unadulterated.us

You need this: Picture books for parents

Misnomer. False advertising. NOT picture books for parents. This is NOT a review of Go the F**k to Sleep. What I think about that book was expressed quite soundly - and strongly - by Roger Sutton of The Horn Book. Roger Sutton is a modern-day hero.

No. These are picture books that are fully for children. Funny, sweet, colorful, devoid of swear words. BUT. They are books that grown-ups will legitimately enjoy themselves. It is one of the perks of having little kids - you have an excuse to consume picture books. Some picture books are insipid or tedious. But some are sly and sparkling.

TO WIT:

The Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde - review

 

"Who, exactly, is the Mysterious X?"

"They're more of a what than a who. It won't be in a form you'll recognise, and there is something other about X that defies easy explanation. It's more of a sense than a person. A shroud, if you like, that confuses their true form. It also smells of unwashed socks and peanut butter. You'll be fine."

Tiger looked at the note, then at the Quarkbeast, then at where the moose had been but suddenly wasn't, then back at me.

"This is a test, isn't it?"

Yes, little children, this is a test. Are you going to grow up to be the kind of person who not only reads all the books of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy but who also seeks out the radio recordings? Will the Discworld become a second home to you? If you cut yourself shaving, will you always claim that "it's just a flesh wound!" in a defensive tone and a British accent?

If so, The Last Dragonslayer is your brand of silly.

Even librarians have a lot to learn

I actually took a whole lot of notes at the SLJ Leadership Summit in Alexandria this week. Do I sound surprised? I'm kind of surprised. I've been doing the same thing for kind of a long time now - 7 years at the public library, 5 years writing kidlit book reviews, and I guess I've gotten pretty complacent. Arrogant. Lazy. You pick. So these two back-to-back conferences I've been to, KidLitCon and the SLJ Summit, with their arrays of high-functioning, extra-smart, thoughtful and energetic speakers, kind of rocked my world.

First of all! Mary Ann Scheuer has posted about the apps presentation that we did at KidLitCon with Betsy Bird. She's going to be writing quite a bit more about what makes a good app in the next few weeks, and I will be following avidly.

Next, here are a couple of things I took away from the SLJ Leadership Summit, so ably and affably hosted by Brian Kenney and Rocco Staino. Rocco had to do some inspired vamping for time when presenters suffered the waking nightmare known as Why Won't The Tech Work I Tested it Just This Morning Dammit. The number and variety of devices the projector in that ballroom had to hook up with, I hope it took a Valium and a dose of Flagyl afterwards.

 

Poetry Friday - Foggy Morning Drop-off

You in the Volvo!
Get back there.
Think you're so safe.
All the nerdy Swedes in the world won't save you,
You insist on edging out into traffic like that.

I saw three different cars jump the curb in the parking lot today.
Nobody knows where they are.
Nobody's safe
But everyone's sleepy.

Spilled my coffee trying not to hit
A van nosing out of a side street.
Would have been a slo-mo crash,
Both of us creeping so cautious.

Should have hit him.
Could have gotten our front end fixed.

 

If you are a Baltimorean like me, I hope to see you at the Living Poetry Flash Mob at noon on Saturday on the City Lit Stage! Poets Virginia Crawford and Laura Shovan are hosting a spontaneous poetry composition that you’ll want to try on for size. Attendees wearing Living Poetry Flash tee-shirts will “be arranged” into written on-the-spot, living poems. Tee-shirts can be made at home (instructions at www.authoramok.com) or picked up Friday and Saturday at the CityLit Stage.

 

Benjamin Bear in Fuzzy Thinking by Phillippe Coudray - review

There is a giant, bulging slob of a penguin in the refrigerator on the front cover of this book. A giant bulging penguin who has apparently eaten everything in the refrigerator. A bear and a bunny confront the penguin. They are deadpan, silent - are they coming face to face with the consequences of a previous bad decision? Is the penguin a nightmarish symbol of some kind, a living, breathing reminder of our greedy id?

I don't know. I haven't read the book yet. I was just so struck by the cover that I had to sit and gaze at it for a little while. These colors are wonderfully sophisticated - the walls and floor are three different shades of khaki tan, the bear and bunny are two edible browns, and the interior of the fridge is light blue with a lot of gray in it. This is a cotton pencil skirt, a man-tailored ice blue silk shirt, and a very nice leather belt, perhaps from Façonnable. Ok, on my budget, maybe J. Crew.

 

I call myself a critic

So, we're just back from beautiful Seattle, where the food is insane and the drinks are even better. Bob and I snuck off for an out-of-town anniversary weekend, using the excellent KidLitCon 2011 as an excuse.

Thanks to Mary Ann Scheuer of Great Kid Books, I was there helping her do a presentation about ebook apps for kids. We were joined via Skype by Betsy Bird of A Fuse #8 Production - and if you've never used videoconferencing as an essential part of your presentation, allow me to tell you, it's just as nerve-racking as you might expect. But all the tech worked, including a nifty document camera that allowed us to not only project what the iPad was doing, but what we were doing to the iPad.

It was truly a pleasure to stand up there alongside two such knowledgeable professionals.

Nonfiction Monday - Animals with Super Powers by Natalie Lunis - review, plus A Memoriam to Charley, a Brine Shrimp

It's a bittersweet day here on the Pink Me couch. The season's changing, the pool has closed. We recently made the not-difficult-at-all decision to finally ditch this bony old beast for a new couch, one with padding in all the right places, one with cushions that have yet to be vomited on. It's an exciting moment, but I can't help wondering if we will be as happy on the new couch as we have been on the - truly repulsive - Jennifer Convertibles sofa that I bought in New York so many years ago. The frog-printed slipcover will be going too.

Will our crazy pillows fit on it? Will we all fit on it? The boys are getting bigger, and nowadays much more likely to be buried in a D&D manual than in a Hardy Boys mystery.

Added to this seasonal introspection is a sliver of bad news that has hit our family unexpectedly hard: Charley, the World's Oldest Living Brine Shrimp, has died.

 

The accidental genius of Weasel High by Rick Detorie - review

Slipping into the boy-friendly spot between Diary of a Wimpy Kid and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a new young adult novel by Rick Detorie, creator of One Big Happy, a strip you may have seen on your newspaper's comics page.

Not a graphic novel but in fact a liberally illustrated prose novel (with extremely short paragraphs), The accidental genius of Weasel High is about a 14-year-old boy named Larkin navigating his freshman year of high school. Larkin's not too bad off - he has a couple of good friends and nobody picks on him much. He has a dreadful sister who manages to throw things into sharp relief, when she's not actually throwing things, and parents who are basically ok even if they are generally clueless and embarrassing.

 

Secrets of Tamarind by Nadia Aguiar - review

 

The scientist in Simon wished there was time to study the animals he was seeing and catalogue all the quirks of nature and environment that had driven their strange evolution. A herd of spotted marsupials, almost impossible to see, moved in shifting camouflage as they chased the shadows of clouds. A small, horselike animal with gigantic ears that swiveled like saucers was the first to hear him coming, and when it took off across the plains its drumming hooves alerted dozens of lumbering, slow-moving tortoises who vanished into their shells, leaving a sudden rock bed. Mice-like rodents leaped dozens of feet into a stand of cactus, fleeing from birds that veered away from the unforgiving spikes at the last second. Simon watched in fascination as these dramas unfolded around him.

We went to Costa Rica last summer, and now I think I understand where Nadia Aguiar's prose comes from. The ruby-red birds and flowers, the emerald landscapes, the fruit that is sweet but complex. The dark jungle, the bright hillsides. Roseate spoonbills and strawberry frogs. Honest-to-god toucans. It's all astonishing, but it's real.

 

The miraculous island of Tamarind, where siblings Simon, Maya and Penny washed up after a shipwreck in The Lost Island of Tamarind, reads like that. Deep in the Bermuda Triangle, its startling beauty is murky or brilliant, misted with cloud or sunlit, lush, decadent, fragile... and likely to twist into violence at any moment.

We're having much more fun: News and events in kidlit

Baltimore is still partly shut down after that rip-roaring nonevent that trickled through town on Saturday - how could a hurricane that barely bothered my willow tree have taken out power to so many people, including my place of work and half the schools in the city and county?

In other words, why are my children still in their pajamas and bothering me at 10:30 in the morning on what should have been the second day of school?

All this quietus has put a song in my head for days: The New World by X.

honest to goodness the bars weren't open this morning
they must have been voting for a new president of something

Now, I roll my eyes at most celebrity picture books (seriously, Cheech Marin?) (and don't get me started on Perez Hilton), but I would LOVE to see a kids' book written by Exene Cervenka. She's kind of an artistic polymath already, ooh and I want that profanity tattoo.

Where was I? Oh. I was going to talk about news and events.

I was talking to Sam Musher (Parenthetical) one time about who reads our blogs (her: "oh, mostly my friends"; me: "not even my mother") and I came to the realization that unlike a lot of great kidlit blogs (see blogroll to the right), Pink Me is not very involved in the community conversation - I mostly only do book reviews, so I don't do a lot of linking. Ergo, I think that the people who read Pink Me are not the same people who read MotherReader or Chicken Spaghetti or even 7 Impossible Things Before Breakfast. So I'm probably not being reiterative when I post a couple announcements of upcoming events and other cool things from the kidlit world.

 

 

COOL THING #1: The Cybils are underway! The Cybils (Children's and Young Adult Bloggers' Literary Awards) are a uniquely democratic suite of awards. Nominations are open to anyone, and the judging proceeds in two phases: phase one judges read EVERYTHING THAT IS NOMINATED and, after heated discussion, agree on a set of finalists. The phase two judges read the finalists and decide on winners.

The call for judges has begun - if you write about children's or teen literature on a regular basis, you are qualified and you should throw your hat in the ring! I am especially excited that this year, there will be a Cybils Award for Best Book App. This new category is being headed up by Mary Ann Scheuer of Great Kid Books.

 

 
 

Speaking of Mary Ann, COOL THING #2! Mary Ann proposed a talk about book apps for the annual KidLitoSphere Conference, which is out in Seattle this year, and she asked me - along with Betsy Bird of Fuse #8, probably the closest thing to a celebrity in the children's book blogger world (except maybe Roger Sutton) - to get up and present with her!

We'll be talking about the book app features that we've come to expect, the features that we'd like to come to expect (more multilingual plz), and the sweet spot between interactive and distracting. Pretty sure we'll also come up with something that we can post to our blogs, if you're not planning to join us in the great PNW.

 

 

COOL THINGIO NUMERO THREE-O: Registration for the KidLitCon has just closed, so if you missed it, you missed it. But registration for Baltimore's own Books for the Beast teen literature conference is still going on, and it's open to all interested parties! It's not that expensive, it's on a Saturday, and you get:

1. a keynote address by Kenneth Oppel, whose new book, This Dark Endeavor: The Apprenticeship of Victor Frankenstein, is on my list,
2. energetic small-group discussions of books in two categories of your choosing,
3. afternoon talks by Melissa Marr (Wicked Lovely),  Felicia Pride (Patterson Heights), and Casey Scieszka and Steven Weinberg (To Timbuktu: Nine Countries, Two People, One True Story). Any time there's a Scieszka involved, you know it's going to be a party.
4. a flash drive loaded with "If you liked..." booklists written by the event facilitators, and
5. lunch
   

I'm going to be a facilitator in the Suspense/Horror category. You end up in my group, I guarantee a spirited discussion.

 

Bonus random coolness:

Here's something that I get asked ALL THE TIME. So, apparently, does Leila Roy at bookshelves of doom, one of my favorite blogs, because Leila posts A LOT, and briefly, and with great wryness. When it came to the perennial "books for a precocious tween girl" question, she threw it open to the masses. Here's the compiled list. It's long, and really good. I'm thinking of printing it out for the children's department desk at work.

Three words: Ninety Second Newbery. Do it. I'm gonna. Possibly with LEGO.

 

 

Etsy is a wonderland. This crib mobile made from a Swedish children's book is worth every krona.