Book Reviews

The Halloween Kid

| Tasha

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The Halloween Kid by Rhode Montijo

In a unique mix of wild west action and Halloween treats, this book tells the tall tale of the Halloween Kid.  The Halloween Kid keeps Halloween safe for all children going trick-or-treating.  Riding his trusty steed, he is able to truss up toilet paper mummies, wrestle vampires, tickle ghosts into submission.  He was so good at it that Halloween was quiet for some time.  But then the Goodie Goblins came to town and folks started talking about canceling Halloween entirely.  The Halloween Kid hadn’t had to fight off baddies for a long time, so he was rusty.  Unfortunately, that made him the target of an ambush.  Now who can save The Halloween Kid?

Montijo has written a book in a slow drawl that is filled with plenty of action and lots of Halloween creatures.  While the Halloween Kid is the powerful hero of the story, so are the children in the book.  This is a book all about kid power and courage.  The illustrations are done in a limited autumnal palette of oranges, yellows and black.  They have a real cartoon appeal to them.  Interestingly, they have been marked up a little as if printed on newsprint that has transferred to other pages.  It makes for a book that feels timeless and well loved. 

A Halloween story perfect for preschool audiences who would like a few monsters but almost no scares.  Appropriate for ages 4-6.

Reviewed from copy received from Simon & Schuster.

Mary’s Penny: A Feminist Folk Tale

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Mary’s Penny by Tanya Landman, illustrated by Richard Holland

A feminist retelling of a classic folk tale, this book combines a stylish modern feel with the classic feel and tone of a folk tale.  A farmer needs to decide which of his children he will leave his farm to.  Will it be the brawny Franz or the beefy Hans?  He doesn’t even consider his daughter Mary because she is a girl, though Mary does have something her brothers lack: brains.  The farmer gives each of his sons a single penny.  Their challenge is to purchase something with their one penny that will fill the entire house.  Franz heads to the market and purchases lots and lots of straw, but he cannot manage to fill the entire house.  Hans heads to the market and purchases lots and lots of feathers.  Though he fills the house further than his brother, he too fails.  Now the farmer is in despair until Mary asks to try.  And you will just have to read the book to find out how Mary spends her penny and fills the entire house.

Landman’s text here sets just the right tone.  She plays with the repetition and rhythm of the traditional folk tale, yet injects a modern sensibility about the role of women in society.  Thanks to the traditional features of the book, it is a pleasure to read aloud.  Holland too plays with the traditional and modern.  In his case, he uses sleek modern lines and modern illustration techniques yet still manages to have something vintage in them.  The illustrations have lots of white space and textures and patterns that make them very interesting and unique.  They also have a flatness that hearkens back to traditional folk art. 

A skillful combining of the traditional and the modern, this book should not languish on your folk tale shelves.  Get it into the hands of parents and teachers.  It would also make a great choice when librarians visit elementary classrooms, because its modern edge will draw slightly older children into the story.  Appropriate for ages 4-8.

Reviewed from library copy.

Bink & Gollie: By Golly What a Charmer!

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Bink & Gollie by Kate DiCamillo an Alison McGhee, illustrated by Tony Fucile

Bink and Gollie are two girls who are friends but could not be more different.  They live together yet apart, Bink in a cottage below the tree where Gollie’s ultra-modern tree house perches.  The two of them use their roller skates to get around town, but beyond that they agree on very little.  Everything from striped colorful socks to goldfish friends to imaginary mountain treks come between them.  In the end though, their friendship remains strong, bolstered by pancakes shared together.  The book is broken into three chapters each a vignette that is funny, charming and delightful. The book is written for beginning readers who will discover two amazing girls that they will long to share a stack of pancakes with too.

The authors have created two characters who are very different yet read as real people with their own quirks and interests.  Bink is younger, wilder and delightfully mussed.  Gollie is steady, level headed and yet has her own moments of imagination.  The authors did not feel constrained by the vocabulary of most beginning readers, instead they introduce young readers to longer words, taking time to put them in context and even define them.  This is a book that will have new readers stretching at just the right pace.

Fucile’s illustrations help bring the differences and friendship of the girls to life.  From the firecracker hair of Bink to the lean lines of Golllie.  The sleek nature of Gollie’s tree house to Bink’s small homey cottage.  Each detail is perfect to underline their differences and their connection to one another.

I look forward to seeing the next Bink & Gollie book.  I can’t wait to see where this friendship heads next.  Appropriate for ages 6-8.

Reviewed from library copy.

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Fatty Legs

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Fatty Legs: a True Story by Christy Jordan-Fenton & Margaret Pokiak-Fenton, illustrations by Liz Amini-Holmes

This is the story of an Inuit girl and her experiences in a residential school.  Margaret Pokiak decides at age 8 that she must learn to read.  And the only way that she will be able to learn to read is to attend the residential school that is many miles away from her home village in the arctic.  Her father and older sister, who have both attended the school, try to convince her to stay at home and learn the native way instead, but she insists.  At the school, she encounters the Raven, a nun who immediately takes a dislike to Margaret and her strong will and courage.  She begins to intimidate Margaret, putting her in red stockings unlike the rest of the girls and meting out harsher punishments to her.  But through it all, Margaret remains strong.  A sympathetic nun sticks up for her and eventually Margaret finds her way back to her family.

The book softens the story to a level that children will be able to handle, focusing more on the emotional and mental hardship than physical abuse.  The humiliation of Margaret by the Raven will resonate with children as will the harsh conditions and poor food.  Married to these in the book is the loss of culture and language, which is as horrible as the treatment. 

Margaret is an amazing girl with her self-possession, her courage and her faithfulness to herself and her culture.  She is brave beyond belief as she enters a foreign culture and comes away having shown them what being human is all about.  The book is simply written, allowing the story to carry through.  The illustrations are strong, depicting the harsher times at the school.  Historical photographs are worked into the book, tying it firmly to history and the true story it is based on.

This book is definitely worth having in a public library.  It offers a clear view of residential schools nicely paired with a young girl’s naive desire for education.  Large font, plenty of interspersed images, and a short length will have reluctant readers interested as well.  Appropriate for ages 8-11.

Reviewed from copy received from Annick Press.

The Winds of Heaven

| Tasha

The Winds of Heaven by Judith Clarke

An amazing book that takes a deep look at love, depression, sisterhood, and life.  Clementine and Fan were opposites in many ways, but that just drew them closer.  They were more sisters than cousins, pulled together over the summer they spent at Fan’s house in Lake Conapaira.  Clementine was dull and regular next to the wild and amazing Fan.  But Fan’s life was not good, living alone with her abusive mother now that both her father and older sister had left.  Fan longed to head to the blue hills that she could see from her room, knew that there was something special out there waiting for her.  As time went on, both young women faced decisions that would change their lives, fears that would overwhelm them, and responsibilities that weighed upon them.  This is a book about the two very different friends, who both relied on each other despite their distance from  one another and the small choices that forced them even further apart.

Clarke’s writing is incandescent in this novel.  My book bristles with bookmarks, marking passages where the writing is astounding and staggeringly lovely.  Here is one of my favorites from early in the book where Clementine is describing how different Lake Conapaira is from her home:

You could even smell the difference: a mixture of sun and dust, wild honey and the smoky tang from the old kerosene fridge on the back veranda.  And you could smell feelings, too – Clementine was sure of it: you could smell anger and hatred and disappointment and jagged little fears.  The anger smelled like iron and the disappointment smelled like mud.

Clarke moves from dense writing like this that truly brings a reader into the scene and makes it real to lighter moments, dwelling on certain thoughts for awhile.  And beautifully, those are the moments that the reader carries with them, importantly through the book, the moments that must be remembered at the end.

This is an Australian novel that is steeped in Australia.  Readers will feel the red dirt in the pages, thanks to the vivid descriptions that Clarke offers us.  The sense of place is not only strong, it is inherent to the story.  Clarke set this book in modern time but the bulk of the story takes place in the 1950s and 1960s as Clementine and Fan grow up.  The time is important here too, reflected in the story.

The two characters, Fan and Clementine, are drawn with great care.  Readers learn about how they think, how they approach the world, and the way the world has shaped them in turn.  Though both girls are very different, they struggle with similar things.  They both have moments of weakness and shame, paired with moments of strength and empowerment.  They both see the other person as the strong one, the intelligent one, the beauty.  It is what brings them together and also what drives them apart.

This is a book about our journey through life and the choices we make.  It is a powerful book, one where even though the ending does not surprise is shockingly brutal at times.  Yet with the brutality comes a beauty as well.  Highly recommended, this is a book appropriate for good readers who will enjoy the prose.  Appropriate for ages 15-17.  Make sure you have some tissues around when reading the end.

Reviewed from copy received from Henry Holt.

Read to Tiger

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Read to Tiger by S. J. Fore, illustrated by R. W. Alley

Turn on the light, curl up on the couch, open your book, you are ready to read.  But what’s that noise?!  A tiger is behind the couch chomping on gum!  This little boy has one naughty tiger to deal with just as he is settling in for a great read.  After the tiger stops chewing him gum loudly, the tiger growls pretending to be a bear.  Then the tiger starts practicing his karate, with great yells and high kicks.  The tiger then choo-choos past on a train.  And finally picks up the couch itself to look for his whistle.  Finally, the little boy has had enough but just then, the tiger gets a glimpse of the book the boy has been trying to read and its picture of a tiger.  Which may finally be what it takes to keep tiger quiet: a great story shared with a friend.

The humor of this book is evident from the very first encounter with the tiger.  Wonderfully, the zaniness increases as the story goes on, and children are definitely going to be laughing out loud by the time Karate Tiger leaps onto the page.  Fore has tapped into the glee that readers feel when they see the humor in a situation before the narrator in the book does.  They will delight in it.  Fore also has a wonderful pacing to the book with the tiger doing something disruptive, the boy correcting him, and then settling again to read his book, only to have the tiger do something even more outrageous.

Alley’s illustrations add to the action and wild abandon of the book.  Alley’s use of subtle colors next to bright allows readers to feel the snuggly reading time and then to be jolted in turn by tiger and his red and yellow coat in full action.  So much of the humor is visual here, and very successfully so.

If you are looking for a book about the pleasures of reading that is funny and filled with plenty of action, this is it.  Even better, it is the sort of book that itself proves exactly why reading is fun.  Appropriate for ages 4-6.

Reviewed from copy received from Viking.

Broom, Zoom!

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Broom, Zoom! by Caron Lee Cohen, illustrated by Sergio Ruzzier

What is to be done when Little Witch and Little Monster both need to use one broom at the same time?  Little Witch notices the full moon and heads inside for the broom.  Little Monster needs to use it right then.  Little Witch still wants the broom, but when Little Monster shows her the mess, she lets him use it first.  She even helps him clean things up.  Now it’s Little Witch’s turn to use the broom to fly in the sky.  She invites Little Monster to fly with her, though he’s not really sure he wants to fly at all.

Told in very brief text that is entirely conversation, this book is a winner for young children. Spare and minimal, the text still manages to tell a clear story about sharing and taking turns.  Yet it never becomes didactic at all.  Ruzzier’s illustrations are bright, clear and vibrantly colored.  There is no white space here, just a saturated palette that makes for a compelling visual.

Highly recommended, this is a very sweet Halloween story that is sure to appeal to toddlers who are looking for monsters and witches with no scare.  Appropriate for ages 2-4.

Reviewed from book received from Simon & Schuster.

The Gobble Gobble Moooooo Tractor Book

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The Gobble Gobble Moooooo Tractor Book by Jez Alborough

Alborough, author of the Duck in the Truck series, returns with a new cast of animal characters and plenty of mischief to keep young listeners entertained.  Early in the morning, when the farmer was still in bed, Sheep climbed onto the tractor and made the sound that the tractor makes when it’s starting up.  Ba-a-a-a.  Cat comes and can make the sound the engine makes when its starting to move.  Purr. Turkey arrives.  He can make the sound of the tractor when it heads down the road.  The three of them pretend the tractor is starting, running and heading off.  Then Mouse, Goose and Cow arrive with their own noises which combined make all of the sounds of the tractor driving away.  Which is just what the farmer thinks when he hears them all together!

The cacophony of animal sounds is great fun here, especially with the twist of them sounding like the motor, wheels and other parts of a tractor.  Children will love trying to make the noises of the animals sound like machinery.  Alborough excels at making picture books that are friendly and very accessible for children.  His text is simple and fast moving, taking readers directly to the humor and the action.  His bright colored illustrations are zippy and jolly.

Add this to any farm themed toddler story time for plenty of noise making fun.  It will also appeal to children who enjoy machines.  Appropriate for ages 2-4.

Reviewed from copy received from Kane Miller.

 

  

And I Love You

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And I Love You by Ruth Krauss & Steven Kellogg

A celebration of parental love, this book has verse that pairs large and small together in relationships.  The big forests love little trees.  Big seas love little shells.  And my favorite: Big stories love little words to fly around in.  Each large element is shown and then the page turns to reveal the other smaller element that matches it.  Krauss’ poem is lovely, gently showing the devotion of a parent in ways that are tangible and in relationships that children will understand.  The book will work equally well for any adult with a child, whether it is a grandparent, aunt, uncle, or guardian. 

Krauss’ poem is very brief, just a few words per page.  Her verse captures love in so few words that it is amazing, making it very accessible for young readers. 

Kellogg’s art has his signature style, but also an added dimension that is very interesting.  His usual characters with their bright eyes are featured.  On some of the pages, where appropriate, a texture has been added to the illustrations, sometimes organic like grass clippings and other times thicker paint that is built up for the background.  His friendly characters are shown on these textured pages as well, creating a wonderful mixed media picture book.

The perfect book for a new baby gift or for adoptive parents, this book would also make a great board book too thanks to its few words and gentle spirit.  Appropriate for ages 2-5.

Reviewed from copy received from Scholastic.