If by Rudyard Kipling

If by Rudyard Kipling, illustrated by Giovanni Manna. Creative Editions, 2014.

Michael Caine reads and comments on the poem If.

I’m a big fan of poems made into picture books with nice, full page or double spread illustrations for each line or couplet or quatrain of the poem. This edition of the famous poem If by Kipling is a fine example of the genre. Italian illustrator Giovanni Manna “has made illustrations for more than 80 books for children since 1995. His work has been featured in exhibitions throughout Italy and internationally, from Bratislava to Britain. He teaches watercolor at the International School of Illustration in Sarmede and was awarded the Andersen Prize for best Italian illustrator in 2003.” (Biographical information from the book jacket.)

Kipling, of course, is one of England’s best known poets and storytellers. This book begins with a biographical note about Kipling, specifically about Kipling and the poem If and Kipling’s son, John, for whom the poem was written. The story of Kipling’s son is also well known, but in case you’ve never heard it, the short version is that John was raised to become a soldier or a sailor but because of poor eyesight, he did not qualify to join the military at the outbreak of World War I. His father, already a famous author and man of influence, pulled some strings to get 17-year old John into the Irish Guards and after brief training, John was sent to the front lines in Belgium. John Kipling died in September, 1915 during the Battle of Loos.

If you want to read more about Kipling and his son, you might try Kipling’s Choice by Geert Spillebeen. I read this book a couple of years ago, but never got around to reviewing it. It’s a fictional account of John’s life and death and his relationship with his father.

However, back to the poem. It’s about a controversial subject: what it takes to become a man. The illustrations all show a boy, a small boy dwarfed by a big world. And that’s the feel of the poem, too. The “son” to whom the poem is addressed can hardly expect to live up to all that the poet enjoins him to do to become a real man. And yet the expectations in the poem are good, even reasonable, the kinds of things we would all want to do and be: a good loser, a hard worker, a persevering leader, a decent person. If we could do all of these things, then we would truly be the men and women God created us to be.

But. There’s very little room for failure in Kipling’s vision of the true man. He does allow that others might break or destroy the things you have labored to build, but that you might fail in your own endeavors to be courageous, diligent, cool-headed, and virtuous—this doesn’t seem to be a part of the poet’s vision. I wonder IF Rudyard Kipling thought about mercy and forgiveness and starting again after our own sin and failure bring us to tragedy and included those things in his philosophy of maturity and growth after the death of his son. Many have blamed the father for the son’s death, and perhaps Kipling himself felt the need for mercy after the death of his son. (After his son’s death, Kipling wrote in a poem, “If any question why we died / Tell them, because our fathers lied.”)

If is an inspiring poem, and Mr. Manni’s pictures add to the poignancy and imaginative influence of the poem. Poetry picture books are a great way to introduce yourself or your children to the classic poems of the English language. I’m going to feature several more during April, National Poetry Month. What are your favorite picture books that feature poetry, preferably a single poem?

Who Says Women Can’t Be Doctors? by Tanya Lee Stone

Mar26

Who Says Women Can’t be Doctors? The Story of Elizabeth Blackwell by Tanya Lee Stone, illustrated by Marjorie Priceman. Henry Holt, 2013.

“I’ll bet you’ve met plenty of doctors in your life. And I’ll bet lots of them were women. Well, you might find this hard to believe, but there once was a time when girls weren’t allowed to become doctors.”

According to this picture book biography, Elizabeth Blackwell changed all that. Because a woman named Mary Donaldson told Elizabeth Blackwell that “she would have much preferred being examined by a woman” and because Mary urged Elizabeth to consider becoming a doctor herself, Elizabeth Blackwell, who lived during that time when women weren’t allowed or expected to become doctors, found herself thinking and dreaming about the idea of being a female doctor. Some people laughed at the idea. Some people criticized. The medical schools she applied to all turned her down. But Geneva Medical School in New York finally admitted her—as a joke!

The illustrations in this picture book are bright and whimsical and appealing. The illustrator, Marjorie Priceman, also illustrated some of my favorite picture books, including How To Make an Apple Pie and See the World, How to Make a Cherry Pie and See the USA, and Zin! Zin! Zin! A Violin (all available from my library, Meriadoc Homeschool Library).

Elizabeth Blackwell graduated medical school and became the first woman doctor in the United States. Except for a few details about her childhood and her med school experiences, what I’ve told you here is what the book tells in its main text. The author’s note at the back of the book includes a few more details about Elizabeth Blackwell’s life. This biography would be the perfect length for primary children, ages four to seven. And it would be a good introduction to Elizabeth Blackwell and the advent of female doctors for older children.

Then if you or your children want to read more about Ms. Blackwell, check out the following books:

Elizabeth Blackwell: Girl Doctor (Childhood of Famous Americans) by Joanne Landers Henry.

Lone Woman: The Story of Elizabeth Blackwell, the First Woman Doctor by Dorothy Clarke Wilson.

The First Woman Doctor: The Story of Elizabeth Blackwell, M.D. by Rachel Baker. (Messner biography)

I tend to agree with Ms. Donaldson. I prefer a female doctor, and I’m glad we have the choice nowadays to go to a woman doctor or a male doctor, whichever we prefer. And, of course, I’m glad that women can become doctors.

Who Says Women Can’t Be Doctors? is available for checkout from Meriadoc Homeschool Library. If you are interested in purchasing ($5.00) a curated list of favorite picture book biographies with over 300 picture books about all sorts of different people, email me at sherryDOTpray4youATgmailDOTcom.

Dreaming in Code by Emily Arnold McCully

Mar23

Dreaming in Code: Ada Byron Lovelace, Computer Pioneer by Emily Arnold McCully. Candlewick, 2019.

This new biography for children of mathematician Ada Byron Lovelace is NOT a picture book, and indeed, although it’s recommended for ages 10-14 in the marketing information, the book chronicles the actions and accomplishments of a woman who lived a rather shocking and tragic life. I’m not sure all fourteen year olds, much less ten year olds, are ready for the revelations that McCully sees fit to include in her biography, revelations of adultery, child abuse, incest, cruelty, and drug abuse.

In addition, the biographer is rather prejudiced. Lord Byron, Ada’s rake of a father, is very nearly absolved of all his faults, mostly because he wrote a poem in which he mentioned his longing to see his daughter after her mother, Lady Byron, ran away with the child and refused to allow Byron near her. Lady Byron, who does seem to have been something of a tartar, is painted in the darkest of terms as “obsessive” and “neglectful”, also self-centered and hypochondriacal, a dark and bullying force in Ada’s life for its entirety. Lord Byron gets off easily, I suppose because he died young and wrote good poetry.

Ada herself, because she was a genius and because she’s the subject of the book(?), is shown as a martyr to her mother’s domineering and dictatorial selfishness and whimsy. Nevertheless, there are numerous indications that Ada wasn’t much better than her parents when it came to being a decent parent and a faithful wife. McCully tells us that Ada was unfaithful to her long-suffering husband on more than one occasion, that she worried that she was a neglectful mother, and that she called her three children “irksome duties”. She was also drug-addicted, unhealthy, and an inveterate gambler. Perhaps one could blame all of Ada’s adult sins and problems on her horrible childhood and her horrible parents, but nevertheless it’s a wonder she was able to accomplish as much as she did in the fields of mathematics and invention.

So, the story of Ada Byron Lovelace is not terribly edifying, but it is a cautionary tale, I suppose. The sins of the fathers are often visited upon the children, and it takes the power of God to break a family heritage of sin and rebellion.

Takeaway:

“This was Ada’s great leap of imagination and the reason we remember her with such admiration. Her idea that the engine (Babbage’s Analytical Engine) could do more than compute, that numbers were symbols and could represent other concepts, is what makes Babbage’s engine a prototype-computer.”

A Boy, a Mouse, and a Spider by Barbara Herkert

Mar19

A Boy, a Mouse and a Spider: The Story of E.B. White by Barbara Herkert. Illustrated by Lauren Castillo. Henry Holt and Company, 2017.

“Andy filled his barn with stoic sheep, anxious hens, and gossiping geese. But he still had a mouse on his mind.”

“Andy repaired a roof while another story brewed inside him. He raised a pig and wondered, what if the creature was rescued from a farmer’s deadly plan?”

“One cold October evening, Andy watched a spider spin. He climbed a ladder for a closer look. He’d found the hero of his story.”

In addition to giving readers the basic outlines of the life of beloved author E.B. White, this lovely and colorful picture book biography also tells about the genesis of White’s ideas for his most popular stories, Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web. (No swans are mentioned.) Andy is the nickname his fellow journalists gave to newspaper writer, essayist, children’s author Elwyn Brooks White, and his ideas came from his love of animals, his farm in Maine, and “his love of boats, cars, skating, and travel; his love of morning and summertime.”

Any child who adores Charlotte’s Web or Stuart Little would be enthralled by this simple biography which uses brief sentences to paint a picture of a boy who faced his fears and a man who found his life’s work in the “power of words” and “the glory of nature.” Ms. Herkert uses words as Ms. Castillo uses pictures to give us a portrait of Mr. E.B. White that will linger in the mind just as Charlotte and Wilbur and Stuart linger and enlighten and give joy.

Definitely recommended.

If you are interested in purchasing ($5.00) a curated list of favorite picture book biographies with over 300 picture books about all sorts of different people, email me at sherryDOTpray4youATgmailDOTcom. I’m highlighting picture book biographies in March. What is your favorite picture book about a real person?

The Pilot and the Little Prince by Peter Sis

Mar13

The Pilot and the Little Prince: The Life of Antione De Saint Exupery by Peter Sis. Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers, 2014.

Like Alice in Wonderland, The Little Prince, written and published in the midst of the author’s exile from his native France, during World War II, is an odd book, hard to classify. Is it a book for children or for adults? Is it a philosophical parable or a simple fantasy, or both? Is it full of deep insights, or simply a silly story about a space-traveling prince? It’s certainly, like Alice again, a matter of taste. Some, like me and my youngest daughter, love it, while others find it abstruse and just plain weird. Early critics, when it was first published in New York, said that it was not at all a children’s book, but rather an adult parable in disguise. Therefore, it is fitting that Peter Sis’s picture book biography of author Antione de Saint Exupery is a bit hard to classify—and to read sequentially— as well.

Sis writes a straightforward biographical text that appears at the bottom of each page, but the illustrations are far from straightforward or clearly linear. Mr. Sis gives us much more information about Saint-Exupery, his life, and his times in the context of the pictures that are filled with facts, and maps, and timelines, and anecdotes, than he does in the actual biographical story that parades across the bottom of the pages of his book. This style may not be appealing to every reader. I confess I find it somewhat tedious to read text wrapped in a circle around a small picture or words that wiggle over a mountain or fly up the page instead of across from left to right.

But other readers may become lost (in a good way) in the variations in style and color and format that Sis uses to tell his story about the pilot who became a writer and then a photographer in the French war effort against Nazi Germany.

“The boy would grow up to be a pilot. He would write about courageous flights, but also about places you might find if you were to fly long enough and far enough. What did he find on the earth? What did he find in the sky?”

“On July 31, 1944, at 8:45 a.m., he took off from Brogo, Corsica, to photograph enemy positions east of Lyon. It was a beautiful day. He was due back at 12:30. But he never returned. Some say he forgot his oxygen mask and vanished at sea. Maybe Antoine found his own glittering planet next to the stars.”

The Pilot and the Little Prince could keep an aspiring pilot or writer or Little Prince aficionado amused and enthralled for quite some time. There’s plenty to explore and learn in this busy, beautiful book about a busy man who was an artist with beautiful and meaningful words.

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Feb1

This adult novel is about mothers and their children and their bond to their children. It’s quite compelling and the issues that are raised are thought-provoking and worthy of examination. However, I have a couple of issues myself with the novel and its believability and the lack of believable motivation and awareness on the part of some of the characters. To talk about these problems, I will have to give some spoilers for the plot of the novel, so here is your warning. Here there be spoilers.

Mia Warren is an artist (photographer) and a single mom. She and her teen daughter, Pearl, rent an apartment in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a Midwestern suburb that is, we are told repeatedly, the epitome of upper middle class respectability, predictability, and dullness. (Under the surface, however, there’s a lot of not respectable, unpredictable, and crazy stuff going on in good old Shaker Heights.) Mia’s and Pearl’s landlords are the Richardsons, particularly Elena Richardson, who lives in a luxurious two-story home in Shaker Heights with her four teenage children and her colorless and barely described husband. (You can forget the husband. He doesn’t really do much of anything in the story.) An old friend of Elena Richardson, Linda McCullough, attempts to adopt an abandoned baby. The baby, abandoned at a firehouse, is ethnically Chinese. In the meantime, Pearl develops a close friendship with the younger of the two Richardson sons, Moody, while Moody proceeds to fall hard for Pearl. Pearl, however, has a crush on the older Richardson, Trip, and eventually they get together. The oldest Richardson child, Lexie, eighteen, has a boyfriend who is black, and the two of them manage to get Linda pregnant. Mia, the avant-garde photographer, not only has a secret in her past that involves Pearl’s conception and birth, but she also befriends the Chinese baby’s real mother and tells her where her baby is, in the home of Elena Richardson’s friend, about to be adopted.

Despite all of these intertwining relationships and problematic characters, the title and the narrative indicate that the book is really not about any of these people as much as it is about the Richardsons’ fourth child, Izzy. Izzy is fifteen years old, and she has a fraught relationship with her mother because of her traumatic birth and the way her mother has treated her ever since—and Izzy’s reaction to that ill treatment. Izzy is a social justice warrior, and she just doesn’t fit into the staid, racially indifferent world of Shaker Heights. She especially doesn’t live up to her mother’s rule-following expectations. She gets along with Mia Warren much better than she does with her own family and her parents. So far, so good. We have a lot of interesting characters and situations to explore.

The first false note sounds when Lexie finds out that she is pregnant. She begins to dream of keeping the baby, of her and her boyfriend, Brian, going off to Princeton or Yale together and living in family bliss while raising their own child. However, she soon realizes that this dream is not likely to become a reality. Brian recoils at the mere suggestion of a possible unexpected pregnancy. Lexie can’t think of anyone she can tell about the baby, and so she schedules an abortion. Meanwhile, Lexie is feeling her own maternal instincts which display as an inordinate interest in the little Chinese baby, Mirabelle/May Ling, and a sympathy for the adoptive parents who are fighting to keep Mirabelle as the birth mother tries to regain custody of the baby she abandoned. Never once does Lexie even begin to think of her own baby and its own right to grow up in a loving home even as she is almost obsessed with the child that is at the center of the custody battle and that girl’s right to grow up in a loving home. Not once does Lexie say to herself, “Wait, maybe someone would like to adopt my child. Maybe my child has a right to life and a home and parents who love her and can care for her.” It’s a huge blind spot, and no one in the novel even brings up the obvious and painful parallel.

Then, there’s the ending of the novel. Basically, Izzy burns the Richardsons’ house down—on purpose. We’ve been told over and over throughout the novel that Izzy isn’t crazy, just misunderstood. Then, she takes Mia’s words about “how sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground and start over” literally, and she sets a bunch of little fires in all the beds in the house and burns it to the ground. Izzy then runs away from home to try to join Mia and Pearl who have left town for their own reasons, and Izzy’s mother vows to “spend months, years, the rest of her life looking for her daughter.” So, if Mother Richardson ever does find her wayward daughter, Izzy obviously needs some serious psychiatric help. People who are simply artistic and misunderstood don’t burn the house down for no reason other than a need to start over. Maybe the last paragraph of the novel is meant to tell us that Linda, too, is in need of some psychiatric help and lives in a fantasy world. She tells herself that Izzy, when they find her, will “be able to make amends.” I wanted to shake Linda Richardson and tell her that Izzy is delusional. Izzy won’t make amends because Izzy doesn’t even see that she’s done anything to make amends for. I can’t make a definitive diagnosis, but Izzy is ill and needs help. And maybe Linda does, too.

So, it’s an interesting novel with compelling characters, but none of the characters were people I could sympathize with or understand very well. Sex-driven teens whose parents preferred not to know what they were doing. Rule-keeping parents who can’t think outside their own little boxes. A rule-breaking parent who suggests vandalism to impressionable teens and then disclaims responsibility. A parent who discards her baby and then wants her back. Another parent who is too dumb to see her own blind spots in regard to societal expectations. And crazy arsonist Izzy. I just couldn’t find anyone very likable, but if these were real people, I would feel sorry for them. And this is me, being smug and patronizing, probably.

The Season of Styx Malone by Kekla Magoon

Jan31

Ten year old Caleb Franklin and his older brother, Bobby Gene, are different from each other. Caleb longs to become someone distinguished and special and he can’t wait to leave the small town of Sutton, Indiana and go somewhere exciting. Bobby Gene is more like the boys’ dad—content to be ordinary, even extra-ordinary, which Caleb understands to mean extra-boring and extra-plain and extra-normal.

So, when Caleb and Bobby Gene meet Styx Malone, a new boy in town, sixteen years old and extra-cool, it’s Caleb who becomes Styx’s acolyte and hero-worshipper. Bobby Gene goes along with the plan to pull off a Great Escalator Trade and trade up to a motorbike that will take Caleb and the other two boys everywhere they want to go. But Caleb does more than just go along; Styx Malone makes promises that Caleb just can’t resist until the dreams and the price of those dreams get a little too high and a lot too dangerous.

What a great story! As Caleb follows the ultra-cool Styx Malone, we as readers get to see just how easy it is to be sucked into doing things and saying things we know are wrong. And there really are no villains in the story. Caleb’s parents are old-fashioned and ordinary, and they don’t really understand Caleb’s longing for the special and exciting. But the parents are good, involved parents, not villains. Bobby Gene tries to put the brakes on the boys’ adventures with Styx Malone, but Caleb is too blinded by his hero-worship to see the wisdom in Bobby Gene’s caution. Even Styx himself, who turns out to be a foster child who has been moved from home to home too many times, isn’t mean or bad kid. He doesn’t tell the boys all of the truth, and he gets them into situations that are at the very least borderline unethical. However, Styx just wants to provide the adventure that Caleb so desires. Styx Malone is the catalyst, but all three of the boys bear some responsibility for what happens.

It has been noted before that good stories provide an opportunity for us to try out different personas and courses of action and see how those decisions might play out in real life—without the danger of actually trying out risky behavior. The Season of Styx Malone provides just such an opportunity for readers to see how heroes can fail us and how our own desires can blind us to the truth. Caleb is a somewhat unreliable narrator because of this blindness, but he’s unfailingly honest. And eventually he and Bobby Gene see what the reader sees much sooner: A Cool Guy is just a regular guys with some extra confidence or bluster, and we all have to rely on our own conscience to make moral and ethical judgments. Or in other words, be careful whom you follow.

And we get all of this wisdom without its ever being stated, without a moral being given. Story really is the best way to internalize wisdom. I’m going to remember Caleb and Bobby Gene and Styx for a long time, and I’ll bet the children who read this book will remember them, too.

Weird, Creepy, and Occultic

Jan7

A steady stream of curst and outcast female protagonists in my middle grade speculative fiction reading gave rise to this post, Outcast and Cursed. Now, I’m seeing another trend, analogous but not quite so prominent: male lead characters who are fixated on horror, monsters, the supernatural, and the occult. These boys are also outcasts, known for their weird, freaky, loser status.

In Nightbooks by J.A. White, Alex Mosher decides to destroy all of his notebooks full of creepy, scary stories so that he can become like everyone else. Unfortunately, he’s intercepted by a witch on his way to the incinerator, and the stories become the only thing that might keep him alive.

The Haunted Serpent by Dora M. Mitchell presents Spaulding Meriwether, a formerly homeschooled sixth grader who doesn’t fit in at his new public school because he’s consumed with graveyards and ghosts and monsters.

Grump, in the book of the same name by Liesl Shurtliff, is obsessed with monsters, too, but in his case, the monsters are humans who live above ground, and Grump is a dwarf. Grump is fascinated by the stories people tell about the world above the dwarf caverns, and he’s shamefully afraid of going down into the depths of the underground mines. Grump is, of course, outcast and friendless among the dwarves—until he finds a few friends who will accept him as he is.

Tito Bonito (The Boy, the Bird, and the Coffin Maker by Matilda Woods) is half-orphaned and outcast, imprisoned by fear of his abusive father. His only friend is Alberto, the coffin-maker. So, this novel also is a story about death and shadows and fear and graveyards. The magical realism of the story serves as a ray of hope in this otherwise dark tale.

In The Darkdeep by Ally Condie and Brendan Reichs, one of the main characters, Nico, is an outcast because his father has taken an unpopular stand in the small town where Nico lives. Nico is bullied, and he becomes consumed with the Darkdeep, a haunted pool of nightmares, that he and his friends (he does have a couple of friends) find and begin to explore. Definitely supernatural and monstrous, but not occultic.

Have you read any middle grade books in this sub-genre lately?

A Dozen of the Best Middle Grade Speculative Fiction Published in 2018

Jan5

I read (or at least started reading) approximately 75-100 middle grade speculative fiction books published in 2018. These are, in my opinion of course, the best of all that I read, worthy of your time and your children’ reading time as well.

Sweep: The Story of a Girl and Her Monster by Jonathan Auxier. Mr. Auxier’s books just get better and better. This one, set in a magical Victorian London, highlights the appalling and dangerous working conditions for chimney sweeps at that time, many of whom were small children sold into what can only be called slavery. But the book is not without hope, and the monster is not so much a monster as he is a friend and guardian. And the protagonist, Nan, is a force of nature, a girl to be reckoned with.

The Stone Girl’s Story by Sarah Beth Durst. The Stone Girl’s Story reads like a supposition: “Let us suppose world in which stone creatures can come to life, and someone wants to enslave and control the stone creatures. Then imagine what might happen.” And it’s a very good supposition.

Endling #1: The Last by Katherine Applegate. Byx is the youngest and most vulnerable member of the dairne pack in a world where dairnes are about to become extinct. There aren’t many of these dog-like but intelligent and communicating creatures left in the world, and Byx doesn’t know whether to believe the legends and rumor that other dairne packs exist in the far off north or not. When she is forced by circumstances to leave home, Byx goes on a journey to find out whether she is the last of the dairnes or not.

Thisby Thestoop and the Black Mountain by Zac Gorman. Thisby complains (to herself and to her slime friend who lives in a jar) about all the tasks involved in caring for all the monsters—wyverns and ghouls and were-creatures and more—who live in the dungeons under the Black Mountain, but it’s her job as assistant gamekeeper. And THisby is good at her job. Nevertheless, when Thisby has to take care of a spoiled Princess Iphigenia and her twin brother, and then the brother gets lost, it’s just too much. It’s a good thing Thisby keeps good notes on the care and feeding of all the monsters. She’s going to need them to get herself and the princess out of this mess.

The Lost Books: The Scroll of Kings by Sarah Prineas. Alex knows he’s meant to be a Librarian, even though no one will give him any training or tell him the secrets of librarians. And Queen Kenneret is meant to be, well, queen, even though her advisors don’t take her too seriously either. Together Alex and Kenneret must save the kingdom from whatever it is that is scaring the books and killing librarians—without being killed themselves or losing patience with each other. Alex is hard-headed and insubordinate; Kenneret is determined and authoritative. Will they manage to put up with one another long enough to figure out what is attacking the libraries and how to fix or defeat it?

Grump: The (Fairly) True Tale of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves by Liesl Shurtliff. This book is the best yet of the fairy tale retakes by Liesl Shurtliff. Grump is a misfit who hates the underground life of his family and fellow dwarves. He actually wants to see what life is like on the surface, even though the surface is a dangerous place for dwarves.

Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow by Jessica Townsend. Morrigan Crow is a cursed child, born on Eventide, blamed for all of the misfortunes and tragedies that occur anywhere in her neighborhood, and doomed to die on her eleventh birthday. She’s sure that she has no gift, no talent to set her apart, and no place or reason to hope for anything, especially not a place in the magical Wundrous Society. Nevertheless, Morrigangets a chance to compete for a spot in the Wundrous Society. Will she be chosen?

R Is for Rebel by J. Anderson Coats. Mallianne Pirine Vinnio Aurelia Hesperus is a member of an outcast group of people, the Mileans, but even among her own people, imprisoned, Malley is different because of her rebellious, untamed spirit. She will not be reformed or reeducated or domesticated, and even the girls who are her fellow prisoners fear the trouble that Malley brings in her rebellious wake.

The Adventures of a Girl Called Bicycle by Christina Uss. Bicycle, a foundling who has grown up at the Mostly Silent monastery in Washington, D.C., is now twelve years old, a lover of cycling, and in need of a good friend. But she’s not likely to find a friend either at the monastery where the monks are limited to eight sacred words or at the Friendship Factory, a camp where she is guaranteed to make three friends or else. So, Bicycle sets off on her own, with her trusty bicycle, to make her own friends in her own way.

A Dastardly Plot (A Perilous Journey of Danger and Mayhem #1) by Christopher Healy. I like Christopher Healy’s Hero’s Guide trilogy, and I like this new series just a as much. Feminist, alternate history, inventors, skulduggery and mystery—what more could one ask for in a middle grade romp?

Nadya Skylung and the Cloudship Rescue by Jeff Seymour. This novel A is another good beginning to what looks as if it will be an exciting series. Nadya is a “skylung” who can breathe through her lungs and through gills, and she is a very important crew member on the cloudship, Orion. The illustrations in this fantasy/science fiction adventure are by Brett Helquist, one of my favorite illustrators, which makes the book even more delightful.

Inkling by Kenneth Oppel. An ink blot escapes its page and comes alive. While learning and growing, Inkling helps Ethan, who needs to learn to draw, his dad, who needs to get un-stuck from his writer’s/illustrator’s block, and little sister Sarah, who just wants a puppy. Such fun, with a realistic but sympathetic portrayal of both depression (dad) and Down’s syndrome (Sarah).

Strange Star by Emma Carroll

Dec11

This book features the Shelleys, Percy Byshe and Mary Godwin, and Mary’s half-sister Claire, and Lord Byron, and as soon as I realized that little fact, I knew that I would be somewhat ambivalent about the book. The Shelleys and their coterie, especially Percy and Byron, but really all of them, were not very good people. In fact, Percy Shelley was a predator who took advantage of at least two teenage girls and drove one of them to suicide. And Byron was even worse in the womanizing department. The tale of these two poets and their harem/community/obsessive fanbase is a sordid one.

And yet . . . The story, especially the famous story of the Villa Diodati and how the group challenged each other to write a ghost or horror story, and how Mary Godwin Shelley produced the tale of Frankenstein’s monster as a result of that challenge, has a particular and peculiar fascination. Just as the book Frankenstein is repellant and yet strangely fascinating at the same time, its origin story has inspired many an author to embroider and fill in the gaps in the Shelleys’ journey to Romantic fame.

“Yet I’ve also tried to make my story echo Mary Shelley’s in certain ways. Felix, Agatha, Elizabeth (Lizzie), Mr. Walton, and Moritz are all names taken from Frankenstein. Strange Star is about scientific ambition: Miss Stine experiments with electricity regardless of the consequences, just as Victor Frankenstein does in Shelley’s original. There is a blind character in Frankenstein who doesn’t judge people by their appearance. Many of the characters in Strange Star face prejudice because of how they look or who they are.
For me, Frankenstein is a great story, and Mary Shelley an inspirational woman. I really hope reading Strange Star will make you want to discover more about both for yourself.”

Well, not really. I think I know enough already. However, I did find that Strange Star, while rather a strange story itself, neither appeals to prurient interest by emphasizing the nasty details of the Shelleys lives not does it whitewash them and make them into kind, honorable people. The Shelleys, Claire Clairmont, and Lord Byron in this book are portrayed as just the selfish, careless people that they most likely were without the author’s giving too much information for a middle grade or young adult audience.

Strange Star itself is a little dark, but it ends on a good note. As another author with a bad reputation once wrote, “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.” I daresay I like my Romantic poets fictionalized to some extent to take away the rough edges.

Semicolon

Books we must have though we lack bread.

Archives