My reserves are coming in oddly – I expected the children’s books to come in more quickly but I should have known better. Children’s books have a way of disappearing and being returned late. That means doubling up on reviews makes for a wee bit of oddness.
Me…Jane is a very pretty book. The paper feels nice. There’s some texture to it that gives the pictures that little something they need. I started out bored, a little girl and her stuffed animal. A little girl that we are obviously supposed to find fascinating and inspiring but it felt a little forced, to me. And when the little girl reads a book about a girl named Jane who lived with a monkey, I kind of rolled my eyes. Embarrassing since it turns out the book is about a young Jane Goodall. That made the book a whole lot better. Had I known that from the start, there would have been no eyerolling or forced feeling. It made sense once I got to the end. I read it again and smiled all the way through.
On the otherhand, Anya’s Ghost is not a children’s picture book. Anya smokes for goodness sakes! (lol) She’s also a very annoying teen girl who falls into a well and winds up with a ghost as a friend. A not very nice ghost. She’s also the daughter of a Russian immigrant who’s trying very hard to be American (and succeeding in all of the annoying ways.) Where is her father, I was fascinated by her mom telling her that she uses her child support to send her to this private school, (which isn’t a great private school but the best she could afford.) This is another book with great paper, (there’s nothing worse than bad paper), and a nice cover. The illustrations are all black and white and in a couple of cases, a little hard to read but not bad. The ending was a little forced, I think we needed another half dozen panels to wrap it up.