Whose Justice?

Sabaa Tahir

Neither all brains nor all brawn is enough to conquer the society depicted in An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir. It's the classic story told throughout human history. But Tahir takes a fresh look through the eyes of two teens--one a Scholar, the other a Martial--at the center of the conflict.

The Scholars may be the group that's oppressed now, but they were the oppressors until 500 years ago, when the Martials took control by force. Laia, a Scholar, must live with the fact that her parents chose the Resistance over their children. The only family member she has left is her brother, held prisoner by the Martials. In her quest to enlist the Resistance members' help to free her brother, she learns that someone within the movement betrayed her parents. She also learns how the Scholars played a role in their own demise.

As her life becomes entangled with that of Elias, an elite member of the Martials called a Mask and a favorite to become the next Emperor, Laia must decide for herself who is on the side of justice--so must Elias. Sahir portrays a fictional society with realistic conflicts. Must justice for one group come about at the expense of another? What do you, as an individual, do to stay true to your ideals when others around you are corrupting them for selfish ends? How do you know when you yourself have crossed a line? If you gain power and prestige, is it because of your leadership qualities, or through force and fear? How can you be sure?

History is littered with examples of those who used an ideology or force (often both) to achieve goals they felt were good, but whose means resulted in imprisonment and death for many. Tahir demonstrates that it's harder to recognize an ideal gone wrong when it's unfolding in the present. Laia and Elias observe the corruption going on around them, but can they stop it, or at least stand up to it? And the implicit question to readers is: What would you do?

Standing at the Crossroads

Mitali Perkins

Mitali Perkins gives readers a journey to an exotic land in flux in her novel Tiger Boy. The village itself mirrors young Neel's predicament. A developer, Mr. Gupta, has arrived in the Sunderbans of West Bengal, who wishes to exploit its resources, using its sundari trees for his buildings, and pressing the villagers to take the wood from reserves where the trees should be protected.

Then a Bengali tiger cub escapes. Mr. Gupta wants to sell it on the black market, and Neel becomes determined to find it first and return the cub to the rangers. It's a crisis of conscience for Neel because his father has begun working for Mr. Gupta to pay for Neel's mother's medical bills and a tutor so that Neel can win a scholarship to go to Kolkata and study--a path Neel does not wish for himself.

Change is in the air, and Neel is resisting it. His country is at a new stage, just as he is. Perkins exposes the differences accorded to the genders in West Bengal without judgment--it's a way of life that requires a girl to drop out of school to tend to the cooking and washing if her mother becomes ill. Yet the focus remains on Neel's choice to remain in the village he loves or go out into the world and try to bring back his knowledge and experience. The author also exposes the moral crossroads of the villagers--namely Neel's father.

As with her Bamboo People, Perkins smoothly conveys the all-too-brief childhood of young people forced to grow up quickly because of the changing nature of their way of life. She transports readers to faraway places yet endows her characters with problems that feel immediate and universal: the importance of safety, food, clean water, family and community--and standing up for the ideals you hold dear.

Keeping Family Secrets

Alice Hoffman

When Alice Hoffman spoke with us about Nightbird recently in an interview for SLJ's Curriculum Connections, she talked about its origins as a story about the isolation that comes from secrets. For Twig Fowler, that secret involves a family curse that has rendered her older brother half-human, half-bird.

Q: Nightbird shares a melding of magic and realism that’s present in your books for young adults, Green Angel and Aquamarine, and your adult novels. What is it about that combination that compels you as a writer?

Alice Hoffman: My childhood reading was fairy tales, and even though they were magical, they felt the most real. In terms of what was happening emotionally and psychologically, even if the story was about a beast or a rose that wouldn’t die, there were truths there. That the magical and the real exist side by side makes sense to me. I always think of myself as a 12-year-old reader…[and] write the book that I want to read.

Q: Where did the idea of Nightbird come from?
AH: This story is about the isolation that comes from secrets. I think many kids know about family secrets, and they know they’re not supposed to discuss them.

Q: What was the inspiration of James’s curse? I thought of the Minotaur—because of his birthright, he’s confined to this half-man, half-creature body. It’s that idea of the sins of the father visited upon the son, isn’t it?
AH: The idea of a family curse, especially one that isn’t talked about, is ancient, whether from father to son or mother to daughter. It’s like the secret of the nursery: you know it even when you don’t know it.

Also, the monster in the family is a common mythological situation. Nightbird came to me as the story of a “monster’s” sister—one who knows that her sibling is not a monster. How you appear on the outside isn’t necessarily how you are inside. Kids at this age intrinsically know that.

Q: It appears that Twig’s mother moved to New York to escape the fact that everyone knows everyone’s business.
AH: Yes, but you carry your legacy with you. That’s what happened to her. I thought of this as a mother-daughter book…. It’s about understanding your parent a little bit [better]. You can never know your mother when she was younger. Twig’s mother, too, doesn’t really know Twig.

This is an excerpt from a longer interview first published in SLJ's Curriculum Connections.

The Inner Workings

Stanley the hamster is just the right hero to guide toddlers through the inner workings of their world. Stanley's Garage by William Bee is a familiar place--the service station--where Mom gets her tires changed, Dad gets his engine repaired, and the entire family fills up on gas.

Youngest children may not know all the different ways that the team at the garage helps them get where they need to be. William Bee uses different examples of characters with their cars to demonstrate a garage's many resources. He creates a small-town atmosphere where everyone knows everyone else, and builds a feeling of community and trust. People know that when they go to Stanley with a car problem, he will solve it.

In Stanley the Builder, the hamster hero similarly walks youngest book lovers through the process of constructing Myrtle the mouse's house, using his bulldozer, yellow digger and green crane, plus a little help from his friends.

Three Tales in One

Pam Muñoz Ryan
Photo: Ryan Publicity

Pam Muñoz Ryan's epic novel Echo began as a way to write about a little-known court case, Roberto Alvarez v. the Board of Trustees of the Lemon Grove School District. Her research led her to a school yearbook photo in which half the students were barefoot and each kid was holding a Hohner Marine Band harmonica. 

That discovery took her on a journey involving three children's stories, all with a Hohner Marine Band harmonica at the center: 12-year-old Friedrich Schmidt in 1933 Germany, as the Nazi Party gains momentum; orphaned 11-year-old Mike Flannery in 1935 Philadelphia during the Depression; and Ivy Maria Lopez living in Southern California in 1942 as World War II rages. I got to interview Ryan for School Library Journal's Curriculum Connections. Here are a few highlights.

One of my favorite lines in Friedrich’s story is when he anticipates his audition for the conservatory: “How could he want something and fear it so much at the same time?”

Friedrich’s story is so much about the disillusionment of dreams. In his mind, he thought that he could have maybe gone to the conservatory, but he would still have stayed there in his town. His biggest worry was the audition, but there’s something larger [Hitler] that jeopardizes his entire existence.

In Mike’s story, [the adoptive mother] is the one who’s completely disillusioned  about the circumstances of her life—there’s another subtle theme about women being repressed. A lot of societal issues [were addressed in the book], and I had to present them matter-of-factly.

There’s the wonderful quote in Mike’s story as the boy goes through the music store that seems to reverberate with the harmonica’s journey: “Isn’t it wonderful! Music is just waiting to escape from all these instruments.”

There was the idea, as far back as my book The Dreamer (Scholastic, 2010) about Pablo Neruda. His premise was that your tangible essence travels with your tools, with anything that you’ve used with your hands. I love the idea that the harmonica carried something positive and self-affirming with it from [person to person]…that sense of euphoric well-being. It sounded so beautiful. I wanted that idea to carry that through the book.

Tell us about the fairy tale as a frame for the three stories.

From the moment they learn about Otto, the three sisters, and the witch’s curse, I wanted readers to suspend disbelief. By couching the three stories within a traditional fairy tale, I was saying to readers, “Come with me and believe…there’s some scary, hard stuff coming. The book is a dark forest, but we’ll make it to the end….”

Rhythms and Layers

Kwame Alexander wrote his 2015 Newbery-winning novel The Crossover in poems that slip off the tongue effortlessly. The emphasis of the all caps and the line breaks assure even those who hesitate to read passages aloud that they will read (and sometimes shout) the lines properly from the start.

2015 Newbery winner Kwame Alexander
Photo: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

As with any great long poem, the novel's multiple meanings begin to emerge as the story progresses. The crossover move ("in which a player dribbles/ the ball quickly/ from one hand/ to the other./ As in: When done right,/ a crossover can break/ an opponent's ankles"), narrator Josh's signature play, takes on diverse aspects of crossing a threshold (from childhood to adulthood, life and death) over the course of the novel. The 10 rules of basketball that twins Josh and JB's father reinforce in them apply as much to life as they do to the game. The dreadlock incident (in which JB bets Josh that if JB can score the last basket of the game, he can cut off Josh's dreads--Josh agrees to one, JB cuts five, then their mother makes Josh slash the rest) hits Josh nearly as hard as it did Samson. The incident begins an escalation of his sense of loss and betrayal.

As Josh's rift widens with JB, who's not just his identical twin, but also his best friend, Josh is in danger of a spiral downward, and his parents won't allow it. Kwame Alexander told Karin Snelson in an interview for Shelf Awareness that he almost didn't keep the parents in the book. "In a lot of middle-grade and YA fiction the parents are done away with so that you can focus on the kids," he said. "My familial bonds were always extremely important, so that was my frame of mind at first. But as I wrote the book, I got caught up in this notion that the parents can't be that instrumental. And so the parents were introduced in the book, but they were just sort of there. I told myself, you have a loaded gun, but you haven't fired it. What's the point of introducing these strong parents if you aren't going to utilize that strength to make the story even more powerful? And once I decided that, I thought, well, that's the kind of house you grew up in, you can draw on your own relationship with your family."

So the final layer is art imitating life. There's no doubt of the emotional truth that informs this novel in verse.

Imaginary Friends

Dan Santat

Not every child invents an imaginary friend like the star of The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend by Dan Santat, winner of the 2015 Caldecott Medal. And the ones who do, says author-artist Santat, don't "pick imaginary friends based on anything in particular."

Santat himself didn't have an imaginary friend, he told us when we interviewed him for Shelf Awareness after his Caldecott Medal was announced. "If I played make-believe, it was referenced by something I knew. I was going on an adventure with a Ghostbuster or Pac Man," he explained. "Talking with kids, not a lot of their imaginary friends reflected their interests or anything in particular about them." The imaginary friends in Beekle, however, share a great deal with the children who created them.

Q: You characterize both Beekle and his child, Alice, as relatively friendless--or at least incomplete--before they meet. 

Dan Santat: For the message of making a friend, I found it to be important to find two halves to a whole. To have Alice find--not because she's an introvert or shy--to find a friend in a world created by her, fills that void. It's like having that "a-ha" moment when all the pieces are coming together. I didn't want the imaginary friend to sound clichéd--hairy monsters with horns and stripes that didn't reflect anything. I wanted them to reflect these children and their interests. You can tell a lot about these children without any dialogue in the book.

Q: How did you come up with that setting--a kind of island of misfit toys with imaginary friends in limbo until they meet their child?

DS: It's funny that you call it limbo, because for a while the island's name was Limbo. The imaginary friends serve a function, but they don't know what it is yet. If you look on the endpapers, there's a monster that plays the drums for a child who loves music [and other examples]; they're not aware of the other half that completes them. With Beekle, my struggle was to make him in such a way that he didn't give away his purpose. He's the only pure white character in the entire book; he represents a blank canvas.

Q: Your Beekle-eye view of the subway is so spot on. Did you think of the sailing ship and the subway as a kind of journey to transition from his island of imaginary friends to the world of humans?

DS: The spread that really communicates the journey well is when he's lost in a sea of commuters walking, and you don't see their faces, just a sea of legs. I was trying to portray a child's experience. It's not as intimidating to meet people eye to eye as it is when you see these giants. If you're little and you're sitting on a couch, your legs are dangling off the edge of the chair. That's evident in the scene in the subway. Every year I go to New York to meet with my publisher, and people on the subway have their faces in books or they're sleeping. They don't really make contact or look around or reach out to anyone. There's a sense of a loss of magic when you're an adult. Things don't seem spectacular because you've gotten a bit cynical with the world.

You see that in the cake and the strawberries, the music notes of the accordion; those are the bright colors. It was important to me to separate these two worlds--the childlike innocence from the reality of how the world is to an adult.

This excerpt is taken from an interview that first appeared in Shelf Awareness.

A Germ of an Idea

Jennifer Niven

Jennifer Niven's character Violet Markey, who had written a successful blog with her sister, Eleanor, summons the courage to start an online magazine of her own called Germ. Niven decided to start an actual magazine by the same name. We talked with her about the relationship between life and art in All the Bright Places.

That opening scene with Theodore Finch and Violet both contemplating suicide from the roof of their high school is both funny and also a nail-biter. How did you decide to start there?

The book is inspired by real-life events. It's a story I've carried around for a long time. I'd just come off a series of books for adults, and I'd just lost my agent. I wanted to write something that really mattered. When I got the idea for the story, I sat down and wrote the first chapter just to see what would happen. I thought, "What would it be like to write from a boy's point of view?" Originally, Violet was not on the ledge; Finch was up there by himself. The first line just came out, and it just kept going.

How did you find the voice for Finch?

I think one of the things that really informed the writing is knowing people--one boy in particular who I was close to--who had struggled with the same thing, bipolar disorder primarily. I have done a lot of research for nonfiction and historical novels. If I hadn't known people who were struggling with this, I don't know that I could have written it the way I did because there's only so much you can learn through research.

Tell us about the seeds of Violet's online magazine called "Germ" and the online magazine that you're involved with.

I was into revisions on a manuscript and I was thinking, "Wouldn't it be cool to have a real Germ magazine?" I started sketching it out, and flash-forward to now, and we have an all-volunteer staff. There are 45 of us, the age range is between 14 and 40, but the majority  are 14-25, and they're amazing. We have editors and social media people, and a literary section as well. We're getting wonderful submissions from around the world. We handle some of the harder issues, some great writers have written about their experiences with an eating disorder or being bipolar... and then also decorating your locker.

Of the kinds of books you've worked on--fiction and nonfiction for adults, this novel for teens--is there one area that's proven more challenging?

There are challenges with each book and each genre. I will say that it felt very natural to write YA. I lost my ex-boyfriend to suicide a long time ago, and my dad died of cancer during the same calendar year. I was allowed to grieve about my dad, but I couldn't grieve about the boyfriend. Writing this book was really cathartic.

I went to visit a high school and we asked everyone to think about their bright places--your dog, or your mom, or a movie you love, or a book or word you love. We put their bright places on Facebook, and you can go on Twitter and Instagram to see some of the places others have come up with. I'm so grateful for everything that's happening.

This is an excerpt from a longer interview that first appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.

Lasting Color

Marla Frazee is not shy about using colors. Just look at All the World (written by Liz Ganlon) and A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever (which she wrote as well as illustrated), both Caldecott Honor books. But in her latest book, The Farmer and the Clown, the absence of words and her sparing use of color highlight the shift a little clown makes in a farmer's life. The clown introduces not only color, but also a new perspective--even a sense of joy--to the farmer's seemingly ceaseless routine.

Interiors from The Farmer and the Clown

The colors of the train traveling on the tracks at the edge of the farmer's property telegraph "circus": fun, entertainment, escape from the daily grind. The little treasure the train inadvertently leaves behind ripples through the farmer's world, disrupting his daily rhythms in the best possible way. The farmer, usually dressed in a crisp white shirt and earth-colored pants, wears red pajamas, suggesting he only lets go at day's end. And boy, does that toddler clown give him permission to let go--making faces, juggling eggs, packing a picnic basket.

In the parting images, Frazee lets readers know that the clown has made a lasting impact on the farmer--he will carry the joy he shared with the little clown always.

The Treats of Friendship

Laura Vaccaro Seeger

A deep and abiding friendship between two very different personalities forms the core of Dog and Bear: Tricks and Treats (and all the Dog and Bear books) by Laura Vaccaro Seeger. Their latest adventure plays up those contrasts using some time-honored Halloween traditions.

Dog takes risks; Bear is more prudent. Dog inspires Bear to try new things; Bear encourages Dog to slow down, think things through. Seeger's stories grow out of the friends' personalities and how they resolve their dilemmas. And they do solve their problems themselves, without any help from grown-ups. So how do they react to Halloween rituals? What if Dog were to misunderstand how trick-or-treating works? Instead of giving out candy, he confiscates it (not meaning any harm, of course). Children are in on the joke, and Dog doesn't recognize his faux pas. Costume hunting and prank playing (much more benign than egging or TP-ing, of course) make up the themes of the other two stories.

With just a sentence per page, these adventures feel complete and make the ideal books for beginning readers as well as picture book lovers. We can't wait to see what Dog and Bear will do next.

Testing Boundaries

Una LaMarche

In Like No Other, Una LaMarche lets readers inside the traditionally private Chabad-Lubavitch community for a rare view of its traditions. Readers enter through the experience of 16-year-old Devorah Blum, whose chance encounter with Jaxon, an African-American young man her age, prompts her to question some of those traditions. Brooklyn's Eastern Parkway marks the boundary between their two communities, but they meet in the hospital that serves them both when the elevator breaks down.

Devorah would never, under normal circumstances, be with a boy her age unchaperoned, let alone a boy outside of her community. They talk about their families, music, and through their alternating first-person narratives, readers watch their mutual attraction develop.

LaMarche reveals the complexity of the mores behind the Chabad-Lubavitch way of life. Devorah jokes that yichud (the rule against two members of the opposite sex alone together) stems from the belief, "Plop two teenagers in a confined space, let them get to talking, and sooner or later the conversation will go to a sinful place..." Yet their attraction bears this out. These rules are rooted in life experience. 

But when does Devorah get to test these boundaries for herself and gain her own life experiences? She's smart and curious and willing to take responsibility for her actions. The author, without didacticism, explores the territory between faith and doubt, fate and free will. Can one's faith strengthen without doubt? Can one respect boundaries without testing them? These are all questions that teens innately raise for themselves, and LaMarche's romance about two 16-year-olds curious about and attracted to each other, gives teens an apparatus for examining these questions for themselves.

Road Trip

Raina Telgemeir (r.) at SLJ's Day of Dialog with
(l.-r.) Lois Ehlert, Chris Raschka and Peter Sís

Raina Telgemeier's new graphic novel Sisters is the road trip from Smile that "only gets a passing mention," the author told the audience at School Library Journal's Day of Dialog this past spring.

Telgemeier joked that only after publishing her first book, Smile, did she learn that "you're not supposed to write [an autobiography] unless you've done something." But her books--Sisters and Smile, and also Drama, aimed at slightly older readers--serve as excellent examples for kids who either think they have nothing to write about or are asked to write their autobiography for school. Telgemeier finds the humor and vulnerability in seemingly everyday experiences: a wish for a baby sister that (when finally fulfilled) can have its drawbacks, a parent losing his or her job, and a family vacation.

Her approach, a mix of visual and verbal storytelling, clearly indicates what's fantasy or flashback--or even wishful thinking (when her father loses his job and she would really like a hug). Telgemeier zeroes in on a road trip and also takes that experience as a way to magnify the family dynamics--as traveling and staying in confined spaces will--using it as the jumping off place for flashbacks that add complexity to present events, and fantasy sequences to reflect her characters' changing emotional states.

Her books also let readers know that the more details they can add to their writing, the more universal their experiences feel to readers of their own writing. Telgemeier says, "I tell very personal specific stories, thinking this doesn't happen to anyone else, and then the letters come." 

Re-imagining Classics

Karen Foxlee
Photo by Sonya Coe

Karen Foxlee is part of a grand tradition of authors who reimagine classic tales. With Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy, she recasts Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen" in which both the boy and girl of his original tale emerge as heroes.

Here are some highlights from a longer interview with Karen Foxlee about what Andersen's story meant to her as a child and why she wanted to retell it.

Your novel uses the themes from Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen in such original ways. Is this a favorite fairy tale of yours?

My mother read to us from Andersen's Fairy Tales when I was a child. It was a large white book, with illustrations by Jiří Trnka. My favorite was always "The Snow Queen," first read by my mum and later, again and again, by myself. I think the thing that attracted me most was the theme of love and friendship. [Andersen's] Gerda is just a little girl, yet she embarks on this treacherous journey to rescue Kai. She never gives up on him, even though he is so changed by that splinter of mirror in his eye.

And I think the Snow Queen was my first-ever true villain. I was so fascinated by her as a character--she's a woman, and she's riding around stealing kids! I can remember just being left breathless by the horror of that. But there was always something so sad and lonely about the Snow Queen--why was she all alone in that icy palace?

In many ways too, that fairy tale played to something much deeper in my heart. My grandparents came from Finland to Australia in the 1920s, and each time I read The Snow Queen, especially as Gerda draws closer to Lapland, I was imagining where part of me came from.

You've kept elements of the original Snow Queen. For instance, it appears that Ophelia's sister, Alice, in some ways, takes the place of the boy Kai in the original tale. And the rescue scene is very similar. But many other elements are uniquely your own--such as the wizards. How did that storyline develop?

There are many parallels with the fairy tale. Ophelia sets off to rescue the boy. But in a reverse of the fairy tale, the boy himself sets off on a remarkable journey to rescue the world (and, in many ways, Ophelia's heart). And Alice's coldness mirrors the coldness of Kai as he falls under the Snow Queen's spell (and the King as well). You'd probably think I had that all worked out from the start but I didn't. It's only through lots of writing and understanding my characters and trying all manner of "what ifs" that I get anywhere.

The wizards were there from the beginning, though. In fact, my first drafts were almost entirely about the boy and the wizards, and Ophelia hardly featured at all. I wanted the wizards to be the good to the Snow Queen's bad, and I loved them immediately, so tall and quiet and surviving on biscuits alone. But like all my stories, I began to whittle away, carve and polish, and I was left with only glimpses of these wizards, and the place that the boy comes from. Beautiful, meaningful glimpses, I hope.

Even though Ophelia's father is an absent-minded professor type, unaware of her whereabouts, the spirit of Ophelia's mother is always with her. And of course, she has the boy's friendship. Why was it important for Ophelia to feel that she does not to have to go on this quest alone?

I was thinking so much about my own life and my own child and what would happen if I were ever gone. What would be the most important things for my child to know if I were leaving? Susan Worthington, Ophelia's mother, gives these answers to Ophelia via the wizard's letter: Being kind, extending your hand in friendship, always stopping to help, being patient, never giving up and always knowing there will be people there to help you.

I think in life there are people who will help you; we forget it, but there are. And I'm a strong believer in always helping others. I can remember after my dad died, when I was in my 20s, every so often feeling him with me. He was there, right there with me, and it was such a comforting feeling. I wanted Ophelia to have that as well, this ongoing guidance and conversation with her mother. That Ophelia should never feel alone felt so important to me.

This entry is excerpted from a longer interview that first appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.

A Comical Con

Varian Johnson

It's refreshing to see a diverse group of friends with a range of talents working together to "fix" any bully--but especially an entitled bully. That is the central plot of The Great Greene Heist by Varian Johnson.

It's Jackson Greene's first outing without his big brother, and he's doing a smashing job. The kids keep referring to a previous effort, one that got Jackson in trouble with his former crush, Gabi, even though he got back at wealthy, bullying Keith Sinclair. Now Keith is obsessed with winning the student council presidency against Gabi, even if it means stealing the election. Jackson plans to fix Keith's wagon once and for all.

This is the Hardy Boys ratcheted up a notch. Jackson and his pals are determined to intercede and take justice into their own hands. The adults are none too helpful. The principal's secretary is prejudiced, and the principal is on the take from the wealthy parents of the bully in question. What recourse do Jackson and his friends have, other than to mete out justice themselves?

One of the many fun features of this comical con game--in addition to the diverse cast--is Jackson's ability to judge characters. So when things seem to go haywire on his team, well, it was all part of the plan. Readers will hope for more from this resourceful group of friends.

Varian Johnson's book has become an independent bookseller favorite: two indies in Massachusetts--Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley, and Eight Cousins in Falmouth--competed in a "Great Greene Challenge" to see which booksellers could hand-sell the most copies of the title. It became a national selloff, and readers had the most to gain.

Visual Grammar

Alison Jay has always created a visual story line in her books, and her beachside adventure Out of the Blue follows that established pattern. Her alphabet book (A B C) and counting book (1 2 3) teach youngest children these early concepts, and they also give them a plot line to follow that unfolds entirely through the illustrations. Out of the Blue, with no words, tells a complete story--two children make friends, take shelter from a storm, and rescue a giant octopus. It's liberating for children who are just learning to read because they can make up their own story.

Jay helps youngest children build confidence, as she reinforces all that they know: pages move from left to right, children can point out the heroes in the book who appear repeatedly (the boy and the girl) and they can follow the secondary characters down the beach. They do not need to decode words to "read" the story.

This spring at the Bank Street College of Education, Stephen Savage spoke about “visual grammar” using his book Where’s Walrus? to explain his idea. He spoke of the text and illustrations as “the harmony and melody of the song” and pointed to silent movies as “the original wordless books.” He explained the four components he believes are essential to books without words:

1)  The close-up
2)  Color/contrast
3)  Design/branding
4)  Pattern/repetition

You can see these elements most clearly in Where's Walrus?, but they also come into play in Alison Jay's work.

Children take in everything around them. They are sponges, absorbing how the world works long before they have words to explain what they're seeing. These elements, of which Savage spoke so eloquently, and which Jay also employs in her books, help children unlock the story within the book and also to use those strategies to make sense of the events in their own experiences.

Cooking Up a Celebration

Jan Thomas

Jan Thomas takes true toddler scenarios and finds the humor and fun in them, as she does in A Birthday for Cow!

Pig and Mouse do a perfectly normal good deed: They make a cake for Cow--"the best birthday cake EVER," in fact. Duck keeps trying to tell them something in his gently (and later, not so gently) insistent way. As Pig and Mouse combine the flour, sugar and eggs, Duck says, "And a TURNIP?" They mix it all together with... "A TURNIP!" Duck repeats. It may seem as though Duck is just being silly, but what toddlers learn at the end is this: Cow loves turnips.

Jan Thomas hints at the outcome with Duck's close attention to the calendar as Cow's birthday draws near. The blue X's indicate Duck's count down to a special day--not Duck's birthday, but Cow's birthday. Duck keeps trying to tell his friends what the perfect present would be for Cow, but they are intent on making a cake -- perfectly reasonable (Pig and Mouse certainly enjoy it), but not what Cow would wish to eat.

It's a subtle lesson delivered with heaping helpings of humor, that sometimes what we would want for ourselves is not what someone else would want. Duck thought about what Cow really loves, and that was the gift Duck gave to Cow. Or, maybe it's because Duck loves turnips, too...

A Family Intact

Erin McCahan in Grand Haven, MI

It is rare in young adult fiction to find a family that gets along well, in which an author portrays teens with parents who respect them and allow them autonomy. Erin McCahan paints such a family portrait in Love and Other Foreign Words.

Josie Sheridan likes routine, predictability, consistency, and she dislikes surprises. Yet everything is changing. Her sister Kate is getting married, and Josie does not approve. Josie must work hard to do the things that come naturally to others. She practices the signature hug for her volleyball team (at home, in private) so that she can belong, but then everyone wants a "Josie hug," which was not the goal she sought.

Josie's father really "gets" her, and provides some much-needed compassion for his youngest daughter. But he also knows when to draw the line, when to point out that she's in the wrong. And he does it in such a way that she must do some soul-searching. He does not make anything easy for her, because he knows she likes to--even needs to--puzzle things out.

So often novels aimed at teens explore the rift between parent and child once he or she enters adolescence. Here's a novel in which the parents give their teen space to become the person she's yearning to become. They trust her and have faith in her, even when she's acting badly. Maybe it's because she's the third of three children. Maybe they've learned with their first two that their children have to figure it out for themselves, but this mother and father have an approach that works.

Josie's mother and father know that along with their daughter's genius come some social challenges, and they are there to guide her, but they also know she must learn from her own missteps. Yes, the friendship, the portrayal of sister relationships, and the awakening of romance are terrific, but the strong, loving relationship between Josie and her parents may be most memorable of all.

Wishing to Be Found

From Hide and Seek Harry: Around the House

The hippo star of Hide and Seek Harry: Around the House by Kenny Harrison does not know that he can be seen. His girth permits him few true hiding places. Harry's approach is much like the child who plays peek-a-boo: Because the toddler covers his eyes and cannot see you, he believes that you cannot see him.

But the other question is, does Harry know that he can be seen? "Harry likes to hide... but he loves to be found!" says the text. Like Harry, the child playing hide-and-seek wants most to be found. Peek-a-boo and hide-and-seek at this age are about being safe, separating momentarily (with no real risk of getting "lost") and then being reunited with the parent, grandparent, older sibling, or caregiver. It's the first dipping of toes into the ocean of independence.

Through Harry, Kenny Harrison taps into this complex mix of feelings in the simplest of ways. Does the hippo choose a hiding place because he thinks he's truly hidden? Or does Harry want to be found? Does it matter? In the end, Harry comes home to his best friends, the boy and girl narrators.

Second Chances

John Corey Whaley

John Corey Whaley, the author of Noggin, says the outlandish premise of his latest novel--a transplantation of a full cranial structure onto a donor body--began with Kurt Vonnegut.

"What is it about him that I'm able to connect with so much?" Whaley said of Kurt Vonnegut when we got to interview him recently. "He's able to take absurd ideas and scenarios, and you can be laughing hysterically on one page, and he'll bring you to tears on the next."

The idea of scientific advances allowing doctors to cryogenically freeze someone's head and surgically affix it to a healthy donor's body may be something akin to what Vonnegut might create, but, like Vonnegut, Whaley grounds the story in authentic emotional experience. Travis essentially falls asleep and wakes up five years later. But the people he cares about have lived on, gathering life experiences. "That was the most realistic way I could re-create the way people feel their friends and family are growing up a little faster than they are," Whaley said. "A lot of life is people moving faster than we are, and us moving faster than others."

Travis is 16 when he goes to sleep, and his friends are 21 when he wakes up. He has a second chance at life, but does he want it, if he can't be with Cate, who is now engaged to someone else, and his best friend, Kyle, who has retreated back into a life of denial? Whaley gets to the core of growing up through his exploration of Travis's dilemma. Travis wants to win Cate back. But in those five years, Cate had fully grieved and accepted the loss of Travis in her life. Travis and Kyle are able to restore their friendship, but Travis's desire to recreate the romantic relationship he'd had with Cate remains problematic.

Travis must ask himself, how do I go on from here, with this new reality? Is it worth it to get a second chance if I cannot have the people I want in my life the way they were? Travis quickly learns that his return does not come with an automatic reset button. It means working on these relationships--with his parents, with Cate, with Kyle, and with his new friend Hatton. How do you stay true to yourself yet still honor that relationship, either as it is now, or what it once meant to you? Is it possible to do? How much compromise is possible without losing your self?

At a pivotal time, when teens are becoming adults and trying on new personas and/or deepening their beliefs, their relationships are shifting. Whaley captures all of these nuances with humor, compassion and unforgettable characters.

The New Orleans Legacy

Rodman Philbrick

Zane and the Hurricane by Rodman Philbrick takes readers with narrator Zane Dupree on a visit to New Orleans, just before Hurricane Katrina hits. Because Zane is new to the city, we learn through his conversations with his grandmother and through Zane's own observations the deep and complex history of this culture-rich town.

He has barely arrived when the mayor instructs everyone to evacuate in preparation for the storm. Zane gets separated from his grandmother when his beloved dog escapes from an open window in her preacher's van, and he chases after his pet--all the way back to her house on the Ninth Ward. This is most of all an adventure story. But as Zane learns more about his rescuers, Malvina Rawlins and her guardian, Truedell "Tru" Manning, a renowned jazz musician, readers also learn more about the culture of New Orleans, its traditions, its racial tensions, its economic divide. Armed security teams guard the homes of the rich, which are on higher ground. Rescue efforts take days and days. Malvina and Tru pass the time by telling Zane stories.

Philbrick describes the situation in a way that 9- and 10-year-olds can understand, yet with enough suspense and details to hold the attention of teen readers, too. Another book for 8- to 12-year-olds about life before and after Hurricane Katrina is Ninth Ward by Jewell Parker Rhodes. And for older readers, the books that delve into the nuances and rich past of New Orleans are the historical novels Richard Peck's The River Between Us, and Out of the Easy by Ruta Sepetys. In many ways, the city of New Orleans reveals in microcosm the tensions that have haunted and continue to plague the United States, as well as the many gifts of food, music, language, celebration and culture that one city's residents have given to the nation.