Old School: A Wizard of Earthsea

As I grew older and out of children's chapter books, all those years ago, I kept only a handful of favorites on my bookshelf. I'm not sure I knew why, exactly, even back then—because I thought even as a high school student I might want to refer back to them? Or (deep down) because I wanted to hang on to them for my own kids someday? The reason was certainly sentimental in some way, and at a certain point I stopped winnowing entirely; what survived high school stayed on my shelves into adulthood.

These were mostly venerable classics of the kid genre, even at the time—the Narnia series, The Phantom Tollbooth, A Wrinkle in Time—with a few relative newcomers like Ellen Raskin's The Westing Game and Walter Wangerin Jr.'s The Book of the Dun Cow. I didn't care if they were classics, though—these were the books that were in some way or another important to my childhood. I don't always remember exactly why. But these were my books—I remember the surge of feeling I had about each of them very clearly, which must have been at the root of why I kept them.

One of the series I kept about which my memory was cloudy was Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books. Another classic series, of course—being reissued in handsome new hardcover editions this month by Houghton Mifflin, in fact. The feelings I associated with these particular books years later, having mostly forgotten the plotlines, were less of warmth and affection, as I recalled Phantom Tollbooth, say. It was more like a vague sort of awe and reverence.

And those aren't feelings that drive nostalgic re-readings. So it had been many years since the Le Guin books had come down off the shelves when my seven-year-old, Dash, started showing interest in books with magical themes beyond Harry Potter. (Not, I should hasten to add, that he finds anything at all lacking in Harry Potter.) I remembered Earthsea, my memory perhaps jogged by the news of the reissues, and we took my dusty old copy of A Wizard of Earthsea down (both noticing right away that it's sure a lot shorter than a Harry Potter book).

It only took a page or two for the vague memories to firm up. And I don't mean just the storyline, though that certainly came back, too: the journey to wisdom of a young, brilliant but arrogant sorcerer-in-training. I don't even mean just the amazing world Le Guin has created as the setting for this series, a land of hundreds of small islands and a full, rich culture that's as vivid and fully imagined as any of the best fantasy worlds of children's literature.

I mean the language itself. The Earthsea books are written in a flowing, almost Homeric style that's simply mesmerizing to read (or read aloud). Words and their power are the lifeblood of this series—the source of the most powerful magic its wizards have, in fact. In Earthsea, to know someone's or something's true name is to have power over that person or thing, and everyone accordingly has both a name they go by in the world, and a secret "true" name that they reveal only to those they trust most—the book's hero, Ged, always introduces himself as Sparrowhawk, for example. It's an old conceit that words and names hold magical power, but Le Guin weaves her whole world around it, giving it weight and even a feeling of importance, or reality. (It's one of the things that has always stuck with me from the book.)

Le Guin's is almost certainly the finest writing Dash has encountered since graduating to chapter books, and I could see the effect on him immediately—he was quietly fascinated (unusual, since his enthusiasm about books is usually more amped-up and vocal), with a sort of reverent awe that was very familiar. I think the Earthsea books may have similarly awakened me to a level of writing I'd previously been unaware of, when I first encountered them, which would more than explain their staying power on my shelves all these years. Maybe Dash will feel the same way about them someday.

[Cover image courtesy of Houghton Mifflin]

Posted with Blogsy

New Books: Novels for Older Kids III

Once again I turn to Elizabeth, my 13-year-old colleague, for some of her favorite new tween and young-adult novels of the last year or so. (None are very new in hardcover at this point, but on the bright side, many are just coming out in paperback!) Without further ado:

Bloodline Rising, by Katy Moran. Written more as a "companion" than a sequel to Moran's earlier British Dark Ages tale Bloodline, this novel tells the story of Cai, a clever young thief in seventh-century Constantinople. With his father away at war, he is betrayed by a rival and sold as a slave to a ship heading north, to Britain—which happens to be where his parents come from. He is taken in by a lord who clearly knew his parents and put to work as a spy amid major political intrigue...but soon finds that the man who took him in may have had something to do with his parents' departure from Britain.
Elizabeth's take: This book was suspenseful and had complex, believable characters. I couldn't put it down and could barely believe the twist in the ending! I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys stories full of danger, tension, and action.

Virals, by Kathy Reich. The first work for young readers by this forensic anthropologist, the novelist behind the TV series Bones, and the initial entry in a new sci-fi/suspense series, Virals is about 14-year-old Tory (she's the niece of Temperance Brennan, the character played by Emily Deschanel on the TV show), who must go live with the marine-biologist father she's never known on a small South Carolina island after her mother is killed in an accident. She soon finds a similarly scientific-minded group of kids to hang out with, and before long they've noticed something strange about the nearby Loggerhead Research Institute. But after they rescue a wolf-dog puppy from the laboratory, they're exposed to a canine virus that changes their DNA, heightening their senses and reflexes—which turns out to come in handy, since they end up with a cold-case murder on their hands.
Elizabeth's take: This sci-fi mystery was amazing! The action and creepy science projects kept me engrossed from beginning to end. I've already recommended this book to several of my friends.

The Eternal Ones, by Kirsten Miller. Tennessee teenager Haven has always had visions of a past life, in which she was a girl named Constance whose doomed love for a boy named Ethan ended in disaster and death. But when she sees tabloid-TV coverage of an infamous celebrity named Iain Morrow, she is certain that she recognizes Ethan, and so when she turns 18 she heads up to New York City to find him. She finds that Iain feels their connection as well, and a love affair soon begins between the two...but soon Haven has doubts: Is Iain really Ethan, or could he be the person behind the deaths of Constance and Ethan in that past existence? Enlisting the help of a secret society with knowledge of reincarnation, Haven determines to find out the truth without reliving every detail of Constance's past.
Elizabeth's take: I loved this book! It was impossible to put down once I'd started. The author keeps you guessing constantly about the characters, their motives, and their intentions. The plot twists and bittersweet ending make it one of my favorite books.

Mockingbird, by Kathryn Erskine. This winner of the 2010 National Book Award for Young Readers is about Caitlin, a 10-year-old girl with Asperger's syndrome whose older brother has been killed in a school shooting. Told with remarkable sensitivity and insight from Caitlin's own perspective, it takes the reader through her attempt to deal with the tragedy herself, and to help her devastated father to weather the grief as well.
Elizabeth's take: This book was really touching, and offered an interesting point of view. It is refreshing to see things from the perspective of a person who doesn't view things the same way as most people.

[Cover images courtesy of Candlewick Press (Bloodline Rising) and Penguin USA (others).]

New Books: Novels for Older Kids II

This is the second in a series of posts I began last fall; once again, I'm relying heavily on my blog's only assistant editor, 13-year-old Elizabeth, the older sister of one of my older son's best friends. Without her, I wouldn't have a prayer of being able to cover these books--so really, this is her post. Without further ado, here's some of Elizabeth's picks of the last six months' best novels for older kids:

The Clockwork Three, by Matthew Kirby. Three separate plotlines involving three children—an orphan street violinist, an apprentice clockmaker, and a hotel maid—are slowly woven together in this adventure mystery (the author's debut). As it turns out, each one has part of the answer to the puzzle one of the others is trying to solve, and they must learn to work together to deal with very real dangers. 

Elizabeth's take: A great mystery, this book has many twists and turns, in addition to interesting characters. Once you start, you can't put it down.


The Queen of Water, by Laura Resau and María Virginia Farinango. This novel, based on a true story, tells of Virginia, a seven-year-old Andean girl in Ecuador who is sent by her desperately poor parents to be the servant in a wealthier mestizo household. It's rather like something out of a Dickens novel—she is beaten, and promises to send her to school are broken—but she educates herself nonetheless in secret, and in the meantime becomes accustomed to a very different way of life from the one she'd known. Then, at age 12, Virginia has the chance to return to her parents...and finds herself ambivalent. This is a powerful caught-between-cultures tale.
Elizabeth's take: This book is touching and inspiring. It's written so well that it's almost hard to believe it's a true story. I really enjoyed it and would recommend it to anyone.


The Chaos, by Rachel Ward. You didn't think we were going to get out of a teen-novel roundup in 2011 without an dystopic novel, did you? The second book in Ward's (and no, she's not that one, though she is also British) Numbers series is set 10 years after the first one, in 2026, and follows young Adam, who has inherited his mother's curse from the first book: When he looks into someone's eyes, he can see the date of their eventual death. When he notices that an awful lot of the strangers' deaths he can't help but encounter are on the same date in the future—New Year's Day 2027—he realizes that he has to try to find out what this apocalyptic event is and try to stop it. Even on just her second book, Ward writes crackling suspense and dialogue, making for a real page-turner.
Elizabeth's take: This book is told from an interesting perspective: a boy who doesn't use proper grammar. And you can follow the plot without having read the first novel, Numbers. I'd recommend it to those who enjoy science fiction or apocalyptic stories.

When You Reach Me, by Rebecca Stead. This is cheating a little—it's the paperback edition of this winner of the Newbery Medal and many other awards, and even it came out several months ago—but we missed it in hardcover, and Elizabeth was so enthusiastic that I couldn't leave it out. It's a tightly written (and fairly short, as these novels go) story about Miranda, a 1979 New York City sixth-grader whose world starts to unravel after she has a falling out with her best friend, Sal, and then starts getting mysterious anonymous notes about an upcoming tragedy she must try to prevent. Presented in Miranda's pitch-perfect first-person voice, and referring directly and indirectly to many of the classic novels sixth-graders of the 1970s and '80s would have been reading (A Wrinkle in Time, Harriet the Spy), it's pretty much an instant classic in its own right.

Elizabeth's take: I could not put this short but eventful novel down! It has that quality that makes you think, "Well, maybe just another few pages...or chapters...." The characters are believable and easy to relate to. All in all, worthy of the Newbery on its cover.

[Cover images courtesy of Scholastic (The Clockwork Three, The Chaos) and Random House (The Queen of Water, When You Reach Me)]

New Books: A Traveller in Time

I'm not much of a reader of modern fiction (and if you're wondering what this has to do with children's books, bear with me—I'll get there). Given the limited time I have for reading at this parenting-laden time of my life, I want to be sure that when I embark on a novel, I really, really love it. And the chances of that always seem higher if the book's provenance goes back past last month's New York Times Book Review. (It's not that there isn't great stuff being written constantly—it's just that more of the mediocre stuff from ages past has fallen away; I'm increasing my odds.) So I mostly read a classic novel I somehow missed in all those high school and college classes—there are an alarming number of them!—or I stick to nonfiction.

Children's books, though, don't seem to work this way; if anything, there's an even greater focus on the present. There are classics here too, sure, but fewer of them, and I've tended to cover them with my kids quickly or not at all. To be fair, children's lit as a reputable field for "serious" writers has a relatively short history, so it's not entirely surprising the canon isn't quite as large—but I've been unable to help feeling there must have been more back there somewhere, lost in the mists of time.

Which is where the New York Review Children's Collection comes in. I've written before about its lovely editions of classic and largely out-of-print kids' classics—a few fairly well-known, but most under the radar, at least to me—but I never feel I manage to express quite how wonderful the whole enterprise is. (It's reached the point that when I see the NYRCC has something new out, I feel, a bit absurdly, rather like I did as a child on Christmas morning.)

The latest NYRCC rediscovery is Allison Uttley's A Traveller in Time, originally published in Britain in 1939. It's a cozier read than its title makes it sound—this is more Sir Walter Scott than Jules Verne—but it's nonetheless an adventure story. It's also a ghost story of sorts, in which young Penelope, sent with her siblings for the winter from London to an old family farmhouse in the English countryside, finds herself stepping through doors into the house's own past—an eventful one. She finds her own 16th-century ancestors involved in a plot to free Mary, Queen of Scots, from her imprisonment by Queen Elizabeth, but her own 20th-century knowledge of how badly this was to turn out for all concerned is of little help in persuading her forebears to alter their course, as events move inexorably toward their bad end.

The writing is certainly British old-timey in many ways, and probably was even in 1939, but Uttley— in her own time something of a noted children's-book author, with more than a hundred titles to her credit—slowly and expertly draws the reader into a tale that proves to be as much about free will, loyalty, courage, and fatalism as about time travel. She also uses the constant and largely unchanging setting of the old English farm to illustrate Penelope's realization that whatever happens in the affairs of mankind, life goes on around us all. What appears at first a simple adventure tale turns out to have quite a lot of depth.

Now, the style and pace of Uttley's writing certainly won't be to the taste of every modern reader, child or adult; there's a lot that's dated about this book (in fact, in a way, being dated is kind of the point of this book). But I think tween-age readers (as well as those a little younger than that) in search of a compelling story with a female lead character, and patient enough to allow it to unwind on its own, bit by bit, will find A Traveller in Time exceedingly rewarding.

[Cover image courtesy of New York Review Children’s Collection.]

New Books: Akata Witch

There are tons of tween and YA books out there nowadays that intertwine childhood rebellion and the supernatural. (I was going to suggest this was the legacy of the Twilight books, but come to think of it, there always have been.) Nnedi Okorafor's Akata Witch stands apart from the rest, and not just because it's set in Nigeria.

Akata is a derogatory term for black Americans in the Igbo language, and its use in the title is a hint that our heroine, twelve-year-old Sunny, is a girl who feels out of place everywhere. Her parents are Nigerian, but she was born in New York, where her family lived until she was nine; the family then returned to their native land. As if that weren't enough to make her the "different" one at school, Sunny is also albino. She stands apart, she excels in school but has few friends, and the popular kids bully her. So far, the usual stuff of YA novels since time immemorial, right?

Except Sunny has these weird premonitions sometimes, warnings from the shadows in the Nigerian darkness that something bad is going to happen. And her mother, a doctor, is extremely circumspect when telling her daughter anything about her own mother, who died long before Sunny was born; Sunny has only a vague impression that she was very odd, perhaps crazy.

The pieces begin to come together when she is befriended by Orlu, a quiet boy in her class who defends her from the bullying, and his friend Chichi, a free-spirited home-schooled girl. Seeing something special in Sunny, Chichi reveals that she and Orlu and their families are practitioners of juju, known as Leopard People. They explain that while the special abilities they have are generally inherited from one's parents directly, they suspect Sunny may be what they call a "free agent," with natural talents of her own.

They're right, of course, and Sunny is soon initiated into a spectacular alternate universe of magic and danger and wonder. Soon afterward, she’s informed that she has a part to play: Along with Orlu and Chichi and a rebellious African-American boy from Chicago named Sasha, she is expected to stop a local serial killer known as Black Hat Otokoto, who has been kidnapping and killing young children locally for months.

Some elements are reminiscent of classics of magically inclined children's fiction; the divide between the magical and nonmagical worlds and people is similar to that in the Harry Potter books, for instance. But I was most put in mind of a favorite series of my own childhood: Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books. (Clearly I'm not alone; I noticed after having this thought that Le Guin provided once of the book's cover quotes.)

As that series did, Okorafor keenly portrays the convoluted mix of rebellion and growing responsibility that make the ages between childhood and adulthood so complicated. She also creates one of those fully fleshed-out alternate worlds that have long been the hallmark of the best children's series, from Lewis Carroll to Le Guin to Philip Pullman. And she is as unafraid as LeGuin was to explore grim and dark realities, which makes the climax of Akata Witch—in which the four child witches face off against Black Hat Otokoto and the even worse evil he's trying to bring into the world—truly thrilling.

But make no mistake: Okorafor marks out new territory of her own, too, with her magnificent use of Nigerian folklore; the magical realm Sunny is entering glitters with fascination. Most American readers will be completely unfamiliar with this world, but the author makes use of that fact, too, engaging our curiosity with the excitement of discovery.

It's a triumph of a novel, one that teens (and many tweens, too, I think) will devour. And happily, Okorafor seems to leave the door open for a sequel, so this may not be the last we see of Sunny and her coven. I hope it isn't—there's plenty of fuel here for what could soon be a serious classic series of its own.

[Cover image courtesy of Viking Books]

New Books: Lizard Music

Daniel Pinkwater's Lizard Music isn't a new book by any stretch of the imagination—in fact, it wasn't all that new when I read it back in grade school. But it is a lesser-known classic, and as such fits the mission of the New York Review Children's Collection, which recently came out with a typically snazzy new hardcover edition. (This seems a propos, given the recent return of offbeat reptiles to the kids'-entertainment zeitgeist.)

Children at the serious chapter-book level who are already looking to have their expectations shaken up a bit will be delighted by just about any of the dozens of books the man has written, right up to last year's Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl. (Parents who never encountered Pinkwater’s fertile, chaotic mind as kids themselves will be in for a treat, too.) But Lizard Music is kind of where it all began (at least for me).

It's told from the point of view of Victor, a 14-year-old boy left behind by his parents when they go on vacation under the supervision of his slightly older sister. (Can you tell yet that this book was written more than 30 years ago?) He is, of course, delighted when his sister ditches her responsibility and leaves him entirely alone. While he’s staying up late and watching as much TV as he can, Victor stumbles upon a late-night transmission from a group of, well, alien lizards. With the help of a local character known as the Chicken Man (who’s based on a real Chicagoan), he decides to try to find out what the lizards are up to.

Obviously, this is not your average kids' chapter-book plot synopsis (though thanks to Pinkwater's influence on a generation of writers, it's slightly less out there than it was when the book came out). Stated flatly, it may even sound a bit off-putting, but the tone of the writing—wry, sardonic, humorous, never taking itself too seriously—is all. (I think my friends who were the biggest Pinkwater fans as kids went on to become Frank Zappa aficionados in their later teen years—there's a common thread there.)This author's work is about reveling in being different, and while today we have a whole genre of entertainment on that subject, his approach still remains fresh, and all his own.

So if you see Captain Beefheart albums in your child's future, I can pretty much guarantee that this new edition of Lizard Music, complete with the author's own original woodcut illustrations, will become an immediate favorite. And even if you don’t, it’s well worth a look—Pinkwater has been a cornerstone of children’s lit for quite some time now, and this is one of his best.

[Image courtesy of New York Review Children’s Collection.]

Security Blanket: Neil Gaiman Novels

As I've mentioned before (endlessly, I know), my son Dash, now six, is a big fan of all things spooky and scary—ghosts, witches, vampires. The Nightmare Before Christmas has been a favorite movie since age three. So on reputation and subject matter alone, it was a no-brainer that he would, sooner or later, enjoy the children’s novels of Neil Gaiman.

Now, Dash devoured several of Gaiman's picture books—the macabre The Dangerous Alphabet, the sweet Blueberry Girl (out in paperback in March!)—the moment they came out. Both are standouts for their cleverness, but also feature a light touch that I found surprising, having only read Gaiman's early graphic-novel work (mainly Sandman) to that point. But even in Dangerous Alphabet, the writer demonstrates that he doesn't believe in sheltering young readers.

The novel Coraline, which I first encountered in perhaps its most frightening version, the P. Craig Russell–illustrated graphic novel (at left), even scared me a little. (The animated film is a Dora episode by comparison, drained of a good deal of the book's creepiness; I found it a little disappointing.) I was blown away by this book—by the storytelling skill, sure, but also by the seamless way Gaiman folds psychology into the tale: Is all this magical, creepy stuff really happening, or is it in the mind of a lonely, creative girl who's furious at her parents for neglecting her and flirting with the idea of an “other” mother and father, then realizing you have to be careful what you wish for? As with most great writing of this kind, the answer is up to the reader—and either way, the ending is deeply satisfying.

But Dash had just turned three when I finished Coraline, and it isn't scary in a playful way—it's really scary! (Even the original chapter-book version, which is slightly less vivid for not being explicitly illustrated, can induce chills—plus, at the time it was a bit ahead of Dash’s reading level anyway.) So while I was convinced of Gaiman's brilliance as a writer for kids, and I knew my son would eventually love his work, I felt I had to put this one off.

Not too long afterward, I got a copy of Gaiman's kid novella Odd and the Frost Giants, a Norse-mythology tale about an self-exiled boy and some anthropomorphic forest animals who need his help. (Gaiman’s work for children often seems to focus on kids forced, for one reason or another, to cope with difficult circumstances without parental help, at least of the traditional kind.) This was the perfect introduction: gentler and far less creepy than Coraline, it allows the author a chance to show off his lyrical side. It's a lovely book, the one that convinced my wife of Gaiman’s preeminence among active writers for children, as Coraline had done for me. And Dash took to its tone—offbeat and calmly proud of it—instantly.

I'm not sure if there was a teaser on our copy of Odd, or if Dash found out about it somewhere else, but he became obsessed with Gaiman's The Graveyard Book about this time, just based on the title. (The 19th-century graveyard one must walk through to get from our house to our town library might have had something to do with it, too.) I’d heard particularly great things about this one, including that it had won a Newbery, so I picked up a copy...and then discovered that it opens with the methodical murder of all the members of a family except their infant boy. (The better to set up the child-on-his-own trope, of course.)

I froze for a while. Dash hadn't encountered anything like this grim, realistic violence in his reading so far. Could he handle it? (Or was the question really, as so often, Could I handle it?) I mentally hemmed and hawed for a while, and Dash conveniently forgot about The Graveyard Book for a bit, allowing me some time to flip through the book some more on my own. I soon found that after the difficult setup, it settles into a gentler place; it wasn’t without frightening moments now and then, but it didn’t dwell in them, either.

Eventually Dash’s mind turned back to The Graveyard Book, and shortly after his sixth birthday I finally agreed to embark during his bedtime reading—fully aware that I might be launching a series of nightmares, and ready to stop at any time. And he was, no doubt, taken aback by the harshness of the book’s beginning. But I made sure we got past that part and through the true establishment of the premise—the infant is named Nobody and raised properly by the ghosts of all those buried in the titular graveyard—before he went to sleep the first night. No bad dreams resulted. And predictably, Dash was hooked.

So was I. Everything Gaiman had shown himself capable of in the books we’d read before was here in spades. The dark story is handled again with that surprisingly light touch, and it’s a true page-turner. The writing has depth, too, touching on philosophy, poetry, and other “serious” matters without getting bogging down in any. And just when you’re immersed in the thriller, Gaiman gives you a surprise gift—a beautifully lyrical chapter about a once-in-a-generation night when ghosts and the living dance together. (The living, naturally, don’t remember it.) It’s a breath in the middle of the book, a short lift that advances the plot not a whit. And it’s just perfect.

As it turns out, The Graveyard Book is closely based on—in fact, is Gaiman’s homage to—Kipling’s The Jungle Book, with the ghosts in the city graveyard taking the place of the animals who raise Mowgli. As always, Gaiman is subtle about this (I know the Kipling pretty well, and I didn’t even see the connection at first), and he never lets his references to the classic overwhelm his own narrative. You could read his book with no knowledge of Kipling and be perfectly satisfied.

But those familiar with The Jungle Book will find that Gaiman weaves a special magic in reference to it: His book makes you appreciate Kipling’s all the more, shearing it of the weight of Disney associations and “Bare Necessities,” and reminding you that for Mowgli, as for Nobody, this is life-and-death stuff, in the end. This ain’t old-fashioned Disney. (Now, a Pixar take on The Graveyard Book…that I’d pay to see!)

So I’ve learned two things in the course of this long story. First: Neil Gaiman is indeed at the very top level of writers for kids today, and we will continue to seek out and devour everything he produces. (Actually, we can start with Coraline; it wasn’t until I was writing this post that I remembered that I forgot to ever return to it with Dash!)

And second: As seems to usually happen, it’s the books and movies I’m most concerned will freak Dash out that become his very favorites. (And often mine.)

[Cover images courtesy of HarperCollins.]

New Books: The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation

Not for the first time, I’m stretching the definition of new here a bit. The first entry in this two-book series by M. T. Anderson came out in hardcover way back in 2006, and the only "new" aspect about either now is their debut in a lovely updated paperback format last month.

But, despite the National Book Award won by volume one, The Pox Party, both of these books were entirely new to me. And while that honor, stamped atop the covers of the new paperback editions, lifted my expectations of their quality, well...I had no idea. This is the best young-adult fiction I've read since I began covering children's books, and the first I'd recommend to adult friends as well since Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. Anderson's tale truly is astonishing.

It's about (and largely narrated by) the title character, the Boston-born son of an enslaved African woman in mid-eighteenth-century Boston. He is thus a slave himself, of course, but he doesn't know it for many years, as his "owner" is a the leader of a philosophical society that has decided, among its many other Enlightenment-inspired projects, to see what happens when you raise an African boy in European fashion. So Octavian and his mother (who develops a kind of salon of her own of infatuated society intellectuals and artists) wear fine clothes and eat well alongside their "masters," and perform no labor beyond that of Octavian's education, which matches the best available to white children—Latin, Greek, "modern" science, etc.

Eventually, however, Octavian discovers the truth—that he's not merely a slave, but one who's been the subject of a lifelong scientific experiment. Worse yet, circumstances eventually require the society to seek a new benefactor for its funding; the source of its continued operation is a group of southern plantation owners. They require that Octavian's "equality" experiment be rigged so that he will fail it, thus justifying their continued use of slavery to amount their riches, all of which has a predictably dire effect on the lives of both Octavian and his mother.

Meanwhile, amid all this, the hostilities between the American colonies and the English government are growing until the Revolutionary War finally breaks out. The bitter irony of the slave-owning colonists' fight for liberty is not lost on Octavian, as the New England patriots start to fear that English promises of liberation will cause their slaves to rise up against them. (A real-life regiment of ex-slaves that was created by Lord Dunmore, the colonial governor of Virginia, in response to Patrick Henry's uprising in that state, plays a central role in the second book, The Kingdom on the Waves.)

The real history, and Anderson's remarkable treatment of it—the American Revolution in these pages is neither as pure of motive nor as sure of success as it's generally portrayed, especially in books for children—would be enough on its own to make these books engrossing. But as vividly described as it is, it's really just the backdrop for the story, and the voice, of Octavian himself, as he discovers the devastating truth about his true place in his world, then questions that truth and finally refuses to let it define him. He's an unforgettably powerful character, rich and deep and real, the kind you start to see cinematically, hearing the voice of name actors (I settled on Larry Gilliard Jr. of The Wire) as you read Octavian’s words.

I should warn that these are among the most adult of young-adult books I’ve ever read. The text itself is dense, written as it is in true-to-era colonial language and sentence structure. And then there’s the subject matter: Not surprisingly given his situation, as well as the war he's living amidst, some extremely upsetting things happen to and around Octavian, and the reader is not spared their full force. That impact is part of what makes the work as strong as it is, in my opinion, but you’ll want to be sure your young adult is prepared. In other words, these are not the YA books with which most smart 10-year-olds will want to be stretching their boundaries.

But high-school kids who are strong readers looking for challenging adult-level material will be blown away by the Octavian Nothing books, I think. Heck, most parents will be blown away by them, as I certainly was.

[Images courtesy of Candlewick Press]

Old School: Kids' Classics (Free!) for iPad

The holiday season is upon us, and with it every parent's favorite pastime, family travel. Every generation thinks it has the worst of things, but ever-longer airport lines and the latest guessing games in the TSA circus are making the temptation for ours to lay claim to the title pretty strong. So more than ever, it never hurts to be loaded for bear several times over when it comes to keeping the kids occupied through all that waiting. On the other hand, extra books to pack are…not exactly welcome.

But for parents with iPads, there's a solution to this dilemma, assuming they plan to bring the gadget along for the trip. (If you're anything like me, you've refused to be parted from yours since you acquired it, so that shouldn't be a problem.) Best of all, it's free—ignoring the high cost of the iPad itself, of course, but if you do have one already....

I've mentioned before that tons of classic children's literature, like pretty much all classic out-of-copyright books, has long been available free of charge online, courtesy of Project Gutenberg, which has spent many years painstakingly transcribing them for public use. The only problem was that the PDFs you could grab off the website weren't formatted in a terribly friendly-to-read way.

Enter the iPad and its (free) iBooks app. In the app's store, under the "Classics" entry in the Categories tab, you'll find a library's worth of classic titles (scroll down for the "free" section), including lots of stuff for kids of any age: Alice in Wonderland. Treasure Island. The Secret Garden. If it's more than a century old, it's probably here.

When you download a title, it shows up on your iBooks shelf just as any new, purchased book would—formatted in the font of your choice, with adjustable print size, and easy to read in portrait or landscape view. There's an occasional layout hiccup with illustrations (sometimes the captions bump the regular text in slightly odd ways), but all in all, the books look great in this format. And they're all ready to hand over to your ten-year-old during that layover, or to use as bedtime reading at Grandma's house.

And those who haven't encountered these classics with their kids before may be surprised at how well they hold up—there really is a reason they've lasted this long, after all. (And as corny as it sounds, there's something about reading A Christmas Carol to your kids on Christmas Eve. That Dickens fella could write a little.)

Plus, if you're feeling your literary oats yourself (or, horror of horrors, you exhaust your existing airport reading), you can download Pride and Prejudice once the kids are safely asleep—or, if you're really ambitious, War and Peace! All free!


(I know that similar wonders are achievable on the Kindle, Nook, etc., but since I don't have those particular gadgets, I can't answer for the quality of the text on those. Anyone know offhand if they, too, give you the free books with the same formatting quality as the ones you'd purchase for those tablets?)

[Cover image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons]

New Books: Novels for (Older) Kids

To a parent of infants or toddlers, reviewing picture books comes pretty naturally. They’re short, often illustration-driven, and precisely what you spend your evenings reading to your own kids at bedtime. While you do need to be careful not to violate the old rule about books and their covers, it’s not difficult to identify standouts in short order. Early chapter books are slightly more challenging, but even there, the well-written and especially imaginative ones make themselves known as such within a few pages; also, there aren’t all that many of them on the market, comparatively speaking, so a high proportion of those published are at the very least worth a look.

Novels aimed at older children—basically the categories known as “tween” and “YA”—are another matter entirely. Thanks to the immense success of books like Twilight, dozens of them come out each season from each major publishing house. They’re for the most part far longer than chapter books for very young kids, and more complex, so finding out whether a given one is any good requires a decent time investment. And if, like me, you don’t have a kid at home who’s old enough to be interested in and ready for books of this length, on these subjects, you can end up feeling a bit at sea; it’s hard to trust your adult critical instincts entirely. (There’s nothing like a moody tween novel to make a relatively new parent realize that his or her own childhood is even more distant than the years would imply.)

For all these reasons, I’ve rarely ventured into books for this age range, both back when I was at Cookie and in this blog. But I’ve always felt a pang of guilt about that, too—isn’t this, for all the same reasons I just listed, the very category of children’s books with which parents and gift-givers need the most help?

To solve the problem, I finally got wise and enlisted an expert: a 12-year-old, naturally. Elizabeth, the older sister of one of my older son’s best friends and a voracious reader, graciously agreed to be my test reader for the ever-growing stack of tween and YA novels piling up on my shelves. With remarkable speed and insight, she separated out the best of the lot for me, and I’m going to gratefully pass along her thoughts, along with quick summaries of my own. (As long as she’s interested in continuing, I’ll make this a recurring column.)

Here, then, are some of Elizabeth’s favorites from my stack of books that have come out in the last several months:

Shiver and Linger, by Maggie Stiefvater. It’s tempting to take the Hollywood-pitch approach and describe this series (the first just out in paperback, the second a new hardcover) as “Twilight with werewolves.” That may be broadly accurate, plotwise, but it’s glibly unfair to the author, who’s written a pair (so far) of evocative, atmospheric page turners, adroitly alternating between the first-person points of view of both of the main characters.
Elizabeth’s take: Shiver is an amazing book! It has the perfect blend of romance and action. I even bought the sequel in hardcover!

Extraordinary, by Nancy Werlin. An engaging (and well-researched) story of a teenage girl from the famous Rothschild family. We learn right off that Phoebe's closest friend is not who she appears to be, but a fairy with an ominous agenda that’s compounded when her irresistibly gorgeous older brother appears on the scene. Werlin, the author of several YA best sellers, expertly doles out pieces of the puzzle to readers, always leaving them just enough steps ahead of Phoebe to keep the suspense taut.
Elizabeth’s take: A great fantasy! I really liked it. It has a great plot, and the intermittent “Conversations with the Faerie Queen” really add to the story.

The Red Pyramid, by Rick Riordan. The debut entry in a new series by the author of the mega-successful Percy Jackson books turns from Greek mythology to Egyptian. In it, a brother and sister who’ve been raised separately try to rescue their father from an ancient, evil being he has released into our world. As always, Riordan fills the pages with great historical and mythological detail while maintaining a blisteringly fast pace of action.
Elizabeth’s take: I did not find this book to be as good as the author’s previous series [Percy Jackson], but it is still a worthwhile read. Anyone who enjoys mythology and fantasy will love it!

Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins. The final book in the dark three-part Hunger Games series (plunges the reader directly back into its dystopic-future version of the U.S. In it, a repressive government forces each district to send two children to battle to the death, gladiator-style, against one another. Katniss, our heroine, has managed improbably to survive two rounds of the Hunger Games now, and the rebellion is looking to her to be the public face of their revolution. But even as she agrees to this, she has growing concerns that the potential new boss may be, as ever, no better than the old. Collins has created one of those great immersive worlds here, so fully fleshed out that you feel the author has given consideration even to unmentioned details. (I knew this series had to be good when I saw fellow parents eagerly anticipating this book’s release in their Facebook status updates!)
Elizabeth’s take: Very well-written plot and characters—but you really have to read the whole series to understand it. I own all three books in hardcover, and I enjoy reading them over and over again. I highly recommend the entire trilogy to anyone who enjoys action, romance, or sci-fi.

[Cover images courtesy of Penguin USA (Extraordinary), Hyperion (The Red Pyramid) and Scholastic (others)]

New Books: Terrible, Horrible Edie

I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to sing the praises of the New York Review Children’s Collection, which continues to find and reissue great but out-of-print children’s literature from decades past, by authors well-known (e.g., James Thurber) and forgotten alike. Anyone in search of the little-known classics of the genre should look no further than its catalog; I pretty much covet every single book in it. (The website even lets you suggest titles of out-of-print classics you think NYRCC should consider!)

Among the more recent releases is Terrible, Horrible Edie, by E. C. Spykman, a book I’d never heard of, by an author I’d never heard of, that’s part of a series I’d never heard of. It’s actually Spykman’s third book about the Cares family—mainly the six children of the family, four from a previous marriage and two toddlers from the current one; they are modeled closely after the author’s own Massachusetts upbringing in the first decade of the 20th century.

In this one, the Cares kids head off to their aunt’s beachhouse on the Atlantic coast, where they’re to spend the summer under the observation of a caretaker, housekeeper, and cook (if it wasn’t already clear that Mr. Cares was well off from the menagerie of family pets along for the trip, which includes a monkey) while their parents tour Europe. The title character could not be more a middle child—her three older siblings are 18, 17, and 16; Edie herself is 10, and her two younger stepsisters, Chris and Lou, are 5 and 3. Which gets to the heart of the adjectives in the title, too: Edie longs for the independence her older siblings are now enjoying, to command sailboats and drive cars and such, but those charged with looking after her are always getting in the way, and she is forced to find creative ways around the restrictions on her summer plans. Since she is about the most determined 10-year-old you’re likely to meet, she usually succeeds.

Spykman presents the family (sans parents) summer at the beach through the eyes of this no-nonsense child, complete with adventures both typical (a rebellious solo sailing adventure) and extraordinary (a massive hurricane, seemingly based on the real one of 1938 but moved back a few decade for fiction’s sake). Through it all, the Cares children react with a resolute sangfroid reminiscent of characters books about English families—it’s not unlike the tone of the Pevensie kids in the Narnia books, except that this is all happening in real-life Massachusetts. Nothing can faze these children for long.

But the real draw, as it should be, is specifically Edie. She’s fiercely self-reliant, endlessly frustrated at the general uselessness of many adults and almost the entire male gender (“In all her life, Edie thought, she had never met so many stupid, nutty men at one time.”), and remarkably adept at solving problems, even the ones she has created in the first place. She’s also completely irresistible, and not at all terrible or horrible, unless you happen to be one of her caretakers. Spykman, a fourth child in a large family herself, brilliantly transcribes Edie’s 10-year-old logic as she convinces herself that, say, it’s okay for her to take the two young children with her out in the sailboat without telling anyone.

Sypkman’s writing in general is outstanding, maintaining funny deadpan humor throughout with moments of beautiful child-POV lyricism sprinkled in. (“Lou gave her one of her hugs and kisses. It was just like eating a new doughnut while you put your face in sweet peas.”) The portrait she paints of the family is vivid and true-to-life, every single sibling relationship with a color and tone all its own, and despite the chaos—and the shock at how very different parenting was in this country a hundred years ago—you come to like them all very much. But especially Edie.

Now, the subject matter and writing style of Terrible, Horrible Edie were a little advanced for my five-year-old at present—he could follow it, but the story wasn’t immediately grabbing him the way it did me, and I ended up finishing the book on my own. But I think he’ll be ready for it—and love it—within a few years. And for those of you with kids, especially daughters, around Edie’s age, say 7 to 12...well, this is the perfect book to read with them this summer. On vacation, of course!

[Image courtesy of New York Review Children’s Collection.]

New Books: Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl

Daniel Pinkwater has been writing children’s books for a long time. Long enough, in fact, that I remember reading some of them back in grade school. I recall really enjoying them, but he’s written so many—and was so prolific even back then—that I can’t figure out exactly which ones they were among the titles in his “works by” lists. (This is driving me nuts, to the point where I’ll probably soon be sighted in my local library sitting in the children’s section, leafing through multiple Pinkwater volumes.) Still, the author’s name summons a vague memory of cleverly offbeat writing.

Now, I was aware that Pinkwater, who’s also now known for his appearances reviewing children’s books on NPR, was still as prolific as ever, but I hadn’t kept up with his work of the last, oh, twenty years, not having had kids of the age to appreciate them until quite recently. (His chapter books seem to be generally labeled as for ages nine to twelve, though as always with such recommendations, that seems a little high on the low end to me. Come to think of it, it might be a little low on the high end, too, in his case.)

Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl, his latest, is a spun off of two other recent Pinkwater novels, The Neddiad and The Yggysey (get it?); its main character, Big Audrey, was a supporting one in those two. But being unfamiliar with the previous books, as I am, isn’t a problem—the novel stands on its own. It’s narrated in the first person by Audrey herself—who, yes, has cat whiskers. Right off the bat, she informs the reader that she’s from another plane of existence—though, as we later discover, that’s not actually the explanation for the cat whiskers. (At this point, it all started to come back to me: One of the delights of Pinkwater’s writing is that the many, many unusual things that happen in it are treated matter-of-factly. They just are.)

Audrey begins the story in our plane of existence (well, Los Angeles, so kinda), having accompanied the heroes of the earlier books on their return from hers. She is working at a doughnut shop (about which she remarks, “Doughnuts are not unknown where I come from, but they are not used as food”), but decides her destiny lies elsewhere and heads east to Poughkeepsie, New York. There she finds work in a UFO-themed bookstore, whose owners instantly and happily convince themselves that her whiskered appearance mean she’s an extraterrestrial. (Audrey is too polite to disenchant them of their delight over this.)

She soon finds some new friends, both of whom are temporary residents of the local old-fashioned insane asylum: an extremely eccentric Vassar professor and a girl from the surrounding foothills who can read minds. Neither is really all that crazy, so when rumors about an old Dutch house in the area and flying saucers start to intersect with Audrey’s own hazy memories of her origins, they check themselves out to help her investigate.

I could go on—the story continues to calmly unfold along equally outlandish lines—but you get the point: This is strange stuff. And not that forced kind of strange one finds in many studiously offbeat kids’ books—the oddness just flows naturally, and each wild turn comes with a twinkle, the author’s winks at the reader. Pinkwater also folds sly references into the narrative—for instance, the characters have a brief discussion about whether bats eat cats or the other way around, which will strike a chord with fans of Lewis Carroll. (The best thing about this one was that while it was subtly done, it wasn’t one of those just-for-the-parents shout-outs—Dash, who’s been reading Alice in Wonderland recently, noticed the nod to Carroll immediately, maybe before I did.)

And Pinkwater writes masterfully. You always feel you’re in good hands as you take the ride with him—you may raise your eyebrows a lot, but he keeps you turning the pages to see what’s going to happen next. He’s funny, too, in a remarkably dry way; I had a bemused, ready-for-anything smile on my face all the way through the 288-page book. (If you happen to be reading it aloud to someone, you may even require brief pauses from time to time to regain your composure.)

Now, I suspect this kind of writing, as top-notch as it is, isn’t for everyone, child and parent alike. (I’m not sure what the bellwether would be for kids, but if you’re a parent who hates the early novels of Paul Auster, say, that might be a sign Pinkwater’s not for you.) But if you and your kids enjoy random, imaginative, and definitely weird plotlines, laced through with intelligent wit, I think you’ll find Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl, as well as the rest of this author’s voluminous oeuvre, a gold mine.

[Image courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.]