Picture Books

Iggy Peck, Architect by Andrea Beaty; illustrated by David Roberts (Abrams, 2007).  ISBN: 978-0-8109-1106-2 

Every school has a student (quite likely more than one!) who is exceptional, unusual, quirky.  This child is different from all of the other kids, extraordinarily gifted in one particular thing-- obsessed with that something to the exclusion of all else. Meet Iggy (Ignacious) Peck, second grader extraordinaire!  “Young Iggy Peck is an architect / and has been since he was two, / when he built a great tower--in only an hour-- / with nothing but diapers and glue.”  While Iggy’s parents bemusedly put up with, and sometimes enthusiastically support, Iggy’s towering constructions of diapers, dirt, fruit, or pancakes, his second grade teacher, Miss Lila Greer “said in her lecture about architecture / that it had no place in grade two.” In this classically structured picture book story in which the hero’s downfall is also his strength, Iggy first suffers under Miss Greer’s heartless pronouncement (“With no chance to build, his interest was killed / Now second grade was a bore”) but later saves the day when, on a field trip, the old trestle to the island collapses and Iggy designs a new one of “Boots, tree roots and strings, fruit roll-ups and things / (some of which one should not mention.)” In superbly rhymed verse that kids will clamor to have read aloud repeatedly, Beaty paints a portrait of a brave boy who is true to his own talents.  To make matters all the more fun, Roberts renders the illustrations in hilarious spare retro pen and ink with watercolor that perfectly befit the story.  He is a master of facial expressions and finds many opportunities to use them to good end throughout. An unusual and exceptional picture book for every collection.  [Suggested Grades: K-3]

Piglet and Papa by Margaret Wild; illustrated by Stephen Michael King (Abrams, 2007).  ISBN: 978-0-8109-1476-6

There are times when one reads a picture book and recognizes, from the very outset, the potential for a perfect structure to follow.  As seasoned readers, we hold our breath, watching the story unfold and hoping for that absolute satisfaction at the end.  Piglet and Papa does not fail in this regard nor in any other.  It is the perfectly structured and fully satisfying tale of Piglet, who loves playing with her papa, sitting on his head, bouncing on his belly, and chewing his tail--hard.  When Papa scolds Piglet, she scurries off and encounters a host of other farm animals all of whom assure her that they love her for her cute little ears/snub little nose/curly-whirly tail/little pink trotters/fat little tummy, but that someone else loves her ten/one hundred/one thousand/one million/one billion times more.  And, indeed, her Papa does.  King’s charming pen-and-ink and watercolor illustrations capture both the sweetness and humor of this tender tale of a child’s insecurities and a papa’s unfailing love. Read this story aloud at storytime.  Use this book with your primary age students to talk about parental love.  Read Piglet and Papa when you focus on the skill of prediction.  No matter.  Your young listeners are going to want you to read it again and again. [Suggested ages: 2-6]

There Was a Coyote Who Swallowed a Flea by Jennifer Ward; illustrated by Steve Gray (Rising Moon, 2007).  ISBN: 978-0873588980 

Are you looking for something to SPICE UP your story time with elementary students?  A book to complement your desert habitat study?  A read-aloud to share with your music teacher?  Then get ready for the merriment of Jennifer Ward’s wildly exuberant variant of the old rhyme, “There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.” Steve Gray’s exaggerated illustrations, including the expressive wall-eyed coyote and his host of meal courses from flea to bull to various items of western attire (think cowboy boots and ten gallon hats!), will have kids roaring with laughter as they sing verse after verse of delightful cumulative rhyme: "He swallowed the chile to season the bird. / He swallowed the bird to catch the snake. / He swallowed the snake to catch the lizard. / He swallowed the lizard to catch the flea, / Plucked from his knee, that tickly flea. / Yippe-o-ki-yee!" Be prepared for noise, silliness, and all-out fun in your library the day you share this treasure!

Novels

Almost Forever by Maria Testa (Candlewick, 2007--newly released in paperback). ISBN: 9780763644660

This is the perfect time for the release of the paperback edition of Maria Testa’s exquisite verse novel about the year that her father spent in Vietnam.  Written with astonishing simplicity and achingly beautiful images of love, loss, and reunion, the book will speak personally to children in communities where parents are off serving in the Iraq war as so many still are.  In fact, the new paperback cover appears to picture just such a soldier walking hand in hand with his daughter as he heads toward departure.  Many library collections will already include this title in hardcover (and should consider adding it if it is not on the shelves) but the newly released paperback format will allow classes of students to read and discuss it in guided reading groups and in literature circles.  Wise teachers will also consider reading it aloud to their classes as library media specialists put it into the hands of all the children who need it and will find affirmation and comfort there.  [Suggested Grades 3-8]

A Crooked Kind of Perfect by Linda Urban (Harcourt 2007). ISBN: 978-0152060077

Consider the opening sentence. “I was supposed to play the organ,” Zoe Elias tells us, with her longings for a glamorous audience in long gowns and tuxedos who hush with anticipation before she removes her long white gloves one finger at a time and crashes her hands down onto the keys in Carnegie Hall like Vladimir Horowitz.  Such are ten-year-old Zoe’s dreams.  What does she get?  On page 3, she tells us straight out.  “I play the organ.  A wood-grained, vinyl-seated, wheeze-bag organ. The Perfectone D-60.” Zoe is stuck in a life that fails to fulfill her dreams, with an agoraphobic dad who takes every class the Living Room University has to offer, a workaholic mom who doesn’t even make it home for her birthday cake, a best friend who has dumped her for the newer, hipper girl, Joella Tinstella, and a classmate, Wheeler, whose own challenging family situation drives him to adopt her dad.  Above all, of course, she’s stuck with the D-60 and her wittily-drawn organ teacher, Mabelline Person.  All this in the life of a girl who believes herself to be destined for more elegance, more enchantment. Nevertheless, Zoe meets the obstacles with an equanimity of spirit that allows her to turn those lemons into lemonade, so that when Miss Person enrolls her in the Perfectone Perform-O-Rama, she focuses on realizing her dream through this alternate route.  Readers can’t fail to love Zoe’s determination despite the underlying disappointment, and her loving acceptance of her flawed parents who, after all, are as crooked as the rest of us and doing the best they can to give her what she needs.  Full of quirky and very real characters, with situations simultaneously outlandish and fully believable and a first-person narrator one loves and roots for, A Crooked Kind of Perfect will hop off your shelf the first time and be on permanent reserve thereafter. An enormously successful first novel by newcomer Linda Urban. [Suggested grades 4-6]

Do Not Pass Go by Kirkpatrick Hill (S&S/McElderry, 2007). ISBN: 9781416914006

Set in urban Alaska, Hill’s novel brings to life a character worth knowing and a not-uncommon situation worth examining. Deet, a young teen whose parents have created a loving if somewhat financially strapped family life, encounters the challenge of his life when his father is arrested and jailed for drug possession and use.  In his haphazard struggle to make ends meet for his family of five, Deet’s father turns to speed to allow him to work two blue collar jobs while simultaneously mismanaging the money he earns.  Deet, a reclusive and conscientious loner at school, fears the opinions of his wealthier classmates when his father’s arrest is made public.  Yet, through the fictional device of an ongoing quotation-and-reflection journal in English class and his daily visits to his father in jail, we watch Deet’s emotional growth and increasing intellectual grasp of crime, punishment, social ills, and human needs. Deet is a character it is impossible not to like--compulsive, earnest, loving, and generous.  Teens will root for him as he faces down his fears and comes to accept his parents’ limitations and his own. They will also have a chance to compare their Hollywood stereotypes of criminals and incarceration to those more complex characters and situations drawn by the author. [Suggested Grades: 6-9]

Home of the Brave by Katherine Applegate (Feiwel and Friends 2007). ISBN: 978-0312367657

 Those whose lives have been blessed with relationships with immigrant children will instantly recognize the authenticity of Kek’s voice and his story.  An African refugee child who witnessed the death of both his brother and his father during political unrest in his homeland and who was separated from his mother after an attack on their refugee camp, Kek undertakes a lonely journey to the United States to live with his aunt and cousin.  In spare first-person verse, the parallel struggles of loss of family, loss of country, and loss of culture are poignantly and freshly rendered in Kek’s simple words.  When Diane at the Refugee Resettlement Center explains that they are still searching for Kek’s mother, he responds with a polite, “Thank you for your looking.” In fact, it is the hope that his mother will be found (“I ready my heart for the words I need to hear”) that carries Kek and the reader from the first day when he steps off the “flying boat” into the Minnesota snow through his efforts to acclimate in a new land.  The urgency of that single question makes one love the character all the more; we read to know both him and the answer to the question. In a successful authorial decision, Applegate purposely renders Kek without a specific tribal identity, not to dishonor any group of people or to amalgamate the people of the African continent, but because she strives to portray a more universal character.  For me, the method is effective, and Kek sings in my ear, a real child with his own hard journey in a new and uncertain life.  [Suggested grades 4-8]

How to Steal a Dog by Barbara O’Connor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2007). ISBN: 978-0374334970

“The day I decided to steal a dog was the same day my best friend, Luanne Godfrey, found out I lived in a car.” So begins Georgina Hayes’ spunky first person narration of her plan to take matters into her own desperate hands after her father leaves the family and her mother, unable to pay the rent, moves Georgina and her little brother Toby into their beat-up old car. Despite Mama’s two jobs, there’s little progress toward saving the money needed to get a place of their own, and even Luanne is getting suspicious, pointing out that Georgina is looking unkempt.  With equal doses of hope and foolishness born of despair, Georgina devises a plan to steal a dog, wait for a reward to be offered, and then claim the money to get the family back on their feet.  The poignancy of her situation will bring homelessness to life for intermediate grade readers as they grapple with their own feelings about righteousness, fairness, and culpability as Georgina executes her plan. There are no easy answers here, as Georgina digs herself deeper and deeper into a deceitful plan that can only hurt everyone involved while her family situation turns more dire.  It is Mookie, a wise and kindhearted old vagrant, who helps her to untangle her feelings about her actions and allows her to change her course.  In the closing chapters of the novel, Georgina becomes the true heroine of her own story.  Read this book aloud to students, or encourage your teachers to, in order to inspire lively discussions as Georgina uncovers the path to personal victory. [Suggested grades 3-6]

Louisiana’s Song by Kerry Madden (Viking, 2007). ISBN: 978-0-670-06153-2

Madden continues the story of the Weems family (begun in Gentle’s Holler) deep in the mountains of rural North Carolina.  In this second volume, narrator Livy Two turns her attention to her shy artistic sister, Louisiana Margaret Pansy Jeanne Marie Weems as the fraught year of 1963 unfolds personally for the family and politically in the nation.  The story begins as Livy, Louise, and their siblings anticipate, and then struggle with, Daddy’s return from an eight month stay in the Rip Van Winkle rest home following his severe head injury.  The Daddy who returns to the family is ridden with auditory hallucinations and a significant loss of memory that alternately breaks Livy’s heart or infuriates her.  Always poor, the family is now desperate for money and much of the telling of this tale of fear and longing, courage and redemption, is driven by that need--and the desire of all of the children to stay in their mountain home rather than follow cranky Grandma Horace down to the dreaded town of Enka-Stinka where factory work is readily available for Mama. Yet Livy Two’s strength of spirit shines brightly as she maintains her commitment to her father’s music and her own, turning out songs by the dozen.  She produces a stream of correspondence with record producer George Flowers that exemplifies her hope, her determination, and her unwillingness to fold, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.  Spunky, with the heart of a giant and the courage of a lion, Livy Two will cause you to love her and every member of her tribe--except, perhaps, the bull-headed Grandma Horace.  In Livy’s world, there’s just no room for failed optimism or practicality without joy. [Suggested Grades: 4-8]

Rubber Houses by Ellen Yeomans (Little Brown, 2007). ISBN: 9780316106474 In a masterfully structured verse novel, Yeomans tells the story of the grief-filled year when high schooler Kit’s nine-year-old brother Buddy is diagnosed with and dies of cancer--and her struggle to come to terms with the loss of her beloved sibling. Buddy’s unexpected death is a blow so severe that the family--and Kit herself--can hardly breathe, can certainly not lead normal lives.  Yeomans wisely chooses the effects on Kit’s best friendship with Callie to exhibit Kit’s progress through the stages of grief.  In addition, because baseball was central to Buddy’s life, the quintet structure of Warm-ups, ‘Regular’ Season, Postseason, Hot Stove, and Spring Training is an effective choice, adding a dimension unusual in verse novels.  Rich with emotion, spare and yet complete, Rubber Houses is a compelling read. [Suggested Grades: 6-12]