families

Swift Fox All Along by Rebecca Lea Thomas

| Tasha

Swift Fox All Along by Rebecca Lea Thomas, illustrated by Maya McKibbin (9781773214481)

Swift Fox is nervous. Her father is taking her on a long drive to meet her aunties, uncles and cousins. She will learn more about being Mi’kmaq. Her father assures her on the drive that she has all she needs already inside her; she is already Mi’kmaq. It’s how she walks, talks and thinks. Swift Fox just gets even more nervous. Swift Fox is greeted warmly by her family. They unwrap a red bundle, preparing to smudge, but she doesn’t know how to. They assure her that she does know, since it’s part of who she is. But it’s all overwhelming for Swift Fox, who bursts into tears and runs outside to hide. She keeps hidden until she starts to smell the familiar smell of the bread her father makes. Then another cousin arrives, he is just as scared as Swift Fox is. Suddenly Swift Fox can help someone else, and it gets her to go back inside with her cousin and show him things as she learns too.

Thomas has written a very personal book that reflects her own upbringing off of the reservation. In her Author’s Note, she explains the impact of the residential schools on Native cultures and languages. Still, their identity survived. Just like Swift Fox, Thomas continues to learn about her Mi’kmaq identity. Readers of all backgrounds will be inspired by Swift Fox and her transformation of her fear into an energy to help someone else.

McKibbin’s illustrations center on the warmth of Swift Fox’s two families, both her mother and sister and then her large extended family through her father. She captures the characters’ complex emotions on the page, allowing readers to really feel Swift Fox’s butterflies, her fear, and then her inspiration to move ahead.

A powerful book about identity and family. Appropriate for ages 4-6.

Reviewed from e-galley provided by Annick Press.

On Account of the Gum by Adam Rex

| Tasha
Cover image for On Account of the Gum

On Account of the Gum by Adam Rex (9781452181547)

After falling asleep chewing gum, it ends up in your hair. When your father tries to cut out the gum, the scissors end up stuck there too. They look online and discover that all the website advise to use two sticks of butter. But the websites were wrong, and the butter is also now in your hair. Your aunt adds the grass. Your grandpa adds the bacon and noodles. Your rabbit eats grass, but ends up stuck too. Perhaps the cat will help? Or scaring the cat away from your head with the vacuum cleaner? Nope, those are stuck too. But don’t worry, the firemen are on their way!

Rex writes this book in the second person, inviting the reader to feel what it’s like not just to have gum in your hair, but all of these other things. It makes the book feel personal and also adds to the wild hilarity as the story builds. The focus of the illustrations is just like the cover, with the desperation building. Rex continues to add to the humor all the way to the end, creating a real catastrophe that will have children entirely engaged.

The illustrations are marvelous with the various family members coming in with their own solutions. The desperation in the main character’s eyes adds to the hilarity, even as they look right at the reader. There’s a wonderful blankness there too, a sense of despair.

Hilarious, this is one you are bound to stick with until the end. Appropriate for ages 4-6.

Reviewed from ARC provided by Chronicle Books.

Fly on the Wall by Remy Lai

| Tasha
Cover image of Fly on the Wall

Fly on the Wall by Remy Lai (9781250314116)

The author of Pie in the Sky returns with the story of a twelve-year-old who wants to prove his maturity to his helicopter family. Henry’s family monitors what he is doing all the time, packing his backpack for him, making sure he has eaten, and hovering all the time. But Henry knows he can do a lot more than they think. That’s how he came up with a very exact plan to prove his independence: he will fly from where he lives in Australia to Singapore where his father lives. He’s also running from being exposed as the author of a nasty gossip comic at his school, something he is both proud of and terrified by. He just needs his ex-best friend to follow through on the plan, or he will definitely get caught!

The entire adventure that Henry experiences is a delight to experience by his side. His sense of humor both in his gossip comics and on the page is broad and very funny. Throughout the book, he is a disciple hoping to find a shifu to teach him what to do next in his quest. When he meets a girl on the plane, he soon discovers that she might just be the shifu he is looking for, if he can keep from making her so mad that she stops talking to him.

With the text broken up with illustrations done in neon green washes and black ink, this book will appeal to readers of Wimpy Kid. The illustrations range from single illustrations to panels in series to examples from Henry’s own blog done in a completely different style.

Funny, insightful and proof that everyone worth knowing is a little strange. Appropriate for ages 8-12.

Reviewed from copy provided by Henry Holt and Co.

Ty’s Travels: All Aboard! by Kelly Starling Lyons

| Tasha

Ty's Travels All Aboard by Kelly Starling Lyons

Ty’s Travels: All Aboard! by Kelly Starling Lyons, illustrated by Nina Mata (9780062951120)

Ty loves adventures and most of all he wishes his family would play with him. But his father is busy making dinner, his mother is folding the laundry, and his big brother is doing his homework. Ty spots an empty box and knows just what to do with it. Soon he has built a train engine and begins a journey down the tracks. At the first stop, someone is waiting! It’s Daddy, who climbs aboard. At the next stop, it’s Momma who comes aboard in time to see the city go by. The next stop has his big brother join in. The last stop comes eventually and they are back home just in time for dinner.

There is real challenge in writing a good easy reader and Lyons meets that challenge head on here. With her story of a supportive and playful family, she has a story that can be told simply. It has plenty of action and motion to keep the story moving forward in a way that is paced perfectly for new readers.

The illustrations by Mata are friendly and use the white space on the page nicely. They support the text on the page, offering new readers just the right amount of support visually. She also shows the imaginary journey clearly using crayon and simpler graphics that are done in a childlike style.

This series is a great pick for new readers. Appropriate for ages 3-6.

Reviewed from e-galley provided by HarperCollins. 

 

The Bridge by Bill Konigsberg

| Tasha

The Bridge by Bill Konigsberg

The Bridge by Bill Konigsberg (9781338325034)

Two teens arrive at exactly the same time on the George Washington Bridge, planning to jump off. At the last minute, when he sees Tillie, Aaron decides not to jump, but Tillie does. Aaron now must find new ways to deal with his rising depression, struggles that he can’t admit to his father, even though his father is desperately to figure out what is going on with his son. Tillie’s family is devastated by their loss, particularly her little sister. Tillie, ignored by her adoptive father because she embarrassed him in one of her performances, is being cyberbullied by girls in her school, including one of her previous best friends. But wait, perhaps it was Aaron who jumped and Tillie survived. Or did they both jump? Or did they both stop themselves and find one another. This masterpiece of a novel looks at suicide, getting help, and the impact of loss.

Konigsberg takes one pivotal moment in the lives of two people and shows how it could be different given a slightly different reaction. How one person could be saved, or the other, or neither or both. He portrays two very different families, each struggling with loss or trying to help their teenage child. He shows glimpses of hope, the long slog of treatment, the lifesaving connections that can be made, and how one person can save another. In short, this is life on the page, captured with real empathy.

Konigsberg takes his young protagonists and builds their storylines fully, in one part even projecting us forward decades into what their loss meant for their families and how it continued to echo in their lives. He shares their deep sorrows, their reasons for contemplating suicide, their inability to put it into words themselves, and the powerful desire to have their pain just be over. He gives us the darkness and then the light, the ending portrayal of their stories are just what the reader needs, hope and unlikely friends.

Powerful, deeply impactful and masterful, this teen novel shows suicide in breathtaking complexity. Appropriate for ages 13-17.

Reviewed from ARC provided by Scholastic Press.

Nerp! by Sarah Lynne Reul

| Tasha

Nerp by Sarah Lynne Reul

Nerp! by Sarah Lynne Reul (9781454934028)

Picky eaters take center stage in this picture book. A young monster is disinterested in all of the delicacies his parents keep bringing out of the kitchen. To each one, he replies with “nerp or nerpy nerp” in refusal. His parents make more and more different options, but he doesn’t want anything. Until, suddenly he is clearly slurping food off the page. His parents are delighted at first, until it’s clear that he’s munching pet food. With a blurp, he finishes eating, with the pet finally getting what they have been drooling over all along, the food for the child!

This picture book invents its own language, full of nerps, yerps, schmerps and blurps. Each of the types of food is wildly named too but in a way that makes it wonderful to say it all aloud: Hotchy-potch, mushy gush bloobarsh, picklefishy verp, yuckaroni smackintosh. Each one is a dance on the tongue that will have children laughing along.

The illustrations are digital drawings done over photographs of cardboard models. They have a marvelous three-dimensional quality to them with furniture, rugs, and an entire house. They are engagingly unique and also bright and humorous too.

Perfect for reading aloud, maybe just before snacks. Appropriate for ages 2-4.

Reviewed from library copy.

Summer We Found the Baby by Amy Hest

| Tasha

Summer We Found the Baby by Amy Hest

Summer We Found the Baby by Amy Hest (9780763660079)

Bruno and Julie aren’t really friends anymore, but in the small town of Belle Beach, Long Island, they still see one another. That’s how Bruno sees Julie discover the baby that was left on the steps of the new children’s library. Julie carries the baby off, leaving Bruno to discover the note that Julie never found. Bruno though is on a mission for his brother who is overseas fighting in World War II, and he must decide if he will miss the train to New York or not. Told through flashbacks that show the story of Bruno, Julie and Julie’s little sister, Martha, this book explores the impact of the war on families and also how one complicated situation can somehow tie their entire summer together.

Hest creates a marvelous story told in brief chapters by each of the three characters. Their perspectives are beautifully individual, filled with misunderstandings about one another, views that are entirely their own, and opinions that they form along the way. The book is almost a puzzle, where one must figure out what is actually happening through these independent lenses that show a fractured image of the truth.

Each of the three characters has their own personality, deftly created and shown by Hest. Her writing is brief and clear, allowing each character’s words to stand strong as their own. It is the quality of her writing and the profound respect she shows her young characters that really let this delight of a novel work, revealing the moments and experiences of a single sun-drenched summer on the beach.

Ideal for summer reading, this work of historical fiction is masterful. Appropriate for ages 9-12.

Reviewed from copy provided by Candlewick.

 

We Are Not Free by Traci Chee

| Tasha

We Are Not Free by Traci Chee

We Are Not Free by Traci Chee (9780358131434)

Brace yourself for this teen novel that brings you along with fourteen teens who are taken into the Japanese detention camps in the United States during World War II. The teenagers have all grown up together in Japantown in San Francisco. But when Pearl Harbor is bombed, their lives are destroyed when their families are relocated to the detention camps. Told in each of their voices, the story revolves around their daily lives in the camp, the intolerable racism and injustice that they face, and how they navigate still being Americans.

Chee moves from her successful fantasy trilogy to this incredibly impactful story of a group of friends who are taken from their lives. Her writing is exceptional, moving from straightforward storytelling to passages that sing with poetic touches to direct verse. All of it screams of the injustice, demanding that people see what actually happened in the camps and the impossible decisions faced by the Japanese Americans who were held there. She also very successfully moves to the battlefields of World War II, breaking lives and hearts.

Fourteen voices are a lot to manage as an author, but Chee does it with such a deep understanding of each character that readers can simply allow the characters to flow around them at first. By the end of the book, readers will have connected with each of the characters both from their own perspectives and from the adjoining stories of the other characters that include them as well. It is deftly done, capturing readers into this powerful story and making it impossible to look away or deny.

Incredibly eloquent and compelling, this historical fiction for teens is one that can’t be missed. Appropriate for ages 13-17.

Reviewed from e-galley provided by HMH Books for Young Readers.

Accidental by Alex Richards

| Tasha

Accidental by Alex Richards

Accidental by Alex Richards (9781547603589)

Johanna lives with her maternal grandparents after her mother’s tragic death in a car accident when Johanna was a toddler. Now at age sixteen, she is starting to resent how dull and stifling her life is. Even worse, her grandparents don’t have any pictures of her mother out and never speak about her. So when Johanna gets contacted by her father for the first time, she decides to meet with him. He shares pictures of her mother, who looks like just like Johanna. More importantly, he shares the truth of how Joanna’s mother died, something that her grandparents lied to her about. As a toddler, Johanna found a gun in the house and accidentally shot and killed her mother. Now Johanna must find a way to cope with her grandparents’ lies, her relationship with her father, and her newfound guilt and responsibility around her mother’s death.

This timely novel deals with gun violence from a unique and fascinating perspective, that of an unsecured gun left to be found by a child. The novel wrestles with responsibility for the tragedy as well as the importance of truth to allow families to heal. Richards gives Johanna a robust support system that gives Johanna and the reader hope to move forward through the situation. The strain of discovering her own role in the tragedy is made worse by it being discovered by everyone at her school and online bullying.

Johanna is a strong and resilient protagonist navigating one of the most terrible situations. Richards doesn’t let up, putting her character through horrible times in the novel, revealing who truly loves her in the end but also showing Johanna’s incredible tenacity and growth along the way.

A gripping look at gun violence that is ultimately full of hope. Appropriate for ages 14-18.

Reviewed from ARC provided by Bloomsbury.