I'm a little late to the blogging party on this one, but it was worth the wait.

Bigger than a Breadbox by Laurel Snyder. Our heroine Rebecca is about 14, I think, when her parents’ marriage starts really falling apart. Her father, an unemployed taxi driver and former teacher, has been absorbed in apathy, spending his time on the couch. Her mother, a hospital nurse, loses it in the middle of the week. She packs Rebecca and her little brother Lew, aged two, into the car and drives them from Baltimore to Atlanta to Gran’s house. She tells Rebecca that it’s just a temporary measure until she and Rebecca’s father get things sorted out, but she’s found a job and enrolled Rebecca in school. Rebecca, quite naturally, loves both her parents and would really like them to get back together again. She’s deeply betrayed both by the split and by her mother’s deciding to start a new life for all of them without so much as telling anyone ahead of time. She misses Baltimore and its seagulls as much as she misses her father and her best friend. While not speaking to her mother, she makes her way up to her grandmother’s attic, and it’s there that she finds, among a collection of old breadboxes, one that grants wishes. It takes a little bit to figure this out, of course, and to figure out the rules: she must wish for a tangible object that will fit in the breadbox. First it gives her an old Agatha Christie novel when she wishes for a book, which turns out to be perfect for taking her mind off the situation. But when she starts school and super-popular Hannah is assigned to show her around, it is perfect for giving her the cash and small gifts that will help her become the popular girl she never was at her old school. What Rebecca doesn’t realize at first is that even magic isn’t free. It takes her a while to realize the full truth about the breadbox magic, and even longer to figure out how to make things right again.

All of the major characters in this book come across as fully developed people, including Gran, both of Rebecca’s parents, Rebecca herself, and even two-year-old Lew. I don’t often seek out Issue Books to read, but here, the magic and the Issue blended perfectly together. The story might be more about divorce than it is about magic, but the magic is essential to Rebecca’s journey, not just beautiful icing on a bitter cake. And even if the breadbox isn’t the magic cure for her parents that Rebecca wants it to be, the place she comes to at the end is still a better one than the beginning. The result is a story with depth and charm that I had a very hard time putting down.

Cross-posted to http://library-mama.dreamwidth.org and http://sapphireone.livejournal.com .

Did you miss me last week? I was dealing with toddler tummy flu, mericfully mild on the external symptoms, but high on the clinginess scale.

The Books of Magic by Neil Gaiman. Illustrated by John Bolton, Scott Hampton, Charles Vess and Paul Johnson. This is an old Neil Gaiman, originally a 1993 miniseries, just brought back into print as a single graphic novel. Hooray for back in print Neil Gaiman! Twelve-year-old Timothy Hunter has magic potential, and a team of four mysterious (but probably familiar to DC fans) men in trenchcoats are watching him skateboard and deciding if they should offer him the chance to have a tour of the magic world. The men include John Contantine, Dr. Occult, and Mr. E. After Timothy’s yo-yo is turned into an owl, Timothy agrees to the demonstration/tour, following which he is to be offered a chance to start proper magical training or not. Each of the four mysterious men takes him to a different realm – past, present, Fairy and future. In each realm, he meets with famous people, some universally famous, like Merlin in the past and Baba Yaga and the Fairy Queen in Fairy, but also lots and lots of magic-using DC characters. I don’t read very many of the ongoing series type graphic novels, so most of these characters were familiar to me only from my work selecting graphic novels for my library, but while knowing them might have added to the story, I didn’t feel that I was missing anything not knowing them. (I’ve read only one short Zatanna comic book, but have seen lots of her on covers, and was quite tickled here to see that Timothy reacts with horror to the sight of her in her costume, when she changes out of her everyday clothes. Like most female superhero costumes, it’s ridiculously revealing and impractical.) In every realm, Timothy is in danger, both from the dangers inherent in traveling someplace one doesn’t really belong while wanting to get back to where one does belong, but also because Evil knows that Timothy is out there, and would like to either recruit or eliminate him. Timothy will witness things along the way that you probably wouldn’t want your twelve-year-old seeing – more along the lines of death than sexuality, probably fine for older teens and less sensitive younger ones, but still put in our adult rather than teen collection. This is a basic magical journey story, something that in the hands of a lesser person might be stereotypical. However, it’s Gaiman. It works beautifully, despite having a very limited amount of space to tell the story. All of the artists are top-notch as well, a different one for each of the original four comic books. It’s beautiful to look at just as art even while it’s art with a job to do: telling the story, maintaining continuity and the ability to recognize the characters from one volume to the next, at the same time as showcasing the artists’ distinctive styles. Any Gaiman fan will of course want to read this, as will those who enjoy a good fantasy yarn.

Cross-posted to http://library-mama.dreamwidth.org and http://sapphireone.livejournal.com .

Giants Beware! by Rafael Rosado and Jorge Aguirre. Graphic novels aren’t my favorites for reading aloud, but I was so excited about this one that I read it aloud to my son. (I read about it on Charlotte’s Library as well as PW.) Even the toddler, normally impatient with my reading to Brother instead of her, was captivated by the bright, vivacious drawings. Active Claudette is incensed when she learns that the hero of her small town did not kill the baby-feet eating giant that plagued it in years past. Even though the giant has been banished to the mountains and the city is safely enclosed within walls, she decides that it’s up to her to slay the giant. She’s the kind of kid who makes up her mind first and thinks through the problems second, if at all. Her first task is convincing her best friend, Marie, a would-be princess, and her little brother Gaston, a chef who dreams of being a sword smith, to come along. This she does by telling them that their ambitions will of course be fulfilled if they come along. They must all then get around Claudette and Gaston’s father, Augustine, the local sword-smith, crippled from a fight with a dragon years ago, and his assistant, the massive, wise and black Zubair, whose words about the foolishness of monster fighting go right over Claudette’s head. Their journey leads them through the Forest of Death, over (or perhaps also through) the Mad River, and up into the mountains. Meanwhile, the Baron of the village, Claudette’s father, leads a party of reluctant villagers in pursuit of the children, while Augustine and Zubair take up a more enthusiastic chase, though slowed by Augustine’s wheelchair. Each one of the children finds that their particular skills will be needed to get them out of one scrape or another along the way. By the end, the quest is accomplished, even if the goal has changed along the way. Claudette has also learned important lessons about the usefulness both of force and telling the truth. These are clear without being preachy or getting in the way of the fabulous adventure. Giants Beware! is a great counter-example to the truism that boys will only read about boys – yes, Gaston is a boy, but Claudette is clearly the reckless adventure-seeker here, and her drive kept my boy enthralled. This is going to the top of my list of good all-ages graphic novels to give both to people who love them already and to people (I keep finding them) who aren’t yet convinced that real literature can come in graphic form.

The Scottish Prisoner by Diana Gabaldon. It must have been my very first year as a librarian, nearly ten years ago now, when a patron I was talking to put her hands on my shoulders, looked me in the eye, and said, “You have got to read the Outlander series. They are the best books in the world.” Well, I’m too fond of having lots of books to call any one series the best in the world, but for once, I took her advice and started the series. The books are addictive, long and involved, such a tight blend of historical fiction, time travel, and romance that the publishers originally decided to market them as romance mostly because romance had the biggest audience, though at the library, we shelve them in SciFi/Fantasy. Gabaldon now has a spin-off series and has done a graphic novel featuring the story from the first book from the point of view of the other main character. I haven’t kept up with all of these – I have a hard time justifying reading everything in a series as a librarian – but considering the volume of the output, I think that missing just one of the main series (which came out the same time my daughter was born) and one of the spin-offs is doing pretty well. Given all that, I was shocked to realize that I couldn’t find that I’ve ever reviewed a Gabaldon book here. However, there is again no way to review (or read) this book without massive spoilers for the first couple of those books.

This book is somewhere between a spin-off and a main series book. It stars Jamie, the hero of the main series, and Lord John, the hero of the spin-off Lord John mysteries. It takes place during the time covered by the third series book, when our heroine Claire is back in her present day. That makes it a little lighter on romance than most of the other books, though Jamie does spend a lot of time thinking about her. Anyway, as our story begins, Jamie is serving parole at the estate of Helwater for his crimes of being on the wrong side at Culloden (being a Highlander and all). Lord John found him this position, where he’s technically a prisoner, but working as the master of horse under an assumed name. What is a secret even to Lord John is that the current heir to the estate and title, Willie (aged two) is actually Jamie’s son. While the story of his conception and his mother’s death was covered in one of the other big novels, this was the first time to my recollection that we get to see Jamie with his son, as affectionate and protective as he can be within the confines of his role. His peaceful retreat begins to break down when one of the maids sends him a message to meet with someone up in the hills, someone who turns out to be Quinn, an Irishman and Jacobite who previously fought in the war with Jamie. He brings news of a second Rising and begs Jamie to help lead it. Jamie refuses, though he cannot tell Quinn that he refuses because he knows from Claire that the Rising is doomed to failure, and more attempts will only mean more suffering and death. Quinn is quite determined, and follows Jamie even when soldiers come to take him to London. Meanwhile, Lord John has received a last request with a packet of documentation from a recently deceased friend – use the documentation to convict Lord Siverly, a high-ranking military official of some dark and evil deeds. Siverly is currently holed up in Ireland, and John’s brother Hal decides that Jamie, coming closer to speaking Irish than anyone else he knows (I think this is the reason, anyway) is the best person to accompany John on the journey to fetch him back to England where he can be court-martialed.

Got that? There’s two separate strands of twining political intrigue, between the politics of the original crimes and the second rising. There are lots and lots of characters that I wasn’t sure if I’d met before or not, only that it was challenging keeping track of them all. This is par for the course, really. Beyond the tangles, the story is about Jamie and Lord John being forced back together after their friendship exploded back in Ardsmuir prison when, among other dramatic events, Lord John made a romantic advance on Jamie and was rebuffed with horror. Can they find a way to trust each other again? Will their friendship ever recover? And how will Jamie balance his desire to keep Scotland safe from a second Rising with the need to protect those he cares about from implicated in the plotting currently occurring? Even though I felt that rereading the first couple of books might have helped me feel less lost, this is still addictive Gabaldon, with strong characters and immersive plotting. And yeah, if you haven't read her before, start at the beginning, with Outlander. The audio books are famously well done, too.

Laundry Day by Maurie J. Manning.
Laundry Day falls somewhere between a graphic novel and a picture book, with a comic book-style layout of cells in a picture book size and target age. Our hero is a little shoeshine boy in a big city, probably around the 1910s. He’s looking fruitlessly for customers when a bright red cloth drops down on him from the tall buildings above. One level up, he sees a Chinese laundress, so he climbs up to ask if it’s hers. It isn’t, but she offers him a moon cake and sends him to a neighbor whom she thinks might be the owner. The little boy’s journey goes on, as he climbs up balconies and across laundry lines, meeting and helping neighbors in small ways. In one case, he takes a penny to an Italian organ grinder from a Ukrainian mother with a crying baby, to see if some music will calm the baby. They are Chinese, Italian, Polish, Jamaican, Ukrainian, and Jewish, as revealed by their hanging laundry and tiny bits of their native languages sprinkled in (pronunciations and definitions given in a glossary at the end). Not until he reaches the roof of the building does he meet the owner. Once he is down on the ground again, the neighborhood is filled with friends instead of strangers and his shoeshine business is booming. One of my youth librarians points out that this is a rare book for preschool/early elementary that takes place during the “Olden Days” in a city rather than on the frontier. This is joyous celebration of the New World and of community.

Cross-posted to http://library-mama.dreamwidth.org and http://sapphireone.livejournal.com .

I just counted. Right now, I have seven library books at home waiting to be read, six reviews waiting to be written, and six books on hold. I hope they won’t all come in at once, though the pile at home says that they’ve been coming in faster than I can read them. Swamped in books I’m excited about is a good kind of swamped, right?

The Microscope by Maxine Kumin. Illustrated by Arnold Lobel. I read this book to my son’s class in April, for Poetry Month. I like a funny poem for kids, especially, and this one is funny enough that I memorized for a high school poetry assignment, too. That time, I found it in a Cricket magazine, and though I have about half a bookcase devoted to my lifetime collection of Crickets, I couldn’t find the poem when I went looking for it a couple years ago. This year, I tried Google again, with better results. Now I have the perspective for the name Maxine Kumin to sound familiar. Right – former poet laureate and Pulitzer prize winner for poetry. Not only was the poem published as a picture book in 1984, but my library had it on the shelf, shelved with the biographies. It’s a tiny little thing, maybe 5 by 6 inches, so Teacher A. was kind enough to set up the document projector for me so the class could see the pictures. I’m not sure if this is irony or appropriate for the topic. In any case, we had fun.

The poem itself is a bouncy little thing, gleefully relating the contrast between Anton Leeuwenhoek, Our Hero, absorbed in making his microscopes and the slightly gruesome things he sees in them, and the townsfolk, who would just like him to keep his dry goods store open. The complete text is up on the Web, but here are the closing verses:

Impossible! Most Dutchmen said.
This Anton’s crazy in the head!
We ought to ship him off to Spain!
He says he’s seen a housefly’s brain!
He says the water that we drink
Is full of bugs! He’s mad, we think!
They called him dumkop, which means dope.
That’s how we got the microscope.

The closing notes that Leeuwenhoek didn’t invent the microscope, but built over 200 of them, refining the design and sharing his findings with many other scientists. Lobel’s drawings, while still distinctively his own work, call to mind seventeenth century-style copper engravings and illustrate the poem brilliantly. Read it for the poetry, the science history, or just the humor.

Storybound by Marissa Burt. Here is a book that called out to me from the shelf with its beautiful cover. It looked to have many things going for it – a lonely girl sucked into a strange magical world, a world where people study to become characters in books. Yay lonely girls, magic and metafiction! It was fun, but somehow not quite as perfect for me as I was hoping, in ways that I’m still trying to put my finger on.

Una Fairchild has grown up bounced from one uncaring foster home to another, with no real memory of her parents. She is sucked into a book in her library, and arrives as Peter Merriweather and Lady Snow are taking a journey and trying to fight a dragon. Peter is trying to fight the dragon, anyway – Snow is busy taking care of her nails and giving Peter directions. Horrified, Una pulls the dagger that’s now in her belt and leaps into the fray. Unfortunately, it turns out that this was an exam. Peter and Snow are students at the Perrault Academy, learning to be storybook characters. They are allowed to choose from a set list of characters. Here, Peter was testing as a Hero and Snow as a Lady. Una’s well-met interventions have resulted in everyone failing the exam. Somehow, Peter turns out to be friendly despite the failed exam. He determines that Una must be Written In to the story, something that hasn’t happened since the Muses were ostensibly destroyed at the (not too far distant) end of the last era. Una’s fate would be dire if she were found, so she pretends to be a transfer student and is assigned to room with Snow. Meanwhile, she’s trying to figure out just what is going on, and since she’s the curious type, this includes wondering what the true history of Story (the country) is, whether or not the Villainy professor is really a villain, what really happened to the Muses, why all the books are locked up, and if there is a mythic King on the way or not. By the end of these books, many of these questions are still unanswered. It turns out to be the first installment of a series, of the kind where the first book is building up so much complex background that it didn’t for me stand very well on its own. The book ended with two major characters kidnapped and unrescued, and there was a jarring switch in the last couple of chapters from Una partnering with Peter to her partnering with another boy who’d been mysteriously following her around earlier in the book. I liked the basic premise of the book, and the characters seemed solid, but I think that there was too much crammed into one book with too little resolution for me to enjoy it as much as I wanted to. Perhaps the middle grade readers for whom this book was intended will find these flaws less glaring and be able to enjoy it more.

I have stacks of books waiting to be reviewed and even bigger stacks at home waiting to be read. Onwards!

The Gift of Dyslexia by Ronald D. Davis with Eldon M. Braun. This is the dyslexia theory that my son’s school espouses, and at least per Amazon.com, seems to be among the top three dyslexia books currently out. Davis’s theories are based on his own experiences as a dyslexic, and the results from helping dyslexics in the clinics he founded. That’s a lot of experience, but as there are no scientifically based studies behind it, it’s more like a very large body of subjective evidence than truly scientific. Anyway, Davis’s theory is that dyslexics are visual learners. They think in pictures, and are used to being able to rotate, explode and reassemble objects in their minds without knowing they’re doing it. This is great for art and engineering, but really unhelpful for reading, where the letters need to stay two-dimensional and in the right order. The more words in a text that don’t make pictures, the more the brain tries to use its unhelpful skills to solve the problem, and the worse it gets. Davis has a test to see if this is the case with the person in question, and then a couple of methods (based primarily on age) for teaching them to be conscious about controlling their mind’s eye and its focus. Once they can do this, the program calls for hands-on work with making letters out of clay and working intensively with the toughest words to read – those that don’t easily translate to pictures. This, Davis says, will effectively cure dyslexia, while still preserving the gifts that caused it in the first place. I’m not sure how much of this really applies to my son, though some of it clearly does. I don’t know whether the school is using their treatment method or just subscribes to the theory that dyslexia stems from a gift rather than a disability. This book does some things very well, though. It has good descriptions of typical symptoms, good and bad, that go along with dyslexia. It is relatively short, printed in larger type with a minimum of hyphenated words to make it easier for dyslexics to read.

I find I have some problems with calling dyslexia a gift that maybe have more to do with the limitations of a title than with Davis’s actual theories. I think Davis finds the abilities that cause the dyslexia the gift, but I don’t think that having a hard time reading is a gift, flat-out. Readers of this blog might guess that I’m somewhat passionate about reading, and I don’t like anything that makes reading harder for people. I would not have read this book for that reason if my son’s team hadn’t recommended it. Now that I have, I’m recommending it for purchase to my library. It might not have all the answers to dyslexia – but no one seems to, despite their claims, and it is the easiest book about dyslexia for an adult dyslexic to read that I’ve found. The need for this was recently brought home as I ran into someone who said (paraphrasing) “I don’t have dyslexia. I just don’t read so much because it’s hard to make the words into pictures.” How many more people with dyslexia could be helped if the myth of dyslexia as seeing twisted letters weren’t still so rampant?

Brain Gym by Paul E. Dennison and Gail E. Dennison This book was recommended to us by a friend, who had great success with both of her children using the exercises in it. I had to have it sent via ILL, and was rather surprised when I got it. It’s a small paperback only 48 pages long with amateurish drawings. The theory behind it is both simple and not much talked about: problems with reading, math, concentration, etc., can be helped by physical exercises, particularly ones that require crossing the body’s midline. For what we were looking at, drawing sideways figure eights in the air, first with just one hand and then with both held together. I think the theory is that problems like these can be caused by lack of communication between the two hemispheres of the brain, and doing physical integration can prime the pump, as it were, making the academic exercises easier. If you or someone you’re helping has difficulty, you can just flip to the appropriate page, where the exercise is drawn out with text descriptions of how to do it and what it should accomplish. I’m not sure we’ve remembered to do this quite as often as we ought, but it has seemed helpful when we do. In order to up the interest quotient, my brilliant husband had the idea of having our son do the exercises holding a foam sword, rather than just tracing the pattern in the air with his hands. It worked. For those more interested in the theory (which, come to think of it, would probably be me), there’s also a teacher’s guide, which has more detailed notes on everything.

It’s taking me a bit to get to reviewing this, but I made it through this whole book just on my breaks at work by the time I’d written up The Piper’s Son.

Saving Francesca by Melina Marchetta Life is somewhat difficult for Francesca Spinelli, whose mother has enrolled her at St. Sebastian’s, a school that prior to that year was all boys. Neither teachers nor students seem inclined to change their customs to allow for girls, and the only other girls for Francesca to hang out with are girls who were losers at her old school: crazy, radical Tara Finke, slut Siobhan, and accordian-playing loner Justine. Then things get even worse. Francesca’s mother Mia, always a major force to be reckoned with at home and at work, stops getting out of bed. Francesca and her beloved little brother Luca are sent to separate relative’s houses, while their father keeps trying to pretend that everything will just get better on its own. At school, Tara decides that the girls will make a list of demands, and that Francesca is the best person to bring those demands to their class representative, Will Tromball. Tromball seems to be a jerk who isn’t interested in changing anything – yet their eyes lock every time they see each other. Francesca keeps getting put into detention for things like trying to talk to Luca at school. In detention she meets guitar-obsessed slob Thomas McKee and weirdo Jimmy Hailler, whom she doesn’t really like but who keeps following her home and is able to accomplish the miracle of getting her mother to talk. There are lots and lots of plot strands here, with family, friends old and new, romance, and school, all swirling around Francesca and the identity she’s building for herself in the absence of the people who have in the past always told her who she is: her mother and her clique from her old school. The characters are clearly drawn and easy to root for, despite the (pardon) depressing topic of a seriously depressed mother. As in The Piper’s Son, families are shown as deeply loving despite their problems, friends worth living for despite their quirks. Though Francesca can draw strength from all of them, in the end, the only person who can save Francesca is herself.

As a note, having read both of these books with shared characters now, it was interesting to read Saving Francesca knowing how things with the characters were going to end up. In actual events, though, only a few big events from this book were mentioned in The Piper’s Son. Most of the past events discussed in that book are set in between the two books, which certainly makes it easier to read them separately.