Review of Ascendant, by Diana Peterfreund

Fantasy, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Ascendant

by Diana Peterfreund

HarperTeen, 2010. 392 pages.
Starred Review

Wow. I thought Diana Peterfreund’s first book about killer unicorns, Rampant was outstanding. But its sequel, Ascendant, is simply awesome. I just spent my Saturday reading it, and couldn’t tear myself away.

In the first book, things are fairly straightforward. Astrid Llewelyn learns that her crazy mother was right and unicorns are, in fact, bloodthirsty killers, and their family has magical powers for hunting them down and subduing them. She goes to Rome and trains with other girls they’ve found, virgin descendants of families from the ancient Order of the Lioness. They learn to hunt together and defeat a conspiracy against them. Along the way, she finds Giovanni, an Italian-American spending the summer in Rome, who loves her as she is.

In the second book, we’ve got the repercussions of this magical scenario. First, Giovanni goes back to college in America so she has to deal with a long-distance relationship. Now the world knows about the Reemergence of unicorns, and Astrid’s mother is capitalizing on their interest. The girls of the Order are still trying to kill any unicorns they can find, but their magic is growing. The hunters can read the unicorns’ thoughts, and Astrid doesn’t like killing something whose thoughts she can read — but her powers are superhuman when unicorns are around. And then, what about school? She wanted to be a doctor, but now she’s a high school dropout.

Meanwhile, Astrid’s cousin Philippa is trying to get unicorns worldwide protection as an endangered species. Astrid tries to reconcile those ideas with the work they are doing. After all, unicorns are attracted to hunters, so they need to train more hunters, or all the people around the untrained hunters will be in danger.

Then there’s the matter of the Remedy — the ancient cure that their ancestors knew how to make that would heal any wound and purify any poison. It works like the unicorns themselves heal when wounded, and like the hunters heal from stabbings by unicorn horns. Surely it can’t be bad for scientists to perform tests on any unicorns they can, in order to try to produce the remedy and save thousands? Can it?

That’s a basic idea of the themes and questions of the book — but the working out of them is much more complex. The plotting is very intricate, and a lot of things tie together in ways we don’t expect. The story is wonderfully well-told, and there are no easy answers. I hope with all my heart that Diana Peterfreund is working on a sequel, because the book doesn’t leave Astrid in a very good situation at all. I’m pretty confident there must be a third book coming, because that’s not the only thing that’s left unresolved. Though the story does end at a satisfying place, I want to learn that things get better for several of the hunters — and the unicorns.

Meanwhile, this book makes a terrific read. A story of characters who find out that saving the world isn’t as simple as it used to be.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/ascendant.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 an uncorrected proof I got at ALA Annual Conference and had signed by the author.

The Ten Things to Do When Your Life Falls Apart

Nonfiction Review, Personal Growth, Starred Review 0

The Ten Things to Do When Your Life Falls Apart

An Emotional and Spiritual Handbook

by Daphne Rose Kingma

New World Library, Novato, California, 2010. 214 pages.
Starred Review

This book brought wonderful encouragement to me right when I was losing my job at the library.

A lot of books about dealing with crisis don’t move me. I know this stuff. I’ve been dealing with my husband leaving me for almost five years now, and it’s been an enormous crisis, and I’m coming out the other side.

But as I faced the new crisis of losing the job which had been some of my consolation in the divorce, it was a good time to think again about what I knew and how I should face this new crisis, along with the ongoing crisis of divorce.

Daphne Rose Kingma has a way of putting the principles that raises a cry of recognition. Not in the sense that I know this and don’t need to go over it again, but instead like a lovely song of truth that I want to keep singing.

Just this evening, as I’m writing this review, I’ve been struggling with a desire to call up my husband and say, “Hey, why don’t we just call the whole thing off?” Even though I know that would be pursuing him again — and I really need to let him go, after all this time. There’s a part of me that still doesn’t believe it really happened. And maybe that’s the same part of me that really wants to be back in a librarian job. (Hmmm. Come to think of it, maybe this was all brought on by a new assignment in my new job of particular boredom today.)

So, for my own sake, I’d like to list The Ten Things to Do When Your Life Falls Apart, and give some quotations from each one, to give you a feel for the helpful encouragement in this book.

The first step deals with the raw emotion of what’s happening to you: “Cry Your Heart Out.”

“We live in a culture that’s afraid of grieving; we don’t know how to cry. When our lives fall apart in one way or another, we usually try to take control of things and solve them, forget them, or deny them — rather than experience them, accept them, or see the meaning they may hold for us. That’s because underlying many of our responses to difficulty is the unstated assumption that we should be able to engage in life, liberty, and the unbridled pursuit of happiness without ever having to grieve — over anything. It’s almost as if we believe that pain, suffering, and challenge are bad and should never be a part of our path.

“The truth is that pain is one of our greatest teachers, hurt can be a birth, and our sufferings are the portals to change. This being true, we need to know how to grieve, to mourn, to shed our tears, because grief is the cure for the pain of loss. Tears are the medicine of grieving.

“When life is hard, when you’re in a crisis, you should cry not because you’re weak but because crying holds the power of healing. Tears, in fact, are the vehicle for transformation. When you cry, your loss moves through you to the point of exit. What was holding you up and eating you up, what was stuck inside your body, gets released and moves outside your body. Your physical structure is quite literally cleansed and, like a blackboard sponged clean, is available to receive the imprint of whatever wants to come next. That’s why, when you have cried, you will be reborn, free to begin again.”

The second Thing to Do is to Face Your Defaults — examine what’s your normal response.

“Your defaults are whatever you do when you don’t know how to cope or what to do next…. Defaults are habitual behaviors, and they’re not always the best way to cope. New — and especially, difficult — circumstances howl out for new solutions: improvisation, imagination, ingenuity. But when we’re intimidated, scared, and overwhelmed, most of us resort to our default behaviors because, well, we always have, and there they are.”

“A crisis is always a chance not only to scrape away the film of your defaults but to see that life is inviting you to develop, to move in the direction of your own creative aliveness, to become more of who you are. In this way, pain is the initiator of great change, and crisis is definitely an opportunity. Indeed, it is an unsolicited chance to become more of yourself, more than you ever have been.”

The third step is to Do Something Different.

“When a crisis occurs, it’s asking not only that we scramble and find some tools to deal with the vexing problems at hand, but also that we grow. Tough times, pain, illness, radically changed circumstances, walls that cave in, rugs that get pulled out from under us, floods that inundate, fires that turn our worlds to heaps of ashes — these ‘inspire’ us to do something different, to become more, better, other than we have been. Indeed, these disasters are all the ways the cosmos has of saying: we’ve been wanting you to do something different. You didn’t get it the first time — or the first hundred times — so, we’ve provided yet another opportunity, a ‘discount special’ for This Life Only, for you to make the changes your soul has been crying out for.”

You won’t be surprised by the fourth step. You knew it had to be in there somewhere: Let Go.

“We’re not used to letting go. We’re used to hanging on for dear life. We hang on for lots of reasons: because something is familiar; because the past is a known commodity and the future is a question mark; because we lack imagination and can’t conceive of a future better than the past we’ve had; because blankies (no matter how ragged and trashed they are) and relationships (no matter how complete they already are or inappropriate they have become) are a comfort to us. We hang on because we’ve been taught that persistence is good and we should never give up. Or we’re simply afraid of the free fall, afraid of coming alive as ourselves….

“Letting go, on the other hand, asks you to believe that somewhere across the Big Tent of Life there will be another trapeze bar that you can take hold of after you’ve let go of this one. It’s an act of terror and freedom, of trust and faith that when you let go, you will find something new, better, different.”

“We need to let go because whatever we’re holding on to is keeping us attached to the problem. Hanging on is fear; letting go is hope. Holding on is believing that there’s only a past; letting go is knowing that there’s a future. In letting go, we surrender the weight of our burdens and find the lightness of being with which to begin once again. We open a door for the intervention of the divine….

“New lands await, freedom abounds. Opportunities hide like rain in the clouds waiting for the moment to reveal themselves. The white canvas, crying out for paint, is alive with possibility. The freed man is free to fall in love again; the freed woman to claim her strength, find her true work, begin again at a deeper and more satisfying level.”

Next, you need to Remember Who You’ve Always Been.

“In the midst of the current frazzling fray, it’s probably easy to feel as if somehow everything’s your fault — not because it is, of course, but simply because you’re overwhelmed. You feel as if you ought to have the stamina, the resources, the savvy, or the moxie to get yourself out of or through all this — whatever your particular “this” is — and you don’t. You feel as if you should have been able to prevent the crisis from happening in the first place — but you didn’t. You may feel utterly hopeless, helpless, and defeated as all hell breaks loose in your life, like you have nothing to work with, nothing to count on right now. You may wake up in the morning (or at three in the morning) feeling stripped of everything you ever were, every talent and strength you ever had.

“But that’s simply not true. When the tectonic plates of the world are shifting beneath your feet, it is hard to remember that there’s a continuous thread of genius, of power, of responsiveness that runs through your life, that, since the beginning, you’ve had certain qualities to bring to the task at hand — no matter how fraught it may be with challenge and frustration.

“Who you are now is who you’ve always been. You didn’t wake up today as somebody else. You are a single, talented, rare, unrepeatable human being. There is something at your core that’s unique to you, that always has been and always will be. This is the throughline of your personal essence, the chiming chord of your unique existence. It has carried you through every day of the year, every year of your life, and it is what will sustain you now. The you who has always been you has been preparing for this moment. The power that is in you will rise to this occasion. You are equal to it with your gifts.”

“Crisis is a challenge to express your strengths at their highest arc, which is when you also are at your most beautiful.”

The sixth Thing to Do When Your Life Falls Apart is to Persist.

“Persistence is the spiritual grace that allows you to continue to act with optimism even when you feel trapped in the pit of hell. It is the steadfast, continual, simple — and at time excruciatingly difficult — practice of trudging forward until the difficult present you’re scared will go on forever is replaced by a future that has a new color scheme.”

“When you decide to persist, it’s not because you’re an idiot, not because you don’t know from the inside or from looking around just how dire your current circumstances are. It’s because in the face of perhaps thousands of reasons to be discouraged, you choose to be bold, to carry on, to keep on duking it out, no matter how grizzly, tedious, intractable, or seemingly hopeless the present situation may seem. The power of persistence is required especially when we’re dealing with intense, emotionally devastating circumstances or bunches of hugely difficult things that have stacked up all at once.”

“In this sense, persistence is visionary. Expectant. A sacred journey resplendent with hope. When you persist, you know, on a visceral level, that you are enacting your part in the invisible contract between you and the cosmos. Instead of feeling powerless, you feel alive. Instead of feeling hopeless, you have a sense that you’re on the path to somewhere. Instead of feeling like a victim, you feel like a person of action; in your deep self you know that this choice for action will one day be rewarded with a response.”

The seventh step in dealing with crisis is to Integrate Your Loss.

“In order to get through the crisis you’re in, you will have to accept what has happened and then integrate it into the fabric of your life. Your integration of the content and the meaning of the crisis will be the sign, the hallmark, that you are moving through this challenge.”

“Crisis cajoles us to move toward integration, to expand, to accept more. This process of acceptance is not incidental to a challenging time; it is one of its intended purposes. That is because, while our human nature prefers distinction, separation, and confusion, our spiritual nature seeks wholeness, inclusion, and union. Since we are ultimately spiritual in nature, life keeps pointing us in the direction of this growth. Like the kaleidoscope, it keeps offering us the pieces that we must put together.

“Integration can arrive in an instant, when, through the free fall of surrender, you finally accept each one of the parts of your existence, even the ugly ones, even the irritating ones, even the ones you want to negate, destroy, and disown. Or it can come more slowly, as day by day, episode by episode, you gradually come to accept what has happened. When you do, you become whole. You become whole not because you have finally gotten rid of the painful or offensive item, not because you have escaped, but because you have embraced it. This is the process of integration in ourselves, in others, in the world. When we have achieved full integration, we know that there is only wholeness, which is enlightenment itself.

“Moving toward integration, to the space in yourself where you can see the wholeness of life, gives you a sense of hope. It also brings great peace because you know that your life, even in this crisis, and your soul, for all eternity, are nestled in the blanket of wholeness where everything, even this very difficult time, has its perfect place.”

The eighth Thing to Do When Your Life Falls Apart is to Live Simply.

“Living simply is paring away — stuff, obligations, expectations, people. It’s removing all the glut and rubble from your life, making space in your house, your heart, your brain, and your life for exactly and only what you need.”

“It’s good to live simply when things are going well, but when life is difficult, it’s essential. That’s because every object, habit, movement, conversation, undertaking, responsibility, and reaction takes energy. The more people, circumstances, widgets, emails, objects, people, and tasks you’re dealing with, the less energy you have….

“You will need to live simply through this crisis or else you won’t have enough energy to get through it. Once you have lived through it, you will understand more about what’s really important in life. In fact, maybe that’s why it showed up in the first place.”

Ninth in the list, if you want to get through this crisis, you will have to Go Where the Love Is.

“When we’re beset by crisis, we also begin to recognize our own vulnerability. We see that in one realm or another we, ourselves, could use some assistance. And so, from the chalice of our own need, we start reaching out for help. That’s because once we’ve been taken apart by life, we are more humble, more open, more willing to both give and receive. We take bigger chances. We speak up. We reveal ourselves. We ask. We break down. We accept comfort. Words. A blanket. A meal. In time, we realize that something amazing has happened: that the more we reach out to others, the less lonely we feel ourselves. Somehow, even in the midst of our chaos, we are actually feeling loved. And the beautiful thing is that, the more love we need, suddenly the more we have to give.

“Learning to love, loving more, that’s the bottom line of what a crisis is really all about. Through it, we are being asked to expand beyond the inordinate focus on ourselves — our obsession with what we need, want, and desire — to notice what we can share, how we can serve and be of help to one another. In short, we are being asked to enlarge the circle of our love. Of course, it’s not always easy to do this. It may be unfamiliar. But when we do engage, when we see and hear and respond to one another, life starts to seem less scary. The more you get and give help, the more it seems that you will actually make it through your own unbelievably painful passage. You sense that there really is a new future. Even in the heartbreaking present you realize that you’re not alone. Not only that, but instead of wearing out your biceps holding up a thousand-pound iron defense shield in front of your heart, you can let down your guard, let down your hair, give up your pride, have a good cry, and, in gratitude, receive the love that’s coming toward you.”

“Dogs and cats can love you. Nature can love you. Music that sounds like you’ve heard it your whole life can love you. Art can love you. Beauty can love you. Whenever you deliver yourself to the experiences, sights, and sounds that make you feel loved, your experience will change. Your problems won’t be instantly solved, but in the arms of love, they will start to feel different. You will feel different. Instead of being in the foreground, your difficulties will recede into the background and your experience of your catastrophe will be transformed. That’s because Love is the highest vibration in the universe, and when you can feel it for even a nanosecond, everything else in your life will fall into its proper — and lesser — place.

“Of course, we don’t want love just in the abstract and in general. We want it to be personal and particular. That is, we want to feel and share love with real people in our lives. As you’re going through this extremely difficult time, therefore, lean on the people who love you. Run, walk, or hopscotch, take a train, a plane, or a bus, to the people who can give you some love. They are your family, your friends, your neighbors and colleagues. Sometimes they’re even strangers. Whoever they are, you’ll know them by how they make you feel. With them, you feel happy and whole. They are the people who recognize your spirit, who touch your sensivity, who nourish and enliven your body, who make you laugh, who “speak your language,” who share your interests, who ask how you’re doing, who call to see if you got the job, won the case, could get the car fixed for less than six thousand dollars.

“They are the ones who will say the words that will carry you through.”

Finally, the tenth thing Daphne Rose Kingma suggests for you to do when your life falls apart is to Live in the Light of the Spirit.

“At the beginning, your crisis may have seemed like an unbearable tragedy, an insult from the gods, something you couldn’t possibly live through. But perhaps as you have, in fact, found yourself moving through it a single day, a single breath at a time, you’ve started to get a sense of its deeper meaning. That’s because one of the gifts of crisis is that it always holds the seeds of seeing life and ourselves in a new and larger frame.

“The most profound gift of any crisis — its backbone, heart, and brain — is that it calls us to restructure ourselves along spiritual lines. But just as we don’t always operate from love in comfortable times, we don’t always live from an awareness of our spirits either.”

“Crisis is the crucible of expanded awareness because it gets us to respond to life in ways that are not patterned or familiar. It changes our energy, pushes our emotions around, taxes our bodies, gives us sleepless nights and heartache, so that our very physical structures and our psyches are vulnerable to information and perceptions that ordinarily elude us. When we are taken apart at the seams, we are vulnerable and permeable; our structures are out of sync enough, revised enough, flimsy enough to entertain some new information. We are open. We can be changed. And we do change.”

The book closes with a blessing:

“May the depth of your crisis remind you of who you really are. May your pain bring you into the light of awareness. May your journey through it give you hope. And when you have made it through the storm, may you feel great peace and joy.”

There you have it. The Ten Things to Do When Your Life Falls Apart. I’d like to wish that none of my readers would ever need it, but on the other hand Daphne Rose Kingma has reminded me of all the many ways that crisis brings growth. So instead I will wish that when crisis comes, you will be able to transcend it. And if you need some encouragement, I highly recommend this book.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/10_things.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 White Cat, by Holly Black

Fantasy, Starred Review, Suspense, Teen Fiction Review 0

White Cat

The Curse Workers, Book One

by Holly Black

Margaret K. McElderry Books (Simon & Schuster), New York, 2010. 310 pages.
Starred Review

“I wake up barefoot, standing on cold slate tiles. Looking dizzily down. I suck in a breath of icy air.

“Above me are starts. Below me, the bronze statue of Colonel Wallingford makes me realize I’m seeing the quad from the peak of Smythe Hall, my dorm.

“I have no memory of climbing the stairs up to the roof. I don’t even know how to get where I am, which is a problem since I’m going to have to get down, ideally in a way that doesn’t involve dying.”

If that isn’t a cliff-hanger beginning, it’s certainly a roof-balancing one. Cassel was dreaming of a white cat. So why is there a white cat outside, watching him on the roof? Later in the first chapter, Cassel tells us:

“Don’t be too sympathetic. Here’s the essential truth about me: I killed a girl when I was fourteen. Her name was Lila, she was my best friend, and I loved her. I killed her anyway. There’s a lot of the murder that seems like a blur, but my brothers found me standing over her body with blood on my hands and a weird smile tugging at my mouth. What I remember most is the feeling I had looking down at Lila — the giddy glee of having gotten away with something.”

I had already scanned the first chapter and decided not to turn it back in (because I have too many books checked out), when I met Holly Black at ALA and she talked about her book — and I moved it to the top of my stack of books to read. I was not disappointed. This book was one I had to keep reading once I started.

Cassel’s world is like ours, only certain people are born with the ability to perform curses. You can curse someone by touching their skin with your hands. But cursing is illegal, and everyone in that society wears gloves all the time.

Curses run a wide range. The most common are luck workers, but there are also people who can change memories, or people like Cassel’s mother who can give you whatever emotion she wants you to have. There are even people who can kill with a curse. Most rare of all are people who can transform things into something else.

All the curses have blowback to the person performing them — a strong reaction proportionate to the curse being performed. So if a memory worker changes a lot of memories, he will start forgetting things himself, for example.

However, Cassel is part of a family of curse workers — and also a family deeply involved in the world of organized crime. He’s the only one in his family who does not have the ability to curse anyone, and he’s been trying to lead a normal life at a private school, trying to forget about what he did to Lila, the reigning crime lord’s daughter. (His family covered it up.)

Now, though, with this sleep-walking caper at the beginning of the book, the school isn’t going to let him live in the dorm. He has to move back in with his brothers, which puts him in the thick of things again.

Holly Black has intricately and beautifully spun a world that seems plausible and real, even with those amazing premises. There are plots and counterplots and counter-counterplots, that get tied up cleverly at the end. Along the way, Cassel learns about making friends and trusting them.

I love that this is called “Book One,” because I can’t wait to read more about this fascinating world. This is a skilfully crafted novel that will make you look at gloves in a whole new way.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/white_cat.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 The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag, by Alan Bradley

Fiction Review, Historical, Mystery, Starred Review 0

The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag

by Alan Bradley

Delacorte Press, New York, 2010. 364 pages.
Starred Review

Flavia de Luce, appearing in her second adventure, has got to be one of the most memorable and captivating fictional sleuths ever created. Flavia is eleven years old, living at Buckshaw, outside the village of Bishop’s Lacey, having the run of the place on her bicycle named Gladys. She lives with her distracted father, an avid stamp collector, and her two sisters, who torment and are tormented by her.

Flavia has a passion for poisons. She inherited her great uncle’s chemistry lab, and has an exhaustive knowledge of chemicals. Because she’s eleven years old, people don’t realize how much she knows and deduces.

In The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag, a BBC puppeteer show has his van break down in Bishop’s Lacey. When the puppeteer is electrocuted during his performance for the village, Flavia does some digging and discovers a connection with a long-ago hanging of a little boy from the village.

The fun of this book, like the earlier The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, is the irrepressible character of Flavia. Add to that a fairly intricate and interesting mystery, with chemical details thrown in (I took Flavia’s word for the truth of those parts.), and you’ve got an enchanting book that makes for captivating reading.

“There’s something about pottering with poisons that clarifies the mind. When the slightest slip of the hand could prove fatal, one’s attention is forced to focus like a burning-glass upon the experiment, and it is then that the answers to half-formed questions so often come swarming to mind as readily as bees coming home to the hive.”

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Fiction/weed_that_strings.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 City Dog, Country Frog, by Mo Willems, pictures by Jon J. Muth

Animal Characters, Picture Book Review, Starred Review 0

City Dog, Country Frog

by Mo Willems
pictures by Jon J. Muth

Hyperion Books for Children, New York, 2010. 60 pages.
Starred Review

I’m sure that everyone who reads my reviews regularly knows that I am a huge Mo Willems fan. It’s gotten to the point that I resist reviewing his books — because I think I may be getting tedious telling every parent and child I know to read Mo Willems’ books. They’re consistently brilliant, and how many times should I say that? So I try to only review the stand-outs among stand-outs.

However, City Dog, Country Frog, is something new. It’s a book written by Mo Willems, but illustrated by someone else. I’ve already reviewed Jon J Muth’s book, Zen Shorts. The pictures in that book are beautiful, and the result is a quiet, meditative book.

As big a fan as I am of Mo Willems, what blew me away about City Dog, Country Frog was not the words but the illustrations. (Though both components are definitely necessary and work together beautifully.) I’m already thinking that I hope this book gets some recognition from the Caldecott Award committee.

The story is simple enough. We have a section for each season: Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and then Spring again. The words are on pages facing big, beautiful watercolor paintings. The first page of “Spring” explains the set up:

“City Dog didn’t stop on that first day in the country; he ran as far and as fast as he could”

On the opposite page, we see a country house with a big enormous spring-green lawn overshadowed by a tree with blossoms. City Dog is running fast down at the bottom corner of the picture, heading off the page, and printed on the picture around him are the words “and all without a leash!”

When City Dog gets to a pond, he spots something he’s never seen before, sitting on a rock.

“(It was Country Frog.)
“‘What are you doing?’ asked City Dog.
“‘Waiting for a friend,’ replied Country Frog with a smile.
“‘But you’ll do.'”

That Spring, the two new friends play together, and Country Frog teaches City Dog “Country Frog games.”

“Country Frog’s games involved jumping and splashing and croaking.”

When Summer comes, City Dog teaches Country Frog “City Dog games,” involving sniffing and fetching and barking.

I love the way the pictures show Country Frog throwing a stick and City Dog eagerly running to fetch it, but then they finish when “Country Frog was too tired to sniff and fetch and bark anymore.”

When Fall comes, Country Frog is tired, so they play “remember-ing games,” remembering together all the fun they have had during City Dog’s visits.

In winter, “City Dog didn’t stop to eat the snow; he ran straight for Country Frog’s rock.” But Country Frog isn’t there.

Finally, when Spring comes again, there’s a nice full circle as a new creature sees City Dog sitting on a rock. My one warning to parents is that your child may ask where Country Frog went, and, as they said in Horn Book Magazine, “this is not a story about hibernation.”

But the story is so simple and so beautiful. City Dog appropriately remembers his good friend and passes on his legacy — but doesn’t stop living life now. As usual with Mo Willems books, there are profound truths behind this book, conveyed simply and so much more powerfully than the most eloquent sermon could ever do.

But let me talk about the illustrations! The story is excellent, simple and profound. But the pictures carry the book into a true stand-out. Jon J Muth has done an amazing job with this book.

His watercolor work is beautiful, there’s no question about that. But he keeps the book from feeling heavy or sad or overly serious, with nice touches like City Dog’s wagging tail and cartoon-like eagerness.

So many of the paintings I just love and would happily frame and hang on a wall — City Dog with his nose in the pond wagging his tail after the friends have been jumping and splashing and croaking; City Dog swimming with Country Frog riding on his nose; the sunlight shining on City Dog’s back as he carries a stick on the section page for Spring; Country Frog flinging a stick and City Dog eagerly running to chase it, tail wagging; the glorious colors of Fall when City Dog arrives again in the country and rushes happily to Country Frog’s rock; City Dog’s ear lifted with curiosity when he arrives at the snow-covered rock in winter and looks for Country Frog; the glorious two-page spread of City Dog waiting for Country Frog on the rock in the purple and yellow winter twilight; but most especially City Dog’s face when he meets a new friend and “smiled a froggy smile.” Jon J Muth manages to make his face look just like Country Frog’s face — yet remain fully doggy.

It’s probably silly for me to try to describe all the wonderful pictures. This is a book you should check out and look at for yourself!

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Picture_Books/city_dog_country_frog.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 Clementine, by Sara Pennypacker

Beginning Chapter Books, Children's Fiction Review, Contemporary, Starred Review 0

Clementine

by Sara Pennypacker
pictures by Marla Frazee

Hyperion Books for Children, New York, 2006. 136 pages.
Starred Review

How did I miss this book so long? I suppose it has something to do with the fact that I don’t have daughters. However, as a children’s librarian, I feel remiss at not having read this book sooner.

This book came to my attention by way of Betsy Bird’s Fuse #8 blog. After her poll of the Top 100 Children’s Novels, she did a post about the other titles that got votes, but were not in the top 100. Clementine was mentioned as a 21st Century Ramona the Pest.

When I read Clementine I was completely enchanted. When I checked it out, I was looking for something to read at the “Mother’s Day Mugs” library program. The program was for ages 6 and up to paint their own mugs, so none of the Mother’s Day picture books at the library seemed entirely appropriate — They are mostly geared for younger kids. I found a happy solution in Chapter Three of Clementine. It’s funny, kept their interest, and has a nice section with her mother when she realizes that it’s okay that her mother isn’t the sort who would ever appear in a magazine picture of a mother.

The book is narrated by Clementine. She’s in third grade and definitely means well. So why does she keep on getting in trouble?

The first page gives you a nice taste of what’s to come:

“I have had not so good of a week.

“Well, Monday was a pretty good day, if you don’t count Hamburger Surprise at lunch and Margaret’s mother coming to get her. Or the stuff that happened in the principal’s office when I got sent there to explain that Margaret’s hair was not my fault and besides she looks okay without it, but I couldn’t because Principal Rice was gone, trying to calm down Margaret’s mother.

“Someone should tell you not to answer the phone in the principal’s office, if that’s a rule.

Okay, fine, Monday was not so good of a day.”

The illustrations by Marla Frazee are absolutely brilliant, showing another perspective on things. One of my favorites is where Clementine says this:

“I knew Friday was going to be a bad day right from the beginning, because there were clear parts in my eggs.

“‘I can’t eat eggs if they have clear parts,’ I reminded my mother.

“‘Eat around them,’ she said. ‘Just eat the yellow parts and the white parts.’

“But I couldn’t because the clear parts had touched the yellow parts and the white parts. So all I had was toast.”

The picture on the page facing this picture has Clementine at the table, dramatically holding her throat and making a choking face. Her mother is holding a frying pan and does not look amused. On the floor is an untidy backpack with books and papers coming out.

I love this passage that shows how Clementine’s perspective is quite different from the adults around her. It’s from when the principal gets back to her office:

“Principal Rice rolled her eyes to the ceiling then, like she was looking for something up there. Ceiling snakes maybe, just waiting to drip on you. That’s what I used to be afraid of when I was little, anyway. Now I am not afraid of anything.

“Okay, fine, I am afraid of pointy things. But that is all. And boomerangs.

“‘Clementine, you need to pay attention,’ said Principal Rice. ‘We need to discuss Margaret’s hair. What are you doing on the floor?’

“‘Helping you look for ceiling snakes,’ I reminded her.

“‘Ceiling snakes? What ceiling snakes?’ she asked.

“See what I mean? Me — paying attention; everyone else — not. I am amazed they let someone with this problem be the boss of a school.”

I enjoyed Clementine so much, I ended up accosting a patron at the library on my last day working there. You see, for the two years I worked at Herndon Fortnightly Library, I had this thoughtful grandmother of two girls asking me for book recommendations. She likes to give her granddaughters well-chosen books. I think two years ago, the girls were two and four, so now they must be four and six. A recent big hit with the youngest was Olivia, by Ian Falconer, and the whole time I was reading Clementine, I thought that this book is the perfect follow-up, for just a little bit older girl. I definitely wanted to mention it to this grandma, so when I saw her on my very last day at the library, I had to bring her over to the Clementine books, whether she was looking for books for her granddaughters that day or not.

I got this book read after reading Half-Minute Horrors showed me that reading a children’s chapter book with short chapters was the perfect activity for waiting at northern Virginia traffic lights. I’ve already seen, from the Mother’s Day Mugs program, that it’s great fun for reading aloud to a wide age range.

Any child who’s been in school will appreciate Clementine’s perspective. With plenty of pictures, and not too many words on a page, it’s also a perfect selection for a child ready for chapter books. Definitely a winner in every way! And I agree that she carries on the legacy of Ramona the Pest. I’m going to snap up the other books about Clementine.

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Childrens_Fiction/clementine.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 Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Children’s Book

Musings, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review 0

Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Children’s Book

Life Lessons from Notable People from All Walks of Life

edited by Anita Silvey

Roaring Brook Press, New York, 2009. 233 pages.
Starred Review

Here’s a fabulous and thought-provoking celebration of children’s books. I read it slowly and savored it, enjoying a few pages a day. I definitely want to purchase my own copy so I can go through it again many times.

In the Introduction, Anita Silvey explains what she has accomplished with this magnificent book:

“In this book 110 society leaders from various areas — science, politics, sports, and the arts — talk about a children’s book that they loved and its impact on their lives. Funny, insightful, and inspiring, these stories testify to the amazing power of the right book for the right child — at the right time.

“A single illustration from Treasure Island created by N. C. Wyeth made his son Andrew want to become a painter and inspired Robert Montgomery to become an actor. Sometimes a specific book sent an individual on a career path: Steve Wozniak of Apple Inc. read the Tom Swift books, knew he wanted to be an inventor, and eventually created Apple I and Apple II. Characters became role models; Jo March of Little Women inspired actress Julianne Moore, television commentator Judy Woodruff, and writer Bobbie Ann Mason. A book revealed a truth about the person’s character, as Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel did for Jay Leno. At times single lines from a book have resonated for a lifetime: William DeVries, the cardiothoracic surgeon who implanted the first artificial heart, has thought about a statement from The Wizard of Oz all of his career — ‘I will bear all the unhappiness without a murmur, if you will give me a heart.’…

“All of the essays reveal interesting details about the person who wrote them. Many of the people in this volume remember the name of their librarian or teacher, the bookstore they frequented, or the person who handed them a beloved book. When we give children books, we become part of their future, part of their most cherished memories, and part of their entire lives.

“Children’s books change lives. Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Children’s Book provides insight into how they do this. I hope the essays in this book will inspire you to find great books for the children in your life and move you to read to them. The act of reading to a child is the most important contribution to the future of our society that adults can make.”

The large format of the book includes a one-page excerpt with a picture from the book that the famous person is remembering. On the page about their remembrances, there is a sidebar about the background of the book and the person who was touched by it.

The books chosen and remembered present an amazing range of titles. There are picture books, chapter books, and even books considered adult books. Given the ages of the contributors, many of the books were written long ago, but a large number of them are still in print and much beloved today.

Here’s a passage that I enjoyed from Kyle Zimmer, who talked about falling in love with The Hobbit as a child and later reading that same book to his own son. Perhaps I especially loved that essay because the same is true of me and that very book. But his summing up applies to so many more books and so many more people:

“When we read great books with our children, we teach them to turn to great books throughout their lives for comfort, humor, and for illumination of the human experience. The most influential leaders and thinkers in the world have consistently relied on literature for inspiration at their most difficult moments. Nelson Mandela turned to Steinbeck during his imprisonment and says it changed his life. Lincoln was criticized for reading novels in the middle of the Civil War; he defended himself by saying that it kept him sane.

“Whether we are called upon to govern a nation or organize a birthday party for too many children, the key to both surviving our days and cultivating our next generation of leaders is many books, well chosen.”

In many ways, that sums up why I love being a children’s librarian and think of it as more of a calling, than a job. (So I am still a children’s librarian, even though I am currently not employed as one.)

As Jerry J. Mallett says in the very last essay, “It is never too late to have your life changed by a children’s book.”

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/everything_i_need_to_know.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 Will Grayson, Will Grayson, by John Green and David Levithan

Contemporary, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Will Grayson, Will Grayson

by John Green and David Levithan

Dutton, 2010. 310 pages.
Starred Review

I confess I probably wouldn’t have read Will Grayson, Will Grayson if I weren’t such a huge John Green fan. I was won over by hearing him speak about his Printz Honor Winning book Abundance of Katherines three years ago at ALA Annual Conference, and then completely hooked when I started watching his and his brother’s daily video blog through 2007. What can I say? He’s my kind of nerd. Nerd Fighters are made of Awesome.

Of course, I also read An Abundance of Katherines, Let It Snow, and my favorite, Paper Towns. So I thoroughly admire John Green as an author. Though the funny thing about reading his books is that I always hear the main character in my head speaking with John Green’s voice, since I’ve heard him so much on the internet.

Anyway, I was four chapters into his latest book (written in alternating chapters with David Levithan), when I went to the 2010 American Library Association Annual Conference in Washington DC. The exhibits had just opened, and I was frantically grabbing free advance copies of books. I looked up, and there was John Green!

I said, “You’re John Green!” and he graciously conceded that he was. I tried to think of clever things to say. Did I tell him I think he’s a brilliant writer? No, I said I follow his blog. Couldn’t think of much to say after that. Anyway, as he was about to go off to the exhibits, I got my wits about me and asked if I could get a picture with him. He said “David can take it!” as his companions were coming to see what was keeping him — and I realized that familiar face I’d seen with John was David Levithan. So, I insisted on a picture with both of them. This was at the very start of ALA, and it made my night!

Here I am with David Levithan and John Green at ALA 2010.

On the last night of ALA, I got another picture with John Green, at the reception after the Printz Awards Ceremony. Kind of fitting, since I’d first seen him in person at the 2007 Printz Awards.

So, as you can imagine, I like the author, and of course I want to like his books. As it began, it seemed a little depressing, so I might have stopped. One of the Will Graysons is clinically depressed. The other one isn’t terribly happy.

It also turns out to be mainly about Tiny Cooper:

“Tiny Cooper is not the world’s gayest person, and he is not the world’s largest person, but I believe he may be the world’s largest person who is really, really gay, and also the world’s gayest person who is really, really large.”

If I weren’t a huge fan of the author, I would probably simply avoid a book where one of the main topics is a high school student’s gayness. But I’m glad I didn’t avoid this one.

The book is about two high school students named Will Grayson. They don’t know each other. They live in different Chicago suburbs. One Will Grayson has been Tiny Cooper’s best friend all his life. But that Will recently lost what other friends he had because:

“After some school-board member got all upset about gays in the locker room, I defended Tiny Cooper’s right to be both gigantic (and, therefore, the best member of our shitty football team’s offensive line) and gay in a letter to the school newspaper that I, stupidly, signed.”

Tiny is writing, directing, and performing a musical about his life. So naturally, there is a character named Gil Wrayson, which Tiny assures Will is a fictional character.

Meanwhile, the other Will Grayson (written by David Levithan), is in love with his internet chat friend named Isaac. He’s gay but won’t admit it to anyone else, he’s depressed, and his only friend at school is a girl who’s even more depressing.

A strange twist of circumstances brings the two Will Graysons to the same porn shop in Chicago late on a Friday night. Both Will Graysons suffer a big disappointment that night, but the other Will Grayson discovers Tiny Cooper, and Tiny Cooper discovers him.

I wouldn’t want my teenage son to take the characters in this book as role models, but I don’t think older teens read books to find role models. The characters’ language and humor are crude (which almost got me to shut the book early), but it’s also very clever. The characters do seem completely real. Tiny Cooper is larger than life, but he’s no cardboard cut-out. And the two Will Graysons have conflicting emotions and confusions that seem completely true to life. Though I wouldn’t want my son to take them for role models, I’d be happy to have him find friends like these. Flawed friends, but ultimately the kind of people you can count on, you can tell the truth to.

And though this book is about some characters being gay and coming to terms with that, more than that, it’s a book about friendship. It’s a book about real love, and a book about truth. It’s a book that shows that people are the same underneath, whether they are gay or not, and that the love of friendship can transcend all that.

As Will Grayson says in a moment of confrontation and revelation:

“You know what’s important? Who would you die for? Who do you wake up at five forty-five in the morning for even though you don’t even know why he needs you?”

This book is awesome. Like so many great books do, it helped me put myself in the shoes of someone very different from me, thus looking at my own life and my own world a little differently. I’m glad I read it.

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/will_grayson_will_grayson.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 The Gift of an Ordinary Day, by Katrina Kenison

Musings, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review, True Stories 0

The Gift of an Ordinary Day

A Mother’s Memoir

by Katrina Kenison

Springboard Press, New York, 2009. 310 pages.
Starred Review

I think that Katrina Kenison’s two sons must be right in between the ages of my two sons. I remember reading her book Mitten Strings for God about being the mother of young boys when my boys were young. Now she’s written a book about being the mother of teenage sons who are growing up and finding their way in the world. It resonates with me, because my oldest son has graduated from college and moved out, and my youngest son is about to be a junior in high school.

That wasn’t the only thing I liked about this memoir. In the book, Katrina Kenison deals with so many issues of midlife. They leave their home of many years and find a dream home that needs to be rebuilt. She leaves her long time job. There are so many issues of change and meaning that a woman deals with at this time of life, and I was encouraged and uplifted to read about Katrina Kenison’s journey.

I liked this paragraph about parenting during the difficult times:

“It is always a relief to be reminded that my job is not to control, or judge, or change my son, but simply to help him remember, with words and touch, who he really is. Loving him this way, I am better able to find within myself the faith and patience necessary to survive his painful transformations. I know to hold a space for his beauty, even when it slips from sight. And I come a little bit closer to understanding his true essence, to remembering the goodness that resides just beneath the surface of even his very worst behavior, behavior that is usually rooted in fear and confusion and self-protection.”

Here’s a nice passage about the changes and growth of midlife:

“The world is filled with need. If I am to be of some use, I must first rise to the challenge of my own rebirth and growth, must engage in the gradual, demanding process of discovering the person I am meant to be now and taking up the work I am called to do.

“’Go into yourself, and see how deep the place is from which your life flows,’ the poet Rainer Maria Rilke once instructed an aspiring young writer. The advice might as easily have been written for a middle-aged woman contemplating her emptying nest. The work my friends seem compelled to undertake in their forties and fifties is no longer what they think they should do. It is what they feel, in their deepest souls, that they are meant to do. What the example of their lives suggests, what I desperately want to believe, is that once we have weathered these changes, honored our sorrows and released them, there is also great joy in moving on.”

And here’s a wonderful part about growing up as a mother:

“Now, we’re in a different place and a different time, and I need to become a different kind of mother. A mother who knows how to back off. A mother whose gaze is not quite so intently focused on her own two endlessly absorbing children, but who is engaged instead in a rich, full life of her own. A mother who cares a good deal less than she used to about what time people in her household go to bed, what they eat for breakfast, whether they wear coats or not, and what they choose to do, or not do, with their own time. A mother who, though her protective, maternal instincts run as fierce and deep as ever, manages, in all but extreme moments, to keep those instincts in check. A mother who trusts in who her children are, even if they aren’t exactly who she thinks they ought to be. Who keeps faith in their futures, even when the things they do, and the words they say, give her pause in the present. A mother who remembers, above all else, that the greatest gift she can give to her own two wildly different, nearly grown sons is the knowledge that, no matter what, she loves them both absolutely, just exactly as they are.”

I enjoyed this book tremendously. Reading it is like having a friend to talk to along the exciting and interesting journey of midlife. She makes it feel a little less uncharted and scary.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/gift_of_an_ordinary_day.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 Princess of Glass, by Jessica Day George

Fairy Tale Variant, Fantasy, Romance, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Princess of Glass

by Jessica Day George

Bloomsbury, New York, 2010. 266 pages.
Starred Review

I’m becoming a bigger and bigger fan of Jessica Day George. Princess of Glass is a follow up to her excellent Princess of the Midnight Ball, but it’s also an incredibly creative twist on the story of Cinderella.

I thought that the Cinderella story has been rewritten so well so many different ways, there was not much more that could be done with it. Though I must admit all the versions I’ve read are among my favorite fairy tale retellings: Ella Enchanted, by Gail Carson Levine, Bella at Midnight, by Diane Stanley, and Just Ella, by Margaret Peterson Haddix.

Jessica Day George does something quite different with the story and wonderfully creative, using the version where Cinderella attends three balls. What if the godmother were really an evil witch bent on entrapping Cinderella for her own evil purposes? What if the prince and all the people at the ball were affected by an enchantment and falling in love with Cinderella despite their true feelings?

Finally, what if a princess who had experience with evil enchantments and how to protect against them was at the court and was falling in love with the prince herself?

The main character of the book is Poppy, one of the younger of the 12 Dancing Princesses featured in Princess of the Midnight Ball. After so many princes suffered fatal accidents trying to break their family’s enchantment, the king tries to build bridges by sending some daughters to foreign courts.

Poppy is a delightfully independent young lady. When she notices strange things going on around Eleanora, a clumsy servant girl from an impoverished family, she determines to get to the bottom of it. I like the way she’s still knitting charms to help, which she learned from her brother-in-law.

The author includes two knitting patterns at the end, one for the poppy-decorated shawl Poppy wears to a ball. My only complaint is that I wish there were a picture. I’m going to have to make one to see what it looks like!

I found it ingenious how Jessica Day George wove in all the motifs of the Cinderella story (except maybe the stepsisters) in a way so completely different than I’d ever thought of them before. Brilliant!

I can’t help but hope that more stories will be forthcoming about some of the other 12 princesses and their adventures in other foreign lands.

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/princess_of_glass.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.