Children’s Literature

We Dine With Cannibals

2012, Books in Bed, Children's Literature /

I didn’t think I was going to enjoy We Dine With Cannibals. It looked really, really young and then I realized it was from a series – I series I had never read. And I hate reading books in a series out of order. But… I enjoyed it. The twins are normal kids who don’t want to travel all over the world or have wild adventures. They just want to stay home and watch TV and eat snack cakes. Oh how I laughed. And it was a theme that just never got old for me, in this book.

I do wish I’d read the book that came before it though. That would have made it even better for me.

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Ghetto Cowboy

2012, Audiobooks, Books in Bed, Children's Literature, Cybil Challenge, Favorites, Fiction /

This has been an awesome year for middle grade lit on audio. First, there was A Monster Calls, which I will never ever forget. Now, I’ve got Ghetto Cowboy and I’m almost glad Michelle has decided to move to Philadelphia because how cool is Philly with their Urban Cowboys and their horses? Because while this was fiction, Philly really does have urban cowboys and they really do  help keep poor black kids off of the streets by getting them involved with horses.   Learn a bit about Philadelphia’s urban riding program and then read/listen to Ghetto Cowboy. You won’t regret it – until the story ends and you want more.

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Two Cybils

2012, Books in Bed, Children's Literature, Comics & Graphic Novels, Cybil Challenge /

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.

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Do the Math: Secrets, Lies and Algebra

2012, Books in Bed, Children's Literature, Favorites, Fiction /

The little spinny thing on my library website strikes again. Do the Math: Secrets, Lies and Algebra sounded cute so I reserved it. And it was cute. Super fast read with an awesome eight grade girl who thinks about pretty much everything in math terms, theories, and problems. And she doesn’t do it in a way that causes me to roll my eyes. Even though my TBR list is long this year, I’m very tempted to reserve the next book to find out what happens next. That Richard needs someone to teach him a lesson… just sayin’… And, I don’t care what the police decided – I think Rob was more involved than we will ever know.

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2 Cybils Picture Books

2012, Books in Bed, Children's Literature, Cybil Challenge, Fiction /

The Princess and the Pig was kind of cute –I liked the “It happens that way in books” refrain throughout the story. Very cute, though the youngest of children may not get it if they haven’t been exposed to all of the traditional fairy tales.  I was pretty troubled by the queen dropping her baby out the window and not realizing it – I mean, I know queens are dumb but that was pretty bad. Sheesh.

I wasn’t sure I’d like Do You Know Which Ones Will Grow but the illustrations and the foldouts really worked.  I would add this one to Johnny Mac Pippins reading list. Definitely.

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Press Here

1 Comment / 2012, Books in Bed, Children's Literature, Cybil Challenge, Fiction /

Funny. I was going to hold off blogging about Press Here because I didn’t have a lot to say – mostly because I couldn’t decide whether I loved it or thought it was stupid. I figured I’d toss it off to Elly (she’s 13) and see what she thought.

She loved it. She did it all. Every single thing. And she said “IT WAS AWESOME, BEST BOOK EVER.”

And still I wasn’t going to blog it yet because, well, I figured it was just a weird Elly thing and maybe the book is stupid.

But just now, RJ, (who is 16, remember), came down to wait for her papers to finish printing and she picked the book up. RJ does not generally give two glances to the children’s books I check out at the library but I sat here and watched her go all the way through it – doing every single thing the book said to do. And as she was doing this, TW walked in and said, “you’re doing it wrong, you have to press down all of the dots at once…”

I looked at her in surprise. TW belittles my reading of children’s picture books ALL. OF. THE. TIME. And yet she had picked that one up, without me mentioning it to her – and she too, went all the way through the book and just said, (sheepishly), it’s kind of cool.

So. I guess it’s not stupid?

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2 Children’s Picture Books from the Cybils Shortlist

2012, Books in Bed, Children's Literature, Cybil Challenge, Favorites /

Guess what – I liked them both. One took me by surprise because I started out bored, the second I enjoyed all the way through.

I Want My Hat Back, started slowly for me and I was bored. One of those books where an animal asks a different animal on each page for his hat (we’ve seen this format a zillion times) what we haven’t seen is how the animal whose hat was lost gets his hat back. I won’t spoil it for you but…. I LOVED IT. Some of y’all won’t love it because you won’t want to have to explain what happened to your small children. I, on the otherhand, found it to be refreshing and will be buying this one for Johnny Mac Pippin.

I Had a Favorite Dress was adorable. A little girl whose mom found a way to tweak the girl’s favorite dress each time she grew. Fabulous. Adorable. Great artwork.

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The Magician’s Elephant

2012, Books in Bed, Children's Literature, Sci Fi and Fantasy /

I found The Magician’s Elephant on my library website – in that carousel of recently reviewed books that shows up before you log into your account. I’m a sucker for elephants, even more so now that my elephant loving child is pregnant, so I reserved it without even knowing what it was. (I didn’t even notice the author was Kim DiCamillo – Tale of Desperaux and Because of Winn Dixie.)

Turns out it’s a middle grade science fiction book about… an elephant, a magician’s elephant that causes all sorts of things to happen and leads everyone to a happily ever after ending.

The book is a wee bit dark and some 10 year olds may not like it for that reason. Oddly enough, I wondered about what kind of movie it might make and what do I find when I take a peek at the Amazon reviews… it’s going to be a movie. (Maybe. There’s no release date and the only news I’ve found indicated someone was hired to write a script based on the book, and that happened 3 years ago. So. There we go. Maybe a movie? Maybe not.)

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Addie on the Inside

2012, Books in Bed, Children's Literature, Favorites, Fiction, Queer, Young Adult /

I almost didn’t read Addie on the Inside because I didn’t love The Misfits enough to really want to read any more of Howe’s books in the series. But, then again, Addie is a good strong female character so… I figured what the heck. And, I think it’s No Name Calling Week, or will be next week? Right, next week, Timely.

And now I’m glad I read it.

Told in verse – nicely done verse – it’s a super fast read and a bit of a page turner, too.

All of the normal stuff. Middle school sucks. Bullies suck. And sometimes bullies are bullies because they’re trying to survive their own kind of hell. Being queer in middle school sucks. Trying to start a Day of Silence program in middle school sucks. Dealing with annoying teachers in middle school sucks. Dealing with race issues sucks. Heck, everything about middle school pretty much sucks. Addie knows all of this but that doesn’t really make it any easier to deal with the middle school suckage (or suckers, for that matter.)

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