Next Year's Caldecott All Sewn Up? New Books — Extra Yarn

Courtesy HarperCollins

Extra Yarn by Mac Barnett, illustrated by Jon Klassen

Every now and again, I come across a picture book that has such a classic feel that I have to flip back to the copyright page and double-check to make sure I couldn’t possibly have read it as a child. The most recent book to send me into such warm and glorious bouts of nostalgia is Extra Yarn by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen. Like so many favorite picture books of my own youth, this one has a story that is simple, yet full and rich.  It’s the kind of plot you could retell at a bedtime years later, even if you couldn’t find your old copy of the book. It’s the kind of fable that, despite being completely fresh and unique, feels like it has been told and retold for generations. Not stale, not clichéd – just timeless.

It’s the story of a young girl who finds a box of never-ending yarn and sets about knitting sweaters for everybody and everything in town. Her spirit of generosity is tested (as is the magic of the yarn itself) when a greedy archduke comes calling. The paintings by Jon Klassen (who is fast becoming one of my favorite illustrators ever) could not be more perfect. With a bright array of changing colors for the yarn and muted earth tones for everything else, his sweet and comical pictures help tell the tale in just the right way.

Together, the story and art scream “Instant Classic.” No, scream isn’t the right word. There’s nothing screamy about this book. It’s got a much quieter, more nuanced power. It put me in mind of Leo Lionni with a slier sense of humor, or Tomi Ungerer on one of his brighter, happier days. But Extra Yarn feels most like a classic Barnett/Klassen book, which is how I expect people will be complimenting other picture books a few decades from now.

Best for: Picture book lovers of all kinds; fans of wry fables; people who liked I Want My Hat Back, but were hoping for something a bit gentler.

Wishes Fulfilled: New Books — Bigger Than a Bread Box

Courtesy Random House

Bigger Than a Bread Box by Laurel Snyder

I’ve made it pretty clear on this blog how much I enjoy magical realism. But my affection for lovely, entertaining, suspenseful, and moving Bigger Than a Bread Box goes far beyond the presence of a wish-granting bread tin. What really made me love Laurel Snyder’s new book so much is its protagonist.

            Twelve-year-old Rebecca is a eminently realistic tween girl — flawed and likable. She gets bored by Civil War documentaries, she gets frustrated by her little brother who she really loves very much, she shares laughs with her best friend by sneaking peeks at dirty greeting cards (just one of the wonderful little details in the book). Everything she does is believable. Which is why, reading about her from a parent’s perspective, I so often felt like I wanted to be there to comfort her through her angst — or warn her against the ill-thought, disaster-bound choices she was obviously making. Kids are so much more interesting to read about when they make mistakes.

           

            In the story, Rebecca’s parents split up and she is forced to move with her mother into her grandma’s house. Adjusting to a new house, new school, new neighborhood, and new friends is just as difficult as you’d imagine. But it’s made a little easier (or at least more surprising) by Rebecca’s discovery of a magical old bread box. Whatever she wishes for appears from within its tin confines. She starts off by wishing for exactly the type of things you’d expect a kid to wish for: money, an iPod, macaroni and cheese. But when her newfound loot doesn’t immediately change her life for the better, she ups the stakes, wishing for more unexpected (and harder to explain) prizes. And of course, the one thing she wants most — a reunion for her parents — is not something that can appear in a bread box. And when she learns a dark and morally challenging secret about the bread box, the tension increases exponentially.

            This is a tale of dangerous magic, the kind that looks incredibly promising and appealing, but which — if misused — can lead to ruin. Be-careful-what-you-wish-for predicaments start snowballing. And you, the reader, want so badly for things to work out for this girl, that you can’t help but be drawn in.

Best for: Lovers of magical realism; readers looking for tween drama with a unique twist; collectors of antique bread boxes

A Fairy Tale of Tween Angst: New Books — Breadcrumbs

Courtesy HarperCollins

Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu

If you’ve read any of my previous book reviews, you may have figured out that I’m a sucker for magical realism (I’m also a sucker for magical magic, but that’s beside the point). I love when I find a story that works so brilliantly as a subtle, slice-of-life drama that you don’t blink an eye at the fantastical and otherworldly elements sprinkled throughout. I have seen the excellent Breadcrumbs (which has already received many much-deserved lauds) described as a modern retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” — and it is — but there’s so much more going on here than just “let’s set an old fairy tale in modern times.”

Breadcrumbs is about childhood friendships — how solid and unchangeable they can seem, how strangely fickle and malleable they can be, and how utterly important they are either way. It’s about the way friendships, especially at that age, help us form a view of ourselves and our world. And the story just happens to have a child-stealing witch in it. And a mystical forest, and a magic mirror. But those Hans Christian Andersonian bits aren’t the story; they just help tell the story. And wonderfully so. After all, your tween years are such a surreal mishmash of hormones, emotions, pressures, and changes that it often feels like you’re roaming through an alternate universe half the time anyway.  In that sense, Breadcrumbs feels like a better bookshelf companion for Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me (another masterful piece of magical realism, or more appropriately, sci-fi realism) than anything by, say, Gregory Maguire (whose work is wonderful in a very different way).

To tell her sad and lovely story of friendship, Ursu makes genius use of not only “The Snow Queen,” but an anthology’s worth of other Andersen tales. I don’t want to spoil too much, but as ten-year-old Hazel treks through the dark and danger-filled woods in search of her missing former best friend, she runs into one Andersen character after another — and grows in some way with each encounter. My daughter is just about Hazel’s age and I can’t wait to pass Breadcrumbs on to her. But I’m going to have her read up on her Andersen first. Getting the references only adds to experience.

Best for: Tweens going through rough patches (or anybody who remembers being one); Hans Christian Andersen fans who have been longing to see any of his stories other than "The Little Mermaid" get its due; readers who enjoy their fantasy adventures with more brainwork than fisticuffs or swordplay

Word Nerds Rejoice: New Books — The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman

Courtesy of Dutton Children's Books

The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman by Meg Wolitzer

There simply aren’t enough good suspenseful dramedies that revolve around Scrabble. So I would like to thank Meg Wolitzer for her new novel, The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman. As a word nerd myself, I thoroughly enjoyed watching her characters drill one another on anagrams, strategize about ways to use a Q, and puzzle over why a word like “za” is legal when no one in the world actually refers to pizza as “za” (although that’s what the Scrabble dictionary says it means).

But I’m making the book sound like a Words With Friends chat board: It’s not. The plot revolves around a national Scrabble youth tournament and the various pairs of middle-schoolers who trek across the country to out-word one another. It has a somewhat similar feel to one of my favorite documentaries, Spellbound (about the contestants in the Scripps Spelling Bee). And the playoffs in Fingertips can be just as taut and suspenseful as the drawn out letter-by-letter spellings in that film.

It helps that the cast of kids here is extremely likable. You’ve got the titular Duncan, a poor, picked-on boy whose cachet in school rises when a popular kid chooses him as his Scrabble partner. And there’s April Blunt, whose geekish love of words makes her the black sheep among her family of workout-mad triathlete types. And Nate Saviano, a Manhattan skateboard buff whose father — a former Scrabble almost-champion — forces him to play. There are others, too. And you’re not really rooting against any of them, so it becomes almost painful knowing that only one duo can win in the end.

Most of the what goes on in these pages is realistic kids-dealing-with-the-pains-of-being-kids Judy Blume-ish material. But there is an out-of-left-field supernatural-ish twist in that Duncan has the power to “see” with his fingertips. He can read letters sightlessly, by merely touching them. Therefore, he should be able to feel the letters on Scrabble tiles and choose a perfect hand on each turn. The question becomes whether he will use this power to cheat or not. And there’s a lot of tension in the making that decision. Which is all the better for us readers, of course.

Best for: Scrabble geeks; fans of realistic kid fiction who can handle a little suspension of disbelief now and then; outsider-ish tweens and the people who love them.

Friendly Ghosts: New Books — Liesl & Po

Courtesy of HarperCollins

Liesl & Po by Lauren Oliver

There’s a very comfortable old-fashioned fairy tale feel to Liesl & Po. Maybe it’s the wicked stepmother. Maybe it’s the Dickensian-style orphans. Or even just the name, “Liesl.” But mostly I credit Lauren Oliver’s soft, lyrical prose. The author does a wonderful job of simultaneously instilling readers with a sense of awe and a bad case of the creeps. It’s rather Spielbergian in that way.

Liesl is a little girl who lives imprisoned in a tiny attic room (with a name like Liesl, where else could she live, really?) and is visited one night by a ghost. That spirit, Po, is one of the more interesting supernatural characters I’ve come across in a long time. Po hasn’t come to haunt anybody; in fact, the ghost isn’t even quite sure why it (gender is unimportant in the afterlife) decided to pop in on Liesl. But this curious spirit is immediately intrigued by the girl's forwardness and lack of fear. Po decides to help Liesl escape. This friendship between a child with no life and a child with no life only becomes more fascinating as the story takes on a kids-on-the-run vibe.

There’s a lot more going on plotwise, too: Lookalike jewel boxes get mixed up, another runaway orphan enters the picture, a greedy alchemist whips up a magical fountain of youth, a musclebound guard carries a cat in a baby sling. The action flows at a smooth pace, but the book always manages to find the time for otherworldly atmosphere. And there’s something about illustrator Kei Acedera’s sketches of Po that I find exceptionally eerie: The ghost is a barely-there shadow with dark, hollow eyes — reminiscent of so many “real” ghost photos you used to see in books with titles like Quandaries of the Unknowable. But with all of its talk of death and loss, Liesl & Po is, in the end, a book about hope and new beginnings.

Best for: Readers who prefer goosebumps over screams; classic folk tale aficionados; anyone who has longed to see Casper in a dramatic role; fans of the name Liesl.

Things Get Hairy: New Book Series — Wereworld

Courtesy Penguin Books

Wereworld, Book I: Rise of the Wolf
by Curtis Jobling

Here we have one of those books that adult readers may feel a bit sheepish about reading in public. Just look at that cover. No arty lupine silhouettes here, like on the passably sophisticated covers of Maggie Stiefvater’s brooding teenage werewolf stories. This is full-on, in-your-face lycanthrope action — the kind of illustration that, at age ten, would have had me trembling in anticipation of the complete and total awesomeness that obviously waited within those pages. As an adult, however… well, let’s just say I might get some odd looks. Especially since Fifth-Grade Me was right: Wereworld is a blast — and I probably had a stupidly giddy grin on my face while reading it.

Quite surprisingly, the story comes from Curtis Jobling, who up until now has been best known as the designer behind preschool TV’s favorite plow whisperer, Bob the Builder. Whatever you may know about Bob doesn't apply here, though. Jobling has revealed his feral alter-ego to present us with a fantasy-horror-action mash-up that takes place in a pseudo-medieval world where the ruling nobility are all shape-shifters. The tale's hero, Drew, is the last of the werewolves, a clan thought to have been killed off by the despotic werelion king. Yes, this world has all sorts of werecreatures — werebears, wereboars, even wereotters. Following Drew’s quest to uncover his heritage and eventually begin a rebellion against the tyrant (I love that the traditionally noble lions are the worst of the lot here), the book moves at a breakneck pace from one battle/chase/escape scene to another, but with very nice character development woven into the action.

Granted, Wereworld caters to a very specific taste. There’s some seriously bloody violence (throat-rippings and the like) and a surprising amount of pantslessness (well, they are werewolves after all). This is sword-and-sorcery epic and creepy monster-tale woven into one. It might be a tad much for some readers, but I was certainly left — please forgive me for this — howling for more.

Best for: Anyone who gets excited (either openly or secretly) by that cover; Lord of the Rings fans disappointed by the lack of lycanthropes in the series; people who would have liked to see Remus Lupin get his own spin-off; anyone curious to see how the Bob the Builder guy handles bloody maulings

War is a Beast: New Books — The Midnight Zoo

Courtesy Candlewick Press

The Midnight Zoo
by Sonya Hartnett (Candlewick Press)

I picked up this quiet-looking, unassuming book with no expectations whatsoever. I hadn’t heard anything about it. There was no pomp and circumstance surrounding its release. But the jacket copy sounded interesting, so I started reading. And I was almost immediately blown away. Sonya Hartnett’s The Midnight Zoo is without doubt one of my favorite books of the year. 

The story is harrowing from page one as two preteen refugee brothers (toting their infant sister along with them) struggle across a bomb-ravaged WWII landscape and stumble into an abandoned zoo. Hartnett’s prose is a thing of beauty, and I was so transported by it that I had a brief moment of worry as soon as the kids encountered the inhabitants of the zoo: Oh, no, the animals are going to start talking.

And they did. But my concern was completely misplaced. The book never gave in to gimmickry, never got the least bit cheesy. It is the best kind of magical realism: A story in which the supernatural elements barely register as being out of the ordinary.

The Midnight Zoo is a bold book, too, daring to tackle literature-course-worthy topics like the folly of war and the meaning of freedom. I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up on elementary school curricula somewhere (or maybe middle school — there are a couple of pretty rough flashback scenes showing how the boys became refugees). But please don’t take that to mean that the book is even remotely wonky or didactic. It isn’t. It is emotionally powerful and thought provoking in a way that should make Newbery judges sit up and take notice. 

Best for: Lovers of magical realism, parents who want to make sure their kids are reading quality literature, anyone who enjoys their historical fiction with a touch of Dr. Dolittle.