Review of Swan, by Laurel Snyder

Biography, Children's Nonfiction Review, Starred Review 0

swan_largeSwan

The Life and Dance of Anna Pavlova

by Laurel Snyder
illustrated by Julie Morstad

Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 2015. 48 pages.
Starred Review

This is an evocative, poetic, and beautiful picture book biography of the great ballerina, Anna Pavlova.

The actual text is short on details and long on atmosphere, but it gets the story across. A well-written, still mellifluous Author’s Note at the back fills things in.

Anna started out the daughter of a laundress. Here’s how Laurel Snyder puts it in her note:

It was a hard life, and Russia under the czars was generally a world where the poor stayed poor. Anna’s life should have been dismal.

But one night Anna’s mother told her, “You are going to enter fairyland,” as the two climbed into their sleigh and sped off to the Mariinsky Theatre. There, Anna heard Tchaikovsky’s music for the first time. She watched the dancers step out onto the stage, and her life was changed forever. Anna knew what she wanted to do with her life.

The main picture book text begins with this incident of Anna and her mother going through the snow to the ballet. Julie Morstad’s illustrations are perfect for this book, capturing the beauty of Anna’s grace as a little girl in a plain dress all the way through her triumphant performances as The Dying Swan.

Here’s the poetic way Laurel Snyder tells about the start of Anna’s career:

Until one night she takes the stage . . .

Anna becomes
a glimmer, a grace.
Everyone feels it,
and the lamps shine brighter.
The room holds its breath.

It shouldn’t be that she should be
this good.
Her legs too thin,
her feet all wrong –
and ooh, those toes!
She is only a girl –
so small – so frail –
but
see her face, her flutter?

Anna was born for this.

I didn’t know before reading this book that Anna Pavlova worked to bring ballet to everyone, where before it had been primarily an art form enjoyed by the rich. But ballet changed Anna’s life, and she wanted to bring its power to others and traveled around the world doing that.

laurelsnyder.com
juliemorstad.com
chroniclekids.com

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

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Review of I See a Pattern Here, by Bruce Goldstone

Children's Nonfiction Review, Mathematical, Starred Review 0

i_see_a_pattern_here_largeI See a Pattern Here

by Bruce Goldstone

Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2015. 32 pages.
Starred Review

I love Bruce Goldstone’s books about math concepts. They are bright and colorful and draw kids in – and explain the math concepts in simple language, with helpful, dramatic visuals.

This one is about patterns. He explains them using simple language and has a little box giving the mathematical vocabulary where it’s appropriate. As in his other books, he starts simply and builds.

The book covers repeating patterns, then translations (“slides”), rotations (“turns”), reflections (“flips”), symmetry (“equal sides”), scaling (“changing sizes”), and tessellations (“tile patterns”). The many, many varied pictures make the concepts so clear.

For example, he uses photos of quilt blocks, tiles in the Alhambra, kaleidoscope images, lace patterns, tire treads, animals, architecture, beads, stamped patterns, and a 2000-year-old Peruvian cloak.

This is a beautiful book that will get kids noticing the patterns around them and give them a new vocabulary for talking about those patterns.

brucegoldstone.com
mackids.com

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

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Review of Stories of my Life, by Katherine Paterson

Biography, Children's Nonfiction Review, Starred Review, True Stories 0

stories_of_my_life_largeStories of my Life

by Katherine Paterson

Dial Books for Young Readers, 2014. 299 pages.
Starred Review

Here’s a wonderful book from a beloved writer. Katherine Paterson, former National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, has lived an amazing life. She was born in China to missionary parents, was evacuated multiple times because of war, went on to be a missionary herself to Japan, became an adoptive mother, and achieved great success as a writer. There are fascinating stories here, in the hands of someone who knows how to tell a story.

The stories are from her family and friends as well as her own life. They are remarkable and entertaining. I found one a day was a good pace for reading them, like having coffee with a friend and hearing a memorable, warm and human story.

At the front of the book, she answers some common questions like, “Where do you get your ideas?” I like this paragraph from her answer:

Some of my writer friends have so many ideas, they’ll never live long enough to turn them all into books. I look at them with a certain envy, for when I finish a book I say, “Well, that was a great career while it lasted,” because I am sure I’ll never have an idea worthy of another book. But by now I’ve written a lot of books, so I must have gotten those ideas from somewhere, and that somewhere is most often from my own life. Another lesson I’ve learned along the way is that there are no truly original ideas. There are no truly original plots. As the writer of the book of Ecclesiastes said three thousand or so years ago: “There is no new thing under the sun.” Except you. Except me. Every individual is new and unique, so we may be stuck with the same old plots, but because a new person is telling the story, bringing his or her singular life to bear on the story, it is fresh and new. So the only excuse I have for daring to write is that no one else in the world would be able to tell the stories that only I can tell. And an aside to those of you wishing to write — that is your excuse as well. The raw material for our unique stories is our unique lives and perspective on life.

This is a beautiful book from someone who’s living a beautiful life.

The book is written with simple enough language that kids can read it, but it will definitely make good reading for adults, too. In fact, I could see reading this book aloud as a family. They aren’t dramatic cliff-hanger stories, but they’re cozy, warm, and interesting stories, and a delight to read.

terabithia.com
penguin.com/teen

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

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Review of In Search of the Little Prince, by Bimba Landmann

Biography, Children's Nonfiction Review 0

in_search_of_the_little_prince_largeIn Search of the Little Prince

The Story of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Written and illustrated by Bimba Landmann

Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2014. First published in Italy in 2013. 36 pages.

Here’s the life story of the author of The Little Prince in oversize picture book form. The pictures tend to be fanciful – showing Tonio’s boyhood dreams – but I like that the narrative is straightforward and easy to follow.

The book tells about how early Antoine became interested in flying, and how he eventually was able to fulfill that dream. It also gives us a poem he wrote at 12 years old about his first flight in an airplane – showing us that his love of writing began early, too.

This book doesn’t have notes at the back. Words are put into the mouths of family members and we’re told about Antoine’s dreams. Many quotations come from letters, but we’re not explicitly told where something like this comes from:

Only writing gave him comfort.
Short stories. Stories to calm his desire to flee.
And to try and get his soul, heavier and heavier by the day, to fly.
“What’s wrong with you?” his friends asked him. “You’ve got a good job; you earn plenty. What more do you want?”

Tonio’s coworkers only ever talked about money, houses, golf, and cars.
They did not feel, as he did, that they were the inhabitants of a wandering planet suspended in the Milky Way.
“I’m bored,” he sighed.
He needed to be in touch with the wind, with the stars.
He had to start flying again.

So this might bother sticklers. I have to admit – it didn’t bother me.

We also see how he developed the themes that eventually made their way into The Little Prince.

The more Antoine drew, the more the boy resembled him.
Like him, the boy didn’t understand people who want to be rich.
He too was sad at seeing his planet smothered by baobabs,
The way the earth was smothered by war.
He too had tamed a fox.
He too loved a rose . . .

Antoine wrote a fairy tale like the ones he used to listen to as a child:
it was a fairy tale about a little prince who came from far away,
and it helped him find the innocence of his childhood once more,
when he was simply Tonio.

This book will make readers – children or adults – want to pick up The Little Prince again. And perhaps think a little more deeply about the ideas behind it.

bimbalandmann.com
antoinedesaintexupery.com
eerdmans.com/youngreaders

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

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Review of The Octopus Scientists, by Sy Montgomery

Children's Nonfiction Review, Science, Starred Review 0

octopus_scientists_largeThe Octopus Scientists

Exploring the Mind of a Mollusk

Text by Sy Montgomery
Photographs by Keith Ellenbogen

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, 2015. 72 pages.
Starred Review

The Octopus Scientists is part of the extraordinary Scientists in the Field series. As with The Tapir Scientist, Sy Montgomery puts herself in the story, telling us all about her two-week visit with a team of octopus scientists, what they were studying, and what they found.

In this case, the team of four scientists was searching for octopuses – to study where they live, what they eat, and even their personalities (bold or more cautious).
Among other interesting facts I learned, it turns out that octopuses is correct, not octopi.

Though many people still use this plural, octopus experts deem it incorrect because it mixes up two languages. Octopus is a Greek word meaning “eight-footed.” Adding i to the end of a singular noun is a Latin practice. The correct plural is octopuses, or octopods.

Most of this book addresses the biggest challenge: simply finding the octopuses, who are experts at hiding. But the team is very successful, and besides scientific results and information, because of this Keith Ellenbogen got an abundance of colorful, stunning photographs of octopuses and other sea creatures in the crystal clear water among the coral reefs.

I love the way the books in the Scientists in the Field series show what actual scientists do – including days of fruitless searching. It includes the difficulties they encounter and the mixed results as well as the triumphs and the new information gained.

Along the way, readers learn a plethora of facts about octopuses, and these facts are told as background in an engaging story, so they won’t quickly be forgotten.

This book may well inspire many future marine biologists. And the rest of us will marvel at the intelligence and beauty of the humble octopus. I had no idea they can change color more effectively than a chameleon, yet are colorblind themselves. Or that they can figure out how to open different kinds of latches. Or… This is definitely a book you should read yourself to find out more.

sciencemeetsadventure.com
hmhco.com

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

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Review of I, Fly, by Bridget Heos, illustrated by Jennifer Plecas

Children's Nonfiction Review, Science, Starred Review 0

i_fly_largeI, Fly

The Buzz About Flies and How Awesome They Are

by Bridget Heos
illustrated by Jennifer Plecas

Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2015. 44 pages.
Starred Review

This nonfiction for early elementary age kids hits just the right note.

A fly buzzes into a classroom and finds the kids studying — as usual — butterflies.

Well, guess who else metamorphoses, can fly, and is beautiful (at least according to my mother).

The fly goes on to explain:

Here’s how the story goes: My 500 brothers and sisters and I started out as eggs. Our mom tucked us into a warm, smelly bed of dog doo. When we hatched, we looked like short, greasy white worms. In other words, much cuter than caterpillars. Scientists called us larvae. Humans called us maggots. Our parents called us adorable.

He tells the kids all about the lifecycle of a fly and cool (or disgusting, depending on your viewpoint) facts about them as well.

My favorite bit is where a kid asks, “I heard that flies throw up on everything before they eat it. Is that true?”

No. We don’t throw up on everything. Only solid foods.

See, we don’t have any teeth, so we can’t chew. I had to throw up on this apple core to turn it into a liquid. That way I could sop it up with my spongy mouth.

But if something’s already a liquid, like the soup you’re having for lunch, I don’t throw up on it. I’ll slurp that right out of the bowl.

Of course, when the kids decide the fly is right and he should be studied, he finds he doesn’t actually want to be kept in a cage in the classroom. Then he tells them the facts about diseases flies carry so they’ll let him go.

Fortunately, readers of this book can learn all the facts the friendly fly has to tell them without making contact with its germs.

This one’s a natural for booktalking in the schools. Children will learn fly facts without even trying.

authorbridgetheos.com
jenniferplecas.com
mackids.com

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

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Review of The Boys Who Challenged Hitler, by Phillip Hoose

Children's Nonfiction Review, History, Starred Review, True Stories 0

boys_who_challenged_hitler_largeThe Boys Who Challenged Hitler

Knud Pedersen and the Churchill Club

by Phillip Hoose

Farrar Straus Giroux, New York, 2015. 198 pages.
Starred Review

This year because of schedule conflicts, I’m not attending Capitol Choices (a local group that chooses the 100 best books of the year for children and youth), and I’d promised myself this year I’ll just read books I want to read, not books I feel I ought to read. So I thought I wouldn’t read much children’s nonfiction. This book came in, and I thought I’d just check it back in, unread. But I started dipping into it, and found I couldn’t stop.

The story is of a group of Danish teens who didn’t like that their government had handed Denmark over to Hitler. They formed their own resistance band before any other organized resistance. They went to prison for it — and their case galvanized other Danes to act.

Phillip Hoose spoke at length with Knud Pedersen in 2012, working on this book with him before he died in 2014. How wonderful that this information was captured. Much of the book gives Knud’s voice and perspective.

Here’s a summary from the author in the Introduction, which explains why this important story had to be told. He was visiting the Museum of Danish Resistance in Copenhagen.

Then I came upon a special little exhibit entitled “The Churchill Club.” With photos, letters, cartoons, and weapons such as grenades and pistols, the exhibit told the story of a few Danish teens, schoolboys from a northern city, who got the resistance started. Mortified that Danish authorities had given up to the Germans without fighting back, these boys had waged a war of their own.

Most were ninth-graders at a school in Aalborg, in the northern part of Denmark called Jutland. Between their first meeting in December 1941 and their arrest in May 1942, the Churchill Club struck more than two dozen times, racing through the streets on bicycles in well-coordinated hits. Acts of vandalism quickly escalated to arson and major destruction of German property. The boys stole and cached German rifles, grenades, pistols, and ammunition — even a machine gun. Using explosives stolen from the school chemistry lab, they scorched a German railroad car filled with airplane wings. They carried out most of their actions in broad daylight, as they all had family curfews.

This book tells the details of their story, a fascinating one about teens deciding to act for what they believed to be right, at the risk of their own lives.

The book is engagingly written, with plenty of photographs and sidebars to break up the text. It’s targeted toward people the same age as these daring young men were at the time of their resistance.

philliphoose.com
macteenbooks.com

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

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Review of If . . . by David J. Smith

Children's Nonfiction Review, Mathematical 0

if_largeIf . . .

A Mind-Bending New Way of Looking at Big Ideas and Numbers

by David J. Smith
illustrated by Steve Adams

Kids Can Press, 2014. 40 pages.

The author of the brilliant If America Were a Village is at it again, using scale to give children a feeling for enormous numbers. Here’s what he says on the first page:

How big is Earth or the Solar System or the Milky Way galaxy? How old is our planet and when did the first animals and people appear on it? Some things are so huge or so old that it’s hard to wrap your mind around them. But what if we took these big, hard-to-imagine objects and events and compared them to things we can see, feel and touch? Instantly, we’d see our world in a whole new way. That’s what this book is about – it scales down, or shrinks, huge events, spaces and times to something we can understand. If you’ve had a doll or a model airplane, you know what scaling down means. A scale model is a small version of a large thing. Every part is reduced equally, so that you don’t end up with a doll with enormous feet or a model plane with giant wings. And when we scale down some really huge things – such as the Solar System or all of human history – some of the results are quite surprising, as you are about to see…

The book goes on to look at such scenarios as:

If the Milky Way galaxy were shrunk to the size of a dinner plate…
If the planets in the Solar System were shrunk to the size of balls and Earth were the size of a baseball…
If the history of the last 3000 years were condensed into one month…
If the inventions of the last 1000 years were laid out along this ruler…
If all the water on earth were represented by 100 glasses…
If all the wealth in the world were represented by a pile of 100 coins…
If average life expectancy (the number of years people live) were represented by footprints in the sand…
If today’s world population of over 7 billion were represented by a village of 100 people…
If your whole life could be shown as a jumbo pizza, divided into 12 slices…

With each scenario, graphics on a double-page spread show how the hypothetical object would be divided up, with some surprising results.

In the your-life-as-a-pizza example, 4 of the 12 slices would be work and school and 4 of the 12 slices would represent sleeping. In the wealth example, we see one person standing on top of a pile of 40 coins, 9 people on top of the next 45 coins, on down to 50 people standing on the one lone last coin. With footprints in the sand, we see the footprints from some continents don’t go nearly as far as those from others.

The population example may be the most interesting, because the author goes back in time. If today’s population were represented by a village of 100 people, the village in 1900 would only have 32 people, in 1500 only 8 people, and in 1000 BCE, there would have only been 1 person.

kidscanpress.com

You get the idea: These ideas and images give you a grasp of the large proportions between these things and a handle for understanding enormous numbers.

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

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Review of One Plastic Bag, by Miranda Paul and Elisabeth Zunon

Biography, Children's Nonfiction Review, History 0

one_plastic_bag_largeOne Plastic Bag

Isatou Ceesay and the Recycling Women of Gambia

by Miranda Paul
illustrations by Elizabeth Zunon

Millbrook Press, Minneapolis, 2015. 36 pages.

In 2012, Isatou Ceesay won a World of Difference 100 Award from the International Alliance for Women for her work establishing the Njau Recycling and income Generating Group in her village in Gambia. This picture book tells her story in a way that children can understand – but which adults will also appreciate.

The book begins with Isatou as a child when a basket breaks. When a basket breaks, people could simply drop it and it would crumble and mix back with the dirt. However, then people in the village began using plastic bags. When you drop a plastic bag on the ground, it leads to a problem with trash.

Goats began to die from eating the plastic bags. There was a bad smell. Isatou and some other women gathered up plastic bags, washed them – and made plastic thread from them. Then they used this plastic thread to crochet purses. And selling the purses made money to buy a new goat – a goat that was not confronted with plastic trash it was tempted to eat.

The note at the back tells more about Isatou Ceesay’s work. I like the way the story is told simply, with beautiful collage art, and then details are given at the end for adults. This is an inspiring story of a woman making the world a better place.

oneplasticbag.com
mirandapaul.com
lizzunon.com

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

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Review of Hansel & Gretel, by Neil Gaiman

Children's Nonfiction Review, Fairy Tale Variant, Folk Tales, Graphic Novel, Starred Review 0

hansel_and_gretel_largeHansel & Gretel

by Neil Gaiman

art by Lorenzo Mattotti

Toon Graphics, 2014. 53 pages.
Starred Review

This book is put out by a publisher of graphic novels and is in the size of a large graphic novel. But there are no speech bubbles here. What you do have are large double-page spreads of black-and-white (mostly black) very dark paintings alternating with double-page spreads of text.

The pictures are dark and sinister, and the story is dark and sinister. Like all fairy tales, it has power. The word painting of Neil Gaiman combined with the art of Lorenzo Mattotti gives this familiar tale new impact.

Here’s the paragraph after the old woman invites Hansel and Gretel into her house:

There was only one room in the little house, with a huge brick oven at one end, and a table laden with all good things: with candied fruits, with cakes and pies and cookies, with breads and with biscuits. There was no meat, though, and the old woman apologized, explaining that she was old, and her eyes were not what they had been when she was young, and she was no longer up to catching the beasts of the forests, as once she had been. Now, she told the children, she baited her snare and she waited, and often no game would come to her trap from one year to another, and what she did catch was too scrawny to eat and needed to be fattened up first.

This story is far too sinister for the very young. Those who read this story will be confronted with evil — and children who triumph over it.

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

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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