Category: Uncategorized

I GET WET
By Vicki Cobb
Illustrated by Julia Gorton
HarperCollins, 2002

Category: Picture book non-fiction

It has been raining in central New England all week. I am sick of being wet. And yet …

My daughter and I have been playing with water indoors all week. Why? Because we found Vickie Cobb’s I GET WET at the library and, well, we are hooked. I GET WET is not a book you cuddle up on the couch and read together. Rather, this is a book you refer to now and again while you are elbow deep with water experiments in the kitchen. We are talking hands-under-the-faucet, water-all-over-the-place, little-minds-expanding, play-while-you-learn fun. And it all starts with this 32-page picture book.

The activities in I GET WET center on helping kids to understand the properties of water that allow it to “wet” things. By filling cups, saucers and pans with water, they come to appreciate the flowing nature of water. By watching water drip slowly from a faucet, they begin to understand the concept of cohesion (it’s NEVER called that in the book, of course). By experimenting with wax paper and paper towels, they begin to wonder about how water interacts with other materials.

I love this book. And, joy of joys, it is one of a series … Vicki Cobb’s Science Play series also includes I FALL DOWN, I SEE MYSELF, and I FACE THE WIND.

Surely the sun will be back by the time we are done!?

Pull our your copy of Barbara McClintock’s ADÈLE AND SIMON. Turn to the spread that shows the children in the Louvre. Find the woman in the fancy yellow hat on the bottom left of the scene. Look closely at the top of her hat.

We have found the pesky yellow crayon at last!

Phew.

ADÈLE AND SIMON
By Barbara McClintock
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006

Category: Picture book

Okie, Dokie Artichokies … I need your help.

Barbara McClintock’s fabulous picture book ADÈLE AND SIMON was among the New York Times Best Illustrated Books of 2006. (The list was published in a special supplement on Sunday and can be viewed online here.) As you may recall, one of the Burns children received this book as a birthday gift about a month ago. There is a whole lot to love about this book, not the least of which is the seek-and-find pleasures throughout. In each double-page spread, Simon loses something—his drawing, his books, his scarf, his gloves, his hat, his CRAYONS, his knapsack, his coat, and his sweater—and the reader gets to find it. Delicious. But here’s the thing: we can’t find Simon’s yellow crayon.

Early on the entire family was in on the hunt, but after several lengthy scouring sessions, the kids gave up. I kept the book in my office and methodically scanned the Louvre spread a few times with a magnifying glass (I kid you not) looking for the pesky yellow crayon. Red, blue and black are easily found. Yellow? No dice. Can’t find it. It isn’t there.

Or is it?

Now that ADÈLE AND SIMON is in the limelight, I am searching with renewed energy. I have got to find that crayon! Do help me if you can. I have so many other things that I should be doing …

PS. A Fuse#8 Production posted a fabulous review of ADELE AND SIMON; check it out.

PS2. Okie, Dokie Artichokie is the name of a picture book by Grace Lin. We’ve loved it forever and the title phrase has become a favorite saying around here.

WRITING MAGIC, CREATING STORIES THAT FLY
By Gail Carson Levine
Collins, 2006

Category: Middle-grade non-fiction

Are you in elementary school or middle school or even high school? Do you like to write stories of your own? Would you like to hear some words of encouragement and wisdom from a successful children’s book writer with more than ten novels and a Newbery Honor Medal to her credit? Well, then, put a copy of Gail Carson Levine’s WRITING MAGIC on your wish list.

WRITING MAGIC is packed with lessons on basic writing skills: how to create vital characters, realistic dialogue, intriguing beginnings, satisfying endings, and compelling stories in between. It is also chockablock with advice on how to keep at your writing: “If someone says that your story is lousy or that you can’t write to save yourself, you must never, ever show your precious writing to that person again.” The pièce de résistance, in my opinion, are the writing prompts that close every chapter. Levine is a truly creative spirit and her writing prompts are simply irresistible. I don’t think it is possible to finish this book and not feel ready to fly. (And by fly, of course, I mean write truly fabulous fiction.)

WRITING MAGIC has been nominated for a 2007 CYBIL award. You can check out the other nominees in the Middle Grade & YA Nonfiction category here.

ISAAC NEWTON
By Kathleen Krull
Illustrated by Boris Kulikov
Viking, 2006

Category: Middle-grade non-fiction (biography)

This is the first book in Viking’s Giants of Science series that I have read, and I can tell you this: I will read the others. Kathleen Krull’s biography of Isaac Newton is well-written, interesting and accessible; if her treatments of Sigmund Freud and Leonardo Da Vinci are half as good then I don’t want to miss them.

Here is an example of the intriguing way Krull approaches biography. In the opening chapter she tells readers that the world during Newton’s time was a dramatic and wild place with kings “coming and going, getting beheaded, being run out of the country.” Newton, Krull assures us, “seemed to float above the fray. Up in his ivory tower at Cambridge University, he lived a quiet life. A life apart.” The reader is given a half-moment to absorb the idea that Isaac Newton may have been both brilliant AND boring before Krull adds: “Except when he was poking sharp objects into his eyes, throwing world-class tantrums, burning fires night and day in his secret laboratory, and making earth-shattering discoveries and refusing to tell anyone.”

ISAAC NEWTON has been nominated for a 2007 CYBIL award. You can check out the other nominees in the Middle Grade & YA Nonfiction category here.

ELSEWHERE
By Gabrielle Zevin
Bloomsbury, 2005

Category: young adult fiction

Late last week, just before my husband and I took off for a three day getaway to celebrate our eighteen years together(!), my friend Maia brought me this book. Knowing absolutely nothing about it, I stuck ELSEHWERE in my bag and brought it on the trip.

This is a novel that is fun to go into blind. If you’d like to give this a try, DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER.

Gabrielle Zevin built her novel around the fictional wonderland Elsewhere. It is where we humans go when we die. In Elsewhere, people age backwards from the day they arrive (i.e. the day they die) to the day they are babies again … at which point they are bundled up and sent back to earth to be reborn. When fifteen year-old Liz, who has been struck and killed by a taxi cab, arrives in Elswhere, she is in serious denial. She is met on the dock by her grandmother, her only dead relative, who died before Liz was born. It is in Elsewhere—under the careful watch of her thirty-six year old grandmother and while aging backwards—that Liz comes of age. Talk about an interesting twist on an age-old theme!

Although I enjoyed the premise of ELSEWHERE, I did find myself craving time and depth in several places. As a reader, I thought the story often moved too quickly, without much time for exploring the emotions of the characters. I mean, some of the situations they find themselves in are incredible; I wanted them to share what they were feeling! For the most part, they didn’t. Be that as it may, this is a book that gets you thinking. For example, in the ELSEWHERE reality, my mother, who died when she was only twenty-four, is already back on earth as a seven year-old. Cool.

FINDING DAY’S BOTTOM
By Candice Ransom
Carolrhoda Books, 2006

Category: Middle-grade fiction

So much of the joy I take from books comes from outside the story. Hard covers encased in library plastic thrill me.* Trim size is important, as is text size, font, and white space on the page. FINDING DAY’S BOTTOM got top marks from me in all these categories. Holding this fine little book in my hands, flipping through its pages, wondering about its intriguing title (What the heck is day’s bottom? How would you find it?), and admiring its cover photo kept me happy for a good long time. I couldn’t resist bringing it home.

Finding day’s bottom is Jane Ery’s only hope for reuniting with her father, or so she thinks. But she doesn’t know where day’s bottom is, or even what it is. She only knows what Grandpap has told her, and since his way is to talk in stories and riddles, Jane Ery is left to figure it out for herself. Jane Ery’s story is sweet and sad, but she is a good and loveable lass.

In a lucky coincidence, my friend Eric Luper attended a talk by FINDING DAY’S BOTTOM author Candice Ransom at the Got Books? Let’s Read! conference. You can read what Eric had to say about what Candice had to say here.

* I think that because libraries and the books inside them have always been refuge for me, the association between plastic dust jackets and safety is strong in my mind. Or maybe I am just weird.

TRACKING TRASH: FLOTSAM, JETSAM, AND THE SCIENCE OF OCEAN MOTION
by Loree Griffin Burns
Houghton Mifflin, 2007

Hooray! I have finally figured out how to post the cover to my book. There it is … the cover to TRACKING TRASH. What do you think?

Here is a re-sneak peek at the flap copy:

Aided by a ragtag army of beachcombers, Dr. Curt Ebbesmeyer tracks trash in the name of science. From sneakers to hockey gloves to LEGO pieces, Curt monitors the watery fate of cargo spilled into the ocean. The journeys he has documented are astounding and some—like the rubber ducks that drifted thousands of miles from the Pacific Ocean across the Arctic and into the Atlantic—have attracted substantial media attention. But the information Curt collects is much more than casual news; it is important scientific data. And with careful analysis Curt is using his data to understand and protect our world ocean.

Tracking Trash: Flotsam, Jetsam and the Science of Ocean Motion chronicles the development of Curt’s unique ocean research program. In engaging text and unforgettable images readers meet the woman who started it all (Curt’s mother!), the computer program that makes sense of his data (nicknamed OSCURS) and several scientists who are using his discoveries to preserve delicate marine habitat and protect the creatures who live in them.

If you can’t wait until the March 2007 release, feel free to pre-order TRACKING TRASH now!

A PLACE FOR BUTTERFLIES
By Melissa Stewart
Illustrated by Higgins Bond
Peachtree, 2006

Category: Picture book, non-fiction

This is the first year in many that my kids and I did not capture a monarch caterpillar, feed it milkweed leaves, marvel at its chrysalis, cheer at its hatching as a butterfly, and release it—with all our best wishes—to begin its migration to Mexico. Milkweed plants were plentiful and I am sure there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of monarchs crawling and munching within a mile of our home. But this fall was busier than ever and somehow our monarch ritual got lost in the chaos. Bummer.

I didn’t realize how much I missed the tradition until my husband sent me this article about the arrival of the monarchs in their winter home. I was struck, as I am every year, with the journey the monarchs make from my backyard in the northeastern United States all the way to Mexico. Thousands of miles on wings as delicate as tissue paper, back to a place they have never even been. It seems impossible.

Today I pulled out Melissa Stewart’s A PLACE FOR BUTTERFLIES in homage. This beautiful picture book uses butterflies to introduce—in a simple but concrete way—some of the major environmental issues of our time. Sidebars on each double page spread relate the story of an endangered butterfly species and the steps we humans can take to ensure their survival. Higgins Bond’s illustrated butterflies are lovely, and her monarchs will tie me over until spring when the grandsons and granddaughters of the monarchs resting peacefully in Mexico (even as I type) arrive back in my yard. I will not forget them next year!

YELLOW STAR
By Jennifer Roy
Marshall Cavendish, 2006

Category: Middle-grade novel

This has been a week for reading heartbreaking novels.

YELLOW STAR is written in verse, a fact which, I am sad to admit, would normally have kept me from reading it. I am, quite simply, a chicken when it comes to poetry. (I must get over this.) Luckily I hang out with cool book people who are not chickens, and they insisted I read this book. I am glad they did. (Thank you Jane and Beverly!)

YELLOW STAR is a Holocaust story. The narrator, four year-old Syvia Perlmutter, is forced into the Lodz ghetto with her parents and her older sister when the German Nazis invade Poland in 1939. There is very little food, no school and a fence that keeps the Jews in the ghetto not only separated from the rest of the world but at the mercy of their Nazi captors. As children all over the ghetto are taken from their families and loaded onto trains bound for Heaven-knows-where, Syvia’s family manages to hide her and keep her with them in the ghetto.

The book is based on the experiences of author Jennifer Roy’s aunt, the real Syvia Perlmutter. She was one of a quarter million Jews forced into the Lodz ghetto in 1939, and one of only twelve ghetto children to leave it alive when Poland was liberated in 1945. Her story, told through the eyes of the fictional Syvia, is startling and harrowing and important.

As for the verse format, don’t let it scare you. This book reads like narrative fiction and is accessible to even a chicken like me.