Batman: The story of the Dark Knight, written and illustrated by Ralph Cosentino - review

Batman: The story of the Dark Knight, written and illustrated by Ralph Cosentino - review

Your Neighborhood Librarian: So, you guys, you read this book. Did you like it?
Nature Girl: Yes!
Mao: Yes!
Zhou: Yes!

YNL: What did you like about it?
Nature Girl: I liked it because it reviewed the part when he was a child.
Mao: I liked it because it had the Batcave under the house and by the seashore.
Zhou: I liked the meditating picture.

YNL: So, you guys are big superhero fans.
NG: Sorta.
YNL: Do you think that someone who's not a superhero fan would like this book?
Mao & NG: Yeah.
Mao: I'm not a superhero fan myself! ["Yeah, right!" thinks his mom.]

YNL: What did you think of the art?
NG: I liked it a lot. They put a lot of detail into it.

YNL: How about the colors? You like the colors?
Mao and NG: YES!
NG: Some of the colors are mixed, and some are regular.

YNL: Is it the same kind of art you see in other picture books?
Mao: Not actually.
NG: It's a very unfamiliar book.

YNL: Does it look like a comic book?
NG: Sorta.
Mao: It has very shapish pictures.
YNL: And that's like a comic book?
NG: I think it's a comic book pretty much.

YNL: Did you think it was violent?
NG: A little.
Mao: Nah, I didn't think it was violent.
NG: I thought it was violent because of all the cutting and the hitting. And Two-Face has a very ugly face and that's violent.

YNL: Did it scare you?
NG: A little bit.
YNL: What part?
NG: When it was saying "There will always be a criminal to stop... a victim to save... a monster to fight... and a crook to catch."
YNL: What's scary about that?
NG: The 'monster to fight,' because it makes me think maybe Batman would lose.

YNL: What about these villains? Do the villains bother you?
NG: Well, they creep us out sorta. Yeah, like Penguin and Joker.
Mao: Catwoman makes me sort of like - eeech!
YNL: 'Eeech?'
Mao: Pretty, like, scared.
YNL: Catwoman more than the others?
Mao: Yeah. Two-Face and Catwoman.



Left to right: Zhou is five, Mao six, and Nature Girl is seven. I recommend that (as always, of course) you assess both book and kid before you hand it over - some kids (and some parents) might balk at the sharp teeth, the lurid, energetic retro-y illustrations, and the whole BIFF! ZAP! POW! of it all. Other kids (and parents) will take one look and think, "FINALLY! A nouveau Golden Age-style Batman overview for the youngest readers! What TOOK them so long!"

The Willoughbys by Lois Lowry - review

The Willoughbys by Lois Lowry
I just finished this book, sitting on the front porch drinking lemon soda and giggling out loud. Summer is so great.

The Willoughbys is a tour de force. In this short novel (174 pages, and that's including the glossary and bibliography), the estimable and thought-provoking Lois Lowry presents her own idea of a nice activity for a fine summer afternoon: she fires up the grill and roasts the living crap out of some of the most ludicrous and unpalatable tropes of classic children's literature.

• She takes the baby left on the doorstep, shears its angelic curls, and pawns it off on a neighbor.
• Her brave orphans are neither orphans, nor brave (at least at first).
• The long-lost relative is not particularly missed.
• The Swiss are by and large insufferable.

At least none of the characters manage to convince a wheelchair-bound pal to get up and walk again. That's one plot nugget too awful to be rehabilitated, even with barbecue sauce and hickory smoke.

And what emerges from the smoke, caramelized and juicy, is a story as lovable and appealing as it is wry and twisted.

The Willoughby children (there are four of them, plus two more that they pick up along the way), who are old-fashioned yet unsentimental, remind me of the kids in the Nurse Matilda stories. Or the Penderwicks. Roald Dahl will also come to mind. The children themselves frequently cite classic children's literature. But despite all these references and echoes - some explicit, others deliberately implied, and at least one sniffed out by a perSnickety fellow author - The Willoughbys stands on its own.

Will there be parents who recoil from the Willoughby children, who wish their (hilariously) detestable parents dead? "I'm wondering," Jane said, "would a crocodile eat a person in one gulp? Or in chunks?" Or who recoil from the Willoughby parents, who are indeed detestable (though hilariously so)? "Two tourists were eaten in huge gulps but it was not sad at all because they were French." I hope not. Because, you know, "hilarious" means "just joking, you dolts!"

My kids are off with their aunties and uncles splashing in rivers and having scavenger hunts in the woods. But when they get back, I am reading this book to them as soon as possible. And as long as Bob and I don't run off on a vacation of our own and try to sell the house out from under them, I won't worry about them getting any ideas!

The Littlest Dinosaur by Michael Foreman - review

The Littlest Dinosaur by Michael Foreman
Michael Foreman has had a long and impressive career. He creates beautiful watercolors and sometimes writes wonderful books.

A parent picked up The Littlest Dinosaur tonight at work, saying, "Oh, my son loves dinosaurs". I looked at the cover illustration, a pensive, wee ceratopsid sitting atop a blue hill, gazing into the blue evening sky, and I thought to myself, "I bet that book isn't about dinosaurs. I bet that book Teaches Us Something About Ourselves." Something about all that blue. And now, oh, you stop it. I do NOT dislike ALL books with a message right off the bat. If a book charms me, I don't care what it's trying to tell me.

So we have a loving mama dinosaur who hatches a clutch of eggs. All but one egg, which mama guards with obsessive care. Eventually, papa dinosaur, tired of taking care of all the other kids while she fusses over the egg, puts his face down next to it and yells, "Do something!" Whereupon the egg cracks. My colleague Dances With Chickens was reading the book with me. I turned to her and said, "Look, yelling at your kids really does work!" We turned the page and from the egg emerged the tiniest dinosaur ever seen. Dances With Chickens observed, "Yeah, but you get less out of them."

So tiny dinosaur lives a lonely, perilous life among his giant family... until! One day everyone else gets stuck in the mud and he has to go for help, enlisting a humongous longneck, who plucks the ceratopsid family from the muck. "I thought I was too big and clumsy to do anything useful," he said, "but now I know that's not true."

Me? I suppose I'm too tired and cynical to do anything useful. When I saw those dinos in the mud, I had been hoping for some La Brea sabertooth action. MmmROWR!

I'm the best artist in the ocean by Kevin Sherry - review

I'm the best artist in the ocean by Kevin Sherry
The return of the squid! More from the talented creator of I'm The Biggest Thing in the Ocean (recommended earlier as a Best Picture Book for Hipsters, and also children).

Kevin Sherry is the Baltimore boy who makes all the coolest t-shirts. He went to our local art school, he visits our library. You might think I'd praise his books just as a matter of course. Hm. You'd probably be right. But anyway. I'm the best artist in the ocean takes Kevin's grandiose little squid with the optimistic disposition, slaps a mustache on him and gives him a bunch of brushes loaded with 100% squid ink (it says so, in the illustration note!).

And what do you know, too, this squid can draw! The savvy adult reader will notice interpretations of Miro and Picasso, styles both abstract and cartoony, and Cthulhu, who generally has NO place in a children's book.

When I read this aloud, I'll do the squid's lines with an outrageous French accent to match his silly mustache. And I will have them rolling in the aisles when I deliver the punch line, an inclusive, art-positive yodel of self-expression.

The House in the Night by Susan Marie Swanson, pictures by Beth Krommes - review

The House in the Night by Susan Marie Swanson, pictures by Beth Krommes
Finally got ahold of this much-praised new picture book the other day. In nested prose ("In the house burns a light. In that light rests a bed. On that bed waits a book."), the author takes us on a swooping, quiet journey through and above a summer night. And in scratchboard illustrations nearly as detailed as something by a Geisert, the illustrator pulls us in and slows us down.

Hypnotic. That's the word. Good for many a moment of stillness with a small child, even one who is rarely still.

We're off to look for aliens by Colin McNaughton - review

We're Off to Look for Aliens by Colin McNaughton
When is a gimmick not a gimmick? When it WORKS, baby! How's this for a gimmick: Colin McNaughton's new book has a BOOK glued inside it - a book called "We're Off to Look for Aliens".

We're Off to Look for Aliens starts with a man accepting a book from the mailman. The man is Dad, and Dad writes and illustrates children's books. The book is his new book, fresh from the printers, and, judging from the characters that surround Dad as he works (Captain Abdul, Preston Pig, etc.), Dad is Colin McNaughton.

Dad asks Family to have a look at the new book, and steps out to walk the dog. Turn the page, and there's Dad's new book! (Becky from Young Readers took a picture of the book-within-a-book) Dad's new book ROCKS. In it, a character (who looks a lot like Dad) leaves Earth on a rocket with his faithful dog Wilberforce to look for aliens. Dad's new book is colorful, energetic, set to the tune of "Here we go 'round the mulberry bush," and full of rockin' aliens with lots of eyes and bumps.

Dad comes home and Family gives him their review. Unfortunately for Dad, Family has just one problem with it, and I'm not going to tell because it's a darn cute joke!

This one goes home with me.

Wave by Suzy Lee - review

Wave by Suzy Lee
Holy wackadoodle. Masterful, internationally-acclaimed author-illustrator Suzy Lee uses a stick of charcoal and one color of acrylic paint and NOTHING ELSE - no words - and chronicles a little girl's encounter with the ocean. In just a few sketched lines, she gives us eager, curious, hesitant, exuberant, intimidated... a new expression every page. It's like the best frames from a whole day of home video, silent except for the call of gulls and the sound of waves, condensed into a slideshow to watch over and over again.

In fact, replace the seagulls with pelicans, and the little girl with my 6-year-old, and you've got our vacation. I took that video myself.

A Isn't for Fox: An Isn't Alphabet, written by Wendy Ulmer and illustrated by Laura Knorr - review

A Isn't for Fox: An Isn't Alphabet, written by Wendy Ulmer and illustrated by Laura Knorr - review

Here's an ABC book with a new angle: each letter gets two rhyming things that it's "not" for... and an animal that it is. This strategy makes the familiar (ants, zebras) feel fresh, and distracts - in a good way - from the awkward (nuthatch, xenops). Laura Knorr's kicky, detailed paintings exude personality and good humor.

G isn't for mugs; it isn't for rugs.
G is for geckos that hide on the rug.

This big fun picture book is perfect to share with a little kid, pointing at the pictures to cue the kid to supply the nouns. The "G" page shows a gecko sitting on a rug drinking from a mug with a bug on it. Between the letter, the repeating framework and the illustrations of each noun, you've got that kid practically reading the whole page. There are very few books that work that way (holla, Ravenous Beast!), and they are to be treasured. Unfortunately, not every page in A Isn't for Fox quite manages the trick:

L isn't for dramas; it isn't for mamas.
L is for llamas in fuzzy pajamas.

This page shows llamas having a pillowfight. Hey, I'm sympathetic: how do you illustrate llamas having dramas with their mamas? And not have it be all Lifetime movie-of-the-week? So this one the kid can't help with.

I really respect Laura Knorr's work here: she works in as many of the rhyming words as she can, and her range is spectacular. Yaks and fairies are rendered with equal skill and charm. It's just a shame that the team that produced this book couldn't support that collaborative reading process on every page.

Vacation reading

Ah! We are back from two weeks in various cities and beaches in the American Southeast, and did we have time to read? We did!

I read:



So Yesterday by Scott Westerfeld
Loved it! The whole "cool hunter" thing is a bit nineties, but you gotta love a good mystery, and a good mystery that is full of cool stuff is even better. Also, Westerfeld's examination of the co-opting of youth trends for mass consumption is straight out of Commodify Your Dissent, a compendium by the folks at The Baffler that every teenager should read before cracking that next can of Monster Mixxd Energy Juice.

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
(reviewed while I was on vacation in New Orleans, thank you very much)

Farthing by Jo Walton
Technically a grown-up book, I would recommend Farthing to any young adult reader interested in speculative fiction, history, or mystery. It's an illuminating "what-if" novel set in an England that has accepted Hitler's "Peace with Honor" - disguised as an old-fashioned English country house mystery: Gosford Park meets Brazil. There are many discussions involving sexuality, i.e. who is homosexual and who is not, but no sex.

The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones by Anthony Bourdain
Essays by the author of Kitchen Confidential and The Bobby Gold Stories. I recommend the crap out of Tony Bourdain - but not, typically, for kids. There's the language, not to mention the extremely frank talk about sex and drugs. There are some teenagers, though, especially the ones considering restaurant careers... hey, they should know what they're getting into!


My rising 2nd grader read:



Black Lagoon adventures, books 1-7 by Mike Thaler ; illustrated by Jared Lee
The kid is giggling to himself as he goes through and then reading passages out loud to his younger brother. I'm taking that as a thumbs-up.


My husband read:



How the States Got Their Shapes by Mark Stein
Recommended road trip reading. At every state border, as we hollered out "Good-bye, Georgia!" and "Hello, Alabama!" Bob would have some anecdotal treasure to relate about battles, topography, bureaucratic snafus, and the duplicitousness of Virginia. Luckily, he kept most of them to himself. (I kid! I kid!)

Also, he read The Economist. Also the newspaper. On the beach. I swear, one of these days I'm going to strap him to a chair and force Robert Ludlum down his throat. Or... eww.


On audio:
Our faithful minivan transported us a grand total of 2875 miles. And did we listen to books in the car? We did!



We spent most of our time in the car with Percy Jackson and the Olympians by Rick Riordan. We got through The Lightning Thief, The Sea of Monsters, and The Titan's Curse.

My boys, who are 5 and 6 years old, now know the traits and attributes of all the major Greek gods and a fair number of the minor ones. They cried out for "more Percy" every time we got into the car. Unfortunately for my husband and I, the narrator, Jesse Bernstein, is... well. In addition to a gritted-teeth Queens accent that would make Archie Bunker proud (shtreet, frushtrated, firmiliar, foward, bedgeroom), the guy continually misplaces the emphasis in sentences and phrases. Also? A word to audio book producers? When your narrator encounters the word "ichor" and pronounces it "icker"? Stop the tape and look it up. He does animal voices really well, though.


And at bedtime:
Since the boys share a room, I can read to them both at bedtime, usually a long chapter book, while they fall asleep in their beds. I have read Nurse Matilda, The True Meaning of Smekday, and A Hat Full of Sky in this way. My Boov voice was irresistable, as I predicted, but the Nac Mac Feegles nearly did me in.



On the road I started reading the second Skulduggery Pleasant book, Playing with Fire. I am pleased to report that it is starting out just as sardonic and action-packed as the first book, and I am proud to say that I am working Skulduggery's deep velvet voice almost as well as Rupert Degas, who read that first book so amazingly well that we replayed sections again and again.

Here's to beach chairs, lounge chairs by the pool, couches in shady living rooms. Anywhere you get a chance to just sit and read. That's vacation, baby.

The adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson - review

The adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson

Interesting. The adoration of Jenna Fox is many things. It is:

• a young adult speculative fiction novel for girls who don't like science fiction

a coming-of-age novel for people who eschew the touchy-feely (me!)

a medical thriller, fully as suspenseful as early Robin Cook

a meditation on choices nearly as profound as Walden, which it frequently quotes

And I think it is, very subtly, a pro-life statement.

Now, I, like the reviewers at SLJ, Publishers Weekly, The Horn Book, etc., and my colleague Other Paula, who recommended it to me, enjoyed this book. I liked Jenna, who has awoken from a coma with no memory, and who struggles to assimilate information that will help her interpret her world and make sense of her often conflicting impressions. I enjoyed watching her evaluate her former life, explore her new life, and forge a new identity from the best pieces of both. The near-future world that Pearson has invented, full of genetically engineered species and antibiotic-resistant bacteria and oxygenated transplant gel loaded with neurochips, is both believable and intriguing. And I thought that "waking from a coma" was a serviceable metaphor for teenagers just beginning to realize that they are not merely extensions of (or reactions against) their parents, and that they can choose what kind of person to be.

But although this book is a suspenseful, thrilling read, I went through it slowly, because there's a lot going on in it beyond the mystery of Jenna's past. Specifically, the frequent ethics discussions merit very close attention.

In Jenna's world, "Science" (it almost wears a capital S in this book) is responsible for the disappearance of native species and an epidemic that killed a quarter of the world's population. In response, the federal government has enacted laws and created an ethics board that controls access to and application of advanced medical treatments. To ensure equitable access, a point system is in place, under which every person is assigned 100 points. Medical procedures use up those points: physicians decide whether a person 'needs', say, biofeedback software for their prosthetic limbs, or a kidney, or a heart transplant, based on how many points they have left.

Jenna is the daughter of a biotechnology billionaire, and she has recovered from a truly devastating car accident. I don't think I'm giving away too much of the plot when I say that Jenna has exceeded her points.

This fact, along with various revelations pertaining to what was lost and what recovered from Jenna's body after the crash, as well as a quadruple amputee whom she meets at school, and the fate of her best friends from before the accident, leads Jenna to question her right - and desire - to be alive.

I was skating right along with Jenna, feeling her dilemmas, rejoicing in her rebellions, all the way up to the book's ending, an artificial-feeling happy coda set two hundred and forty years later. 240 years is a long time: long enough, presumably, for a character to gain complete perspective. And 240 years later, Jenna is content with her choices, and the world's society backs her up. She muses on faith and science, and thinks that they are two sides of the same coin. At this point, I thought to myself, "'Faith'? Was this book about faith?" Earlier in the book, Jenna wondered if she had a soul, and her grandmother is Catholic... and then I realized that Jenna's post-coma memories include events that happened before she could talk: a near-drowning as a toddler, her baptism, and... being in her mother's womb. This representation of a fetus's perceptions and feelings is extremely provocative and, amid Pearson's well-written examinations of the meaning and value of human life, I think it's unnecessary. It made me go back and re-examine all of the science and ethics in the book.

I feel sure that Mary Pearson did not write The Adoration of Jenna Fox (although, if that title isn't Jesus-y enough for you, I'll write the sequel, and call it Ecce Jenna) as Christian or pro-life propaganda.

Until that ending, I would even say that her presentation of the ethical issues faced by the characters is basically balanced - though that point system thing rather reeks of pro-life rhetoric. If the book had been left open-ended, I would recommend it without reservation. It could be used in many terrific science-class discussion topics (some of which are listed in the discussion guide, some, not). Teen literature should challenge convictions, should poke holes in the status quo.

But resolving Jenna's ethical conflicts - presenting her choice as the one right choice - damages the credibility of the book. Sure, "it's just fiction," but I'd like to give this book more credit than that. You quote Walden that much, you kind of better be prepared to defend your choices.

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow - review

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
Marcus is the kind of kid whose best friend gets him a biography of Alan Turing for his fourteenth birthday. A boy who spoofs gait-recognition software by putting gravel in his shoes. He's the kid who hacked the spyware-infested and adware-infested laptops the school system provides. Smart and sneaky, Marcus might as well have been born with a Question Authority bumper sticker slapped across his butt. Not the kind of kid to take five days of detention and questioning (aka imprisonment and browbeating) by the Department of Homeland Security lying down.

Cory Doctorow weaves a lot of interesting set pieces, e-culture references, and technical explanations into this tale of cyber disobedience and the power of ideas. I guarantee that any reader will learn something new. You may know what a Sailor Moon outfit looks like, and you may understand how public keys work and how to make them. You may have read about how to make a video camera sniffer using a toilet paper tube on Instructables (and in fact, that Instructable may have been written by Marcus), but... how's your Bayesian analysis? Did you know that your digital camera "signs" each shot with unique metadata - meaning your every capture can be traced back to your machine? And did you know that Kerouac wrote On the Road on a big long scroll of paper?

Well, ok, everyone knows that last one.

Little Brother is a terrific adventure. Its protagonist is resourceful and brilliant but also thoughtful and real. But what really distinguishes this book is the voice of Cory Doctorow, patiently and passionately explaining why privacy is important, why dissent is crucial to democracy, and what can happen when we forget that. Oh, and he also slags Microsoft without hesitation every chance he gets - giving the book that whiff of honesty that teens crave.

Like Halting State for teens. Like So Yesterday for geeks. Like 1984 for today (and with a happier ending). And when they're finished with this one, start 'em on Gibson and Philip K. Dick.