think). Just hit the play button:

Since returning from our vacation (long, excellent, TROPICAL PARADISE did I mention?) (and if you accuse me of gloating, please allow me to mention that my last two vacations were to Lake Erie and DETROIT - we deserved this), I have been feverishly reading picture books, trying to catch up. I consider it a responsibility to try to clap eyes on just about every picture book we get at the library. They're short, you can get through a big stack in half an hour, and the difference between a truly extraordinary picture book and an average everyday picture book is immense.

Click through for my short stack of recent favorites...

You and me could write a bad metaphor

Ever since the Christ-like Aslan, he of the foaming blonde mane and the deep wise sorrowful Christ-like insights about forgiveness and sacrifice, pulled a Christ-like resurrection, rising Christ-like from the dead in order to help the Pevensey children... win a war (cue needle-scratch sound effect), I have had a special smirking place in my heart for metaphors that just don't quite go the distance.

If I have just pissed you off beyond imagining by saying something critical about The Chronicles of Narnia, please have a nice weekend with my blessings and enjoy the weather. But if you are in an ornery Friday mood, by all means, click through to read the rest of this post.

The Adventures of Ook and Gluk, Kung-Fu Cavemen from the Future, by Dav Pilkey - review

I probably don't need to bring this book, the first in a new graphic novel series, to anyone's attention. Young people who admire the body of work created by Mr. Dav Pilkey, a body of work that includes perennial prompters of parental protest like Ricky Ricotta's Mighty Robot and Captain Underpants, are probably all up on top of this new book and do not need meddling grownups to point it out to them. The abovementioned peeved parents will respond to it with the same distaste they feel for the gross-out gags and fart-filled froth that is the main content of all of Mr. Pilkey's work.

But last night one of these boys of mine read the whole thing out loud to me - again - and had all of us laughing, and when a book is as phenomenally phun as that, I feel the need to weigh in.

Hot x: Algebra exposed! by Danica McKellar - review

On Nonfiction Monday, bloggers across the kidlitosphere write about nonfiction books for kids. Despite all the nonfiction I read, I am only an occasional contributor, mostly due to me often forgetting what day it is. Monday really creeps up on you sometimes, doesn't it? Today, the exceptional kidlit blog The Miss Rumphius Effect is hosting, with links to all of this week's nonfiction posts.

Let us now praise Danica McKellar. Nonfiction Monday, prepare to eat her math.

Would you, have you, responded with knee-jerk distaste to a pretty girl, a TV star, protesting loudly that "Math Doesn't Suck"? (especially when her book with that title is subtitled "How to Survive Middle School Math Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail"?) Do you find the magazine-style covers of the pretty girl's books, promising personality quizzes, and "boy-crazy confessionals" along with word problems and polynomials, patronizing and/or pandering?

Well, you might. You might. But don't.