Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Ever post about something and then want to add to it later? Or read someone else’s post and have an idea for them? Well, I’m taking care of that today with a short list of addenda. Just humor me.

Addendum 1. Remember when Adrienne and I posted about what we called Slightly Demented Picture Books, a post dear to our hearts that resulted in quite a handful of folks piping up to name their favorite demented books? Well, I keep running across books to add to the list (namely, why hadn’t I ever read Roald Dahl’s The Enormous Crocodile, which I stumbled upon recently? Sylviane Donnio’s I’d Really Like to Eat a Child seems almost an homage to Dahl’s book, published back in 1978. And I read ’em in the wrong order, but at least I finally found Dahl’s crocodile tale).

Anyway, there’s a new title out from Candlewick, Beware of the Frog by William Bee, set to be published next week, I believe. And it not only made me (and the children around me) laugh out loud, but it is also one of those titles that embodies the spirit of our definition of Slightly Demented. Hoo boy, talk about the food chain (as we did in our post):

Sweet little old Mrs. Collywobbles, looking like she came straight out of South Park and who lives right on the edge of a “big, dark, scary wood,” has a pet frog. And he’s the only thing that protects her from all the horrible and terrifying creatures that live in the big, dark, scary wood. Three of those horrifying creatures—Greedy Goblin, Smelly Troll, and Giant Hungry Ogre—believe they have the ability to one-up the frog. But they’re wrong, and the results of their attempts to do so are pretty funny. And then, just when you’re already hoo-ha’ing over this intrepid frog and Bee’s offbeat, wry depiction of his triumphs over the scary wood creatures, Bee brings, not one, but TWO bah-dum-ching moments at the book’s close, throwing the reader two punchline curve balls you don’t see coming. Calling it quirky doesn’t cut it. Everything about the book—the narrative and Bee’s left-of-center style, including all his close-ups and frog get-ups—is wonderfully wacked. It’s almost as if Bee is speaking directly to those parents all set on shielding their children from the Grimms-esque scary and mysterious elements of the world (the Giant Hungry Ogre sings, “I must have my supper—a juicy old lady cooked in lots of honey and butter”). Maybe not so much speaking to them as saying: Here, try this on for size. And did I mention I almost soiled myself laughing at it, as did my children? Read the rest of this entry �

I know that title is horribly unfair. You have your books for those first learning to read, often called Emerging Readers or Beginning Readers. You have your Chapter Books, sometimes further delineated into Early Chapter Books. And then sometimes these early chapter books are called Early Readers. And I suppose all of them fall into the general category of Intermediate Readers.

But I lumped ’em all together into one seriously lame title for this post, because I tend to give them the cold shoulder way too often here at 7-Imp. I don’t set out to do so, but I’m such a huge picture book fan that most posts end up being about them or the people who have created them, and if I’m not doing that, I’m talking about a novel.

So, here’s my attempt to run down some new titles within the broad category of books that are between picture books and those novels for older middle grade students (or older).

Let me say right off the bat: I’ve read some of these; others I’ve just started; and some I’ve yet to crack open. I’d love to hear from those who have read these, particularly those who have read the ones I’ve yet to start. Bottom line is that all of them are books that caught my eye for one reason or another and that I’m interested in telling you about or reading.

Also, before I begin, there are of course Mo’s new beginning-reader titles (here and here and pictured above). Sadly, I have not seen them yet. Anyone want to share their thoughts on these?

Erica Silverman’s Cowgirl Kate and Cocoa are back, this time in Rain or Shine, released by Harcourt in April. These are beginning readers for the child just learning, and I promise that with Kate and Cocoa he or she will have a yee-haw good time (you knew a “yee haw!” was coming, right?).

If you’re not familiar with Cowgirl Kate and Cocoa, this is the fourth book in the series. The first one was named a Theodore Seuss Geisel Honor Book (“the most distinguished American book for beginning readers published in English in the United States”). There’s lots of child appeal here in these books with our endearing characters in Kate, a “cowgirl from the boots up,” and her horse, who can speak and who in this new installment of the series gets spooked by a thunderstorm; feigns illness to avoid work; suffers a brief attack of extreme vanity in trying to ditch wearing the rain sheet he considers “silly”; and tries to locate the pot of oats at the end of the rainbow. As always, Cowgirl Kate knows all too well how to deal with Cocoa’s not-so-shining moments, their tight friendship always pulling them through any rough spots. Betsy Lewin’s illustrations capture well the affection in their friendship. A winning emerging reader series all-around. Read the rest of this entry �

As I mentioned this past Sunday, I took a blog break last week just to get caught up on some reading. As it turns out, this very intriguing novel was staring me in the face. On the back of it, author Alison McGhee is quoted as saying, “{r}arely do I come across a book that makes me catch my breath, that reminds me why I wanted to be a writer—to make of life something beautiful, something enduring.” Whoa. Well, maybe I’m a sucker, but statements like that pique my interest. Or, as Betsy Bird put it in her review of this title, “{w}hen you pick up a copy of The Underneath by Kathi Appelt and you read the words, ‘A novel like this only comes around every few decades,’ on the back cover you’re forgiven if you scoff a little. Uh-huh. Suuuuuure it does. But doggone it if it isn’t true.”

Once I picked this one up, I was spellbound. Couldn’t put it down. I fell into the world of Gar-Face and the muddy Bayou Tartine and the Alligator King pretty hard, and I couldn’t pull myself out ’til I was done with the book. And I couldn’t do much else ’til I finished it either; sure, I managed to feed myself and my children and I suppose I remembered to take care of my personal hygiene (oh wait, my immediate family would make sure I did so), but everything else was pretty much neglected for the length of time I was in Appelt’s world.

Good thing, then, that I was blog-breaking when I stumbled into The Underneath, released by Atheneum in May.

I’m feeling mighty daunted, too, at the notion of trying to describe the book to you. Or finding the words to describe how enchanting the writing is or how expertly the story is constructed. And not everyone will agree with that latter statement; the School Library Journal review, describing the book as Southern Gothic, wrote “the constant shift of focus from one story line to the next is distracting and often leads to lost threads.” I didn’t lose any threads while reading, but, hey, to each his own. As Betsy put it well (I know I keep quoting her, but it’s no mystery that I adore her reviews), “{b}ound to be one of those books that people either hate or love, I’m inclined to like it very very much. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t weird, man. Really freaky deaky weird.” So, there you have it: A book people will either love or hate. Hmm . . . Perhaps. But put me in the former category. And with bells on. Read the rest of this entry �

I wanted to force this post into the Nonfiction Monday category, but it won’t quite fit. This is Nikki Giovanni’s and Chris Raschka’s brand-new adaptation of Aesop’s “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” and—to be sure—those fables of Aesop are lumped into the 398.2s. But, not only does this not qualify, I think, for the “facts first” mission of Nonfiction Monday, but Giovanni has also really elaborated on this tale, adding a new cast of characters (literally — the book opens with a spread which depicts our “cast”) and turning it into an argument for the respect for and compensation of an artist for his/her work. I speak of The Grasshopper’s Song: An Aesop’s Fable Revisited, illustrated by Raschka, and published in May by Candlewick.

“Jimmy Grasshopper was furious,” the book opens. He’s complaining to Henry Sr., a bird who eventually becomes the counsel to Jimmy-as-plaintiff with his partners (Robin, Robin, Robin, and Wren). Jimmy says he sang songs and played music all summer for the industrious ants while they harvested their food — yet the ants are shutting him out from any of the rewards. “Even in the evening, when we were all tired, I played a melody to keep up our spirits. I never thought they would turn their backs on me. It’s just not right.”

But things aren’t so black and white, as it turns out. Henry Sr. is reluctant to take the case: “You provided a service they didn’t request.” Read the rest of this entry �

There are two reasons I’m hosting a rather random interview with author Kerry Madden today: First, her Maggie Valley trilogy of books, whose third installment I finished a few months ago, are so positively good—so full of love and laughter and warmth and fairies-in-the-holler and mountain music and family and honeysuckles and bookmobiles and Ghost Town in the Sky and wildflowers and Daddy’s banjo—that I wanted to ask her a bit more about writing them and try to convince any of our loyal readers who perhaps haven’t already read them to COME ON and DO SO already, ’cause reading them is like giving yourself a gift. Whew.

Second, there is a large part of my heart still nestled in East Tennessee — in the foothills of the Smokies, where both Eisha and I went to college and where I decided to stay and study some more and work, volunteer, get married, give birth, etcetera etcetera and all that. And Kerry herself, my friends, is also a Knoxville Girl (though, to be sure, she’s also lived and travelled all over the world). WOOT! (I refuse to yell GO BIG ORANGE!, with respect to my football-fan friends. You’re all gonna have to settle for WOOT!) Best of all, she writes about the Smoky Mountains in her Maggie Valley trilogy with such vividness that she so clearly takes me back there — and without me having to jump in my car for the 200-mile drive.

And, honestly, there’s another reason: Kerry is just a neat person. Interesting. Smart. Funny. A style all her own, in just about every way. I only briefly met her last summer at The Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, and I found myself wanting to talk to her for much longer than I had time. And, yes, it’s true that an author’s personality should have no bearing on whether or not I like her book; I can separate Kerry from her books, and I can evaluate her books based on her talents as an author (and I happen to think the books are great and her talent is immense). But, well, like I said, she just seems endlessly interesting: She’s a “journalist, mom, explorer, biographer, essayist, poet, author, writing instructor,” as her site’s header will tell you — and you can add playwright to that, too. And so I wanted to chat with her some more.

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{Note: The rest of today’s Summer Blog Blast Tour interview schedule is posted at the bottom of this interview.}

If you haven’t read anything by British author David Almond, here—in the words of reviewers who covered his first novel, Skellig, winner of the Carnegie Medal and Whitbread Children’s Novel of the Year Award as well as a Printz Honor—are some of the themes you’re missing: “the transforming power of caring and love” (Publishers Weekly); “worlds enlarging and the hope of scattering death” (NY Times Book Review); “loneliness, friendship and grace” (ALA; Printz Award Selection Committee); “the fearful, wonderful fragility of life” (author Richard Peck); “essential goodness, faith, truth, and love” (author Karen Cushman); and “miraculous happenings” (The ALAN Review). In their review of Almond’s first novel, School Library Journal best summed up what I think is Almond’s greatest strength as a writer: “The beauty here is that there is no answer and readers will be left to wonder and debate, and make up their own minds.” In their review of Skellig, the New York Times Book Review praised my second favorite thing about Almond’s writing: his subtlety.

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I don’t know about you, but I find the news of late very sad and quite unsettling. I have to wonder what kind of world my children are going to live in when they themselves are adults. I don’t want to be one of those people who is so out-of-touch with current events, but oftentimes it’s hard to even take it all in anymore. Eisha and I recently had a conversation about all the apocalyptic movies we’ve seen of late, too, Eisha joking that she’s seen enough recently that she pretty much feels like she needs to get ready for the end of the world NOW. And then I had to up and read Susan Beth Pfeffer’s The Dead and the Gone, which is just as mercilessly stark and honest (about, you know, the end of the world when the moon’s too close to the earth) as its prequel (more on that later perhaps).

I’m also not one of those people who refuses to read books with sad endings, no matter the current state of world affairs, but I will say that I’m glad I was reading Barbara O’Connor’s Greetings From Nowhere (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, March 2008) when this news story broke. As well as this one. Not necessarily because reading a story with a happy ending was a necessity at that time, but because Barbara’s story reminds us that, no matter our particular pains and fears and losses, we have each other to lean on. And because, at its core, it’s a story of hope. Might sound corny the way I put it, but . . . well, O’Connor does it up much better than I explained it.

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Last September, Betsy Bird wrote a smashing piece at ForeWord Magazine’s “Shelf Space” column about books, as she put it, “that refuse to be neatly arranged under a single category. They straddle the genres.” The new titles I’m covering today could fall into this category, I think, but more simply, I think they are examples of what Eisha noted last week when we guest-blogged over at School Library Journal’s Practically Paradise. When I asked Eisha if she has a favorite current trend of children’s lit, here’s what she wrote:

I love that more and more middle grade and YA novels are incorporating heavy amounts of illustrations to support the story, bending the genre lines between straight novels, picture books, and graphic novels.

To that I add the ever-so eloquent, word. Word up, even.

Today I’m going to mention some new illustrated titles I think are worthy of our attention. They’re not necessarily all middle grade or YA, as Eisha mentioned, but they are the types of books that aren’t normally as heavy on illustration as these titles are.

If you’re a big kidlitosphere reader, I’m sure you’ve heard about these new TOON Books from The Little Lit Library (a division of Raw Junior, LLC), launched by Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman. These are technically what are called emerging reader titles anymore, but the idea here is that these are comics (designed for children ages four and up), which beginning readers can read to themselves. “The artistic and literary qualities that we hope are at the core of the TOON Books are often lacking in standard easy-to-read books, which tend to be made with good intentions but little creative impulse,” said Mouly in this interview from the wonderful new Notes from the Horn Book. “How is a child going to learn to read if she is presented with books that offer none of the pleasures of reading?” Read the rest of this entry �

Happy Saturday, dear readers. I’m going to get right to it today: Here is my attempt to catch up on some book reviews, both titles from last year. I’m, uh, really slooooooooow sometimes, but better late than never.

If dark humor is your thing — and I mean moments of incredible pathos that rattle your heart in your chest a bit while, somehow, also make you laugh simultaneously — here’s a new title for you, Gone and Back Again (Soft Skull Press, 2007) by Jonathon Scott Fuqua (based loosely on “the author’s own strange childhood,” according to his site). Fuqua is the award-winning author of four YA novels, a graphic novel (also geared at adults), and one book for young children. This is his first novel for adults, though I say it has tremendous cross-over appeal to teens.

Middle-schooler Caley; his brother, Fulton; and his sister, Louise, are being dragged from town to town by his mother, who has “changed after the divorce. It was like her goodness and affectionateness seemed to be hibernating or were gone.” Caley, whose father is capable of moments of undeniable cruelty and a master of the fine art of guilt-tripping, must acclimate himself to life with his mother’s new boyfriend, Henrico, “who was a total jerk to us kids.” His mother occasionally attempts to convey affection but mostly fails (“I wanted my mom to be like a mom instad of just a woman we sometimes saw”). “For me,” Caley tells the reader, “life was like a train passing into a tunnel just before an avalanche falls and blocks the way out.” Thus, Caley starts his “days of badness,” drinking and stealing: “I was the kind of kid who, even if you wanted to, you didn’t care about.”

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If you’re a wordsmith or a wordsmith wannabe, here’s a book for you. Bust my buttons! It’s the cat’s meow, an indubitable lollapalooza — and that’s no codswallop (nor is it flapdoodle, claptrap, tomfoolery, shenanigans, malarkey, or even blarney). You need to find yourself a copy by hook or by crook, or you may find yourself feeling a bit woebegone. (I can try to not pepper this post with words and expressions from the book, but it wouldn’t be as fun, now would it?).

Chronicle Books released this little gem of a book this month, developed and compiled by Molly Glover with additional text by Kate Hodson. It’s called L is for Lollygag: Clever Words for a Clever Tongue (geared officially at ages ten and up), and — as someone who has always loved a good, juicy word — I am all atwitter about this title. This is for you word-nerds, like me, who feel a bit of ennui with your typical dictionary or even your typical alphabet book — you must go and take a look-see. This is a world in which “A” is for alakazam, “B” is for boondoggle, and “C” is for catawampus. (Amusingly enough, “X” is for nothing, since — as the book points out — “X can be a lot of fun: X marks the spot, X-ray vision, planet X, generation X, X-Men, signed with Xs and Os . . . and you can’t play Tic-Tac-Toe without good old X. But most of the tongue-tickling X words don’t actually begin with X.” Lisa Graff would be happy. And, though I’m seriously digressing here, I have to add that my favorite adaptation to that pesky letter is when They Might Be Giants make up a country called “West Xylophone” in their “Alphabet of Nations,” one of their children’s songs, which I’ll add to the bottom of this post — appropos to very little, but just for fun.)

So, yes, they’re all here, words that are deliciously fun, tripping off one’s tongue: hoi polloi, flibbertigibbet, fussbudget, loosey-goosey, mizzenmast, jittery-skittery, kit and caboodle, snollygoster, and spindle-shanked (I’ve always wanted to be spindle-shanked myself). The definitions are concise and full of swagger, brief and often amusing. Read the rest of this entry �