Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

H SI I NOI S UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN

PRODUCTION NOTE

University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign Library Large-scale Digitization Project, 2007.

~~b~~ B

University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science __ I-~·" icrE~'"~ 4:-'" I~ B i :· "W "A warm kitchen filled with inviting aromas sets the scene for this heartfelt novel celebrating friendship and family ties. Here 12-year-old Rosie and her Italian grandmother whip up extraordinary dishes and exchange confidences.... Creech once 1 1 1_ 1l .l . -.. ._±- _I 1-- „ - ....L ....,- ..-- - ...... their emotions through very few, carefully chosen words." k - Starred review / Publishers Weekly -* S"A tasty treat. As 12-year-old Rosie makes zuppa with her O grandmother, she struggles with her feelings about her best friend, Bailey.... This gets high marks for its unique voice." - Starred review / ALA Booklist "The integration of the Italian kitchen and Granny's favorite stories I from the old country add flavor just like the ingredients in her recipes. This is a meal that should not be missed."- School Library Joural

Ruby Holler Tr (0-06-027732-7) $16.99 * Lb (0-06-027733-5) $16.89 Au (0-06-008786-2) $24.00 THE BUvL LE T IN

OF THE CENTER FOR CHILDREN'S BOOKS November 2003 Vol. 57 No. 3

A LOOK INSIDE

91 THE BIG PICTURE Creation written and illus. by Gerald McDermott 92 NEW BOOKS FOR CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE Reviewed titles include: 102 * The Animal Hedge by Paul Fleischman; illus. by Bagram Ibatoulline 107 * The Stone Lamp: Eight Stories ofHanukkah through History by Karen Hesse; illus. by Brian Pinkney 112 * Jake, Reinvented by Gordon Korman 119 * The River between Us by Richard Peck 121 * The She by Carol Plum-Ucci 132 PROFESSIONAL CONNECTIONS 133 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) Janice M. Del Negro, Contributing Editor (MD) Betsy Hearne, Consulting Editor and Faculty Liaison (BH) Elizabeth Bush, Reviewer (EB) Karen Coats, Reviewer (KC) Krista Hutley, Reviewer (KH)

Reviewers' initials are appended to reviews. OFFICE STAFF Molly Dolan Krista Hutley Hope Morrison

SUBSCRIPTION RATES 1 year, institutions, $70.00; 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: $5.50. 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.edulpuboff/bccb

Periodicals postage paid at Champaign, Illinois © 2003 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 Gerald McDermott from Creation ©2003. Used by permission of Dutton Children's Books. NOVEMBER 2003 * 91

THE BIG PICTURE

Creation written and illus. by Gerald McDermott

Recreating creation has been a particularly fruitful literary enterprise of late. Phyllis Root and Helen Oxenbury envisioned in Big Momma Makes the World (BCCB 2/03) a zaftig goddess who fashions the cosmos with her pudgy baby at her side, folksy benediction on her lips, and an indulgent but slightly stern love for her humans in her heart. Julius Lester and Joe Cepeda injected a broad measure of humor into the undertaking, with the god of What a Truly Cool World (BCCB 2/99) putting the finishing touches on his work while a host of opinionated min- ions put their two cents in. Now McDermott rides the pendulum back from playful imagination to the sacred mythology that shaped the image of creation in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. God is once again a potent, incorporeal force, and the genesis of life an impalpable mystery. The creative trajectory of Genesis is honored here, but the narrator is the Creator himself, and he makes his pride and power manifest: "I was before time. I was everywhere. There was nothing. I was there. My spirit moved over the deep. I floated in the darkness." What better than a disembodied voice to evoke the wonder of bringing being into being by breath alone? When he says, "Then I breathed light into the dark. The light became day. The darkness became night," there's no need to point out that "it was good." What else could it be? There's also no need to define the order of human emergence-no purloined ribs, no hint of woman as an afterthought: "Out of myself I brought man and woman. I gave my gifts to them." Of course, there's a paradox to this unnamed Eden: all creation may be a gift, but it's also a mission, and humans are designated stewards with a heavy onus of responsibility: "Creatures that swim. Creatures that crawl. Crea- tures that fly ... with woman and man to care for them." Abrogation of responsibility and the thumping fall from grace are, happily, still in the future, and McDermott leaves his burgeoning world rife with innocent possibility. An audience familiar with McDermott's An Arrow to the Sun (BCCB 11/74) or Raven (6/93) will recognize his skillful signature deployment of obsidian black. Darkness here, however, is more than effective artistic contrast or a device to catch and direct the eye. Black is a fundamental element in a nascent universe, and McDermott spreads broad spaces of slick emptiness against which a hazy gray swirl of "spirit" can bloom in the next double bleed into a field of nearly incandes- cent white as "the light became day." Black isn't banished with the appearance of light; it forms the boundaries between "sweet and salt" waters above and below heaven. It's the void that swooping birds and leaping fish and stampeding land animals race to fill at every turn of the page. Against the black, colors intensify as 92 * THE BULLETIN the cosmos grows, from the muddy brown and steely grays of the primal mists to the riot of jewel-toned entities-amethyst birds, emerald seas, topaz stars, sapphire humans, all mottled and stippled in dense brushwork that fairly crackles with life. The closing spread returns to serene blackness, but now a fiery red spark encasing an embryonic shape floats above the text: "I am all this. All this I AM." This, of course, explains nothing. Or perhaps it explains everything. Could be a profound theological insight. Could be a teasing, artistic conceit. But then, hasn't this always been the ultimate mystery story? (Imprint information appears on p. 115.) Elizabeth Bush, Reviewer

NEW BOOKS FOR CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE

ALDA, ARLENE Morning Glory Monday; illus. by Maryann Kovalski. Tundra, 2003 32p ISBN 0-88776-620-X $17.95 R 5-8 yrs A 1930s New York tenement is the setting for this story of a small immigrant family and their neighbors whose lives are transformed one magical summer. The young daughter narrates as she and Papa do everything they can think of to cheer up Mama, who misses Italy. When the narrator wins seeds at Coney Island, she's sure that growing flowers will make Mama smile again. The flowers start on the fire escape, but eventually blue morning glories cover all of the buildings, "as far as you could see." The miracle affects not only Mama but the neighborhood: the final illustration shows all of the frowns turned upside-down as grumpy Mrs. Grimaldi smiles at everyone, and Mr. Shapiro turns from selling pickles to playing the trumpet. Alda convincingly portrays tenement life and its hardships in small details: the narrator's friend Jackie "slept with his five brothers, all on the very same bed," and Mama "smiled a little, but mostly she ironed and sewed and mopped the floor and took naps." Kovalski's charcoal and watercolor illustrations are equally authentic, especially in neighborhood scenes: the book opens with a double-page spread of quick lines, muted yellows, and bright whites that show the overcrowd- ing, poverty, and unhappiness of the occupants, and later scenes convey not only the visual grimness but also the summer heat, street noise, and garbage smell. This doesn't quite have the personality of Stewart's The Gardener(BCCB 10/97), and the story that started out as an engaging depiction of the search for happiness turns a little too charming as the narrative switches to rhyming couplets, but this weakness is balanced by the strength of the illustrations. Young readers will be satisfied that the ending is a happy one, and the point-that happiness can come from a change of attitude rahrther than a change of circumstance-is carried through in both picture and story. KH NOVEMBER 2003 * 93

BARNARD, BRYN DangerousPlanet: NaturalDisasters that Changed History; written and illus. by Bryn Barnard. Crown, 2003 4 8p Library ed. ISBN 0-375-92249-0 $19.99 Trade ed. ISBN 0-375-82249-6 $17.95 Ad Gr. 6-10 Natural disasters make absorbing reading in their own right, but Barnard has taken a slightly different view, examining nine crucial historical redirections caused or strongly influenced by natural disasters. Following an introductory overview, the book starts with the impact that likely led to the extinction of the dinosaurs, swiftly moves onto human history with the volcanic explosion and subsequent tsunami that spelled the end of the enduring Minoan culture, and weathers various climatic catastrophes up through the Japanese earthquake of 1923. Each entry provides a map of the affected region (with the weather effects and relevant political locations indicated), three pages of double-columned text that discusses the historical context for the situation, the scientific background of the relevant natural phenom- enon, and the effects of the intersection of disaster and situation. The book's short of explanation on how we know about all this, and the information is so densely packed that some additional clarification would sometimes be welcome (how exactly did the unrest in Japan lead to ikebana flower arranging?), but this is a dramatic and provocative approach to history and environmental issues. There's a good mix of locations and of types of event, ranging from military defeat to agricultural failure, which adds to the inherent interest of nature running amuck. The art, one full-page and a few subsidiary images per section, runs toward garish colors and cheesy unsubtlety, but in an enjoyably disastrous way. A conclusion offers some extrapolation and food for further thought; though there is oddly neither table of contents nor index, a bibliography and glossary are included. DS

BLOCK, FRANCESCA LIA Wasteland. Cotler/HarperCollins, 2003 [160p] Library ed. ISBN 0-06-028645-8 $16.89 Trade ed. ISBN 0-06-028644-X $15.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 9-12 No one does love among the ruins of the Valley like Francesca Lia Block, especially when that love strains the boundaries of convention and produces more bitter than sweet, more pain than pleasure. Lex has loved Marina since she was a baby- his baby sister, in fact-and his love for her grows as Marina becomes the achingly beautiful blond waif so common in Block stories. Though consummation of their mutual affection is never actually confirmed, lines are definitely crossed, and Lex, unable to face life with or without his sister/lover, commits suicide. Much of the narrative is given over to an exploration of Lex and Marina's developing devotion for each other, shifting perspectives from one to the other, with Lex being more aware of the transgressive nature of his feelings than Marina. As usual, the adults are self-absorbed to the point of toxicity, and the secondary characters are little more than colorful stereotypes of '80s punk culture. Uncharacteristically, Block backs down from the full impact of her subject by revealing that Lex was in fact adopted, a revelation that justifies the title. Though there is a happy ending of sorts, with Marina finding love, forgiveness, and healing in the arms of another boy, readers who get their tears from teen Shakespearean remakes like Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet and Tim Blake Nelson's O will find their tragic sense of love's sublime agonies affirmed here. KC 94 * THE BULLETIN

BORDEN, LOUISE Touching the Sky: The Flying Adventures of Wilbur and Orville Wright; by Louise Borden and Trish Marx; illus. by Peter Fiore. McElderry, 2003 6 4 p ISBN 0-689-84876-5 $18.95 Ad Gr. 3-6 Although this year's centennial attention is currently focused on the first flight in North Carolina, the Wright brothers had plenty of achievements following that event, as Borden and Marx reveal in this account. The action here is largely centered in 1909, when Wilbur crowned New York's tricentennial festivities with lengthy, controlled flights around the Statue of Liberty and up the Hudson River and Orville dazzled Europeans with record-setting feats of airmanship. Readers familiar with Borden's tribute to aviatrix Bessie Coleman, Fly High! (BCCB 2/01), will recognize the format: blocks of verse-like, left-justified text interlaced with watercolor double-page spread backdrops and spot art. There's not much here on the fliers' technical improvements since the 1903 flight, the struggle to defend patent rights, or even the brothers' quest to land a buyer for their invention. What Borden does deliver-in spades-is a sense of excitement and pure astonishment that swept through the crowds of spectators as they caught their first glimpse of manned flight. While this title won't qualify for one-stop Wright Brothers readers, centennial enthusiasts may want to muse awhile on life after Kitty Hawk. An aviation timeline and maps are included. EB

BREDESON, CARMEN After the Last Dog Died: The True-Life, Hair-RaisingAdven- ture ofDouglas Mawson andHis 1911-1914Antarctic Expedition. National Geo- graphic, 2003 64 p illus. with photographs ISBN 0-7922-6140-2 $18.95 Ad Gr. 4-8 The burst of recent Antarctic literature for youth has largely been focused on Ernest Shackleton; the work of Australian Douglas Mawson, especially his Australasian Expedition of 1911-14, has been largely overshadowed by the drama of Shackleton's and Scott's contemporaneous journeys. Bredeson's biography puts Mawson front and center, briefly surveying his youth and his burgeoning career in geology before turning to his Antarctic explorations. Though he first proved himself on Shackleton's 1908-09 expedition, where he and two colleagues were the first people to stand at the magnetic south pole, the main subject here is his own expedition. On that expedition four parties set out to cover and map an extraordinary amount of uncharted territory; Mawson's journey turned into an ordeal of survival after his two companions died and he, ill and deprived of food, had to make his way back to the expedition's main camp on his own. The writing lacks the smoothness and focus of the publisher's similarly formatted biography of Shackleton (Kostyal's Trialby Ice, BCCB 12/99), and there's little critical assessment of Mawson's achievements; some of the photographs seem to be not of his actual expedition or traveled region (captions suggest that he traversed landscape "similar to this one"), but their actual subject is never stated. It's nice to see some primary research, however (the author spoke to several of Mawson's relatives), and this is an account of an eventful and dramatic life invitingly condensed for easy access; the elegant format, blending an emphasis on photographs with catchy pull quotes and generous white space, will draw readers not ready for Mawson's own autobiography. End matter includes a list of expedition members, a chronology, a list of sources and resources (electronic as well as print), and an index; the copyright page includes specific page notes for quotations. DS NOVEMBER 2003 * 95

BUNTING, EVE The Presence: A Ghost Story. Clarion, 2003 [2 08p] ISBN 0-618-26919-3 $15.00 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 6-9 A Christmas with her grandmother in California seems like a good idea for seventeen-year-old Catherine, who's trying to pull herself back together after a tragic car accident that injured her and killed her best friend. Once there, she finds her usual rapport with her beloved grandmother and there's even a possible boyfriend (Collin, the son of her grandmother's pastor), but she's also beginning to wonder if she's losing her mind: she's hearing voices that no one else hears and seeing things that no one else detects. Interpolated narrative reveals that her grandmother's church houses a murderous ghost, who's been waiting to add Catherine to his gallery of doomed young women; Catherine, however, is drawn by his promise to assuage her guilt over her friend's death. There are some classic elements here-a secret guilt, a lonely ghost, a gothically romantic flavor-as well as additional pleasures in the budding relationship between Collin and Catherine and her easygoing rapport with her energetic grandmother. The components are sometimes rather cursorily unfolded, however, so the book doesn't always manage to attain the necessary atmosphere; detailed accounts of the ghost's existence and formative influences make the mystery overly earthbound in places while leaving his actual actions somewhat unclear. This therefore isn't up to Hahn's Look for Me by Moonlight (BCCB 4/95) or other tales of romance foundering on supernatural rocks, but readers will still find pleasure in the traditional ghost-story ingredients as Bunting puts them through their satisfying paces. DS

CADNUM, MICHAEL Ship ofFire. Viking, 2003 197p ISBN 0-670-89907-0 $16.99 R Gr. 5-9 Doctor William Perrivale and his apprentice, Thomas Spyre, are down to their last coin, and they leap at the chance to sign on as ship's surgeon and assistant on the Elizabeth Bonaventure, Sir Francis Drake's flagship leading the fleet to wreak havoc among Spanish ships at Cadiz. The two have been hired by the Lord Admiral not only to tend the sick and injured, but also to keep watch over Drake himself, who is suspected of having his hand in the till rather than on the tiller, so to speak. Perrivale is promptly carried off by an explosion during gunnery practice, and Thomas, at age seventeen, is left in charge of all shipboard medical concerns. There's plenty to keep him busy, from leeching to amputation, and he hones his already considerable skills on captive patients who quickly reward him with cautious friendship and respect. Drake himself keeps an eye on Tom, who happens to hail from a town near his own birthplace, and Thomas always seems to have an ear to strat- egy and plans. Except for the battle at Cidiz, which seems to be based on actual events (although no historic note is provided), this could be any maritime adventure tale, with a medical twist. A rousing yarn it is nonetheless, and as soon as readers cease questioning whom narrator Thomas is addressing (he seems to speak across the centuries, explaining social and nautical terms for twenty-first century middle-school landlubbers), they can settle in for a boatload of action. Much of the novel's satisfaction, however, rests ultimately on whether a sequel waits in the wings. We leave Cadiz harbor ablaze, but the Lord Admiral's commission-and even a romance for Tom-are becalmed. Readers can keep their fingers crossed. EB 96 * THE BULLETIN

CAVE, KATHRYN You've Got Dragons; illus. by Nick Maland. Peachtree, 2003 32p ISBN 1-56145-284-X $16.95 Ad 6-9 yrs One day, while walking home through the park, Ben turns around to find that he is being pursued by an absolutely huge dragon who is soon accompanied by others. It soon becomes clear that the "dragons" in this self-consciously bibliothera- peutic offering refer to both specific and generalized worries and anxieties, and after delineating the symptoms and dismissing non-helpful responses to dragons, the book reassures the reader that everyone has them at some time or another. It goes on to offer Ben's suggestions for dealing with dragons through an advice column in which he answers letters from other children and his own father and through a list of "Ben's Top Tips for What to Do When You've Got Dragons," which include befriending your dragon, drawing pictures of it, making it laugh, and talking to others. Some of the advice seems contradictory; for instance, earlier in the book, talking about your dragons is presented as a risky enterprise: either people want you to talk about dragons when you don't want to talk, or they respond with their own dragon stories rather than listening to yours. In addition, the nature of the dragons themselves is rather muddled-in one scene the math- test dragon is threatening to overwhelm the child, in another he is eating the teacher. However, the emotional oscillation and confusion caused by the presence of dragons is rendered perceptively through the use of varying fonts that alternate between straight and curved orientations, and the final reassurance that "No dragon is morepoweful than YOU" is reinforced by the soft pastels and crosshatching that ground and contain the illustrations against the white backgrounds. The purpo- sive metaphor will appeal to adults and may, if properly understood (and this may require some prompting), prove helpful to youngsters a bit too old to be soothed by simpler approaches such as Henkes' Wemberly Worried (BCCB 9/00) or Wells' Felix and the Worrier (reviewed below). KC

CHILD, LAUREN Utterly Me, Clarice Bean. Candlewick, 2003 190p ISBN 0-7636-2186-2 $15.99 R Gr. 3-5 Clarice Bean, heroine of picture books such as Clarice Bean, Guess Who's Babysit- ting? (BCCB 4/01), appears here in her first chapter book. Clarice tells her own story in a breakneck narrative (packaged, if not couched, as a diary) that speeds from one chapter to the next in a breathless style reminiscent of Kay Thompson's legendary Eloise of the Plaza. Clarice opens with an introduction to her family and segues almost immediately into the major preoccupations of her life: archen- emy Grace Grapello ("what a showoff'); teacher Mrs. Wilberton ("not my favorite person on the planet of Earth"); classmate Betty Moody ("we are utterly best friends"); and her literary passion, The Ruby Redfort Collection ("Betty Moody and me utterly love them"), excerpts from which punctuate Clarice's commentary. A class project, the naughtiest boy in school, and a misunderstanding between friends make up the main threads of this feather-light tale. Plotting and characterizations may be a bit facile, but despite the predictable nature of the action, Clarice's voice is attention-grabbing enough to catch-and hold-readers. Black-and-white illustrations interspersed throughout the text give a wild-eyed (sometimes literally) view of the protagonist and her environs. Clarice is a bubbly and inviting narrator who will make firm friends of those seeking to master chapter books. JMD NOVEMBER 2003 * 97

CHRISTENSEN, BONNIE The Daring Nellie Bly: America's Star Reporter; written and illus. by Bonnie Christensen. Knopf, 2003 [32p] Library ed. ISBN 0-375-91568-0 $18.99 Trade ed. ISBN 0-375-81568-6 $16.95 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 3-6 In a time when working women were confined mainly to schools, factories, and sweatshops, Nellie Bly became a renowned investigative reporter, tirelessly campaigning to expose injustice and corruption. In 1889, she traveled around the world in seventy-two days with only one handbag for essentials and a monkey named McGinty for company. Christensen succinctly summarizes Bly's unconventional life, using her record-breaking trip around the world as the prime example of Bly's motto, "Energy rightly applied and directed will accomplish anything." Young readers will be able to get into the travel spirit with descriptions of the frustrating delays, fearsome storms, and determined competitors that Bly faced; they'll also enjoy charting Bly's progress on detailed maps, which sport mock memorabilia such as reproductions of travel tickets and representative pictures of the different countries and cultures Bly experienced. Christensen's line-and- watercolor illustrations of Pittsburgh and New York highlight the cities' industrial nature with muted grays and browns and smoke-clogged skies, and her representation of clothing and buildings gives the book much of its turn-of-the- century feel. The straightforward text lacks some of the verve of its subject, but this is balanced with quotations from Bly and her contemporaries that show her willful spirit. With the book's addition of a chronology, bibliography, and videography, readers who are left curious about the woman who bullied and coaxed her way into changing the world will know where to go. KH

DATLOW, ELLEN, ed. Swan Sister: Fairy Tales Retold; ed. by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. Simon, 2003 165p ISBN 0-689-84613-4 $16.95 R Gr. 6-9 Datlow and Windling follow up their recent foray into fairy-tale retellings for young adults (A Wolfat the Door, BCCB 7/00) with this new anthology, featuring thirteen stories that take their themes from the plots and motifs of well-known fairy tales and lesser-known fairy lore. Jane Yolen offers "Greenkid," about a vora- cious nature spirit who nearly succeeds in taking over a young man's fancy; Pat York's "The Fish's Story" looks at "The Fisherman and His Wife" from a new perspective; Gregory Frost takes the bones of an old ballad and clothes them in chilling prose in "The Harp That Sang." While the quality of the entries is not completely consistent, most of the tales approach the familiar truths of fairy tales and tell them slant, providing readers with a different angle that relieves the tales of their burden of domesticated familiarity. The entries are arranged with a tonal rise and fall, from the romantic lyricism ofMidori Snyder's quest tale "Golden Fur" to the rising terror ofNina Kiriki Hoffman's "Bluebeard" retelling "Chambers of the Heart"; from the antic humor of Bruce Coville's "Tom Thumb: A Life in Minia- ture" to the internal surprise of Kathe Koja's red-cloaked "Lupe." Here's an opportunity to introduce younger readers not ready for fantasy epics to the tropes and delights of the genre in an abbreviated but still involving format. JMD 98 * THE BULLETIN

DEFELICE, CYNTHIA Old Granny and the Bean Thief; illus. by Cat Bowman Smith. Farrar, 2003 32p ISBN 0-374-35614-9 $16.00 Ad 4-6 yrs An old lady with a penchant for beans is perturbed when a sneak thief robs her of her favorite food three nights in a row. On her way to town to inform the sheriff she meets a talking water snake, a pecan, a cow patty, a cactus, and an alligator, all of whom tell her "Old Granny ... on your way home, pick me up and put me in your sack. You'll be glad you did." The sheriffhas, unfortunately, gone fishing, so Old Granny walks home, "feeling plumb discouraged and lonelier than ever." On her way she is so happy to see the cheerful alligator, chatty cactus, etc. that she picks up each and every one and takes them home, where they scare off the bean thief (a mischievous raccoon) in a scene that echoes the rousting of the thieves in "The Bremen Town Musicians." Despite structural echoes of traditional folktales, the text is overly wordy and the pace bogs down in the excessive accumulation of jolly helpers and undifferentiated repetitive language. Smith's loose-lined infor- mal watercolors suit the humor of the plot, but the palette is washed out and the compositions lack impact. Still, there is something irresistible about a talking cow patty, and in the hands of a storyteller with an editorial bent, this will make a successful silly tale for telling. JMD

DEMI The Legend of Saint Nicholas; written and illus. by Demi. McElderry, 2003 40p ISBN 0-689-84681-9 $19.95 M Gr. 3-7 If not the outright winner, St. Nicholas must be at least a contender for the Most Colorful but Unverifiable Legends award, and here Demi rounds up every available story and delivers them all in a solemn but less than satisfying account. With nary a source or reference, each suspect miracle and hazy date is presented as widely accepted fact, from his birth and death years to his improbable resuscitation of three dead children pickled in a tub of brine. Readers who accept the legends at face value may still find themselves confused about how young Nicholas became a bishop when no mention is made of his having been a clergyman, or why he was "tormented for his beliefs and put on trial during the first ecumenical Council of Nicaea." And how in the world had his "body passed into Heaven" when, according to previous text, his remains were securely buried in Bari, Italy? Icon-styled scenes, liberally accented in metallic gold, are at once gravely formal and naively doll-like. Pictures that accompany the textual explanation of Nicholas's popular transition from Saint to Santa, as well as end paper renderings of various "ethnic" Santas, break faith with the overall attempt to fashion a sacred biography. The content is diverting, but it must be taken with a heaping tablespoon of salt; readers seeking the broadest coverage of the popular saint may want to turn to Tompert's Saint Nicholas (BCCB 10/00). EB

DENT, GRACE LBD: It's a Girl Thing. Putnam, 2003 275p ISBN 0-399-24187-6 $15.99 R Gr. 7-10 It seems that teen angst isn't so angsty these days, especially when you've got fabu- lous mates and a plan for greatness. The mates are the LBD, short for Les Bambinos Dangereuses, or Ronnie, Claude, and Fleur, three inseparable fourteen-year-old girls whose parents unreasonably refuse to let them spend the night at the Astlebury Snogging, er, Music Festival. The plan is to stage their own music festival featur- NOVEMBER 2003 * 99 ing local bands, a move that promises to make them the most popular girls in Blackwell School. Meanwhile, it seems as though Ronnie's parents are splitting up, which is really too inconvenient when she's got a festival to plan. Not to worry: the festival comes off far better than expected, and the trouble with Ronnie's parents, an unexpected pregnancy which is obvious to everyone except Ronnie, is resolved when they come to terms with their little surprise. Following in the tradition of Louise Rennison (Angus, Thongs, andFull-Frontal Snogging, BCCB 5/00), Dent plays the trials and tribulations of being fourteen-inscrutable parents, equally inscrutable lads, and breasts, buns, and noses that are either too small or too large- for laughs and doesn't try to cram any life lessons in amongst the drollery. The book drags in the middle as Dent indulges herself in a bit too much atmosphere and not enough plot, but the pace picks up toward the end. As a regular contribu- tor to British teen magazines, Dent has a keen ear for British teen slang and a knack for quotable quips that will make the book worth the price of admission for Anglophile readers. KC

DICAMILLO, KATE The Tale ofDespereaux: Being the Story ofa Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup, and a Spool of Thread; illus. by Timothy Basil Ering. Candlewick, 2003 272p ISBN 0-7636-1722-9 $17.99 R Gr. 3-5 The young mouse Despereaux Tilling simply does not fit in (he can read, and he has an innate appreciation for music), either with his family or his community, and, as the author states, "you must know that an interesting fate (sometimes involving rats, sometimes not) awaits almost everyone, mouse or man, who does not conform." When Despereaux makes the unforgivable mistake of speaking to a human, the Princess Pea, he loses both his heart and his place in the mouse community, and the adventure is off. On its way, the novel tells the story not only of Despereaux, the chivalric mouse who risks all for his ladylove, but also Chiar- oscuro (a.k.a. Roscuro), the outlawed rat who craves the light, and Miggery Sow, the servant girl who squanders hope on an impossible wish. DiCamillo speaks directly to the reader throughout this deliberately though gently mannered book, and she states the point of her lessons clearly. There's an intimacy to the authorial tone that makes the artfully crafted prose and precisely contrived exposition accessible as well as gratifying. Ering's full-page pencil drawings contribute to the romantic feel, the meticulous drafting softened by the dusty, almost pastel-like treatment of dark and light; the physical design of the book hearkens back to leather-bound volumes with gold imprints and other detailing. There is a classic charm to this picaresque tale of an idealistic mouse suffering unrequited love for a princess; that and a pace that lends itself to reading aloud will make this novel a favorite among those ready for some gentle questing. JMD

DRUMMOND, ALLAN The Flyers; written and illus. by Allan Drummond. Foster/ Farrar, 2003 40p ISBN 0-374-32410-7 $16.00 Ad 4-7 yrs GLASS, ANDREW The Wondrous Whirligig: The Wright Brothers' FirstFlying Ma- chine; written and illus. by Andrew Glass. Holiday House, 2003 32p ISBN 0-8234-1717-4 $16.95 Ad 5-8 yrs Lest the story-hour crowd feel left out of the Wright Brothers hoopla, Drummond and Glass step in with kiddie spins on the aviators' career. Flyers views the events 100 * THE BULLETIN at Kitty Hawk through the eyes of some fictional local children who hang around the beach watching the brothers and daydreaming about the airships they will in- vent. Details of the first flight itself are neatly adapted for lap- and floor-sitters and elegantly realized in Drummond's buoyant, airy watercolors. The children's imag- inings, though amusing in their spot-on predictions for the future of manned flight ("He's going to make aflying war machine and fly it right over the Macy gang's hideout and drop rocks and water bombs on the roof"), may prove annoyingly intrusive to listeners who want just the facts, ma'am. Whirligigtakes a quite different tack, offering a rambunctious tall tale based on reports of the Wright boys' flying toy and their early efforts at tinkering. There's plenty of enthusiasm and pratfall humor in the bouncy text and feverishly active watercolors, as well as a strong (and probably quite accurate) sense of the family support the young inven- tors enjoyed. However, there's no clear connection between the boys' puttering and the men's accomplishment, and listeners lacking prior background won't be much enlightened as to the Wright Brothers' significance. Still, each of the above titles is visually enticing and could supplement a more solid presentation in classroom or story hour. EB

DUNREA, OLIVIER Ollie; written and illus. by Olivier Dunrea. Houghton, 2003 32p ISBN 0-618-33928-0 $9.95 R 2-4 yrs Ollie the Stomper; written and illus. by Olivier Dunrea. Houghton, 2003 32p ISBN 0-618-33930-2 $9.95 R 2-4 yrs This picture-book duet introduces Ollie the gosling, sidekick of slightly older goslings Gossie and Gertie, who appeared previously in Gossie and Gossie and Gertie (BCCB 12/02). In Ollie, Gossie and Gertie impatiently await Ollie's arrival, but Ollie has other ideas. Happily ensconced inside his egg, Ollie announces, "I won't come out," and despite some preliminary rolls to the left and right, he doesn't- until Gossie and Gertie feign disinterest, at which point the contrary gosling cracks his way into the world. Ollie the Stomper finds the diminutive hero in a temper: Gossie and Gertie have boots (red and blue, respectively) and Ollie wants some, too. The two older goslings exasperatedly give in to the demands of the younger, each donating a boot to the cause, but Ollie finds getting what he wants is not necessarily satisfying (" 'These boots are too hot!'Ollie shouts") and the three kick off their boots and go swimming. Dunrea's text may be simple but it is packed with toddler-sized drama, and Gossie and Gertie easily assume the roles of older sisters dealing with a pesky but beloved younger brother. The text includes repetitive language and action verbs (Ollie the Stomper "hops," "stomps," "kicks," and "stares") with solid consonants that lend themselves to creative reading aloud. Spare line- and-watercolor illustrations are streamlined but effective, and their reliance on visual repetition (the goslings are always seen in readily identifiable profile) makes them easy to "read." Move over, Gossie and Gertie, here comes Ollie; shelves of toddler titles will be all the better for his presence. JMD

ERDRICH, LISE Sacagawea;illus. byJulie Buffalohead. Carolrhoda, 2003 40p ISBN 0-87614-646-9 $16.95 R Gr. 3-6 Erdrich combines known historical fact with accessible storytelling in this picture- book biography of Sacagawea, Shoshone guide and interpreter for Lewis and Clark's NOVEMBER 2003 * 101

1804 Corps of Discovery expedition. The story opens with Sacagawea's capture by Hidatsa warriors, then segues into her time with the Hidatsa and her marriage to French trapper Charbonneau. When Charbonneau is hired to guide Lewis and Clark, Sacagawea and her newborn infant accompany them. The author clearly explains what is known and what is surmised, differentiating between legend and documented history. The narrative is interspersed with small but telling details that give concrete insight into the trials and triumphs of everyday life, as well as an unintrusive sense of historical context. Buffalohead's full-page color illustrations are notable for their tangible textures; though articulation of figures and features is sometimes stiff, there's drama in the rich palette and expressionistic style. Erdrich ends with the departure of the Corps of Discovery and Sacagawea's return to the Knife River villages of the Hidatsa; an afterword explains the difficulty of following Sacagawea's story and outlines various speculations about her fate. An introductory author's note explains the spelling and pronunciation of Sacagawea's name; a timeline, historical maps, and a select bibliography are included. JMD

FALCONE, L. M. The Mysterious Mummer. Kids Can, 2003 192p ISBN 1-55337-376-6 $16.95 Ad Gr. 5-8 Despite Joey's protests, he is off to spend Christmas with his bereaved aunt, Corinne, in her lonely house on the coast of Newfoundland. What he finds there is more than simple grief over the loss of her husband; his aunt seems to have gone off the beam-not eating, not sleeping, not paying any attention to her young houseguest except to yell at him. Shades of Miss Havisham emerge when Joey finally goes into Corinne's bedroom and finds a shrine erected to her late husband, complete with candles, black roses, and her wedding dress mounted on a dressmaker's dummy. Circumstances go further awry when Corinne attends a stance and an uninvited spirit shows up with a dire warning. Things appear to be looking up when Joey befriends an abnormally pale boy his own age (of course, Joey is oblivious to the fact that his new friend is a ghost, but no reader will be) and Corinne's chipper mother-in-law shows up bearing gifts for Christmas, but Joey and his aunt should beware perky strangers, as these two are apparently determined to reunite Corinne with her dead husband, no matter how many other holiday revelers they have to take with them. The plot moves along at a fast clip, and the climax is sufficiently ghoulish, but the motivations of the characters are altogether unclear. Corinne's response seems a bit excessive, for instance, seeing how she and Stephen were mar- ried less than a year, and that after a scant three-month courtship. Further, how could such an endearing fellow as Uncle Stephen become such a foul spirit as to lure a roomful of holiday guests to their deaths just so he can be with his wife? These and other unanswered questions will frustrate the attentive reader, but kids who just want a titillating encounter with the unvarnished occult will find some shivers here. KC

FENNER, CAROL Snowed In with Grandmother Silk; illus. by Amanda Harvey. Dial, 2003 80p ISBN 0-8037-2857-3 $14.95 R* Gr. 2-4 Grandmother Silk is Ruddy's father's mother, a very proper individual who favors high heels, carefully styled hair, and a well-ordered existence, and Ruddy is not looking forward to staying with her over Halloween when his parents are away. Things go from bad to worse when a freak early snowstorm blankets the area and 102 * THE BULLETIN cuts off their power, water, telephone, and access to the rest of the world; this means that Ruddy will have to miss the Halloween party at the zoo, where he was going to sport his new gorilla costume, and endure sheer, unadulterated together- ness with Grandmother Silk. The book is understated yet tender in its treatment of Ruddy and Grandmother Silk's unfolding relationship in the face of their pre- dicament; as the world freezes, Grandmother Silk thaws, finding pleasure in learning chess with her grandson and sharing her memories of Ruddy's grandfather, and Ruddy finds himself enjoying his grandmother's company. The modest survival story, with Ruddy and his grandmother cooking on the stovetop (her household help can't make it to the house) and hauling water from the lake, is precisely observed (Ruddy keeps warm in his gorilla suit as Grandmother swathes herself in her minks) and satisfying in its own right, and it's also subtly demonstrated that the situation levels the playing field, with Grandmother Silk's control lessened and Ruddy's talents (he's learned how to lay a fire, for instance) properly appreciated. This would make a snug little readaloud as well as an enjoyable readalone that'll make youngsters yearn for a chance to rough it for a few days with a special grownup. Harvey's line-and-watercolor inserts evince a quiet and personable benignity well matched to the story's tone. DS

FISHER, LEONARD EVERETT The Gods and Goddesses ofAncient China;written and illus. by Leonard Everett Fisher. Holiday House, 2003 34 p ISBN 0-8234-1694-1 $16.95 Ad Gr. 4-6 Fisher adds to his picture book pantheons of gods and goddesses from ancient cultures with this abbreviated gallery highlighting the deities of ancient China. A one-page introduction (heavy-handedly beginning "China-itsvery name evokes mystery to the Western world") provides a thimbleful of Chinese history and explains that this title is intended to serves a "brief introduction to seventeen of the most popular of these gods and goddesses." Each spread that follows features a full-page color portrait of a particular deity or deities on the verso, with explana- tory information on the recto. Deities presented include Yu Huang Da Di, The Jade Emperor; Sun Wukong, God of Mischief; Guan Gong, God of War; and Cai Shen, God of Wealth, among others. The information provided is limited, and curious readers will find their appetites whetted but not sated; still, this is often- sought, curriculum-related information in an accessible, unthreatening format. While the deified figures themselves are roughly defined and the faces disappoint- ingly undifferentiated, Fisher's illustrations achieve power through opaque colors and intense hues; a band of color contrasts with the background color on each spread and unifies the compositions with a frame-like effect. A short bibliography and a pronunciation guide is appended; the endpapers feature a map of ancient China. JMD

FLEISCHMAN, PAUL TheAnimalHedge; illus. by Bagram Ibatoulline. Candlewick, 2003 38p ISBN 0-7636-1606-0 $16.99 R 6-10 yrs A farmer "whose heart glowed like a hot wood stove with the love of animals" lives with his three sons on the family farm until the farm falls on hard times, the animals are sold, and the family moves to "a tiny cottage with a hedge around it." The farmer misses his animals, and one day, he is struck by a familiar form in the hedge; some careful snips with his shears and the shape of a cow emerges, then a rooster, then a duster of sheep, until finally the farmer has a topiary barnyard. When his NOVEMBER 2003 * 103 sons are pondering going out into the world and finding a trade, the father cuts down the hedge and tells each son to watch the shrubbery for an answer; sure enough, each son sees his future in a shape offered by the growing hedge. After successful years as coachman, sailor, and fiddler, the men return to their father's house and restore to him the real barnyard animals he so long missed: "The farmer's heart glowed like a hot wood stove. And he made up his mind to let the hedge grow back just as it pleased." The deliberate formality of Fleischman's language and the tale's folklike structure keep the plot clear despite its complexity. Ibatoulline's watercolor and gouache illustrations, based on nineteenth-century American folk art but evincing more fluid draftsmanship, have a pastoral naivete that suits the somewhat nostalgic sensibility of this story. Thematically attuned design features in the varied spreads include pictures with embroidery-like bor- ders, text blocks framed in ornamental curlicues, and paint-on-wood endpapers that echo the motifs of the compositions. The loving relationship between the farmer and his sons and the genuine affection the farmer feels for a lost way of life add an emotional subtext that enriches the coming-of-age theme. JMD

FLOYD, MADELEINE Captain's Purr; written and illus. by Madeleine Floyd. Harcourt, 2003 24 p ISBN 0-15-204939-8 $16.00 Ad 4-7 yrs Captain is an elegant black and white tomcat, who enjoys the traditional cat pleasures ("Captain likes to sleep. . . . When he is not sleeping, Captain likes to wash. ... When he is not sleeping or washing, Captain likes to eat"). On a more unusual note, he also enjoys courting his sweetheart in a most romantic way, row- ing a boat down the river to her house and holding paws with her under the stars. There's a felicitous specificity to the description of Captain's everyday pastimes, so cat-owning kids will immediately recognize the feline habits and perhaps chime in with their own kitties' activities. This realistic particularity makes the shift to fantasy all the more jarring, however, and youngsters with a bit more insight about cats' nocturnal prowling may find it a rather coy obscuring of the earthy truth; there's also not much plot beyond the description of the day. The illustrations are a major highlight: Scott's brushy watercolors recall Victor G. Ambrus in their splotchy textures and charismatic animal portraiture, and there's also a nice line in shimmering nocturnal landscape. This doesn't have the payoff or credibility of Martin's Leo the Magnificat (BCCB 11/96), but cat lovers may still relish this creative demonstration that every cat has his day. DS

FRENCH, JACKIE Diary of a Wombat; illus. by Bruce Whatley. Clarion, 2003 [3 0p] ISBN 0-618-38136-8 $14.00 Reviewed from galleys R* 5-8 yrs A rotund little wombat dutifully records her daily life, which starts out with basic wombatty highlights ("Morning: Slept. Afternoon: Slept. Evening: Ate grass") but then gets more interesting when she acquires new human neighbors. Now she's discovered a wonderful location for her holes (the garden bed), a splendid new scratching post (the patio table), and, best of all, a source of delicious new treats (carrots). It's always funny to see your own world though the viewpoint of an outsider (or downunderer), and the sweet yet deadpan humor of the wombat's amiable tenacity ("Banged on large metal object till carrots appeared") will tickle 104 * THE BULLETIN

youngsters even as they realize the accuracy of the wombat's conclusion: "Have decided that humans are easily trained and make quite good pets." Whatley's acrylics make the wombat an adorably shmoo-like character, legs sticking up stiffly as she snoozes; the layout favors vignettes on white space, which puts the protagonist in the spotlight (the people are appropriately peripheral). This is amusing in its own right, and it gets an extra piquancy from the exotic air wombats acquire from a northern perspective; use this in combination with Fleming's Muncha! Muncha!Muncha! (BCCB 3/02) for a global look at clever (and awfully cute) garden infiltrators. DS

FRITZ, APRIL YOUNG Praying at the Sweetwater Motel. Hyperion, 2003 26 6 p ISBN 0-7868-1864-6 $15.99 R Gr. 5-8 Sarah Jane, her mother, and her four-year-old sister, Alice, slip away quietly in the middle of the night, leaving Sarah Jane's beloved Georgia home behind to escape her abusive alcoholic father. They land in Dublin, Ohio, where, to Sarah Jane's horror, they take up residence at the Sweetwater Motel. The owner, Mrs. Sweetwater, and the motel's other permanent resident, Henry, are kind and pro- tective, but that doesn't mitigate the stigma of living in a motel, especially when the snobby girls at Sarah Jane's new school find out. Fortunately, she has been befriended by two other misfits-a brazen, diminutive girl named Fred and the gallant but gawky and carbuncular Arthur. Together they hatch a plan for Sarah Jane to go home-after all, her father has assured her that he has stopped drinking and that he would never lay a violent hand on her or her mother again. When she calls him from the bus station in Macon only to hear the telltale "psshhhh" of a beer can opening, however, she realizes that she has made a mistake. The plot offers no real surprises, but Sarah Jane's voice, both in the narration and the inter- stitial prayers between each chapter, is credible and recognizable in its hopes and its hurts. By having Sarah Jane pray for her father to stop drinking, Fritz risks painting herself into a corner, but instead she uses the prayers to chart Sarah Jane's maturing understanding of the complexities of loving both herself and her father, and of learning what it means to have a real home. KC

GAALDA, ANNA 95 Pounds ofHope. Viking, 2003 [112p] ISBN 0-670-03672-2 $14.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 5-9 Poor old Gregory: he's thirteen and in sixth grade, and no matter how hard he tries, school is one massive collection of failures for him; he's just trying to hold on until he's sixteen and can finally drop out. His great skill is his ability to work with his hands (his kindergarten teacher, the last to understand him, said he had "a head like a sieve, magic fingers, and a heart of gold"), and his main consolation is his easygoing relationship with his beloved Grandpa Leon, also a gifted craftsman. When Gregory's current school despairs of him and his parents decide to send him to boarding school, he sees a ray of hope in a technical school that emphasizes the things he's actually good at-but will his terrible record ruin his chances of entry? Gregory's narration in this French import is plaintive yet plainspoken and ruefully humorous ("Then comes the torture of homework. If my mother helps me, she always ends up crying. If it's my father, I always end up crying"), realistic as the voice of a kid who knows that he's never going to succeed in what's currently the main arena of his life. The imaginary--or spiritual-intervention of his grandfa- NOVEMBER 2003 * 105

ther at a crucial moment and his grandfather's sudden recovery from a coma lack the grounded credibility of the rest of the novel, but it's Gregory's travails that dominate. It's refreshing to see a book that acknowledges that working harder doesn't always get you there, that some struggling kids never succeed at school, and that they may find ways to succeed at life nonetheless. The book's brevity and easygoing text makes it a promising readaloud or sympathetic, uncondescending novel for reluctant readers, but any kid who knows what it's like to fail when adults want you to succeed will empathize with Gregory. DS

GLASS, ANDREW The Wondrous Whirligig: The Wright Brothers'FirstFlying Ma- chine. See review under Drummond, p. 99.

HABER, MELISSA GLENN The HeroicAdventuresofHerculesAmsterdam. Dutton, 2003 213p ISBN 0-525-47119-7 $16.99 M Gr. 4-6 Hercules is a miniature hero-three inches tall, he lives in a Victorian dollhouse that used to belong to his normal-sized mother. Determined to avoid being mainstreamed into a regular classroom, Hercules slips through a hole in the base- board and into a civilization of mice, complete with town, library, festivals, and history-a civilization that is just Hercules' size. In short order, the boy becomes an integral part of this concealed world, so much so that he is appointed Little Steward of the Chronicle, keeper of the history of the mice, a position of great honor in the community. When a marauding band of rats endangers the mice, only Hercules can save them, but he'll have to grow to normal size to do it. The construction of Hercules' world is painstaking and precise; unfortunately neither plot nor characters have enough electricity to spark this world to life. The writing is dense and formal, and the result is a thick prose that suffers from a consistently slow pace. That all magical assistance requires payment in order for balance to be maintained is a point clumsily driven home in a conclusion that lacks finesse. Characterizations lack the energy necessary to enliven the action; only Hercules' friend Juna has enough quirky personality to make her fate matter to the reader, but in the end, even she is not enough to carry the tale. JMD

HADDIX, MARGARET PETERSON Escapefrom Memory. Simon, 2003 220p ISBN 0-689-85421-8 $16.95 M Gr. 5-8 The entertainment at the weekly sleepover is hypnotism, and fifteen-year-old Kira babbles a sketchy tale of war, intrigue, and midnight escape that seems related to her own past. Kira confronts Mom (who really isn't her mother) with her questions and suspicions, but Mom isn't talking. Sophia (Mom who really isn't Mom) disappears, and Aunt Memory (who really isn't Aunt Memory) shows up with a wild tale of Sophia's abduction and Kira's duty to save her from her captors in Crythe, a Roman colony (well, maybe a Roman colony) established in California, by way of Eastern Europe. Kira's friend Lynne stows away in Kira's suitcase (yes, in a zippered suitcase), a flurry of political maneuvering ensues, Kira and Lynne are imprisoned with Sophia, Aunt Memory (now revealed as villainess Rona) wants computer secrets that are hidden somewhere in Sophia and Kira's keeping, deals are struck, and now the story gets complicated. Sophia, who isn't Kira's mother, really is Kira's mother, or at least she's Kira's mother Toria with Sophia's memo- 106 * THE BULLETIN

ries as well as her own (and Kira's father's, too, while we're at it). And you know that means trouble. Fortunately, the police kill the bad guys, Kira builds a laptop computer that will get everyone's memories into the proper place, and she has "friends who care about me, not just the convoluted secrets in my mind." Plot twists and switchbacks occur with such regularity that they fail to surprise, and the rapidly accrued improbabilities are less likely to elicit "Oh, nooooo!" than "Puh- leeeeze!" Dyed-in-the-wool Haddix fans might want to give this a go, but new- comers can, well, forget it. EB

HAu, SHANNON The Goose Girl. Bloomsbury, 2003 388p ISBN 1-58234-843-X $17.95 R Gr. 6-10 The Grimms' tale of the princess deceived by a maidservant and relegated to the role of goose girl is here thoughtfully and originally retold in this first novel. The opening line sets the tone for the densely magical tale that follows: "She was born Anidori-Kiladra Talianna Isilee, Crown Princess of Kildenree, and she did not open her eyes for three days." Ani is a princess, it is true, but she feels out of place in the palace of her royal mother and spends more time riding her horse, Falada, than in princessly pursuits. Betrothed at seventeen to the son of a neighboring king, Ani sets out with a retinue of guards and her lady-in-waiting, nineteen-year- old Selia, for her new wedded life. The princess' misgivings about her marital future become irrelevant when a Selia-led coup leaves Ani bereft in the unknown land of Bayern, while Selia assumes the role of that land's future queen. Cast upon the mercy of strangers, Ani finds herself, literally and figuratively, when she is hired to be goose girl to the king's geese. Hale weaves a complex pattern of magic and romance in this intense coming-of-age tale. Lyrical language supplies a sen- sual energy that subtly infuses the text. Characterizations are multilayered and solid, each player having a believable emotional connection to the action. Ani becomes herself in the course of the story, and her personal and physical growth, combined with the intrigue and adventure of her dilemma, makes this novel a journey worth taking. JMD

HARLOW, JOAN HIAT Shadows on the Sea. McElderry, 2003 244p ISBN 0-689-84926-5 $16.95 Ad Gr. 5-8 Harlow conflates two historical episodes from World War II-U-boat espionage off the Maine coast and the sinking of the ferry Caribou-toserve as backdrop for the fictional story ofJill Winters, a fourteen-year-old who's sent to stay with Nana while Mom is in Canada and Daddy, a popular singer, is on the road. Jill is squarely in the middle of every intrigue going, from small-town adolescent squabbles surrounding membership in the snooty Crystals club to a wartime crisis involving townsfolk who pass information to the German "wolf pack" via carrier pigeon. Roiling beneath these problems is Jill's constant anxiety for the safe return of her mother on the Caribou,which traverses U-boat infested waters, and her father on a domestic transportation system that is vulnerable to sabotage. Fortunately, Jill still has a little time left for a clambake date with love interest Quarry MacDonald and some mild obsession over the latest cunning fashions. There's more than a bit of Nancy Drew in both plot and presentation, from the brief but genuine menace when a German collaborator traps our heroine on Nana's widow's walk, to the demure romance between the girl crime-solver and her loyal but ever so slightly dim boyfriend. Even the dialogue smacks of literary style gone by: "Everything NOVEMBER 2003 * 107 will be all right in the big picture of things, Jill. Meanwhile, keep your thoughts in the sunlight where it's bright and promising." Still, the combination of mystery and teen tale that keeps Nancy alive and kicking should work its magic here as well. EB

HESSE, KAREN The Stone Lamp: Eight Stories ofHanukkah through History; illus. by Brian Pinkney. Hyperion, 2003 4 0p Library ed. ISBN 0-7868-2531-6 $19.49 Trade ed. ISBN 0-7868-0619-2 $18.99 R Gr. 4-8 Through eight poetic imagined testimonies, Hesse revisits several of the darkest moments in Jewish history, from the twelfth century to the twentieth, against which the Hanukkah candles shine their brightest light. Each free-verse poem is introduced by a page of historical background, bordered with a Scriptural passage, and illuminated by a stylized vignette above the entry's title and a more literal full- page illustration. Readers hear the voices of children who have survived persecu- tion or intrareligious conflict. Reyna and her family hide their Hanukkah celebration in Inquisition-era Venice ("Mother makes ready the lamp,/ though she dares not place it in the tall window"). Anichka mourns the loss of her father in a Russian pogrom ("Papa will not plant beets again,/ nor light the wicks in the ancient lamp,/ the stone lamp given his papa in trade for beets"). Ori, who witnessed the assassi- nation ofYitzak Rabin, ponders his politically divided people ("The boy who shot Rabin-/ he thought he could stop something./ He was wrong./ I look at this ancient lamp and know/ some things cannot be stopped./ One of those things/ is the Light"). The steady, confident voice of each narrator is ably matched by the bold solidity of Pinkney's artwork-thick outlines, strong colors, and expressions of cautious hopefulness of the children pictured commemorating the holy day. EB

HILLS, TAD, illus. The 12 Days of Christmas; illus. by Tad Hills. Little Simon, 2003 [26 p] ISBN 0-689-84976-1 $9.99 Reviewed from galleys R 4-7 yrs This cozy dramatization of the familiar carol features a fond piggy pair in the traditional gift provision. Each day and each spread, he lugs another huge, gaily wrapped package through the snow to the little white house where his ladylove waits; opening the page flap on the recto reveals him revealing the day's bounty to her. Hills' imaginative exploration is amusingly poker-faced as well as porker- faced: the mild-mannered and respectable piggies are only taken moderately aback by the excesses of the expanding population and the increasing crowd in the tidy house, and the soft realism of the draftsmanship contrasts with the absurdity to add to the humor of the situation. Seasonal giggles abound in the interpretation of the gifts (many of whom assist in the holiday decorating of the house); not only do the French hens wear modish berets and the calling birds monopolize the telephone, the maids a-milking are plucky little mice reaching up to the pendulous udder of a single cow, the drummers drumming are a crisp corps of penguins, and the lords a-leaping are regally crowned and extremely bouncy bunnies. The final scene borrows the terminal couplet from "'Twas the Night before Christmas" in order to gather the swain and his gifts together in a serenade for his patient porcine princess (now resting with her feet up on the partridge's cage after all the exer- 108 * THE BULLETIN tions). The combination of cacophonous silliness, seasonal gaiety, and snug accessibility makes this a dozen days that'll be a welcome present for many audiences. DS

JENNINGS, RICHARD W. Mystery inMt. Mole. Lorraine/Houghton, 2003 14 4 p ISBN 0-618-28478-8 $15.00 R Gr. 4-7 Andy Forrest is nearly thirteen years old, and he's lived in Mt. Mole, his village, all his life. He and the rest of the village are stunned when the small-town peace is disrupted by the inexplicable disappearance of Mr. Farley, the unpopular vice- principal; since Andy's one of the few people who didn't loathe Mr. Farley, and since the chief of police tends to do his work by napping and hoping for psychic visions, Andy decides he's the one to solve the mystery. Joining up with his classmate, the glamorous (and disaffected) Georgia Wayne, and traveling Mt. Mole aboard his trusty electric scooter, Pegasus, Andy attempts to assemble clues ranging from Mr. Farley's interest in popcorn and volcanoes to the strange environmental afflictions the town is suffering to the influential Knott family's desire to declare Mr. Farley dead, but little does he know what other town secrets are lying in wait for him. This doesn't have the cohesion of the author's Orwell's Luck (BCCB 10/00), nor does it quite muster the energetic silliness of a screwball com- edy. The absurdities nonetheless fly fast and entertaining, with funny names, outrageous events, and comic-book-type characters, and the weird alternative-world flavor ofMt. Mole is pleasurable in its own right, like a benign Twin Peaks. Andy is a terrible sleuth ("Is there a psychological condition in which a person feels he's always the last to know?"), but that-and his affection for his strange, unprepos- sessing little town-is what makes him endearing. The explanation of the enigma itself is absurd enough to recall Daniel Pinkwater, but readers aren't likely to care; in fact, they may appreciate the relief of a mystery where the solution really doesn't matter. DS

JOHNSON, ANGELA IDream of Trains; illus. by Loren Long. Simon, 2003 32p ISBN 0-689-82609-5 $16.95 R 6-10 yrs A young African-American boy picks cotton and dreams of traveling on passing trains to places beyond the hot Mississippi field. After work, the boy wanders: "When the cotton's all gone, I'm still dreaming/ I walk along the tracks, and soon it's just us./ Me, Casey Jones, and his fireman, Sim Webb." The passage of time and seasons is clear in the succinct language: "Short days, cold days,/ turn back into long, warm planting days,/ and we are where we were and who we are." As the days and seasons pass, the boy narrates the events and thoughts of his own life as he tells the legend of Casey Jones and his last fateful ride. Johnson's contemplative tale has a focused energy that infuses the text and underscores the boy's final determination to leave his hard life behind: "But when my time comes for leaving,/ I will take a train and/ remember as I roll away/ what Papa said about Casey/ and his soul-speaking whistles/ and my place in the big wide world." Long's acrylic paintings are sometimes reminiscent of Thomas Hart Benton's WPA murals, the images varying between monumental figures dwarfing their locations and smaller figures lonely against the sweeping landscape. This multilayered text distills complex history into an accessible narrative complemented by powerful images. A note gives some historical context for black sharecroppers in the turn of the twentieth-century American South and their connection to the legend of Jones and Webb. JMD NOVEMBER 2003 * 109

JOHNSON, KATHLEEN JEFFRIE Target. Brodie/Roaring Brook, 2003 [17 6 p] Library ed. ISBN 0-7613-2790-8 $22.90 Trade ed. ISBN 0-7613-1932-8 $15.95 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 9-12 Grady was a happy junior with good friends at his old high school, but that was before what he thinks of as the Night of, the night two men abducted him and raped him, leaving him destroyed and shamed, afraid of human contact, unable to eat, and loathing his own body for its betrayal. Refusing all contact with his former friends, he's now starting again at a new school, where he hopes to survive by skulking unnoticed through his days, a plan that's undermined when Jess, a funny, temperamental, loquacious classmate, takes an interest in Grady, sitting next to him in art class. Jess has his own issues-he's trying to balance his African-Ameri- can identity within his white stepfamily, and he's often merciless in needling his classmates-but Grady begins to finds the familiar routine ofJess' rapid-fire commentary a reassuring constant in the turmoil of his days. Always in the back of his head, however, is the fear that someone will discover his secret. This is a challeng- ing subject, and Johnson tackles it with strength as well as sympathy. Grady's complete alienation from his own body is compellingly depicted, extending far beyond the sexual, but the significance of that dislocation is given its due in a seventeen-year-old kid just developing his sexuality (even masturbation becomes a reminder of the event). The book is also perceptive in its exploration of Grady's guilt and self-questioning: was there something about him that brought this on? does the fact that they brought him to orgasm prove that? does it mean he's gay? The secondary characters are a bit oversimplified (both old and new friends rally staunchly around him when he reveals his secret and a nasty classmate threatens to publicize it), but this is an unusually compelling and articulate portrait of a young man in torment. DS

JOHNSTON, TONY A Kenya Christmas; illus. by Leonard Jenkins. Holiday House, 2003 32p ISBN 0-8234-1623-2 $16.95 R 5-8 yrs Juma, the narrator, obliges his importuning grandchildren with a story, the tale of a December when he was ten. That December his rich aunt leaves Nairobi to visit Juma's family in their Kenyan village, promising to grant Juma's wish that he see Father Christmas. They develop a secret plan to provide a Christmas surprise of a Father Christmas visitation for the village, arranging for the chicken man to dress up as Santa, ordering an elephant for Father Christmas to ride ("Sleighs do not grow here like bananas on trees"), and readying chicken feathers for a snow effect. The performance is all they could have wished, with a splendid elephant-mounted St. Nick delighting the village and passing out presents galore. Only after the visit, when the sorrowful chicken man apologizes for being unable to ride the elephant and perform his role, do they realize that their plan worked out in a very different way than they had expected. The folkloric nature of the story gives it an involving shape, while the unusual setting makes it fresh and original (if a tad unlikely); Johnston's unaffected style and taste for evocative particulars give the text additional luster. Jenkins' mixed-media illustrations combine the chalky opacity of pastels with the textured brushstrokes of paints; strong hot colors, such as hot oranges and pinks, are balanced with cooler tones, such as blues, greens, and browns, for an intense palette that nonetheless works cohesively, giving the landscape a 110 * THE BULLETIN

vivid if nontraditional festivity. This will make a joyful contrast to snowy Ameri- can Yuletide tales, and youngsters will relish the magical Christmas twist. Though unfortunately no background note is provided, there is a brief glossary of unfamil- iar/non-English terms. DS

KELLER, HOLLY What a Hat!; written and illus. by Holly Keller. Greenwillow, 2003 [24 p] Library ed. ISBN 0-06-051480-9 $16.89 Trade ed. ISBN 0-06-051479-5 $15.99 Reviewed from galleys R 3-5 yrs Bunny siblings Henry and Wizzie are anxious for their cousin Newton to arrive, but when he does, Henry is nonplussed by the fact that Newton will not give up his hat, wearing his orange headgear at the dinner table, in the bath, and in the bed. Henry goes from nonplussed to irritated, so much so that he snatches Newton's hat and runs away with it, causing Newton to shriek "NO HAT!" and give chase after Henry. Wizzie retrieves the hat and returns it to Newton, and from then on Newton and Wizzie are fast friends. When a big boy bunny knocks down their cooperatively built sandcastle, Wizzie cries; Newton, in an effort to cheer her, gives up his prize possession: "Newton wanted to help. He wanted it more than anything. So he took off his hat and put it on Wizzie's head. And she stopped crying." The tale of this family visit is simple and heartfelt. Readers and listeners will recognize the dynamics among the cousins as the bigger ones tease the younger ones, the younger ones exasperate the older ones, and they stick up for one another in a pinch. The watercolors are cleanly lined yet emotive, with the moving-portrait eyes of the characters cunningly evocative and the geometric forms of figures and clothing enriched by subtle textures and patterns. Keller's understanding of the way kids tick is expressed with an understated humor that makes this a winning slice-of-preschool life. JMD

KERR, M. E. Snakes Don'tMiss Their Mothers. HarperCollins, 2003 [208p] Library ed. ISBN 0-06-052625-4 $16.89 Trade ed. ISBN 0-06-052624-6 $15.99 Reviewed from galleys M Gr. 4-6 Critters is an animal shelter in the Hamptons, home to an array of animals hoping, with various degrees of optimism, to find a home one day. Just before Christmas, there's a flurry of activity: Placido the ill-tempered Siamese embarks on yet another placement; Rex, a yellow Lab who's separated from his owners, arrives; Catherine the greyhound enjoys a Christmas visit at the home of the Star-Tintrees. There are human dramas as well: Jimmie Twilight, child star, is beginning to wonder if her career is really worth the trouble; Walter Splinter, grandson of the shelter's director, wishes very much he could see more of his busy parents; Percival Uttergore, the legendary evil dogcatcher, trawls the streets for any animal he can ransom to its owners or sell to the unscrupulous. From Kerr, you'd expect this to be a quick-moving and witty pastiche, but unfortunately the flashes of wit are largely occasional, overshadowed by TV-movie coyness, especially in the dialogue of the animals; the occasional messages about animal welfare lose credibility in the context of a shelter more notable for eccentricity than diligence. Neither human nor animal characters are sufficiently sharply delineated to make individual impact amid the crowd; the plot strands fare a little better, since it's good to see the ani- NOVEMBER 2003 * 111 mals find (or rediscover) homes, but the book never generates much interest in the fate of the humans. Kids looking for a funny and tender story of an animal's search for a home should look instead to Kimmel's Orville, reviewed below. DS

KIMMEL, HAVEN Orville: A Dog Story; illus. by Robert Andrew Parker. Clarion, 2003 [3 2p] ISBN 0-618-15955-X $15.00 Reviewed from galleys R* Gr. 3-7 Orville's been a hard-luck dog ("Everywhere he had ever lived involved a chain, and he had broken every one"), but that doesn't stop him from enthusiastically embarking on a new life with a farmer and his wife. His enthusiasm is unfortunately not matched by the couple ("Maybelle and Herbert realized he was uglier than they'd thought when he was dirty"), and he ends up on a chain again, barking and barking. His world changes, however, when a young woman moves in across the road ("She was as alone as a person can figure out how to be"), and he begins to run away to her house, convinced that's where he belongs. Just in time, the young woman, helped by the words of a nice young fireman (called three times now to help get the dog back to his official home), realizes that he's right and their lives would be better together. Kimmel's tone has some of the quirky gravity ofJacqueline Briggs Martin's writing; her taste for well-grounded detail and compact description combines with a gentleness about people (and dogs) and their inner lives, making this a poetic but solidly vivid tale. It's particularly appealing that there are no real villains here, just people (and dogs) whose lives aren't quite what they hope for, and that's tension enough for a story; it's all the more gratifying that the story manages, without sentimentality, to get all of them a bit closer to what they want by the end. Parker's watercolors offer a surprising variety of texture, from blotchy shadows to liquid skyscapes, all set off by his scrubby, determined lines. The unusual layout is fresh and effective: lacking a picture book's traditional height, the pages are instead long and landscape-oriented, with the ragged-right text always sharing vertically rather than horizontally; the result is a closer relationship between pictures and words, because each line returns readers to the image rather than taking them farther away. Suitable for reading by a variety of age groups and reading levels, from advanced primary-grades readers to dog-loving middle- schoolers, this would also make a heartening but gratifyingly unsappy readaloud for kids who know their Orville is out there somewhere. DS

KING-SMITH, DICK The Nine Lives of Aristotle; illus. by Bob Graham. Candlewick, 2003 80p ISBN 0-7636-2260-5 $14.99 Ad Gr. 2-3 Aristotle is a bold little kitten owned by the witch Bella Donna, who thinks a white kitten will be a "nice change" from the traditional black cats. That's only ifAristode manages to lives long enough, though, since the kitten has an unhealthy habit of indulging his curiosity in adventures that use up one after another of his nine lives. Each chapter relies on the same structure: the kitten finds himself in mortal danger, after which Bella Donna retrieves him, reproves him, and reminds him how many more lives he has left to go. The insertion of a subplot involving Bella Donna's befriending of a dog who chases Aristotle does little to mitigate the re- petitiveness; the humorous text, however, has a lighthearted tone that offsets the somewhat creepy predictability of the repeated scenes of the hazards of Aristotle. 112 * THE BULLETIN

Graham goes for the homely rather than the macabre in his line and watercolor art; witch, cat, and even situations hazardous to felines derive a comfy air from the casually sketched lines and muted autumnal shades. Despite the repetitive structure, young readers will appreciate the loving relationship between Bella Donna and Aristotle and the gently suspenseful cat-in-peril plot. JMD

KORMAN, GORDON Jake, Reinvented. Hyperion, 2003 [208p] ISBN 0-7868-1957-X $15.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 7-12 Jake Garrett comes out of nowhere to become the coolest individual at F. Scott Fitzgerald High, throwing parties that quickly become legendary, making himself invaluable as an unerring long-snapper on the football team, and evincing a casual magnetism that draws the admiration of guys and the yearning of girls ("The guy is like a walking zone of happening, and everybody wants to breathe the rare air"). The narrator, Rick, soon realizes that Jake is on a mission: he's trying to win Didi, the glamorous girl of his dreams whom he knew several years ago, and who's now the firmly installed girlfriend of the possessive (if not entirely faithful) quarter- back, Todd. If this reminds you of something, there's a good reason: it's a contemporary reinterpretation of The Great Gatsby, and a rather good one to boot. The explanation of Jake's shadowed history is kind of lame (he's a former math geek), and there's more moral vindication and redemption than moral ambiguity and entropy, but otherwise Korman deftly translates the drama into a high-school setting. The notions of the importance of image and the contagion of both popularity and stigma convert readily, and the book excels at describing the phenom- enon ofJake's weekly parties, where exhilaratingly wild behavior becomes the norm and where cars restlessly circle the block in hope of being lucky enough to get a parking place that will allow them to get to the house. The real triumph is the atmosphere, which conveys both the heady excitement of the possibilities offered by the world Jake creates and the inevitability of its destruction. This is a natural pairing with Gatsby in a curriculum, but it's also an involving read in its own right, a legitimate and compelling investigation of the transience of charisma and the flimsy underpinnings of popularity. DS

KRUL, KATHLEEN Mls forMusic; illus. by Stacy Innerst. Harcourt, 2003 56p ISBN 0-15-201438-1 $16.00 R Gr. 2-4 As the title suggests, this is a musical alphabet, with each page or spread offering various terms beginning with the relevant letter: "A a is for anthem and accordion ... E e is for Elvis, energy, and encore ... Y y is for yodeling 'Yankee Doodle.'" The alphabetical format makes the text fairly sketchy, but there's a broad gallery of musical material included (and it is one of the few books where "xylophone" is an uncontrived entry for X). The visuals are what really sing here: Innerst's thickly textured oils and acrylics have a luminous sheen and earthtoned solidity that re- calls the art of Gregory Christie, but they've got a three-dimensionality and amiable strangeness all their own, with generous evocations of surrealism, cubism, and other styles. Recognizable portraits (Louis Armstrong, all four Beatles) mingle freely with humorous vignettes (a Wagnerian soprano uses the Vibration of her Voice to shatter a glass) and imaginative interpretations (Elvis' microphone is actually an ear; each member of a quartet plays an instrument in the shape of a NOVEMBER 2003 * 113 numeral four). Playful jottings provide additional musical terms for each of the letters, while even the fonts of the sample letters incline towards the appropriate musical spirit (the Beatles' B is a swirly psychedelic style, while folk's F is rustically hand-hewn). While this will find a place in musical curricula, it'd work even better as genuine inspiration in art-or perhaps stage design for the next concert. A "Musical Notes" section concludes by explaining the textual references. DS

KURTZ, JANE Bicycle Madness; illus. by Beth Peck. Holt, 2003 122p ISBN 0-8050-6981-X $15.95 Ad Gr. 4-6 Lillie's father considers their neighbor, Miss Frances Willard, to be a menace to stable society and a dangerous influence on his daughter, but the motherless little girl is attracted to the woman's plainspoken friendliness and her courageous determination to master the newfangled safety bicycle that she's dubbed "Gladys." Al- though Lillie tries to honor her father's demand that she not visit the famed nineteenth-century suffragist, she can't help regarding Miss Frances as a role model, and she musters her own determination to conquer the challenge of the upcoming school spelling bee, despite her previous dismal performances in that arena. There's precious little drama built into the plot, and most of Lillie's anxieties involve her 'fessing up to a tear in her dress or her agreement to feed Miss Frances's dog. Willard's attitudes and activities have been so carefully modeled on her autobio- graphical writings that her neighborly conversation is unremittingly stiff and forced: "But some people give off the light of a firefly. Others give off the light of a star. I believe that, as more of us choose to shine brightly, change will happen-a little at a time." Although this is a quick, undemanding read for historical fiction buffs, readers with an interest in women's-rights advocates will do better with Harness's breezier Rabble Rousers (BCCB 2/03). EB

LANDRY, LEO The Snow Ghosts; written and illus. by Leo Landry. Houghton, 2003 32p ISBN 0-618-19655-2 $9.95 R 3-6 yrs Snow ghosts "live in the far, far north where snow is always falling," which accounts for snow-themed pleasures such as snowball fights ("When snow ghosts throw snowballs, no one gets hit"), downhill sledding ("on their smooth ghost bellies"), and snowman day ("Prizes are awarded"); other diversions include calis- thenics and, for the talented, turning colors. It's a quirky yet idyllic existence, and it makes for a quirky yet idyllic little book. The text is soft-spoken and specific with a touch of poetry underneath ("the snow ghosts lay their ghostly heads on their icy beds"), and once the desire for logical inquiry is quelled (audiences will just need to accept that snow ghosts who can't be hit by snowballs can still throw them), the experience is comfy and inviting. The small square pages make a tidy background for the even smaller rounded rectangles of illustration, wherein trim lines divide white snow ghosts from blue watercolor skies and the occasional ac- cent color in a yellow moon or brown bear cub. The snow ghosts themselves are soft, smiling biomorphs, with a plasticity and sweetness of aspect that suggest marsh- mallow as much as snow; occasional speech balloons give them voice, and their playful tendencies keep them from being static. With its alluring vision of a happy snow existence, this would make a cozy winter readaloud, and its touch of dreamy lyricism invites a bedtime reading when the frost is thick on the windowpane. DS 114 * THEBULLETIN

LEE, JEFFREY True Blue. Delacorte, 2003 [96 p] ISBN 0-385-73093-4 $14.95 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 4-6 Molly isn't happy about changing middle schools, but she hasn't been happy about much since the auto accident that left her legs scarred, her father brain-damaged, and her mother struggling to keep the family together. The new school is pretty horrible, so Molly finds a lunch companion in a strange solitary boy, Chrys Lepida. As the two work on a science project together, Molly becomes more impressed with Chrys' meticulousness and more appreciative of his company, until finally she discovers his secret: he's somehow part butterfly, and he's got the wings to prove it. This is an unusual premise, and Lee effectively grafts the fantasy element onto the domestic realism; Molly's unfazed responses to Chrys' abilities and habits are plausibly expressed ("'Ofcourse it's weird,' I said. 'But it's still cool'"), making their relationship believable as well as effective. Other elements are unfortunately less successful: characterization of the other players is trite and cursory, and the plot strand of Molly's father's frustrated rehabilitation and Molly's own guilt about possibly causing the accident offers hackneyed resolution rather than following through on the initial promise of thoughtful exploration. Still, this is an unintimi- dating read with some unusual plot points, and kids usually skittish about fantasy may wish to explore this imaginative possibility. DS

LEKUTON, JOSEPH LEMASOL Facing the Lion: Growing Up Maasai on the African Savanna; by Joseph Lemasolai Lekuton with Herman Viola. National Geographic, 2003 128p illus. with photographs ISBN 0-7922-5125-3 $15.95 R Gr. 4-8 Joseph Lemasolai Lekuton, a teacher at the Langley School in Virginia, tells the story of his childhood in Kenya, where he lived between two cultures-the culture of his nomadic village, and the school culture that eventually led him to America. From the first episode he narrates, when he panics in the face of a lion's attack on his village's cattle, to the final one, where donations from a group of parents and students whom he guided on a trip to Kenya enable him to buy his mother some good breeding cows, Lekuton emerges as a delightfully honest, open-hearted person. Through his stories, he becomes an ambassador between cultures; he clearly understands the kinds of things that will interest and entertain a young audience (tales of discipline, friendship, embarrassment at school, and triumph in sports) as well as educate them (foodways, the work of cattle herding, initiation rites). Lekuton's prose style reflects his immersion in a primarily oral culture; words, phrases, and themes are unobtrusively repeated in each paragraph to keep the reader grounded in his stories, making this a good choice for readers still developing their literacy skills. An afterword by one of Lekuton's friends explains more about Lekuton's people and culture and fills in some details about Lekuton's life and accomplishments, opening the possibility for discussion on multiple levels about immigration, cultural similarities and diversity, the value of education, and the difficulties and pleasures of living between two cultures. KC

MACK,TRACY Birdland. Scholastic, 2003 [208p] ISBN 0-439-53590-5 $16.95 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 6-9 Inspired by Pam Conrad's novel Our House, Jed's teacher instructs his students to NOVEMBER 2003 * 115

come up with a creative project that captures their neighborhood as they see it, saying that "true healing ... begins with imagination." The healing to which he refers is the healing of New York City after September 11th, but Jed's healing journey is a bit closer to home, since his brother, Zeke, has recently died. Jed decides to capture his neighborhood on film, guided by a notebook full of Zeke's poetry that he found under Zeke's mattress. In his wandering through the neighborhood, he sees beauty and pain in the energy of a subway performer, in the grief of his father, and especially in the haunting eyes of a homeless girl named Kiki. When he offers Kiki asylum in Zeke's hideout on the roof, he learns about the interconnection of lives and the responsibility that entails. The relationships between Jed and his friend Flyer, who has suffered a loss of his own, and between Jed and his family members are carefully individualized and poignantly drawn. Each chapter takes its name from a Charlie "Bird" Parker song, and each scene riffs off the others like so many notes of pain, but the narrative as a whole follows an improvisational logic; you don't know how it's all connected until you're finished. Jed produces a "walk-u-mentary" featuring his video and Zeke's poetry, and so begins to effect his imaginative journey toward healing. By articulating an artistic response to loss and grief on the road to growing up, this novel may inspire students to take up their cameras and walk their own neighborhoods, looking for the stories they want to tell. KC

MASTRO, JIM Antarctic Ice; by Jim Mastro and Norbert Wu; illus. with photographs by Norbert Wu. Holt, 2003 [32p] ISBN 0-8050-6517-2 $16.95 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 3-5 Like Mary Cerullo's Life under Ice (BCCB 9/03), this is a photoessay about life on the southernmost continent. The text here is somewhat simpler, making this a good readaloud candidate and introductory piece for younger readers, and it's shaped by the changing seasons, starting in winter (when the animals either leave the area or wait the season out under the ice) and going through the summer (when they give birth and tend their babies). Concepts are sometimes oversimplified (it's not strictly true that "the sun does not shine in Antarctica during the winter," since there are locations that never experience a single sunless day, let alone a sunless season), but the streamlined prose ably supports the visuals. Wu's photographs are stellar, with brilliant shots of penguins shooting like depth charges through the ocean, rows of fuzzy Emperor penguin chicks standing like cuddly bowling pins, an underwater Weddell seal, its mouth open in what's presumably mid-comment, glaring in annoyance at the viewer. Layout emphasizes the theatri- cality of the photographs by placing them in slender bright frames on glossy black pages; white text stands out against the darkness, while ghostly gray images of the featured animals add texture (and a bit of overbusyness) to the background. This isn't exactly untrodden ground these days, but it's still an inviting and highly visual entree to marine life at the end of the world. DS

MCDERMOTT, GERALD Creation; written and illus. by Gerald McDermott. Dutton, 2003 32p ISBN 0-525-46905-2 $16.99 R 5-10 yrs See this month's Big Picture, p. 91, for review. 116 * THE BULLETIN

McDNALD, MEGAN Baya, Baya, Lulla-by-a; illus. by Vera Rosenberry. Jackson/ Atheneum, 2003 32p ISBN 0-689-84932-X $16.95 R 3-5 yrs A mother weaves her baby girl a "safekeeping blanket" while in a tree a yellow and black baya bird weaves flowers into "its vining, twining nest-/ acacia petals laced/ in a golden crown." This rhythmic and lyrical story-song has both melody and harmony: the main story is that of the mother weaving, dying, and sewing the cloth for the baby's blanket; the concurrent tale is that of the baya bird's building of its nest. Melody and harmony combine when "Baya Bird calls a warning,/ mother to mother," to warn the woman that a cobra endangers her sleeping child: "Mata swoops you up,/ holds you tight,/ rocks you in her arms./ Rock-a-bye, hush-a-bye,/ choti ladki, little one./ She carries you home,/ heartbeat to heartbeat,/ through the pale green/ haze of desert." The day-to-day life of the baby and its mother parallels the natural changes to the baya bird's nest, as the nest goes from holding the bird to a succession of subsequent tenants following the hatchlings' departure: a tree mouse, a mason wasp, a spider. This combination of natural science and lullaby is illustrated in luminescent watercolors, the inviting compositions framed in earthy lines that set off bucolic country and spare interior scenes. Carmine reds and saffron golds glow amid cooler colors, giving the figures, orna- ments, and setting an immediate appeal. A list of included Hindi words is appended, as is a note describing the many uses of the baya bird's nest and explaining the source of the lullaby. JMD

McNAEE, GRAHAM Acceleration. Lamb, 2003 [176p] Library ed. ISBN 0-385-90144-5 $17.99 Trade ed. ISBN 0-385-73119-1 $15.95 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 7-10 Duncan is sweating his way through a sweltering Toronto summer, trapped during working hours in the subterranean world of the subway lost-and-found office. Desperate for some reading material to pass the time, he happens upon a small leather-bound journal ("with a cover that feels like skin") that turns out to be the chronicle of a demented individual involved in the ghastly process of what police and FBI profilers call "acceleration," or the "escalation of increasingly destructive aberrant behavior." The diary includes graphs of how long it takes mice to drown in various fluids, newspaper articles of neighborhood pet dismemberments, plans for burning down buildings with newspaper clippings that confirm their success, and worst of all, detailed profiles of three women whom the creep is considering for his first actual human victim. At first, Duncan decides to ignore his find, but then he wonders whether it might offer him a chance for redemption. Earlier in the year he had failed to save a girl from drowning; haunted by her memory, he muses that saving the killer's intended victims might atone for his inability to save her. Duncan's first-person narration is wry and understated, and his motivation is clearly situated in that oft-explored yet seldom mapped territory of guy country. As his father explains, "itdoesn't go away-that thing, the belief or whatever, that one day you're going to be a hero. All guys think that." Though the atonement angle is a tad contrived and the acceleration detailed in the diary is a bit too text- book to be entirely plausible, the action of the book will make the acceleration of the reader's heartbeat all too real. It's a fast-paced read with a satisfying payoff, especially gratifying for reluctant readers with a taste for suspense. KC NOVEMBER 2003 * 117

MCPHAIL, DAVID Henry Bear's Christmas; illus. by David McPhail and John O'Connor. Atheneum, 2003 4 0p ISBN 0-689-82198-0 $16.95 R 4-7 yrs Henry and his raccoon buddy, Stanley, don't want to get caught treeless on Christ- mas Eve, so they start their evergreen shopping early. Although Stanley is quite happy with a scrawny little number at the school fundraiser, no tree meets Henry's exacting standards until he spies the perfect fir at a church raffle. He invests his entire tree fund in tickets but then misses the drawing during an ill-advised trip to the doughnut shop. He won, but his no-show at the drawing means no tree, and his attempt to wheedle money from Stanley founders on Stanley's own friendly impulses: "I knew how much that tree meant to you, so I took the grocery money and bought some more tickets." No tree, and now no dinner. But it's not Christ- mas without neighborly kindness, and the two friends get their raggedy tree as a freebie from the school sale, and Momma Bear shows up with a Christmas feast. McPhail supplies an inviting visual setting, rich with hatched and stippled earthy greens and brown, and populated by expressive animals who mingle freely among the Sendak-ian humans of their village. The tale may be overly tidy, but the mood is just right for a Yuletide story-and-snuggle. EB

NIXON, JOAN LOWERY Nightmare. Delacorte, 2003 16 6 p Library ed. ISBN 0-385-90151-8 $17.99 Trade ed. ISBN 0-385-73026-8 $15.95 Ad Gr. 4-8 Getting average grades, avoiding close friendships, and hiding behind her hair, sixteen-year-old Emily Wood has been making herself invisible ever since the nightmare about the dead body began. Then her parents send her to an experimental summer program for underachievers at the Foxworth-Isaacson Educational Cen- ter, where Emily is sure she's been before. When she sees a familiar face in a portrait, she knows why: the dead body in her nightmare is Dr. Amelia Foxworth, one of the Center's founders. Emily realizes her nightmare is a repressed childhood memory, and the more she remembers, the more she's in danger. Nixon's obvious foreshadowing and predictable ending may disappoint some young readers, and the murderer's point of view, presented alternately with Emily's, isn't particularly well developed or distinguished. This is still an enjoyable mystery, however: Nixon provides effective red herrings in the staff members of the Center, and there's a nice touch of dread imparted by the murderer's-eye view. Emily's three friends provide the humor and companionship necessary to overcome Emily's secretive nature and make her more likable as a character, and since the mystery depends on searching for answers within, her transformation from a secretive loner to a confident girl who's not "afraid to be Emily" is a satisfying result. Nightmare is a good choice for readers already loyal to the Nixon canon or those looking for an undemanding, entertaining mystery. KH

OATES, JOYCE CAROL Freaky Green Eyes. HarperTempest, 2003 34 1p Library ed. ISBN 0-06-623757-2 $17.89 Trade ed. ISBN 0-06-623759-9 $16.99 R Gr. 7-12 After an attempted rape at a party, Franky finds a secret, strong, uncowed side to herself, which she calls "Freaky Green Eyes." She's going to need it: her parents' marriage is showing increasing signs of strain as her mother tries to find a life out from under the shadow of her high-profile sportscaster husband. Despite denials 118 * THE BULLETIN from both her parents, it becomes clear that they're actually undergoing a separa- tion, as Franky's mother retreats to her family cabin on Puget Sound while Franky's father keeps a firm and controlling-sometimes dangerously controlling-hand on Franky and her younger sister, Samantha, at their upscale home in Seattle. Garden-variety strain turns into something else when Franky's mother disappears; while initially allowing herself to accept her father's version of the situation-that his wife betrayed the family and that she's run off in order to hurt them further- she begins to find the strength to remove herself from her father's power and face the truth of his involvement in her mother's disappearance. While this doesn't have quite the sharp originality of Deb Caletti's The Queen ofEverything (BCCB 1/03), this is a compelling psychological portrait of a family destroyed by one of its own. Oates is particularly gifted at depicting the way Franky's natural teenaged distance from her mother sets her up perfectly for the complete rejection her father encourages, and the way she unknowingly echoes her father's tendencies; there's also a subtle suggestion that she dangerously echoes her mother's tendencies as well, in her inclination to keep silent in the face of threat. There's enough tension and pulse-pounding to appeal to thriller aficionados as well as those reading for the human dynamics, and young people just beginning to cast a sharp eye at their parents' human frailties will find perspective (or perhaps bitter satisfaction) in the notion of a father with feet of truly dangerous clay. DS

ORENSTEIN, DENISE GOSLINER Unseen Companion. Tegen/HarperCollins, 2003 [3 6 8 p] Library ed. ISBN 0-06-052057-4 $16.89 Trade ed. ISBN 0-06-052056-6 $15.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 9 up A mysterious boy of an enigmatic background in 1969 Alaska, Dove Alexie hits a teacher, goes to jail, and disappears; these events affect various people around him, four of whom tell their stories here. The first is Lorraine Hobbs, a fourteen-year- old Gussak (white) girl who cooks for the prisoners at the local jail and begins to fear for Dove Alexie after seeing him bruised and bloody in a cell. The second is eighteen-year-old Annette Weinland, another Gussak, who lives under the thumb of her stern minister father and who does volunteer clerical work at the prison, where she's intimidated by the sleazy deputy and disturbed by discrepancies in the official records. Briefer accounts come from Thelma Cooke, a Yup'ik girl at school with Dove Alexie, and from Edgar Kwagley, a Yup'ik boy from the same school. The Dove Alexie thread is a fairly tenuous one plotwise as well as interpersonally, and the dense and unhurried accretion of layers and the open-ended finish make this a sophisticated read. This is, however, an impressively subtle and penetrating portrait of a complicated world, where Yup'ik, Aleut, and various Indian peoples coexist, sometimes uneasily, while often being treated as homogeneous by Gussaks in authority and while undergoing a series of degradations large and small. It's also where the Sleep-Off Center is a crucial part of town, where the Children's Receiv- ing Home deals with floods of kids ranging from babies to teens old enough to divide their time between there and the Sleep-Off, and where man's first step on the moon contrasts sharply with the local version of progress-an actual service to remove the buckets people use for their sanitary arrangements. Though character is overshadowed by the milieu, it's gratifying to see Annette grow beyond her restrictions and feisty, imaginative Lorraine begin to embrace the world she's really NOVEMBER 2003 * 119 in. Older readers who want to further explore the realm ofJean Craighead George's Julie will find this an eye-opening journey. DS

PALATINI, MARGIE Bad Boys; illus. by Henry Cole. Tegen/HarperCollins, 2003 [40p] Library ed. ISBN 0-06-000103-8 $16.89 Trade ed. ISBN 0-06-000102-X $15.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 2-4 Where can a couple of big bad wolves go to lay low until the heat's off? Willy and Wally Wolf, of "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Three Little Pigs" fame respectively, hatch a perfect plan: they will don sheep's clothing and go live among the ewes whom they hope will someday be their lunch. Completely convinced of their own cleverness and in love with their roguish personae ("Oh yeah, we're bad. We're bad. We're really, really bad"), the hapless wolves, posing as the missing Bo Peep Sheep, find themselves outsmarted by a group of old ewes and shorn of their disguises, and they're left to their humiliation until their really bad haircuts grow back in. The wordplay flies fast and thick throughout this text and it's dead-on for a young audience (when Meryl Sheep comments on how big the wolves' ears are, they respond, "the better to hear ewes with"). Visual humor abounds as well; and the figures are comically and energetically rendered with hyperbolic snouts and overblown facial expressions and body postures. Add in detailed illustrations of the wolves' cross-dressing preparations, and you've got the potential for serious guffaws. KC

PECK, RICHARD The River between Us. Dial, 2003 165p ISBN 0-8037-2735-6 $16.99 R* Gr. 5-9 During the opening days of the Civil War, the two most exotic, sophisticated young women ever to set foot in Grand Tower, Illinois alight from a steamboat. Clearly what passes for the town's hotel is woefully inadequate for Delphine Duvall and her dark, silent companion, Calista, so the Pruitt family takes them in, and soon the sheltered, reclusive household finds itself transformed by the strangers. Son Noah is smitten with Delphine; daughter Cass, who suffers from prescient visions of war and death, discovers new interests in cooking and herbalism at Calista's side; even Mama holds her head up higher among her neighbors. Tilly Pruitt, who turns sixteen during this pivotal year (and serves as retrospective adult narrator through most of the story), begins to take an interest in the outside world and her own potential. When Tilly and Delphine make an emergency trip to a Union camp hospital to nurse Noah, their landlady recognizes and exposes Delphine's origins-she's a quadroon who's been sent North by her mother for protection in the event the South should lose the war and the New Orleans gens de couleur should be associated with freed slaves. Peck approaches the plafage system (rich white men openly take free black women as mistresses) with laudable sensitivity; Delphine's parentage is both a source of social entrapment and fierce, dignified pride. The Pruitt story is encased in a second narrative, in the voice of Howard Leland Hutchings, who learns his family history from his "Grandma" Tilly. This slim but potent storyline delivers a final punch that knocks family relationships on their ear and challenges Howard-and readers-to ponder how a seemingly quaint and antiquated system of racism can reach across generations. Historical fiction fans should enter this at the top of the must-read list. EB 120 * THE BULLETIN

PFEFFER, WENDY The Shortest Day: Celebratingthe Winter Solstice; illus. by Jesse Reisch. Dutton, 2003 4 0p ISBN 0-525-46968-0 $16.99 Ad 5-8 yrs Following several introductory spreads on the transition from autumn into winter, Pfeffer surveys, at thousand-year intervals, how ancient cultures perceived and ritu- alized the apparent movement of the sun. In an approach similar to that of Ellen Jackson in The Winter Solstice, Pfeffer notes how the Egyptians observed and marked the "shortest" day through a stacked stone keyhole, how Romans decorated their homes with evergreen foliage, how the Incas used a reflective glass to kindle a fire that would burn all year long. This title is far hazier, though, on the relationship between contemporary religious wintertime celebrations and their ritual roots in millennia past. Stockings hang by the fireplace and lighted shrubbery peeks through the window as package laden guests arrive, but the text merely notes, "Today people still celebrate at the beginning of winter by decorating their houses, lighting the darkness, gathering together, and exchanging gifts." A double-page spread of"Sol- stice Facts" and a half dozen activities round out the presentation, encouraging listeners to keep detailed sunrise charts and make shadow measurement, or, for the decidedly less ambitious, to decorate cupcakes with a birthday candle and candy corn (sunlight and rays, if you didn't quite catch it) and sing "We wish you a happy solstice/ And a happy winter." Luridly hued scenes, in which each pudgy- cheeked celebrant seems suspiciously Euro-Caucasian, should set multiculturalism back a decade or two. EB

PIERCE, TAMORA Trickster's Choice. Random House, 2003 422p Library ed. ISBN 0-375-91466-8 $19.99 Trade ed. ISBN 0-375-81466-3 $17.95 R Gr. 6-9 Aly, sixteen-year-old daughter of Alanna the Lioness, the King's Champion, has a lot to live up to, and she plans on doing so, despite the efforts of her parents to keep her safely at home. Determined to avoid an inevitable confrontation with her mother, Aly takes her small boat to visit nearby friends; she is captured by marauding pirates and winds up as a slave in the house of Duke Mequen Balitang of the Copper Isles. This is just the beginning of Aly's adventures: a bet with a trickster god, the delusions of a mad king, and the growing revolution centered around the daughters of the Balitang household involve the capable Aly in a mael- strom of racial politics. Her plan to escape quickly disintegrates in the face of her growing involvement with and affection for the individuals and peoples of a country long at odds with her own. The ethics of patriotism and loyalty bend around assassinations and assignations, and Aly finds herself reexamining her own actions in light of the actions of others. In what one hopes is the first of a new series, Pierce has set the stage for a complex adventure. Aly is a promising character with depth and humor, and her wit and daring make her a natural leader readers will be eager to follow. There is intelligence to the complex plotting that supports the unfolding events, and believable relationships add the necessary emotional note to the rising crescendo of action. Secondary characters have nuance that makes them intriguing, and even the villains are multidimensional; good does not always triumph, and loss is an accepted part of battle. The threads of the emerging plot Sweave a compelling tapestry that will leave old fans impatiently waiting for the next installment and new fans searching for other Pierce titles. JMD NOVEMBER 2003 * 121

PLUM-UCCI, CAROL The She. Harcourt, 2003 [288p] ISBN 0-15-216819-2 $17.00 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 8-12 Evan is now in his senior year, and he's been doing pretty well since the death of his parents at sea years ago; he no longer seems to hear the otherworldly shrieking that plagued him as a boy and that horrifyingly preceded his parents' drowning, which he had "witnessed" over ship-to-shore radio. Now, however, a troubled schoolmate, Grey Shailey, is in a mental hospital following her involvement in the death of a girl in a sailing accident, and she has specifically asked for Evan's help, knowing that he heard the same shrieking that she did when her sailboat passenger was swept out to sea. As they pursue the local fishermen's legend of the She, a sea monster who consumes sailors, Evan's older brother, Emmett, begins to fill Evan in on details surrounding their parents' death that strongly indicate they were involved in drug running. As Plum-Ucci cleverly metes out the clues, readers are not only drawn deeply into a first-rate mystery and a compelling drama concern- ing Grey's fractured family but also into provocative discussion on the nature of "objective" evidence, as the brothers respectively cling to supernatural and scientific explanations for their parents' disappearance. The She exerts her terrifying presence throughout, as Plum-Ucci skillfully keeps folkloric explanations in play right alongside government reports and cold, imperfect logic. This is a thinking teen's horror story, and it's difficult to say whether the monster's screams or the problem of Truth will keep readers awake longer into the night. EB

POLACCO, PATRICIA The Graves Family; written and illus. by Patricia Polacco. Philomel, 2003 4 8p ISBN 0-399-24034-9 $16.99 Ad 7-10 yrs When Doug and Shalleaux Graves move their family into the old house on Park Street the first thing they do is paint the place "bloodred": "No one in the village even considered visiting them after that. Even the postman left their mail at the curb." Enter Seth and Sara Miller, the children who live across the street. The two meet Ronnie (Hieronymus) Graves, "a boy about their age," and the three become fast friends; after some time, the Miller siblings are invited inside the Graves' mysterious house. It is worth the wait: the house is filled with exotic spiders, Venus flytraps, and a laboratory housing strange experiments (including one made from an enzyme in cat follicles that will grow hair on anything). Ronnie's jolly if weird parents welcome Seth and Sara, who in turn smooth the way for Dr. and Mrs. Graves's entree into local society-which doesn't go quite as they had hoped. Polacco's chirpy tale is closer to the Munsters than to the Addamses; the text is overlong and the eventual focus on the adults is disappointing. There's still plenty of amusement, though, in the sweetly monstrous outsiders and their efforts to be accepted. The illustrations add some energy, splashing across the spreads in swoops of color and activity, and the characterizations of the small-town movers and shak- ers are right on the money, from the tasteful strings of pearls to the gentlemen's bouffant hairdos (newly restored by Dr. Graves' potion). Kids with a penchant for haunted houses will be attracted by the cover art (which features a spooky front door with a malevolent-looking door knocker) and will likely stay for the party. JMD 122 * THE BULLETIN

PRUE, SALLY Cold Tom. Scholastic, 2003 187p ISBN 0-439-48268-2 $15.95 Ad Gr. 5-7 Tom is the weak link in the Tribe of fair folk, and Sia and Larn, the strongest of the Tribe, want that weakness excised. With nowhere to turn, Tom takes shelter in the city of "demons" (humans), where he is discovered by Anna and her half- brother, Joe. Anna wants to help Tom and Joe wishes to exploit him, but it is their reclusive neighbor, Edie Mackintosh, who finally provides the key to just who and what Tom really is. Prue effectively creates a fairy world existing within the midst of modern society while operating very differently. Among the fair folk, emotional and physical ties are seen as bondage (Tom dislikes the "heavy, hot, gross" humans and the way they touch each other, "casting slave-shadows into each other's minds"), and Tom fights against connecting with his human rescuers with all his strength, despite the fact that they are all that stands between him and his doom at the end of Larn's spear. The chase is suspenseful, and the mystery of Tom's fate will keep the pages turning. On the other hand, the pacing is uneven, and the psychological dissonance caused by Tom's emotional conflict between his adora- tion for the beautiful fair folk and his revulsion at his human companions is never really resolved. In the end, Tom surrenders to life among the demons, but neither Tom nor the reader has to like it. Still, the elements of adventure and the tension between fair and human folk may hold readers. JMD

RAY, DELIA Ghost Girl: A Blue Ridge Mountain Story. Clarion, 2003 [22 4 p] ISBN 0-618-33377-0 $15.00 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 5-8 Using letters, newspaper accounts, and personal narratives as her source material, Ray sensitively captures the atmospheric flavor of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the early 1930s. Here, the Hoovers, moved by the intense poverty of the people living around their summer home, build a school and hire Christine Vest to teach the mountain children, whose hearts she wins. Particularly drawn to Miss Vest is April Sloane, whose family is still shattered from the death by fire ofApril's brother, Riley. When April finally ventures to confess to Miss Vest her role in Riley's death (left in charge of him, she failed to note the flames in time), April's mother over- hears her and ejects her from the family home. The author may wax a bit adula- tory about the intentions and actions of the Hoovers, but this too is realistic in that they are seen primarily through the eyes of Miss Vest, their friend and employee, and the starry-eyed April, who attributes to them her opportunity to learn to read. Ray's sympathy for the Hoovers is also in keeping with her practice of treating her characters as real, complex people who err in judgment rather than predictable stereotypes. A warm but not sentimental coming-of-age story, this work of historical fiction could be used with Hesse's Out ofthe Dust (BCCB 12/97) and Bud, Not Buddy (11/99) to emphasize the variety of experiences of young people during the '30s. KC

REES, DOUGLAS Vampire High. Delacorte, 2003 226p Library ed. ISBN 0-385-90143-7 $17.99 Trade ed. ISBN 0-385-73117-5 $15.95 R Gr. 6-10 Cody Elliot and his parents have just moved from California to New Sodom, Massachusetts so his father can take a job with the law firm of Leach, Swindol, and Twist. After enrolling in Vlad Dracul Magnet School, Cody discovers he isn't NOVEMBER 2003 * 123 expected to do anything except play on the school water polo team in matches required by the state; if he plays, he gets straight As and guaranteed admission to a prestigious university. The contrary hero finds he isn't as willing to get something for nothing as he thought; that, and the clues about his fellow students (brilliant, sunglassed, and pale) add up to a mess of trouble for Cody, one of the few humans in a school full ofvampires. Cody makes friends with nerd vampire Justin Warrener and future vampire queen Ileana Antonescu; the three form an unusual triad that threatens the historical tenets upon which Vlad Dracul-and the town of New Sodom-are based. Cody stubbornly refuses to bend, and he doggedly defends his own worth by refusing to take the easy way out: he defies the norm, saves the school, wins the vamp of his heart, and, in the end, meets Dracula himself (a rather benevolent old monster with a seventeen-meter wingspan). The author plays fast and loose with vampire lore but puts together an absorbing look at the familiar social dynamics of high school: who's in, who's out, what loyalty means, and what it is, exactly, that makes one heroic. Rees gives his hero such a believable voice that even the most unlikely vampiric events are plausible; readers will suspend disbelief just to see how it all works out. Cody is true blue, and his character is admirable enough to carry the day... night ... whatever. JMD

SAN SoucI, ROBERT D., ad. Little Pierre: A Cajun Story from Louisiana;illus. by David Catrow. Silver Whistle/Harcourt, 2003 32p ISBN 0-15-202482-4 $16.00 R 6-9 yrs Little Pierre "had more brains than all of his brothers put together," and he puts them to good use when Marie-Louise, "daughter of the richest man around," is kidnapped by an ogre from the cypress swamp. Although each of Little Pierre's older brothers (Big Pierre, Foolish Pierre, Wise Pierre, and Fat Pierre) thinks he'll be the one to rescue and marry her, it is Little Pierre who saves the day. Elements are folklorically familiar: Little Pierre uses his maman's colorful buttons to leave a trail so he can find his way home, he saves his brothers from certain death by engineering a clever switch, and (with echoes of "Three Billy Goats Gruff') he maneuvers the ogre into being a giant catfish's dinner, all the while maintaining his excellent manners and his ability to think fast in a crisis. San Souci's retelling has a rhythmic, rocking flair, and the fast-flowing text will work for storytelling as well as reading aloud. Catrow packs his busy bayou with personality, hiding faces and forms in the trunks of trees and leafy foliage. The ogre seems overgrown with fungus and moss (which might explain his smell, oft mentioned in the text), the trail of buttons looks like sugar candy glowing on the woodsy path, and there are any number of visual surprises for alert readers. Catrow's acid-green palette is offset here by some midnight blues and mushrooms browns, but the sweep of these watercolor illustrations exhibits continued mastery of diverse perspectives and balanced compositions. An extensive author's note provides a variety of written sources for this spicy retelling. JMD

SCOTT, KIERAN Jingle Boy. Delacorte, 2003 230p Library ed. ISBN 0-385-90138-0 $11.99 Trade ed. ISBN 0-385-73113-2 $9.95 Ad Gr. 7-10 Following a typical YA formula, this tale of yuletide bliss turned to woe turned back to bliss begins with a protagonist, Paul Nicholas, who has it all and then loses everything within the first fifty pages. The twist is that Paul has an obsessive- 124 * THE BULLETIN compulsive relationship with Christmas holiday traditions, so when his girlfriend is caught kissing the wrong Santa, his father is electrocuted hanging up their outrageous annual lights display, their house-in particular, his room-is partially burned down in the resulting fire, and his mother loses her mall job trying to return the girlfriend's very expensive Christmas gift without a receipt, he blames Santa himself. In fact, the only carol he has left to sing is "Santa must die!" The particular Santa he has in mind is his girlfriend's new interest (a sleazy mall Santa named Scooby), but all his plans for revenge, carried out with the help of a group of juvenile delinquents who call themselves the Anti-Christmas Underground, blow up, rather comically, in his face. Undaunted, he digs himself in deeper and deeper, until the plot tips over into magical realism with a visit from the big elf himself, who reveals that it is Paul's duty to atone for his anti-Christmas shenanigans and, you guessed it, save Christmas. Animated more by the spirit of kitsch than the spirit of Christmas, the book features humorous prose and enough hip, up-to-the- minute cultural references to successfully evoke a Jersey Mall Teen ethos. The tide turns too far, however, when our Grinch wannabe turns every problem into a genuine Christmas miracle. At that point, the book loses its darkly comic edge and moves into schmaltzy, made-for-TV holiday movie territory, and it's a wonderful life all over again. KC

SEEGER, LAURA VACCARO The HiddenAlphabet; written and illus. by Laura Vaccaro Seeger. Porter/Roaring Brook, 2003 2 8p ISBN 0-7613-1941-7 $17.95 R 4-7 yrs There's no shortage of graphically intriguing alphabet books (Stephen T. Johnson's Alphabet City, BCCB 11/95, and David Pelletier's The GraphicAlphabet, 12/96, being probably the best known of the lot), but here's one with a slightly different approach. Each page offers an illustration of an item beginning with the relevant letter of the alphabet (A is "arrowhead," B is "balloons," C is "cloud"), framed by a glossy black flap whose die-cut hole allows the relevant image to peek out. When the flap is lifted, however, it reveals a depiction of the letter in question, cunningly expanded from the detail that delineates the item: the stony arrowhead forms the hole in the capital A, the yellow and red balloons the holes in the B, the fluffy white cloud a peninsula into the sky-blue C. The idea doesn't really vary much from letter to letter, but each page is executed with polish and panache: Seeger's adroit employment of paint effects confers gleaming luster, soft mottling, and liquid ripples on various backgrounds while contrasting them sharply with the crisp edges on the featured elements. This is begging for use in art class, and the gentle hide-and-seek aspect adds appeal as well as a certain flair that will make this entertaining to kids who have only recently mastered the reading of the alphabet itself. DS

SMITH, ANNE WARREN Turkey Monster Thanksgiving. Whitman, 2003 103p ISBN 0-8075-8125-9 $13.95 R Gr. 2-4 Katie's reasonably contented with her haphazard life with her father and little brother, until classmate Claire Plummer starts bragging about the perfect Thanks- giving she and her father are planning and lecturing Katie on the importance of standards in motherless homes: "Kids like you and me-without mothers at home.. have to do things perfectly." Now Katie's in a turkey-day tizzy, hoping to pull off a gorgeous decorator Thanksgiving despite her overworked father's in- NOVEMBER 2003 * 125 structions to the contrary, especially since she's accidentally invited her teacher, Ms. Morgan. While it's not hugely surprising that Thanksgiving ends up as the pizza party Katie's family originally had planned, much to the pleasure of Ms. Morgan (and Dad's boss, a last-minute guest), this is a perceptive as well as a sympathetic account of a kid's first awareness of different family approaches. It's a nice touch that Smith doesn't give the Plummers feet of clay but rather allows them to be the kind of family that revels in foil-wrapping chocolate truffles for treasure hunts (and has an extra copy of BeautifulLiving magazine) while Katie's is the kind of family that slurps up soupy cranberry sauce; instead, the book emphasizes that they're both things real families do ("They aren't any more real than we are," Katie's father reassures his daughter). Vivid touches of character (Katie shares with Claire an appreciation for lists and enjoys playing with her little brother's toys) and authentic dialogue ("My father says that when you don't have a mother, people notice socks," pontificates the all-knowing Claire) add liveliness. This is a likable and accessible story, suitable as a readaloud or an easygoing readalone when holiday frenzy strikes. DS

SPINELLI, EILEEN The Perfect Thanksgiving; illus. by JoAnn Adinolfi. Holt, 2003 32p ISBN 0-8050-6531-8 $15.95 R 4 -8 yrs Let's face it, most of our holiday feasts resemble a Norman Rockwell painting about as much as a real turkey resembles one drawn around a kindergartner's hand- print. This is precisely the visual joke that runs through Spinelli's quatrains highlighting the differences between Abigail Archer's family holiday and the narrator's. Thanksgiving at the Archers' is perfect: "Their turkey is plump and golden./ Their napkins are made of lace." Not so the narrator's: "Our smoke alarm is wailing./ Our turkey, burnt as toast." Of course, the comparisons become comically hyperbolic; one doubts even the perfect Archers live up to such press as "Abigail's older cousins/ read books in velvet chairs./ The younger ones bring favorite toys,/ and everybody shares." Nonetheless, the contrasts are funny and recognizable enough even for small children, even though they may miss some of the irony. The jaunty rhymes beg to be read aloud, and the energetic collage illustrations add to the chaos and situate the story on the narrator's end of things rather than the Archer's. Rich fall colors predominate, and the paper turkey and the real turkey turn up at odd moments, showing a kind of solidarity despite differences. Indeed, the narrator predictably but wisely points out that families can be "ultra-perfect" in the love department, even if their whipped cream is not perfectly swirled or they call their peas legumes. Thematically similar to Smith's Turkey Monster Thanksgiving, reviewed above, but for a younger audience, this is a fine holiday treat for kids of messies and Marthas alike. KC

SPINELLI, JERRY Milkweed. Knopf, 2003 [22 4 p] Library ed. ISBN 0-375-91374-2 $17.99 Trade ed. ISBN 0-375-81374-8 $15.95 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 7-10 Spinelli's main character here shares with Maniac Magee his dislocation and long- ing for family, his quirky naivete, and his refusal to accept or even at times ac- knowledge the derogatory uses of identities that he would wear proudly, like "stupid" or "Jew." In this case, however, the protagonist (who adopts the name Misha) is 126 * THE BULLETIN attempting to survive in occupied Warsaw, and this is a plausible portrayal of an orphaned gypsy child wandering the devastated streets, surviving by virtue of his anonymity and ignorance of the enormity of his circumstances. Uri, a streetwise orphan, takes Misha under his wing and tries to teach him to how to be invisible; Misha's talent for thieving enables the survival of those he adopts, but his love for a particular family almost destroys him as he attempts to follow them onto the trains. Fortunately, Uri, who as a red-haired Jew is passing for a Nazi, pulls him out of line, forcing him to wander along the tracks until he is picked up by a farmer, who holds the strange child hostage until the end of the war. Spinelli spares no details of the horrors of the Ghetto, where death is everywhere: "Angels and crows passed each other; one leaving, the other coming." That's an appropriately grim image for a desperately grim time, but Spinelli shows through Misha that the crows didn't always have the last word. KC

STANLEY, DIANE, ad. Goldie and the Three Bears; ad. and illus. by Diane Stanley. HarperCollins, 2003 4 0p Library ed. ISBN 0-06-000009-0 $16.89 Trade ed. ISBN 0-06-000008-2 $15.99 R 4-6 yrs Goldie is a kid who knows exactly what she wants, such as her favorite snack (chunky peanut butter sandwiches, no jelly), her favorite book, and naps in her "just-right" bed. Goldie's parents would like her to have a friend, but "Jenny was too boring, Penny was too rough, Alicia was too snobby, and Sylvia wouldn't come." One day Goldie gets off the school bus at the wrong stop; looking for a place to call her mother, she rings the bell at "a cute little house." No one answers, but the door is unlocked, so Goldie goes inside. She finds a just-right sandwich, a just-right comfy chair, and a just-right bed to nap in, and when the three bears come home, she finds a just-right friend in blue-pinafored Baby Bear. The prose is folktale-simple, with some repetition and an ease of language that makes it suitable for reading aloud (or even alone for those early readers looking for some non-rote practice), and the retrimming of the traditional story will tickle those familiar with the classic version. Stanley's illustrations have an old-fashioned air that will reas- sure viewers concerned about Goldie's friendless plight: Goldie is a suitably tressed, neatly turned out child, and Baby Bear is just as neatly coiffed and clothed. Per- snickety youngsters may see themselves in Goldie's small attempts to make her life just so, and they will appreciate Stanley's ability to take a well-known personality and put her through reassuring and slightly untraditional paces. JMD

STAPLES, SUZANNE FISHER The Green Dog: A Mostly True Story. Foster/Farrar, 2003 128p ISBN 0-374-32779-3 $16.00 Ad Gr. 4-6 Suzanne's a daydreamer who's happiest on her own, especially on her own outside either fishing or walking through the woods. Though her parents think she should develop some friends, she's determined that all she really needs is a dog; when a stray lost on the highway turns up at their door, it seems like Providence has granted Suzanne's wish. Jeff, as Suzanne names him, is the dog she's dreamed of, providing her with unconditional love and eternal satisfaction, but he also threatens her parents' provisional acceptance by destroying the neighbors' property, threatening the mailman, and escaping at will. According to flap copy, this is an autobio- graphically based story, which may account for the somewhat retrospective, epi- NOVEMBER 2003 * 127 sodic nature of the narrative and also for the literarily unsatisfying ending (Jeff is sent away to the proverbial farm, and Suzanne is reconciled to the fact after a visit with a sympathetic doctor); the emphasis on description also makes the pace quite leisurely. Staples is articulate about a young person's yearning for and bond with a canine companion, however, and readers will share her sharp anxiety about Jeffs fate. It's also an evocative picture of a kid genuinely absorbed by the outdoors and the events in her own mind in preference to other people, a priority that many readers may share. This doesn't have the classic dog-story arc of Naylor's Shiloh (BCCB 10/91), but it might suit readers ready for a canine story with a more contemplative tone. DS

THESMAN, JEAN Rising Tide. Viking, 2003 [22 4 p] ISBN 0-670-036560 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 5-9 In this sequel to A Sea So Far (BCCB 11/01), Kate has returned to 1908 San Francisco from her sojourn in Ireland as companion to the now-deceased Jolie Logan. As promised, Jolie's father has made Kate a generous monetary gift, and Kate and her friend Ellen establish a small shop in which they will sell Irish linen lingerie and dry goods. Ellen has a hard time keeping up her end of the partner- ship, since she has squandered much of her investment stake on fancy clothing to catch the eye of her boss's son. Catch it she does, and he lures her off on a private picnic where he tries to seduce her. Meanwhile, Kate captures the attention of their landlord, a terse but polite young businessman whose diary has accidentally come into Kate's possession. In this progressing series, as in that of The Ornament Tree (BCCB 3/96), romance hovers in the wings but never makes it to center stage, and tenderhearted readers may reasonably wonder ifThesman will ever cut to the chase and get these gals some guys. Those willing to take the longer view, however, may find themselves quite happily wrapped up in such period detail as department-store fashion modeling, the classism surrounding selection of under- garments, and even the perils of the import market, issues that the book handles with knowledge and relish. It's hard to believe the author will leave her characters stranded in their current love limbo, so watch for another installment. EB

TROPE, ZOE Please Don't Kill the Freshman: A Memoir. HarperTempest, 2003 [30 4p] Library ed. ISBN 0-06-052937-7 $16.89 Trade ed. ISBN 0-06-052936-9 $15.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 9-12 The pseudonymous Zoe Trope is the freshman in question, with the first section of this book (previously published by a small press) a journal of her innermost thoughts during her freshman year at school in Portland, Oregon; the next, much larger section follows the subsequent summer and her sophomore year. The author's experiences are, at least initially, fairly traditional for a teen with a desire for un- conventionality and a literary bent: she plays in marching band, passionately loves her gay friend, despises some schoolmates and teachers while yearning to connect with others, and embarks on her first real love affair as a lesbian (which takes a confusing turn when her girlfriend reifies herself as a boy). Most such teens don't end up published, however, and the second part includes her reaction to becoming a teenage author, speaking at bookstores and negotiating with major publishers for 128 * THE BULLETIN the purchase of this very book. As with many journals, this one doesn't translate that well into a book: other people (all identified with vivid epithets rather than names) float about the speaker like a constellation of reflective objets d'art mirror- ing bits of the author rather than appearing fully human. The tendency of innermost thoughts to be repetitive and contradictory is fully evident here, and the more mannered style of the first section, with its shards of terse sentences, inter- feres with the substance more often than conveying it. There is an authenticity to all of this that will strike a chord with many readers, however: Trope is not only intense but she's intense about being intense. Her love of icons ranging from Margaret Cho to Charles Bukowski to Mother Jones makes itself felt in her bitter, hard-edged prose, and many teens will relate to her determination to create herself through difference and her derision of much of what's around her. This will also doubtless encourage other budding writers to turn their journals into more than casual productions; they won't all muster Trope's impressive perseverance, but they may still be encouraged to explore and value their own voices. DS

UHLBERG, MYRON The Printer;illus. by Henri Sorensen. Peachtree, 2003 32p ISBN 1-56145-221-1 $16.95 R 5-8 yrs In this historical picture book, a young boy tells the story of his father's work as a newspaper printer. Like many of the other workers in the plant, his father is deaf, and when a fire breaks out, his father signals to the other deaf workers using sign language, which, because of the noise of the machines, is the only effective way of communicating the danger. The plant is destroyed, but all of the printers escape without harm. After the plant reopens and the printers return to work, the hearing printers use sign language to express their thanks to the man who saved their lives. An afterword explains how deaf people in the early 1900s, like the author's father, were taught trades, with printing being a very common choice because of the loud machinery involved. Also included are insets describing how to make the sign for fire in ASL, and directions for making a newspaper hat like those of printers of the day. The painterly illustrations reinforce a sense of nostalgia, and the arrested motion of the figures evokes the quiet world of the printer in the midst of an obviously noisy industrial setting. Told from the viewpoint of an adoring son, this story of unassuming heroism subtly impresses its message that "dis"-ability has its compensations; in its various emphases on vocation, history, and language, it also invites cross-curricular applications. KC

WADE, JOHN FRANCIS 0 Come, All Ye Faithful: Performed by Ye Bethlehem All- Stars; illus. by David Christiana. Simon, 2003 32p ISBN 0-689-85967-8 $16.95 R 4-7 yrs "Ye Bethlehem All-Stars," a theatrical group that comprises a determined stage manager, many enthusiastic angels, and a host of animals of various cooperative or recalcitrant dispositions, performs the classic Christmas hymn in tableaux. The first line goes pretty well, with an adorable pair of sheep and an exultant angel successfully dragged on stage in a tiny gray cart. It all gets a little ragged from there, though; the top-hatted pigs tap dance their "Glory to God" without a slip, but it takes the whole heavenly host to tug a stubborn donkey into the act, while the animals waiting in the wings have to be uncrated, soothed, and petted until their big moment arrives. At the invitation "O come, let us adore Him, Christ the Lord" the animals are sufficiently awed by the peacefully snoozing Babe and the NOVEMBER 2003 * 129 dove cradled at his feet that the final scene is as devout as barnyard thespians can make it. There's no real plot here, just an extended visual joke that gently parodies the mishap-prone Nativity plays in churches and Sunday schools throughout the season. Christiana's softly tinted watercolor cast ofmassive-schnozzled, big-footed angels, and sweet-faced but slightly dopey critters may be as histrionically chal- lenged as most primary grade players, but they, too, manage to turn their bum- bling endeavor into a labor of love. Melody and lyrics are included. EB

WELLS, ROSEMARY Felix and the Worrier; written and illus. by Rosemary Wells. Candlewick, 2003 32p ISBN 0-7636-1405-X $12.99 R 3-5 yrs Felix (from Felix Feels Better, BCCB 6/01) has a little problem: every night, just as he is about to fall asleep, he gets a visit from the Worrier. A yellow, imp-like creature with the face of a paper cut-out, the Worrier bounces onto Felix's bed and gives him stuff to worry about until dawn such as a black spot on his tooth, bullies at the park-why, the Worrier even tries to make Felix's birthday more of a problem than a pleasure. Felix is in the midst of listening to the Worrier describe what can go wrong ("Supposing nobody comes to your birthday party?") when they hear a noise: "Wow! Wow! Wow!" While the Worrier worries, Felix goes to investigate. The noise is coming from "a mysterious birthday box" in the kitchen, and when Felix opens it up, out pops puppy Rufus: "'Oh, no!' said the Worrier. 'Dogs worry me more than anything in the world!' The Worrier jumped into the night sky and went to worry somebody else. Felix and Rufus slept on clouds of birthday happiness together." This is a loving and comforting story of youthful anxiety, and young listeners will identify with Felix's story. While the banishment of the Worrier by a birthday puppy is a bit convenient, Felix is still an active participant in his own salvation, ignoring the Worrier to seek the source of the nighttime noise. Mixed-media (predominantly line and watercolor) illustrations offer child-safe characters with a rounded softness and cuddly compositions that adds to the overall and satisfying sense of safety; illustrations and text boxes are framed with a wide ribbon of color that add a colorful intensity to each spread; Wells offers preschoolers yet another accessible assurance that they are not alone in their concerns, and that in itself makes this a worthy purchase. JMD

WHYTOCK, CHERRY My Cup Runneth Over: The Life ofAngelica Cookson Potts; written and illus. by Cherry Whytock. Simon, 2003 163p ISBN 0-689-86546-5 $14.95 Ad Gr. 7-10 Lighthearted British imports featuring girls telling their most intimate hopes and dreams in quirky teenspeak are becoming more prevalent (see Dent, reviewed above). In this example of the genre, Angel Potts is a fourteen-year-old who loves food, and as a result she is plagued with "wobbly bits," including unfashionably large breasts that keep escaping her best efforts to keep them under control. She is surrounded by beautiful, thin friends who assure her that she isn't nearly as wobbly as she thinks, but her mother, a former model, makes her feel huge. Unfortu- nately, this book doesn't work nearly as well as other books of the same type; the humor falls rather flat, and the secondary characters are built on overblown cli- ch6s, from her dotty father who writes and distributes pamphlets on arcane subjects, to Flossie, the plump cook, who is always ready with sweets or tonics to soothe Angel's and her friend's anxieties. Throughout the book, readers are given 130 * THE BULLETIN details (complete with recipes and captioned ink drawings) of Angel's obsessions with food, the Naked Chef, her body, and a rather thuggish boy named Adam, in painfully redundant language. In a predictable but nonetheless unmotivated conclusion, she is somehow rendered the most beautiful model at a school fashion show and the unwitting object of at least two boys' affections. Besides a conclusion that undermines the entire premise of the book (either Angel is not as big as she lets on, or designer dresses come in one size fits all), Whytock doesn't quite capture the fourteen-year-old voice or audience, with Angel's voice rather forced. Readers who fancy a bit of Bridget Jones for teens will do better to stick with Louise Rennison. KC

WRIGHT, BETTY REN The Blizzard; illus. by Ronald Himler. Holiday House, 2003 32p ISBN 0-8234-1656-9 $16.95 R 4-7 yrs Billy bemoans his December birthday; his relatives have once again been snowed out of attending festivities in his honor. Throughout the school day the storm gains in intensity, and when the first parent shows up at the one-room school- house to claim his offspring, he breaks the news that the roads are now impassable. Miss Bailey bundles up the whole crew and the adults lead the children to Billy's house, the nearest place of refuge. The family is delighted to take everyone in, and with a whole school of kids to help with the chores and join in the celebration, Billy has a better birthday than he ever could have expected. There's just enough menace in the thought of spending a night in a cold school building to set listeners shivering, but the real point is the warmth and hospitality of Billy's household and the joy of a big ol' impromptu sleepover, with kids crammed crosswise into beds and everyone well fed, safe, and sound. The gemiitlichkeit extends to Himler's watercolor and pencil pictures, in which gray-white swirls of snow soften the landscape and a strong air of coziness gradually softens the anxiety on the children's faces. Youngsters who regard snow with a twinge of mistrust will find Billy's grand day most reassuring. EB

YEE, LISA MillicentMin, Girl Genius. Levine/Scholastic, 2003 [256p] ISBN 0-439-42519-0 $16.95 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 5-7 "I have been accused of being anal retentive, an overachiever, and a compulsive perfectionist," says Millicent, "like those are bad things." To her, correctness, achievement, and perfection are the joys of life, and since she's already out of step with her peers as an eleven-year-old finishing her junior year, those characteristics are pretty much the nails in her social coffin. Her parents are determined that she develop some friends of her own age, so to this end they sign her up for summer volleyball; there she's surprised to find herself embarked on a genuine friendship with garrulous and inclusive Emily, but she's unwilling to reveal the truth about her academic achievements to her new friend. While the book deals head-on with the cliche of the Asian-American genius (Millicent resentfully tutors a Chinese- American age-mate who feels her perpetuation of the stereotype only makes his life harder), there are quite a few other cliches in untrammeled operation: Millicent has the ulcers of many fictional accelerated kids, she understands just about everything except for the responses she engenders, she misconstrues her mother's physical change as illness when it's really pregnancy. The portrayal of Millicent and NOVEMBER 2003 * 131

Emily's growing friendship is cheerful and plausible, however; less cheerful but also believable is Millicent's bewilderment when finally facing something-volleyball-that she has to work to master and her unhappy discovery that college (she's taking a summer class) isn't the shortcut to easy human interaction she'd hoped ("It is a cruel joke on me then that college is just like high school, only bigger"). The depictions of Millicent's affectionate parents and her loving and eccentric grandmother refreshingly reject stereotypes of both Asian-American families and showboating relatives of gifted children. The "genius" notion may hook readers, but it's the sympathetic depiction of universal trials that will keep them reading. DS 132 * THE BULLETIN

PROFESSIONAL CONNECTIONS: RESOURCES FOR TEACHERS AND LIBRARIANS

CODELL, ESMI RAJI How to Get Your Child to Love Reading; illus. by Cyd Moore. Algonquin, 2003 532p Paper ed. ISBN 1-56512-308-5 $18.95 Codell has put some of her apparently inexhaustible energy into a compilation of recommended books and book-related crafts, recipes, activities, and projects aimed at inspiring children from birth to age thirteen. The compendium is divided into nine areas within which there are further divisions by various subjects, genres, ages, and themes; the selections are solid and the recommendations effusive. The design of the book reflects the content: it is packed and plentiful, with sidebars, "potato picks" (annotations of outstanding single titles), "creative cues" (things to do before and after books), personal anecdotes, book covers, changing fonts, lists, and websites. Asides about a plethora of kid- and reading-related stuff are scat- tered throughout. Each chapter opens with an introduction to the type of reading matter addressed, with suggestions for accessing the material as well as additional background information. Appendices include lists of award-winning books and instructions for group activities built around birthdays, author studies, and book parades; author, title, and subject indices are included. Codell's writing style is literate, funny, cajoling, and convincing. While motivated parents will drool over this tide, librarians will find useful thematic lists and offbeat programming ideas that will stand them in good stead. JMD

JONES, PATRICK A Core Collectionfor YoungAdults; by Patrick Jones with Patricia Taylor and Kirsten Edwards. Neal-Schuman, 2003 4 05p (teens@thelibrary) Paper ed. ISBN 1-55570-458-1 $65.00 Jones, Taylor, and Edwards have brought their considerable collective expertise to bear on the task of compiling a collection of more than 1200 fiction, nonfiction, and graphic format items for young adults. The result is an ambitious volume containing a motherlode of useful information about young adult materials and preferences. The authors make a clear distinction in the preface: "This is a core collectionforyoung adults, not a core collection ofyoung adult books.... A large part of the selection criteria arose from this totally unscientific test: was the title a book we could visualize a teen holding in her hands and describing as cool?" Each entry includes complete bibliographic information, a succinct (and signed) annotation, recommended grade levels, and (for many titles) citations for reviews. A section on "Sources and Tips" includes web and print sources for "best" lists, tips on maintaining the YA core collection, title recommendations from YA librarians and authors, and brief essays by the authors on selection within genres; author and title indexes are appended. An included CD-ROM contains the basic bibliographic information for each entry in a variety of database and text formats. The authors would be the first to say that this book is neither a complete nor exhaustive list of possible tides for a young adult collection, but it is certainly a solid foundation from which to begin a new collection or to evaluate an existing one. JMD NOVEMBER 2003 * 133

SUBJECT AND USE INDEX

Keyed to The Bulletin's alphabetical arrangement by author, this index, which appears in each issue, can be used in three ways. Entries in regular type refer to subjects; entries in bold type refer to curricular or other uses; entries in ALL-CAPS refer to genres and appeals. In the case of subject headings, the subhead "stories" refers to books for the readaloud audience; "fiction," to those books intended for independent reading.

ADVENTURE: Cadnum; Computers-fiction: Haddix Christensen; DiCamillo; Pierce Cousins-stories: Keller Africa: Lekuton Crime and criminals-fiction: African Americans-fiction: Johnson, Haddix; Johnson, K.; McNamee; A.; Peck Nixon; Oates Alcoholism-fiction: Fritz Crime and criniinals-stories: ALPHABET BOOKS: Krull; Seeger DeFelice Animals: Mastro Cultural studies: Lekuton Animals-fiction: Kerr Dating-fiction: Harlow Animals-stories: French Deafness-stories: Uhlberg Antarctica: Bredeson Death and dying-fiction: Bunting; Art: Krull; Seeger Mack; Plum-Ucci; Ray Art and artists-fiction: Mack Depression, the-fiction: Ray Asian Americans-fiction: Yee Depression, the-stories: Alda Aunts-fiction: Falcone Disabilities-stories: Uhlberg Aunts-stories: Johnston Disasters: Barnard Aviation: Borden Disasters-fiction: Jennings; Plum- Aviation-stories: Drummond; Glass Ucci BIOGRAPHIES: Borden; Doctors-fiction: Cadnum Bredeson; Christensen; Demi; Dogs-fiction: Kimmel; Staples Erdrich; Lekuton; Trope Dragons-stories: Cave Birds-stories: Dunrea; McDonald Emotions-stories: Cave; Wells Birthdays-stories: Wright Ethics and values: Korman; Books and reading-fiction: Child McPhail; Oates; Orenstein; Brothers-fiction: Mack Pierce; Spinelli, J. Brothers and sisters-fiction: Block Explorers and exploring: Bredeson Business-fiction: Thesman Fairies-fiction: Prue Cats-fiction: King-Smith FANTASY: DiCamillo; Haber; Cats-stories: Floyd Hale; Lee; Pierce; Prue; Rees China: Fisher Fathers-fiction: Fritz; Lee; Oates; Christmas: Demi; Hills; McPhail; Smith Wade Fears-stories: Cave; Wells Christmas-fiction: Scott FOLKTALES AND FAIRY TALES: Christmas-stories: Johnston Datlow; DeFelice; Fleischman; City life-stories: Alda Hale; Palatini; San Souci; Stanley Civil War-fiction: Peck Friends and friendship-fiction: Clothing-fiction: Thesman Dent; Fritz; Johnson, K.; Stanley; Clothing-stories: Keller Whytock; Yee 134 * THE BULLETIN

Gardeners and gardens-stories: Reading aloud: Fenner; Gavalda; Fleischman Haber; Hesse; Kimmel; King- Gays and lesbians: Trope Smith; Lekuton; Palatini; Smith Geography: Barnard Reading, advanced: Kimmel GHOST STORIES: Bunting; Reading, easy: Child; Fenner; Falcone Fleischman; King-Smith; Ghosts-stories: Landry McPhail; Smith Gifted children-fiction: Yee Reading, reluctant: Gavalda; Gods and goddesses: Fisher Lekuton; Mastro; McNamee Grandfathers-fiction: Gavalda Relationships-fiction: Block; Grandmothers-fiction: Bunting; Korman Fenner Religious instruction: Demi; Fisher; Grief-fiction: Mack Hesse; McDermott; Pfeffer Guilt-fiction: Bunting; Johnson, K.; RHYMING STORIES: Spinelli, E. McNamee Saints: Demi Gypsies-fiction: Spinelli, J. School: Trope Halloween: Polacco School-fiction: Gavalda; Korman; Hanukkah-poetry: Hesse Rees HISTORICAL FICTION: Alda; SCIENCE FICTION: Haddix Cadnum; Secrets-fiction: Lee History, U.S.: Borden; Erdrich Self-image-fiction: Whytock History, world: Barnard; Pfeffer Ships and sailing-fiction: Cadnum; Holidays: Pfeffer Plum-Ucci Holocaust-fiction: Spinelli, J. SHORT STORIES: Datlow; Hesse HUMOR: Child; Dent; Dunrea; Snow-fiction: Fenner French; Hills; Jennings; Kerr; Snow-stories: Landry Palatini; Polacco; Rees; Scott; SONGS: Hills; Wade Spinelli, E.; Wade; Whytock Storytelling: Hesse; San Souci Immigrants: Lekuton Storytime: Drummond; Dunrea; Incest-fiction: Block Floyd; French; Glass; Keller; Inuit-fiction: Orenstein Landry; McDermott; San Souci; JOURNALS: Trope Spinelli, E.; Wells Kenya-stories: Johnston SUPERNATURAL STORIES: Magic-fiction: Hale; Prue Plum-Ucci Marine biology: Mastro SURVIVAL STORIES: Fenner Mice-fiction: DiCamillo; Haber SUSPENSE: Harlow; McNamee Monsters-fiction: Plum-Ucci Teachers-fiction: Jennings Mothers-fiction: Haddix Thanksgiving-fiction: Smith Mothers-stories: McDonald Thanksgiving-stories: Spinelli, E. Murder-fiction: Oates Trains-fiction: Johnson, A. Music: Krull Vampires-fiction: Rees MYSTERIES: Jennings; Nixon Voyages and travel: Borden; Native Americans: Erdrich Christensen Native Americans-fiction: Orenstein Voyages and travel-fiction: Nature study: McDonald Cadnum Pigs-stories: Hills Weather-stories: Wright POETRY: Hesse Witches-fiction: King-Smith Poverty-fiction: Ray Wolves-fiction: Palatini Princesses-fiction: DiCamillo; Hale Women's studies: Christensen; Racism-fiction: Peck Erdrich; Kurtz Rape-fiction: Johnson, K. World War II-fiction: Harlow; Spinelli, J. Five starred reviews for OLIVE'S OCEAN by KEVIN HENKES :*^ "Martha Boyle is one of the memorable 12-year- old girls of fiction ... The book is divided into chapters of various lengths that are frequently like prose poems . .. each with the sort of title one might expect in a book of poetry." -Starred review /Kliatt

-"• "With his usual sensitivity and insight, Henkes explores key issues of adolescence, through the observations of an aspiring writer, 12-year-old Martha Boyle." -Starred review / Publishers Weekly

~"This lovely, character-driven novel explores, with rare subtlety and sensibility, the changes and perplexities that haunt every child's growing up process." -Starred review / ALA Booklist W "Well-plotted, the working out of [12-year-old] Martha's feelings ... are effected with originality and grace. Few girls will fail to recognize themselves in Martha."-Starred review / Kirkus Reviews

W "[Henkes's] language is carefully formed, sometimes staccato, sometimes eloquent, and always evocative to create an almost breathtaking pace." -Starred review / School Library Journal

Ages 10 up. $15.99 Tr (0-06-053543-1); $16.89 Lb (0-06-053544-X) Stoiy by ELIZABETH PARTRIDGE Quits by ANNA GROSSNICKLE HINES ~-* "Jake's Daddy wakes him just before dawn, as he's curled up in his sleeping bag next to the campfire. Jake is not sure he's ready, but Daddy thinks he is. He tries once (too hard) and once more (too soft) but then Jake is whistling softly.... Daddy joins Jake in whistling, as the sun comes up. 'We whistled up the sun.' This tender story of a family ritual unfolds to the full-page images from Hines, who makes her pictures in quilts. Every single piece of fabric is perfect.... Children wili be entranced." - Starred review / Ifirkus R~evkws

"[A] beautifully illustrated picture book.... Young children will enjoy the story; adults will find the unusual and distinctive illustrations fascinating." ~~I- FALA. Book/l~F - Starred review / School Libraryjournal Also by Geraldine Wi-- 'A gently heightened view of homesteading life McCaughrean serves as the backdrop for some hilarious characters and THE KITE RIDER their efforts to make the train stop in their town. What $15.95 Tr finally works makes for a spellbinding denouement." (0-06-623874-9) $16.89 Lb - Starred review / ALA Booklist (0-06-623875-7) $ 6.99 Pb W-- 'A narrative that feels like the literary equivalent of (0-06-441091-9) a grand old western movie..... Completely enjoyable." - Starred review / Publishers Weekly

:9 ai-prmnlni(.iliieisRok L /Y- h4-d :I'- "[A] satirical, laugh-out-loud debut about a wacky home-schooled teenager who decides to try public high school.... Narrating in a diary format, the now 15-year-old Alice relates her sidesplitting struggles with her clueless parents, social acquaintances, and the various members of the helping professions. Juby wields a sharp pen and has a marvelous time skewering everything from makeup to multiple chemical sensitivity disorder.... Hilarious."- Starred review / Kirkus Reviews

-" "Alice has caused the nervous breakdown of her counselor ... and feels obliged to do better by her counselor's replacement.... Along the way, she tries out 'alternative' clothing and gets the worst haircut ever, attracts boys even less together than herself, gets pummeled by the local bully-and utters acerbic apercus that will have readers roaring.... Dark wit glitters on every page." - Starred review / PublishersWeekly g

Teen fiction. $15.99 Tr (0-06-0051543-0) $16.89 Lb (0-06-051544-9); $24.00 Au (0-06-054340-X) I rý ýý HarperTempest -Iýiiitil)ý-iiilol'llai-pei-CollitisPitblislei-.ý; 13K. AN CI ILIC oft I ic A mcricas. NcNN York, NY IC-019 - NvNvNN.h a rywo-chi I(] rells.colli FTHE MIHEL L RINTZ OF THE MICHAEL L. PRINTZ AWA

"Growing up in Harlem, 12-year-old David copes with his father, who is sometimes violent, and his older brother, who is hanging out with a dangerous crowd. After befriending Mr. Moses, an old man who speaks of himself as a dream bearer, David begins to hear stories that reflect the African American experience over the centuries... [and which] help him understand those around him. This well-crafted novel offers some original characters and insights as well as a good story." -ALA Booklist

'* "Myers retains his usual gentle, plainspoken accessibility, making this a thoughtful book that will reach many young readers." - Starred review / The Bulletin of the Center for Children'sBooks

W- "This quiet, subtle story works on a number of layers with several themes- dreams, visions, home, community, and manhood." -Starred review / Kirkus Reviews

Ages 10 up. $15.99 Tr (0-06-029521-X); $16.89 Lb (0-06-029522-8)

' Ha - ici ___

rom the ing author ting Esm6 ARA

Rail Codell

rkable and le cast of . An ovely debut from the

Esm6." kus Reviews, arred review

Vn" - T --- -1 1- *"Presenting memorable characters in spirited scenes, this novel will surely be empowering for reluctant learners-and thought-provoking and gratifying for everyone." -Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Miss Pointy joins the constellation of fictional inspirational teachers who serve as models for students and teachers alike. Give Codell a shiny sticker from Miss Pointy's Happy Box." -The Horn Book

"Codell has a plainspoken yet vivid creativity of expression that gives the story an effervescent enjoyability ... -The Bulletin for the Center of Children's Books

I*ntel----ft7 Teacher's Guide available at 61.ýu^^^^^^^^H www.hyperionbooksorchildren.com

HYPERION BOOKS FOR CHILDREN i Meet Matt the Rat! A bilinqual series for pre-school through grade 4

Meet Matt the Rat and be swept away with his adventures told inEnglish and Spanish.

Pp-'lcan hardly wait to t. 7 grandchildren in and share ,heýrnthe bilingual spiritual dventures of Matt the Rat," AvalablelSI fmLBLr &l'a[]llor.o.lthe diibutors,!an. dU h6_ Ma^rk.eoff utho h^Biudfo wiBiplflGf For orders and inquiries: a Harvest Sun Press * PO Box 826 * Fairacres, NM 88033 Harvest Sun Phone: 479-283-4000* Fax: 505-526-6930 P R ESS Website: www.harvestsunpress.com E-mail: [email protected] P E

Lincoln Park Zoo: -is one of last remaining 'free' zoos -began with swans bought to beautify the park -is, at 135 years, the second oldest zoo in the U.S (only the Central Park Zoo is older)

With a foreword by Jack Hanna, this book combines photographs, oral histories and other resources to chronicle Lincoln Park Zoo's development and chart the unique role it continues to play in the growth of Chicago and in the establishment of zoos and preser- vation activities in cities across America. Read about Mike the polar bear and how he ripped off a man's (already artifical) arm. Illustrated. Cloth, $49.95; Paper, $24.95 Other stories introduce Rocky the parachut- ing bear; Bushman, a lowland gorilla with Available at booksellers, call 800-537-5487, an outgoing personality; and Princess or visit www. press. u illinois.edu Spearmint, a Nile hippopatamus donated by William Wrigley, Jr. UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS 'c

j' ('God Bought a Couch,' 'God G( in a Boat,' 'God Got Arrested') .. the poems wind providing some serious food for thought ... In tf compelling poen Rylant puts to exceptionally go< use her folksy storytelling skills, her spare and direct writing sty] and her ability to sincerely extol life everyaay pleasures ana pantul losses. - Starred review / The Horn Book 0 M "Kids who feel down home with God are going to love this book. Rylant has loosened up with the Lord and shares some of His everyday activities in twenty-two page-and-a-half poems, plus one more complex ten-pager.... An appealing 4 poetry book for teenagers." - Starred review / The Bulletin of the Center for Children'sBooks _ "Rylant takes two tropes-God as one of us and God's presence in everything-and turns them into wry and radiant poetry.... Thoughtful young readers will be beguiled." - Kirkus Reviews

Teen fiction. $14.99 Tr (0-06-009433-8): $15.89 Lb (0-06-009434-6)

7ý H a p e e m e s n ni wi t of I-a -p i- 'o lii ~ ib is eý. SPANISH NURSERY RHY1MES Selected by Alma Flor Ada &r F Isabel Campoy English Adaptations by Alice Schertle mlustrated by ViVi Escriv~ '*~ "This [is a] wonderful collection of nursery Srhymes mn both English and Spanish selected from the rich oral tradition of Latin America and the American Southwest. Schertle's English adaptations are poetic re-creations as memorable in English as they are in Spanish. Escriv~'s bright and detailed illustrations hold tremendous child appeal. This title will be read and reread for years to come." - Starred review / Criticas ~i-"Certain to become a staple for preschool and early elementary programs, this is also a wonderful, reassuring lap book. A must purchase for libraries." - Starred review / School Library Journal "Asubstantive, useful collection that will * enrich nursery rhyme, read aloud, and biling~ual shelves." - The Bulletin of the Centerfor Children'sBooks Ages 1-6. $14.99 Tr (0-688-16019-0) $16.89 Lb (0-688-16020-4) 1 wiunn debtf -MBoOMst

debut *"Preschoolers will howl." -Booklist, starred review

Byperion Books for Chldren hyperionbooksforchildren. corn r Avilab-fro th

STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBESPACE Connecting Children and Narrative EDITED BY BETSY HEARNE, JANICE M. DEL NEGRO, CHRISTINE JENKINS, AND DEBORAH STEVENSON Papers Presented at the Allerton Park Institute Sponsored October 26-28, 1997, by the Graduate School of Library and Information Science University of Illinois

In our interest in children's welfare, we often forget that children are not simply passive receptacles for whatever treasure or trash the adult world throws at them but are lively agents who are continually interacting with their environment. Children actively create meaning as read- h ers, viewers, and listeners. The 3 9 Allerton Park Insti- tute papers emphasize the critical need to connect children and narrative as a way to affect their development ISBN 0-87845-105-6; as listeners, readers, viewers, and evaluators of litera- Number 39; 143 pages; ture-and information in all forms. paper; $21.95*

The Bulletin Storytelling Review, Volume 1 Recommend-only reviews of storytelling audio- and videotapes EDITED BYJANICE M. DEL NEGRO AND DEBORAH STEVENSON Add to your library this vital compendium of material not regularly reviewed in other publications. Designed to be a tool for selection and collection development, the first volume of The Bulletin StorytellingReview contains: * 162 alphabetically-arranged reviews of tapes by sto- rytellers such as Joe Bruchac, Len Cabral, Donald Davis, Barbara McBride-Smith, J. J. Reneaux, and Laura Simms * Price, distributor, and grade level information for each review * Ordering information for each distributor listed * An index that allows readers to search for tapes by type of story or possible use ISBN 0-87845-106-4; 99 pages; paper; $14.95*

st'lld ()rdcrý, 1(): (;ý,Hs IluHication", ()fl ic(% 1ý()(Inl 2 1, ý01 1ý.D"mid 1ýtrco, Clutllpýlign. 11, 01820,

Indkid" 'Ilippilw" \\ ;[11111111,, 1 nited III" sllipjmlý11, i, 13 1'()l111c In't ord(-1-.(.)11tidcott11( stýlw', III,, (t ,,I I, "'ý)1''I II)c ti:,I 1)()()I" " 1,ýf) lot- k,,Id1;0di1ion:1I III01c )Idkýl :;sli,"u · 5~i~-·1

Universityu~i of Illinois Press 1325 SoSouth Oak Street PERIODICALLs Champaign, IL 61820 POSTAGE Champs PAIDPA ID U.S.A. CHAMPAIGN,NIL IL

ADDRESS SERVICE REQUESTED

I BooksRnnk~ makem4~p greatcrrPlt gifts,criftr buthilt pickingnir~ina the I perfect books for your favorite youngsters can be daunting.Just in time for the holidays, the expert staff of The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books have created a guide to help you navigate the bookstore wilderness full of shshiny new you aR children's books.

Updated and expanded from last year's edition, thet Guide Bookok aR to Gift Books contains annotations for over 225 ofo the best books for giving (and receiving), the Guide Book ito Gift Books is ~ available for only $3.50 as a downloadable PDF file that you can print out and use for every holiday, birthday, or other gift- giving occasion on your calendar this year. r

ii Listed books have all been recommended in full Bulletin I reviews from the last three years and are verifiedverifie as currently Ir ly s

in print. Entries are divided into age groups and includei author,31; A· title, publisher, and the current list price. To purchase, go to 1 www.lis.uiuc.edulgiftbook!www.lis.uiuc.edulgiftbooks/ i;

;; B I ii ·d? r

0008-9036(200311)5-/:3;1-10008-9036(200311)57:3; 1-1

i:: ~- 3i

~T -:· ; ~E~i~3