Words I Looked Up This Week

Chthonic--of or relating to the underworld. The “ch” is silent, so it’s pronounced “thawnic.” The alternative would be chthonian, with a long o. I don’t know if I’ll ever have occasion to use it, but I like it!

Puce--I keep seeing this word and not quite knowing what color it is, so I finally checked. That would be a dark grayish purple or a purplish red. It’s a homely sounding word, isn't it? Too close to puke for my liking, but nevertheless a handy addition to the mental dictionary.

Thanks to Farida, Minh, and Harold!

Okay, I’d like to thank my mother, my six brothers and sisters, my chiropractor, and my neighbor across the street, also SCBWI. Yes, I actually won a contest! But mostly I had a VERY good time writing entries for Farida and Minh's cool competition, Picture Book Sequels That Never Were. (Instead of working on my current manuscript, ’cause who wants to do that?) My prize-winning entry was a sequel to Harold and the Purple Crayon called Harry and the Can of Purple Spray Paint. Check out the announcement of my win, then scroll up (and down!) to read more entries, all of them very funny in different ways, at Farida’s website, Saints and Spinners. Then take a look at Minh’s new jacket art for my entry and many others at wry and hilarious Bottom Shelf Books. I especially like the sequel to Kitten’s First Full Moon! I also like knowing how funny and warped (in a GOOD way) the people who love children’s books can be. And here’s a picture of the prize Farida sent me in its new home with other artful oddments atop my file cabinet. That would be the handmade green butterfly herder with his blue donkey standing front and center. I believe Farida will be selling her dolls starting in May at a site called Alkelda, so watch for them!

A Review of Help Me, Mr. Mutt! by Janet Stevens and Susan Stevens Crummel

I’ve liked Janet Stevens’s work for years—she may be best known for her Caldecott Honor book, the folktale Tops and Bottoms, but my personal favorite is her rendition of The Three Billy Goats Gruff, complete with the biggest goat brother in a leather motorcycle jacket and dark glasses. Priceless!

Help Me, Mr. Mutt! by Stevens and her sister came out about a year ago, in Spring 2008, but if you’re like me, you missed it. I discovered the book a few months ago, and I’ve been sharing it with friends ever since. I suppose the ideal audience for this picture book would be dog lovers, but pet owners in general and just about anyone with a sense of humor will probably appreciate it.

Mr. Mutt gives us a series of letters from dogs to a canine Dear Abby whose responses will amuse humans because they implement dog logic, not people logic. For example, a dachsund writes that he is wasting away because his owners have put him on a diet. Adding to the humor, he includes a drawing of himself as stick thin—alongside a photo that shows he truly is plump. Mr. Mutt’s advice? Swipe people food. The counselor includes a doggy food pyramid which indicates that dry dog food should be avoided and things like hamburgers, birthday cakes, and Thanksgiving turkeys should be ingested at a high rate. Mr. Mutt recommends that big dogs scavenge on countertops, while smaller dogs will have to use teamwork. Checking the trash or lying under the baby’s highchair should also help. And for an after-dinner drink, try the toilet.

If it just consisted of these letters, the book might not quite work. But there’s a running gag which provides a narrative thread: Mr. Mutt and his correspondents are constantly exchanging jibes about spoiled house cats, and a cat named The Queen in Mr. Mutt’s own home takes offense. The cat, who is apparently lurking beneath the very table where Mr. Mutt is typing, begins inserting warning letters on regal stationery, e.g., “Watch it, Muttface. Cats are not spoiled rotten. Especially me. I am royalty. I am The Queen. P.S. The Queen would never drink from a toilet.” Little by little, as the book progresses, The Queen gets more angry, until at last she goes after Mr. Mutt, who must then be rescued by his loyal fans.

The humor in this book is on the sophisticated side--a four-year-old wouldn’t really get it. But six- to eight-year-olds should be vastly amused, especially with some help from a grown-up reader and more particularly if they own cats and/or dogs. Be sure to look at the final endpaper, which rounds out the tale. Help Me, Mr. Mutt! may be something of a niche picture book, but it is also the funniest thing I’ve seen since The Flim-Flam Fairies.

A Review of Bubble Trouble by Margaret Mahy and Polly Dunbar

New Zealander Margaret Mahy is one of those rare authors who writes cross-genre with incredible skill: picture books, humorous chapter books, and dark, sophisticated books for teens. Before there was ever such a character as Edward Cullen, I fell in love with the troubled witch boy in her classic supernatural tale, Changeover. But today I’m reviewing something at the other end of the spectrum, Mahy’s latest giddy picture book, Bubble Trouble.

The story is fairly simple: a little girl named Mabel is blowing bubbles and one bubble lifts her baby brother into the sky, where he floats along, chased by a growing crew of would-be rescuers as colorful as that chain of goose-grabbing people in the old fairy tale about making a sad princess laugh. As her brother is faced with increasing peril late in the story, Mabel manages to save the day.

This is all very nice, but what it doesn’t tell you is just how amazing the rhymes are. We’re talking page after page of near-tongue twisters. The internal rhymes in particular are works of genius. If Bruce Degen’s Jamberry went to Oxford University, I’m thinking it would graduate as Bubble Trouble.

In fact, enough of the vocabulary words in this book are rather elevated that some people might be a tad intimidated by them:

In her garden, Chrysta Gribble had begun to cry and cavil at her lazy brother, Greville, reading novels in his bed. But she bellowed, “Gracious, Greville!” and she groveled in the gravel when the baby in the bubble bibble-bobbled overhead.

I’m here to tell you that this book is worth it—your child won’t need to understand every word to follow the story, and the rollicking sounds of the words will be a pleasure to adult readers and lap listeners alike.

For their part, Polly Dunbar’s lively illustrations contribute great good humor to the narration. Watch for the innovative use of a Scrabble board in both the art and the story telling, for example. I also really liked Dunbar’s work on Jane Yolen and Andrew Fusek Peters’s terrific poetry collection, Here’s a Little Poem. She’s one of those British illustrators we need to import more often.

If you want an upbeat read as well as a workout for your tongue, get your hands on Margaret Mahy’s Bubble Trouble and share it with the nearest small human!

A Review of A Walk Through a Window by kc dyer

I’ll start with my bias alert: This book is by a member of my writing group, kc Dyer! kc is the author of the Eagle Glen trilogy, about a girl named Darrell Connor who travels through time to Scotland, Italy, England, and Spain at crucial points in history and deals with villainous intrigues; she is also the author of Ms. Zephyr’s Notebook, about three kids who share a teacher—and secrets—on a hospital ward.

With A Walk Through a Window, Dyer returns to time travel, this time in her native Canada. Our intrepid traveler is Darby Christopher, a teenage girl whose parents send her to a small town on Prince Edward Island for the summer. Darby stays with her grandparents, but as the book begins, two things are apparent: Darby doesn’t want to be there, and something is wrong with her grandfather.

While exploring the neighborhood on her skateboard, a cranky Darby meets a boy named Gabriel who apparently lives in an abandoned house. After hearing her complaints about being stuck in a small town instead of Toronto, Gabriel pulls her into a series of time travel adventures. A shadowy Darby joins the Inuits crossing the Bering Strait, the Irish fleeing the Potato Famine to worse troubles on a coffin ship, and finally some later immigrants who turn out to have a direct connection to her own family.

Along the way, Darby loses her attitude, caught up in her curiosity about the past. She also grows a little more patient with her grandpa, who is beginning to suffer from Alzheimer’s. In fact, the subplot with Darby and her grandfather, which at first seems less important in the book, eventually takes center stage, becoming especially poignant in the final chapter or two.

This book is about history, but it is also about family. As the author gently reminds us, our families make us who we are. Like the inuksuk, a small Native Canadian sculpture made out of a hodge-podge of rocks and used to good symbolic effect in A Walk Through a Window, our lives are composed of bits and pieces of experience and heritage. Take a walk with Darby, and discover what it means to come from somewhere.

What Is It with British Writers and Fantasy?

There’s just something about British fantasy—but what is it? You’ve heard of the “It” factor in Hollywood (no doubt sex appeal), but what is the “It” factor when it comes to fantasy, and how come British writers seem to be so very good at that particular genre?

Or, to be less intimidating about it, since many American fantasy writers are very talented, how is British fantasy unique? To answer that question, we obviously need to compare Monty Python and the Holy Grail to I Love Lucy, or Wallace and Gromit to The Simpsons, or When Harry Met Sally to Bridget Jones’s Diary. Therein we will surely find the answer, especially if we stick blithely to sweeping generalizations, which I hereby pledge to do in today’s post.

Actually, I looked at a couple of lists of American film comedies and TV shows, trying to decide what they have in common, and I concluded that Americans are very good at what the term “sitcom” tells us: situational comedy. Our humor is based on plot twists. We’re especially good at putting people in embarrassing situations and watching what happens—e.g., I Love Lucy, Everybody Loves Raymond, Get Smart, Seinfeld, and just about every “reality” show ever made. And just like in reality shows, the situations we find funny tend to be derived from things that do actually happen, or things that could happen very easily.

In contrast, British humor tends to lean towards the surreal—witness any number of scenes in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but just for instance, take the one where the guy’s arms and legs have all been chopped off and he’s yelling at his opponent to come back and fight. Or the killer rabbit, or the coconuts. It’s all kind of nuts, and I mean that in a good way!

Combined with the strangeness, we get a real deadpan reaction from the characters. When something goes wrong for Lucy, she scrambles to handle it, but ends up flipping out. Wallace of Wallace and Gromit fame, like other British comedic characters, reacts to the most bizarre happenings with equanimity and an air of faint puzzlement.

Which brings me back to books: there’s something literary, not to mention clever, about British comedy, and about British fantasy writing. The words that keep coming to mind are wit and whimsy. I realize these tend to be used stereotypically, but then, stereotypes can have their roots in truth. I suppose we can define wit as cleverness and surprising humor. Just what is whimsy? Overused, it can become saccharine attempts to be cute, or as the British themselves, especially Terry Pratchett, might say, “twee.” But whimsy is creativity with a cheery grin. It is the oddly hopeful thought processes of a child, taking us to strange places which are not inhabited by vampire boyfriends, but rather by giant, traveling peaches and by baby griffins who eat too much and require our young heroes to earn extra money in order to feed them (thanks to Roald Dahl and Joan Aiken, respectively).

Beyond offering up solid plotting and appealing characters, children’s books—especially fantasy—really should surprise us. I’ve written before on this blog about the Fresh Factor, by which I mean innovation, the kinds of plots and language and details that make us sit up and take notice. Perhaps it’s a sad tribute to the televisionization of American culture that so many of our stories are prone to being predictable. In any case, I don’t know why some of the best or certainly most off-the-wall fantasy is British, but I can only surmise that there’s a little less TV involved and a lot more Lewis Carroll.

Whatever the explanation, the most innovative children’s fantasy I’ve read in recent years has been by British writers. This may seem like a cruel thing to say considering all of the excellent American fantasy out there, but I’m comparing good books to other good books, truly. My point is simply that the most fantastical fantasy tends to be British. There’s Diana Wynne Jones with her dragon’s blood smugglers and moving castles, Terry Pratchett with his frying pan-wielding young witch and his tidal wave-and-ghost-washed island, and Philip Reeve with steampunk space adventures and moving cities that devour smaller cities, for example. Not to mention Garth Nix’s bell sorceress in the land of the dead or his key-seeking Arthur Penhaligon in the seriously strange House, let alone Neil Gaiman’s Other Alice and Mowgli-in-a-Cemetery. (Yes, I realize Garth Nix is Australian, but I’ve decided to lump him in!) Frankly, one of the most original concepts I’ve seen in years is from a less well-known book, Eva Ibbotson’s Dial-a-Ghost, in which a temp agency that places ghosts in houses gets two orders mixed up. I also recently read the collected Armitage Family stories by Joan Aiken in The Serial Garden—and really, if you want to know what I mean by British wit and whimsy, her book perfectly exemplifies the phrase.

Of course, the big name in British fantasy today is J.K. Rowling. People who fuss about her rather ordinary prose are completely missing the point, which is that this is the woman who invented Bertie Bott’s Many Flavored Beans and quidditch. Besides the lovable characters, it’s those crazy, brilliant details that lift the Harry Potter books out of the ordinary.

And despite all the press, Rowling hasn’t actually unseated Roald Dahl—his stuff is still the best bet I know of for almost any eight-year-old on the planet. Talk about wit and whimsy! Golden tickets for the possibility of entrance to a mysteriously unknown chocolate factory? A girl who chews a stick of gum and turns into an oversize blueberry? I won’t get into lions and witches and wardrobes, but I hope you get the idea.

I got started thinking about all this because I read two British fantasies this week: Magical Kids by Sally Gardner and The Deep Freeze of Bartholomew Tullock by Alex Williams. I didn’t realize they were British at first, but I started getting the feeling I wasn’t in Kansas anymore and checked those back flaps to see where the authors were from. Suspicions confirmed!

Neither book is amazing, though both are pretty good. Magical Kids is a flip book—one side is a novella called The Smallest Girl Ever and the other is one called The Boy Who Could Fly. The idea of a shrinking child is not new, nor is the rather pop psychology explanation that Ruby Genie shrinks because adults are belittling her. The idea of a boy getting his wish to be able to fly is an oldie, as well, and it’s burdened by a creaky subplot about a dad who has forgotten how to have fun. But in each case, the story telling rolls cheerfully along just the same—especially in The Smallest Girl Ever, whose title character spends part of the book inhabiting a ladies’ purse while improving the magic tricks of an inept but helpful magician. (Apparently this is the second volume, by the way; the first volume consists of The Strongest Girl in the World and The Invisible Boy.)

The Deep Freeze of Bartholomew Tullock features one of those moustache-twirling villains intent on taking the family farm, also the farmwife. Only in this case, the farm is an oddly crafted house where the Breezes make intricate mechanical fans, and the farmwife is Elizabeth Breeze. Bartholomew Tullock has turned the town into a wintry, miserable place where everyone but the Breezes works in his turnip fields under a dark gray sky. As the villain increases the pressure, Madeline Breeze and her father leave town with a charming con artist to try to sell their fans in a warmer climate, while Rufus Breeze and his mother try to keep the bad guys from destroying their house. The book is a fun, fast-paced read, but as other reviewers have pointed out, the best thing about The Deep Freeze is the fans, which are utterly bizarre and are described in loving detail, making readers want to own one.

Like Magic Kids, The Deep Freeze of Bartholomew Tullock is a good way to spend an afternoon. Both books have that sense of whimsy, a valuable commodity in a fantasy world often overrun by dour plotting.

Of course, all is not lost on the American front. Going back to humor, I am happy to report that Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid and sequels actually give British humor a run for its money (particularly Louise Rennison!). And when it comes to TV, I am both relieved and proud to say that The Simpsons makes up for any number of predictable, unfunny TV comedies cobbled together by less creative Americans.

As for children’s fantasy, I suppose we can attempt to claim Neil Gaiman, despite the deplorable persistence of his entrancing accent. More important, we have some innovative newcomers appearing on the horizon: Marie Rutkoski (The Cabinet of Wonders), Ingrid Law (Savvy), and Joseph Helgerson (Horns and Wrinkles) all seem promising.

But let’s focus on the really kooky stuff. For madcap, whimsical, Britishy off-the-rails books, there are two American writers to watch: Ysabeau S. Wilce and James Kennedy. Wilce is the author of Flora Segunda: Being the Magical Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog. The sequel, just in case you can’t guess, is Flora’s Dare: How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from a Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined to Her Room). The first book tends to ramble, but is nevertheless something new and intriguing—imagine a California about a century or so ago if the Aztecs were still around and had territorial rights, and if all concerned had magical abilities. Throw in a teenager with a Califan slang vocabulary and insufficient supervision, then watch what happens. Flora’s mother is the Califan military leader, while Flora herself is a rambunctious fourteen-year-old who gets suckered by a banished magical butler. I will say that the second book hangs together better. (It is also more clearly a Young Adult title.)

James Kennedy’s The Order of Odd-Fish isn’t perfect, but it is astonishing and funny. Here’s my Amazon review:

Jo was discovered as a baby by the flamboyant actress, Lily LaRouche, inside a washing machine, accompanied by a note that read: “This is Jo. Please take care of her. But beware. This is a DANGEROUS baby.” When our story opens, Jo is thirteen years old, living with Aunt Lily in the extravagantly moldering ruby palace in the middle of the California desert. The night of Lily's annual costume Christmas party, a Russian colonel whose actions are directed by his intestinal rumblings shows up, as does a narcissistic giant cockroach butler, not to mention a package for Jo that falls out of the sky. Chapter One ends, “After that, everyone had the leisure to start screaming.”

Soon Jo and company are being chased by a billionaire with evil aspirations. They end up in Eldritch City, where Jo finds out just why she is considered dangerous and must continue to hide her identity from her newfound friends, fellow squires to the Knights of the Order of Odd-fish. The order is working on making, not an encyclopedia of all knowledge, but an appendix “of dubious facts, rumors, and myths.... A repository of questionable knowledge, and an opportunity to dither about.”

As this task implies, author James Kennedy prefers to range along the road from the absurd to the ridiculous, stopping along the way in the outrageous. He also makes arguably masculine side trips into the realms of bodily functions and violence.

The plot is a little uneven in spots, perhaps because Kennedy combines one of those dark end-of-the-world story lines with the aforementioned nuttiness—and sometimes these two efforts seem to pull each other sideways. A few bits and pieces work better than others: I didn’t quite buy the parts involving a pie-loving character called Hoagland Shanks, for example. However, many OTHER bits are simply hilarious—and refreshingly creative. The rituals related to dueling, particularly the exchange of insults, are among Kennedy’s bizarre gems. Think of Eldritch City as the love child of Lewis Carroll and Neil Gaiman. It is well worth the trip.

I will caution you that Kennedy does not shy away from big words, nor from an irony worthy of a satirist writing for adults. I suspect a lot of the humor will sail right over young readers’ heads, although Lemony Snickett has already established a precedent for using irony and obscure vocabulary in children's books. Watch in particular for the subplot involving the vain cockroach butler, Sefino, and his archenemy, a centipede newswriter.

I can’t resist closing this review with the most astonishing sentence in The Order of Odd-Fish, a lovingly concocted work of art that will give you some idea what you’re in for: “But soon Ken Kiang found he was both cat and mouse in a bewildering showdown with the Belgian Prankster, in which strategies of ever greater sophistication were deployed, canceled, reversed, appropriated, adapted, and foiled; pawns sacrificed, attacks repulsed, fortresses stormed and captured, treaties signed and betrayed, retreats faked and traps sprung, territory gained, lost, besieged, divided, despoiled, and exchanged—it was a shadow world, of infinite levels of deceit and disguise, of decoys that were Trojan horses full of more decoys that were red herrings in non-mysteries that had neither a solution nor a problem, concerning people that didn't exist in a place that was nowhere in a situation that was impossible!” (275)

Frankly, I can’t wait to see what Kennedy writes next.

Now, I suppose this idea of British fantasy I’ve been trying to describe may be a style—and it may even be partly imaginary. (How apt!) But if there’s a lesson American fantasy writers can learn from the Brits, it is that we needn’t limit ourselves to simply finding a new method for establishing a portal to another world or swiping a medieval setting and introducing sorcerers. There’s a special kind of risk-taking involved in letting your imagination go significantly farther afield. So perhaps with this entry, I’m issuing a challenge to children’s fantasy writers, myself included. Because the mind can come up with far more creative worlds and plots and details if you will only let it travel higher into the ether.

A Review of Mama Says: A Book of Love for Mothers and Sons by Rob D. Walker and Leo and Diane Dillon

The more poetic type of concept book has lost ground in recent years. At a recent SCBWI conference I attended, it was clear that editors were hungry for action-packed, TV-esque plotting in children’s books. I’ve also heard it from my own editors: “This is lovely, but it’s not commercial enough.”

A concept picture book is centered around an idea rather than a plot. Or plot may be hinted at, but only because the concept conveys a certain degree of chronology or simply because pages are being turned. Alphabet books and books about colors or opposites are well-known examples, but the best concept books may be less obviously educational: take a look at Charles G. Shaw’s dreamy cloud book, It Looked Like Spilled Milk; Laura Vaccaro Seeger’s First the Egg; and Margaret Wise Brown’s The Important Book, for instance.

So what does it take to get a concept book published these days? Well, in the case of Mama Says: A Book of Love for Mothers and Sons, it takes the grand lions of illustration and a message the world seems to be in need of. Rob D. Walker is a fairly new author, but I hope you’ve heard of the formidable husband-and-wife illustration team, Leo and Diane Dillon.

Memorable concept books read like poems, and Mama Says is no exception. Each spread shows a different mother teaching her son, with her words presented as an unpunctuated seven-line poem. The lines are brief, as you’ll see in my favorite stanza:

Mama says
Embrace the moon
And marvel at the sun
Mama says
To study stars
And make a wish on one

This is about as specific as it gets, which isn’t what you want to see in poetry. Most of the stanzas sound like proverbs or the types of pat advice parents give their children, e.g., “Mama says/To put my heart/In everything I do.” But saying this does the book a disservice because Mama Says works better as a whole than in parts. One of the strongest messages of the book is that we live in a global community. Each spread represents a mother and son from a different part of the world, and each stanza is also given in translation from the corresponding language: Cherokee, Russian, Amharic, Japanese, Hindi, Inuktitut, Hebrew, English, Korean, Arabic, Quechua, and Danish (key at the back of the book). I also noticed that some of the messages seemed particularly relevant to the culture being depicted, another thoughtful aspect of the book, e.g., inner peace relating to meditation practices in India.

If the “showing” is not given in the words, it is provided in the illustrations, done in the Dillons’ signature soft-edged style. The idea of “sharing” sounds pretty vague, but it becomes clear as a Russian boy gives a loaf of bread he and his mother have just baked to an elderly man. The Japanese boy who is told to be true and put his heart in everything he does is shown in a smaller left-hand illustration confessing to having broken a vase, then repairing the vase with his mother’s help in the larger illustration on the facing page.

Good poems tend to conclude with a bang, and the last line of this book, in conjunction with the illustration, gets it right. The ending ties everything together with uncommon grace.

While I’m presenting Mama Says right now partly so you can think about ordering it as a Mother’s Day gift, I did wonder about the role of fathers and wish for a book like this for them, too.

There is more than one reference to God in Mama Says, which some readers might not relate to, but then again, the references are presented as being culture-specific and furthermore seem appropriate in a book about teaching children values in different countries. The mercenary, splintered, and combative nature of the modern world is a source of worry to many parents. Whether you’re religious or not, I believe you’ll find inspiration in this beautifully made book, Mama Says: A Book of Love for Mothers and Sons.

Because of the importance of Leo and Diane Dillon in the picture book world, I want to add a brief note about their other books. They are best known for winning back-to-back Caldecott medals, in 1976 for Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears (author Verna Aardema) and in 1977 for Ashanti to Zulu: African Traditions (author Margaret Musgrove). They have won numerous other awards and created a lot of jacket art, along with many picture books. Recent books include Jazz on a Saturday Night (a Coretta Scott King Honor Book), Mother Goose Numbers on the Loose, The People Could Fly: The Picture Book (also a Coretta Scott King Honor Book), Earth Mother, and Whirlwind Is a Spirit Dancing. My personal favorites are out of print: two books by poet Nancy Willard—Pish, Posh Said Hieronymous Bosch and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice—and Wind Child by Shirley Rousseau Murphy.

But the most gorgeous book by the Dillons, which is still in print, is their rendition of To Every Thing There Is a Season, the famous verses from Ecclesiastes. A precursor to Mama Says in terms of both design and the theme of universal human truths, the book uses a different culture to represent each couplet, yet each spread is done in a different art style, from different periods of time (with a key at the back). If you don’t own this book, you should. It’s a real showpiece, one of my picture book treasures.

Note for Worried Parents: Mama Says includes one scene where a child’s dead male relative, presumably his father, is shown. The image is presented in the context of Hindu burial customs and is perfectly tender, but I realize some of you may shy away from the book for this reason.

A Review of Blueberry Girl by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess

If Neil Gaiman wants to make a concept picture book, he doesn’t exactly run into an argument from his publisher about how concept books aren’t that hot right now. Still, you might expect said concept book to be pretty dire, given Gaiman’s work as a horror/fantasy writer. Instead, his Blueberry Girl is warm and upbeat. I present it here as the mother-daughter counterpart to the mother-son book reviewed above, Mama Says. (Sorry, fathers, this just isn’t your year!)

According to the author, the book started out as a personal poem written for the soon-to-be-born daughter of a friend, singer Tori Amos. At that time, the child was affectionately being referred to as “the Blueberry.” Perhaps this explains the book’s intimacy, despite its universal themes and the depiction of more than one girl in Charles Vess’s illustrations. Gaiman recounts that people kept hearing about the poem and asking him for copies, and then Charles Vess saw it and liked it, and the two of put their heads together, deciding they could use it to raise money for causes protecting women and girls, and well—here’s the book!

Blueberry Girl is written as a prayer, but it isn’t addressed to a Judeo-Christian god. Instead it’s addressed to “Ladies of light and ladies of darkness and ladies of never-you-mind.” The illustrator has drawn three women in long robes who might be the Three Fates from Greek mythology, the Maiden-Mother-Crone triple goddess, or even the Queen of Faerie and a couple of her ladies.

Mind you, Gaiman doesn’t seem to be making a point so much as inhabiting his rightful fantasy milieu as he calls on the logical deity for blessing a small girl child. This is the world of metaphor, after all. The blessings themselves are a mixture of the thoughtful and the playful, beginning with “First, may you ladies be kind” (which encourages me to go with that Three Fates interpretation). The second blessing is from a fairy tale, a famous story about fairy gifts, no less: “Keep her from spindles and sleeps at sixteen....” Some of the blessings are more contemporary and long-sighted in nature: “Nightmares at three or bad husbands at thirty, these will not trouble her eyes. Dull days at forty, false friends at fifteen—let her have brave days and truth....” Having worked with high school students, I suspect a lot of girls could use protecting from “false friends at fifteen”!

From a poetry standpoint, the best language here is when the author names the Ladies, which he does two more times for a proper fairy tale thrice.

As lilting as the words, the illustrations show a hopeful girl skipping along treetops, riding an owl, or diving with whales. She is always moving forward, accompanied by a small parade of animals and birds. Framing art at the beginning and end show a woman in a blue dress, first very pregnant and then holding her baby. The art has a loose, Earth Mother sensibility which may strike some as granola-ish, but I hope the book is read by more traditional folks, as well. The joy conveyed by Blueberry Girl is worth sharing with mothers and daughters everywhere.

Now, if you really want a treat, also a preview of the book, watch this YouTube trailer and listen to Neil Gaiman reading the entire text. He has such a lovely, word-loving voice that you may feel a little funny reading Blueberry Girl aloud after hearing him! In case you also want to see more of Charles Vess’s art, go to his website, then scroll down and click on What’s Old: Recent Projects and Paintings.

Proximidade Award

Em of Em's Bookshelf gave me (or rather my blog) a Proximidade Award! Thanks very much, Em! "This blog invests and believes in the PROXIMITY-nearness in space, time and relationships. These blogs are exceedingly charming. These kind bloggers aim to find and be friends. They are not interested in prizes or self-aggrandizement! Our hope is that when the ribbons of these prizes are cut, even more friendships are propagated. Please give more attention to these writers! Deliver this award to eight bloggers who must choose eight more and include this clever-written text into the body of their award."

For my part, I nominate Laura Salas's blog for her friendly 15-words-or-less poetry contests, which keep intriguing me; Candace Ryan of Book, Booker, Bookest for her fresh and thoughtful comments; Susan Thomsen of Chicken Spaghetti for reminding me to celebrate the birthday of Strunk and White's Elements of Style; Lynn Hazen for having an Imaginary Blog, my favorite kind; Linda Gerber for interviewing sooo many authors and having excellent contests, also for talking shop with me; Enna of Squeaky Books for her great Shannon Hale header quote, t-shirt designs, and chocolate analogies; Oops...Wrong Cookie because you can't go wrong with Texas librarians--plus they keep reviewing books that I really like; and Deanna H. of Once Upon a Time for sharing cool stuff like creative bookshelves and the Poetry Month poster, which I now covet avidly. Okay, Proximidade Award winners, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to give this award to eight blogs you like and leave them a comment letting them know they've been honored!

A Review of Thirteenth Child by Patricia C. Wrede

I’ve been looking forward to this book coming out for months! So when I saw it in the bookstore yesterday, I snatched it up, ran home, and read the whole thing straight through. Why, you may ask, such transportations of delight? Well, fantasy is my favorite genre, and Patricia C. Wrede has written some very fun books, most notably the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, starting with Dealing with Dragons. She also coauthored Sorcery and Cecilia or the Enchanted Chocolate Pot and its sequels with Caroline Stevermer—novels of manners set in an alternate England where magicians are the norm.

Another reason I’ve been dying to read Thirteenth Child is because it clearly falls in the new subgenre I’ve been talking about, rural fantasy. (See my blog entry for January 16: “Move Over, Steampunk!”) With this book, Wrede is starting a new series called Frontier Magic, in which Americans in the 1800s have magicians to help them settle the Wild West (only here they're called Columbians). Wrede’s world is new in other ways, I discovered: the frontier is populated by “natural” animals such as mammoths, bison, and woolly rhinoseroses, along with magical creatures such as steam dragons, spectral bears, and swarming weasels.

On the far side of the plains were mountains, sharp and high, that no one had seen but a few explorers. Papa said that at least ten expeditions had tried to find a way through them to the Pacific Ocean, but only three men had ever come back alive, and they were stark out of their heads. There was a monument in the capital to Lewis and Clark, who headed the first group that went missing, back in 1804. It was more than wild country; it was unknown.

Alternative history, indeed! But there’s more: formerly, magicians led by Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin erected the Great Barrier Spell, intended to keep the lethal beasts of the frontier from overrunning and devouring Columbians. Now Eff and her family are moving out to the edge of the frontier, where her father will teach magic at a small college.

Eff is the hero of our story, though she thinks she's its villain. Because she is the thirteenth child, her superstitious uncles and aunts and cousins tell her over and over that she will turn out to be evil and should have been drowned at birth. To make matters worse, her twin Lan is the golden boy, seventh son of a seventh son and mightily magical. Fortunately, he and Eff are very close. But one of the reasons Eff’s parents are moving out west is to get away from the relatives who treat their daughter as if she were cursed.

The story telling has an epic feel, beginning when Eff is five and ending when she is eighteen. Eff and Lan attend a small public school out in the settlement, though Lan is given supplemental lessons to cultivate his gifts. It doesn’t occur to anyone except the amazing Miss Ochiba that Eff might be plenty gifted in her own right. Miss Ochiba schools Eff and her friend William in Aphrikan magic during after-school tutoring sessions while Lan is busy learning the more commonly valued Avrupan (European) magic.

We also meet the Society of Progressive Rationalists, who abhor magic and are determined to build a settlement without using any at all. One such rationalist, Brant Wilson, studies with Eff’s father and turns out to be a bit of a hero; he also turns Eff’s older sister’s head. Another character of note is “Wash” Washington Morris, a circuit riding magician who troubleshoots problems in the scattered settlements.

In time, Eff’s gifts begin to show in unexpected ways as she and her family and friends take on a problem that is destroying the crops of the entire region. It’s not dragon fighting, but it’s a matter of life and death for these struggling farmers.

Thirteenth Child reads like historical fiction, and I was thoroughly caught up in the way the Columbian settlers handled their challenges. One of the strengths of the book is the way Wrede captures the "can do" feeling of frontier living and this era in our country's history. Her greatest success, though, is the character of Eff and her story, which is what really kept me going. I did get a little bogged down near the end of the book during explanations about different stages of beetles, but that’s the only place my reading faltered. I can assure you that Patricia C. Wrede’s latest series, like a settler taming new land, is off to a brave, strong start.

A Review of The Books of Umber: Happenstance Found by P.W. Catanese

In some cases, as an author launches into a new fantasy series, there’s a noticeable grinding of gears, the kind you might hear at a large and prosperous gristmill during the Middle Ages. I didn't get that feeling with Wrede's new series, Frontier Magic (reviewed above), but I did get it with this first volume in P.W. Catanese’s Books of Umber, Happenstance Found. Still, the series definitely has potential.

The story begins with the discovery of a young boy in a series of ancient caves. His name is Hap, short for Happenstance, and he has no memory of anything prior to about five minutes before he is found. Hap turns out to be the hidden treasure an adventurer named Lord Umber has been seeking. Like a foundling on a doorstep, the boy has a note in his pocket, and it is addressed to Umber himself. Soon Umber and Hap are making their way out of the caves, accompanied by Umber's companions--a strongman named Oates who is magically compelled to speak only the truth and a shy one-handed archer named Sophie. The four barely manage to escape a dreadful wyrm, the collapse of part of the cave network, and a volcano. Then, as they set out across the sea on a leviathan boat, they realize they are being followed.

It soon becomes obvious to the others that Hap is a little different. He never needs to sleep, can leap much higher than ordinary people, can see in the dark, and can read and speak any language—even dead ones and languages from other worlds. He also has strange, glimmering green eyes. For his part, Hap finds out more about Lord Umber, especially once he is ensconced in the man’s fortress, the Aerie. Umber is a stranger to this magical world, bringing with him knowledge from the land of his origin. He is essentially a Renaissance man, but in addition to his own brilliance, Umber has a secret device that provides him with information.

The author gives strong clues early on, so I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that Umber is a refugee from Earth. The explorer appears to be manic-depressive, as well, which is an interesting component in a fantasy. (At one point he tells Hap he misses his meds.)

Umber is well regarded as the savior of his city-state and a provider of ideas such as how to build a better ship. When Hap visits the royal palace with Umber, he meets three princes: the duty-driven heir to the throne, a jolly drunkard, and a poisonous snake type. Back at the Aerie, an uptight housekeeper, a miniature man, a mad librarian, and an extremely dangerous captive witch round out the cast. It is clear that the author intends to write future books involving the princes and the witch. But this volume is mostly about how Hap is pursued by a horrible being who seems to want to assassinate him. Even though Umber draws on all of his resources to protect the boy, the Creep eventually closes in on Hap. The climactic scene brings Hap face-to-face with his stalker, who turns out to have something far more terrifying than death in mind.

Fortunately, one of the best things about Happenstance Found is the way the good guys defeat the villain. I had been wondering how they were going to pull it off, and the answer turns out to be surprising, effective, and even funny. Watch for it!

As for flaws, I did get a little irked by the larger story arc and the way it’s presented: a powerful unseen being has led Umber to Hap, and his goal has to do with helping Umber save Earth, not the world of this story. That aspect of the plot felt like we were seeing the man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz. Besides relying on deus ex machina, Catanese devalues the world of the story by making it a sort of byproduct of the problems on Umber’s home world. Fantasy imperialism rears its ugly head, as does a messagey “save the environment, ‘ware the apocalypse” agenda for readers here on Earth. (Useful thoughts, perhaps, but difficult not to wield heavy-handedly in a fantasy adventure story.)

Even so, the array of characters in Happenstance Found bodes well for future volumes, and I’m curious to see what the author does with them, especially Hap and his strange gifts. The book is told from Hap's point of view, yet there’s no doubt Umber is really the star of the show, an intriguing cross between Indiana Jones and Leonardo Da Vinci, with a morose drop or two of Sylvia Plath thrown in for good measure. And so it begins: If this first volume is all about setting the stage, then the stage is very well set.

Note for Worried Parents: The bad guy is pretty scary. I mean, really scary, especially in that climactic scene. The witch is kind of horrific, too. Amazon lists the book as being for 9- to 12-year-olds, but I’d say it depends on the 9-year-old.

A Review of Tiger Moon by Antonia Michaelis

A story within a story, Tiger Moon owes a debt of thanks to Scheherazade. In this case, however, there’s a slightly different reason that the young wife is doomed: having failed in various attempts to escape, she will be killed when her new husband finds out she is not a virgin. As the book begins, this girl is sold by her poverty-stricken parents to be the eighth wife of a volatile and wealthy Indian merchant, Ahmed Mudhi, who prefers to be called Rajah. The girl herself is named Safia, meaning Virtue, but prefers to be called Raka, the Full Moon. Or so she tells a young eunuch who sometimes attends her in the Rajah’s harem. He is called Lalit, The Beautiful One, by the household, but prefers his own name, Lagan, meaning The Right Time.

In case all this talk of names seems like a muddle, think of it as a symbol of the surprises to come. For one thing, the "fictional" framed story is far more powerful than the "real" framing story. For another, all of the important characters in Tiger Moon first appear to be something other than their true selves. The main character, Farhad Kamal, is even able to change his appearance readily, beyond what would be explained by mere disguise. Later in the book, he uses a series of names that represent transformation. Michaelis makes us think about the differences between who we are and who we seem, as well as the differences between who we are and who we may become.

As she awaits her fate, Raka begins to tell Lalit a story about the Hindu god Krishna setting a trap to catch a hero. Of course, Krishna doesn’t seem to get quite what he expected. Even the place he sets his trap has been altered—an ancient sacred grove turned into a large garden by the British. The author writes, “Krishna ground his teeth, but he sat down and waited patiently for his hero. The hero turned up around midday.”

We learn that “Farhad means Happiness and Kamal means Lotus Blossom, and up to this point in Farhad Kamal’s life, he had not discovered what his life had to do with either of them.” A scruffy sixteen-year-old trickster and thief, Farhad is drawn to the silver amulet Krishna has placed in the center of a lotus blossom. But as soon as he touches it, he is also drawn into Krishna’s schemes, assigned to rescue the god’s daughter from the demon Ravana. As the story continues, we understand that the girl Farhad must rescue and Raka are one and the same—only they’re not. Michaelis's two stories overlap lightly and cleverly in the beginning, then boldly and mystically by the end of the book.

In the meantime, we are utterly captivated by Farhad, a flawed but likable young man whose doggedness charms even though we know he’s mostly pursuing Krishna’s quest so that he won’t spend his next life on Earth as a worm or a woodlouse. (I was reminded of Lloyd Alexander's slightly vain, mistake-prone heroes.) Farhad's task is not a straightforward one. Before he can rescue Krishna’s daughter, he must steal a cursed jewel, the bloodstone, in order to bribe the Rajah’s chief servant. Farhad must also steal a sacred tiger, for the tiger will be his steed as he races across the desert, trying to reach the girl before it’s too late.

No quest would be complete without a villain, and Farhad's is a man he first encounters as a fellow prisoner when the boy is thrown into jail. Like Farhad, the Frenchman is in pursuit of the lost jewel. Like Farhad, he is more than a master of disguise, changing his appearance as he comes after the bloodstone again and again with increasing viciousness. But Farhad has allies of his own, most notably the great white tiger, Nitish. The two bicker, yet gradually become partners in Krishna’s enterprise, compensating for each other’s weaknesses—selfishness and cowardice in Farhad’s case, pride and a fear of water in Nitish’s.

Farhad’s growth during the course of his journey is rough, but nevertheless heartening. By the end of the book, we are more than ready for the framing story and Farhad’s tale to merge, and the transformation somehow works. From a writing standpoint, it’s a tremendous accomplishment. Most of all, however, Tiger Moon is a magical reading experience. I found myself madly rooting for Farhad to succeed.

I’ll just mention that this book came to my attention because it won a 2009 Batchelder Honor award, given to the finest children’s books in translation. Originally written in German, Tiger Moon was translated into English by Anthea Bell.

Note for Worried Parents: This is most definitely a Young Adult book, and it’s pretty open about sex. There are a couple of discreet, yet clear scenes of sex between main characters, as well as a few less pleasant encounters and references. I have already mentioned that a key plot point is Raka’s not being a virgin. Though none of this particularly detracts from the story telling, some readers might find it offensive.

Update (5-16-12): Rethinking my take on this book after reading a review from Book Smugglers. Wow!

Three Bird Books for Spring

It’s the quintessential image of spring: three blue eggs in a robin’s nest. And so I give you three books, each as surprising as a new egg. Two of them are recent arrivals, while the third is out of print. Each captures the poetry of birds in a way I think Emily Dickinson would have appreciated. Birds are fantastic metaphors, after all. Their eggs represent new life and their flight represents hope and freedom. Remember Dickinson’s poem? “Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul/And sings the tune without the words/And never stops at all....”

Birdsong by Audrey Wood and Robert Florczak

Birdsong is out of print, but it’s still a favorite of mine. Readers will travel around the United States for a day, bird watching with children in different states as they go. The text is simple: “Caw-caw-caw—swaying on telephone wires, jaunty crows banter at dawn. Missy and Deni awaken to birdsong.” A look at the key on the back cover tells us that these kids live in West Virginia, that the birds they hear are American crows, and that the flowers in the page border are Big rhododendron. Next it’s on to cardinals in Arizona and rock pigeons in New York. Fourteen birds later, evening falls with an owl calling in Michigan.

Robert Florczak’s illustrations are quietly appealing as well as accurate. In nearly every spread, one or two children play or hike or work while noticing the birds calling nearby.

Birdsong didn’t hit it big like the author’s book, The Napping House, but I loved sharing it with my students. We attempted to guess the states and flowers before peeking at the back of the book, and of course we tried out each birdsong. The songs are transcribed well, so they’re easy to imitate. This is unabashedly a concept book, with the slimmest imaginable narrative arc. But Birdsong shows young readers something new, a way of listening to the world. After you’ve read it, you’ll find yourself noticing birdsongs all around you. It turns out Earth has a soundtrack.

Birds by Kevin Henkes

Birds is the work of an amazingly talented author-illustrator, Kevin Henkes. He is well known for writing a number of picture books about mice as schoolchildren, including Owen and Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse. He then turned his hand to middle grade fiction with books like Olive’s Ocean, a 2004 Newbery Honor book. More recently, Henkes has been making picture books for a slightly younger crowd, say two- to five-year-olds instead of four- to seven-year-olds. He’s very good at that, too, winning the 2005 Caldecott for Kitten’s First Full Moon and rave reviews for Old Bear and A Good Day.

Birds is Henkes’s latest picture book, really an illustrated free verse poem. At first its narrator is unseen, but like Audrey Wood’s characters, she begins her day with birdsong. The child then tells us a series of seemingly random things about birds. She remarks on their colors and sizes before giving an anecdote, a what if, an even more fanciful what if, and so on. As the book progresses, metaphor becomes more and more important in a rising way that may remind you of a bird taking flight. Here’s one example partway through: “Sometimes in winter, a bird in a tree looks like one red leaf left over.”

Birds makes a deliberate, delicate transition from the factual to the metaphorical, the way a fine green vein travels through a spring leaf. I think maybe Henkes is saying that bird facts are great, but the free-winged beauty a bird brings to our world is even better. Whatever his message, his book gives me spring fever, a desire to run through the grass barefoot and, like his young narrator, sing into the sunshine.

How to Heal a Broken Wing by Bob Graham

I ordered this book because I’d read the author's “Let’s Get a Pup,” Said Kate! and liked it very much, especially the funny, friendly illustrations. Later I found out that How to Heal a Broken Wing had won the Charlotte Zolotow and Cybils awards for best picture book of 2008 and was an ALA Notable Children’s Book.

It is very difficult to write a tender book without being alarmingly sentimental, but Bob Graham knows the value of understatement. A little boy in a big city finds an injured pigeon on the way home with his working mother. He insists on rescuing the bird, and his parents help him care for it while it heals. Nothing special? Just listen to the first page: “High above the city, no one heard the soft thud of feathers against glass.” On the next page, we read simply, “No one saw the bird fall.” Graham's language is gently lovely, but his illustrations make How to Heal a Broken Wing soar. With simple lines and just a few colors, Graham paints a vast cityscape that dwarfs the bird and the child at the center of his tale. Yet he also uses smaller, graphic novel-style sequences to illustrate parts of the story. The author-illustrator has a knack for pacing his close-ups and wide-angle shots. The blue-tinged palette lends a slightly melancholy air to most of the narrative, then surprises by leading us to the top of the sky. And the same type of slightly comical characters Graham drew for “Let’s Get a Pup” read here as sublimely ordinary, led by our small hero, Everychild.

This book isn’t just about helping a hurt pigeon, it’s about keeping your eyes open in a world where too many people have their eyes closed. It is also about hope. As the author puts it, "A loose feather can't be put back...but a broken wing can sometimes heal." For some reason, How to Heal a Broken Wing reminds me of Shaun Tan’s The Arrival. I think it’s because both books give me a bone-deep feeling of being glad to be alive and human.

The crepe myrtles in my town are blooming pinkly and the birds are calling from dawn to dusk. Even in sunny California, the world changes when spring comes. Wherever you are, and however much your own neighborhood has bloomed, I suggest you celebrate with one of these picture books. If you're in the mood for more bird books, I also highly recommend First the Egg by Laura Vaccaro Seeger, An Egg Is Quiet by Dianna Hutts Aston and Sylvia Long, and an out-of-print folktale called The Language of Birds by Rafe Martin and Susan Gaber.

A Review of Thornspell by Helen Lowe

Fairy tale retellings are almost always done from the princess’s point of view, so it’s nice to read one from the prince’s perspective. Offhand, the only other book I can think of with a similar point of view is Alex Flinn’s Beastly, a modern-day retelling of "Beauty and the Beast." Of course, in the case of "Sleeping Beauty," the princess is out of commission for much of the story. Hence Thornspell, Helen Lowe’s retelling of the rose-covered fairy tale about an eerie hundred-year enchantment.

As a boy, Prince Sigismund reads stories of Parsifal and the Grail quest and dreams of becoming a knight-errant. Raised quietly in a castle on the west edge of the kingdom while his father goes south to fight a war, he looks out over a forbidden forest, wondering about the legend of a hidden castle there. Eventually he comes under attack by an enchantress calling herself the Margravine zu Malvolin, who appears at the castle gate and tries to enlist Sigismund to her cause. The boy barely escapes and becomes very ill, but he is helped by shadowy figures who appear to wish him well. Sigismund also begins to dream of walking through the legendary castle in the wood.

In response to the near miss, the king sends Sigismund a bodyguard and trainer named Balisan. The man is mysterious and powerful, and he seems to know a lot about magic. He introduces Sigismund to the fairy who healed him, the Margravine’s adversary.

In time, Sigismund journeys to the capital city and his father’s castle. There he is befriended by a smiling youth named Flor who, if readers are paying the least bit of attention, will immediately strike them as the back-stabbing type. Malvolin’s attempts to stop Sigismund from freeing the princess in the wood continue, but with the help of his allies and a magic sword, the prince ultimately triumphs.

Sigismund is such a likable boy, then hero, that I think you will enjoy spending time with him. The only thing I didn’t love about this book is something I’ve seen popping up a lot lately, and that is an obsessive need to explain every little plot point and bit of magic in detail, dialoguing it to death. Really, as long as a story hangs together, long explanations and swathes of backstory are simply a distraction. There’s a Hercule-Poirot-gathering-everybody-in-the-library feeling to some of the discussions in this book, is all I’m saying. (Of course, J.K. Rowling did it for pages with her ghostly Dumbledore near the end of Book 7.)

I’ll note that Balisan teaches Sigismund meditation practices to bring out his heritage of magical power. Again, I’ve seen this mixture of Eastern religion and European fairy tale magic in other fantasy I’ve read lately. Since our modern world is becoming a real cultural mix, I suppose such blendings are inevitable. I recently read a book where it was handled very badly, but Lowe manages to pull it off, mostly by making Balisan a magical figure from another land.

Quibbles aside, Helen Lowe’s Thornspell is an excellent addition to your library of fairy tale retellings—my favorite subgenre. Girls who like fantasy and fairy tales will want to read this one. And, while it isn’t a guy book the way the Alex Rider books are, boys who read fantasy should also like Thornspell, putting themselves in the place of good-hearted prince Sigismund as he struggles to defeat an old and evil adversary.

A Review of Aurelie: A Faerie Tale by Heather Tomlinson

There’s an old tale about a midwife who is taken to help with a fairy birth and accidentally gets fairy sight in one eye. When the woman gives herself away at a later point, the fairies blind her in that eye. And you all know the story of the twelve dancing princesses. The idea of dancing in the fairy realm with untrustworthy yet romantic figures further evokes warnings such as those in the ballad of Tam Lin or Christina Rossetti’s poem, “The Goblin Market.”

Although these fairy tales influence Heather Tomlinson's Aurelie, it is not specifically a fairy tale retelling. Instead it is the story of Aurelie, Garin, Netta, and Loic, childhood friends in the land of Jocondagne. Aurelie is the princess and her father’s heir, Garin is a fosterling from the ocean-faring realm of Skoe, Netta is Aurelie’s companion, and Loic is a young river dragon. Loic isn’t actually supposed to be friends with human children, let alone give them the ability to see fairies. Unfortunately, Netta reveals her fairy sight to Loic’s father and is blinded as a result.

All of this happens in the first chapter as a kind of prologue. The rest of the book picks up two years later, when the four friends are unhappily separated and feeling various degrees of abandonment and betrayal. Most of the story concerns itself with political intrigue and a threat of war from the too-lucky Captain Inglis of Skoe. On a diplomatic mission to Skoe, Aurelie encounters Garin again, but he is in disguise, and he’s not very happy about Aurelie’s escort, Captain Inglis’s arrogant son.

When Aurelie flees Skoe for her home, she encounters Loic again, and she begins dancing with him in the world of Faerie to forget her troubles. He seems to woo her, but everyone knows his heart lies with Netta—although no one has dared tell him what happened to the girl’s eyes. Then Garin comes after Aurelie, with Captain Inglis’s army at his heels. Having resolved their old hurts, the four teens work together to undo the warleader’s luck and save the kingdom.

Along the way, the author has a little fun with her world building. The realm of Skoe is especially clever, with its fishy cuisine, its ice boat races, and its stair-stepped city built on a cliff. I laughed when Aurelie observed that everyone in Skoe is in really good physical condition from running up and down all those stairs!

At 184 pages, this book is more of a novella than a novel. Partly an adventure story, Aurelie moves at a brisk pace despite pausing for some teen-type angst along the way. Aurelie is told in the first person, and different chapters are presented by the four main characters, though the princess is most often the narrator. This POV choice gives the book a more contemporary, Young Adult feel. Aurelie is being marketed as YA, in fact.

And speaking of contemporary: In my review of Thornspell I mentioned that fairy tale-influenced fantasy may stop for scientific explanations of plot points; here I’ll add that they sometimes contain pop psychology. For example, “detachment” just isn’t a medieval concept! Still, Loic’s an interesting character in that regard. His motives are more sinister than Aurelie suspects, rather more alien, reptilian, and fey, to be precise.

I did notice a couple of too-handy coincidences in Aurelie. Bruce Coville has said that the later in the book you place a coincidence, the more it strains credulity. Keep an eye on Captain Inglis in that regard.

However, like Thornspell, Aurelie is ultimately good story telling. Aurelie and her friends are an appealing bunch, and watching them solve the mystery of Captain Inglis’s devious plans is just as entertaining as seeing them work out the troubles that led them to lose their once-prized friendship. Don’t forget that the subtitle is “A Faerie Tale”: Tomlinson ends with a pair of satisfying happily-ever-after romances as the foursome comes together again.

Note for Worried Parents: Although Aurelie is very wholesome compared to many YA novels, it does have a few brief, oblique sexual references, the most memorable of which is one character asking another if she plans to take a lover. And there's some kissing. That's about it!

Picture Books with Bite

Despite the popularity of No, David! and Where the Wild Things Are, I suspect most people think of picture books as being sweet. No doubt this impression is influenced by the abundance of bedtime books—often lullabyes—which really are sweet. So it is with some gusto that I give you a handful of books that aren’t sweet. In fact, they are tart and funny, and above all, toothy.

But first, let’s talk about the horror genre. A decade or so ago, it was all wizards: nothing but miles and miles of pointy hats and wands everywhere you looked. That was in the days when Potter was king, or Rowling was queen, take your pick. Today’s royal couple, both of them actual human beings, would be Neil Gaiman and Stephenie Meyer.

Still, The Graveyard Book and Twilight are not for small children, and neither is Coraline, even if you do decide your five-year-old won’t get nightmares from seeing the movie. Which raises the perhaps-less-obvious-than-I-think question: Does horror have a place in picture books?

The answer, at first glance, would seem to be yes—in the form of Halloween books. But if you have ever examined the offerings on the orange holiday altar in a bookstore in October, I can guarantee that few of the books you saw were actually scary. Again, we’re talking picture books. (For middle grade readers, forget about Goosebumps—the scariest stuff would have to be those Alvin Schwartz collections. Extremely creepy!) One of the few Halloween picture books I like is Shake Dem Halloween Bones by W. Nikola-Lisa and Mike Reed, but it's not scary. The Halloween subgenre has yet to offer up a classic picture book, nothing like The Polar Express or How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Of course, this is probably because most people don’t think it’s a good idea to terrify four-year-olds.

Even so, the tinge of horror has reached its haunted hands into picture books. Either that, or we’re simply seeing the brashness of a generation of writers who've read Scieska and Smith’s books and watched a lot of Simpsons episodes. The four books I’m reviewing today aren’t noticeably “horror” so much as they have a boldness about them, the subversiveness I wrote about a few weeks ago. And yes, they all involve teeth, or at least food. Think of this as my homage to Sendak’s classic line, “Oh please don’t go—we’ll eat you up—we love you so!”

The Odd Egg by Emily Gravett

Emily Gravett is quite the maverick. I like her work very much, and I expect more funny, unpredictable books from her in the years to come. Besides, wolves, spells, and fears? Emily is clearly a closet horror writer. (I’m choosing to ignore the dogs and meercats.) Gravett is also a talented illustrator.

As The Odd Egg begins, a little gathering of birds waits for their eggs to hatch. Except a duck, who doesn’t have an egg. It didn’t occur to me till later that the robin, the hen, the parrot, the flamingo, and the owl might all be female, while Duck is referenced as a male. I doubt Gravett is dabbling in gender politics, but it certainly explains why Duck has not laid an egg!

Fortunately, Duck finds an egg—a beautiful white egg with green spots. In Duck’s fervent opinion, it is “the most beautiful egg in the whole wide world.” Soon the other five eggs hatch, and here the author/illustrator makes wonderful use of specially cut partial pages. She also throws in a clever joke about the baby owl.

When Duck’s egg doesn’t hatch right away, he waits patiently, knitting baby booties with great good cheer. The other birds are not what you’d call supportive: like the adults in Krause and Johnson’s The Carrot Seed, who inform the little boy that his seed will not come up, these birds tell Duck that his egg will never hatch. But Duck just keeps knitting, and eventually his patience is rewarded. We also get some teeth and some comeuppance. Be sure to look at the endpapers, which are actually the last page of the story.

This is a seemingly simple book, and the soft-edged watercolors make it look like it might be sweeter than it is. But The Odd Egg is a hoot—an owl’s hoot, most likely. More important, it has an ironic edge that readers who aren’t fans of the saccharine in children’s books will surely appreciate.

I’d Really Like to Eat a Child by Sylviane Donnio and Dorothée de Monfreid

The bite in this story is more overt, which makes it all the more amusing to me that Donnio’s work is ultimately sweeter than The Odd Egg. But only a little, kind of the way a lemon square tastes. In the absurd alternate reality that children's books so readily create, we meet a family of crocodiles whose diet largely consists of bananas. Then little crocodile Achilles wakes up one morning and announces, “Today, I’d really like to eat a child.”

His parents try to convince him to eat something else—bananas, perhaps? They cajole, they prepare special foods, but to no avail. Achilles is determined. Eventually he goes down to the river and finds a real live child. His dream has come true! Or has it? The human girl he meets casually turns the tables on the little croc, which results in Achilles hurrying home to rethink his strategies, if not his diet.

What’s really funny about this book is that it depicts the traditional battle between parents and small children over what, if anything, those children will eat. Russell Hoban’s Bread and Jam for Frances is the only book I’ve seen previously that handled this topic successfully. Times have changed, however: children of yesteryear may have been stuck eating whatever was plopped on their plates, but lately, I’ve been in grocery stores eavesdropping on parents who walk from aisle to aisle, asking the four-foot-and-under crowd to tell them what to buy. Along these lines, I love the way Donnio, a French writer, depicts the calm arrogance of a cute little kid who knows how much his parents want him to be happy. For example, look at the first few pages of the story:

Every morning, Mama Crocodile would bring tasty bananas to little Achilles for his breakfast, and each time she said in wonder, “What a big boy you are getting to be, my son! And how handsome! And what beautiful teeth you have!”

“True,” Achilles would say to himself.

There are other jokes in I’d Really Like to Eat a Child, but I’ll leave them to you to discover. Suffice it to say that this book might inspire your own family to adopt the title as a catchphrase for arguing about what kids—and adults—will or will not ingest.

Beware of the Frog by William Bee

This one is flat-out satirical. I hope you get the idea as soon as you read the first sentence: “This is the story of a sweet little old lady named Mrs. Collywobbles.” Naturally, the dear old soul “lives in a little house on the edge of a big, dark, scary wood.” The only thing standing between her and terrible danger is “her little pet frog,” who sits on the front porch looking innocuous.

Then again, the sign on the front gate does say, BEWARE OF THE FROG. On something resembling crime scene tape, no less. So when a parade of monsters comes up to the house, planning to rob Mrs. Collywobbles or even cook her for supper, they get the surprise of their lives. As each one opens the gate: “But oh, dear, the frog doesn’t look very pleased about that....” (Like me, you may be reminded of the rabbit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.)

Your child might notice that Mrs. Collywobbles hides in a different room of the house each time one of the monsters comes along. Eventually, her house is completely without monster threats, so she decides to reward her deadly watchfrog.

That’s when the gleeful author-illustrator throws, not one, but two plot twists at us. All in a mere 32 pages! I do not recommend you read this to your child if your favorite picture book is Guess How Much I Love You. But if you have a bright, anarchic kid, he or she will thoroughly enjoy Beware of the Frog. (And be sure to check out the back cover design, which also resides outside the box.)

Inside the Slidy Diner by Laurel Snyder and Jaime Zollars

I remember seeing Jaime Zollars's gorgeously creepy art on display at SCBWI’s summer conference, and I’ve “met” Laurel Snyder in Kidlitosphere, where a group of people blogs about children’s books. This book is the closest to horror that I'll present to you in today's post. Inside the Slidy Diner shows us a place defined by ooze and hints of strange magic, but with beauty lurking beneath. I’m sure on some level it’s an allegory, although it doesn’t have to be, not unless you’re in the mood.

Instead, let’s say this book is a tall tale. You may even get the sense that Edie, standing outside the diner and trying to convince her friend to come inside, is making the whole thing up. But wait: that’s no fun. Let's try again. We'll call the Slidy Diner the restaurant where Lewis Carroll's Alice goes for dinner, or better yet, Neil Gaiman's Coraline.

My own guess is that the author was in a cheap diner one night and imagined taking the idea of a “greasy spoon” to its logical extreme. In fact, she uses the phrase early in the book: “Inside the Slidy Diner, the greasy spoon of stuck, there’s a gray man at the counter who mumbles and smells like mice.”

The food here is way past icky. Just for example, the coffee gives you hives and the pie is pumpkin asparagus topped with unidentifiable crunchy bits. There are a lot of dead flies in this book, some of them sticking to the back of witchy proprietor Ethelmae’s sweater. And don't ask about the ladyfingers.

But there’s more to the Slidy Diner than just the ick factor. In the depths of the diner, we find “dark blue secrets” and other wonders. Once we see the bird-shaped secrets, we realize they have been perched on previous pages, unnoticed.

Laurel Snyder is a poet, and the text of this book is beautifully worded. Illustrator Jaime Zollars, with her penchant for fantasy horror, is the perfect artist for envisioning the diner.

Does Snyder’s concept of marrying horror with hidden joy work? It’s an unusual and thought-provoking mix. The book reminds me of magical realism as well as horror, only the food in Like Water for Chocolate sounded a lot more edible. Of course, life itself is like the Slidy Diner, a rough mixture of troubles and blue-winged happiness. (Oops! Allegory attack!) I’m sure some parents will be uneasy with a book like this one, but people do know their own children—for others, it will be delightfully gruesome and possibly instigate some intriguing conversations.

Which is really the point of children's books with bite. Stories that do not surprise are not worthy of being called stories. Furthermore, in this new world of ours, horror makes a good analogy for terrorism, rampaging economies, and other powers beyond our control. In such a world, having a few sharp-toothed specimans hiding at the edge of the picture book forest seems entirely appropriate.

Update: Please, oh please, take a look at two posts about "Slightly Demented Picture Books" over at Seven Imp! There's one from 2008 and another from 2010, where you'll find still more picture books with bite and some wonderful discussion on the topic.

A Review of Shooting the Moon by Frances O'Roark Dowell

Jamie’s father is the Colonel, and her world is the Army. Growing up, she plays war games with her older brother and wishes she could be a soldier. When her brother, T.J., decides to go fight in Vietnam, she is thrilled—he will be a hero! Jamie is utterly baffled when her father tries to discourage T.J. from enlisting. After all, this is the man who wears his fatigues and combat boots to play football in the yard with his daughter:

“Pathfinders,” he’d yell, zigzagging across the yard toward the imaginary end zone.

“Combat ready, sir!” I’d yell back, completing the old 8th Infantry Division call-and-response we’d learned as kids, which was part of our life, just like answering the phone “Colonel Dexter’s quarters” or making sure we had our military IDs with us whenever we went to the PX or the commissary so we could prove who we were, proud citizens of the United States Army. Hooah, as we liked to say. Hooah, yes sir.

Pretty soon T.J. is writing letters home from Vietnam, but with each letter, he encloses a canister of film for Jamie, instructing her to develop the film herself. Jamie has already been hanging around the army base’s rec center, where she has a summer job sweeping up and spends most of her time playing diabolical games of gin rummy with Private Hollister. Another soldier, Sergeant Bird, agrees to teach Jamie how to develop T.J.’s film.

So begins a book where an older brother’s wordless messages to his sister are more powerful than anything he might have written. Jamie shares the photos with some of the soldiers at the rec center and with a handicapped friend, Cindy, who likes to keep T.J.’s shots of the moon. She also shows them to her parents. Then, as T.J.’s photo subjects change, Jamie finds herself holding back certain photos, not showing them to her parents at all.

Shooting the Moon’s message may seem heavy handed if you haven’t actually read the book, but the story telling is stronger than that. Jamie doesn’t change her mind in a direct way so much as she blossoms out of innocence into ambiguity about the meaning of war, of heroes, and of fathers. Her friend Cindy is an intriguing character, a purified, magnified version of Jamie’s naivete but also occasionally the voice of the "wise fool."

As the book draws to a close, Jamie makes a choice that casts light on her evolution. Of course, the author’s spotlight would have to be the moon. The moon has been a symbol in a lot of literature over the years, so it’s really kind of stunning that Frances O’Roark Dowell manages to give it a new and subtle significance in this book. Shooting the Moon won a Boston Globe Horn Book Honor Award for 2008, and I can see why. Whether you’re anti-war, pro-war, or nothing of the kind, I suggest you take the time to see the world through Jamie’s eyes, and through T.J.’s camera lens.