Kidlit Tuesday: Kids On Their Own

Since I'm about three months late, I'm trying to group some of the kidlit I've read into loose groups. This weeks batch is books about children, almost exclusively girls, left without parental support for some reason. For some reason I haven't read books lately where the boys are orphaned. Maybe I just read more books about girls? After all, we are more interesting, right?

In some of these, the plot is an adventure and the parents are gone mostly so the kid can act heroically. Although there is some worry about the lost ones, clearly they need to be out of the way. Zita doesn't seem to trouble about her worried folks back on the home dimension, and Leanne, friend of the Cyborg,  doesn't have a personality as much as a plot purpose, so her worries about her arrested mom come and go depending on what the plot would prefer. My kids never worry about the missing parents in these books either, which concerns me a bit. I ask them if they'd notice if I were gone, and they say probably, although if magic or robots start appearing they might be too busy. Fair enough.

In increasingly emotionally complex books, the parents are removed in a more realistic way. In Summer of the Gypsy Moths, two twelve year old girls desperately want to avoid foster care and so they conceal the death of their elderly guardian and survive alone in a house for a summer. May B.'s parents and employers manage to abandon her in a lonely sod house on the Kansas prairie with no way to get out or call for help. These last two are a good contrast, as May is capable of all the tasks she needs for survival, but is unwillingly alone and desperately lonely, while the lesser skilled Gypsy Moth girls not only have each other for support but could end their isolation at any time by admitting the truth. So while May cooks and manages and desperately tries to contact anyone, the Gypsy girls constantly fend off well-meaning adults to keep their isolation going while scrambling to feed themselves.

Cyborg: Clone Wars 2, Patricia, Frederick, & John McKissack. The writing is uneven enough to make me wish the author above had been pushier with her coauthors -- the characters' motivations and actions were often inexplicable (why didn't Houston tell anyone their ally was lying? Why did Leanne suddenly decide to give herself up without discussing it with her friends? Why did Toby suddenly show up a few pages before his help was essential?) It's like they think story doesn't matter if you are doing SF, especially SF with a message.

Legends of Zita the Spacegirl, Ben Hatke.  My kids and I reallly like these graphic novels, with their attractive art and fast moving story lines. I found it interesting that Zita makes some big mistakes (stealing a spaceship) although my kids agree with her that it was just necessary. I also worry about her parents back home, which doesn't trouble the boys at all. We'll keep looking for more Zita.

The Summer of the Gypsy Moths, Sara Pennypacker. Classic story in the tradition of My Side of the Mountain, the Tillerman cycle, and other independent child tales, with two young girls fending for themselves after their foster parent dies. As an adult, I found the dead body creepier than my younger self would've, but the authentic voices of the girls and their often hilarious attempts to cover up their solitude more than made up for it. Very different from the Clementine books, but still good.

May B., Caroline Starr Rose. RML. Ooo, I strongly dislike poem novels. So I got mad when she did something silly even though she was only a kid. I liked that she went off on her own, even though only a coincidence saved her life.

Importance of an Epipen: Sidekicks

I rushed Dan Santat's Sidekicks to the top of my reading pile when the library called it home, and I had so much fun reading it that I immediately passed it along to P, who also completed it within the hour. This middle grade Cybils Graphic Novel finalist has bright colors, nifty super powers, and an internal family drama that keeps the emotions real even as the hamster and chameleon fight crime with the help of the superpowered cat and dog.

We do have to point out that the clock in the first panels is drawn incorrectly -- at 6:45 the hour hand of a clock does not point to six but is much closer to seven. This bugged my child from the first page, but luckily the clock does not return after that initial scene.

Anyway, the driving conflict of Captain Amazing's neglect of his pets because of his demanding superhero job clearly resonates with many kids, but the sugar coating of delivering the message through anthropomorphic pets keeps the tone light, even as they deal with sibling rivalries and devotion. This was a fun and lighthearted read that charmed adults and kids (X had read it weeks ago, when I first checked it out).

Ambiguous Good Guys: BadIsland

In the next Cybils YA Graphic Novel, Doug TenNapel's BadIsland, there is a definitely lack of good guys.  There's the inhabitants of the island, who are mostly bad guys, there's the people shipwrecked on the island, a family who doesn't like each other much (although they pull together in the end), and there's the island itself, a victim of hubris that cost his family dearly.

There are also pages of fascinating images; TenNaple's graphics sometimes confuse me but never bore me. Even the annoying characters, such as the improbably idiotic little sister and her dead snake, have distinct features and unlikely yet effective perspectives. I find the pictures more satisfying than the story, which follows a family forced by murderous aliens to rely on each other (honestly, if that's what it takes, I'm not sure the family really needs to stay together).  But both kids liked it, so it may be that a middle aged mom is not really the target audience. I bet the lack of space between the words in the title didn't bother them at all, and it's still the first thing that grabs me when I look at the cover. Why BADISLAND? What was wrong with Bad Island? Is it Badisland Island? 

Spooky Help: Anya's Ghost

My seventh grade son passed me Vera Brosgol's Cybils Graphic Novel finalist Anya's Ghost with the admiring caveat "it's creepy!"  I almost forgot that as I read the first few sections, which grounded Anya as a fairly shallow and spoiled girl who disdains her immigrant mother and longs for a better social status at her ritzy private school.  She finds a ghost after falling down the same sink hole that created the spirit, and at first she's happy to give the ghost a chance at seeing a bit more of the world, especially the bits that include cheating on tests and helping Anya get an invite to the best party of the year.

But things turn dark when the ghost starts making demands that Anya doesn't want to meet, and suddenly Anya finds herself forced to make stands that she's deliberately avoided for years.  The ghost turning creepy gave Anya a good place to take a position instead of slowly sliding down a path of lazy compromises and easiest shortcuts that nibbled away at her integrity. I liked that she got mad when her family was threatened, and got furious when the ghost went after her little brother.
Also, I could mostly tell all the characters apart (not a given for me with graphic novels!), with one small shock when someone referred to her best female friend and I had no idea what they were talking about because I had read that character as male throughout (I just thought Siobhan's parents accidentally saddled him with a girl's name because it was foreign).

I'm glad I read this before I got to Nursery Rhyme Comics, because I recognized Brosgol's style and felt very in-crowdy. I'm so hip!

Ew?: Y The Last Man Safeword

My seventh grade son read the latest installment of Brian Vaughan's Y The Last Man before I did, and when I finally got around to reading #4 Safeword I found myself very uncomfortable. It starts with an extended scene about a very odd suicide intervention technique involving rape, bondage, unpleasant homo-eroticism, whips, and asphyxiation.  At the last minute the purpose of helping Yorick reclaim his desire for life pops out, so they don't actually have nonconsensual sex, but wow, did it make me turn the pages gingerly from then on. I've read dubious things with him before, but usually he's not the one out in front.

At least it made a lot of graphic violence seem almost safer, by contrast. Maybe? I have to admit that I'm losing my taste for this series, but X remains enthusiastic so I'll probably read the ones he brings home. Except he's getting them quickly and my TBR Dare prevents me from reading them.  Just as well, although as a parent I'm now a bit curious what's in them.  Geez, I guess the author started feeling funny about having a series about the last man on earth without any sex in it.  So suddenly there's all this very odd almost-sex.  Which my kid is reading without bothering to ask about it, which either means that he found it boring or that he's now old enough to find this stuff strange to talk about with his mom.

Heh, actually, I'm guessing it's the former, although the latter is probably also true.

Ugly Lies: The Big Kahn

I actually remember how this book arrived on my TBR list -- unshelved comic has a Friday feature of recommending books they've been reading with explanations of why it's a good read.  Their enthusiasm often lures me into seeking out their choices such as The Big Kahn, a graphic novel by Neil Kleid and Nicolas Cinquegrani.

Rabbi Kahn, nee Donnie Dobbs, died as the respected head of a New York Jewish temple, leaving behind a grieving widow, a rabbinical son who expected to inherit the temple, a selfish and rebelling daughter, and a younger son who never quite fit in.  He apparently figured that his love and affection only lasted until death, because in his will he revealed that he was as Jewish as the pope and had kept up the lie ever since he fell in love with his wife while running a criminal scam with his brother.  The family found out the story at the funeral before the will was read, where Kahn/Dobbs' brother showed up and roughly revealed the truth.  This is a great scene that first reveals the brother's depth of faith and the sister's self-centered nature before cracking open the lie of their father's life.

The knowledge tears apart the children; the older son finds his faith in God teetering with his faith in his father, while the temple he grew up in firmly rejects him.  The daughter finds justification for her wild ways but the sight of her brother's pain brings her back towards piousness, and the younger son finds genetic backing for his love of cards and gambling.  The pictures blend well with the text, although again I find my cluelessness with comics a hindrance -- I kept missing flashbacks or confusing the daughter with her roommate.  It's an interesting, adult take on a comic book where the art moves the story along quickly so the book has the strength of a novella, with the complex emotions of a family built on sand.

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.

Passes the Bechtel Test: Y The Last Man Unmanned

When searching the shelves for something for my son (he has just started dipping his toes outside the kid-specific areas) I noticed a copy of Y: The Last Man, Vol. 1: Unmanned by Brian Vaughan and remembered seeing it recommended on tor.com. So I picked it up, partly to see why this was shelved in adult nonfiction as a comic rather than in Graphic Novels, which is apparently a YA group. I guess if a story doesn't involve either teenagers or superheroes, it's not YA. Odd.

The story follows Yorick, child of parents with poor naming skills, with a few excursions into the life of his sister Hero. In the first few pages, Yorick is an unambitious post-college guy talking with his much more energetic girlfriend while she hikes through Australia. Then all the men in the world drop dead except for him (and his pet monkey). This shakes up society a bit.

Yorick goes looking for his family, so we travel around a bit to see the devastation (lots of male drivers crashed) and the strange turns of society, including some women who adopt Amazon personas and glory in the removal of the evil sex. He has to hide his gender from everyone, since the crazies would kill him to finish the job and the non-men haters want to control him for his own protection. Yorick only wants to find his girlfriend, which is a bit sad since I thought she was trying to dump him during their last conversation. Oh, and there is an Israeli spy doing something or other. The pictures are clear and vivid so that it was effortless to follow the twists of the story, and the premise is interesting enough that I think I'll keep looking for the other volumes. I like having the guy everyone is left with be a rather dim sloucher rather than a superstar.