Review of Darth Paper Strikes Back, by Tom Angleberger

Children's Fiction Review, Contemporary, Humorous, Starred Review 2

Darth Paper Strikes Back

by Tom Angleberger

Amulet Books, New York, 2011. 159 pages.
Starred Review

Darth Paper Strikes Back is, naturally, the sequel to The Strange Case of Origami Yoda. Both books are fabulous middle school reading. I so wish I could ever find them on the shelves of the library, because there are many customers I would recommend them to — but so far, they are always checked out.

The first book covers Tommy’s sixth grade year, where he gets surprisingly wise advice from Origami Yoda, a finger puppet manipulated by a really weird kid called Dwight. The advice solves all kinds of problems and is far too wise for Dwight to have made up on his own. But all along, there was a skeptic, a kid named Harvey who scoffed at everyone else’s belief in Origami Yoda.

On the first day of seventh grade, Harvey shows up with an origami finger puppet of Darth Vader. And Harvey does Vader’s voice much better than Dwight has ever done Yoda’s voice. And then things get bad for Dwight.

Tommy explains the scenario at the beginning of his latest “case file”:

“The bad news is that this year Origami Yoda’s up against the destructive force of Darth Paper, and can’t seem to handle it.

“It has all gone wrong since that first day. Now it’s October and Darth Paper has pretty much destroyed all the good Origami Yoda did last year. Now the girls don’t like us. The teachers don’t like us. Some of us don’t even like each other….

“But it’s been worse for Dwight. He’s been suspended from school, and the school board is going to decide if he should get sent to CREF — the Correctional and Remedial Education Facility — the school where they send the really, really bad kids, which Dwight isn’t. Amy’s older brother said the toughest, meanest, nastiest guy in his class was sent there . . . and got beat up! It’s kind of like Jabba’s palace, except without the alien rock band.

“This would be the ultimate defeat for Origami Yoda! And we think that Darth Paper is behind it. I just find it hard to believe that even Darth Paper/Harvey could be so evil!”

Tommy’s case file consists of telling about the good influences Origami Yoda has already had this year, the good advice he’s given, the situations he’s saved. I love the way these are real middle school concerns — like a game to play when they take video games off the library computers, helping Lance to decide which class to take, a way to clean up on the school popcorn sale, and even telling Murky the secret origins of Yoda that are not revealed in the movies. And, yes, there’s a return of Mr. Good Clean Fun and Soapy the Monkey, but this time he’s encouraging participation in the popcorn sale, rather than teaching them to wash their hands. (You see, the background situation of the middle school has some wonderful humor, too.)

Now, I was halfway through the book, wistfully thinking of how in the first book, the kids learned through the adventures that Dwight was a pretty great person after all. But in this book, Harvey just seemed bad clear through. I also thought it pretty unrealistic that a school board would listen to a bunch of students about a disciplinary matter, so Tommy’s whole case file seemed awfully misguided and unrealistic.

Then I read the ending, and I will just say that Tom Angleberger nailed it! Best of all, we’ve got a picture of Yoda at the back, promising “The End… This is Not!”

Did I mention that, like the Wimpy Kid books, this book has cartoons throughout? Personally, I like these books better. They feel more good-hearted to me. Sure, Harvey’s mean, but there’s not much bullying going on, and these seem like genuine middle school kids with middle school concerns. So I really hope our library will get more copies before long, so I can direct those who like the Wimpy Kid books to turn to Origami Yoda next. Now, admittedly, people familiar with Star Wars will enjoy it a lot more. I could be wrong, but isn’t that pretty much all middle school kids?

origamiyoda.com
amuletbooks.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of The One and Only Ivan, by Katherine Applegate

Animal Characters, Children's Fiction Review, Contemporary, Starred Review 0

The One and Only Ivan

by Katherine Applegate

Harper, 2012. 305 pages.
Starred Review

This book is already my early Newbery pick. This might change during the year, but the book itself is exquisitely crafted and told simply. You believe a real gorilla is telling the story, and you see his growth.

Ivan is a gorilla. “It’s not as easy as it looks.”

Ivan lives “in a human habitat called the Exit 8 Big Top Mall and Video Arcade. We are conveniently located off I-95, with shows at two, four, and seven, 365 days a year.” That’s what the owner says when he answers the phone.

Also in the mall circus are an aging elephant, some sun bears, chickens, rabbits, dogs, and some parrots. The other animals do tricks for the people who come in to watch them.

Ivan is resigned to his lot. The janitor’s daughter, Julia, has brought him crayons. He draws pictures of things in his domain. The people don’t recognize them, but they are willing to buy pictures made by a gorilla. He is an artist at heart.

But things change to make Ivan no longer so resigned. A baby elephant comes to their little circus. She is very young, very curious, very talkative, and misses her family. We see Ivan change now that he has someone to protect.

But how can a gorilla in a cage protect anyone?

This book will appeal to a very wide age range. I’m often prejudiced against prose poems, but in this one, it seems natural, since you don’t expect complicated sentences from a gorilla. I am also prejudiced against present tense, but again, it seems like a natural way for a gorilla to tell us about his lot. After all, his life has hardly ever changed, and he’s telling us about it as it happens. As a prose poem, there is plenty of blank space on the pages and the story reads quickly, so the language won’t be an obstacle for less advanced readers. But the story covers issues that people of any age will care about.

The craft in this book is exquisite. We see Ivan grow, slowly and realistically, as he is confronted with situations that make him care, in spite of himself.

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of Cloaked in Red, by Vivian Vande Velde

Children's Fiction Review, Fairy Tale Variant, Fantasy, Humorous, Short Stories 0

Cloaked in Red

by Vivian Vande Velde

Marshall Cavendish, 2010. 127 pages.

I loved Vivian Vande Velde’s The Rumpelstiltskin Problem, so I made sure to snap up Cloaked in Red when I heard about it.

In both books, she takes a fairy tale you thought you knew, and casts it in a very different light. Okay, several different lights. She looks at the story from many different perspectives.

Her Author’s Note at the beginning makes some fun points:

“There are different versions, but they all start with a mother who sends her daughter into the woods, where there is not only a wolf, but a talking, cross-dressing wolf. We are never told Little Red Riding Hood’s age, but her actions clearly show that she is much too young, or too dimwitted, to be allowed out of the house alone.”

Or how about the heroine’s unusual name?

“And what happened later in life, when Little Red Riding Hood was no longer little? Did she shift to ‘Medium-Sized Blue-Beaded Sweater’? Did she eventually become ‘Size-Large and Yes-That-DOES-Make-Your-Butt-Look-Enormous Jeans’?”

I love the way she points out how unlikely it all is. Here’s Red in the cottage:

“I don’t like to criticize anyone’s family, but I’m guessing these people are not what you’d call close. Little Red doesn’t realize a wolf has substituted himself for her grandmother. I only met my grandmother three times in my entire life, but I like to think I would have noticed if someone claiming to be my grandmother had fur, fangs, and a tail.

“But Little Red, instead of becoming suspicious, becomes rude.

“‘My,’ she says — as far as she knows — to her grandmother, ‘what big arms you have.’

“Big she notices. Apparently hairy and clawed escape her.”

Vivian Vande Velde concludes her introduction with these words:

“However you look at it, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ is a strange and disturbing story that should probably not be shared with children.

“That is why I’ve gone ahead and written eight new versions of it.”

The eight stories that follow are amazingly varied, even though you can see how they relate to the fairy tale. These ones seemed darker to me than the ones in The Rumpelstiltskin Problem, but then “Little Red Riding Hood” is a quite dark and violent tale.

We’ve got one from the perspective of pretty much every one in the story. I like the one where Jakob and Wilhelm, the dimwitted Grimm brothers, sons of a woodcutter, misunderstand when Grandma’s talking about making a wolf draft-stopper for her granddaughter. My favorite is probably the one about the nice wolf who is trying to be helpful after an annoying little girl steps on his tail, screams, and drops her basket.

“The wolf inhaled deeply the tantalizing smells of meat and baked goods, and was strongly tempted to gobble everything up. But his mother had raised him better than that.

“‘Little girl!’ he called after the fleeing child. He could no longer see her, though her shrieks trailed behind her like a rat’s tail. ‘You forgot your food!’

“Apparently the little girl could not understand wolf speech any more than the wolf could understand human speech, since she didn’t come back.

“If the wolf hadn’t had such a deeply held moral belief system, he could have convinced himself that by leaving the basket behind, the girl had forsaken her rights to it. But, instead, he picked up the basket in his teeth, then loped through the trees, following the trails of wailing, crushed forest vegetation and human scent.”

Reading this book makes me want to try my hand at rewriting fairy tales. Above all, all the variations are clever and inventive and a nice exercise in how point of view changes a story.

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on my own book, ordered from Amazon.com.

Review of The Wizard of Dark Street, by Shawn Thomas Odyssey

Children's Fiction Review, Fantasy, Mystery 0

The Wizard of Dark Street

by Shawn Thomas Odyssey

Egmont USA, New York, 2011. 345 pages.

This is a fun and clever middle-grade fantasy. We’ve got that old fantasy stand-by — a girl with a gift of Natural Magic, the like of which hasn’t been seen in hundreds of years — but she doesn’t want to be her uncle the Wizard’s apprentice. She wants to be a detective.

So, her uncle needs to find a new apprentice. When they’ve got the apprentices assembled to try out, something awful happens to her uncle, and Oona has a case to solve.

One thing I love about this book is that it doesn’t try to tell how Oona first became a detective, but starts us just after some outrageous action has happened, implying that what we’re about to hear is even more dramatic. Here’s a paragraph on the third page:

“‘You’ve got to be more careful!’ That had been her uncle’s advice on the subject of her nearly getting her head chopped off. His words had been direct, and his tone uncharacteristically stern. ‘I will only agree to this detective business of yours if you promise not to go getting yourself into such terrible trouble. I mean it, Oona! Igregious Goodfellow was a scoundrel, a thief, and a homicidal maniac all rolled into one. You’re incredibly lucky that it was your hair that got caught in that horrible man’s guillotine. You should never have followed him to his secret hideout. The moment you discovered he was the Horton Family Jewelry Store thief, you should have left matters to the police.'”

The author keeps up the tone of the book throughout, and, yes, the things Oona encounters in the rest of the book are even more dramatic.

“Presently, she turned her gaze north, and before her lay all of Dark Street, the last of the thirteen Faerie roads, connecting the World of Man to the fabled Land of Faerie. A broad cobblestone avenue more than thirteen miles long, the street stretched out in a continuous line, a world unto itself, unbroken by cross streets or intersections. The buildings rose up from the edges of the sidewalks like crooked teeth crammed into a mouth too small to fit. They listed and leaned against one another for support, giving the impression that if one of the buildings should ever fall down, then all of the others would quickly follow, toppling one by one like dominoes.

“She considered the street for a moment, this ancient world between worlds, with its enormous Glass Gates at one end and the equally vast Iron Gates at the other. And yet of these two gateways, only the Iron Gates ever opened, and then only once a night, upon the stroke of midnight, when the massive doors would swing inward on hinges as big as houses, opening for a single minute upon the sprawling, ambitious city of New York. For the amount of time it took a second hand to travel once around the face of a clock, the Iron Gates remained open to any who should choose to venture across their enchanted threshold. Few ever did. Few ever even noticed.

“In a city such as New York, even at midnight, the people were too busy getting from one place to another to observe anything out of the ordinary. And those who did see the street suddenly appear out of nowhere might simply pretend that it was not there at all. They might turn their faces, and when they looked again, the street would be gone, and they would tell themselves that it had been a trick of the light. Nothing more. The children of New York would surely have been more apt to see the street than adults, but of course, at midnight most good little children were tucked safely away into their beds, dreaming of stranger places still.”

Shawn Thomas Odyssey keeps the story inventive, fast-paced, and clever. We’ve got detective novel elements like a locked room and a bumbling police chief and a super villain behind the scenes, but it’s set in this magical world and the fate of even the World of Men may be at stake.

I read this book on the airplane flying from New York to Seattle, and it was a nice light-hearted yarn for the flight. It has some amusing elements like a clock that tells bad Knock-Knock jokes. I was inordinately pleased with myself when I figured out the riddle Oona needed to solve in the process of looking for her uncle. A lot of things that seem scary at first, like witches and goblins, end up being quite humorous. And some things you might not be afraid of, like a faerie servant, end up rather scary. This has the puzzles of a detective story, with some Fantasy tropes twisted and thrown in.

I love that the book has the subtitle, An Oona Carte Mystery, because that implies there will be more. This will be a mystery series for kids I can get excited about!

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on an Advance Reader Copy I got at ALA Annual Conference.

Review of True Blue, by Jane Smiley

Children's Fiction Review, Contemporary 0

True Blue

by Jane Smiley

Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2011. 297 pages.

I read this book when finishing up my vacation in Oregon, because staying with my Auntie Sue made me hanker for a horse book. Auntie Sue had horses when I was small, and I also loved horse books then.

I enjoyed True Blue, but I’m wishing that I’d read the earlier two books about the Lovitt family first. There’s a nice horsey atmosphere which I was looking for, but the resolution of the drama in this book was rather unsatisfying to me. I think the book would have affected me more if I were already caring about the Lovitt family and invested in whether or not Abby’s brother Danny reconciles with their father.

In this book, Abby gets a new horse named True Blue. His owner died in a traffic accident, and no one at the stable knew anything about her. Abby works with True Blue. He seems unusually nervous. Then Abby starts seeing ghosts. Is Blue’s former owner haunting her?

Meanwhile, Abby breaks her wrist and can’t ride. So she starts helping train students, including her best friend. And her brother Danny comes around to help on the farm — which adds lots of tension.

As I said, I enjoyed this book, but think I would have enjoyed it more if I’d read the others first. It’s a quiet book, but a nice story. I do think I’ll go back and read The Georges and the Jewels and A Good Horse, because sometimes it’s nice to read a good horse story.

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on an Advance Reader Copy I got at ALA Annual Conference.

Review of Dodsworth in Rome, by Tim Egan

Beginning Chapter Books, Children's Fiction Review 0

Dodsworth in Rome

by Tim Egan

Houghton Mifflin Books for Children, Boston, 2011. 48 pages.

Move over Madeline! If you’re going to take your kids to Paris, New York, London, or now Rome, you need to get these books about Dodsworth and his duck visiting those cities.

The first Tim Egan book I read was Serious Farm, and that was enough to make me love his work. The Dodsworth books are short chapter books (four in this one) with large pictures on each page, showing major landmarks, and a hilarious deadpan storyline.

In Rome, they ride a scooter, see (or don’t see) the sights, evade pickpockets, and participate in a pizza-throwing contest. Dodsworth stops the duck just in time from adding a duck to the Sistine Chapel.

I really wish I had these books when I lived in Europe. It would add some fun to take my kids to the same places Dodsworth saw, making sure they behaved better than the duck.

This is simply a fun story — a perfect choice for a child ready for chapters, sure to help them enjoy reading.

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of Renegade Magic, by Stephanie Burgis

Alternate History, Children's Fiction Review, Fantasy, Starred Review 0

Renegade Magic

by Stephanie Burgis

Atheneum Books for Young Readers, New York, 2012. 329 pages.
Starred Review

I loved Stephanie Burgis’s first book, Kat, Incorrigible, a marvellous blend of Jane Austen-type society with magic and an incorrigible, irrepressible heroine. So I was delighted when I found an Advance Reader Copy of the second book about Kat at ALA Midwinter Meeting. It went directly on the top of my pile to read after the conference, and I was not disappointed.

I do recommend reading the first book first. I think you can still enjoy the second book without it, but you’ll understand better what’s going on with the Order of the Guardians who protect England and the enemies Kat has already made.

At the start of this book, Kat’s older sister Elissa is going to be married. Her sister Angeline’s beloved, Frederick Carlyle, is the best man. But when Frederick’s mother interrupts the ceremony and accuses Angeline of ensnaring Frederick by witchcraft, with the word of a member of the Order of the Guardians as her evidence, the happiness of the younger sisters is seriously set awry.

Stepmama decides to take them away from the scene of their humiliation, fleeing to Bath, along with Kat’s brother Charles, who always seems to be getting into trouble with gambling.

At Bath, Kat can sense a strange, wild magic, a magic that goes back to the Romans who founded the baths. Someone is trying to stir up a magic that can disrupt all of society. Can Kat fix things, as well as her own family’s happiness? All while learning to use her own powers without proper training? The process is quite an adventure!

These books are outstanding middle grade fantasy with plenty of humor, lots of action, some actual history, lots of suspense, and people you enjoy knowing. I wouldn’t want to be Kat’s Stepmama, but I would definitely like being Kat’s friend.

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on an Advance Reader Copy I got at ALA Midwinter Meeting and checked against a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Top 100 Chapter Books Poll – Again!

Children's Fiction Review, Classics, General, Sondy's Selections, Top Ten Tuesday 0

As I said last night, Betsy Bird, who writes School Library Journal’s Fuse #8 blog, is doing another Top 100 Chapter Books Poll. You have two more days to get in your votes! Anyone who loves books, do this soon! You’ll be so glad you did!

I had a terrible time limiting my list of Chapter Books to only ten. In fact, the only way I could do it at all was to take out some of my absolute favorites because part of what I love about them is the romance. Come to think of it, ALL of these choices, I read at one time or another to one or both of my boys (or my husband did). So I can safely say that all of these books are definitely children’s books. Though I can also firmly say that there are adults who will love them, too. And I’m afraid I only read half of them as a child myself.

I definitely still keep wavering with the final choices. In fact, let’s see if I make any last-minute changes as I post this list!

The Books I Believe are the Top Ten Chapter Books of All Time:

1. Anne of Green Gables, by L. M. Montgomery

I mentioned last night that I would have loved to include Emily of New Moon. But this is right. Anne is classic. Anne is the heroine who started it all. I first read this book in 10th grade, and I found it a breath of fresh air after all the adult books I’d been reading. Then, as I was in high school and college, they slowly came out with more and more of L. M. Montgomery’s books. I also own all the volumes of her journals and everything I could get my hands on of hers. My absolute favorite is The Blue Castle, but it’s actually a book for adults. Anyway, Anne Shirley is a character who comes alive.

2. Momo, by Michael Ende

I know this one won’t make the list, but I can’t let it go unrecognized. This was the first book I ordered from Book-of-the-Month Club, and it was so good, I blame it for all the other books I ended up ordering. When I moved to Germany, my first purchase was a copy of this book in the original language (German). Momo is a little girl with a gift for listening. So when gray men come and steal people’s time by convincing them to save it, Momo is the only one who can see them, because she really listens to them. This book is mythic in scope.

3. Winnie-the-Pooh, by A. A. Milne

I tell the whole story of how much I love this book in my review. Let’s just say that I remember my mother reading it to me. Then I remember reading it to my little brothers and sisters. Then, in college, I learned that one of the most fun things to do was read with a group of friends, where different people read the different voices. And finally, I got to read it to my sons, or together with my sons. Oh, and I’ve read it in German!

One of the funny things is that it reads on different levels. I remember as a child just taking the things said as perfectly reasonable and matter-of-fact that now I think are hilarious. This book is a work of genius.

I also have to mention that I brainwashed both my sons into loving these characters so that the very first characters they pretended to be were ones from Winnie-the-Pooh. In fact, my son learned early to write his own name — “P-O-O-H.” (When he called me in the night with the call, “Pi–iglet!”, I thought he’d gone too far.)

Now, to be honest, The House at Pooh Corner is a little better, since it includes Tigger. However, last time I voted for The World of Pooh in order to include both and my vote was totally wasted. I’m sure everyone who reads the list will be thinking of ALL the Pooh stories.

4. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, by C. S. Lewis

I remember at my vast old age in 7th grade sadly concluding that I was too old for the Narnia books now. (I had already read them many times.) Then I took them up again in college and found new riches. I know I will never “outgrow” them again. Of course, it does help that I’m a Christian, and love the insights about God found in Lewis’s writings. But the magic of the stories works fully, even without that. (And I appreciate that part much more as an adult than I did as a kid.)

As I said in my review, no kid who reads this book will ever look at a closet door the same way again.

5. The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien

I remember reading this book on the way to school and having to stop right when Bilbo was in the tunnel leading to the dragon’s lair. That was excruciating!

6. The Thief, by Megan Whalen Turner

When we were reading to both our kids together, my older son said we had to read this book next. I was skeptical, but by the time I finished, I was a complete fan. And it grows on me with each rereading — because I notice more clever things each time. The second book, The Queen of Attolia would be near the top of my YA list.

7. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, by J. K. Rowling

Oh, our family got hours and hours and hours of enjoyment out of these books. We read all of the first five out loud as a family, with no reading ahead. (Or as little reading ahead as we could stand.) We read books #3 and #4 on family vacations, and ended up putting off a visit to Neuschwanstein Castle because we just had to finish Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

8. A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle

This book isn’t perfect, but how it endures. I didn’t read this until I was in college. When I did, I was so grateful to the person who told me about it.

9. Pippi Longstocking, by Astrid Lindgren

This book has such childlike exuberance. Pippi is someone we’d talk about as if we knew her. (“And she sleeps with her feet on the pillow!”) This is a child-sized tall tale.

10. Half Magic, by Edward Eager

My favorite of his is Seven Day Magic, but Half Magic is more well-known, the first one I read, and a classic concept.

Oh, so do I really have to leave out so many? I wanted to include Little Britches, by Ralph Moody, Dealing with Dragons, by Patricia C. Wrede, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum, and Black Beauty, by Anna Sewall. I hope other people include them! And the ones I decided were YA, but that I love, love, love are The Blue Sword, by Robin McKinley, The Goose Girl, by Shannon Hale, and The Witch of Blackbird Pond, by Elizabeth George Speare.

I am helping Betsy compile the results, but I am sure if I changed some answers, I’d get found out, and she would withdraw the privilege. So I will be good. Sigh.

The results will be better the more people send in their lists! So get moving on that! And I do really enjoy your comments. What would be on your list?

Review of Wonder, by R. J. Palacio

Children's Fiction Review, Contemporary, Starred Review 0

Wonder

by R. J. Palacio

Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2012. 315 pages.
Starred Review.

August Pullman has never been to school before. Not because he has a disability, but because he’s always been recovering from one surgery or another to attempt to fix his face. It was always easier to homeschool him. So now he’s starting fifth grade at Beecher Prep Middle School, and he doesn’t quite know what to expect.

Auggie doesn’t actually tell us how he looks. He says that however you imagine it, he looks worse. He knows the looks people give him. He’s used to the averted eyes and people trying not to stare, but going to school makes it all new.

“Being at school was awful in the beginning. Every new class I had was like a new chance for kids to ‘not stare’ at me. They would sneak peeks at me from behind their notebooks or when they thought I wasn’t looking. They would take the longest way around me to avoid bumping into me in any way, like I had some germ they could catch, like my face was contagious.

“In the hallways, which were always crowded, my face would always surprise some unsuspecting kid who maybe hadn’t heard about me. The kid would make the sound you make when you hold your breath before going underwater, a little ‘uh!’ sound. This happened maybe four or five times a day for the first few weeks: on the stairs, in front of the lockers, in the library, Five hundred kids in a school: eventually every one of them was going to see my face at some time. And I knew after the first couple of days that word had gotten around about me, because every once in a while I’d catch a kid elbowing his friend as they passed me, or talking behind their hands as I walked by them. I can only imagine what they were saying about me. Actually, I prefer not to even try to imagine it.”

The book gets yet more interesting about 80 pages in, when the author starts giving us sections from other people’s perspectives. Auggie’s sister. Various friends and acquaintances. We see some of the same events through new eyes, but we also see new events unfold around Auggie.

When the book starts, Auggie seems very realistically overprotected. He’s always been homeschooled, and with his birth defects, his parents, especially his Mom, have always been protective of him. He still displays his love of all things Star Wars, and he cries easily. The growing up process is not easy, but we see Auggie make some strides.

This book covers the whole school year, with lots of interactions and events that happen because of Auggie. There’s plenty of Middle School humor; these feel like genuine fifth-graders, and there’s lots to make kids laugh. But the book also strikes deep, making the reader think: How much do I judge by appearances?

I think this book is going to be a contender for next year’s Newbery Medal.

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Childrens_Fiction/wonder.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of Wonderstruck, by Brian Selznick

Children's Fiction Review, Historical, Starred Review 0

Wonderstruck

A Novel in Words and Pictures

by Brian Selznick

Scholastic Press, New York, 2011. 637 pages.
Starred Review
2012 Battle of the Kids’ Books Contender

Brian Selznick did something amazing with The Invention of Hugo Cabret, telling half the story with pictures. The pictures were so excellent, he won the Caldecott Medal for his work.

Now, with Wonderstruck, Brian Selznick has created another work that will fill readers with wonder. The form is very similar to Hugo Cabret, but the book has a logic and beauty of its own. In both books, the writing didn’t draw me in, didn’t make me feel for the characters as much as I wanted to. However, Wonderstruck pulled me in anyway with the characters. Where, to me personally, Hugo Cabret felt like a clever puzzle, Wonderstruck is a brilliant puzzle wrapped up in a heart-warming story and fascinating historical details.

In Hugo Cabret, the detailed pictures evoked the silent films the story was about. In Wonderstruck, we’ve got two separate stories going on. The written narrative is set in 1977, beginning in Gunflint Lake, Minnesota, and the story told through the pictures is set in 1927, beginning in Hoboken, New Jersey. The story in 1927 is about a deaf girl, so silent pictures, like the silent movies she loves, are appropriate for her story. The two stories converge in New York City at the end of the book.

The author’s Acknowledgements at the end reveal the vast amount of research he did and his incredible attention to historical detail. This book is an amazing work of art in the way he wove together words and pictures, but also two separate stories into one. He even makes the pacing the same as he tells the stories. When one child is running away, so does the other. When one child is discovering things, so does the other.

I do love having Brian Selznick’s books there to offer to children. They look like a big, daunting book — but with all the pictures, can be read quite quickly. So even reluctant readers can read an “Award Winner” and thoroughly enjoy it.

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Source: This review is based on an Advance Reader Copy I got at ALA Annual Conference.