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Airhead by Meg Cabot
How can it be that I've never read any Meg Cabot before?
Ahem, actually, I know exactly how that can be, and I'll bet you my colleague TinkerCinderBelleAhontas could tell you too. I am not such a big fan of girly. My hair may be pink, but that's kind of the only pink thing about me. So Princess Diaries
? Yeah I'm not likely to pick that up. Queen of Babble
? Exact no. When it comes to grownup fiction, I read Chelsea Cain
, who, in all fairness, also features a stunningly beautiful heroine in her books, but one who accessorizes with scalpels instead of stilettos.
What made me pick up Airhead then? A strong sense of duty to young adult girl readers? No. Those girls who like Meg Cabot probably already know they like Meg Cabot and don't need me to introduce them. Also, I've never scrupled at recommending Meg Cabot even not having read her. I trust TinkerCinderBelleAhontas, who really enjoys Meg Cabot.
It was seeing Ms. Cabot speak at Book Expo this year. She was introduced by Julie Andrews, and she was appropriately "OH MY GOD y'all, that's JULIE ANDREWS!" even though she knows Julie Andrews from when they made the movie. She was even appropriately "OH MY GOD y'all - a MOVIE!". She doesn't say "y'all," by the way. But she should maybe take it up, it goes good with "OH MY GOD!" She talked about her new series, Airhead, explaining that the brain of a smart, video-game-playing tomboy (Emerson) ends up transplanted into the body of a famous teen supermodel (Nikki), and then admitting that it's maybe not the most realistic book she's ever written. And this is a woman who has written books about an average American girl turning out to be the heir to the throne of a European country, so, as she pointed out, she knows from unrealistic.
Anyway, she was charming and really really funny.
So I picked up Airhead, and I giggled. And I enjoyed the descriptions of the luxe loft life of the supermodel. Plus, I giggled. And I liked the characters, and I got all "Brandon or Dylan" over whether she's going to end up with her homeboy, the secretly studly Christopher or with the dreamy British singer-songwriter Gabriel. (Oh, we all know, don't we?) And - yes you know - I giggled.
AND Y'ALL!!! That is TOTALLY NOT LIKE ME! Do we remember? Hunger Games was almost spoiled for me when it got to the "Brandon or Dylan" part. Same with Graceling
! So I am totally crushing on this lighter-than-air, all-romantic-complications-all-the-time girl book? It's amazing. I feel exactly like Em, the tomboy, who has always disdained the girlier things in life, when she realizes that kissing? IS SO GREAT.
Meg Cabot? IS SO GREAT.
Lives of the The Great Artists by Charlie Ayres
Brilliantly laid out, beautifully printed, brightly written, and augmented with activities, web resources, and fun facts, this book will hook young readers of every type.
Twenty European artists are profiled, arranged in chronological order. Each entry begins with a summary and a portrait, and then the reader is dropped into the artist's life. We accompany J.M.W. Turner as he sells a painting, and wait with Goya for the Spanish royal family, who are coming for a portrait sitting. Facts about each artist's life, technique, and importance are skillfully blended into these present-tense vignettes.
The narrative is written in the present tense, which gives it a fictionalized "feel," but the bulk of the events and feelings described are based on correspondence or other documentation (although such support is not cited in the book).
The works of art chosen to represent each artist are heavy on the drama and detail, resulting in high kid appeal and interesting captions. In some cases, sketches are included. The book's design merits special mention: each artist's entry has its own color palette, drawn from the works of art used as illustrations, and despite the multitude of sidebars, layout is clean and clear.
Back matter includes chronologies of the artists, locations of major collections of each artist's works, a glossary, and catalog entries for each work of art.
Unfortunately, this graceful, thoughtful book is badly marred by a garish cover that not only fails to represent the rich content within, but also fails to acknowledge the author's stated scope - European artists of the past seven hundred years. There is no such qualifying language on the cover, leading to the unpleasant - and offensive - impression that the book is declaring that the only important artists are European.
Antony Mason's A History of Western Art: From Prehistory to the Twentieth Century
takes a more encyclopedic approach to this subject and would make a good companion volume.
Little Beauty by Anthony Browne
I am joined in my review of this book today by my friend Juicy, who is 5.
YNL: Juicy, say hello to the folks.
Juicy: [waves. Juicy likes to keep 2 fingers in his mouth]
YNL: Looking at the cover of this book, what do you think it's going to be about?
Juicy: It's about a guy who doesn't have a brain and who gets one.
YNL: That's not a brain, kid, that's a kitten on the gorilla's head.
Juicy: I SAID "FRIEND" not "brain".
YNL: Sometimes it's hard to understand you with your fingers in your mouth.
YNL: So here's the gorilla using sign language to ask for a friend, and here are his keepers. Can you tell what they're doing by the way they're standing?
Juicy: Thinking.
YNL: That's called body language, like the gorilla uses sign language. And then one of them has an idea. What do you look like when you have an idea?
Juicy: [Takes fingers out of mouth, crosses arms in front of him.]
YNL: How does the gorilla feel about his new kitten?
Juicy: He loves her!
YNL: How can you tell?
Juicy: Because she's cute?
YNL: Some people don't like cute. What makes you think the gorilla loves the kitten?
Juicy: Because the gorilla's happy?
YNL: How can you tell the gorilla's happy?
Juicy: Because he has a smile on his face. [Juicy is beginning to think I am a little stupid]
YNL: "They did EVERYTHING together." What are they doing here?
Friend the Girl (Juicy's sister, 8) interjects: POOPING!
Juicy: POOPING AND PEEING!
Juicy: He's SWINGIN ON THE LIGHT!
Juicy: He turned into a polar bear. He's turnin brown he's gettin dirty.
YNL: Uh-oh. What's happening here?
Juicy: The gorilla's angry at the TV. He busted it.
YNL (reads): "'We have to take Beauty away now,' said another."
Juicy: They're starting to cry because they love each other.
YNL: So what did the kitten do when they asked who broke the TV?
Juicy: He lied.
YNL: Do you think it's ok that Beauty lied?
Juicy: No.
YNL: Do you think the keepers believed Beauty?
Juicy: Yeah.
YNL: Really? So why did they let Beauty and the gorilla stay together then?
Juicy: I don't know. Because grownup cats can... It's the same as humans. Babies act different than kids, kids act different than grownups. So the the kitten acted... if that actually happened... I don't want to explain it because it's a long story.
YNL: But if they believed the kitten broke the TV... I don't get why they didn't take the kitten away.
Juicy: Me neither.
Ok, that didn't turn out how I expected. Well, we all really enjoyed the book, and Juicy kept his fingers out of his mouth kind of a lot. Cheers to Anthony Browne, wherever he is!
How to Train with a T. Rex and Win 8 Gold Medals by Michael Phelps with Alan Abrahamson, illustrated by Ward Jenkins
Oh my gosh do I need this book!
When you select books for school libraries, you are always on the lookout for sports-related books. It's a fact that some people - usually gentleman-type people, although there are ladies who fit this description too - just won't read anything that's not about sports. So we need sports books for every assignment: we need sports fiction
, sports poetry
, sports science project books
, and lots and lots of sports biographies.
Most of that stuff is easy. Dan Gutman
and Tim Green
can carry a lot of water for a school librarian (especially Gutman - guy, if I ever meet you, I'm gonna kiss you right on the mouth!). But then there are the bios. Now, when you select biographies of athletes, you want to cater to local tastes. I mean, of course, we're all going to buy LeBron
and A-Rod
, but you might not plonk down your school system's hard-earned $17.95 on, say, Troy Polamalu
unless your school is full of Steelers fans. Even if he is an athletic polymath with fabulous hair. Which, yeah, no Steelers fans in Baltimore.
So there's my problem. Baltimore. Which is in Maryland. We play things like lacrosse here, and do you know what I have to offer the young ladies looking for biographies of outstanding female lacrosse players? Zip. Also, our football team is the Ravens, whose players are famous not only for their athletic prowess, but also for their arrest records. So, no juvenile biographies of famous Ravens. (Way to go, JAMAL.) And? we don't even have a basketball team.
So, here in the kids' sports biographies aisle in Baltimore, we've got Johnny U
, who played for a team that doesn't even live here anymore, and Cal
, who the kids are kind of rapidly forgetting. Thank heaven, then, for Michael Phelps. Can I make little sparkly fireworks shoot out of his name? Blogger? Help me? No? Ok then you have to imagine them.
Michael Phelps is a hometown boy. Born, raised, learned to swim, went to school here... heck, the kid even uses the library where I work (when he uses a library, which, well... after all, you can't read in the pool, regardless of what the condition of a lot of our Large Type books might seem to indicate). Michael Phelps is a bona fide sports hero. Unprecedented achievement. Also, accessible to the point of goofy. Ok, there's the pot thing, but as far as I'm concerned, that just proves he's a real guy. It's not like he tortured dogs or beat up his girlfriend. He just got - one has to imagine - really, really high. Seriously. The lungs on that guy? Bad decision though. Bad. Say no to drugs.
Say yes to How to Train with a T.Rex though! Michael gives us a quantitative look at his Olympics training - in 6 years, he swam 12,480 miles, napped for 273 days, ate half a ton a year, leg-pressed 9 tons per workout... you get the idea. These figures are given scale in multiple ways: we see Michael sitting down to eat half a car, swimming the length of the Great Wall, and lifting a NYC subway car (the W, my old line!) with his legs. Curriculum connection to measurement and scale lessons - niiice! The illustrations are perfect - as loose-limbed and friendly as our hero himself. Although rendered digitally, they have a very nice, tactile, watercolor-y feel. Colors are both bright and earthy. I feel like I've seen the work of Ward Jenkins before (but apparently I haven't), and I like it.
Eight gold medals to this fun new book!
Bring me some apples and I'll make you a pie: A story about Edna Lewis, by Robbin Gourley
As soon as warm weather comes to Edna's family's farm, good things are ready to be harvested, one after the other. First, it's wild strawberries, which Edna and her sister gather (and eat - "One for the basket and one to taste"), excitedly anticipating the strawberry shortcake they'll prepare. Next, they gather the first wild greens of spring with Auntie, as Edna recites:
But I have never tasted meat,
nor cabbage, corn or beans,
nor milk or tea that's half as sweet
as that first mess of greens.
As Spring turns to Summer, Edna helps gather food that the family has grown (beans, melons, corn) and food that has grown wild (sassafras, honey), all the way to the apples and nuts of autumn. Each time, she and her family sample the goods as they're picking, but also talk about all the pickles, jelly, pies, and bread they'll make, and often quote some few lines of a song or rhyme.
This book is so seamless and languid and pleasant, even though everyone's doing a whole lot of work. The folk rhymes, the foods, and the seasons are woven together in a sunny, smooth, shining braid. And what a pleasure it is to read about the real Edna Lewis, who grew up to be a famous chef, in the Author's Note. We even get a recipe for that shortcake.
Guttersnipe by Jane Cutler, pictures by Emily Arnold McCully
Interesting.
Ben is a young Jewish boy in Canada in the early part of the twentieth century. Determined to help make ends meet for his fatherless family, he takes a job as a delivery boy for a hatmaker. On his first run, he stops by the workplace of each of his family members: sister Rose selling tickets at the movie theater, brother Max setting pins at the bowling alley, and his mother, singing in Yiddish as she sews as fast as she can.
And then something terrible happens. Hitching a ride on a streetcar, he loses control of the bike and is thrown to the ground, the silk hat linings he was to deliver scattered among the trash of the street and ruined. What I find interesting is this: Ben's failure is not a picture-book failure: a ripped-drawing mishap, an ill-tempered word, a dropped pie. This is a truly spectacular failure, a failure in real-world terms - Ben is going to lose his new job, he may be actually injured, and he will be in trouble if the bicycle is broken. One speculates Mr. Green is going to try to get him to pay for those hat linings, too. This is the kind of screw-up that freezes the blood of even an adult with many years of screw-ups behind her.
But lying there in the street, Ben realizes: "His body would heal. There would be other bicycles, other jobs, and other chances. He was only a boy, just starting out, and he had many things left to learn and to experience."
Perspective. Is it something you can communicate to a kid? Can you read this story now, and then next week, when that kid steps on his brother's meticulously-constructed LEGO masterpiece, can you invoke Ben's perspective on failure? I guess we'll see.
"This was not the end. This was only the beginning."
Always lots of heinies at the zoo, written by Ayun Halliday, illustrations by Dan Santat
The author of the zine East Village Inky has written a picture book. That's it, my world just exploded.
I read Ayun Halliday's account of new motherhood, The Big Rumpus
, when my older son was just a few months old. In that book, Ayun carted her daughter India around the East Village in a sling, wondering if her Dead Kennedys t-shirts were ever going to shrink back to normal after having worn them over her pregnant belly. Or something like that. As Ayun listlessly swiped at crusty wads of mushy peas on the kitchen floor and speculated over random puddles (apple juice? or pee?), I laughed the laugh of the unbelievably sleep-deprived. Good times.
Good times at the zoo, too, I'm happy to report. "No one tries to hide his heinie at the zoo." Like Chicken Cheeks
(reviewed earlier), we get lots of fun heinie synonymy: tushy, glutes, can, and even caboose. Unlike Chicken Cheeks (reviewed earlier), we have an elephant with "junk in her supplemental trunk" - kind of steep slang for the K-3 set, and I think they're going to love it.
The vaguely Adam Rex-y, J.Otto Seibold-y illustrations are fine, not super-noteworthy (although, gotta say, GOOD MONKEYS), but composed very well. I love the portraits of Ayun and her husband Greg on the dedication page.
By the way, Ayun, if you're reading this: my colleague Dances with Chickens thinks this book would make a terrific little song. Maybe Greg
can run something up.
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