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May 13
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Elizabeth
is currently reading:
Prince Caspian (The Chronicles of Narnia, Book 2)
by C.S. Lewis
bookshelves:
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my rating:
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Elizabeth
gave
to:
Mermaids on Parade (Hardcover)
by Melanie Hope Greenberg
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my rating:
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read in May, 2008
Elizabeth said:
"New York City has changed a lot in the past 30 years. Used to be a grittier, seedier town. Graffiti and wild parties. Love and violence. And when New York had a parade it was an adults only affair. Today that seediness has receded, leaving every...more
New York City has changed a lot in the past 30 years. Used to be a grittier, seedier town. Graffiti and wild parties. Love and violence. And when New York had a parade it was an adults only affair. Today that seediness has receded, leaving everything a little more family friendly. You walk in Times Square and sex shops don’t appear to the eye. You can attend the Greenwich Village Halloween parade without worrying about excessive nudity. Really, one of the few parades left in the city that successfully melds that old-time wildness with the newfangled kid-friendly vibe is Coney Island’s annual Mermaid Parade. Boobs and babies, that’s what you’ll see these days. It seems an odd parade to celebrate in the format of a picture book, but Mermaid Parade attendee and illustrator Melanie Hope Greenberg is up to the challenge. With her bold colors and sense of pizzazz, Greenberg brings to life an event that continues to enthrall both children and adults alike with a love of fun, costumes, and general unavoidable weirdness.
A young girl puts on a mermaid costume, but not just for the fun of playing dress-up. The summer solstice is nigh and it’s time for the yearly Mermaid Parade at Coney Island. This year the girl will be participating with her mom and dad and they’ve come up with the perfect outfit to wow the judges. Joining them are crowds of other participants and everyone gets a number. Then, as people dressed as King Neptune and Queen Mermaid lead on, everyone marches down the boardwalk and around the streets for all the happy onlookers. The route ends at the sandy shore, but that’s not all there is to it. The Costume Judges look everyone over carefully and by the end of the day the girl has won for “Best Little Mermaid.” And though it may be over, next year it’ll happen all over again, and she has her trophy until then to remember.
For those of you who have first-hand experience with The Mermaid Parade, just let me say that there are no naked breasts in this book. Not so much as a drop of nip slippage. In fact, you could hardly come up with a more wholesome story of grown adults putting on shiny sequins and pretending to be the denizens of underwater lands. And for a moment I was a little sad when it looked as if there weren’t any men in skirts, but a closer inspection cheered me entirely as I found them. Greenberg has also included many of her fellow participants in this book, which is fun. Her style utilizes gouache, pen and pencil to create simple characters with distinctive personalities. Some might miss the presence of grime and sleaze, but this book is very much from a child’s perspective. And kids, by and large, notice shiny costumes before all else.
From a non-fiction standpoint the homework for this book covered several different areas. For example, there’s a pretty cool two-page spread that provides a map of the Coney Island area, detailing the parade route and all that it encompasses. Astroland, the Wonder Wheel, Nathan’s, the parachute drop, and even Keyspan Park are included (though I fear the Go Kart area has been one of the first areas of the park to go now that the area’s being “renovated”). Back matter includes information on “How to make a mermaid tale in 3 easy steps”. She isn’t kidding about the easy part either. The pattern and instructions are simple enough for even craft-challenged adults like myself to be able to whip up one of these puppies on the sly. If you’ve a storytime or a birthday party with a mermaid theme on the horizon, this book may be the friend you never knew you had. An Author’s Note offers historical information on the parade, going back long before its official inception in 1983. I also appreciated the time taken in the book to record the traditions of the parade, like cutting the ribbons that symbolize Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer and then tossing fruit into the waves.
As I sit at the reference desk at my library, there are moments when children inundate me with requests for mermaid picture books. I’ll pull out the usual Princess Fishtail and Sukey and the Mermaid, nine times out of ten. But if I judge the kid to be a little open in their choices, I might try to talk up a book where a girl goes to a real life parade here in New York where EVERYBODY dresses like a mermaid. The notion has appeal. Of course, I’ve the advantage that I’m a librarian in New York City, but no matter where you go, mermaids are pretty cool. And having a book that celebrates not just them but also people who dance to the beat of a different drum is well worth reading. Fun, eye-catching, and original. A parade picture book like none written before.
Ages 4-8...less
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May 11
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Elizabeth
is currently reading:
King George: What Was His Problem?: Everything Your Textbooks Didn't Tell You About the American Revolution (Hardcover)
by Steve Sheinkin
bookshelves:
currently-reading
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my rating:
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May 07
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New comment on Elizabeth's review of
Diamond Willow
(see all 2 comments)
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May 06
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Elizabeth
gave
to:
Diamond Willow (Hardcover)
by Helen Frost
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my rating:
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read in April, 2008
Elizabeth said:
"The sentence "I told you so!" is deeply satisfying. Granted, the satisfaction you feel when you say it only lasts a minute or two, but for a little while, as you do your "I told you so" dance, you get to feel that thrill of vindic...more
The sentence "I told you so!" is deeply satisfying. Granted, the satisfaction you feel when you say it only lasts a minute or two, but for a little while, as you do your "I told you so" dance, you get to feel that thrill of vindication sweeping through your veins. I often feel this way when an author or illustrator I've liked over the years starts garnering a little more notice. Admittedly Helen Frost is maybe not the best example I could call up. After all, she won a Printz Honor a couple years back for her book Keesha's House and her recent picture book Monarch and Milkweed has been getting nothing but sweet sweet loving from professional reviewers. All that aside, I've never felt that anyone has ever given Ms. Frost enough attention for her cleverness. When The Braid was published several years ago it was so smart, so sharp, and so interesting that it took everything I had not to bop people over the head with it at dinner parties. "BOP! Read this!" "BOP! Read this!" No such bopping will be necessary with her newest novel, though. Diamond Willow aims younger than Frost's usual teenaged fare. Examining the relationship between a girl and her sled dog, Frost combines her standard intelligent wordplay with a story that will catch in the throats of dog lovers and people lovers alike.
Take the branch of a willow tree, carve it down, get to the center, polish it, and there where the scar of a living branch remains you will find the shape of a diamond. A diamond willow branch is pretty special but middle schooler Diamond Willow, named after the natural wonder, doesn't feel very special at all. She has a hard time making friends at school and sometimes it seems like her dad loves his sled dogs more than her. Not that Willow doesn't love the dogs too, particularly Roxy, the smart and clever lead dog who always knows the way. Willow's getting older and one day she convinces her parents to let her take the dogs to her grandparents' house. When tragedy strikes and Roxy's eyes are harmed along the way, Willow does whatever she can to protect her furred friend from her parents' flawed intentions. As she does so, secrets long since buried begin to come to light and Willow gets a better idea of who she is and what Roxy really means to her. Every page containing Willow's thoughts appears in the shape of a diamond, a buried message found at the heart of each of these free verse poems.
Maybe the reason Frost's The Braid never got the attention it deserved was that it was too clever for its own good. As I recall, Frost braided her poems over and under themselves, weaving sentences and even details like her characters ages into the mix. Or maybe the reason was simpler than that. Maybe people just don't appreciate it when a poem is smarter than they are. None of this is to say that Frost hasn't been doing some pretty fancy footwork with this book too.
The fact that a shrub willow's diamond pattern forms when a piece of it has been roughly hewn away in some matter is more than a little significant to this tale. As with a real diamond willow, the center of each diamond poem contains a dark spot at the center. Often Frost will place certain letters in bold at strategic moments. If the reader chooses to read these dark words on their own, they'll encounter thoughts and feelings hidden within Willow. Many of these feel as if they are her innermost feelings. The kind of gut reaction or subconscious understanding that she may not even be aware that she feels. On page six, for example, Willow describes her state in life. "In the middle of my family in the middle of a middle-size town in the middle of Alaska, you will find middle-size, middle-kid, me." It doesn't look like much when I pull the sentence apart and place it on a page like this, but the message of "find me" is clear as crystal. This is someone who wants to be found, even if she can't express it directly. Authors always try to find new and interesting ways to have their characters say what they think, and at the same time express what they mean. Frost's technique is perfect for child readers and may cause them to concentrate a little more as they read each section.
Willow is part Athabascan, a fact that is important to the story. As she continues along her way her narrative, which began entirely with her diamond-shaped thoughts, is broken up by the voices of animals. And a few of these animals appear to be related to her. The first time you see one of these sections, usually written in a straightforward prose-style, it is introduced with, "John, Willow's great-great-grandfather (Red Fox)". And sure as shooting, we're hearing the impressions of a fox who just so happen to have also have been related to Willow in a past life. It's tricky territory taking any particular ethnicity and assigning a spirituality to it that may or may not belong to the author herself. I'm not saying I was offended, but it's a difficult path to walk and I don't know that Frost need have gone that route. Due to the fact that Roxy's speech near the end wraps up a lot of loose ends, I understand the desire to make someone else talk beforehand, but it's still sketchy territory. At least Ms. Frost handles it tastefully in any case.
Far more kid-friendly than her previous books, Helen Frost has a knack for writing free-verse novels that never feel like someone took a page of prose and broke it up arbitrarily. Every sentence, word, and syllable in this book is crafted and honed. If a diamond willow branch needs to be polished to look and feel right then I think it's safe to say that just as much polish must go into Ms. Frost's four-sided works of art. A dog story sure, but one that definitely (forgive me) separates itself from the pack. Animal poetry done right.
Ages 8-14....less
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Elizabeth
gave
to:
Uh-oh, Cleo (Hardcover)
by Jessica Harper
bookshelves:
to-review
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my rating:
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read in May, 2008
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New comment on Elizabeth's review of
The Underneath
(see all 3 comments)
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May 05
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Elizabeth
gave
to:
Monster Blood Tattoo 2: Lamplighter (Hardcover)
by D.M. Cornish
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my rating:
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read in April, 2008
Elizabeth said:
"You can like the first book in a new fantasy series. You can love a first book in a new fantasy series. You can compare that book to the works and worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien or Philip Pullman, if yo...more
You can like the first book in a new fantasy series. You can love a first book in a new fantasy series. You can compare that book to the works and worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien or Philip Pullman, if you’ve half a mind to do so. But no matter how much you love a book, when you see that its sequel is a whopping 711 pages long you may find yourself somewhat reluctant to pick it up. I’m a busy reviewer. I get sent a lot of books to read and I’m only able to review a tiny portion of them. If a book is 711 pages long then it better earn my trust. I’d better be sure that there isn’t any needless information there. For all its length this had better be one heckuva lean, exciting, entrancing read. So I hefted this tome (there’s no other word for it) around with me and found pretty quickly that not only is Lamplighter, the second book in the Monster Blood Tattoo series, good, it happens to be even better than its predecessor. If Cornish tackled the idea of creating an original world and laying down the foundations in his first book, the second speaks to human prejudice, ignorance perpetuated, and maybe even the author’s Australian roots in this remarkable middle book in an increasingly multilayered world.
When last we saw of young Rossamund Bookchild he had successfully arrived at Winstermill, the fortress of the lamplighters. The boy is to learn the dangerous job of keeping the Empire’s roads lit at all times, despite the omnipresent fear of monsters on all sides. Because he has arrived a little late Rossamund is considered a bit of a laggard by his fellows. His status changes substantially, however, after a young noblewoman by the name of Threnody also arrives to become a lamplighter (the first female ever, perhaps). She and Rossamund strike up an uneasy friendship and good thing too. Dark machinations are afoot at Winstermill. The Master-of-Clerks has taken over in the Lamplighter-Marshal’s sudden absence. Rossamund finds a creature of despicable origins in the bowls of the fortress. And suddenly he and Threnody are bundled off to serve their first posts, but in a place as dark and dangerous as any in the Empire. Between parsing his own thoughts on monsters and trying to keep alive, Rossamund soon finds that the strange secrets from the past have a way of coming to light.
Generally the second book/film in any trilogy is going to be your weakest part. What percentage of people can honestly say that The Two Towers is their favorite book or Empire Strikes Back their favorite Star Wars movie? But Lamplighter is surprisingly strong and engaging for all that it’s a stepping stone to a conclusion. Maybe Cornish is helped by the fact that you never quite know where the storyline is headed until you’re almost to the end of the book. If Rossamund was a mild sedorner (monster lover) at the end of the first book, he’s made leaps and strides in that direction by the finale of the second. True, Lamplighter ends on a very “To Be Continued” note, which I usually despise. But in spite of this cliffhanger the book stands tall on its own two feet. Villains have been fleshed out and identified properly. Heroes are also named, though Rossamund is increasingly anxious over the moral complexities of people like Europe. And he finds himself wondering about his friend Sebastipole, “Could he be what Rossamund considered a good man and still do this? Could a man be wrong for doing what he thought was right?” And on top all of this, the book’s theme has been polished and defined.
It took me a little while to realize it, but D.M. Cornish shares much in common with his fellow Australian writers. As I read this book I was reminded of John Marsden’s remarkable “picture book” The Rabbits, as illustrated by Shaun Tan. In that book, a group of native animals are colonized violently by an invading species. Now look at the Monster Blood Tattoo books. Cornish has given us a set of assumptions and then turned them slowly on their head. In the first book you acquired Rossamund’s own “learned suspicions” as pertaining to the “fact” that all monsters are evil and must be destroyed else they will destroy you. Now in the second book we get a glimpse of the true stakes of the battle. Humans, it seems, have been encroaching on the monsters’ land for years. They destroy them regularly, even creating disgusting zombie-like creatures to fight them, and the monsters respond violently to this. As the book continues, you even got a glimpse of how little the humans even know about monsters. Their ideas about monster birth is a kind of spontaneous regeneration involving mud or maybe the buds on trees. These people know so little about their foes that they would rather kill them than learn anything about them, and it has been this way for centuries upon centuries.
You would think that this would mean that Rossamund was destined to do something to end all of this conflict. I’d like to think he could bring monster and man together in peace, but in truth I’m not sure if Cornish is really aiming that high. It seems like it will be enough for him to simply have Rossamund defeat the villains of the piece in the end. Then again, maybe it’s all connected. Hard to say. I guess we’ll just have to see what Cornish has up his sleeve in the last installment. One thing I will say (and this may be a tad spoilerish so avoid the rest of this paragraph if you care) is that I made a mistake in reviewing Lamplighter’s predecessor Foundling. In that review I said something along the lines of “never have I had such a clear sense that a character’s parentage is not the point of the series.” I might have as well have said, “I believe the next novel in this series will be written with Cheerios rather than words”, since that’s roundabout how off-base I was with that assumption. It’s not immediately apparent at the start, but Rossamund’s parentage may be the sticking point on which this entire series hinges.
Second novels have the luxury of getting to begin with an already well-informed bang. Lamplighter begins with excitement, heroism, blood, and women kicking monster-butt. Because the book assumes that you’ve read Foundling, it brings up multiple references to the occurrences in the previous book. A word to the wise then, do not begin this series with this book. It may be stronger than the first novel, but you need to understand this world completely from the first book to get anything at all out of the second. As for the new characters you meet, they’re fun. You can’t help but love poor sweet Numps, the seltzerman who is no longer quite right in the head but turns out to be a good friend to Rossamund. Or Threnody, the young noblewoman who wishes to be a lamplighter and who has such a crush on Rossamund that it shows itself in biting remarks, snipes, and a lot of pouting (which he never catches on to, sweet boy). What’s more, characters from the previous book are better fleshed out, which is helpful.
As in the second, Lamplighter retains Cornish’s ear for a well-turned phrase in his world’s particular vernacular. “Move your ashes, scrub!” sounds like a real enough sentence to me. Descriptions too remain sparkling and bright. Cornish isn’t afraid to use delightful words in average sentences as with, “A susurrus of deep displeasure stirred about the boys.” And then the names have multiplied here and become delicious. There’s Sourdoor, Epitome Bile, Bellicos, and more.
It has been said many many times before regarding other series, but I don’t think one more time is going to hurt anyone. Having finished this book at long last my sole regret is that I don’t have the third. Perhaps Mr. Cornish will be kind enough to make the final book in the trilogy a good 1,000 pages at least so that I don’t have abandon Rossamund and his world quite so soon. Someday I like to think that children’s literary scholars will take some time to pick apart Cornish’s histories and theories regarding conflict and how it is perpetuated by a society that would perhaps prefer peace if they considered the matter. Until then, you’ll just have to enjoy the books on their own. It’s a brilliant little number and hopefully will garner the fan base it so desperately deserves.
Ages 10 and up....less
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Elizabeth
read and liked
JustOneMoreBook.com's
review of McFig and McFly: A Tale of Jealousy, Revenge, and Death (with a Happy Ending):
"A veneer of feigned pleasantries can’t conceal the ceaseless, senseless competition that corrupts then consumes former friends in this deliciously absurd yet apt demonstration of misguided attention"
...read more »
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May 04
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Elizabeth
marked as to-read:
The Porcupine Year (Hardcover)
by Louise Erdrich
bookshelves:
to-read
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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Mighty kind of you to say, Daniel. I'm inclined in that direction, but I've a non-fiction library-related title to finish before I can delve completely into the fiction I love. Thanks for the compliment!
You're going to make me go broke. I bought something like a dozen books today and five of them I bought because of your reviews. Aargh! Could be worse though, I suppose.
I have that same mouse puppet! I named mine Franklin. ;)
