Meghan Reviews: Introducing Dinosaurs: Tyrannosaurus Rex

I don’t know if this is true for the majority of public librarians who serve children, but I have students in the first and second grade asking for non-fiction book all the time.  Recently, I had a teacher at a nearby school assign the kids to read five non-fiction books in one go.  Upon further questioning, both kids and parents insisted they didn’t care what the book was about per se; they just wanted a book their kids could read, one that would fulfill the assignment. Ultimately, parents wanted age-appropriate books that were interesting and easy-to-read.  That’s not necessarily a simple order when it comes to non-fiction, especially in my library where I have a lot of children who aren't strong readers or who are still learning English as their second language.

I think I found a winner with Introducing Dinosaurs:  Tyrannosaurus Rex by Susan H. Gray.  Gray adeptly explains what a Tyrannosaurus Rex is, what it probably (see Boy, Were We Wrong About Dinosaurs! for more on that) looked like, its habits, and how scientists came to these conclusions.  Robert Squier’s illustrations are clear and colorful and Gray also intersperses actual photographs of dinosaur bones and excavations, including Sue, the most complete, reconstructed T. rex skeleton at the Field Museum.  24 pages long, the book includes a table of contents, a world map indicating where T. rex bones have been found, a brief entry on fossil hunters, a glossary, and recommended books and a website (childsworld.com/links).  The author should have included more on-line resources, as that’s where kids will inevitably look first. The Child’s World site requires the user to first input the book’s ISBN in order to go to their on-line resources.  No child is going to get over that barrier to entry, especially the target audience.  Publisher fail.

As my collection needs refreshing, especially for the younger grades, I will definitely order more in this series.  The Child’s World Introducing Dinosaurs collection features 12 titles: Allosaurus, Ankylosaurus, Apatosaurus, Compsognathus, Iguanodon, Maiasaura, Oviraptor, Spinosaurus, Stegosaurus, Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus Rex, and Velociraptor.

Meghan Reviews: All About Faces!

All About Faces! By La Zoo is an “everything but the kitchen sink” concept book about the face.  The book will appeal to parents who are already design conscious (think dooce, daddytypes or mightygirl) and are sure to like the adorable, distinctly Japanese illustrations. But from a librarian standpoint there's just too much going on to recommend it widely for libraries. 

Author Zoo uses the face as a mode of discussing shapes, facial expressions, and emotions.  Parents will want to read this one-on-one with kids since Zoo uses words like:  disdain, jubilation, and dissatisfaction. (They  might also want to have a thesaurus ready when trying to explain some of those listed emotions to little ones.)  Zoo then jumps to the anatomy of the face, with a lift-the-flap page showing bones (the general idea, not the Grey’s Anatomy version), eyes, ears, nose, and mouth.  On the next page readers get to check out some things that come out of ears (wax), eyes (tears), noses (boogers), and mouths (slobber).  This is sure to get some squeals and laughs.

And then we come to my least favorite part of this book:  the coloring page.  Zoo writes, “My mother’s face changes sometimes.  But my face doesn’t.”  What could the author be getting at here?  It turns out Zoo is talking about mothers who apply make-up and includes a page where the reader can draw "make-up" on a blank female child’s face with a crayon.  Instructions indicate that the crayon can be wiped off with a tissue from the slick surface of this particular page.  Frankly, I didn’t try because I can’t imagine crayon would be that easily wiped away.  From a librarian standpoint I really don’t want to order any book that invites readers to draw on even one page.  It’s pretty difficult to explain to kids why they can’t color on the rest…Thus, the coloring page is the single greatest reason I can't recommend it for the library.

After the coloring page, Zoo returns to facial colors (red with embarrassment); more emotions (smiling and frowning); ways to play pretend by changing your face (“Give yourself a mustache and pretend to be a grown-up.”) [Note:  I just waxed mine, but perhaps I’ll grow it out and see if the kids at the library will recognize me.]; expressions using the word “face” (A long face); the way a face changes as it ages; and, finally, a matching game (find the “twin sister” face in the crowd).  There is a lot of content and several concepts in All About Faces and some are more effective than others.  I think it would work for parents looking for a book about emotions and feelings, but young readers will want someone to read this with them to explain the big words.  It’s a terrific browsing book in terms of cool, funky illustrations and lots of bang for the buck – colors, feelings, shapes, patterns – but it just doesn’t hang all together effectively and, in my opinion, wouldn’t be a good fit on the library’s concept book shelf.  The perfect home for All About Faces! is probably with a sophisticated toddler with hipster parents and not the public library. 

If you sense some ambivalence, you're right.  I enjoyed flipping through this one and am so grateful Seven Footer was nice enough to give me a copy at ALA Midwinter, but...for many libraries this book just isn't a good fit.

Rachel Reviews: Mockingbird

I know it’s not very professional, but I always have to stifle a laugh when a kid comes up to me at the reference desk and tells me that their teacher wants them to read a book where “the main character has a problem.”  The punch line is, of course, that in every novel - whether it takes place in Brooklyn, at Hogwarts, or on the planet Xenu - the main character has a problem.   Snarky criticism of teacher’s phraseology aside, I know what the kids mean.  They are looking for realistic fiction where the main character has a big ticket problem, like Divorce, Drug Addiction, or Homelessness.  

Kathryn Erskine’s Mockingbird, told from the perspective of Caitlin, a fifth grader with Asperger’s syndrome who recently lost her brother in a school shooting, boasts two problems for the price of one. But, I can promise you a no didactics/no cheesy resolution guarantee.  Although books about characters with Asperger’s are increasingly prevalent (see: Cynthia Lord’s excellent middle grade novel Rules or Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night), and you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a novel about a school shooting (see: examples too numerous to mention) Mockingbird doesn’t feel like a retread.  Erskine draws on her own experiences of having a daughter with a mild case of Asperger’s, and does a wonderful job of rendering Caitlin as a three-dimensional, sympathetic character.  Reading Mockingbird is a welcome glimpse inside the head of someone with a uniquely wired mind. 

People with Asperger’s generally have above average intelligence, but are very literal, and can’t read social cues.  They have to consciously learn many of the things that we take for granted, like when someone draws their eyebrows together, they are confused, or when someone says “I have a lot of work to do,” they are asking you to let them get back to work, not simply stating a fact.  In Mockingbird, Caitlin is devastated by the loss of her brother Devon, both because she loved him, but also because he was her interpreter.  Through him, the world was made understandable, and without him, it seems there is no one who Gets It. 

A major theme of Mockingbird is empathy.  Part of Caitlin’s symptomatology is that she doesn’t understand the feelings of others. Conversely, Caitlin’s dad, her teacher, and her counselor have just as much trouble seeing the world through Caitlin’s eyes.  In one of many heartbreaking moments, Caitlin’s father asks her what she would like to do for her birthday, and she replies that she’d like to go shopping at the mall with her brother.  Shocked, Caitlin’s dad explains what he thought Caitlin already understood; Devon can’t take her to the mall, because Devon is dead.  Caitlin is frustrated, because she knows this, but her father has asked her what she wanted, and she answered the question.  Neither father nor daughter understand why the other is saying what they are saying, and it eventually takes the school counselor to unravel the misunderstanding, and explain to Caitlin that her father wanted to know what to plan for her birthday, and to explain to her father that Caitlin does understand that Devon is dead, and in no position to take her to the mall, but that she wishes that he could.

Because it covers trendy topics and is poignant and well written, Mockingbird is classic award bait, but it is also a surprisingly universal story about finding a way to live after the worst happens.  I highly recommend this book to adult readers of children’s literature, and hope that teachers, librarians, and parents find a way to get it into the hands of young readers as well. With diagnoses of Asperger’s syndrome on the rise, who among us couldn’t use a little more empathy?

Meghan Reviews: Crust and Spray

Crust and Spray: Gross Stuff in Your Eyes, Ears, Nose, and Throat by C.S. Larsen is one of a series by Lerner Publishing called “Gross Body Science”. I ordered them all for my library and most circulated immediately.  Crust and Spray is especially fun and timely during the winter months when kids are sneezing and coughing all over the place. Instead of tossing them out the window, I’m giving them this book and some hand sanitizer.

From front-to-back, Crust and Spray has a lot to recommend it. The cover features a huge eyeball and bright illustrations of bacteria.  The chapters are divided into: Boogers, Snot, and Sneezing; Cough, Hack, and Wheeze; Eye Secretions, Pinkeye, and Sties; and Earwax, Ear Germs, and Infections. Does anything more need to be said?

Well, since we’re librarians I’ll evaluate the criteria that make it worth ordering and hand-selling. Crust and Spray is full of vibrant, accurate illustrations by Michael Slack of things like pollen grains, mucus membranes, and fungi. They help present science as something exciting and creative. The book is also full of delightfully disgusting pictures of pus draining from an ear infection (not for the faint of heart), eyeballs, and uvulas.  To the delight of any young reader, Larsen has also included a recipe for fake snot. Awesomely gross.

But Larsen doesn’t do gross just for the sake of gross. Crust and Spray includes call-out boxes with “Gross Out” facts that are relevant and clearly written. The writing style is mildly chatty and funny without veering into stupidity.  The actual content of the book is quite valuable. I especially like the Glossary, Selected Bibliography, and Further Reading at the back of the book. The Glossary provides and clarifies key terms and the Bibliography and Further Reading act as a relevant gateway to other books and websites.  I’ll never have to hunt for booger information again! 

Crust and Spray is a great browsing book and provides enough in the way of scientific information to be a fine way for a kid to jump into more technical fare about the body.  

A Whiff of...Suprisingly Good Children's Nature Poetry

Like the existence of good and bad touches, there exists both good and bad (terrible, nauseating, painful) rhyming poetry.

A Whiff of Pine, a Hint of Skunk by Deborah Ruddell is the good variety of rhyming poetry. The rhymes make you want to repeat the poems out loud, not only for the humor surrounding the anthropomorphization of woodland creatures, but for the delight in the rhythm of the language. A fun collection of poems with some good examples for the introduction of common poetic devices.

Rachel Reviews: Love Ya Bunches by Lauren Myracle

Lauren Myracle’s Luv Ya Bunches, a cutesy, chat-acronym infested middle-grade novel about a quartet of fifth grade girls all named after flowers, received a lot of attention from the blogosphere after Scholastic declined to include it in elementary school book fairs.  The juicy bit was not the ban of the book, which does feature some (ho-hum) swearing and a lisped iteration of the word “penith,” but rather that Scholastic asked Myracle to change the fact that Milla, one of the main characters, has two mothers.  To her credit, Myracle refused.  In an article in School Library Journal she is quoted as saying “kids benefit hugely from seeing themselves reflected positively in the books they read. It's an extremely empowering and validating experience."  This quote brings us to an important point about Luv Ya Bunches: This is a book about positive representations of minorities.  The lesbian mothers play no role in the story; (all the parents in Luv Ya Bunches are of the wah-wah Charlie Brown variety) they are only there because they make Milla a minority figure.  All the main characters are in some important sense minorities.  Perky, know-it-all Katie-Rose is biracial, half Chinese and half Caucasian.  Mysterious, sad Violet is African American, with a mentally ill mother. Shy, kind Yasaman (Turkish for Jasmine) is Muslim.  And blonde haired, blue eyed Milla (short for Camilla) has her two mommies.   At first, I was skeptical, finding the contrivance very heavy handed.  I mean come on, how many times did we need to hear that Yasaman was a big fan of peace?   

But midway through the book I began thinking about my own middle school clique, and that was when I started to cut Myracle some slack.  Looking back on it, I realized that we were a pretty diverse lot.  There was half Jewish me, two ABC’s (American born Chinese), an immigrant from Russia, a half Filipino girl from Australia, and our token WASP, who had recently been demoted from the sixth grade A-List.  And here lies the actual important contribution of Luv Ya Bunches to the children’s literary canon: (and no, it is not the bold mention of dingleberries) This isn’t a book about nerds or cool kids. This is a book for the rest of us.  My friends and I weren’t diverse in a deliberate, representative way like Myracle’s characters, but we did become friends for the same reason as the Flower Girls.  Like Katie-Rose, Milla, Yasaman, and Violet, we met in the middle.  Whether we were refugees from the popular crowd or from silent, almost nerd-dom, we were looking for people to giggle with us, crush with us, protect us, and ultimately give us a sense of belonging, a group identity.  We might not have had a lot in common, but we gave each other the confidence to become the teens and ultimately the adults who we were meant to be.  Luv Ya Bunches depicts this common middle school phenomenon in a way I haven’t seen in other books, and in that way, Milla’s mothers, and each of the other girl’s racial or ethnic identities, become secondary.   Don’t get me wrong, I am very happy that Myracle stood up to Scholastic and refused to straight-wash her book, but I think, in the end, the story would have worked either way.  Myracle could have written this book about four white girls from “traditional” families and it still would be one in which girls would recognize themselves and feel proud.