Painting and Poems: Self Portrait With Seven Fingers

The Cybils Poetry finalists are always a hard sell with my family, since somewhere they developed a severe poetry aversion.  Even as little kids they avoided rhymes. I think my awful singing voice may have influenced this, but it meant that getting P to read J. Patrick Lewis & Jane Yolen's Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers: The Life of Marc Chagall in Verse with me took effort, persuasion, and bribery.

In the end, we both felt a bit unsatisfied, because the book is trying to do three things -- show samples of Chagall's paintings, deliver a biography, and respond in poetry to the paintings. And what we wanted from a given page often didn't match up with what appeared -- the poem would address different emotional beats, the biography would skip over the questions we asked, the painting wouldn't match the timeline we thought we were on.

Again P and I treated this as a picture book so we could avoid the "poetry" thing, although I thought the poems themselves did a good job in capturing the emotional journeys in Chagall's history. It did feel like a collection of poems to me, although I attempted to conceal this from my son. I liked all the pieces of it, but I'm not sure they cooperated with each other enough.

Research Is Fun At the Library

Thursdays have gotten a bit more complicated with the new timing of swim class, so library visits with all the kids may be a relic of the past. Instead I'll probably grab the Favored Few (innocent victims?) and work my visit around whoever is handy.

I skipped several weeks of posting our library visits, including the very successful trip with A. She needed to research a Presidential figure for a school report.  I shoved her past the catalog to force her to browse biographies, where she swiftly found her book after I gently nudged her to look under his last name. Then we checked the online resources, where she had fun whittling the 200 choices down to a few screens (those "available now" buttons are a blessing of modern times). One more book from the adult section, and then yet one more when I showed her how to browse a bit in nonfiction. How gratifying to hear her amazed voice "Wow, looking up books isn't even boring!"

This week was my first trip since the TBR Dare ended (although since I fell off the wagon last week I could have cheated then), so I celebrated by grabbing two books from the temptation display.  I'm pretty sure they are on my TBR list, so finishing them will give me the pleasure of crossing something off my list.  P was there with me, and he obligingly checked out two books on his card since I had two things for him out on mine.  "That's fair," he told me in his little voice of Solomon.

On the hold shelf:

• Sidekicks, Dan Santat. Cybils book.
• Where Things Come Back, John Corey Whaley. YA
• The Returning, Christine Hinwood. YA
• Ghetto Cowboy, G. Neri (audio). The audio won a prize, so I thought I'd try it out. 
• Swirl by Swirl, Joyce Sidman. I've enjoyed her previous books of science poetry, so we'll try a new one.  Maybe I'll have something to recommend to the 2012 Cybils.
• The Wives of Henry Oades, Johanna Moran. I'm back to ticking off my TBR list from the bottom up.
• The Placebo Chronicles, Douglas Farrago. This was supposed to be a research book for P's science project, but it's actually a collection of often off-color memories of medical interns and professionals.  Oops.

The new things I grabbed because I saw them and wanted them and TOOK them (ah, the freedom from the accursed Dare):

• Timeless, Gail Carriger. Last in the series.
• The Reading Promise, Alice Ozma. Best parenting idea ever!
• GLEE CD, but I don't remember which one.

I also have some ebooks out:

• Echoes of Betrayal
• Kings of the North
• Oath of Fealty
• Angels of Darkness
• Magic Slays
• Magic Mourns
• Daring
• Wizard of Mars

This brings me to a total of 33 items out on my card, plus 8 ebooks. One book is overdue, but it's heading back tomorrow.  The pile of review-real-soon-now books is now lower than my lampshade, which is definitely good progress.  I'll go share my Library Loot at the event co-hosted by Claire from the Captive Reader and Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader, where all the library addicts compare their treasures.

Athletic Heros: Go Big or Go Home

Actually, when I grabbed this book for my Reading My Library quest, I thought it was a jock book and was proud of myself for expanding my horizons.  As it turns out, it was a science fiction book with jocks in it, so I had even more fun.  And for added goodness, it takes place in South Dakota, so it counts towards my geographic challenge as well. Will Hobbs, thanks for writing Go Big or Go Home.

I know I've been complaining about first person narratives in my recent YA reads, but apparently it's just angsty teens that bug me. Hobb's characters are confident and definitely not self-absorbed, reporting the events and problems but not lingering over their uncertainties or insecurities. Instead Brady gives an impression of an active, interesting boy who is honest about his faults without being proud of them. It was fun reading about his basketball and biking skills because they far surpass my couch-potato levels of athleticism.

The science in the science fiction doesn't hold up to close scrutiny (well, I think the factoids are true, but what happens is unlikely), but the story moves along rapidly enough with just enough emotional grounding to keep things steady, so I didn't mind. I bet my seventh grader would like this, and maybe it would inspire him to take a few long bike rides even if he isn't infected by a super-charging asteroid named FRED.

Dragons!: Echoes of Betrayal

Curse you, Elizabeth Moon! and King County Library! You foiled me one week short of my TBR Double Dare, when Elizabeth Moon's book Echoes of Betrayal came out and the library inexplicably had an e-copy available instantly for my NOOK.

Anyway, I was going just to save it for April 1st, but then I read the first chapter and before I knew it I had finished it. Oops. And now I have to decide whether to buy it for my NOOK or match my other hard copies.

I found this installment more focused -- the previous book had opened many story lines to an extent that the word "sprawling" came to mind several times after I put it down. In Echoes of Betrayal we start to see the connections between events and why we need to worry about the people on the various stages of the board. It's a hard balance to take between having characters we care about and want to follow, but needing them to drive the history of the entire continent. These books are about the entire land, unlike the earlier Paks trilogy which was about the development of a person from youth to paladin.

She treats her religion very seriously -- these gods don't shy away from interfering, and the question isn't whether to believe but whether (and whom) to worship. We see Gird hounding would be skeptics around until they drag themselves into a better grace. I like the treatment of ethics; good and evil aren't there because of what the gods say -- they are choices people make, and the gods made choices as well.

And there are dragons! Which is always a good thing. I think I'll put some of Moon's books on my "I think the kids will like it" shelf.

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? 

Youth Against the Dark: The Shattering

Down in the South Island of New Zealand, Karen Healey's The Shattering places a perfect town.  It has reliable weather, good schools, a good community, a solid economy and nothing changes.  No one notices. And no one knows the price paid for this loveliness, at least until three teenagers who helped pay that price start to figure things out.

I loved this book because it uses the fantasy as a way to work the deeper emotional themes, but never backs away from the essential realism of the characters. They have crushes, some requited and some not, they have secrets, they deal with their grief and emotions in powerful or childish ways. The things they learn and the things they have to do don't come for free; at the end of the book both they and their world have changed fundamentally.

This is the second year Karen Healey appears as a Cybils YA Fantasy and Science Fiction finalist, and she's probably enough reason for me to love this award. I haven't pushed this book on my seventh grader because I think it's a bit adult for him; the tensions and relationships are clearly high school rather than junior high based.  I'm looking forward to whatever else Healey decides to write.

Family Fun: Nerd Camp

For our March family book club, I picked a Cybils finalist that I had lent P to read on an airplane trip; he much prefers books he has just finished so as to avoid the tormenting suspense of having to read a book. Since X and I easily finish any book on the list we tend to pamper his sensitivities.  So I moved Elissa Weissman's Nerd Camp further up my pile of Cybils finalists (it's a Middle Grade Fiction entry) and then X gobbled it up happily the day after I finished it.  And so it was time for sushi.

The slowest part of the conversation was the lack of controversy -- we all agreed on almost everything. It was a fun book, nerds can have cool fun, and the camp sounds awesome although P thought it would be more fun if X came too, even if they were in different cabins. We kept getting sidetracked into nerdy investigations -- what kind of snake was the Milk Snake that saved Gabe's bacon? How useful is a head-held flashlight, and who was the last one to see X's? How many digits of pi should an educated person know, and does that mean my fifth grader is more educated than me?
It's a fun book for a family, although I do wish A had tried it, as she knows more about the "cool" stuff represented by Gabe's stepbrother, and so could advise us on how plausible the finale was. Thanks, Weissman, for writing a book that gave us a delightful family book club night.