Great Authors: Jean Ferris

Jean Ferris is probably best known for Once Upon a Marigold and its sequel Twice Upon a Marigold, her updated fairy tales about a mind-reading princess, a runaway boy and the dwarf who cares for him, an evil queen, and the tooth fairy. However, Ms. Ferris has been around for quite a while and is deserving of a wider audience. Her fiction is wonderful for young adults and upper elementary kids -- full of humor and emotion and exiting action.

What I love most about Jean Ferris is her selection of quirky, screwball comedies. The two Marigolds fall into this category, as do Love Among the Walnuts and Much Ado About Grubstake. There's a quality to them that makes me think of John Irving (The World According to Garp); they are full of characters that in other novels would be hopeless misfits and yet in Ferris's stories they are valued individuals and important to the resolution of the story.

It's practically impossible to describe the plot of Love Among the Walnuts, other than to say that it involves a mental institution, a pair of evil uncles, and two people and a chicken who've been put in a coma. In Much Ado About Grubstake, 16 year old Arley has to outsmart a powerful businessman who is trying to buy up all the played-out mines in tiny, run-down Grubstake. That she has to manage this with a misfit collection of townspeople and reformed bad guys is part of the novel's charm.

Her comedies always bring together strange assortments of people with all their quirks and oddities and over the course of the story they manage to find family in each other. I love that about her work.


All of her comedies are suitable for younger readers -- say 3rd grade and up -- but would also work for older readers right through high school. They are great vocabulary stretchers, too, so much so that I had my 9 year old start making lists of words she wasn't sure about. She's probably added 50 new words to her vocabulary thanks to Jean Ferris.

Ferris also has some more serious novels and these would be more appropriate for a little older audience. Of Sound Mind is a fascinating book about a boy who is hearing but has been raised by deaf parents. Theo's role as family interpreter is explored even as it changes when his father has a stroke and his self-absorbed mother can't bear to take care of him. Once again, Ferris does a nice job of portraying people with all their warts, though this time with a more serious bent.

Into the Wind is part one of a three-part series which is more or less a romance for high schoolers, complete with an orphaned heroine and a dashing pirate who rescues her. It takes place in 1814, is loaded with action, and provides some historical detail, all in a wholesome, totally-appropriate-for-older-teens story (no bodice ripping here, folks).

Underground is another historical novel, this time exploring slavery. The main character, Charlotte, is a slave at the Mammoth Cave Hotel. When she discovers runaway slave sometimes come to the hotel on their way north, Charlotte has to decide whether she, too, will run away or stay with Stephen, another slave who doesn't feel the need or desire to leave. Another one which would be good for junior high and up.

Ferris does a wonderful job of creating memorable, original characters in compelling, entertaining stories. It's definitely work looking her up the next time you need reading material for your older kids.

The Missing

The Missing is Margaret Peterson Haddix's newest series and I have to say, it's a original idea. In fact, as I was reading volume one, Found, I couldn't predict what was actually going on. When the twist was revealed, I was intrigued.

Jonah was adopted as a baby. He's always known he was adopted and he is not much bothered by this fact. His parents obviously love him and Haddix pokes gentle fun at them for their perhaps overly-earnest desire to be sensitive to Jonah's adoption "issues," should he ever begin to have any. However, things begin to happen that lead Jonah to wonder just what the circumstances surrounding his adoption were. He meets Chip, a new kid in his neighborhood, and then he gets a bizarre letter. It's a simple piece of white paper that says "You are one of the missing."

Jonah dismisses it as a prank, but when Chip gets the same letter, the boys begin to wonder what it means. Jonah thinks it might have something to do with his adoption, but Chip isn't adopted -- is he? Turns out he is, and his parents have kept that fact from him his entire life. Then the boys get another letter: "Beware. They're coming back to get you."

With Jonah's younger sister Katherine, they begin to investigate where they might have come from and discover they're part of a group of 36 kids who were all adopted and who now, mysteriously, have migrated from all over the country to the community where Jonah and Chip live.

I'm going to give some spoilers here, so if you don't want to know the twist on which this whole series rests, stop reading now and go check out Found from your local library.


What is it all about? In a word, time travel. I know -- you didn't see that coming, did you? Me neither. Turns out Jonah and Chip and the other kids were kidnapped out of time in a cosmic baby-smuggling ring. And they were kidnapped because they were important personages in history -- the Princes in the Tower, Virginia Dare, Anastasia Romanoff, Chinese princesses, philosophers...people who would have died too soon but instead were "rescued" to be adopted by prestige-seeking parents in the distant future. In a bungled baby-snatch, the 36 kids were accidentally crash landed in the late 20th century -- a plane-load of babies, mysteriously appearing on a small regional runway.

Unfortunately, their kidnappings have wounded Time and while one faction of time travellers is trying to snatch them back so they can be adopted in the future, another faction is equally determined to return them to their proper times so they can die as they were meant to do. Neither option is very appealing to the kids. If they go forward, they'll be regressed to babies and have to grow up all over again. If they go back, well...they die.

Eventually, the faction trying to restore Time to its proper path wins and Chip is sent back to 15th century England with another boy, Alex, to fulfill their destiny as the Princes in the Tower. But Jonah and Katherine manage to hitch a ride with Chip and are also catapulted back to the 1400s. They are reluctantly given the chance to "put things right" in a way that heals Time and spares their friends. And that is the subject of the second book, Sent.

Haddix has laid the groundwork for a very ambitious series here -- at lot of books, if she truly plans to cover each child on the plane (one child doesn't show up for the big adoption reunion and Jonah's sister, Katherine, who is not adopted, takes her place; Alex and Chip are handled in one book, but still, there are a lot of kids to cover). That ought to be enough to keep her busy for a while. The books are well written and do a nice job of combining the time-travel elements with actual history. These are books that do a lot to illuminate events and people from the past, so they get my vote just for that.

I don't know what adopted kids will make of this series. Certainly there's a kind of wish fulfillment here, finding out that your birth parents were royalty or famous or whatever -- like everyone wanting to believe they were Napoleon or Lady Godiva or Cleopatra in a former life instead of Joe the Pig Farmer. It might pass completely below the radar for adopted kids, or it might open some doors to talk about birth parents and what you actually know about them. Jonah and Chip present different adoption experiences, with Jonah's all very open and above-board and Chip's hidden as though it were completely immaterial, or even embarassing. Chip also feels "out of place," which is put down to his being literally "out of time," but his feelings may provoke a response in some adopted kids (and bio kids as well; feeling out of place can just be a teenage condition, too). I think parents of adopted kids should read this first so they know what kinds of ideas or questions or issues might be raised by the story.

39 Clues: Into the Gauntlet

Maybe I should have called this Rick Riordan Week because even though this particular book isn't authored by Riordan, the whole series and kickoff book were his brainchild. The final volume was actually written by Margaret Peterson Haddix, another well-known kid lit author, and it's a solid ending to a series that I, at least, wasn't sure could be brought to a satisfactory close.

The story picks up after Dan and Amy's Very Bad Day in Jamaica, where an innocent dies and they discover they're Madrigals. Now their task is to somehow unite the branches of the Cahill family and stop the competitive bloodshed that has spanned centuries. A pretty tall task, and one that on the face of it seems difficult for them to achieve. And I'll tell you straight out that this ending wouldn't make it in an adult book because it's a bit too pat, a bit too "now the world's a better place," a bit too Scooby Doo-ish to be completely plausible. But it's helpful to remember the target audience here: middle school and younger. For kids of that age, I think it works, and if it's a tad naive, it doesn't insult their intelligence.

The action moves to England, where it turns out that William Shakespeare was a Madrigal as well and clues at his grave point the Cahill sibs to the Madrigal stronghold. Haddix does a good job of incorporating the cryptic inscription on Shakespeare's monument at Stratford-Upon-Avon into part of a greater Madrigal code -- that actually made me smile, since that inscription has baffled scholars for years precisely because it makes no sense. Now, in a Cahill context, it does. Very neat.

This is the first book of the series where it felt like Haddix was struggling to catch the rhythm and pace of the previous books. The opening chapters are somewhat clunky and awkward, but eventually the book levels out and seems to find its mojo. Haddix moves the point of view around in the book so we see events not just through Dan and Amy's eyes but also through Hamilton Holt's, Ian Kabra's, Alistair Oh's and a surprise returnee from book one, Sinead Starling of the Starling triplets. Getting into their heads, this next generation of Cahills, allows the reader to see the shift in their attitudes, which does ultimately make the ending work.

Book 10 is a tidy wrap-up of what's basically an extended geography and history lesson. It's kind of a lightweight series, mainly action without a ton of substance, but it was a good read and one that my 9 year old really enjoyed.

I've Got a Crush...

On Jon Berkeley.

I have blogged before about his very excellent book The Hidden Boy, so I was tickled pink to find the first book in his Wednesday Tales series, The Palace of Laughter. And I am here to tell you, it did not disappoint.

It's fantasy, but it's so fresh, and told in such a novel way...I am almost at a loss for words (and that never happens. Seriously.)

Miles Wednesday, who lives in a barrel outside the town of Larde, meets a tiger one day in the woods. A talking tiger. Who decides not to eat him. The next morning, the tiger is gone and Miles, who has run away from the orphanage (Pinchbucket House -- how's that for a name?) sneaks into the circus to see if the tiger is real or not.

Instead of a tiger, he meets an angel. A real angel named Little who's in trouble. He rescues her from the evil ringmaster, the Great Cortado, and this begins their cross country adventure. They are searching for the Palace of Laughter -- though they don't know what or where it is. They hope to find Little's angel companion, Stormpoint, but they are sidetracked by a number of odd and sometimes frankly bizarre happenings.

Love Love Love Jon Berkeley. Love his originality, love the mesmerizing rhythm of his prose. I get lost in his finely drawn, almost-modern-yet-curiously-old-fashioned-worlds. I can picture each one of his oddball characters -- from Little, whose skin glows faintly, to fat Lady Partridge, who lives in a tree house with a hundred cats, to Tangerine, the bear Miles has had since he was left at the orphanage and who is brought to life by some magic of Little's.

Seriously, give this one a try. Or read The Hidden Boy -- if you like fantasy or even just oddball fiction, Jon Berkeley won't let you down.

The Magic Half

Annie Barrows (Ivy and Bean) is a good writer. I like her storytelling, love her use of detail, enjoy the way she unfolds her characters. However, Annie Barrows does one thing that gets under my skin. She has her characters swear. She doesn't do it a lot, but that fact that she does it at all annoys the heck out of me because it's always completely gratuitous.

gratuitous: lacking in benefit; uncalled for or lacking a reasonable basis. In other words, NOT NECESSARY.

Sometimes swearing is critical to the realism of the story. Mexican Whiteboy wouldn't work without a certain grittiness that the swearing adds to the characters and events. It's a tough neighborhood and it wouldn't be believable for the characters to run around saying "Fudge!" But The Magic Half would work just fine without the OMGs and the one "Christ Almighty" which marred an otherwise excellent story.

Eleven year old Miri is the middle child between two sets of twins -- "a one-in-50,000 family" her dad likes to say. But Miri feels isolated. Now in their new house, Miri finds a piece of glass stuck to the wall of her room. She looks through it and finds herself in 1935. Here she meets Molly, who has "called her" to help "set things right" -- though precisely how they're going to do that, neither of them is sure. Molly is similarly isolated, living with an aunt and two cousins who see her as a nuisance and a burden. One cousin, Horst, loses no opportunity to make Molly's life as miserable as possible, even to the point of physically harming her when he can get away with it.

The story does a nice job of transitioning back and forth from the present to 1935. Molly and Miri are believable, as are the other kids in the story, Miri's twin sisters and brothers. It's suspenseful, it's well written, it's got a nice ending. It's such a great story...

Just wish Annie Barrows would lose the swearing.

Ingo: A Series for Mermaid Lovers

Mermaids, I suspect, are a perennial favorite among girls. Unfortunately, books about mermaids tend to be a bit light on literary merit. In a word, they often stink. What a great thing, then, is the Ingo series by Helen Dunmore.

11 year old Sapphire and her brother Connor live in Cornwall, growing up "in sight of the sea," as their mother puts it. One midsummer's night, their father, a fisherman, leaves the family to go for a walk by the ocean and disappears. The family is fractured by his disappearance. When his boat washes ashore some days later, rumors abound -- he drank too much that night and fell overboard, he only made it look like he drowned and he's left them for another woman. But there is one possibility that Sapphire is forced to consider: that he went into the sea of his own free will, lured by something out there, something irresistible.

Her suspicions are sharpened when her brother Connor begins disappearing for hours at a time; in fact, he seems barely conscious of the time he is gone and his manner tells Sapphy that he is being pulled toward the sea as their father was. She sees him sitting on a rock just off the shore, talking to a strange girl, but he denies later that he was with anyone. Then one day, she herself feels drawn, pulled like a magnet toward the ocean, and there she meets Faro, a boy who takes her into the realm of Ingo beneath the sea.

Ingo is a step up from books like The Tale of Emily Windsnap (and for comparison, Emily Windsnap is a step up from the Tinkerbell books). The writing is better, the plot is richer and more complex. The characters and their motives are more finely drawn and more multi-faceted. Even Ingo itself is a riddle: is it good? Is it evil? Do Faro and his sister mean well or ill? It all adds to the tension and the conflict. There's a parallel plot involving Sapphire and Connor's mum, who is beginning to date again and the book explores their feelings for her new friend, who they both like and detest in equal measure. He's a likable guy, but he's not their dad. And they both feel very strongly that their father is still alive, perhaps is even in Ingo.

here are four books in the series. It's been around for a while -- Ingo was published in 2005 -- but the last book was only recently made available in the US. If you have a strong reader, this one could go as young as 9 or 10, and I think its appeal would hold into 8th or even 9th grade. If you have a daughter who likes magic and fantasy, this is a good one to try.

Book 10 Is Here!

Released today.

Are you running to the bookstore so your little readers can have it by the time they get home from school, or did you pre-order it so you can stroll leisurely to the mailbox and pick it up that way? Or are you cheap like Bookivore and planning to wait for the next Scholastic Book Warehouse Sale to get it for half price? Of course, this means we have to take our chances with the public library, so I might have to cave and go to the bookstore for this one...

I can't wait to see how Amy and Dan fare in the final book of the series.

Yes, Virginia, There are Unicorns...

If you were in junior high or high school in the late 70s and 80s, the word unicorn is going to conjure up images of afros, rollerskating in short shorts, and sparkly tee-shirts with rainbows and such like. They belong in the same category as Care Bears and Trolls-- a collective interest that we're now just a little ashamed to admit we actually liked back when we were young and impressionable.

At least, that's the baggage I had to get over when I picked up the first volume of The Unicorn Chronicles, by Bruce Coville. I had very low expectations for this series, but agreed to read it because my then-10 year old niece really wanted me to.


Now would be a good time to say, I was completely wrong. This is no sappy, sugary unicorn tale; it's a fully realized fantasy with complex characters and a compelling plot that follows so many twists and turns I won't even begin to attempt to untangle it all here. The fact that it spans four largish books would make that task pretty unrealistic anyway.

Here's an ultra-short teaser: Cara Diana Hunter has been thrust into another world to escape a Hunter. Why she is being hunted, she doesn't know. She only knows that she and her grandmother, Ivy, are always on the run. Now she finds herself in a world where the trees have blue leaves and odd creatures are roaming about, some friendly and some not. She meets a unicorn named Lightfoot and learns about the Hunters and their "grandmother" Beloved, a woman who is being simultaneously wounded and healed constantly by a shattered unicorn horn in her heart. She is consumed with hatred for the unicorns, and although the unicorns left earth centuries earlier, Beloved can't rest until she finds a way into Luster to finally carry out the genocide she has dreamt about for so long.

Along the way, Cara meets a variety of creatures and characters -- dragons, delvers, dwarves, centaurs, a gryphon, a geomancer, an assortment of humans, and the squijum (don't ask me what it is -- some kind of squirly thing, I think). It's at least partially a coming-of-age story about Cara, but it's so enmeshed in the fantasy that it doesn't feel like that at all. It's really the story of the unicorns and Beloved. The fourth book, last in the series, is finally out some twenty years after the series began. I can only be glad I was introduced to these books now and didn't have to wait two decades to see how it all turned out.

HOTCHA BIG SPOILER ALERT: SERIOUSLY DON'T READ THE NEXT PARAGRAPH IF YOU DON"T WANT SOME CRITICAL STUFF REVEALED!

There are some things in the final book that some readers might find disturbing. Cara's grandmother, we learn in Book 2, is actually a unicorn. She became human when she stumbled back to Earth while pursued by hunters. This makes Cara 1/4 unicorn. In the last book, Cara is offered the chance to become a unicorn to escape a large party of hunters who are tracking her. She accepts, but I found this really unsettling, the idea of losing your human-ness. I was particularly bothered by her lack of hands and found myself feeling rather claustrophobic about her transformation. Another theme developed in the last book is that of the Great Powers, the immortal beings who created the world of Luster and at least some of its inhabitants. The Great Powers are portrayed as essentially human in nature, just very much more powerful. Two of them have been exiled because of the illegal creation of Luster -- something the Great Powers aren't actually great enough to be permitted to do. One of them was exiled to earth, where he must "do enough good to earn my way back into paradise." So, running around in the narrative you have these beings that are, for lack of a better explanation, the gods of this world who subscibe to a kind of "do good, get good" philosophy. It's probably more mature than I'd be comfortable with for a child under 12.

It's epic, it's sweeping, it's long, but it's well worth the effort. Good reading for 10-15 year olds, maybe a little younger if your reader isn't intimidated by big books. Just bear in mind that the last book is for an older child -- perhaps 7th grade or so -- because of the themes and events it contains.

11 Birthdays

11 Birthdays, by Wendy Mass, is kind of like Groundhog Day for kids: the characters are experiencing the same day over and over and over again, but this time, the characters are a pair of 11 year olds.

Amanda and Leo have known each other since, well, since birth. And every year, they've celebrated their birthdays together. Until their 10th birthday, when Amanda overheard Leo tell some boys that he didn't really like hanging out with a girl so much anymore. Devastated, Amanda runs away from their party and cuts off contact with Leo completely.

It's one year later and Amanda is facing her 11th birthday alone. Worse, she and Leo are having competing parties on the same night and it's looking like Amanda's is going to be the losing venue. She botches her gymnastics team try-out, her party flops, her mom gets fired and all Amanda can be glad of is that the day is finally over. Except that it's not. She wakes up the following morning to discover that it's her birthday again. No one seems to realize that the day is repeating itself but Amanda and she's too weirded out to know what to do.

Eventually, Leo and Amanda make up and find a way to mend the repeating loop in their lives, but not before they learn some lessons about friendship and finding your place in the world and forgiveness and understanding.

This was a lovely book, one that I passed on to my 9 year old immediately. It's perfect for the 9-13 crowd and it's blessedly free of the OMGs that seem to be everywhere in tween literature. Because the main characters are male and female, this one could work for either boys or girls, but it may seem more like a girl's book because the story is narrated by Amanda.

The Red Pyramid OR Percy Jackson Goes to Egypt

The Red Pyramid is Rick Riordan's newest novel for the pre-teen and teen set. In it, Carter and Sadie Kane find out they are members of an ancient family of magicians, entangled for millenia with the Egyptian gods. If this sounds a little reminiscent of the Percy Jackson and Olympians series, that's because it is.

Some things are quite different: there's the obvious difference between the Egyptian and Olympian gods, the heroes are a brother and sister, there's a society for magicians which is distinctly unwelcoming to the pair, and there's a persistent theme of possession -- gods possessing humans to achieve their own ends, or humans "hosting" gods to achieve their own ends.

But the action -- fast and well done -- is the same, as is the light, humorous storytelling and the need for the characters to find out about/explain the Egyptian myths. Likewise, there's a long-imprisoned monster who is longing to break free into the mortal world again, thus bringing about the destruction of life as we know it.

There are enough differences to make the book mostly feel like a separate adventure; the narrative bounces back and forth between Carter and Sadie, which allows the reader to see more sides to the story; but there are many places that felt similar to the Percy Jackson books. There are many more OMGs in this book, but no other swearing, and the violence is again mitigated by the monsters turning to dust when they're killed. I was uncomfortable with the possession theme and with the minions, who are occasionally referred to as demons, so would probably not let a child under 10 read this one, and possibly not a child under 12 without some discussion about how contrary to our beliefs this book runs.

It was a good, fast-paced read and very enjoyable, so here's my verdict: if your child read the Percy Jackson books and loved them, this will give them a hit of what they liked. If, like me, you're uncomfortable with some of the themes, you might want to hold off on it until your child is older or give it a miss entirely.

Runaway

"What happened to that book you were reading about
China?"

"Lost on Planet China? I finished it. Now I'm reading
a book about a girl who had a brain transplant against her will."

"What?"

"A brain transplant."

"You're kidding me, right?"

"Um...no."

"Who in their right mind would buy a plot about a brain
transplant?"

Yep, it's book three in Meg Cabot's Airhead trilogy. Runaway follows the further adventures of Emerson Watts, whose brain was transplanted into the body of supermodel Nikki Howard after a freak accident at a Stark Megastores' grand opening. Book one, Airhead, is mostly concerned with Em learning to live as Nikki. In book two, Being Nikki, Em learns that Nikki didn't die of an aneurysm as she'd been told, but is very much alive and the victim of attempted murder because of something she'd overheard about Stark Megastores and the launch of their new, low-cost laptops. She tried to blackmail her boss and wound up as nothing more than a brain to be discarded until a compassionate doctor transplanted her into yet another available body, this one much too average for Nikki's taste.

Book three opens with Nikki, her mother and brother, and Em all being held prisoner by Brandon Stark, Nikki's one-time boyfriend. He wants Nikki's secret so he can blackmail his father. Nikki wants her old body back. Lulu, Em's roommate, wants Nikki's brother, Steven. And Em? She wants Christopher, her best friend, to be more than a best friend.

Got that?

It's barely plausible as a plot, but it is very readable and funny in a campy, conspiracy-theory kind of way. I like Meg Cabot's writing style -- she's like a Sophie Kinsella for the high school set -- but she doesn't quite make it past my mom-filter on this one. My biggest objection throughout this whole series has been the implication that Nikki is no sexual innocent. Em is, there's no question of that, but many references are made to Nikki's body and its sexuality. Em is confused by the sensations and signals her new body sends her. In book three, we find out that Nikki really isn't an innocent -- Brandon admits he'd only stayed with Nikki "for sex." And Nikki's been a bit of a skank, sneaking around behind Brandon's back to hook up with Lulu's boyfriend at the time, Justin. But now she wants to get back together with Brandon because she's convinced he'll be able to help her get a reverse-brain transplant so she can go back to being Nikki, even though the operation would almost certainly kill either her or Em or both.

Got that?

Em has to deal with the fallout from their infidelity, has to make sense of her body's messages, has to find a way to get Christopher to see that she loves him (though I have to say, this is pretty obvious and I found myself wondering how she could miss something so glaringly clear). While I like Cabot's easy, breezy style, and I very much liked the realization Em has that being pretty on the outside doesn't really make up for being a jerk on the inside, I have all the same objections I had to the first book; there's just too much sexuality in this for me to be comfortable with it as a junior high book, and almost too much for me to be comfortable with it below age 16.

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon

How fitting that I should pick up this little gem to read just as we're embarking on our World Tour for summer lessons. Where the Mountain Meets the Moon is a perfect pearl of a book, deftly blending Chinese folklore and tradition with an almost modern, very accessible, heroine.

Minli lives with her parents in a dreary little village where life is just barely eked out of the barren soil. Inspired by her father's stories, Minli decides to set off for the Neverending Mountain to ask the Old Man of the Moon how she can change her family's fortune. Along the way, she is guided by a talking goldfish, meets a dragon born of a painting, watches the Goddess of Weaving flirt with an oxherd, has dinner with a king, and meets the happiest people in the land. In the end, she changes the fortunes of her whole village, but not at all the way she thought she would. Woven throughout are the stories Minli has heard from her father, as well as the stories of the people she meets, which you can't help feeling are going to become fairy tales for future generations.

The story is amply enriched by Grace Lin's beautiful paintings, which are reminiscent of traditional Chinese illustration techniques, and the little woodcut-style pictures that adorn each chapter. Other Grace Lin books we've encountered have been artistically much simpler; these are really a step up in both style and impact.

The story is magical, simple and rich at the same time. The whole thing was just charming. I have been bugging my 9 year old to finish what she's reading because she's got to read this next. My sense of this one is that it would make an excellent read-aloud book, too, because of the fairy tale nature of the text, so I may try it out on my son as well. Probably best for 3rd grade and up, though, if reading independently.

The Hidden Boy

"When Bea Flint opened the front door, just a few days before her little brother imploded, she found a stocky man in a sea captain's uniform waiting on the doormat. "

I am a sucker for a good opening line; that one starts things off with a nice off the wall touch. The Hidden Boy, by Jon Berkeley, just gets weirder, but in a unique, inspired sort of way.

Imploding brothers aside, Bea and her family are not your average bunch. Her mother is a tattoo artist, her father is a mountain who used to ride with a motorcycle gang. And then there's Clockwork Gaby, who needs to be wound every day to keep functioning. No one know where she came from: she was simply there when they moved into the apartment. Granny Delphine stares at everyone through her owlish spectacles, which Bea suspects show more than they ought. Add to this the semi-kidnapped neighbor's daughter, several people with some sort of psychic powers, a presumed-dead leader, a missing parrot, and a clan of menacing, dough-faced burglars and you have a recipe for a highly original, can't-tell-where-it's-going-next sort of book.

When Theo disappears on the "crossing" to Bell Hoot, only Bea can hear his voice, first through the "Squeak Jar" and then in her dreams. Bea, it turns out, may be the only one who can find Theo and bring him home. This turns out to be very complicated indeed, especially since someone sinister is invading her dreams, searching just like Bea for the Hidden Boy, who may or may not be Theo.

I loved that this book was so different than the average run of kids' fantasy books. That the fantasy is rooted in the real world simply added to the mystery. I especially loved the Gummint (for which, read: government) men and their shadowy persecution of Mumbo Jumbo, the powers of observation and intuition that Granny Delphine has studied for years. The book plays with language; everything from the anagrams that Phoebe (or Blue Hope) fiddles with (even Bell Hoot turns out to be an anagram), to the descriptions of the countryside and the strange people Bea and her family are encountering.

A good one for middle school or junior high, possibly a little younger as well if your child likes fantasy.

.

Magazines for Kids

Access to books is a critical aspect of cultural capital. But equally important is exposure to a range of texts and formats -- it allows children to transfer the skills they learn reading fiction to other mediums, and adapt them to works of different format and lengths.

Magazines are a great way to give kids experience with different kinds of texts -- poems, non-fiction articles, short stories, song lyrics.

Back in the stone age, when Bookivore was a kid, there was one magazine for kids: Highlights. That was it, folks. Now there is a veritable feast of magazines for children, some quite excellent, some just thinly-veiled advertisements for products, TV shows and movies. Highlights is still a favorite at our house: it's far more colorful than what it was when I was a kid, and nicely multicultural too, teaching about Diwali, Ramadan, Chinese New Year and a host of other cultural celebrations and traditions. The magazine works hard at promoting good values and good behavior, which it does this from a sense of fair play rather than from any particular belief system. It's a nice blend of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, comic strips and puzzles that appeals to kids from 3 to 10.


A nice addition to the Highlights stable is High Five, their magazine for 2-5 year olds. The text is much simpler, pictures are larger and fill the pages. It has the same focus on good morals, though the message is obviously greatly simplified. One lovely feature of both these magazines is no advertising.


I absolutely love these next three, put out by the National Wildlife Federation: Ranger Rick (at the top of this post) Your Big Backyard, and Wild Animal Baby.


Like the two Highlights magazines, the NWF's offerings are stepped for different age groups. Ranger Rick is for ages 7 and up, though for independent reading your child might need to be a little older. Your Big Backyard is for 3-7 year olds, and Wild Animal Baby is for 1-4 year olds.



One nice feature about Wild Animal Baby is that it comes in a board book format of heavier cardboard, rather than flimsy magazine pages. It's perfect for little hands to hold. The photography in all these magazines is fantastic and the range of articles is impressive -- whatever animals your little ones like, they'll show up eventually in these pages, one way or another. Another blessing: no ads to disrupt your reading.

National Geographic Kids is another one we get, but I would be lying if I said it was a favorite. It was a gift, otherwise I'd cancel my subscription. I find the layout overly busy and it's loaded with ads for candy and video games. Additionally, it contains feature articles on movies -- special effects, actor interviews, etc. Not strictly National Geographic stuff -- more along the lines of paid endorsements. In and among the plugs are some interesting articles about animal rescues, critter cams, and habitats, but it's pretty buried in junk. Ostensibly for 6-14 year olds, but I can't see kids sticking with it that long.

Another one for 2-6 year olds that gets good reviews is Ladybug. It's colorful and full of stories, poems. The publishers also have a magazine called Babybug, which is made of heavy stock like Wild Animal Baby. They also publish one called Click! which is geared more towards science and nature.

Of a similar nature is Spider, which is for 6-9 year olds. It includes stories, poems, articles and illustrations from around the world.

For older kids, there are magazines about science, like Odyssey.


And magazines about world history, like Calliope.


If you have a sports nut, Sports Illustrated for Kids might be a good choice. Parents rated this one very highly because it focuses on the positive achievements of athletes and their good sportsmanship, rather than on their questionable activities and sexual antics. One word of caution here would be that kids may assume the adult version of SI is okay because of their exposure to SIKids. Obviously the articles in SI are going to burst some bubbles, so that's something to consider.

Appleseeds is a magazine full of non-fiction and social studies articles for kids ages 7-9. Each issue covers a particular theme: Becoming President, Whiz Kids, Unusual Structures, Halloween. Rather a narrow age range, but the content makes it of use in giving kids experience with non-fiction text.

Ask is for 7-10 year olds covering science, inventions, recipes, web activities, projects, and other activities. Each issue is devoted to a particular theme -- water, camouflage, migration, the musical brain, etc.

Cricket has been around since the '70s and is another publication that celebrates fiction, though this time from established, even classical writers like Shakespeare, Robert Frost, Shel Silverstein, and Lloyd Alexander. It also includes games and puzzles. It's geared for 9-14 year olds.


This is really just a sampling. There are many more publications for kids, of varying quality: American Girl Magazine, Kids Discover, Boy's Life, Cobblestone, Girl's Life, Disney Princess, Dig, Nick Jr. Preschool Playroom. The list goes on and on.



Before subscribing, go to your library and see what these magazines offer -- look at several issues, if possible, to get a sense of the kind of content they regularly offer. Be leery of magazine that contain a lot of ads: they really will encourage your kids to pester you for Yogos, or whatever. And if the subscription prices seem too high, remember that magazine subscriptions make excellent birthday and Christmas gifts from Grandma and Grandpa. All of our subscriptions have been gifts and they are very much appreciated.

Images courtesy of Amazon.com and National Wildlife Federation

Background Reading

A super quickie: If you have a child who is interested in the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan, this little book from Dorling Kindersley (DK) is good background reading. It covers the basic relationships between the Greek gods and also many of the hero myths -- Hercules, Perseus, and Theseus -- and some of the more familiar stories like Pandora, Midas, Orpheus and Daedalus. It's a nice overview that helps put the Percy Jackson books in context and makes some of the monsters and events make more sense.

Note: this is the same book with different covers. Your bookstore might have either one.

Invisible Detective

The Invisible Detective, by Justin Richards, is a series billed for 5th to 8th graders with mystery and adventure and a dose of the paranormal thrown in for good measure.


It's not new -- book 1, The Paranormal Puppet Show (which goes by Double Life in the U.S.) was published in the UK in 2003 -- but it hasn't been heavily promoted in the U.S. and that's a shame because these are really excellent books.

The stories center around a group of children in 1936 London; Meg whose father knocks her and her mother around, Flinch, who has no family and lives on the street, Jonny, who is undersized and bullied, and Arthur Drake, the 14 year old son of a Scotland Yard detective. Together they have become the Cannoniers, the leg-men for a mysterious character known as the Invisible Detective. The book reveals right away that there is no Invisible Detective -- it's Art and his friends, solving minor mysteries and answering questions for the people of the community. Suddenly, though, they find themselves caught up in a real mystery, and one that threatens to be much bigger than they bargained for.



An odd exhibition has come to Cannon Street -- a warehouse filled with automatons which look eerily like people who have been reported missing in the community. Coincidence? The children aren't sure, but there is certainly something sinister going on, if only they could figure out what it is.


At the same time, there's a parallel story from 2003; Another Arthur Drake, this one thoroughly modern, stumbles into a shop one day and discovers the casebook of the Invisible Detective. Funny thing is, the whole notebook is in Art's handwriting. He becomes obsessed with figuring out who the Invisible Detective was, and how he himself seems to "remember" things he wasn't even alive to experience.


The story is full of action, creepy, but pleasantly so, and the characters are likeable. The historical period is one which American kids aren't going to be familiar with -- it concerns the abdication of Edward VIII so he could marry Wallis Simpson, and Hitler re-arming Germany prior to the start of WWII -- but the events are pretty well explained for readers.



I think this one could be for kids even older than 8th grade, certainly at least through 9th grade, and possibly even through 11th. I wouldn't go much younger than 5th grade, as it might be a little scary, a little violent (people do get killed, though all the violence is at the end and is not graphic at all) for younger kids and the complexity of the language is better for middle school and older.

This is a series that deserves a wider audience in the U.S. It's good literature for kids, thoughtful, exciting, full of kids with integrity trying to do good things, a solid mystery, and a second, even more tantalizing mystery about Art himself. There are 8 books in the series -- go check them out from your public library.

The Lightning Thief: Now a Major Motion Picture

"Look, I didn't want to be a half-blood.

If you're reading this because you think you might be one, my advice is: close this book right now. Believe whatever lie your mom or dad told you about your birth, and try to lead a normal life.

Being a half-blood is dangerous. It's scary. Most of the time, it gets you killed in painful, nasty ways.

If you're a normal kid, reading this because you think it's fiction, great. Read on. I envy you for being able to believe that none of this ever happened.

But if you recognize yourself in these pages -- if you feel something stirring inside -- stop reading immediately. You might be one of us. And once you know that, it's only a matter of time before they sense it too, and they'll come for you.

Don't say I didn't warn you."

So opens the first chapter of The Lightning Thief, by Rick Riordan. The Lightning Thief has been out since 2005, so it isn't new, but a host of children who were too young to read it when it was initially released may be draw to it once the movie comes out on February 12.


The premise of the story is that Percy Jackson is a demigod--half human, half Olympian god. This makes him a target for every "mythical" monster ever thrown out by Greek Mythology. At the beginning of the story, he is unaware of his parentage. Severely ADD and dyslexic, he's been thrown out of every school he's ever attended, usually because of some bizarre incident that lands him in trouble. Finally sent to a school for troubled kids in upstate New York, Percy is on his last chance -- if he's thrown out of Yancy Academy, who knows where he'll go next?




On a class field trip, his pre-algebra teacher morphs into a hideous monster bent on killing Percy. With some assistance from his Latin teacher, Percy manages to vaporize her with a magical sword. After this incident, no one seems to have noticed a thing. Percy knows something is going on, but can't even begin to fathom what. Returning home, he learns from his mother that his father was Poseidon, god of the sea. Once he knows who he is, he becomes the focus for more monsters, and is pursued all the way to Camp Half-Blood, a camp for demigods on Long Island. Here he meets Annabeth, a daughter of Athena, and Luke, son of Hermes, and learns the legend of Thalia's pine tree, which guards the camp from monsters.

The rest of the book is a romp: loads of action, lots of monsters turning up here and there, a quest to recover Zeus' Master Bolt, a secret prophecy involving a child of the Big Three (Zeus, Poseidon, Hades), and a plot to overthrow Olympus which will be the foundation for the rest of the series. Riordan has a gift for humor; Percy is wry and funny and fatalistic -- the characters often find irony in whatever bizarre situations they're confronted with. They're fast, entertaining reads and will appeal to boys and girls alike.

These are books for 9-14 year olds -- Percy is 11 when the series begins, and like Harry Potter, he ages a year with each new book. The books assume the existence of the Olympian gods, and while they don't go into any specifics, the promiscuity of those gods is a central theme. If you studied mythology in high school, you know that the Greek gods seldom resisted a pretty face; Greek myths are littered with their illegitimate children. Since most of the gods were also married, all of these connections are adulterous, though the book doesn't really comment on their morality (or lack thereof). There is perhaps a tacit commentary in that one of the themes running through the entire series is that of demigods who don't know their parentage because their immortal parent hasn't claimed them. This is always presented as a painful thing, which is as it should be.

Much of the Greek mythology is going to go over most kids' heads. Since I taught mythology, I thoroughly enjoyed how Riordan managed to bring many of the mythological characters into the present day -- I particularly liked "Auntie M's," the burger joint and statue shop -- what a great way to use Medusa (who, you will remember, turned people into stone with her hideous face). Here, she lures them in with greasy burgers and fries and then asks to "take their picture." She is heavily veiled to hide her face, but the kids assume she's Middle Eastern. Brilliant.


Each subsequent book does much the same thing, updating Greek myths for the modern world. In book 3, we learn that the sea of monsters travelled by Odysseus has been relocated in the modern world to the Bermuda Triangle -- so that's why all those ships keep disappearing! Circe runs a spa island and now turns men into guinea pigs instead of pigs ("so much cleaner!"). Olympus is now on the 600th floor of the Empire State Building.



Most of the characters use the phrase "Oh my gods!" and there are a few "butts" here and there. The characters, especially in later books, are depicted as dating each other, but there's nothing more explicit than some hand holding and a chaste kiss or two. There's lots of monster-slaying, but since the monsters only crumble into dust, the violence is somewhat softened. In later books, demigods are killed and the emotional tone of the story is cranked up a notch or two.

I enjoyed these books tremendously. When I re-read them for this post, I was struck all over again by how funny they are and how well paced for middle schoolers. I do think they're not for kids under 9, mainly because of the implied promiscuity and the violence, however mitigated. Also, I think you may find yourself embroiled in a discussion of values and beliefs after reading these books, and this is okay: it provides an opportunity to talk about what some cultures believed and how it affected their behavior and what the fallout for everyone was.

The great thing about movies now is how stunningly they can render worlds which previously could only live in the mind. The magic of CGI has made kingdoms like Middle Earth and fabulous places like Hogwarts spring to vivid life. But the very real danger of movies like these is that kids will only see the film and leave the books -- often very good books -- languishing on the shelf. I hope the movie attracts more readers, but if you think your child might abandon the book for the movie, you might want to encourage the reading before the viewing.