Month: June 2011

Book Review: Blackout by John Rocco

| Tasha

blackout

Blackout by John Rocco

It was a normal summer night in the city.  That meant it was hot and noisy.  In their apartment, the family was busy.  Her older sister was on the phone.  Her dad was cooking.  Her mother was using the computer.  Everyone was much too busy to play a board game with her.  So she started playing a video game on her own.  Until the lights went out all over the city.  At first, the family huddled in the dark near their candles.  But then as it got hotter and hotter inside, they headed to the roof where they found a party going on.  They headed out to the street where there were more people enjoying the blackout.  The family wasn’t busy anymore.  But what would happen when the lights came back on?

Rocco tells this story in a nearly wordless format, allowing the illustrations to carry the story itself.  The illustrations are framed like a graphic novel, giving the entire book a hip feel.  Rocco’s illustrations have a wonderful play of light and dark, celebrating the stars, candlelight, the cool glow of a screen, and the warm yellow of flashlight beams.

This is a book about slowing down, enjoying the time together, and yet the book never becomes didactic or preachy.

Share this with a group of children, but prepare to have some time with the lights off to allow them to have their own adventures in the dark.  Just a few candles around the room, and it’s magical.  Appropriate for ages 4-7.

Reviewed from library copy.

Check out the trailer!

 

Book Review: Animals Home Alone by Loes Riphagen

| Tasha

animalshomealone

Animals Home Alone by Loes Riphagen

When the humans leave the house, the animals are left all alone and do some wild and silly things.  In this wordless book by a Dutch illustrator, there are fifteen animals to try and keep track of.  From one page to the next, they escape their confines, eat things, watch TV, and even fall in love and have babies.  The front endpages have the animals’ names while the rear ones have questions about what happened in the story.  It’s a fun book that requires eagle eyes to spot everything.  It’s not a book you can read entirely in the first sitting.

Riphagen’s illustrations have a great quirky quality to them that adds to the humor and silly feel of the book.  With the crowded page, bright colors and engaging animals, this book has so much to look at and see.  Then add the stories that each of the animal characters is engaged in and you will find yourself flipping back and forth pages to figure out how the jam was spilled, why the goldfish is now yellow, and what happened in the bathroom!

A visual game that has some very funny moments built into the various storylines, this book will be a hit with children who enjoy Where’s Waldo and I Spy books.  Appropriate for ages 6-9.

Reviewed from copy received from Seven Footer Press.

Also reviewed by Bookie Woogie.

New British Children’s Laureate Announced

| Tasha

 

Julia Donaldson, author of The Gruffalo, has been appointed as the new children’s laureate, following the term of Anthony Browne.  Donaldson is the first Scottish-based laureate.  She has been a children’s book author for over 20 years and is best known for her picture books. 

Librarians will be happy to hear of her plans for her tenure:

"Maybe I’ll be able to talk to the minister of culture and persuade the government to have some kind of overall plan because at the moment I feel all the library cuts and closures are very piecemeal, so I’ll do what I can," she added.

Book Review: Seasons by Anne Crausaz

| Tasha

seasons

Seasons by Anne Crausaz

Explore and celebrate the seasons in this lovely picture book.  A little girl moves through the seasons, seeing each one through the changes in nature that occur.  She experiences them with all of her senses:  seeing the green of spring, smelling the tomatoes, basil, verbena and mint in the garden in summer, tasting the blackberries in fall, and feeling the cold of snow in winter.  This is a book that reminds all of us to treasure the time we currently in, to slow down and notice the seasons, to savor the tastes and smells around us.

Crausaz’s text is spare and poetic, allowing readers to experience the moments in the book without any excess words.  A few sentences per page at most, the book takes readers through a sensory journey where they too can remember the colors, smells, tastes, sounds and feels of each season. 

Her art is equally simple.  Using only a few lines to denote facial features, the illustrations are done in bright colors that play well against each other.  The horizon is done in colored bands, the sky and clouds in other colors, trees and leaves play against that background.  It is a stylized and very successful look for a picture book.

While the seasonal picture book shelf can get crowded, this fresh, poetic book should find a place there.  Appropriate for ages 3-5.

Reviewed from copy received from Kane Miller EDC Publishing.

Also reviewed by:

Book Review: Red Glove by Holly Black

| Tasha

redglove

Red Glove by Holly Black

This second book in The Curse Workers series continues the story of Cassel Sharpe.  Cassel was born into a family of curse working con artists and mobsters.  Cassel had always thought he was the only of his brothers without any curse working talent, but as he discovered in the first novel in the series, his memories were being manipulated by his brother, Barron, so that he forgot his unusual power and that he killed with it.  Now Cassel knows that he is one of the most powerful curse workers in the world.  When Cassel’s oldest brother, Philip, is murdered, the feds come to Cassel for some answers, but the problem is that Cassel cannot remember the truth about what happened with his brothers.  Now he is under pressure to provide some information to the feds.  At the same time, he is going to high school and trying not to take advantage of the fact that the girl he loves has been cursed to love him.  Plus there is at least one mob family eager to have Cassel start working for them.  The only way to proceed is to weigh the pros and CONS.

This is a worthy second book in the series with Cassel continuing his struggle with his mobster family, his own role in their business, and his personal history.  Cassel is a very intriguing protagonist with his tough exterior but loyalty and strong sense of right and wrong, though it may not be the same right and wrong as the reader’s.  His view of the world is evolving yet very consistent and strong, which is a large part of why this book and series work so well. 

Along with the strong characterization, the book has plenty of action, cons, humor, and puzzles to figure out.  Nothing is ever as it appears at first in this book filled with con artists.  The big question here is who killed Cassel’s brother, but that pales compared to the puzzle of his own life and family.  There is a great richness to the world that Black has created, enough richness to leave on wondering what is coming next at almost every point in the book.

Beautifully crafted, well written, with compelling, funny characters, this book is a must-read for fans of the series and a must-have for any library serving teens.  Appropriate for ages 14+.

Reviewed from copy received from Margaret K. McElderry Books.

Also reviewed by:

2011 Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize Longlist

| Tasha

The longlist of the 2011 Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize has been announced.  The Guardian site has summaries for each book.  Here are the books in the running:

  

Momentum by Saci Lloyd

Moon Pie by Simon Mason

Mr. Gum and the Secret Hideout by Andy Stanton, illustrated by David Tazzyman

  

My Name is Mina by David Almond

My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece by Annabel Pitcher

Return to Ribblestrop by Andy Mulligan

 

Small Change for Stuart by Lissa Evans

Twilight Robbery by Frances Hardinge (titled Fly Trap in the US)

Book Review: Meet the Dogs of Bedlam Farm by Jon Katz

| Tasha

meetbedlamfarm

Meet the Dogs of Bedlam Farm by Jon Katz

This is the very engaging story of the four dogs who live with the author at Bedlam Farm.  Each of the dogs has a particular job that they do and do well.  All except for Lenore, she doesn’t have a clear job to do.  Rose, a border collie, helps out with farm chores like herding sheep.  Izzy is also a border collie, and his job is to visit people who are sick as a therapy dog.  Frieda, part rottweiler and par German shepherd, guards the farm, even chasing the farm cats up trees.  But what does Lenore do?  Lenore reminds Rose that it is OK to play.  She showed Izzy how to live in a house and eat from a bowl.  She shows Frieda how to be friendlier.  She has the most important job of all, creating a family from the individual dogs.

Katz has captured the personality of each of his dogs in both his writing and his photographs.  He tells the story of each of the dogs, how they came to live at the farm, and portrays the jobs that each of them have.  The book is engagingly written with a repeating question of “But what is Lenore’s job” at the end of each section on another dog.  The details of their lives are funny, touching and underline the connection of this family of canines.

An ideal addition to any public library, this book will fly off the shelves and into the hands of dog lovers.  Happily, it is also a nonfiction book that will work when shared aloud, so consider it for your next dog-themed story time.  Appropriate for ages 4-7.

Reviewed from copy received from Henry Holt & Company.

Also reviewed by BookDragon.

Check out the book trailer too:

Book Review: Imaginary Girls by Nova Ren Suma

| Tasha

imaginarygirls

Imaginary Girls by Nova Ren Suma

Released June 14, 2011.

Chloe knows that she can depend on her older sister Ruby.  Ruby is a girl who has always seemed to be more alive, more beautiful and more intense than anyone else.  She has series of boyfriends, some of whom never go away, lingering for more attention from Ruby.  Chloe knows that Ruby would do anything for her and that she will always live with Ruby.  But that all changes one night at the reservoir when Ruby asks Chloe to swim across the water and return with a trophy from a long-sunken town below the surface.  Chloe trusts Ruby implicitly, knowing the Ruby would never let anything happen to her.  So she starts across, but she doesn’t find the other side of the reservoir, instead she discovers the body of a dead girl floating in a boat.  Now Chloe is sent away to live with her father.  But Ruby will not allow them to be separated from one another and will do anything to get her sister back.  Anything.

This is horror fiction that is literary at the same time.  It takes its time slowly becoming more and more eerie and strange as the reader continues.   The journey here is a large part of the book, as layers are peeled away, readers begin to understand more and more about the sisters, about Ruby, and about the dead girl, London.  It is a book that gives readers the space to think, to untangle the knot, to solve the puzzle.  It is a joy to read.

The prose is beautiful even at its more horrific and strange.  In the early pages there is this section from page 34 that epitomizes the beauty of the language:

It felt like we could have made it to the station in seconds, flown there and back with a canister of gasoline, our eyelashes glistening with frost, our bones weightless from cold.

And you can see within that passage that even the most mundane, running out of gas, can be made sinister yet mesmerizing.

Chloe is a character who struggles with living in her sister’s shadow even as she basks in the attention that it brings her from others and from Ruby.  Their relationship is strange, but Chloe continues to see it as normal.  Readers must wrest their thoughts free from Chloe’s to begin to understand what is happening.  The world the two sisters inhabit is beautiful, troubling and irresistible.

The design of the book is very effective.  From the cover that is beautiful but haunting to the way the chapter titles are done.  Each chapter title is pulled from the first few words of the chapter, giving the book an echo and each title even more strange weight.

Highly recommended, this is a phenomenal horror novel filled with gorgeous writing and a strong paranormal feel.  Ideal for teens who think they have read it all.  This is a book full of surprises and twists that will have them regretting reading it after dark.  Appropriate for ages 14-17.

Reviewed from ARC received from Penguin Young Readers Group.

Also reviewed by:

And you can check out the book trailer:

Movie News

| Tasha

A couple of news items about movies based on teen novels:

 

Jamie Campbell Bower is in talks for the lead of Jace in The Mortal Instruments movies.  Lily Collins has already been signed to play Clary Fray. 

You can also read about Cassandra Clare’s response to his audition tape.

According to Deadline, Mary Harron has been selected to direct Wicked Lovely.  The script was written by Caroline Thompson and will be produced by Vince Vaughn, Victoria Vaughn and Peter Billingsley.  Harron has most recently director The Moth Diaries.