Gifts for girls

Girls can be hard to buy for. They're picky! We're picky - us girls. Here are some things to think about when you're buying for girls.




Is she an animal lover?
Korgi by Christian Slade. For anyone age maybe 5 or 6 and up, up, up. Wordless, but not toothless. Unbelievably adorable little corgi dog and his girl (who has wings but I wouldn't call her a fairy) get into trouble with monsters and squidlike aliens and scrap their way out. Black and white, but that doesn't seem to be a problem with this title. And Korgi Book 2 is even better than the first.




Does she like action?
Rapunzel's Revenge by three Hales. Mmm, call this 10 and up. There are bullets and a hint of romance. Also wit. And BEAUTIFUL, detailed color art. I think this is one of the best graphic novels of the year.

The Lost Island of Tamarindby Nadia Aguilar. Age 10 and up. Reviewed earlier.




Any interest in cooking?
The Spatulatta Cookbook. Age 7 and up, but you might be able to push it younger if there is an interested grownup in the house. This is last year's excellent cookbook for kids, but nothing this year tops it. It's two sisters doing the cooking, and they're in most of the pictures, fooling around, demonstrating, having a good time. It's spiral bound, which is so great for cookbooks. And the pictures make the food look appetizing, not weird. The best kid cookbook I've seen this year is Southern Living Kids Cookbook, which kind of surprised me.




Into mysteries?
Ottoline and the Yellow Cat by Chris Riddell. Age 7 and up. Heavily illustrated, this is kind of a bridge book between First Chapter type books and regular chapter books. A lot of the clues are in the crinkly, detailed pictures, which is super fun.

The Far-Flung Adventures series by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell. Age 9 and up. Not as heavily illustrated, super sense of humor. I know an entire class of seven year olds who pushed their reading ability so that they could read one of these books together, and they all loved it.

The 39 Clues. Age 9 and up. Ok ok it's gimmicky as all get-out, with the cards, and the online thing, and the actual prizes, but kids are lapping it up and the authors that are participating are first-rate. Plus the characters are interesting and strongly-written, and the plot is respectably labyrinthine.




Is she curious about the world?
What the World Eats. From the team that brought us Material World: A Global Family Portrait back in 1995 - you know, the book that showed families all over the world in their houses, and with all their stuff brought outside for a picture? Holy crap, we should do that with our house, and see what we can leave out on the curb. But anyway. The new book has the same lush, colorful, giant pictures, the same potent juxtapositions, and results in the same sense of insight about wealth, and health, and opportunity.




And once those insights have been attained, there's Give a Goat, a picture book for kids maybe first grade and up that's all about Heifer International. The kid in the book organizes his class to raise money so that they can purchase a goat via Heifer. Touches on teamwork, responsibility, compassion, arithmetic, and economics. A terrific accompanying gift if you yourself give flocks of chicks for the holidays.

Oh, you've got a teen girl to buy for?
Sorry, you're screwed. Can't make a teen happy. Amazon gift card, baby. That way, if she spends it on The Twilight Saga: Slipcased, you don't have to know about it.

Ahem. Did you really think I was going to leave you in the lurch like that? Naw... here are just a couple ideas for teenage girls.

Crafty crafter?


Get her to make me one of those mohawk hats, will ya?


Not so adeptly crafty, and not as much of an anarchist?


Cute but not kawaii.


Writer?


Ignore the stupid title, this one is an excellent how-to for self-expression, covering technical aspects as well as inspiration.


Artist?


Buy her art supplies, but throw in this one for inspiration.


I'd be tempted to buy actress/mathematician Danica McKellar's new book, Kiss My Math: Showing Pre-Algebra Who's Boss, for a middle school or teen girl, but I'd be afraid it'd look like I was being all preachy. If you can get away with it, you should. The book is legitimately funny and helpful and hard to put down! Who'd'a guessed?

And if she sometimes feels the pressure:


It's wonderful. It's a year in the life of several high school students in Chicago - it's like a reality show with a writer.

Stay tuned for the boy books.
Your pal,
your neighborhood librarian

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.

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.

Tuff Fluff: The case of Duckie's missing brain by Scott Nash - review

Tuff Fluff: The case of Duckie's missing brain by Scott Nash

Thank goodness for Scott Nash. With this book, the first of a series, the illustrator of the Flat Stanley books shows that he, like his late partner in crime, out there thinking of the first graders. Not everybody is. I mean, I love Elephant and Piggie very much, but I bet that when Mo Willems's daughter grows out of Beginning Readers he'll move on to kids' graphic novels (please? that would be really great!). In fact, I wonder if, after my kids grow out of Beginning Readers, if I'm going to continue trolling those aisles for something, anything fun and readable and cool-looking.

Well, hopefully, Scott Nash will always be there for the little guys.

My recent graduate of first grade snatched up Tuff Fluff as soon as he saw it, plopped right down on the floor, and started reading it to his younger brother. That's the highest endorsement I know.

Kingdom Keepers by Ridley Scott - review

Kingdom Keepers by Ridley Scott.
There are a few things my husband and I believe we will never do. We will never live outside of the city limits. We will never go on a cruise. We will never go to a Disney park.

I don't feel like I'm missing anything, really, by hewing to these few resolutions. They're not iron-clad, anyway - I have an idea that in twenty years, that cruise is going to look a lot more attractive. And in lieu of that third item, I sometimes read about Disney World. I love hearing about the tunnels, and the staff in-jokes. Cory Doctorow is pretty much my Disney lens. That guy is obsessed. His Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is a book I recommend to young adult and adult readers all the time.

Kingdom Keepers provides another neato, after-the-park-is-closed view of Disney World, and that is FUN. Here's the premise: Finn, our main character, along with his 4 middle-school colleagues, is tasked with solving a riddle and obtaining a magic talisman in order to thwart the evil forces threatening to take over the Magic Kingdom and beyond.

There is an inscrutable old man to serve as guide. There is an inscrutable and heart-stoppingly beautiful young woman (two, actually) to cause Finn to question motives and loyalties. There are thrilling chases through darkened rides. BUT. Kingdom Keepers suffers from a paradigm conflict. On the one hand, there are those meddling kids, using logic and detective work to solve the mysteries, figure out who the bad guys are, and plan their moves... but on the other hand, there's one heck of a lot of magic going on: Finn, who is part hologram, can from time to time walk through walls and stuff; and the villain (Maleficent, the evil witch from I think Sleeping Beauty) can throw fireballs, fly, and crash network servers.

In general, when you pit the human detective against the supernatural villain, it becomes really difficult to make the detective's methods seem worthwhile. Unless you set up very clear (and tedious) rules, magic is enough of a deus ex machina that it can knock your detective's deductions into a cocked hat. It's why Batman rarely comes up against bad guys with supernatural powers – he battles human criminals who make weird wardrobe decisions, not elemental forces gone berserk. Like fights like.

I could come up with other examples here – John Constantine comes to mind – but I just read WIRED magazine today and I keep thinking of the geek who got an entire convention full of gaming nerds to put on an impromptu re-enactment of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And I don't want to be that guy.

Further, Kingdom Keepers suffers from open-end-itis. When you've finished the book, a number of questions are left hanging - Who was she? How come that worked? That kind of sequel-bait to me is just cheating.

In conclusion. Kingdom Keepers. Let me put it this way: it's just exactly like Scooby-Doo. Five kids, an empty amusement park, costumed villains trying to take over – except there's no use ripping the mask off that pirate – he's an Audio-Animatronic.

Bonus for you: animated LEGO Monty Python.

Skulduggery Pleasant by Derek Landy, read by Rupert Degas - review

Gosh, it seems like I've just hated everything I've read lately, doesn't it? Peter and the Starcatchers got the big raspberry, I got all kvetchy about Peak, and The Name of this Book is Secret just didn't ring any bells for me. I haven't even put up my review of The Kingdom Keepers by Ridley Pearson, and just as a preview? it's not 100% positive either.

All of which is kind of funny, because the two books I've got going right now? Sweet! I'm reading Un Lun Dun by China Mieville, and we've been listening to Skulduggery Pleasant in the car.

Skulduggery Pleasant is Derek Landy's first book for children, and the second is already in the can, which is a Very Good Thing. His characters are broadly drawn, meaty, yet precise - like Chinese calligraphy done with a big fat brush dripping with ink. The dialogue is snappy, with some fun deconstructionist bits; and the plot is just twisty enough: not even the very close listener Mr. Four could find any holes.

But the real revelation here is Skulduggery Pleasant himself, a several-hundred-year-old living skeleton working as a freelance detective. He's urbane. He's competent. He's noble. He knows it. And his wit is very, very, very dry. He puts me in mind of James Bond, if Clive Owen had gotten the job. Or Indiana Jones, perhaps as played by Hugh Grant.

It's fairly unusual in contemporary children's literature to find a leading man per se: that is, an adult male that carries the book. Adult males are villains (say, Voldemort), or guides (Dumbledore), or surrogate fathers who aren't around much either (Sirius Black), but it's usually the eleven-year-old orphan who is the center of attention. Skulduggery Pleasant is written from the point of view of its main female character, an eleven-year-old girl named Stephanie Edgely, but it's Skul who drives the action. He's more than a mere guide for Stephanie. It's interesting, and I think it's because Derek Landy's background is in screenwriting rather than children's literature. My guess is that nobody told him.

Which is not to say that Stephanie falls by the wayside. More than your usual preternaturally resourceful girl protagonist, she is written from the inside out, and feels very real, though a bit devoid of background. Even her parents, bit players for sure, are people who you feel you kind of know.

A word about the audio edition - GET THE AUDIO EDITION. Like the Lemony Snicket books read by Tim Curry, it has original music: deep, jazzy bass, thumps of percussion, fingersnaps and distant screams; and, also like those books, it is read by a MASTER of vocal characterization.

Rupert Degas is apparently a voice superstar in the UK, with everything from Bob the Builder to Haruki Murakami on his resume, but this is the first time I've heard him. He reads an Irish tween girl as convincingly as an adult woman from London, and he has a vast repertoire of deep, hoarse, whispery, creaky, etc. that he gleefully applies to everyone else in the book. The cackling, gibbering, transforming Troll under Westminster Bridge should win this guy an Audie all by itself. We've played that chapter "about a hundred and sixty-seven times, and it KEEPS GETTING FUNNIER EVERY SINGLE TIME"!

When we finished the audio book this afternoon, my two boys and I were left craving more Skulduggery, and there it was! a bonus track featuring an interview with the man himself: relaxed, egotistical, coy, and dead-on funny. Can't wait for the sequel.

The Name of this Book is Secret by Pseudonymous Bosch - review

The Name of this Book is Secret by Pseudonymous Bosch
Two kids, not popular at school, become unlikely allies in their quest to solve a mystery, foil creepy villains, face peril, etc etc yes we know.

More than anything else, this book reminded me of Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett. The main characters are more prickly than appealing at first, and maintain their less-pleasant quirks throughout the book, which is nice to see, for a change. Often, authors will drop that stuff once they've established the character as an “individual” and the plot takes off. There are lots of riddles and lots of abstruse knowledge, in this case about people with sensory differences, especially synesthesia. A pretty unusual topic to find in a kids' book, and hey! I'm all for interesting information tidbits tucked into the plot.

My kids thought it was just as funny as could be, and the plot was straightforward enough for them to follow. I wouldn't say that it was one for my all-time favorite list, but eh, it'll appeal to the funny mystery lovers.

Victory, by Susan Cooper - review

Victory by Susan Cooper. When I was a kid, I read Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising series at least once a year starting in 5th grade. There's a movie of the first book out, a movie that apparently poops all over the plot and characters, which is a darn shame, because they're wonderful. My imagination developed like a print in a darkroom because of those books.

Now, I clearly remember that it was 5th grade when I first read The Dark is Rising, because I did a book report on it for Mrs. Milloff's class. Mrs. Milloff was really large and really really short, and kind of grey and hairy to boot, plus she had a fierce New York accent. She would have easily fit in at Hogwarts. Maybe that's where she's teaching now. I liked her, and oh sure, she was unforgettable.

So it was with some surprise that I spotted Victory by Susan Cooper on the New Books shelf. I mean, 5th grade was 30 years ago (I am shocked to realize). It's the same Susan Cooper, I checked. But this book is not about semi-mystical peril in the Welsh countryside, it's about Admiral Nelson. Ugh you say. Certainly Ugh I said. Naval history, god, I think only my father reads it, and I'm pretty sure he reads it so that he'll have at least one subject that he is sure to know more about than anyone within earshot.

But I read it out of loyalty to Susan Cooper, and it turned out to be a real page-turner. It's told by alternating narrators: Sam, a young crewmember on board Victory, Admiral Nelson's ship; and Molly, a lonely 21st century girl recently transplanted to Connecticut from her home in England. The descriptions are vivid and believable and the action is quick and exciting. As with many novels based on actual events, the book has to go to some manufactured lengths to inject suspense towards the end, but that is a very minor issue that most kid readers will not resent. And that cover, well, it's handsome, but a bit cryptic for my younger patrons.

Victory takes pride of place on my list of historical fiction to recommend to young readers who either like historical fiction or are required to read some for school. Thumbs up.

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsberg - review

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler is my favorite book of all time. In it, two kids, Jamie and Claudia, decide to run away from home. Since they're smart and practical (not to mention snobbish and greedy) and don't want to end up on a curb in Times Square, they plan to run away to a place that's indoors and has some of the comforts of home. They pick the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Isn't that great? That's a thought process that basically makes sense. And you can tell right off that this is not going to be your hijinky plot-driven pratfall novel - they don't run away to the circus, they run away to an art museum. E. L. Konigsberg writes great books, with sharp characters, but this is her genius work. An unpleasant, geeky girl with a violin case and an annoying little brother goes into an art museum - and that's the premise for a successful, beloved kids book? Dag.

What keeps this book going, and what fascinated me as a kid, is the view of the off-hours museum through Claudia's eyes. Claudia is a pretty dissatisfied kid, and in the peace and beauty and mystery of the museum, she has a chance to get out of her crabby self and become absorbed in the beautiful, weird, storied objects that surround her. She gets to touch and examine precious things that are usually off-limits, and in the process, one object stops her in her tracks - a small sculpture of an angel.

When it was my turn, my object was Cupid and Psyche by Jacques Louis David.

I came around a corner in the Cleveland Museum of Art, looking for something to write a paper on for ARTH103, and this baby popped me right in the eye. It's enormous, for one thing, and very detailed, almost realistic. Cupid is climbing out of bed, smirking - yeah, he tapped that - and now he's trying to get out of there without waking her. I believe I met this painting before I met my husband, but this is kind of what my husband looked like when he was 19, when we met (minus the smirk, he would insist I point out).

Claudia wants to learn everything there is to know about "her" angel, and in the process discovers something that only the titular Mrs. Frankweiler knows (looking back, Mrs. Frankweiler had to be a registrar - registrars are consistently the coolest, geekiest people in all art museums I've come across). Though the angel isn't really Claudia's, this secret knowledge is. The process of discovery, the possession of knowledge, and her intimacy with the object change her, showing her what is best and noblest in her nature.

When I had my Art History classes in the basement of the Cleveland Museum, I would leave through a set of very high, very heavy double doors. I'd run down the wide marble steps that led to the Lagoon. I was usually the only person there, and at those moments, I always felt like Claudia - I felt like I lived in that museum, and that all the treasures inside of it were mine. Eventually, I spent so much time with those objects that, like Claudia, I did own them in a way. I sat in front of paintings and tapestries and Japanese woodcuts for hours, desperately hoping to find enough to say about each object to fill a ten-page paper.

I am not a spiritual person. Maybe I'm the antithesis of spiritual - I'm a physical person. I believe in the transformative power of knowledge, and I believe that firsthand observation is the best way to gain that knowledge.

When you can take time to absorb the textures and smells of an object, you can absorb its language, feel the actions that made it, and figure out which questions to ask. You can meet its maker.

Me, I know the political climate that Jacques Louis David painted in - I know why there are laurel leaves on Psyche's bed. I know what the missing letters in the Byzantine tapestry were, and I know what happened when the weaver was running out of room on the right side.

Don't get me wrong - it's not the trivia itself that I groove on. What I like is the way you can decode details of the artist's world backwards from the details of the work.

When I finally had a chance to decide what to do with my life, I chose to live in museums, like Claudia. That book showed me a place filled with intrigue and stories, a place where you could figure out things that nobody else knew.

I have spent a lot of time in Claudia's museum, both as a student and working there, and she was right -- knowing that place feels like having a big cool famous friend. It was a privilege every single time I went into the workrooms of any museum I worked in, from Birmingham to Brooklyn to Baltimore.

Maybe if I'd read a different book, a good book about a scientist kid, for example, I might have been a botanist (except I still would have flunked Calculus). But I read From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, and it changed my life.