Cybil Challenge

Four Graphic Novels

2015, Books in Bed, Children's Literature, Comics & Graphic Novels, Cybil Challenge, Don't Read This, Favorites /

I’m only about a month late but I’ve started the whole Cybils shortlist thing and am slowly making a dent in the list. Graphic novels were a good way to dive in.

El Deafo was excellent. Really. I wasn’t sure I was going to like it — so much hype around it! But, it was well deserved hype.

Bad Machinery: The Case of the Good Boy, sigh. I just don’t like Bad Machinery. I don’t get why everyone else does. This one was better than the last one I read (or tried to read) but I had to force myself to get through this one, too. If it makes the Cybils next year, I’m just not going to read it. Blah.

Gaijin: American Prisoner of War — I liked it. The art was excellent.

Bird & Squirrel on Ice was super cute. I particularly like Sakari and her role in the story.

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The Boys of Blur

2015, Books in Bed, Cybil Challenge, Fiction, Sci Fi and Fantasy, Young Adult /

First… OMG I read a book. A real live book with pages and stuff! Yippee! It had been so long, I wasn’t sure I actually liked reading anymore. (Kidding. Mostly.)

Anyway, Boys of Blur is from the Cybils shortlist and it was good. Also creepy, as books set in the swamps of Florida can often be. It was a quick read and exactly right for my still not quite back from vacation/caught up at work attention span.

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Cybils Shortlist Challenge for 2014

2015, Books in Bed, Cybil Challenge /

I’ve been reloading the Cybils blog for HOURS waiting for the list to appear and now the wait is over. Here are the finalists and I’m off to reserve a few at the library right now.

Easy Readers
– Clara and Clem Under the Sea
– Extraordinary Warren: Super Chicken
– Inch and Roly and the Sunny Day Scare
– My New Friend Is So Fun!
– Okay, Andy!
– Pigsticks and Harold and the Incredible Journey
– The Ice Cream Shop (Scholastic Reader Level 1)

Early Chapters
– Dory Fantasmagory
– Like Carrot Juice on a Cupcake
– Lulu and the Rabbit Next Door
– Lulu’s Mysterious Mission
– The Chicken Squad: The First Misadventure
– The Lion Who Stole My Arm
– Violet Mackerel’s Possible Friend

Fiction Picture Books
– Brimsby’s Hats
– Here Comes the Easter Cat
– Knock, Knock: My Dad’s Dream for Me
– Maple
– Shhhh! We Have a Plan
– This is a Moose

Graphic Novels for Early & Middle Grades
– Bad Machinery: The Case of the Good Boy
– Bird and Squirrel on Ice
– El Deafo
– Gaijin: American Prisoner of War
– Hidden: A Child’s Story of the Holocaust
– The Dumbest Idea Ever
– Ballad

Graphic Novels for Young Adults
– In Real Life
– Strange Fruit (Volume 1)
– The Harlem Hellfighters
– The Shadow Hero
– Through the Woods
– To This Day: For the Bullied and the Beautiful

Middle Grade Fiction
– Abby Spencer Goes to Bollywood
– All Four Stars
– Death By Toilet Paper
– Ice Dogs
– Nickel Bay Nick
– The Crossover
– The Meaning of Maggie

Non-Fiction for Early & Middle Grades
– Chasing Cheetahs
– Handle with Care: An Unusual Butterfly Journey
– The Case of the Vanishing Little Brown Bats
– Alice + Freda Forever
– Be A Changemaker
– Beyond Magenta
– Popular: Vintage Wisdom for a Modern Geek
– The Family Romanov
– The Freedom Summer Murders
– The Port Chicago 50

Poetry
– Brown Girl Dreaming
– Dear Wandering Wildebeest and Other Poems From the Water Hole
– Firefly July
– Hi, Koo!: A Year of Seasons
– Santa Clauses
– Voices From the March on Washington
– Water Rolls, Water Rises Water Rolls, Water Rises

Speculative Fiction for Early & Middle Grades
– Boys of Blur
– Greenglass House
– Nuts to You
– The Castle Behind Thorns
– The Jupiter Pirates: The Hunt for Hydra
– The Luck Uglies
– The Swallow

Speculative Fiction for Young Adults
– Death Sworn
– Glory O’Brien’s History of the Future
– Noggin
– Salvage
– The Living
– The Winners Curse
– While We Run

Young Adult Fiction
– Gabi, A Girl In Pieces
– Girls Like Us
– I’ll Give You The Sun
– Pointe
– When I Was The Greatest

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7 Non-Fiction Children’s Books from the Cybils

2014, Books in Bed, Children's Literature, Cybil Challenge, Favorites, Non-Fiction /

I think this means I’ve wrapped up my Cybils shortlist challenge but I should double check…

Locomotive was pretty good. Not great but not bad. Lots of technical info about steam engines.

Look Up! Backyard Bird Watching In Your Own Backyard was awesome. I loved it.

How Big Were Dinosaurs was a little boring — I’ve read quite a few that are better than this one.

Barbed Wire Baseball was excellent. Interesting person that a lot of kids will never have heard of. Nice illustrations.

Volcano Rising was ok, not great. Unless you have a kid really into volcanoes or a kid who has never thought about volcanoes at all.

The Boy Who Loved Math was pretty good, though oddly enough I felt like I’d already read it. Which is weird but there you go. Is there another children’s book about Paul Erdos? That would seem odd but of course it must be possible. The whole Paul didn’t know how to take care of himself and everyone helped him — that part, seemed awfully familiar. Even the illustrations of him trying to butter bread — very familiar. Anyway — it was good. I liked it.

Anubis Speaks was… I’m torn. I was bored, which is saying something since the stories shouldn’t have been boring. I think this one could have been better. Should have been better. It just wasn’t and I wanted it to be.

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Two Audio Books — Sort Of

2014, Audiobooks, Books in Bed, Cybil Challenge, Fiction, Sci Fi and Fantasy /

We listened to Jodi Picoult’s Leaving Time on our trip to/from Oberlin and finally finished it up a couple of days ago. This book was a hot mess, which you would expect because it’s a Jodi Picoult book. But, it might be the biggest hot mess of all of her hot messes. I figured out the big issue long before it actually happened and… oh boy. The look on TW’s face when it happened. Hahahahaha. She might kill me if I ever force her to listen to another Jodi Picoult novel. hahaha. And that’s all I’m gonna say about this one because I don’t want to ruin it (hahaha) for Picoult fans.

When we headed to Oberlin, I made sure another audiobook was in the car, in case Leaving Time was short and we needed another audio book… TW took one look at that and said, “You’re kidding me. Are you trying to punish me? First Picoult, then this?” I laughed and said “What? It’s a Cybils book. It sounds like fun!” And then she put the first disc in and my head almost exploded. I couldn’t handle more than the intro before I told her to turn it off. I returned it.

I don’t think I’ve ever NOT finished a book from the Cybils shortlist before. So this is a first for me. I feel a little bad about that — but not bad enough to sit through William Shakespear’s Star Wars. I’m sure it’s fabulous, if you like that sort of thing. I absolutely do not and I am NOT even gonna pretend.

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Prisoner B-3087

2014, Books in Bed, Children's Literature, Cybil Challenge, Fiction /

Prisoner B-3087 wasn’t a bad book, it also wasn’t a great book. It covered too much ground, far too quickly – Jack Gruener’s story is amazing and hard to convey in a short middle grade fiction novel.

It was hard to feel a bond with Yanek though of course you feel all of the horror that comes with a story about a Jewish child in the Holocaust. I get it though, Yanek’s story is complex, really complex. Done properly, it would probably be a 3 book series so I see why the author took the course he did. It just made this book not great and only good. Hopefully kids who read this will go look for more information about Gruener.

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Pantomine

2014, Books in Bed, Cybil Challenge, Queer, Sci Fi and Fantasy, Young Adult /

Another Cybils shortlist book, Pantomine was… slow. It’s also trying to do a lot of things (slowly) and not necessarily succeeding with any of them.

I didn’t dislike the characters. The intersex/Kedi idea is interesting. The weird glass things are interesting but we didn’t get enough information about the world they’re living in to really understand why they were interesting, which made Micah/Gene’s connection to them less interesting than it might otherwise be. It’s ok to keep some of the story back, but giving us just a little bit more about why we should care, well, that would have been good.

I’m not sure I’ll read the next book, we’ll see.

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The Summer Prince

2014, Books in Bed, Cybil Challenge, Sci Fi and Fantasy, Young Adult /

The Summer Prince is from the Cybils shortlist. If it hadn’t been, I’d have never read it. I am not usually a fan of the summer prince storyline. I just… no. I don’t generally like the characters and I don’t particularly like this particular myth and books that use it tend to leave me cold.

This one… wasn’t bad. It was certainly better than others I’ve read, though I saw the ending coming from about 100 pages away.

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Two Audio Books

2014, Audiobooks, Books in Bed, Cybil Challenge, Sci Fi and Fantasy, Young Adult /

The second book in the His Fair Assassin series was on the Cybils shortlist but I hadn’t read the first book. So, I grabbed it on audio and we listened to it last month.

We enjoyed Grave Mercy. It’s definitely a YA book — there’s a lot of flowery lovey-dovey stuff that makes me and TW roll our eyes but we definitely liked it.

The second book, Dark Triumph, oh boy. Sybella is a hot mess. Horrible horrible descriptions of horrible horrible acts – killing babies, creepy brother/sister sex stuff. A whole lot of violence. Then, of course, there’s a lot of flowery lovey-dovey stuff which makes me and TW roll our eyes, particularly after we’ve just heard some really disgusting stuff about dead babies and gah. It was good. We liked it. We just needed strong stomachs to get through it.

I need a bit of a break from the series before I can bring myself to listen to the third book. Maybe in the spring? lol

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Shadows

2014, Books in Bed, Cybil Challenge, Sci Fi and Fantasy, Young Adult /

Oh look, another Cybils book that I wanted to love but couldn’t. Shadows turned out to be perfectly fine but not great. I don’t generally mind made up words or ordinary words turned into slang words but in this case — it was a struggle from beginning to end. Too much of it, not enough context and to make matters worse, there were Japanese words thrown in for fun. The struggle was real. Very real.

We also spent a whole lot of the beginning of the book listening to Maggie rant about her step-father and that took way too much time and used far too many made up/slang/Japanese words.

Once the story got beyond the hatred of Val the step-father, it was better. The author does a fabulous job with animals (the kind we know and the gruaa kind that we didn’t) and the use of origami throughout the book was fantastic. These last two things make the book worth reading. Mostly.

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