ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN PRODUCTION NOTE University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library Large-scale Digitization Project, 2007. il~c;r~ Sof Illinois School of Library and Information Science 1A I THE B UL LE T IN OF THE CENTER FOR CHILDREN'S BOOKS October 2004 Vol. 58 No. 2 A LOOK INSIDE 57 THE BIG PICTURE So Yesterday by Scott Westerfeld 58 NEW BOOKS FOR CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE Reviewed titles include: 67 * Bucking the Sarge by Christopher Paul Curtis 68 * BarfburgerBaby, I Was Here First by Paula Danziger; illus. by G. Brian Karas 76 * The Cats in KrasinskiSquare by Karen Hesse; illus. by Wendy Watson 83 * Margaux with an X by Ron Koertge 86 * Gifts by Ursula Le Guin 105 PROFESSIONAL CONNECTIONS 106 SUBJECT AND USE INDEX EXPLANATION OF CODE SYMBOLS USED WITH REVIEWS * Asterisks denote books of special distinction. R Recommended. Ad Additional book of acceptable quality for collections needing more material in the area. M Marginal book that is so slight in content or has so many weaknesses in style or format that it should be given careful consideration before purchase. NR Not recommended. SpC Subject matter or treatment will tend to limit the book to specialized collections. SpR A book that will have appeal for the unusual reader only. Recommended for the special few who will read it. The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (ISSN 0008-9036) is published monthly except August by the Publications Office of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and distributed by the University of Illinois Press, 1325 S. Oak, Champaign, IL 61820-6903. REVIEWING STAFF Deborah Stevenson, Editor (DS) Betsy Hearne, Consulting Editor and Faculty Liaison Elizabeth Bush, Reviewer (EB) Timnah Card, Reviewer (TC) Karen Coats, Reviewer (KC) Janice M. Del Negro, Reviewer (MD) Krista Hutley, Reviewer (KH) Hope Morrison, Reviewer (HM) Reviewers' initials are appended to reviews. OFFICE STAFF Molly Dolan Krista Hutley Hope Morrison SUBSCRIPTION RATES 1 year, institutions, $75.00; multiple institutional subscriptions, $70 for the first and $50 for each additional; individuals, $50.00; students, $15.00. In countries other than the United States, add $7.00 per subscription for postage. Japanese subscription agent: Kinokuniya Company Ltd. Single copy rate: $7.50. Volumes available in microfilm from ProQuest, 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48106. Complete volumes available in microfiche from Johnson Associates, P.O. Box 1017, Greenwich, CT 06830. Subscription checks should be made payable to the University of Illinois Press. All notices of change of address should provide both the old and new address. Postmaster: Send address changes to The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, University of Illinois Press, 1325 S. Oak, Champaign, IL 61820-6903. All inquiries about subscriptions and advertising should go to University of Illinois Press, 1325 S. Oak, Champaign, IL 61820-6903, 217-333-0950; toll free 866-244-0626. Review copies and all correspondence about reviews should be sent to Deborah Stevenson, The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, 501 E. Daniel St., Champaign, IL 61820-6601. Email: [email protected]; phone: 217-244-0324. Visit our homepage at http://www.lis.uiuc.edu/puboff/bccb Periodicals postage paid at Champaign, Illinois © 2004 by The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois Drawings by Debra Bolgla. This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Cover illustration by Lauren Monchik and John Son from So Yesterday ©2004. Used by permission of Razorbill/Penguin Young Readers Group. OCTOBER 2004 * 57 THE BIG PICTURE So Yesterday by Scott Westerfeld The gleaming, nocturnal urban world of our cover is the milieu of the aptly named Hunter, who is a teen cool spotter, a consultant paid to advise companies-in- cluding one well-known sneaker company with a world-famous "swoosh" logo- on the trendiness of ads and products while always looking for new and exciting directions ("We have to observe carefully and push and prompt you in ways you don't notice. It's not like you can just start making your own decisions, after all"). After he meets up with Jen, a disturbingly original thinker, the two find themselves drawn into a mystery when Mandy, the consultant who's Hunter's contact with the shoe company, goes missing, leaving behind only a pile of the most beautiful, most seductively cool sneakers ever manufactured-which are sport- ing a challenging anti-logo, the swoosh with a red circle and slash. As Hunter and Jen search for the apparently abducted Mandy, they uncover further signs of a brilliant and disruptive plot to infiltrate the glitzy world of cutting-edge marketing and undermine it with guerrilla action, satire, and parody, to "disrupt the sacred bond between brand and buyer." The tale is lively and quick paced, but it's secondary to the social com- mentary; Westerfeld tackles the merchantry of cool like no other YA author (ex- cept perhaps M. T. Anderson in Feed, BCCB 11/02, and Anderson's is, at least nominally, a futuristic vision), offering a witty and provocative investigation of the surrealistic world of marketing and status. There's food for thought aplenty in Hunter's crisp assessment of the various roles in the trend-marketing pyramid: Hunter is a Trendsetter, while Jen is that dangerous thing, an Innovator; there are also Early Adopters, Consumers, and Laggards ("They bravely tuck in their Kiss T-shirts and soldier on"). His tortuous analysis of the possibilities of the situation ("Or maybe," he says about the irresistible shoes, "these are supposed to look like bootlegs when they're not. And after these get too popular, which they will, the client will absorb the backlash and become cool again. Maybe they're ironic boot- legs") is absurd yet completely justified, a mad inspiration that may well become real life in our time. The book further teases its audience by salting the narration with commercial references but deliberately circumlocuting their instantly identi- fiable brand names, referring to the shoe manufacturer throughout as "the client" (and, therefore, to the subversive bootleggers-shoeleggers?-as the "anti-client"); there's also an array of sharply drawn characters plugged into cool from various directions-or hoping to be. What's particularly interesting is the book's shimmering ambiguity: there's cynicism aplenty here, which will appeal to quite a few readers, but there's also an understanding of the sheer glamour of marketing and the exhilaration of 58 * THE BULLETIN trendspotting. Jen the free spirit is as obsessed with the anti-client's sneakers as any mall rat is with the right brand name (she digs frantically through the ashes of the sneakers' funeral pyre, "looking for lost cool, the hardest thing to find"). The revolt is coolness itself, even surer than most revolutions to spawn eager confor- mity with its principles, more obliged than any to keep ahead of those who em- brace it. Alert readers will also enjoy turning the implied questions on the text itself (is, for instance, the notion of cool as contrived as the notion of marketing it?), and there's plenty of diversion and provocation even at the manifest level, making this an alluring offering for both pursuers and scorners of cool. (Imprint information appears on p. 103.) Deborah Stevenson, Editor NEW BOOKS FOR CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE AHLBERG, ALLAN The Improbable Cat; illus. by Peter Bailey. Delacorte, 2004 110p ISBN 0-385-73186-8 $9.95 R Gr. 5-7 It all starts out harmlessly enough: an adorable stray kitten limps into the life of David Burrell's cheerful, messy family, and the soft-hearted Burrells not only adopt the little gray cat but become completely besotted with it. David is allergic to cats in general and deeply suspicious of this one in particular, since it's growing at an unnatural rate and becoming an obsession with his parents and his little sister; upon his return from a week's camping, he discovers his family in complete thrall to the unrecognizably mutated creature, and he realizes that he (with the help of his friend George) is his family's only hope for release. The book's brevity and small trim size (as well as Ahlberg's history of easygoing titles such as The Woman who Won Things, BCCB 6/02) may suggest a pettable middle-grades read, but this is in fact a dark and intense novella with some genuine menace and rough edges in language and implications. Ahlberg cunningly keeps the threatening feline an amorphous figure, making it all the spookier, and his deft hand at friendly domes- ticity allows for sharp contrast between David's normal boy, best friend, and dog world and the eerie transformation of his family. The ending doesn't quite live up to the suspense of the buildup (the preternatural puss gets turned into roadkill by a passing truck), but the remaining unanswered questions are more enjoyably dis- comfiting than annoying. Bailey's compact line drawings echo the comfortably quotidian tone of David's narration while emphasizing the increasing gloom of the Burrell house with dense hatching and crosshatching, and they'll make this even more attractive to readers looking for something creepy yet compact. DS OCTOBER 2004 * 59 AHLBERG, ALLAN The Little Cat Baby; illus. by Fritz Wegner. Dial, 2004 [32p] ISBN 0-8037-3012-8 $10.99 Reviewed from galleys R 4-7 yrs When a dapper Edwardian couple decides they want a baby, they head to Nurse Doodle's Baby Shop, "which was how it was done in those days." They find quite a selection but settle on a cat baby, who proves precocious and loving.