literature-for-children

"Itamar Makes Friends" by Josh Hasten

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 17:02:29 +0100

This picture book, "Itamar Makes Friends: A Children's Story of Jewish Brotherhood" by Josh Hasten and Illustrated by S. Kim Glassman, is innocuous enough, but I wish it had attempted more. The protagonist, Itamar, is an eight-year-old Israeli, who lives in the country. When he goes to visit his cousins in the city, he has an unpleasant encounter with some city boys, who refuse to return his soccer ball. After Itamar falls and hurts his knee, one of the city boys, Eitan, remembers a time when he hurt himself playing soccer and tries to correct the situation by helping Itamar and apologizing. Itamar then invites the group to visit him in the country. They come, all have a great time, and "Jewish brotherhood" is restored.

I was mostly bothered by the facile solution to the bullying stage of the story. While one would like to believe that children would apologize and make everything okay, I found it to be just too pat an answer. But for young children, this story could be a way to illustrate how to empathize and apologize to another after being unkind.

I received a copy of this book courtesy of the publisher through LibraryThing.

Rosemary Well's On the Blue Comet

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 17:42:31 +0100

I'm going to start with a disclaimer: Rosemary Well's On the Blue Comet is exactly the kind of book I loved as a child. It reminds of some of my favorites by Zilpha Keatley Snyder, which had an enchanting blend of realism and whimsy. But I also think that much about the book would be hard for modern children to understand.

Our protagonist, Oscar Ogilvie Junior, is obsessed by the world of Lionel trains. Set at the beginnings of the Great Depression, the book shows just how quickly a comfortable life in Cairo, Illinois, can go wrong. Oscar's father loses both his job and their house and has to sell their train collection. Then, Oscar is forced to live with his exceedingly prim aunt and his obnoxious cousin while his father goes to California to look for work. Oscar makes friends with Mr. Applegate, a kind man who helps him understand his math assignments and who introduces him to Einstein's theories of time and space. Up until about page 100, this book reads just like a historical novel.

But then the magical begins to happen. During a traumatic incident, Oscar is mysteriously transported into the train display, on his way to California to join his father. He meets Dutch (who probably only the adults will recognize as Ronald Reagan). Dutch helps him reach his father by phone, but leaves Oscar at the station alone. Somehow, when Oscar goes out to meet his father, he ages 10 years in the process.

The mysteries continue through Oscar meeting Alfred Hitchcock and his mysterious Chinese housekeeper to him traveling yet again as an 11-year-old on a train to find Claire, a girl from pre-Crash New York City. When he leaves the train with Claire in New York, he reverts to the age he was in that year--5 years old. Eventually Claire helps get Oscar home to his own time, with the ends of the story getting tied up.

Is the time travel believable? Well, that depends. I'm sure that if I had read this book when I was a kid, I would have had no problem with it. As an adult, I find it a tad less easy to suspend disbelief. :-) Children might have difficulty understanding why trains were so entrancing to Oscar, for one thing. Yet readers could learn a great deal about the early years of the Depression if they got some additional explanation. Plus, many of the issues ring true: for example, students could begin to see how the choices people make can shape how things turn out This book isn't a typical sci-fi novel, nor is it a typical historical novel. All of us probably know students who could benefit from stretching their appreciations of genres, and this book might be a good one to open them up to other possibilities.

Ubiquitous: Celebrating Nature's Survivors by Joyce Sidman and illustrated by Beckie Prange

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 18:25:39 +0100

Ubiquitous: Celebrating Nature's Survivors by Joyce Sidman and illustrated by Beckie Prange is quite engaging and difficult to categorize. Or, perhaps, this book is engaging BECAUSE it is hard to categorize. Whatever it is, I like it.

Sidman's poems laud the thriving world of "survivors" that populate the world. Ranging from the microscopic bacteria and diatoms to the larger sharks, from plants and animals as well as humans, these poems and the accompanying non-fiction texts enlighten readers as to how and why these various living things are worth paying attention to. The illustrations by Prange deepen our senses of these creatures and plans and enable us to think about them in a more sophisticated fashion.

The only quibbles I have (and they are quibbles) are few. First, it isn't clear exactly where the non-fiction parts of the book come from. The poetry is directly attributed to Sidman. Her author's note suggests that she has written the prose parts as well, given the lists of people and texts that she has consulted. But it would be nicer if it were clearly stated. My second quibble is over the the timeline. I can understand that the time to be covered is vast, and therefore the line needs to express that creatively. But the way the scale is depicted at the bottom of the page doesn't make clear whether it is measuring the LINE length or the PAGE width. I assume the line, but I'm not sure if children would automatically grasp that idea or not.

But as I said these are mere quibbles. This book provides a lovely overview for the opposite end of the spectrum from endangered animals. Here students can learn just how full of teeming life our planet is, and just how "ubiquitous" some of us are.

For Good Measure: The Ways we say How Much, How Far, How Heavy, How Big , How Old

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 14:03:16 +0100

Ken Robbins has done something with this book that I often despair of finding -- he has created an entertaining, truly informative, well-written non-fiction book for kids in middle grades. I found this book to have information I didn't know, which is an added plus.

"For Good Measure" looks at one of those topics that people of all ages often obsess about -- how do we measure what we see or experience and why do we do it the ways we do. (If you don't think we obsess about it, just try to get my weight out of me -- it isn't going to happen...) This book not only explains what the measures are and how to visualize them, but it also tells a bit of the history of where they came from and where they might be going. I liked that he included the metric terms as well.

I found the history of the terms fascinating, and I really liked the equivalent comparisons, e.g., the acre as being 80% of a football field. The images and the explanations are clear and appropriate. They work well to help the reader understand what these terms are and why we use them.

"Meanwhile" by Jason Shiga

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 18:41:54 +0100

Okay, I am SOOOO an English major. On my first couple of attempts to read this book, I (literally) whined and complained to anyone and everyone within ear shot. The book is too hard to follow, it is boring, it doesn’t make sense, etc. So I handed it to my more mathematically-inclined family members who looked at me like I was crazy and implied I was too lazy to figure out how it works.

So, with some grumpiness, I picked it up the next day. And, much to my dismay, they were right. Meanwhile, by Jason Shiga, reads like a flow chart, but it’s a flow chart that some kids are going to be really engaged by. A “choose your own adventure book,” Meanwhile shows that a simple choice of chocolate over vanilla ice cream can make the difference between a non-eventful evening at home or world-wide destruction.

While this book may not be my cup of tea, it is clear that many children (mostly boys, in my experience) will love this clever, albeit baroque look at how decision trees can shape a story or life experience. It uses real mathematical principles to set up this story that had just the right amount of horror and gore to appeal to those children who love both logic and horror stories.

A Million Shades of Gray by Cynthia Kadohata

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 15:44:11 +0100

The novel A Million Shades of Gray by Cynthia Kadohata is a thoughtful and compelling book, but I think it would work better with middle-school or high school students. The book tells the story of Y’Tin, a boy who achieves his dream of becoming an elephant handler. The story is set in Vietnam, mostly in 1975, after the US troops have left.

Some of the subject matter of this novel would captivate and charm students in the age range of 4^th and 5^th grade. The early parts of the novel, while Y’Tin describes his relationship with Lady, his elephant, are lyrical and sweet. For example, at one point, he thinks of how Lady greets him: “He always thought of the trunk as being at the center of an elephant, just as the heart was the center of a human. Sometimes, when Lady was especially happy to see him, she wrapped her trunk around him and squeezed, knocking the air out of him. He should probably scold her for that, but he didn’t want her to think he didn’t love her.”

But the novel soon turns much darker. When Y’Tin’s village is overrun by enemy troops, people try to flee, but he ends up among the captured. He and his friends are forced to dig what will become a mass grave for all the captured people. While Kadohata has most of this genocide occur outside of the character’s view, we are all painfully aware that is happening.

This book would be great in a classroom where the students are learning about the Vietnam War. But I think that the kids in 4^th and 5^th grades are just too young to handle this sort of material. Middle-schoolers are more ready to cope with the moral ambiguities that Y’Tin encounters.

"I Dreamed of Flying Like a Bird" by Robert B. Haas

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 04:01:39 +0100

Robert B. Haas artfully and clearly explains how and why he uses aerial photography to capture his subjects in the wild. Hass introduces some of the basic terminology of photography, and he makes clear just how dependent he is on the skills of the pilots he works with.

The photographs in this book are stunning. Haas explains how he takes the photos and how often he is dependent on luck to get the best image. The sidebar explanations about the subjects of the photos help us better understand the images – for example, why animals travel in groups and why flamingos are pink.

This book provides a great opportunity for children in these grades to grow in their appreciation of the topic. They are often predisposed to gravitate toward animal picture books. This book extends the idea by focusing on what is involved in creating these photos and how this job is part of Haas’s lifelong dream of “flying like a bird.” It shows a real, concrete outcome from pursuing that dream.

"Cosmic" by Frank Cottrell Boyce

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 12:46:33 +0100

In Cosmic, Frank Cottrell Boyce presents us with a charming and believable narrator – Liam, the twelve-year-old boy who looks like an adult man. Liam’s narrative begins in the middle, with him telling us how he got into the mess/adventure that he is in. His story is told with verve and energy, and just the right mix-in of self-deprecating humor.

For you see, as the novel opens, Liam is in space, on a rocket near the moon, with four other children. Unfortunately for Liam, he is the “adult” chaperone on this flight that has gone wrong. The novel tells the story of what has happened to bring him to this place, and explores what it is like to be always assumed to be older than you are. (It is frighteningly easy for Liam to fit in with adults.)

I loved Liam’s voice in this book. He wants to do the right thing most of the time, but he also wants to have fun and thrilling adventures. Sometimes, he finds, these two don’t always overlap easily.

I think the novel also raises some interesting questions. The four children who end up on the space flight are – with the exception of Florida, Liam’s friend and pretend daughter – are all child prodigies, pushed to the extreme achievements by their differently overbearing fathers. Boyce does a great job of showing how each of these children is in some ways limited and stifled by the efforts of these parents. By contrast, Liam’s parents are the ordinary, appropriate parents that he so desperately wants to return home to.

This delightful novel mediates between the thrills of adventure and the fear of being in over one’s head. What more could we ask of a recreational book for students?

True (. . . sort of) by Katherine Hannigan

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 15:55:33 +0100

True (. . . sort of) by Katherine Hannigan is both fun and serious. It is also an example of why I have learned to trust my instincts – some of my favorite books are the ones I happen to stumble upon. This book falls squarely into that category.

The main character is Delly Pattison, a short, sassy spitfire of a girl who can’t seem to stay out of trouble. Delly has enough of a reputation in her family, at school, and in her town that she is the first suspect in all disasters. She even has a strong relationship with a local police officer after she frees chickens at the local fair. At first the troubles are innocent and unintended. But as she gets more and more blame for her behavior, Delly begins to accept the role of "problem child."

But Delly’s world begins to change when a new student comes to town. Ferris Boyd is a bundle of issues – she is a girl who looks like a boy, she doesn’t talk, and she plays basketball better than anyone has ever seen. Even Brud Kinney, the local basketball star for the Catholic school, has never seen such a player. Ferris intrigues Delly, and Delly is persistent in her efforts to befriend and understand Ferris.

This novel shows how these three children, along with Delly’s younger brother RB, have to counter their fears and their personal demons to reach a place where they can truly trust each other.

This book does an amazing job of exploring how hard Delly works to control her impulses. Delly needs to calm down if she wants to spend time with Ferris. She first tries RB’s suggestion to count before she acts, but she gets so overwhelmed by counting that she no longer feels any joy in life. Her next strategy is brilliant and successful: every time she wants to act out, she asks an honest question, which defuses the situation. For example, in the middle of a major argument with her sister Galveston, Delly finally asks, “Galveston, do you hate me?” At first her sister shouts “Yes,” but she finally gets to the point where she says, “You’re always making Ma upset and getting Dad mad. It’s always about you and your trouble, and I hate it.” The truth makes Delly and Galveston stop fighting, and begin to actually work through everything. It doesn’t make Delly happy, but she can keep herself under control because she sees the truth in Galveston’s words.

The book deals with some really serious issues, but it never feels too preachy. I highly recommend it.

The Fantastic Secret of Owen Jester by Barbara O'Connor

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 15:43:32 +0100

Owen Jester seems like a typical elementary school boy. In Barbara O'Connor's The Fantastic Secret of Owen Jester, Owen feels stranded on the wrong side of town, away from his friends. His family has moved in with his grandfather both to help out his grandfather, who is recovering from a stroke, and to help themselves out, since Owen's father has lost his job. Viola, the nearby neighbor girl, is no substitute for Owen's friends--she suffers from being a smartypants and, well, from being a girl. It's summertime, and Owen wants adventure. And he ends up going to great depths -- pun intended -- to get it.

The strengths of this book are many. I like that Owen struggles with the ethics of keeping the frog he has named Tooley, no matter how wonderful a cage he builds. His moral dilemma would resonate with many children, I believe. Owen also comes to question his initial assessments of Viola as well. He begins to appreciate both her knowledge and her persistence. He also shows a shy, but confessional relationship with his grandfather, who can't communicate much, but always shows that he is listening.

A bit more complicatedly, Owen also decides to have an adventure with the "fantastic secret" (a small submarine) that fell off the train BEFORE he notifies the company. While that choice may strain adult safety issues and believability, the adventure is a necessary part of Owen's growth and a rite of passage.

I can think of a number of children in this age group who would enjoy reading this book. It falls somewhere lower on the scale of difficulty, which might make it attractive to a more reluctant reader who would enjoy its entrancing adventure.