Book Review: The One and Only Ivan

The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My kid's 5th grade English teacher sent him home with this.  He read it in about 30 minutes.  It took me slightly longer. ;)

Somewhat in the vein of "Love That Dog" where fewer words manage to tell a powerful story (as Ivan, the silverback says, "Humans waste words. They toss them like banana peels and leave them to rot. Everyone knows banana peels are the best part" and "Humans speak too much. They chatter like chimps, crowding the world with their noise even when they have nothing to say.")

A heartbreaking story well-told with wonderful bite-sized nuggets of wise philosophy scattered throughout:

"I always tell the truth. Although I sometimes confuse the facts."

"When I'm drawing a picture, I feel...quiet inside."

And in the reproduction of the author's Newberry acceptance speech, this quote from Madeline L'Engle captures so beautifully why I often abandon books written for adults and return to young adult fiction;

"You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."

Amen.


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Book Review: Counting by 7s

Counting by 7s by Holly Goldberg Sloan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It is always so lovely to return to literature for young people after slogging through philosophical tomes aimed at adults.  Invariably, I learn more from kid lit fiction than I do from adult self-help books.  Makes me want to go to the self-help section of the bookstore and reorganize a bit.

I'd put this book in the section about how to deal with grief.  But also in the section about how to create meaning in life.  And in the gardening how-to section.

"It has been my experience that rewarding and heartbreaking often go hand in hand."

"I have seen trees that survive fire.  Their bark is burned and their limbs are dead branches.  But hidden under that skeleton is a force that sends a single shoot of green out into the world.  Maybe if I'm lucky, that will one day happen to me.  But right now, I can't see it."

"...almost everything I pursue is for my own understanding or amusement.  I believe having an audience naturally corrupts the performance."

"I realize now that I'm worrying about all of them.  It's better than worrying about myself.  This is one of the secrets that I have learned in the last few months.  When you care about other people, it takes the spotlight off your own drama."


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Book Review: The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A lovely read.  A turn of the 20th century girl who longs for more than what her lot holds.  Colorful characters, light on the angst, heavy on the atmosphere of central Texas in the summer of 1899, Darwin thrown in as a sideline.  No magic.  No secret societies. No intermittent cartoon graphics.  No vampires.  No dystopian futures.  So atypical of books for children these days.  Which is maybe why I liked it so much.

In describing an ongoing altercation between a cat and a possum, where the possum always plays dead, the cat stalks off triumphantly then the possum opens its eyes slyly and slinks away;

"The scene played night after night, all summer long. Neither I nor the adversaries ever fatigued of it.  How satisfying to have a bloodless war in which each side was equally convinced of its own triumph."

I hope I can get my nine year old boy to read it.


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Book Review: Savvy

Savvy by Ingrid Law
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A great conceit, great characters within a great structure and a good story bogged down by a writing style that borders on the preciously overwritten.  From the opening paragraph;

"I had liked living down south on the edge of land, next to the pushing-pulling waves.  I had liked it with a mighty kind of liking, so moving had been hard - hard like the pavement the first time I fell off my pink two-wheeler and my palms burned like fire from all of the hurt just under the skin."

Thankfully, I either got used to it or Law calmed down the metaphoricsimile a tad and though I rolled my eyes a couple of times at the language, it usually didn't get in the way of the story.

And sometimes it created deep insight;

"'I'm not perfect, Mibs.  Nobody's perfect.  I just have a knack for getting things right.  Maybe that looks a lot like perfect sometimes.  Besides you'd be surprised at how many people dislike spending time with someone who constantly gets things right.  It's not always an easy way to be.'"

"Maybe we all have other people's voices running higgledy-piggledy through our heads all the time.  I thought about how often my poppa and momma were there inside my head with me, telling me right from wrong.  Or how the voices of Ashley Bing and Emma Flint sometimes got stuck under my skin, taunting me and making me feel low, even when they weren't around.  I began to realize how hard it was to separate out all the voices to hear the single, strong one that came just from me."


"When something like that comes along, whether it's an accident or a savvy or a very first kiss, life takes a turn and you can't step back.  All you can do is keep moving forward and remember what you've learned."


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Book Review: Regarding the Fountain

Regarding the Fountain by Kate Klise
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Delightful.  Truly delightful.

And being mired in an organization where I am charged with being creative while balancing that creativity on a general ledger and booking a profit, I found particular joy in the exchanges between Florence Waters and Walter Russ, the principal of the school.

Principal Russ requests, "Product: drinking fountain.  Style: plain.  Price: modest."

Florence Waters answers, "You sound just like the author of that little book of directions that came with my blender."

I left this book wanting to find more strength to be a Florence Waters in a world run by Walter Russes.


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Book Review Throne of Fire

The Throne of Fire by Rick Riordan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Another rollicking adventure from Riordan.  These Kane adventures are not as enjoyable to me as the Percy Jackson epic, if only because I'm much more familiar with Greek and Roman mythology than I am with Egyptian mythology.  Egyptian mythology is darker and more serious, which makes these books a little less playful than the Percy Jackson/Heroes of Olympus books.


However, Sadie Kane is a really fun character and Riordan captures her voice, and the angst of a 13 year old girl, very, very well.


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Book Review Whales on Stilts

Whales on Stilts by M.T. Anderson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I picked this up for my kid at the library, flipped through it real quick to scan for possible emotional potholes and decided that it was so ironic and tongue-in-cheek that it would be fine.

And it was.  My son laughed and laughed and laughed.  Then I read it and laughed and laughed and laughed.  MT Anderson is funny.  And funny in a way that appeals to a seven year old and his jaded mother.  Both.

This is not one of those books that tries too hard to be clever.  This is one of those books that just simply IS clever.  The very embodiment of it.  Ostensibly a spoof of the children's literature of the 50s and 60s it is also an homage;  an homage to Nancy Drew and Tom Swift and the pulp, series children's books of that era.  There is the promotion of Gargletine, Jasper Dash's drink of choice and fake ads for books starring Jasper Dash (the Tom Swift character who says things like "Great Scott!  Will these cads never ceases mocking my jumpsuit?") and Katie Mulligan (kind of cross between Nancy Drew and Buffy the Vampire Slayer).   One of the fake ads features an asterisk next to the declaration "AVAILABLE AT FINE STORES NEAR YOU!"  The accompanying footnote, which occupies the bottom of seven pages, starts thusly;  "No longer available on the shelves at fine stores near you.  Available now exclusively and by special arrangement on the shelves of old vacation rental cottages, where you can often find Jasper Dash books in the living room, as well as old National Geographics, Chinese checkers, half colored-in Herbie the Love Bug activity books from 1978, used up Mad Libs, and dog-eared, boring novels for adults by Leon Uris, Colleen McCullough, and James Michener, I mean big, thick books with names like Space and Novel, you know what I mean ... all the books are dry and yellow from the sun, and all of them have wrinkly pages from the salt water, and when you flip through them, sand falls out as if it was index cards marking the place of former summers..."

The dialogue runs from clever to even more clever and nothing is sacred.

"The whale fired his laser-beam eyes.  The girls felt the jolt as the laser beam bounced off the mirror.  Of course the girls didn't feel the jolt as the laser bounced off the mirror, because lasers are just light.  This story is highly scientific, and I would never mislead you.  I want to depict whale eye-laser technology as accurately as possible.  Instantaneously the laser doubled back on itself, a continuous stream of light-using all the standard oculo-incendiary prohulsifiers and megegolisms that you'd expect ..."

And the "Guide for Reading and Thinking" was a nice touch.

Anderson continued Whales on Stilts into a series called Pals in Peril.  I've not yet read the follow-up books but if they are only 50 percent as clever and enjoyable as this one, they will be worth your time.

Highly recommend.


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Book Review The Sign of the Beaver

The Sign of the Beaver by Elizabeth George Speare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Speare was the it-thing in children's literature in the late 50s; between 1957 and 1961 she published three books, two of which won the Newbery.  Then she took 20 years off.

The Sign of the Beaver was her return, in 1983, and it, too, won awards (a Newbery Honor citation, the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction, and the Christopher Award).  But I didn't want to read it because I never liked her other books when I was a kid.

This one I liked, though, which makes me wonder if I would, now, like The Witch of Blackbird Pond  Guess there's only one way to find out.

A well-told story with economical prose and likable characters; a boy left alone in the barely settled wilderness in the 1760s while the father goes back east to retrieve the rest of the family.  The boy's gun is stolen by an itinerant traveler but he survives with the help of a boy from a local tribe, who grudgingly teaches him the ways of the natives while the boy tries to teach him to read.  One of those stories that, as a mother, makes me shiver and shake my head but, as a child-at-heart makes me want to develop the same pluck and bravery I see in the characters.


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Book Review The Accidental Hero

The Accidental Hero by Matt Myklusch
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I bought this for my kid while we were on a road trip;  we stopped in Oxford, MS and while my husband tromped in the footsteps of Faulkner, my kid and I spent a couple of hours at Square Books.  This book was recommended by the staff there as something a kid who loves Harry Potter and Percy Jackson would enjoy.

So I bought it and handed it to Cameron; one of the first books I've given him without a pre-read.  I guess I was tired.

He read it before we pulled into Nashville that afternoon and pronounced it excellent.  When I finally read it, I agreed with his assessment but with caveats.  The story and ideas are, indeed, excellent; clever turns on phrases and ideas about alternate realities that made my adult brain nod with recognition.  The writing is more sketchy than I had hoped;  and not sketchy in a "questionable" context but sketchy in a "outline and not much detail" context.  I have had these problems with other children's books;  I often decide that kids fill in left-out details better than I do.  In this one, though, I wished Myklusch had fleshed out his fantastic ideas a great deal more.  What is a good book could have been a great book.

Regardless, my kid thinks it's brilliant.  And that's what really matters, right?


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Book Review Have Spacesuit Will Travel

Have Spacesuit Will Travel by Robert A. Heinlein

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Read it in a day;  wondered aloud how the world has changed that a book like this could have been published in a magazine for boys.  I mean, there was math, for cripes sake!  And physics!  And mechanical engineering!  And no gratuitous violence!

There was violence, yes, but Heinlein seems to think math is more exciting than gore;  indeed, his palpable excitement concerning all things mathematical was almost contagious.  Almost.  His in-depth descriptions of mechanical properties were engaging, if only to make me wish I understood crap like that.  I also wished I had built a radio at some point in my development.  And then I wondered why I hadn't built a radio.  And then I wondered if my kid would ever build a radio.

Very 1950s but maybe that's what made it engaging.  Words like "swell" cuddled up with formulas and mechanical concepts of spacesuit design.   A very antiquated concept of gender roles in one instance (there is an alien "Mother-Thing" who has that reassuring presence of a good mother, as well as "father- things" who don't spend much time with you and don't say much but leave you feeling like you need to prove something to them and succeed so that he will proud) cuddled up with a brilliant female heroine and the idea that the "Mother-Thing" wasn't necessarily female.

A book that put you firmly in a place, late 1950s America, and then took you firmly to a place that was "other" but still viewed through the lens of 1950s America.  I kept finding myself thinking of that scene in Back to the Future where Marty visits George dressed in a haz-mat suit and scares the bejeesus out of him using a Walkman and Van Halen.

The most lasting impression of the book is to marvel at the great intelligence of those human beings who have created space flight and who wrestle with formulas with Xs and zeds and lots of zeros. For fun.  And then to imagine that they know nothing in the grand scheme of things.  And if they know nothing, what the hell do I know?  Whoa.

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Book Review The Wee Free Men

The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is my first Terry Pratchett.  I loved it for the first half;  the clever language, the fresh way of looking at things. But then the main character fell into the proverbial rabbit hole and it all got too Narnia-Wrinkle-in-Time hallucinatory.   It would have been fine to dip into the LSD but Pratchett stayed there too long for my tastes;  it kept going. And going.  And is it still going?  What? That's not the denouement of the winter-queen-dream-world?  Crap.

He won me back in the last few chapters, though.  And now I'm wondering if all of his books are more like the first third of this one or like the second third;  here's hoping the it's the first.

My kid will probably love it;  someday.   But he needs to develop a little more intellectual focus first.  And that's saying something.

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Book Review The Seven Wonders of Sassafras Springs

The Seven Wonders of Sassafras Springs by Betty G. Birney
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A nice little collection of vignettes designed to encourage us to open our eyes to the world around us and be tourists in our own town.  And also to be better folks.   Magical realism for the elementary set.


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Book Review Gregor the Overlander Series

Gregor the Overlander Box Set by Suzanne Collins

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Collins, who is now more famous as the creator of the dystopian-future-riffic Hunger Games trilogy, started out on her authorial path with this five book series.  Inspired by her imagining what a big-city kid would find if he fell through a manhole like Alice fell through her rabbit hole into Wonderland, Collins has created an underland that has urban grit where Wonderland had bucolic oddity; a world of giant roaches, bats and rats, as well as regular sized humans with violet eyes and a violent nature.



The series is a well-constructed page turner with wonderful lessons on the futility of war, though one has to get through a lot of blood, gore and battle to learn the lessons.  Like most series of this nature, the tint gets darker as the plot progresses;  Gregor starts out as an innocent 11 year old boy but by the last book, though he is only 12, his world has been tainted by experiences and lessons that would scar any fallen adult.  There are many deaths, an Underland holocaust complete with allusions to gas chambers, and creatures who only know how to solve problems by killing other creatures. 



Yet, in the end, the reader is told that war is not the answer.  Even though it was for Gregor and the Underland.



A dichotomy.  Like life.



Pre-reading for my 7 year old;  I won't let him touch them until he's at least 10.



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Book Review Guys Read: Funny Business

Guys Read: Funny Business by Jon Scieszka
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Eh.  Perhaps I didn't find this funny because I'm not a guy.


I did like the Adam Rex story, "Will."  I simply adored "Your Questions for Author Here" by Kate DiCamillo and Jon Scieszka.  But other than that, I was rather unmoved and, often, rather offended, particularly by the first story, which was about manipulating people and using people.  Not funny.


But I might buy the book someday for my kid, if only to get my hands on the two stories mentioned above, which rate much higher than the two stars I'm giving the whole thing.


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Book Review: Seeds of America (Chains and Forge)

Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Laurie Halse Anderson came to our local children's bookstore and I went to hear her speak.  She was an unassuming personage, more like a gal you'd run into at the Target than a highly-acclaimed author.  But her passion for this era of our history was palpable; her inner brilliance showed in her eyes and her voice as she talked about how her whole life changed when she discovered that Benjamin Franklin owned slaves. And she wanted to write about it.  For kids.  Because kids need to know about our spotted history; to learn the story that they don't learn in school.  And, also, she hates Johnny Tremain.


The result is the Seeds of America series, a complex but age-appropriate set of young adult books that looks at the Revolutionary War through the eyes of a Loyalist’s slave (Chains), as well as a male slave conscripted into the army on his owner's behalf (Forge).


As Anderson says in her Author’s Note at the end of Chains, “you really can’t look at this through good guy/bad guy glasses" and, truly, there are no characters that are pure; all the good guys have bad instincts sometimes and some of the bad guys have good instincts.  Sometimes.


Anderson writes with aplomb and, though the books suffer a bit from plots that force characters to be in the shadow of documented history, the story is so compelling, the writing so masterful, that this reader didn't really care.


One of the blurbs on the back of Chains says it "knocks on the conscience of a nation."   Indeed.


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Book Review: George's Secret Key to the Universe

George's Secret Key to the Universe by Lucy Hawking
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The adventures of George as he explores the universe with an unlikely computer named Cosmos;  science lessons included.


I'm on the fence about this book.  Plainly, it is meant to clothe the miracle of physics into language that children can understand but the laws of physics themselves are blown off at almost every plot point.


Then there's the part where a person gets sucked into a black hole but the super-computer speeds up time and sucks him back out again, putting him back together, particle by particle, messing up only his eyeglasses.


I am not a physicist so I cannot speak to the accuracy of the science contained herein.  There were a few typos but I read a first edition and assume those mistakes were corrected in subsequent releases.


The story is engaging.  The hero brave.  The villain evil.   The enormity of space well-described (and, thusly, the ridiculousness of just about everything I'll ever do in my little life reiterated which made the book, in a sense, a little too scary for an adult to read ;)


I'll add to this review when my kid has read it.  We'll see what he thinks.


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Book Review: The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg

The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg by Rodman Philbrick
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Surprised by the darkness of this book with the flippant title and the happy-go-lucky cover illustration.  People in Homer's world are mean.  If they are not mean, they are nice but with ulterior motives.  Then Homer gets to the war and, among other things, describes the sound a saw makes when it cuts a man's leg off.

Putting this one on the shelf for a while.  My kid might be ready for it when he's 11 or 12.


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Book Review: Peter and the Starcatchers

Peter and the Starcatchers by Dave Barry
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I spent many moments while reading this book wondering how two people, who live in different cities and possess remarkably different writing styles, could possibly write a book together.

By the time I was finished, I decided they did it kind of like that parlour game where one person in the room starts a potboiler, spins it to a cliffhanger and then hands it to another person, who then continues the potboiler and spins it to yet another cliffhanger.  And so on.  The parlour-game-potboiler becomes, by design, overly long with too many needless cliffhangers.

Which kind of describes this book.  Not that it wasn't a fun read.  But I could have done without about half of the obstacles and cliffhangers.

Clever by half in explaining the genesis of Peter Pan, the Lost Boys and Captain Hook.  Oh, and Tinkerbell in the last two pages.

A tad too violent for my now almost seven year old but a good book for the "read-when-older" shelf.  An adventure he'll most likely enjoy.


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Book Review: The 39 Clues

The Maze of Bones by Rick Riordan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Da Vinci Code for kids.  A longer version of the Westing Game.  It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World in book form with slightly less slapstick.  Fiction infused with history presented in a meaningful way that might stick.  Heroine loves to read.  Hero good at math.  Benjamin Franklin wrote an essay about the possibility of  doing research that could result improving the odor of human flatulence and invented Sudoku.


Yeah, I'll read the whole set.  And my kid is going to love them.


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Book Review: Igraine the Brave

Igraine the Brave by Cornelia Funke
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A nice little romp with no scary, questionable material but still enough excitement and intrigue and magic to keep a young kid occupied.  Lovely intermittent illustrations, too.  Not great literature but a wonderful diverson and a really good read-aloud for younger kids.


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