Worst Things I Could Do: Scrawl

Mark Shulman's Scrawl is the second Cybils YA Novel finalist about a boy who hits other people that I read in a row.  Although it shares an explosive protagonist with Split, it feels and reads as a younger, less introspective book.  That's not a criticism; it deals with violence directed outward and hard choices forced by societal pressures, so it makes sense that the main character looks outward more.  Tod, the main character, writes his journal as punishment after been caught breaking into the school, and that's the text we read.  For some reason, the guidance counselor sentenced him to write every afternoon instead of calling in the police.  His co-conspirators are left cleaning up in the yard.  (We do get to hear her explanation at the very end of the book.)

Promising not to lie, he writes about his life and struggles, from managing to keep his pals happy to staying warm without a furnace to somehow getting finagled into making the costumes for a school play.  Although the journaling doesn't really stand up to firm scrutiny, I was completely willing to relax into Tod's voice and watch him almost learn to succeed.  The dynamics of his struggles with the play seem particularly spot on, as did his struggles between pride and self-respect.  I'll hand this over to my seventh grader, who should like it despite the lack of dragons.

Hard Place: Split

I'm moving faster through the 2010 YA Novels Cybils finalists, since that's the largest category left for me this year.  Luckily King County has Swati Avasthi's Split for my NOOK, so I could read it conveniently.  I also tend to read my NOOK in short bursts, which helped me with this novel, which had me in turns dreading to see what main character Jace would do next, or what would happen next.

The plot follows Jace's escape from his abusing father; after Jace finally hits back and gets thrown out, his mother gives him the address of his older brother who had disappeared from Jace's life five years ago.  Then things start piling up -- Jace seems determined to sabotage himself.  I started to wonder if Avasthi was deliberately making him hard to like -- he's a thief, he's rude to his peers, he resents his brother's girlfriend, he lies to his brother.  Pieces of his past float up, memories of the abuse he watched his family suffer, and then what happened when his father included him in the violence.  And the destructive relationship with his girlfriend that ended with him hitting her, the act that really precipitated his flight.

Jace is trying really hard to not be his father, and he's terrified that he's already lost this battle.  He tries to keep all girls away from him, fearing that he'll erupt again.  And he's terrified about his mother and desperately wants her to escape with him.  Avashti depicts the relationship between Jace and his older brother Christian with harsh accuracy; Christian is both the beloved older brother from Jace's childhood and a young man still trying to deal with his own abused childhood that he's not sure he escaped.  Jace's arrival also brings forward the fears for his mother that Christian has buried deep, mainly because there is nothing he can do. The story of Jace's step forward is a very powerful one, although I don't think I'll order the print version to give my thirteen year old.

The climax of the novel happens around Thanksgiving, so I'm glad I finished this one in time for Turkey Day.  And I'm grateful for all the good reading the Cybils have brought me this year.

Unpleasant Heroes: Reckless

I feel a bit like I'm double-dipping from my library; I have two copies of Cornelia Funke's Reckless checked out, one in hardback and one for my NOOK.  But I need the hardback to convince my kids to read the book while I prefer ebooks if I can get them.  I'm glad I had both copies of this 2010 Cybils Fantasy and Science Fiction (Middle Grade) finalist out because my seventh grader gobbled it up.  Now that I've read it however I'm not as keen to pass it on to the fifth grader.  His to-read pile intimidates him if it gets over two inches tall, so I'm very selective about what I place on it.

To be brutal, I found the book unpleasant.  The concept is nifty: Jacob finds his father's secret passage to a magical kingdom but never tells his little brother about it.  Little brother eventually finds it, gets in danger, and Jacob has to save everyone.

But little brother Will doesn't find the passage until they are adults, and he brings along his girlfriend (fiance?) Clara, and nobody really has any great magnetism. Will poisons himself within minutes of blundering through, and his brother is frantic to pull out a rescue that has never been done before.  Clara is clearly in the way and will certainly slow them down, but she insists on accompanying them anyway.  Which does indeed mean that they don't save Will in time, due in a large part to Clara refusing to believe that Jacob could possibly know more than her about this world in which he's been working for fifteen years.  After all, she loves Will, and she's been in there several hours! Or days, since they don't move too quickly with her assistance.

I need to talk to my son about why he liked it so much, and maybe that will realign some things for me.  The only redeeming quality I saw in Jacob was his loyalty to his brother; Will was too ill for most of the book to have much personality, and I spent most of the book rooting for the Goyl, who I think were supposed to be the bad guys.  The emotional arc of the brother's relationship doesn't seem as if it would be interesting to kids; I'm not sure my son really noticed how much Will resented his brother's constant disappearances.  The book never explained what happened to their father, another emotional loose end. And I was a bit surprised in the many sexual encounters in a book on the middle grade list; I thought this book was YA until I went to grab the link for this review.  Huh.

Extended Family: Anna Hibiscus

I am chasing down the finish line of the Cybils challenge, although I don't have much low-hanging fruit left.  A quick lap came with Anna Hibiscus by Atinuke, my penultimate read in the Early Chapter Book finalists group.  I've had this on hold for about eight months now; it was one of the books I requested my library buy (King County Library is awesome in many ways) and the first one to magically show up in my hold list because I had asked them to buy it.  Computers are nifty.

It's a gentle read about Anna Hibiscus and her life among all her brothers and cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents in their sprawling family home in Africa.  She goes on a holiday, meets a new aunt, learns a lesson, and gets a wish granted in four chapters liberally illustrated with cosy black and white depictions of the events.  A few times the lessons learned grated for me -- her parent's wish for a private vacation is revealed as foolish and nearsighted, and the problems of space available in a small holiday cottage are ignored out right.  But I doubt kids will mind; they will have too much fun watching the parents stumble about making mistakes that only more family can fix.

I'll offer it to my kids to see how they like it; it's a fun child-eyes view of life in another country.  Unfortunately they are all dragging their feet because of the obvious lack of robots or dinosaurs in the book, but I will keep trying.  After all, X will read anything.

Kids Dying Young: Yummy

The latest 2010 Cybils Graphic Novel (Young Adult) finalist book definitely represented a change of pace.  Yummy: Last Days of a Southside Shorty by G. Neri delivers a tough history lesson about the decaying culture of the Chicago southside, where children turned to gangs for support, and the gangs exploited the kids by using them in violent crimes for which juveniles received almost no punishment.  Neri invents a child to view the events, someone who played with Yummy when they were small and who never knows whether Yummy has turned up to bully him for lunch money or to show off a frog found in the sewers.

When Yummy tries to impress his gang leaders by shooting a rival, his world collapses.  He kills a neighborhood girl instead, and the authorities who ignored him while he stole cars and mugged his peers instigate a man-hunt (a boy-hunt) that leaves Yummy terrified and lost.  The nation solemnly discusses Lost Youth and gang violence while Yummy huddles in derelict houses and under dripping bridges, until the gang decides he's more trouble than he's worth.  My seventh grader had eagerly grabbed this book (he loves graphic novels) and then indignantly told me that it wasn't fit for kids.  He views the death of children as too harsh for his eyes, and he was shocked to learn that it basically told a true story.  Neri tells a powerful story, but one that is probably more appropriate for high school than junior high. Sad that the boy in the story might still be in elementary.

Reasons To Be Self-Centered: Milo, Sticky-Notes, and Brain Freeze

As I started Milo: Sticky Notes and Brain Freeze, my penultimate read in the Cybils 2010 Middle Grade Novel finalist section, I thought I recognized the genre Alan Silberberg was writing in: annoying middle grade boys who draw cartoons.  The Wimpy Kid types, ranging from the selfish Roddy and the slightly nicer Nate the Great.  My kids love these books, but I find them a bit dull.

But Silberberg surprised me with a sharp turn towards the Newbery type of things -- Milo's mom is dead, and a lot of his self-centered behavior directly stems from his attempts to deal with this loss.  His family, all equally shell-shocked, provide little help.  Dad tries hard, but is clearly overwhelmed.  His sister never emerges as a character. Milo is all alone with his grief.

The mourning seems very realistic, and Milo's general boyishness reinforces and parallels the parts about his grief.  His is lucky in his friends; his best friend, the amazingly kind neighbors, even the final connection with the girl of his dreams.  I'm still unsettled by the tone shift in the middle, where we suddenly learn where Milo's mom has been -- not divorced but dead.  I gave it to my son to read, and he devoured it eagerly because of the illustrations, and then knocked straight into the same issue ("Mama, is Milo's mom DEAD?").  And we both cringed during some of Milo's more spectacular social failures; the seventh grader actually skipped the pages around Valentines Day because they were too painful to read. I admitted to zipping through them with my eyes half-shut.  My fifth grader also likes it although he's less influenced by the emotional storms. It's truly an unexpectedly powerful addition to the reluctant-reader shelf.

PS: Congratulations to my sons for getting a new baby sister!

Bleak Future: Ship Breaker

Well, things have gotten bad.  Due to the evils of big corporations, the world is a dark and dangerous place; the climate changes mean that bigger, stronger hurricanes batter the changed coastline of a ruined America, where only a few slums remain for the barbarous refugees to grunge for a living.  In the my latest Cybils 2010 YA Fantasy and Science Fiction finalist, Paolo Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker, the protagonist Nailer has it lucky: he hasn't yet grown to big for his child-labor job of sliding through narrow vents in ancient wrecks hunting for wires and other salvageable materials.  His luck holds even when an accident almost kills him; he survives but another child in his work group moved too quickly to try to take his place and ends up thrown out to starve.  Time for a party!

Yes, this world is too gritty to reward loyalty or tolerate betrayal, and Nailer's abusive and drug-addicted father doesn't take it kindly when the boy chooses his work mates over his family. When Nailer and his friend find a survivor on the newest shipwreck, they have to choose between following a long shot chance at riches or accepting that they too can kill to survive.  Paolo Bacigalupi paints a world full of violence and greed, where corporations delight in grinding down the poor while creating half-men genetically forced into blind loyalty to their owner/employers.  Nailer himself faces test of loyalty in many different ways -- can he betray his father? Does he trust his work crew? Can he trust Lucky Girl, the rich survivor that so obviously finds him barely human?  Overall I found Nailer's world too grim for pleasure; I could guess plot points just by wondering what would put capitalism in the worst light and be most depressing for our hero.

I'd better hurry on my Cybils quest; next years nominations have already finished and the judging teams are preparing the list of the 2011 finalists.  I have one more left in this category so I'll order it up from the library today.  I'm not sure my seventh grader will get through this book; he tends to read more optimistic fare but I'll definitely leave it lying provocatively around.

Future Me: Princess Posey and the First Grade Parade

When I reserved the next Cybils Early Chapter Book finalist, I noticed that the library had Princess Posey and the First Grade Parade in an epub version, so I grabbed that.  Instant delivery!  I wasn't sure how it would work; picture books definitely do not read well on my black and white NOOK, and illustrations are often an important part of a chapter book.  Luckily most pictures were half page, so that I could see them in full and clearly.

In this case my bias against "girl" books worked against Stephanie Greene's story; in the words of my seventh grade son it was "just too pink.  Pinky."  I didn't really start to like Posey until she poked the teasing neighbor kid with a stick.  The story painted her character fairly clearly, although I thought her connection to her baby brother annoyingly stereotypical ("I was the baby until you got here.")  But she didn't do anything to solve her problem, and no one even suggested that maybe showing courage was an option.  Although it read easily enough I feel no need to search out the next one, or even to wonder what happens to Posey next.  This is probably a flaw in me more than in the book.

Wild Weekend: Foursome

No time for computers this weekend -- it started off with Foolscap, a book-centered SF fan convention that I dragged my kids along to.  The neat thing (well, one of them) about my wonderful children is that they are not only eager to go to this convention with me, they are even willing to go to the panels.  I enjoy Foolscap for the people; it's a bunch of smart and interesting people who tend to read the same kind of books as me, so discussions of books leave me with with long lists of things I want to read, and discussions of anything tend to be animated and wide-ranging.   Everyone tends to punctuate conversations with mentions of books that deal with whatever sort of thing we are referencing, so more book lists!

The kids tolerate or enjoy the discussions, although they loved the Game Show (about books) and other interactive events (chocolate fountain!).  P wore the Funny Hat he won at last year's masquade; if anyone saw the Kid With the Beanie, he's mine.  X got to be a contestant at the Game Show this year, which would have been the highlight of his weekend if things for him hadn't just kept getting better.  Saturday X's cold kept him home so it was just P and me; highlights included discovering that P likes Thai food, stretching our artistic chops to the limits in Iron Crafting, and learning more about how to look at computer art in the docent guide through the art show.  Oh, and picking up more books from both the book sale and the book swap, and letting my kid laugh at me at the Real-Life Achievements panel. It was very hard to be a Good Parent and head out at 10 PM with my ten-year-old, just when the YA book discussion started sparking out good stuff.

Sunday Foolscap had to go on without us because we had major family milestones to celebrate.  My baby brother is turning 40 just as my oldest turns 13, so clearly the day before Talk Like a Pirate Day called for a Boffer Party.  Just to make it super special, we secretly flew in Gramma and two cousins and surprised the birthday guys with the special guests.  A great time ensued.  Let me know if you want an invitation to our next one.

On Monday and Tuesday I hung out with my mom most of the day, while finishing up the library books that absolutely positively had to go back that day.  The five books that I read at some point on this weekend without blogging:

• I Now Pronounce You Someone Else, Erin McCahon.  Story of a high school senior who almost gets married before college.  I found it a bit didactic -- the flags highlighting "this girl isn't really all that mature" and "now she realizes what she will miss" waved a little too brightly, and her come-to-her-senses moment was over-dramatic and selfish.  But the characterization was solid, and I really enjoyed the dynamics of her immediate family, even if her too-good-to-be-true godfather was conveniently oblivious whenever the plot demanded it.  This Cybils YA Fiction finalist was good enough to be uncomfortable to read -- I can't imagine my kids being ready for marriage in that short a time.
• Eye of the Wolf, Daniel Pennac.  This French children's book plays with a magical realism feel that somehow left me cold.  Maybe I just don't get French sensibilites, but I disliked the attempt at a wolfish point of view and found the child more annoying than precious.  Humph.  
• Buffy, Ballads, and Bad Guys Who Sing: Music in the Worlds of Joss Whedon, ed. by Kendra Preston Leonard.  I'm enjoying the return to reading literary analysis, especially since I'm doing it through the nontraditonal method of reading deep Buffy analysis.  I now remember what diegetic music is.
• Wench: A Novel (P.S.), by Dolen Perkins-Valdez (NOOK).  I liked the complexity of the main character, a woman who loves and hates the man who owns her and who fathered her children.  This is a heart breaking story of the twisted nature of slavery.

• Ninth Ward, Jewell Parker Rhodes.  It was hard to judge this book fairly, since it wasn't the book I wanted.  The ghost part of the story weakened the more interesting depiction of a young girl facing difficult times bravely, both the dangerous world of New Orleans as the floods of Hurricane Katrina start rising, and the emotion troubles of growing up too quickly when her caretaker falters.   I wish I could have offered my sons this Cybils Science Fiction and Fantasy (Middle Grade) finalist so I could get their take on Lanesha's journey, but the library called it home.

Poor Little Astronaut: Twin Spica Vol.1

My older son read Kou Yaginuma's Twin Spica Vol. 1 before me, but he found it rather dull. Reading this Cybils Graphic Novel (YA) finalist, I can see his problems with the book. There are two stories, the present and the past, and only the present plot line would interest him, while the past is given much more space and attention.

The present story follows young Asumi as she tries to enter the highly competitive Tokyo Space School. Her scores are high, but her father seems unsupportive at first, and the final test proves tricky. The reasons it proves tricky trigger the extensive flashbacks, where we learn about Asumi's tragic past, her mother's slow death, her father's disintegration, and her teacher's own tragedy. Oh, and the invisible ghost who serves as her imaginary friend. While I enjoyed seeing the various twists in Asumi's backstory that will obviously influence her career at the Space school, I can easily see my son zipping through pages to get back to the tests at the academy and hoping to get some real astronaut stuff happening. If I get the next few volumes, I bet he'll enjoy them more, especially if they actually launch into space.

ZOMG -- Zombies: Rot and Ruin

Apparently zombies are the best thing to hit paranormal books since vampires. I can't see it; dead people do not become more interesting when they rot.  So it takes a lot to get me to read a zombie book -- maybe a Hugo nomination, or an appearance on the Cybils YA Fantasy and Science Fiction finalist list.  Jonathan Maberry's Rot and Ruin made that list, so it's the third zombie book I can remember reading.

I do know a good song about zombies, though.

The cover reinforced my low expectations; it looked like a zombie would be the main character.  Luckily Benny lives and breathes; the zombies are all outside the fenced town that clings to survival after the dead rose on First Night fourteen years ago and destroyed civilization.  Unfortunately, Benny is dumb as a rock, with the interpersonal skills of a post.  He hates his brother for cowardice, ignoring the supreme respect all decent people extend and the loving care and devotion shown for the past fourteen years (their parents died that First Night).  Slowly over the course of the novel Benny learns about his family and his brother, gradually coming to realize that anyone who trains with weapons for hours every day and earns his living dodging zombies and keeps his temper while an idiot teenager screws everything up maybe isn't a complete waste of space.  Touching.

Benny is almost as smart with girls as he is with his brother.  Luckily the girl who fell in love with him doesn't hold a grudge.  The story action moved along nicely, and the society and post-apocalyptic world was fun even if not really all that sensible, and I think kids reading this would have a much larger tolerance for Benny that I did.  I had a distressing tendency to sometimes see things from a wider perspective than his, which almost always made him look rather dumb.  Sometimes forgivably so; many fifteen years olds have poor career management skills, but sometimes cruelly so, when he casually insults his friends and family.  I'll see what my seventh grader thinks; I'm betting he'll stick with Benny's viewpoint and not notice any problems, especially when the action with the bad guys and the zombies gets going.

Warm Fuzzy Feeling: The Kneebone Boy

When I pick a book for my book club, I'm always a little nervous that everyone will hate it.  This is true even for my tiny family book club where it's just me and the kids.  This month was especially risky since I was the last to read the book -- I chose one of the Cybils Middle Grade Novel finalists, Ellen Potter's The Kneebone Boy.  First X read it and gave it a seal of approval, but he likes almost everything, then I chased P around for a week or  to get him to start reading the book.  Finally X put his foot down -- he wanted the dinner out we have as part of the family club and so P would by golly read the book.  And after a chapter or two he was hooked -- he finished it at his dad's house and met me demanding I read it as well.  He even told me it was an especially good book for the club because there was so much he wanted to talk about.

*Preen.*

So I read it this afternoon, and I agree that it is delightful.  The tone is note-perfect, from the Nesbit-echo of a child narrator who doesn't identify herself (you see who I think it is, but it could be one of the brothers).  The family dynamics between the three siblings also charmed me, including the alienation of the youngest because of the tight bond between Otto and Lucia.  The adventures that continuously danced on the edge of impossible but managed to stay just on the right side of improbably, the rich gifts of all three children -- Max's brains, Lucia's imagination, Otto's sensitivity, the American great-aunt with her mysterious motives, everything added to the atmosphere and prepared me for the bittersweet ending.

I'll probably come back and update this entry after out dinner out tomorrow, but for now I'm just glad I forced us all to read this book.  I wonder if I could get P to try Potter's other books...

Advanced Comic Reading: The Unsinkable Walker Bean

Just when I started to feel confident about my comic reading, I found myself stumbling through my copy of the Cybils Graphic Novel (Middle Grade) finalist The Unsinkable Walker Bean by Aaron Renier.  To start my problems from the end, it never occurred to me until the last page that the story would have more than one volume, so I was gobsmacked at the cliff hanger.  The fifth grader and seventh grader laughed at my confusion; they had figured out much earlier that the pacing was all wrong for a single book.

They had no problems reading straight through; several times I had to back up to see what had happened to whom.  Never mind that the three main kids looked completely different; I still got confused.  And I had to ask the fifth grader to explain what the deal was with the pirate captain.  The story was complicated and fast-paced, the art was colorful and eye-catching, and the whole thing made me feel almost fifty years old.  Which, you know, I am, but usually reading kidlit keeps me young, not pushes me up and over the hill.  This is apparently a book aimed at the graphic novel reader, which I managed to read but that gives even more to those who understand the pages better.

Poems for Science: Ubiquitous

I have successfully dragged my youngest son through the last of the Cybils Poetry finalists with me: Joyce Sidman's Ubiquitous: Celebrating Nature's Survivors. P cannot be counted among poetry's biggest fans; his normal instinct is to run screaming. He regards my hobby of memorizing poetry as mild insanity, so including a poem a night in our bedtime reading was a major concession on his part.

However, with this book, he allowed several poems daily, sometimes taking turns reading them with me. Sidman hooked him with science. Ubiquitous traces the history of the planet Earth through life forms, starting with a beautiful color coded time-string showing when each selection developed. We flipped back to the inside cover every few poems to see how much time had passed. Each poem included a facing page with facts about subject and its development, often new information for me as well as P. Some of the poems we liked, some we didn't, some we classified as prose with fancy line breaks, but we talked about both the facts and the poetry. This was a joy for me, and we even had a favorite:

The Lichen We
(after Siegfried Sassoon's "Man and Dog")

Who's this -- alone with stone and sea?
It's just the lowly Lichen We
the alga I, the fungus me;
together, blooming quietly.

...

Hair Makes Your Brain Sweat: Fever Crumb

Middle grade books are a category of kidlit that confuses me.  I think it means books that are too young for YA but too old for early readers, but that's a huge middle ground.  I tend to think of middle school as another name for junior high, but some books that are perfect for third graders count.  So then I started thinking of it as high elementary, but the latest Cybils Fantasy and Science Fiction (Middle Grade) finalist, Fever Crumb by Peter Reeve, felt like YA to me, so much so that I offered it to my ninth grade nephew, who read it and agreed that younger kids probably wouldn't get it.

Fever Crumb lives in a post-apocalypse London, a decade after humans have risen up against the mutants that ruled.   She was raised by Engineers, scientist types who eschew all emotion and shave their heads for some rational reason.  But now it is time for her first apprenticeship, which leads her towards all sorts of emotional and fire-arms related adventures, including meeting her parents and watching people struggle and die.  Oh, and zombies.  But she doesn't fall in love, which I guess makes it for younger kids? Odd.

Most of the book wanders about explaining the world, which unfortunately involves some flat villains wallowing in villainy, but more importantly leaves Fever reacting to everything about her instead of acting on it.  This slowed down my reading, but at the end, as she and I finally understood more about both the society and her personal history, she began to assert herself against the world directly.  I'm fairly sure my fifth grader wouldn't go for this book (and he's buried in reading right now), but I'll try the seventh grade guy.

Hard Boiled For Kids: The Night Owls

I brought a few Cybils books along while visiting my brother's house, and offered the YA selections to my 14 year old nephew.  He read and enjoyed the Graphic Novel (YA) finalist The Night Owls Vol 1, by the Timony Twins, although I forgot to ask him why he liked it.  My twelve year old also enjoyed it, enough to reread it two times and pick it up again when he was trapped at a dinner with me with no book.  (The dinner was explicitly a reading meal, because my other son needed extra time to finish his family Book Club book.)

I found it an easy read, but not a beloved one.  I enjoyed the time period -- the book is set in flapper New York with slightly subverted stock characters; the mix of realism and fantasy elements is adeptly handled.  The characters were easy to tell apart, which is important to me because I'm terrible at this!  Or maybe I'm getting better; working my way through the graphic novel finalists may have taught me some comic reading skills.  The story lines tended to be very short; it read more like a compilation of a newspaper comic than a story in its own book, which didn't bother the kids at all but I found a bit dull. I suspect I would have liked it better in the original format, which come to think of it is more likely a web comic than a fuddy duddy old newsprint item.  In general a worthwhile read, but I probably won't work to find future volumes, although I won't avoid them if my son brings them home.

Kids Eye View: The Extraordinary Mark Twain (According to Suzy)

Ah summer!  So brief and fleeting.  And I really mean that because this is about the second day of summer we've had so far, and it was stretching definitions as it is.  The boys spent the day at the pool; the older ones swam and the younger one busied himself with toys, snacks, and back rubs.  He, like me, seems to demand a minimum 25C before plunging into the wet.

Another nonfiction picture book that I enjoyed only because the Cybils Nonfiction Picture Book finalist list prompted me to find it is Barbara Kerley's The Extraordinary Mark Twain (According to Susy), illustrated by Edwin Fotheringham.  This biography builds itself around topics his daughter Susy wrote in her journal, encouraged by her father.  So the text includes both frequent quotes by Susy (I assume the bolded words in quotation marks are from her) and small inserts in the form of tiny books that contain larger quotes from her journal.  It was too bad that these extracts were printed in a cursive font, which my fourth grader can read but doesn't enjoy, but as we read the book together I took most of the cursive writing while he read the printed copy.  My sixth seventh grader read the book to himself and I forgot to ask if he skipped the cursive parts.  It seems to be a dying art among the key board generation.

The illustrations help jolly along the text, giving bold and giant sized pictures that played with size and perspective.  We had fun reading it, but it didn't really stick afterward; I think it took us two or three nights because bedtime starts so late when the sun forgets to start setting until long after dinner.

Catch Up

Well, I seem to have taken a blog vacation.  I have no idea why.  To catch up on my Summer book-a-day program, here are the seven books I meant to be recording last week:

Monday: Spilling Ink: A Young Writer's Handbook, by Anne Mazer and Ellen Potter.  This Cybils Nonfiction finalist prompts young creative writers to put pen to paper and write.  It is written for the enthusiast, the kid who wants to write stories but maybe worries that no one wants to read them or that it's just too hard.  Each chapter has writing prompts or exercises to help get the ink flowing, and the authors share from their own experience about facing problems or overcoming inertia or handling feedback, wanted or not.  I don't think it will get far with my writing-phobic boys, although I'll certainly try to get them to read it in hopes they conquer some of their fear.

Tuesday: Bad Apple, by Laura Ruby.  This story of family trust and loss is told through the lens of a girl made notorious for a teacher/student love affair because of the web shenanigans of an ex-friend.  She narrates chapters detailing her isolation and loneliness, with breaks in-between for magazine-style quotes from the other characters.  Since I never found Tola authentic, I had trouble connecting with her problems or her quirky ways of dealing with them.  The family members' diverse emotional journeys seemed scripted rather than natural.

Wednesday: The Battle for Azeroth: Adventure, Alliance, And Addiction Insights into the World of Warcraft (Smart Pop series), edited by Bill Fawcett.  Taking a break from my Buffy studies, I read a book of essays about the online adventure game World of Warcraft, which I, my brother, and my sons all play.  Writers looked at their own experiences playing the game, from wholesome family fun through life-changing obsession, at the social dynamics in many games, with role playing or gender politics considered of particular interest, and at the technical details that go into making the game fun, addictive, and playable.  I didn't learn anything of deep interest, although I was surprised to find that people identify so deeply with their avatars -- I suspect this is more of a role-playing thing.  X also found it interesting, although the fact that the book was written pre-expansions made it seem old-timey to him.


Thursday: Moonshine (Cal Leandros, Book 2), by Rob Thurman. I picked the next installment of the Cal and Niko series for one of my non-electronic travel books on my vacation.  I wanted something fairly shallow that would chill my vacation buzz.  This wasn't exact the right flavor, since Cal's voice is really whiny and sometimes annoying; yes, he's polluted and demonic and should never touch the hand of the pure and sweet girl who gets kidnapped anyway, but really, how about having some fun?   But it wasn't hard to finish, and I'll probably eventually read some more; I like the stories and the plots and I think Cal grows up a bit in later books.

Friday: In the Teeth of the Evidence, by Dorothy Sayers.  A group of mystery stories, including two Lord Peters and a handful of Montague Eggs, most of which were fun and tricky.  The rest were a mixed bag, dated without the pleasure of a recurring character, with strange people from the distant past doing strange things.  Several stories involved someone suspicion a crime because of obvious reason but an innocent explanation appears too late to save them from a horrendous mistake.  I probably won't keep the book around, but I liked the first few bits.  Also, it was a reread, so I got to solve most of the mysteries, which made it a non-stressful experience.

Saturday: Pod, by Stephen Wallenfels.  An unexplained catastrophe sets the stage for two horrifying situations.  Aliens prevent people from going outside, so a boy and his dad try to stretch supplies at home as long as possible.  Meanwhile a younger girl watches from the parking garage as thugs in a hotel peel off layer after layer of civilization.  The two stories gave different grim difficulties, but didn't really parallel each other in a way that added to both.  I found each engrossing as a short story, yet was only annoyed by the attempt to connect them at the end, especially as I felt that it gave a bad ending while pretending it was a note of hope.  I like the story better if the two halves aren't connected at all.  This Cybils  Fantasy and Science Fiction (YA) finalist is very graphic and depressing -- people die, horrors happen in front of our characters, and it's fairly clear that at least one main character doesn't survive much past the end of the book.  Just a warning for squeamish types; the grimness helped keep the story real.

Sunday: Perfectly Princess: Green Princess Saves the Day, by Alyssa Crowne (I knew that was a pseudonym!).  Another reading-my-library selection from the series shelves teaches me more about "girl books."  The book packaging includes green pages, a leaf-polka-dotted cover, and a girl who not only draws strengths from her dreams of being a princess but who needs to learn the feminine talents of cohesion and team-building during her quest to save her park.

Dog Meets Wild: Home on the Range

I was not that impressed with my second Cybils Early Chapter book finalist, Lucy Nolan's Home on the Range.  Two dogs who think their names are Down Girl and Sit take their confused sensibilities to a dude ranch, where they attempt to amusingly misunderstand things.  I found it predictable rather than charming, but I can see where kids would laugh at the trouble that the pets get into.  This is a hard category to get right for the whole family; this one may read better for the actual child taking his first steps at independent reading than for curmudgeonly me.

I think my kids have read it, but they are off at camp so I can't ask for their opinions.  But this one did not ring my funny bell.

Go To Sleep, Baby: Switching On the Moon

My son P and I continue to slog our way through the Cybils Poetry finalists; he detests poetry and I only like a slim fraction of it, preferring more structured forms that rarely appear in children's anthologies.  So we really hoped that Switching on the Moon: A Very First Book of Bedtime Poems would be short; I imagined Jane Yolen and Andrew Fusek Peters making the hard calls for what makes it into a board book.

It turns out that Yolen and Fusek had more ambitious ideas of what babies like; there were three chapters of poems.  Nothing really grabbed us; neither of us are night-time poem lovers so the book had an uphill battle from the start. While we were reading it I noticed the controversy over the meta-children's book Go the F*** to Sleep, which I told P about (in a censored sort of way) and he found the concept very amusing.  We then started classifying some of the poems as Go the BEEP To Sleep poems; which cheered us up a bit.  Quite a few children's poems about bedtime do have the theme of "please go to sleep already" so there was plenty of chances for us to discover the type.

We also had fun counting the poems by the editors and debating whether they got in by merit or because people like their own poems.  We are a very shallow pair.

"Night Sounds" by Berlie Doherty may make it into my poetry notebook:

When I lie in bed
I think I can hear
The stars being switched on
I think I can

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