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

It's a Toy! It's a Game! It's Skylanders! – Video Game Review

Skylanders Spyro's Adventure (for Wii, PS3, Xbox 360, 3DS, Mac, and PC)

It’s almost embarrassing how much I enjoy Skylanders. It fills me with a sort of nostalgic glee. Not way-back nostalgia like you get when you encounter pixely old Atari games like Frogger or Breakout; nostalgia for the dawn of 3D gaming and the colorful classics of the Nintendo 64 and the original PlayStation 1. The moment I started playing Skylanders, I realized how much I’d been missing a certain kind of game: Vibrant cartoony graphics, with loads of action and exploration, and whimsical characters adventuring across creatively magical landscapes. Skylanders made me think back to the fun I had playing Banjo-Kazooie, Super Mario 64, Crash Bandicoot, and even the original Spyro the Dragon (the star of which is revived nicely here).

Of course, Skylanders has a gimmick: You place toy characters on a plastic “portal” (which is connected to your game console by USB port) and watch them magically appear in the game world for you to use. During a gaming session, all experience, powers, and money earned by your character are stored on a chip within the figure and will be at the ready next time you play. The game comes packaged with three Skylanders (including the titular Spyro) and you can swap characters in an out as often as you want. And while there’s nothing stopping you from completing the game with just those three heroes, there are twenty-nine others temptingly available for purchase at your local toy and video game stores.

Each Skylander has a completely unique set of moves and powers, upping the temptation factor. And to make matters worse, each character belongs to one of eight “element” groups (fire, water, air, earth, life, magic, tech, and undead [they sort of lose me on that last one]}, and each level of the game has bonus areas that can only be entered by members of certain element. So while you can reach the conclusion of the game with only three Skylanders, you’ll never be able to see all the secret areas. But that doesn’t mean you’d need to buy all 32 characters — as long as you have one of each element, you’re good. Still, at an average cost of $8 per figure, that means you’re paying an additional $40 over the typical $70 for the game starter pack.

Courtesy Activision

So is it worth it? I still say yes. Here’s one of the coolest things about these Skylanders figures and their power portal: They’re truly universal. If you use your characters to play the game on, say, an Xbox 360 and then take them to house of a friend who has the game on a Wii, you can bring your Xbox-primed characters into that Wii game complete with all their earned experience, powers, etc. Same goes for a PS3. You can even use them on the handheld Nintendo 3DS (which has a completely different version of the game, by the way). And whatever game system you have, you can use port your same toy figures into the Web MMORPG, Skylanders Universe (which works on both Mac and PC). This universality is a trend I’d love to see continue.

In addition, the story is fun, the writing can be very clever at times, there are a ton of awesome hidden treasures to find, and the co-op capability makes it a nice game for parents and kids to play together. To be honest, there’s no way I could not love a game in which the villain surprises you with a deathtrap called the Deadly Shark Bath of Doomsharks.

Best for: Gamers keen on early-90s nostalgia; avid collectors; parents looking for light-hearted action for their kids; people with the room to store 32 toy figurines

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.

Hail to the Chief: New Music by Caspar Babypants

Sing Along! by Caspar Babypants

If you don’t already know Chris Ballew by his wonderfully ludicrous nom de song Caspar Babypants, you may remember him as the guy who sang that “Lump” song from the ‘90s. The former Presidents of the United States frontman has revived himself as a refreshingly different and wildly entertaining children’s musician. His latest CD, Sing Along! is high on my recommendation list of literal kid pop.

There are lots of acts out there crafting fantastic rock, folk, bluegrass, and even calypso music for young audiences. But one of the great things about Caspar Babypants is that his songs genuinely sound like children’s songs — he’s got a cover of “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” and “Ring Around the Rosie” on this album, for Zanes’s sake! — and yet, they remain unalienating to adults. There’s a happy poppiness to all of Sing Along’s tracks, and many — especially the pumping “Spider John,” the rousing “Long, Long Dream,” and the uber-catchy “Wild, Wild Time” — will make you do just what the album’s title asks of you.

The original Babypants tunes are the highlights of the CD, but I also personally love when Ballew layers his POTUS alt-rock sound onto children’s classic, as he does with a quick-picking, driving guitar riff behind “Pussycat, Pussycat.” And I can’t let this review end without a mention of “Sun Go,” Mr. Babypants’s hauntingly lovely acoustic duet with one of my other favorite kids’ singers, Frances England. It’s the kind of family music that may be squarely aimed at the lower age end, but remains happily appealing to those on the upper end as well.

Best for: Young kids who want their music to sound like it’s intended for them; former Presidents of the United States fans; classic kid-tune revisionists

The Hipwaders Should Be Way More Famous: Music Review

The Golden State by the Hipwaders

REM may be gone, but at least we still have the Hipwaders. Yes, they’re technically a children’s band, but close your eyes, listen to the track, “Hey, Josie” off of their new album, The Golden State, and tell me you can’t picture Michael Stipe swinging around a microphone stand. And then the song will suddenly surprise you by veering into a Beach Boys-esque ba-ba-ba-ba bridge. It's those sort of style-morphing musical moments that make listening to the CD so exciting. While I stick by the REM comparison — and songs like “Welcome to California” feel like they could have been bonus tracks on Green — the Hipwaders are not mere sound-alikes. Could these guys be an awesome REM tribute band if they wanted to be? I'm sure. But their original music is far from derivative.

For one thing, there’s a West Coast surf sound underlying a lot of what the Hipwaders do (appropriate for an album titled Golden State). And bouncy ska beats weave their way in often, tying the ‘80s college-radio vibe to a ‘00s college-radio vibe. Add funky guitar licks and ‘60s-style harmonic vocal riffs, and you’ve got an fantastically distinctive sound.

I’ve been listening to the album on repeat for the past couple of days. And that’s even when the kids haven't been home. It doesn’t matter in the slightest that I’m singing along with songs about pet dogs, standing up to bullies, and playing with toy trains. It’s certainly no worse than belting out, “Stand in the place where you live/ Now face north.”

For a second opinion on Golden State, check out this thoughtful assessment from my friend and colleague, Myles McDonnell, on his blog, You Know… For Kids.

Best for: Parents who think they hate all children’s music; children who think they hate all children's music; fans of REM who would have liked to see the group bitten by Vampire Weekend

H is for Hip: New Books — Paul Thurlby's Alphabet

Paul Thurlby's Alphabet
by Paul Thurlby

Years back, when first venturing back into the world of picture books in order to buy reading material for my then-baby daughter, I remember saying to myself, “Why do people bother making alphabet books anymore? What could anyone possibly bring to the genre that would be fresh or different?” Of course, I had my cynicism thrown back in my face by works like Alethea Kontis’s super-clever AlphaOops! and Neil Gaiman’s entertainingly eerie Dangerous Alphabet. Nowadays, I have a special appreciation for ABC books that bring that extra zing. The latest book to fit into that category is Paul Thurlby’s Alphabet.

Graphic artist Thurlby has a flashy retro-mod style that is undeniably cool. Every page of this book — with its faux-weathered edges and not-of-this-era color schemes — carries the instant hipness an old tin diner sign. The illustrations make you think Ed Emberley was working at Sterling Cooper. You almost want to rip them out and frame them — but you don’t have to, because the dust jacket unfolds into a poster (!).

Paul Thurlby's Alphabet Book © 2011 by Paul Thurlby. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Candlewick Press, Somerville, MA.

But it’s not just that these pics are so beautiful, they’re also wonderfully creative in their representations of the different letters. The subject of each illustration not only begins with the letter in question, but is also made out of that letter. “M” becomes a pair of twin peaks in what looks like a period travel advertisement. “S” is a what-we-used-to-think-the-future-would-look-like space station. “F” is the roaring head of a “fierce” lion. And “A” is, appropriately, awesome. 

Confession: I Like Kid Stuff

Have you ever taken the dust jacket off a book you were reading so other people wouldn’t see the cover illustration of a teenager riding a dragon?

Illustration: Christopher Healy

There should be no shame in an adult enjoying a bit of entertainment that just happens to be targeted at younger audiences. In fact, the lines between children’s entertainment and mainstream pop culture have been blurred more than ever before.

This comes as a blessing for parents who are captive audiences to their kids’ pop culture choices (i.e., all of us). When you read your children a book, chaperone them to a movie, or listen to a playlist at one of their parties, you hope you can get through the experience with your sanity and good taste intact. And if you make the right entertainment choices, you can. You can even genuinely enjoy yourself.

But wait! Those of you without kids — don’t leave yet. This blog is also for any non-parent whose bookshelves sag under the weight of Harry Potter hardcovers. Or who goes to late night showings of Pixar films. Or who knows the actual channel number of Cartoon Network.

This blog is also for those parents who happily use the existence of their kids as an excuse to engage in children’s pop culture for themselves. Like the mom who bought a copy of The Hunger Games to save “until her daughter is ready for it” — and her daughter is two. Or the dad who plays post-bedtime games of Lego Star Wars on the family Wii, so he “can give the kids a hint if they get stuck.”

Of course, some kid stuff is just for kids — as it should be. And when a bit of media falls into that category, I'll be sure to point that out. In the meantime, I invite all of you to join me in the search for that holy grail of children's entertainment: Crossover appeal.