elow is linked, but more important, I wanted you to be aware of this resource for future reference. Also, Charlotte often publishes lists introducing the newest books for children in sci fi/fantasy. I highly recommend her site for kids, parents, and teachers with an interest in the genre! Here's the link to today's roundup.
Stringer's humor gives this often dark book a surprisingly light touch. For example, as the above scene continues, the guide at the castle, who I should point out manages not to be a flat character, tallies up the students using a counter, leading Belladonna to wonder why he needs "a mechanical device to count to twenty-eight."They stopped in front of a massive black gate, and Mr. Watson pressed the doorbell. He turned and looked out over his charges, suddenly nervous.
"Now, I want—for God's sake, Evans, give the boy his glasses back!—I want you all to behave yourselves.
Arkbath Hall was built in the late fifteenth century—"
"Sixteenth," muttered Belladonna.
"Sorry? Yes, very good, Johnson, the late sixteenth century. Quite right. Anyway, it's very old, so I don't want any of you touching anything. Is that clear?"
Silence.
"I said: Is that clear?"
Twenty-eight dreary voices said, "Yes, Sir," in unison, though not one of them sounded even remotely like it had heard what Mr. Watson had said.
He looked at their faces as their attention wandered to the building, the
grass, and the snail on the path. Belladonna suspected that in his quiet hours Mr. Watson despaired for the future of their country.
The green one said "Enter," the orange one said "Wait," and the red one said "Busy." According to Steve, if the red one came on when you knocked at the door, then you could go back to class, and sometimes she'd forget all about you.It's touches like these that really bring the book to life.
So this week I'm thinking about books that are so popular they get made into movies and are otherwise worshipped by vast quantities of young readers, as well as by old people hoping to make money. These would be the books considered commercial, the ones that make the bestseller lists. Some of them are even well written! No, seriously, there's a reason kids like certain series. Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, for example, are among the funniest things I've ever read.
Muchamore's young heroes are more earthy, in part—truly—because they aren't upper-class kids like Alex. Along the same lines, I've noticed that my teenage students, who are mostly Latino and African American and quite poor, have no interest in Alex Rider. I figure it's because he's too rich and white and British. I suppose I'm not the first to wonder if we'd have more readers in the inner city if we had more books, not just about pregnant girls and drug dealers a la Precious, but along the lines of the Percy Jackson or Alex Rider series, only with young minority heroes.
The Percy Jackson books were burning hot about three years ago and continue to be popular, with the upcoming movie amping up interest. The Alex Rider books are a little less popular now than they were five or six years back, but continue to be a recognized read for tweens and teens, especially boys. (The movie didn't do very well.)
Another much-anticipated book in the NYT's top ten is Fire by Kristin Cashore. I read Graceling last year and thought it was good, though I wasn't quite as enamored of it as some of my friends in the kidlitosphere blogging community. Fire is a companion book set in the same world as Graceling. (I try not to get Catching Fire and Fire mixed up!) The cover art to the left is from the UK edition.
If you take the time skim through Amazon's list of the Top 100 Bestselling Books for Children, you'll get a little better picture of the market, finding other commercial books such as the 39 Clues series and my 9-year-old nephew's favorite, Klutz Press's very fun Encyclopedia of Immaturity, along with more literary works. Well, a few, anyway. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is holding its own, for instance.
Here are a few notes from the writing side of things, which will, coincidentally enough, give you two terrific lists of books to browse.
Then, very gradually, these other creatures began to appear on my drawing paper, and I knew right away that they were my relatives. They were my uncles and aunts. It wasn't that they were monstrous people; it was simply that I didn't care for them when I was a child because they were rude, and because they ruined every Sunday, and because they ate all our food. They pinched us and poked us and said those tedious, boring things grown-ups say, and my sisters and I sat there in total dismay and rage. The only fun we had later was giggling over their grotesque faces—the huge noses, the spiraling hair pouring out of the wrong places. So I know who those "wild things" are. They are Jewish relatives.That's all the psychology this book can bear, if you ask me.
"Now stop!" Max said and sent the wild things off to bed without their supper. And Max the king of all wild things was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.The expression on Max's face on this page, with its utter wistfulness, is simply perfect, the more so because it is juxtaposed against the isolating absence of the three wild things around him, who are lost in drowsiness and sleep. (We also get the little side joke of Max being the one in charge, and of feeling his own inclination to send someone to bed without supper.)
Then all around from far away across the world he smelled good things to eat, so he gave up being king of where the wild things are.
One answer was from a little boy, who said the book's message was that you should eat a lot because all my books feed you: because in Wild Things there was dinner, and in In the Night Kitchen there was cake, and in Higglety Pigglety Pop! there was everything to eat. In Jack and Guy there was a lot of fresh bread. So he saw my works as a meal, which is as good a compliment as one could have.
Maurice Sendak turns anger into hunger, and he turns anger into a party. He tames the wild thing in this book, namely Max, by giving him what might smarmily be called a creative outlet for his energies. In doing so, the author-illustrator summons the inner world of a child.
tions, captured in the slightest strokes of ink. Less well-known books that you might want to seek out include Sendak's illustrations for a collection of Grimms' fairy tales titled The Juniper Tree and a picture book by Charlotte Zolotow called Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present. Have you seen Sendak and Sesyle Joslin's What Do You Say, Dear? and What Do You Do, Dear? They are very, very funny, putting all of the other children's books about good manners to shame. Then there are Else Holmelund Mindak's Little Bear books, classic easy readers illustrated by Maurice Sendak with great tenderness. You'll find that in addition to creating his own books, Sendak has made other people's writing live and breathe. Another example is his 1984 edition of George MacDonald's tale, The Light Princess, a story made new by Sendak's pen-and-ink illustrations. And of course, we have Sendak's creepy rendering of an obscure fairy tale, Outside Over There, plus his own cool-but-controversial In the Night Kitchen. (Little boys have penises. Who knew?) For a complete listing of his books, try the Wikipedia entry for Maurice Sendak.)
I like serendipity, and I like Margaret Mahy. Put the two together, and I'm a very happy camper! So on Veteran's Day, I made the pilgrimage to Pasadena to cruise Vroman's, one of L.A.'s best bookstores. When I walked up the YA aisle all unsuspectingly and saw a new book by Margaret Mahy, I grabbed it with such an ecstatic smile that a passing mother with a toddler probably thought I was having a religious experience.[T]here's no end to story. The world suggests stories as you go along. You see things happen or you hear something said, and sometimes these things extend themselves into stories. It's partly because of being a reader, I think. Reading is very creative—it's not just a passive thing. I write a story; it goes out into the world; somebody reads it and, by reading it, completes it. [Horn Book Magazine, November/December 2009, 606-607]The Magician of Hoad has an epic feel to it. It has that whole hero-and-friends-defeat-villains thing going. But it's really the biography of a magician, which is a fairly bold move in the world of fantasy. We are accustomed to having magicians and wizards dropped on our heads randomly, as a matter of course. We don't often explore the nature of their evolution as people who contain magic. (Books about training, e.g., the Harry Potter series, don't count in this regard.)
He had rough, wavy, mouse-colored hair that stood on end like a puppet's wig, a big nose, and a wide smile. His right eye was a light clear blue, while his left was hazel, so it was as if two different people were looking out of the same head. As she came into the tent, he caught her expression and burst into wild laughter. Later she was to think someone had stolen part of Dysart's life, and he filled the empty space by laughing, and that she had been able to tell this from the first moment she ever saw him.
A wind composed of light and the breath of dragons beat through the company, rustling carefully assembled clothes and tangling hair, and there in the dimness Heriot began to shine. The broad planes of cheek and forehead remaining dark, the lines from nose to mouth and the creases of his eyelids etched on the night with fine lines of fire, each hair a thread of silver, lifting with reluctant grace when the wind blew. He appeared to be not so much contained by the air as embroidered on it.
In case you missed it, here's the Publishers Weekly list of the best children's books of the year. I was pleased to see some of my favorites on the list, including Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me (read my glowing review here), Shaun Tan's crazy-cool Tales from Outer Suburbia, and Peter Brown's eco-friendly picture book, The Curious Garden, with its touch of magical realism. Richard Peck's A Season of Gifts and Libba Bray's Going Bovine are in my To Read pile; I'll have to move them to the top!
Once upon a time like now, and in a place like here, there existed a crooked house. The house at 33 Gooch Street was decrepit beyond description. If it could walk, it would limp. If it could talk, it would stutter. If it could smile, it would have rotting teeth. You get the picture...Libby's mother Sal is obese, consuming an astonishing quantity of food that Libby fries up for her each day, as well as the ominous buttergoo pudding Libby's father feeds his wife. Tall, thin Mal—who only bathes in months that have a Z in them—sells fake insurance to people when he's not down in his basement lab concocting miracle potions.
Libby Ames was small with two long dark braids and pale skin. She owned only one dress, a gray one, with big pockets to hold her cooking utensils and cleaning supplies.
Although she was ten, she was not in any grade, like you might be. Her parents had never allowed her to go to school. They told the school officials that she would be "homeschooled." Usually, that's a fine thing. For Libby, though, it meant that she was locked up all day, waiting on her parents hand and foot, dodging their insults like a beleaguered catcher.
The Blue Shoe begins with a single entrancing and mysterious shoe. Then a boy named Hap is caught stealing and nearly sentenced to exile on terrible Mount Xexnax, except that kind-hearted cobbler Grel intervenes and takes him on as an apprentice. The cost? Grel must make free shoes for the greedy mayor's wife for the rest of her life. Or, as he sweetly points out, the rest of his life!
Though I bow to the familiarity aspect of the witch from Hansel and Gretel, I personally like Baba Yaga for number one. This witch is scary-cool. She has iron teeth and flies around in a giant mortar, steering with the pestle. What's more, she lives in a hut that walks through the forest on chicken feet. When it stays in one place, the fence around her house is made of human bones topped off with skull torches.
I also own an out-of-print book called Baba Yaga and the Wise Doll, retold by Hiawyn Oram and illustrated by Ruth Brown. The Vasilisa character in Oram's version is much younger, and she is called Too Nice. By the end of the story, she learns not to be quite such a pushover.
Since I felt the ghost of Walt Disney breathing down my neck with numbers four and six, for number seven I'll pick an obscure witch from the Brothers Grimm tale, "Jorinda and Joringel." The crone hobbles around the forest turning young girls into birds, which she collects in cages in a huge room inside the tumbledown castle where she resides. When a courting couple walks too close to the hag's lair, Jorinda is turned into a nightingale while Joringel is frozen helplessly in place till moonrise. It is only by means of a dream that the boy eventually finds the key to freeing his love—and all of the other girls trapped in the castle. ("The Blue Light" or "The Tinderbox" is another Grimms' story with a witch in it.)
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Part Two
urkish Delight to bribe young Edward into treachery. (She is also reminiscent of Hans Christian Anderson's cool-as-ice Snow Queen, a witchy character I probably should have listed above.)
n smell children—and hate the smell. The witches have no hair, so they must wear wigs, and they wear gloves to disguise their clawed hands. They have no toes, either. Perhaps most deliciously creepy of all, witches have bright blue saliva. As a group, Dahl's witches are dedicated to destroying as many children as they can, in an organized campaign.
might as well throw in Elizabeth George Speare's The Witch of Blackbird Pond, which won the Newbery in 1959. Even though the book is only about an accused witch, it skillfully raises the specter of the Salem Witch Trials, showing us how easily someone who's a little different can be flagged as a witch. Plus it's a really good story, albeit a little dense for today's rush-rush young readers.
y the way, I spent this morning carving pumpkins with my students, a thoroughly satisfying endeavor. The kids are planning to be zombies, vampires, and green Barneys for Halloween. Their favorite candy seems to be a tie between Reese's and Snickers.
STEW (the OMTs [official management terms] are thick and savoury, which translate as "viscous" and "dark brown") is the staple FOOD in Fantasyland, so be warned. You may shortly be longing passionately for omelette, steak, or baked beans, but none of these will be forthcoming, indoors or out. Stew will be what you are served to eat every single time. Given the disturbed nature of life in this land, where in CAMP you are likely to be attacked without warning...and in an INN prone to be the centre of a TAVERN BRAWL, Stew seems to be an odd choice as staple food, since, on a rough calculation, it takes forty times as long to prepare as steak. But it is clear the inhabitants have not yet discovered fast food. The exact recipe for Stew is of course a Management secret, but it is thought to contain meat of some kind and perhaps even vegetables. Do not expect a salad on the side.Yet much as I love The Tough Guide, it is ultimately a book for grown-ups, and although Diana Wynne Jones's books are often funny, satire is too small a window through which to consider her work. Let's turn instead to her many marvelous books for children, beginning with the Chrestomanci titles.
Diana Wynne Jones envisions a series of parallel worlds related by differing causalities, or alternative outcomes of key events, and one of the worlds is our own. (Read about Hugh Everett and string theory for quantum mechanics-based thoughts on the concept.) In these worlds, magic is a commodity that is often misused by the criminal element. The most powerful enchanter in the related worlds, recognizable because he has nine lives, is appointed director and policeman over magic in all of the worlds. His title is Chrestomanci, and he can be summoned by repeating it three times in magical emergencies. (Click here for an A-Z Glossary of the Related Worlds as compiled by Helen Scott on the official DWJ website.)
illegal magical supplies, Christopher begins to lose his nine lives at an alarming rate. The tangle eventually gets untangled, but in the meantime, Christopher aids and abets a young runaway who happens to be the goddess of Asheth, along with her menace of a temple cat. To give you an idea of the kind of humor in Jones's books, the goddess wants nothing more than to be a British school girl, like the ones she reads about in a series of dippy books Christopher has brought her because she is bored.
Another key book about Christopher Chant/Chrestomanci is Conrad's Fate, in which you can see the enchanter and Millie as teens. The rest of the books set in this series of worlds give us a Chrestomanci who simply makes cameo appearances, usually in the role of a rather tongue-in-cheek deus ex machina. But never fear, the young characters in these books do work out their own magic-related dilemmas. The Magicians of Caprona, The Pinhoe Egg, and Witch Week are also Chrestomanci books, and Jones has written four short stories involving her nine-lived enchanter, as well. Of these titles, I particularly like Witch Week, a tale that plays out in a world where witchcraft is forbidden. The setting is a school called Larwood House, and the book begins,The note said: SOMEONE IN THIS CLASS IS A WITCH. It was written in capital letters in ordinary blue ballpoint, and it had appeared between two of the geography books Mr. Crossley was marking. Anyone could have written it. Mr. Crossley rubbed his ginger mustache unhappily. He looked out over the bowed heads of Class 6B and wondered what to do about it.The world of Witch Week considers such a note to be more than a prank; it's an accusation. But Mr. Crossley hesitates to inform his boss, who will probably call in an Inquisitor, a man authorized to use torture to root out and destroy witchcraft. As the school is rocked by magical happenings, including flocks of birds flying through classrooms and the sudden disappearance of every shoe in the entire school, the students in Class 6B try to uncover the identity of the resident witch and save each other from the forthcoming attentions of the Inquisitor.
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The trouble started the day Howard came home from school to find the Goon sitting in the kitchen. It was Fifi who called him the Goon. Fifi was a student who lived in their house and got them tea when their parents were out. When Howard pushed Awful into the kitchen and slammed the door after them both, the first person he saw was Fifi, sitting on the edge of a chair, fidgeting nervously with her striped scarf and her striped leg warmers.Howard discovers that his father has been writing two thousand words of nonsense and sending them to Town Hall every month for some inexplicable reason. This month, the pages are missing. Howard gradually learns that there is more than one person trying to get their hands on the pages, and that each of these individuals is a kind of sorcerer who "farms" part of the city arrogantly and sometimes criminally. The mystery takes still more twists and turns before Howard learns the complete truth, and all along the way, the Goon looms just over his shoulder.
"Thank goodness you've come at last!" Fifi said. "We seem to have somebody's Goon. Look."
Howard looked the way Fifi's chin jerked and saw the Goon sitting in a chair by the dresser. He was filling most of the rest of the kitchen with long legs and huge boots. It was a knack the Goon had. The Goon's head was very small, and his feet were enormous. Howard's eyes traveled up a yard or so of tight faded jeans, jerked to a stop for a second at the knife with which the Goon was cleaning the dirty nails of his vast hands, and then traveled on over an old leather jacket to the little, round fair head in the distance. The little face looked half-daft.
Aside from many wonderful standalone titles and several story collections, one other group of books is worth mentioning: the Dalemark Quartet. Here Jones delves into more serious and traditional fantasy. Dalemark is split between the freedom-loving earls of the North and the tyrannical earls of the South, so war often breaks out between the two sections of the land. I am especially fond of the first book, Cart and Cwidder, which begins with the murder of a musician who has been driving around the countryside with his children, putting on performances. But there was more to Clennen than meets the eye, and his children discover they must carry out his last mission while evading the reach of the ruthless earls of the South. Like many of Jones' books, this is a good example of the way the author draws a realistic picture of the bickering and support between siblings even as her plot takes us on an adventure colored by magic.
Other notable books include The Merlin Conspiracy, A Tale of Time City, Wild Robert, Power of Three, Aunt Maria (U.S. title), The Time of the Ghost, and The Game, along with short stories in the author's own collections and other anthologies. I especially like "Chair Person" from Stopping for a Spell and "What the Cat Told Me" from Unexpected Magic.I started writing children's books when we moved to a village in Essex where there were almost no books. The main activities there were hand-weaving, hand-making pottery, and singing madrigals, for none of which I had either taste or talent. So, in intervals between trying to haunt the church and sitting on roofs hoping to learn to fly, I wrote enormous epic adventure stories which I read to my sisters instead of the real books we did not have. This writing was stopped, though, when it was decided I must be coached to go to University. A local philosopher was engaged to teach me Greek and philosophy in exchange for a dollhouse (my family never did things normally), and I eventually got a place at Oxford.
At this stage, despite attending lectures by J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, I did not expect to be writing fantasy. But that was what I started to write when I was married and had children of my own.
I had been a fan of poet Tony Johnston's An Old Shell: Poems of the Gallapagos for a few years when I came across The Whole Green World, which is one of those books people tend to call "a celebration of life." Each spread is composed of a stanza of the poem on the left, displayed inside a circle of items representing the theme of the stanza (watch especially for the circle of ladybugs and ants!). Then on the right-hand page, you find a series of illustrations of a child planting a little garden, accompanied by her dog.I've got a little pair of shoes.And you see the girl putting her shoes on, a book about gardening beside her and her dog peeking in the window along with the sun. She talks about her dog and the stick she digs with, then we get this stanza about seeds:
(Comfy, cozy little shoes.)
Got a little pair of shoes
to walk the whole round world.
I've got a little sack of seeds.Far too many poetic picture book texts out there are mere verse, but Tony Johnston is the real deal, and it shows. The poem is beautifully crafted, a cheery and tongue-pleasing read. On top of that, the choice of Elisa Kleven to illustrate it is simply inspired. If you haven't seen Elisa Kleven's freewheeling art before, you're in for a treat. I suppose I'm biased: the one piece of original children's book illustration I've ever bought is a small Kleven work depicting kids cartwheeling among autumn trees. It hangs in my office where I can see it when I write, and it lifts my heart to look at it.
(Fat and slick like glassy beads.)
Got a little sack of seeds
to plant the whole round world.
"I write and illustrate picture books because I've never outgrown a deep childhood urge to enter a magical world. As a child growing up in Los Angeles I used to wish that my huge, congested city were more like the places in the books that I loved - places where forests grew and seasons changed, where animals talked and anything was possible."Somehow, Tony Johnston's poem and Elisa Kleven's art come together in this small book to recreate the world, making it more magical and happy without resorting to sticky sentimentality. Share Tony Johnston and Elisa Kleven's picture book with your own child, and learn to "dance the whole green world"!
Thesaurus, and I need a lot of color words for the book I'm writing. I happened to glance at the etymology and had to laugh: I had figured the word was German, but I never would have guessed that it comes from roots roughly translating as "goblin farts"! Apparently the bread had quite a reputation for being indigestible...
The truth is, collections of poems are a lot like short story collections, which are typically comprised of a couple of clunkers, several average entries, and two or three successful pieces. In the same way, even the best poets tend not to have books simply packed with breathtaking poems; they will give us books with a number of very nice poems along with a handful of stunners. I find this is true even of books of selected poems—because who can possibly keep up the pace for page after page?Besides a tidy description of the flower itself, Worth gives us a wry portrait of a particular person and even some insight into the poet's personality, which is not at all zinnia-like. (For that "someone," I'm picturing a precise and pompous zinnia woman, are you?)Zinnias
Zinnias, stout and stiff,
Stand no nonsense: their colors
Stare, their leaves
Grow straight out, their petals
Jut like clipped cardboard,
Round, in neat flat rings.
Even cut and bunched,
Arranged to please us
In the house, in water, they
Will hardly wilt—I know
Someone like zinnias; I wish
I were like zinnias.
CrabThese poems are mostly descriptions, but they make you feel like no one has ever looked more closely at a thing. For example, Worth tells us that "Turtle" is "Shawled/In the shade/Of his shell." Or look at her horse:
The dead crab
Lies still,
Limp on dry sand,
All strength to crawl
Gone from his
Hard shell—
But he keeps a shape
Of old anger
Curved along his claws.
HorseAside from her surprisingly apt furniture analogy, note how the horse's legs are unseen, his head "forming" above the door in a way that is absolutely accurate but made newly mysterious by the way the poet presents it to us. Worth's "Dog" is another elegantly delineated portrait, and her "Rosebush" manages to be bleakly philosophical in just nine lines. Or consider the chicken and her egg, which you may never think of in quite the same way after reading this poem:
In the stall's gloom,
His back, curved
Like a high sofa,
Turns on unseen
Legs, looms closer,
Until his long
Head forms above
The door, his face
Of thin silk over
Bone: to be stroked
Carefully, like
Fine upholstery
On a hard chair.
EggValerie Worth's small poems remind me of Emily Dickinson's work in that at first glance they might appear slight, mere fragments of thought. But each one contains much more than the hen's egg contains, the way this book contains far more than you might expect.
Somehow the hen,
Herself all quirk
And freak and whim,
Manages to make
This egg, as pure
And calm as a stone:
All for the sake
Of a silly chick,
Another squawking hen.
