New Books: Super Grammar

Okay, before I start, full disclosure: I make my living largely as a copy editor. And I've occasionally been accused by certain close friends and family members of being a bit, shall we say, overzealous when it comes to enforcing proper grammar. (I will spare you my thoughts on gerunds here, however. You're grateful, trust me.)

That said, even my wife—who may or may not be one of the family members mentioned above—has been disturbed at the rumors that English grammar is no longer taught in any structured manner in many or most grade schools. Our oldest is only in second grade this year, which as far as I can recall would be kinda early for discussions of dangling participles anyway, so I'm not really sure how true that rumor is. (The limited investigation I've done leads me to think there's at least something to it.)

Either way, given that Dash is a fairly advanced reader for his age, and given my profession, I had been vaguely wishing there might be a way of giving him an understanding of the basic building blocks of sentence structure and the like. Ideally, one that didn't involve my teaching him on weekends out of old, dry grammar textbooks from the 1980s. (That would not go well, I fear.)

So when I first laid eyes on Tony Preciado and Rhode Montijo's Super Grammar, a comic-book approach to basic grammar, I had high hopes. Which I then immediately tempered. After all, most attempts at making potentially dull subjects "fun," I have found, fail by leaning too far one way or the other: They're either so concerned with getting the educational points across that they aren't much fun at all, or they're lots of fun...without any real educational takeaway to speak of.

Still, I figured, leafing through the pages about superheroes (like The Proper Noun and The Preposition) and supervillains (like Comma Splice and The Fragment), it was worth a shot.
And turns out: Preciado and Montijo got the balance exactly right, at least for our kid. Dash is very much into graphic novels and comic books of all kinds nowadays (he's even starting to create his own), so Super Grammar was right in his wheelhouse thematically from the start. He saw it, picked it up, and consumed it in a day, without any exhortation from any pesky adults.

Now, Super Grammar is by no means the most complex of comics—there's no narrative as such, just a series of introductions of the "characters" and examples of their exploits (each of which serves as a grammatical example). The illustrations themselves are what I'd term "classic comic-book style," quite well executed but nothing fancy or especially artsy, either.

But the combination gets the job done marvelously. Dash liked Super Grammar so much from the get-go that it's become one of what I call his "lingering" books—it stays out on his desk or nightstand so he can read it again, and again (and again), over a period of weeks. It's even accompanied us on a couple of trips already.

And the book does have educational impact, it would appear—Dash appears to have a better conception of what an action verb is, or what purpose a pronoun serves, than he did before, and we've noticed his use of punctuation in particular improving since the book arrived in our home.

So while I don't expect that Super Grammar will—or should!—be the end of his education on the subject (one way or another), it's serving exactly the role I'd hoped it might: an easy, low-effort primer on the basics of grammar. And that—well, that's a pretty heroic accomplishment.

[Cover image courtesy of Scholastic]

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2011 Wrap: Books, Part II (Graphic Novels & Comic Books)

My seven-year-old, Dash, spent a little less of his time reading graphic novels in 2011 than he had in 2010 (and a little more trying to create his own, thrillingly enough—more on that another time). But a few of them made enough of an impression to reach the top of his, and therefore this, list.

It's no surprise that George O'Connor's Hera was first on the list; the initial book in his wonderful Olympians series of graphic novels was the subject of this blog's very first post ever. Even with our expectations sky-high for volume three, O'Connor managed to surpass them, taking a challenging and difficult mythological character and finding a way to spin her sympathetically. Like the first two volumes, Zeus and Athena, these get read over and over and over again. We're both really looking forward to seeing what he'll do with Hades, which comes out later this month.

Dash's other favorite this year was a rare nonfiction graphic novel: Matt Phelan's Around the World, which tells the tales of three amazing 19th-century solo circumnavigations. I think the biggest challenge for Dash is differentiating it from the fiction—sometimes it's hard to believe that Nellie Bly, Thomas Stevens, and especially Joshua Slocum really, truly made these journeys. Regardless, Phelan makes it all a vivid, unforgettable read.

But there's a third graphic novel, sort of, that I neglected to mention on the blog this year, though I meant to, and even thought I had. (That's kind of indicative of what 2011 was like overall, I'm afraid.) Nursery Rhyme Comics: 50 Timeless Rhymes from 50 Celebrated Cartoonists seems topical only for younger kids, by nature of its text. But its appeal is much broader, in fact, because each of these rhymes (some classic, some obscure) is illustrated—and really, more than that, its story told—by a different prominent artist, from Jules Feiffer ("Girls and Boys Come Out to Play") to the aforementioned George O'Connor ("For Want of a Nail") to David Macaulay ("London Bridge Is Falling Down," appropriately enough) to Gahan Wilson ("Itsy Bitsy Spider," again appropriately, and not so itsy bitsy) to Roz Chast ("There Was a Crooked Man"). Needless to say, the artists' takes on their respective rhymes are endlessly imaginative, and the book as a whole serves as a great example of how stories can be interpreted in an infinite number of ways. It's also a treasure as a sampler of so many of today's best active cartoonists, and neither Dash nor my three-year-old can get enough of it.

Next wrap post: Our family's favorite chapter books of the year.

[Cover image courtesy of First Second Books]

New(ish) Books: Hera: The Goddess and Her Glory

I wrote my very first post on this blog about the first two volumes in George O'Connor's Olympians series of graphic novels about the ancient Greek gods, so I'm a little ashmaed that it took me this long to get around to the third installment. (I mean, the fourth is just around the corner.) I spent much of that previous post marveling over O'Connor's ability to create compelling, action-packed, illustration-driven narratives while remaining remarkably true to both the letter and the tone of the ancient mythology. And if anything, he trumps himself in Hera: The Goddess and Her Glory.

As the author points out himself in the book's end notes, the queen of Olympus is a tricky subject, portrayed in most of the best-known myths as a shrewish wife and a vindictive punisher of both the various mortal women who are seduced by her husband, Zeus, and their progeny by him. Yet O'Connor has found a way to add a feminist slant to Hera's story—one that doesn't feel the least bit forced—by smartly mining some of the lesser-known variants on these stories, particularly the ones surrounding Herakles. (His very name—which translates as "the glory of Hera"—gives an author a lot to work with, and as his subtitle indicates, O'Connor doesn't disappoint.). This may be the former classics major in me speaking here, but I'm blown away by the extent of the author's research, and even more by what he's able to do with it.

Mind you, Hera is also every bit the engrossing page-turner that O'Connor's previous two Olympians books were; our six-year-old was difficult to separate from Zeus: King of the Gods and Athena: Grey-Eyed Goddess for the better part of a year, and this situation looks no different. (If anyone doubts my word, here's some direct-source backup for Hera's immense kid appeal.) All the Olympians books are in classic comic-book style (by which I mean the comic-book style of my childhood, naturally!), and it once again suits these tales perfectly. While I believe I have seen the labors-of-Herakles/Hercules stories executed in a comic-book format before somewhere or other before, the difference here is that O'Connor's is a really good graphic novel, one you—I mean, a kid—can read happily alongside the top entries in the genre. There's a reason these myths have had such staying power through the millennia—and O'Connor has captured it in these pages.

Can't wait for Hades....

P.S.: I just discovered that O'Connor also has a truly awesome Olympians website as well, with background on the mythology and the cast of characters, activities for kids, even resources for teachers! It will clearly be a challenge to keep Dash off the computer this month.

[Cover image courtesy of First Second Books.]

Old School: Tintin

I remember when a friend introduced me to the world of Tintin. I can't remember exactly how old I was, probably about seven or eight, and he brought out what looked like comic books...but they were bound, and different from American superhero ones. (Basically these were my first graphic novels, though that term wasn't yet in use, and seems rarely applied to bound Europeans series like Tintin and Asterix anyway.)

I was blown away by the adventures, the humor, and the storytelling, and I also recall being a bit hypnotized by the exoticism—these were from Europe, and at the time were a little hard to find in U.S. stores. (Well, only a few stores carried them, at any rate.) I tore through them, as many of my schoolmates did the same, and there was a little competition among us to grab copies of the ones we hadn't read yet from the school library.

In the last year or so, our six-year-old has been pulling down the three or four Tintin books I still have, and so I've been rediscovering them as he discovers them for the first time. As many parents have noted through the years, they are of their times (the Belgian writer-illustrator Hergé created the bulk of his oeuvre between 1930 and 1950) in ways both good and bad. The bad causes occasional generational hubbub—I vaguely remember one from when I was a kid, and recently there was a controversy at the Brooklyn Public Library that put one early Tintin book in a locked room.

Yes, there is some offensive stuff in the Tintin books. Most of it involves a general (and typical of much European pop culture of the time, as anyone who's read Agatha Christie novels knows) patronizing attitude toward nonwhite peoples of the globe. Tintin is almost invariably defending these peoples against violently racist and venal Europeans who want to abuse/enslave/exploit the hapless third-worlders, but there is unquestionably an offputting sense of innocent, simple races that must be protected and treated kindly by their European betters. In a few of the books, Herge goes beyond this into awful stereotype. (His portrayal of a group of Africans whom Tintin rescues from being enslaved by the bad guys in The Red Sea Sharks comes to mind, in how he makes them both appear and speak).

This is a bit uncomfortable, and difficult to explain to a young child—but I also think the all-too-recent past of open racism is a subject they're going to encounter sooner or later, especially in classic literature, film, or television from the period. Tintin books are as good a way to confront it as any. Better, even, since Herge's plots often use real history as their backdrop—The Blue Lotus, for instance, is explicit about (and extremely critical of) Japan's move to dominate China in the 1930s. His drawings of Asians use upsetting stereotypes, and his "the Japanese are bad; the Chinese are good" message is obviously simplistic, but he does make the Japansese characters bad mainly because they demonstrably do bad things, not simply because they're Japanese.

But none of this is the reason you'll want to read Tintin with your kids. It's because these are some of the seminal Western adventure stories, drawing on a prior generation of European thrillers and unquestionably influencing those that followed. (Reading the Scotland-set The Black Island with Dash, I couldn't help noticing how many of the story elements turn up in Hitchcock films—for instance, there's a scene in which a biplane dives to attack Tintin on the ground, just like the famous one that chases Cary Grant in North by Northwest, which was filmed some years later.) The stories are riveting, true page-turners; the characters broad but unforgettable, and quickly beloved to kids and adults alike, from the plucky hero himself to his blustery sidekick Captain Haddock to the brilliant but absent-minded Professor Calculus to the bumbling near-twin detectives Thompson and Thomson. I sense Dash is on the cusp of flying through the entire series just as I did more than 30 years ago. And I can't wait myself.

I should add that there's one more reason to be excited about Tintin right now: Steven Spielberg's 3-D animation Tintin movie is scheduled to arrive in theaters next December. Based on The Secret of the Unicorn and featuring a voice cast that includes Andy Serkis (Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies) as Captain Haddock, Daniel Craig as villain Red Rackham, and Jamie Bell (Billy Elliott) as Tintin himself, it would seem to have a good shot at doing the books justice. You can bet we'll be there.

[Image: Courtesy of Little, Brown]

New Books: The Olympians

Greek myths were my fairy tales when I was young. I remember loving that the stories always seemed to have some kind of twist to them: the hero wasn’t always heroic, and even the gods themselves were often petty, jealous, and downright mean. The deities may have been nearly omnipotent, but they were also developed characters, and that always made for good stories.

So of course, I was eager to introduce these tales, which are getting a lot more play among kids these days anyway, to my son Dash, 5. We started with the classic D’Aulaires book, and he took immediately to the adventure stories: golden fleece, gorgon’s head, flying horse. Still, the D’Aulaires’ writing style often shows signs of the book’s age—for adventure tales, it can be a little dry. Yet there didn’t seem to be much else on this subject for a kid Dash’s age.

Enter graphic-novel artist and writer George O’Connor, who has created a series of comic books about the Olympian gods, published by First Second Books—the first two, Zeus: King of the Gods and Athena: Grey-Eyed Goddess are already out. Now, I love comics as only someone who wasn’t allowed to have them as a child can, but I’ll admit to some initial skepticism: Marvel Comics delved into mythology long ago, and while the results often stood well enough on their own,  I wouldn’t use them to introduce anyone to the basics of Norse mythology.

But O’Connor has been rigorously faithful to the original myths—he even cites his sources (the big boys: Hesiod, Ovid, etc.), alongside suggestions for further reading in the back. His interpretations are vivid, absolutely gorgeous, and often revelatory. For instance, the Greek creation myths—Gaea and Uranus and the Titans and all that—can be murky stuff; I recall skipping over a lot of them as a kid to get to the juicier Olympian gods. But O’Connor begins his Zeus book at, well, the beginning, and then produces both the clearest and most beautiful portrayal of the pre-Olympians I’ve ever read or seen. 

And if he indulges in a little “teen Zeus” melodrama at times, well, what’s wrong with that? The Olympians spent a decent amount of their time acting like teenagers, frankly. (Fair warning: There is a bit of violence to these myths, and while O’Connor is never graphic in his portrayals, he doesn’t omit it entirely. Didn't bother me, but some might object.)

Of course, none of that would matter if the books didn’t play to kids. But Dash, who reads the D’Aulaires' book with calm interest, was over the moon at his first sight of Zeus--his eyes lit up, and he tore into it immediately. Both graphic novels have had great staying power, too, making repeated appearances at both bedtime and in his solo reading.

O'Connor has created a fantastic, and much-needed, addition to the Greek-myths-for-children genre. Dash can’t wait for his next entry (Hera—oooh!), and honestly, neither can I.

[Photos: Whitney Webster]