Nonfiction: The Trainable Cat, John Bradshaw & Sarah Ellis

The Trainable Cat
John Bradshaw & Sarah Ellis
ISBN: 9780465050901
Specific directions on using rewards-based training to accustom cats to household life requirements.

Very readable, with clear step-by-step instructions.  The authors are based in England, which colors their attitudes towards cat ownership in small ways, but the advice is absolutely universal, and would be beneficial to every owned cat, as well as to their owners.  The only difficulty is the time and patience required for the training to actually occur, to keep up with the training, and have it be effective.

Covers everything from tricks: "playing fetch" and "coming when called" to life skills like tolerating nail clippers and companion animals (info for cats, dogs, and smaller animals), to really crucial things like tolerating cat carriers and not freaking out during vet visits.

YA Fantasy: Skyborn, David Dalglish

Skyborn (first of a trilogy)
David Dalglish
ISBN: 9780316302685
Floating islands, religious oppression, spunky war-orphans.

Part of my ongoing research into "floating islands in the sky" stories, and this first book started out very neatly, but it's headed into religious territory that I don't feel particularly inclined to pursue.  I've got the feeling of the writing and the world-building pretty well from the first book.  I very much enjoyed the focus on their version of military academy, and on the training in magic and tactics and their equipment, and I also thought Dalglish did a very good job of describing aerial combat.  If it wasn't for the religious overtones building up through the book, I would probably have stuck with the series just because it's decently written and interesting politically, but oh well.

Tuesday Storytime: Teddies and Bears

I love that teddy bears exist.  I especially love that we have picture books about actual wild bears, about "real" bears who act in anthropomorphic or unnatural ways, and even books about stuffed teddy bears!  I picked a set today that focused on "real" bears, across a spectrum of natural to fantastical situations.

My Friend Bear
Jez Alborough
ISBN: 0763605832
This sequel to Where's My Teddy? showcases the joy of making a new friend.

Eddie (a little boy) and his teddy bear (named Freddie) are walking in the woods where they encountered the bear from Where's My Teddy? when they come across the giant teddy once more.  This time tho, Eddie finds out that the bear is lonely and friendless too, and after a bit of a mix-up involving a talking teddy bear, the two spend a day becoming fast friends.  Great rhyming cadence, lovely word-play, and cute lighthearted illustrations.


Bear is Not Tired
Ciara Gavin
ISBN: 9780385754767
Sequel to Room For Bear (super cute about chosen families) talks about the fear of missing out.

Winter is coming, and for most of the Duck family, that's no big deal.  But not for Bear.  He has to hibernate, and he is really unhappy about being asleep while everyone else is up, and missing all the fun and getting left out!  This not-so-subtle comparison to early bedtimes and naps is actually handled really sweetly and with cute illustrations of Bear getting more and more tired, until "every sound was a lullaby" and "nothing made sense anymore." The solution that Mama Duck comes up with to welcome Bear back to the waking world in the spring is cute and sure to resonate with little ones who are SURE they've missed something.


Every Autumn Comes the Bear
Jim Arnosky
ISBN: 0399225080
Oversized, fall-off-the-pages dark and visceral paintings are a bit scary, but the story is calm and measured.

Arnosky doesn't shy away from a scary picture, and there are a few here, not least of which is the cover.  A VERY large, black, hairy-scary bear is so big that all you can see are clawed feet and the tip of a nose, and a BIG black furry shadow looming over the whole book.  Inside is equally realistic.  A sere fall-winter landscape is cold contrast to this looming black presence, with a bright red mouth and tongue, and sharp white teeth and claws.  Despite the intense illustrations, the story is calm and matter of fact, with few words and not really any emotional resonance: the bear simply comes, notices things, does a few things, and finds a den to sleep away the winter in.  It's a very interesting dichotomy, and I think the dark and powerful images made quite a few of the parents uncomfortable, but the kids loved it.

Juv Fantasy: Dragon Slippers, Jessica Day George

Dragon Slippers

Jessica Day George (Tuesdays at the Castle)

ISBN: 978159990575

Coming-of-age, betrayal and friendships, and very nice dragons, with a side order of creepy.

I really loved Tuesdays at the Castle, and I don't know why I assumed it was George's first book, but I just discovered the truly excellent Dragon Slippers, and I'm very glad I did.  Great storytelling, excellent characters (both good and bad) and a lovely take on dragon-kind and dragon hoards.

Creel's family is dead, so she and her brother are being raised by her aunt and uncle.  Sadly, no one really has any money, so auntie gets the bright idea to have Creel captured by the local dragon, rescued by the local lord's son, and carried off to a glorious life in the manor house (whereupon manorial favor (ie, money) will shower down upon the rest of the household (meaning auntie).  Creel, like most of us reading this devious plot, attempts to point out the many and manifest errors in logic, but auntie is firm, and Creel figures the old dragon is probably dead anyway, so she'll hang out for a bit, then come back home and her aunt will move on to a new wild scheme.

But the dragon is NOT dead, and Creel finds herself set off on an adventure that has her struggling to use her wits and her talents (embroidery and design) to support herself in a wide and wild world that doesn't particularly care about her.  

Creel is sharp and smart, clever and hard-working, and she's aided by (and hampered by) a well-written supporting cast (human and dragon).  She plans, she acts, and she is unafraid to speak up for herself (even when it doesn't necessarily work out well for her).  

The story gets a little dark and parts of it are downright creepy towards the end, but the overall tragic/terrible details are blurry and distant - think Prince Caspian, or the weirder parts of Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  Anyone who's more than one book into Harry Potter ought to be just fine as well.     

Young Adult: The Walled City, Ryan Graudin

The Walled City
Ryan Graudin
ISBN: 9780316405058
A pair of sisters cross paths with mob bosses and desperate kids in a gritty crime-filled shanty-town.

This book is roughly based on the reality of the Walled City of Kowloon, which used to be in Hong Kong, but set in roughly modern times. What's interesting is that for a large part of the story, I couldn't tell if they were even in a real-world setting, or a gritty semi-modern "fantasy" analogue, and it doesn't really matter.  The story is real and gripping and powerful, and even though it's a bit darker than I usually select (trigger warnings here for rape and abuse and parental abandonment and really just about every type of violence you can think of), I'm glad I read it, and it was VERY good.  It reminded me strongly of The Girl With Ghost Eyes, but with better agency and voices for the women leads.

Play Script: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Jack Thorne & J. K. Rowling

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
Jack Thorne (based on a concept and the HP universe of J. K. Rowling)
ISBN: 9781338099133
Read August 1, 2016

Did I wait long enough to avoid spoiling those who don't want to be spoilt?  If not, please skip to the next review!

First things first: yes it's short.  Very short.  It's not anything like the complexity and length of any of the later novels, and in tone it's actually a lot more like the first few books than the latter ones.  I am sure that the talented acting and directing cast have added a lot more flavor and impact to the bare script in the actual play itself, but this is a review of the written script, and it's just a little on the flat side.

Good Things:
More Official Harry Potter story!
Scorpius.
Time Travel done not so horribly
Interesting worldbuilding grace-notes and lovely call-backs and nods to the books.
Serviceable and solid plotting and pacing.
Snape getting to be a hero!

Not So Good Things:
Flat Characters
Storyline and moral was trite and cliche
Limitations caused by format (unavoidable, but still present)
A bit too reliant on hitting those nostalgia notes: no new ground being tread here.

Very Bad Things:
Unfortunate treatment of ALL the women in the script. If it were one or two instances, or one or two characters, I would shrug it off, but it's ALL of them, in EVERY interaction, in EVERY bad cliche of womanhood there is. It was to the point that I was feeling sorry for the actresses trying to salvage their characters.


Was it fun to read? Absolutely.
Would I love to see it?  Certainly.  I can only hope they'll decide to produce a staged-filmed version, or perhaps to translate it to a movie or short BBC-style "season" of two or three long episodes.
Did I notice things that made me cringe a bit and like it less in the critical-evaluation sense?  Yep.
 


 

Nonfiction: Do Parents Matter? Robert and Sarah LeVine

Do Parents Matter? Why Japanese Babies Sleep Soundly, Mexican Siblings Don't Fight, and American Families Should Just Relax
Robert A. LeVine and Sarah LeVine
ISBN: 9781610397230
Read September 17, 2016

An interesting cross-cultural study of various parenting practices and the outcomes observed, but flawed and limited in a lot of ways.  Really makes one wish that there were larger groups studying this sort of thing in earnest - I think there would be a great deal of knowledge acquired that way, but it might not be particularly flattering to the current medical/psychological concepts, so there's understandably little push for it.

The authors use personal anthropological/sociological observations and those collected by other groups to make comments about various parenting tactics and supposedly basic concepts, inferring from their observations that there is very little universal about how children are nurtured and raised, and that despite that vast gulf of differences, mainly the adults end up as well-adjusted adults in their respective societies.

I would have liked more citations or deeper explanations, as a lot of things are hand-waved or offhandedly explained without backing: I want to be clear that I don't think they're faking any of their information, or purposefully being misleading, I just wanted to have a clearer understanding of what they're basing that on (which would have made this a much thicker and more scholarly book, so I can completely understand why they chose not to).

Overall interesting, but it raises a lot more questions than it answers.

Nonfiction: The Perfect Horse, Elizabeth Letts

The Perfect Horse: The Daring U.S. Mission to Rescue the Priceless Stallions Kidnapped by the Nazis
Elizabeth Letts
ISBN: 9780345544803
Read September 2016

So the title is a bit misleading, because honestly the US didn't know (or didn't care) about European stallions during the course of the war, and even through the course of this book.  They don't even appear in the narrative until half-way in, and that's just to track the beginnings and development of the characters for when they DO become important, which is at the last minute (insert "typical American" joke here).

So this is the real sub-title: How Devoted People from LOTS of Countries Saved Really Expensive Horses During the Last Days of the War.

So: Why is this important?  Did you know that Hitler wanted to apply eugenics to horses, so he got the civilian manager of the German-hosted Olympics to start a horse-breeding program, which he did mostly by stealing the Arabian and Lipizzaner horses from neighbors as they were conquered.  Horse-loving people in several places all worked furiously behind the scenes to keep the welfare of the horses in mind as the horrible war took place and people's minds were generally on more important global issues, until one week, right at the end of the war, when everything fell into place for the US to basically steal the stolen horses, and try to get any of them back to their proper owners and countries of origin (which we didn't do very well, but it was only partly because we were selfish and wanted them for ourselves).

Very well written, interesting cast of characters, and a really interesting read - right up until the end, when all the narrative drive just dies a slow whimpering death as people lost track of the horses which had been so important up until then, and leaves the story to end with only two of the now-American horses' fates actually known.  How sad that was.

Tuesday Storytime: Baby Animals

The only difficulty I have with this type of theme is that it makes it more difficult to have a coloring sheet that goes along with the theme - in those cases I have a collection of general "storytime" or "book" themed coloring sheets that I use instead.

Baby Bear Counts One
Ashley Wolff
ISBN: 9781442441583
Very detailed woodcut-style art, very dark and vibrant and detailed.

Baby bear and Mama bear are walking through the autumn woods and Baby counts various animals as they prepare for winter by stocking up or migrating away.  A good mesh of naturalistic (the artwork and the matter-of-fact descriptions of the animals' various activities) and fanciful (the conceit of Baby and Mama talking).  Very nice, but a smidge on the long side.  I actually read Bunnies!!! first, and I regret it, because this one was longer in reading than it ran when I previewed it, and we had VERY squirmy audience today.  It would have flowed much better in the top billing, which is why I'm listing it here as such.

Bunnies!!!
Kevan Atteberry
ISBN: 9780062307835
A sweet-faced monster is quite excited by a family of pastel bunnies, but they keep running away!

The art here is notable specifically for the quality of the emotional content conveyed with very little text and minimalistic art style.  It's really delightful to watch the kids respond as the little sweet monster gets more and more discouraged by the bunnies who keep running from his over-excited advances.  The twist ending manages to be sweet and to draw a chuckle from both parents and the older (or genre savvy) kids who realize what's about to happen again.

Hush, Little Horsie
Jane Yolen, illustrated by Ruth Sanderson
ISBN: 9780375858536
Beautiful restful spreads and vignettes of pairs of dams and foals in various environments.

I love this book.  It's sweet and calming and restful, and the catch at the ending is very well done - a parent reading to her horse-mad small child, putting them to bed.  The rhymes are VERY repetitive, but I don't even care - they're pretty and calming, and just different enough to flow beautifully from one horse family to another.  I do wish there was at least one horse father or grandparent present, but that could be easily altered by a quick-thinking reader.  Beautiful and quite short on the read, which made it a delightful positive finish for our overactive audience today.

Graphic Novel: The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Vol. 3, Ryan North & Erica Henderson

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol 3
collecting issues 1-6 of The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, and a crossover issue of Howard the Duck #6 (Unbeatable Squirrel Girl is re-numbered after Marvel "event" of 2016, following the previous set of 1-8 & specials reviewed here.)
Writer: Ryan North
Howard the Duck Writer: Chip Zdarsky
Artist: Erica Henderson
Color Art: Rico Renzi
Trading Card Art: Joe Morris, Matt Digges, David Robins, Chip Zdarsky, & Doc Shaner
Van Art (I swear this is a thing that actually exists in this collection, and the van is awesome): Joe Quinones
Letters: VC's Clayton Cowles & Travis Lanham
ISBN: 9780785196266
Read August/September 2016

The continuing adventures of Squirrel Girl continue!  Everything I loved about it before, I still love, and the sweet and fun tone is delightful and refreshing in a lot of grimdark surroundings.  Excellent stories, even more excellent characters (although I thought that Chipmunk Hunk and Koi Boy (Boi?) were sadly neglected this time through) and just so much joyous fun from time-traveling start to "the great hunt" of the finish.  Even beyond the stories themselves, the collection includes the little aside notes on the bottoms of the pages, the in-jokes between authors and artists, and the lovely letters from fans (real or imagined, but I think mostly real - judging by the cosplay pictures).  All of that just adds a lovely layer of fun metafrosting to the nutty cake.

Tuesday Storytime: Dancing

Three really lovely dancing books today.

Flora and the Flamingo
Molly Idle
ISBN: 9781452110066
Wordless lift-the-flap book with a double-page unfolding spread. Beautiful illustrations.

This one really had to have been amazing to make it past the usual storytime hurdles.  It's a wordless picture book, AND it has lift-the-flaps on quite a few of the pages (AND a big double-spread fold-out section at the end) so you know it has to be really cute or really amazing to get past all that.  And it is!  Both.  Cute.  And amazing.  Flora is a dancer, and as far as I can tell, she's at the zoo. Maybe she's dreaming, or she has a pet flamingo, because there's really nothing in the way of backgrounds to let us know one way or the other, and I find that it doesn't really matter. Either way, Flora is a dancer, and she's wearing black swim flippers (to look like the flamingo's feet?  Because she likes wearing swim flippers? Again, not important.) and a swimming cap, and she and the flamingo are DANCING. TOGETHER. It's beautiful, and the proportions are delightful and the matching movements with the very different bodies are just so sweet and the little bits of story that unfold through mirrored movements and poses and facial expressions are just delightful. It really is just lovely. I love Molly Idle's books so much.


Wiggle
Doreen Cronin, illustrated by Scott Menchin
ISBN: 1599610930
American-cartoon style dog leads an interactive-inviting story through a day of wiggles.

"Do you wiggle out of bed? If you wiggle with your breakfast, it might wind up on your head." These are the important questions in life, and ones that invite the audience to wiggle right along with the irrepressible dog star in this book.  There's not much substance, and it's awfully quick, but for a short middle book and short toddler attention-spans? The wiggly content and the fast pace make it perfect. This one also got the rare award of actual toddler laughter. Adults tend to chuckle quite a lot in my storytimes, but I don't often feature stories that hit the little ones' funny bones. This one was a rare exception, and it was a smash hit. Prepare to follow this with a song or an activity that lets those wiggles free!


How Do You Wokka-Wokka?
Elizabeth Bluemle, illustrated by Randy Cecil
ISBN: 9780763632281
A diverse inner-city sidewalk is home to a variety of dance styles told with wokka rhymes.

Wokka-wokka is how the first kid dances, and they go along the sidewalk and ask a lot of others how they dance too - and the answers are as varied as the kids encountered.  We get flamingo dances (how appropriate!) and mariachi dances, and breakdancing (dancing like a clock), and the worm (fish-flop dancing), and by the end of the book, the whole neighborhood is dancing all together in their different ways, all having a great time with the repeated rhyme chorus.

Tuesday Storytime: Cars and Trucks

I was on vacation this week, so I left a nice simple bouncy storytime program for my replacement to run.  I always feel so bad when I miss, partly because I really enjoy storytime and seeing the kids every week, but also because I feel honor-bound to leave a good program behind, so it often has really good stories that I wish I were reading myself!

Big Truck and Little Truck
Jan Carr, illustrated by Ivan Bates
ISBN: 0439071771
Dreamy pastel-bright watercolors of a little truck stretching to meet the requirements of a big-truck job.

Big Truck has been teaching Little Truck for a long time, and they do all the jobs together: go to the market, pull things out of ditches, haul veggies and compost, and everything else needed on the farm.  But when Big Truck has to go to the shop for a while, can Little Truck manage everything alone for the first time?  Sweet, satisfying, and re-assuring, all while being "trucky" enough for the most die-hard enthusiast.


Calling All Cars (boardbook)
Sue Fliess, illustrated by Sarah Beise
ISBN: 9781492638360
Bright poppy "modern" cartoon illustrations of all sorts of cars.

This is like a modern-day short version of a Richard Scarry's "Things that Go" sort of book.  It's cute and quick and fun, and very modern (in the "wow this is really going to be dated in a couple dozen years" sort of way) in the artistic sense. The narrative roughly follows the course of a day, but it really is just a rhyme as an excuse to illustrate a whole lot of cars and trucks.


Zoom! Zoom! Sounds of things that go in the city
Robert Burleigh, illustrated by Ted Carpenter
ISBN: 9781442483156
Retro-pop illustrations in quad-tones (blue, red, yellow, black) and a fun swinging rhyme structure.

Catchy rhymes, cute retro cityscapes and cars, and a fun lighthearted set of rhymes, with onomatopoeic highlight words on each spread.  Each one has the focus on a different type of cityscape: a morning scene with trash trucks and busses, a highway under construction, a metro train, ambulances, ice-cream trucks... This one does have non-cars: bicycles, joggers, skateboards, etc, but it's still very vehicle-oriented, so I kept it, just because it's so pretty and fun.

  

Tuesday Storytime: Haiku Trio

I had originally hoped to do all three about pets, but I wasn't quite able to manage it.  Still, these three worked very well together, and it was a nice chance to incorporate some poetry into the storytime routine.

Won-Ton: A Cat Tale Told in Haiku
Lee Wardlaw, illustrated by Eugene Yelchin
ISBN: 9780805089950
Linear, edgy, almost comic-book art, with minimalist backgrounds.

Won-Ton is a shelter cat who's been adopted, and he's ready to tell us all about the process in a series of truly delightful haiku.  I know beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but this is my favorite book from this storytime, and probably one of my favorites in general.  Wardlaw just does such a perfect job capturing the sly and superior tone of a cat, even in undignified moments, and Yelchin's lanky bony angular artwork is just perfect.  I especially love the expressive eyes.


Hi, Koo! a year of seasons
Jon J. Muth
ISBN: 9780545166683
Koo is a panda bear (perhaps related to the panda Stillwater from the Zen books) and this is his year in unmetered haiku.

Unlike Won-Ton and Dogku, the haiku here are more free-form, with the understanding that syllable breaks in the original don't quite match up to what syllables represent in english. So some of these are quite short, and others are much more wordy than expected.  Still, it's a beautiful and interesting way to represent time flowing in little snippets of verse.  We start in autumn, which is a good fit for this time of year, and flow smoothly through to end at the height of summer. Quick, sweet and touching, but the illustrations don't quite manage to carry as much interest.


Dogku
Andrew Clements, illustrated by Tim Bowers
ISBN: 9780689858239
A dog sits on a doorstep, hoping for a home.  Sweet painterly illustrations.  Lots of color.

Like Won-Ton, we have a dog hoping for a forever home in this story.  Unlike Won-Ton, this puppy has invited himself in, and it's a gamble as to whether he'll be allowed to stay.  (Happy endings are not optional in my storytimes, so no worries there.)  Great framing, a good progression through the day, and a nice "cliffhanger" for the little ones.  I'm highly tempted to save this one for another storytime and match it up with Taxi Dog.

Juv Nonfiction: A Smart Girl's Guide to Worry (American Girl) Judy Woodburn, Nancy Holyoke & Brenna Vaughan

A Smart Girl's Guide to Worry: how to feel less stressed and have more fun
American Girl nonfiction/advice books
Judy Woodburn and Nancy Holyoke, illustrated by Brenna Vaughan
ISBN: 9781609587451
Very specific and science-based (mostly CBT) techniques for conquering anxiety.

A very clear and straightforward advice book that focuses attention on the reality-warping aspects of worry and anxiety, and provides Cognitive-Behavioral-Therapy-based mental and physical techniques to counteract those negative impulses and move beyond fear-based thinking.

This isn't a match for a good therapist, but for your run-of-the-mill kiddo who is suddenly anxious about a particular subject or activity, or is growing awkward and walled-off as she grows older and feels less confident in herself, this is a great starting point, making it clear that everyone has to deal with worries, and while some people suffer more than others, there are techniques that will work over time to negate or quiet down those fearful or insecure thoughts.

Recommended.