Review: Skeletons and orphans

Billy Bones: Tales from the Secrets Closet

by Christopher Lincoln

Synopsis: "Deep within High Manners Manor, Billy and his skeleton parents live in the Secrets Closet, where they're in charge of filing all the secrets and lies of the unscrupulous Biglum family. Then Billy meets Millicent, Sir Biglum's niece who has been recently orphaned. Together, Billy and Millicent encounter ghosts and other uncanny creatures as they explore each other's worlds and uncover the biggest secret of all: Billy was once a Biglum."

This was sort of a weird experience for me. While the author certainly writes very well, and he had done a respectable job creating a unique world, I found myself constantly unable to keep my mind from wandering while I read it. Something about the story seemed a little... tame, maybe? Not exciting enough to keep my thoughts from drifting to other things, and I would forget what I just read.

Despite the fact that we were talking about ghosts and skeletons, there was nothing creepy about them. If anything, they were too cute; more Strawberry Shortcake than Tim Burton.

One thing I don't understand was why the illustrator who did all the interior work (the author did the skeleton on the cover, which looks nothing like the one on the inside) didn't get more credit (his name isn't on the cover or the back flap). His name, I found out, is Avi Ofer and he's very good. His pictures were probably my favorite part of the book.

The Willoughbys

by Lois Lowry

Synopsis: "Abandoned by their ill-humored parents to the care of an odious nanny, Tim, the twins, Barnaby A and Barnaby B, and their sister, Jane, attempt to fulfill their roles as good oldfashioned children. Following the models set in lauded tales from A Christmas Carol to Mary Poppins, the four Willoughbys hope to attain their proscribed happy ending too, or at least a satisfyingly maudlin one.

"However, it is an unquestionably ruthless act that sets in motion the transformations that lead to their salvation and to happy endings for not only the four children, but their nanny, an abandoned baby, a candy magnate, and his long-lost son too. Replete with a tongue-in-cheek glossary and bibliography, this hilarious and decidedly old-fashioned parody pays playful homage to classic works of children’s literature."

This definitely smacked of Lemony Snicket at the outset, but lacked much of the bite. I like humor, and I like dark humor. I like taking classical ideas and turning them on their heads. But, while well-written (I would expect nothing less from Lowry), this fell a little flat to me, a little too safe.

And frankly, I don't know why she felt the need to illustrate it herself, because, sorry to say, she is no illustrator. They were quaint, but definitely amateurish. There are sooooo many talented illustrators out there, and many are young and hungry if budget is an issue. Sorry, Ms. Lowry, but next time let a professional do the job right.

No Flying No Tights

Found this web site called "No Flying No Tights" (great name) that posts recommended graphic novel reading for teens as well as middle grade kids. (The lists are good, but boy, the design of the site itself is, sorry to say, gawd-awful. I'll try to look past that...).

IF: Shaky

Haven't done one of these in a long time. I really wanted to do one, but time ran short, so I had to sort of spit this one out. Kind of a cheesy idea, but I think it's kinda funny to think that squirrels might be so jumpy just because they haven't had their coffee yet.

Terrible Yellow Eyes

Terrible Yellow Eyes is a collection of works inspired by the beloved classic, Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. Over time, they'll display a growing collection of works created by invited contributing artists.

From the site: "We share a love and admiration for Sendak's work and the pieces we present here are done as a tribute to his life and legacy."

Some killer work here. Very fun.

Review: Psychics, Geckos & Steampunk

Gilda Joyce, Psychic Investigator
by Jennifer Allison

Synopsis: "Ever since her father died, kooky Gilda Joyce has been working hard to sharpen her psychic skills. She's determined to communicate with spirits from the Other Side and become a crack investigator of spooky, twisted mysteries. After wrangling an invitation to visit San Francisco relatives, Gilda discovers just how much her dreary, tight-lipped uncle and his strange, delicate daughter need her help to uncover the terrible family secret that has a tortured ghost stalking their home. From poignant to hair-raising and hilarious, this is a behind-the-scenes, tell-all account of the very first case in the illustrious career of Gilda Joyce, Psychic Investigator."

I was a little ambivalent about this one. It was written well-enough and everything, but I guess I, personally, tend to like actual ghosts and paranormal shenanigans (like "Beetlejuice" or "Ghostbusters"). But this resolves without ever saying for sure if ghosts are real or not, so I suppose that left me a little disappointed. But otherwise, a good little mystery with some nice, creepy moments. I'd read more if I had the time!

The Chameleon Wore Chartreuse
by Bruce Hale

Synopsis: "Some cases start rough, some cases start easy. This one started with a dame. (That's what we private eyes call a girl.) She was cute and green and scaly. She looked like trouble and smelled like... grasshoppers. Shirley Chameleon came to me when her little brother, Billy, turned up missing. (I suspect she also came to spread cooties, but that's another story.) She turned on the tears. She promised me some stinkbug pie. I said I'd find the brat.

"But when his trail led to a certain stinky-breathed, bad-tempered, jumbo-sized Gila monster, I thought I'd bitten off more than I could chew. Worse, I had to chew fast: If I didn't find Billy in time, it would be bye-bye, stinkbug pie."

If Bruce Hale is involved, you know it's going to be silly and fun. I like the idea of taking the classic hard-boiled detective and replacing all the stock characters with animals (who attend school, no less). Maybe it's cheesy to some, but I like that sort of thing.

But I doubt if kids will ever, ever get the jokes that allude to elements of classic detective literature (all the titles in the series are plays off of classic movies or books that I'm sure no kid has ever seen or heard of). Does it matter, I wonder? Still, it's fun, silly quick and a good time.

Larklight
by Philip Reeve

Synopsis: "Larklight combines historical fiction, fantasy, and science fiction into a charming story that young listeners will devour. Art and his sister Myrtle are British youngsters living with their father at Larklight during the reign of Queen Victoria. However, in this alternate Victorian era, Britain controls not only most of Earth—including the American colonies—but also Venus, Mars, and the moons of Jupiter. Larklight is a home that hangs just beyond the moon. Art is happy living in the suburbs of the solar system, but his priggish sister longs for the excitement of London's social scene.

"When giant spiders attack their home and their father disappears, the siblings are tossed onto a lifeboat and float through the ether until they are rescued by young space pirate with a grudge against the Empire. This Victorian Star Wars trio hurtles through space battling robots, aliens, and a loony scientist."

Steampunk for kids! That idea alone, I love. I also loved David Wyatt's pen and ink illustrations throughout. I richly imagined world that, frankly, I wish I'd thought of. I love how it completely reinvents the reality of outer space, the way sword and sorcery fantasy reinvents the landscape of medieval Europe. I would have loved this when I was a kid! Again, I need to read more in this series if I ever get around to it.

Illustrators I like:

Sascha Preuss
A freelance illustrator out of Germany who does lovely vector work. Cute, bubbly, and almost 3 dimensional. The Bubble Army is just plain irresistible!


Scott Fischer
The illustrator I learned about from "The Secrets of Dripping Fang." His look is actually flexible, but I love the work in the "Big Kids" section. The body language of his characters is wonderfully dynamic and the black and white interior ink work for "Dripping Fang" is both funny and gruesome (in a good way!) I wish I inked like that!

Review: Onts, Gumm Street & Moody

Secrets of Dripping Fang 1: The Onts
by Dan Greenburg, illustrated by Scott M. Fischer

Synopsis: "The debut book in the paper-over-board Secrets of Dripping Fang series introduces the 10-year-old Shluffmuffin twins, whose father drowned in a Porta Potti and whose mother was smothered by a gang of angry bunnies. No one who comes to the Jolly Days Orphanage wants to adopt either Cheyenne or Wally, since her allergies cause her to sneeze constantly, and his feet reeked worse than festering, maggoty meat. But the siblings' luck seems to turn when two tall sisters with large heads and extra hands arrive at the orphanage.

"After taking the twins to their house in Dripping Fang Forest, the sisters tell the children to address them as Aunt ("we pronounce Aunt as ont, not ant," the ladies instruct). Wally discovers that the two are, indeed, giant ants and are breeding a race of super ants to enslave humans and take over Earth. Escaping into the forest, the twins narrowly escape some unpleasant encounters before temporarily taking refuge in the home of a professor and his wife-a large, hairy spider."

It's starts with orphans, which is a sore spot with me, as you may know, and goes downhill from there. One thing I apparently have to live with when it comes to kidlit, at least part of the time, is corny humor and over-the-top silliness. I like humor, mind you; I love humor. But I don't like corny, not at all. And I like over-the-top silliness, but in a Monty Python, Douglas Adams sort of way, not a Spongebob Squarepants sort of way.

But I'm an adult, after all, and kids obviously don't have such aversions. Even still, this felt rather hollow to me, devoid of any real charm. I did, however, really enjoy Fischer's illustrations and I want to investigate him further.


The Secret Order of the Gum Street Girls
by Elise Primavera

Synopsis: "Franny longs for adventure but can't even do a cartwheel. Pru can do a cartwheel but prefers hiding under her quilt making up safety tips. Cat has no use for safety tips but supposedly has ESP. And Ivy has had a seven-year string of bad luck—a Jinx that's about to get a whole lot worse.

"The four are thrown together when a pair of mysterious ruby red slippers turn up, along with the fashionably mad Cha-Cha Staccato, who bears a frightening resemblance to a certain wicked witch. . . "

There's no shortage of stories lately that spin off the Wizard of Oz, starting with the most notable, Wicked by Gregory Mcguire. This was a particularly strange one. At first, I had no idea there was such a connection. I thought Primavera had created a wonderfully unique and silly world of her own, and I was enjoying being in it, and almost got a little disappointed when I realized that it tied into an already established story. I thought, she's doing fine with her own world, why bother with using someone else's?

But I got over it, and enjoyed the rest. I have to admit, it must be tricky for an author to balance the POV between more than one character, and at times I did get a little confused with which girl was which. Over all, this was the good kind of silly, and Primavera's drawings add a lovely Dahl-esque sort of squiggly doodle charm.

Judy Moody
by Megan McDonald, illustrated by Peter H. Reynolds

Synopsis: "Judy Moody was in a mood. Not a good mood. A bad mood. A mad-faced mood.

"Judy Moody doesn’t have high hopes for third grade. But she does have an abundance of individuality and attitude, and when Mr. Todd assigns the class a special Me Project, she really gets a chance to express herself!"

If anything, I love the way the covers on these books are printed (sorry, I'm a graphic designer, so I pay attention to these sorts of things). An uncoated "craft paper" stock with a couple of spot colors and a die cut! Hurray for explore the medium a little and doing something different!

As for the stories themselves (and I have read more than one, but only felt the need to review one), they are rather ordinary in terms of setting and story. No silly other worlds or weird creatures. Just a girl, her family, her school and all the problems and real-world silliness that goes with it. And normally, I'm not all that interested in "real-life" stories, but Judy (and her brother Stink) are interesting characters, and the world is so much more interesting when viewed through the their lenses (the brother was apparently interesting enough to warrent his own spin-off series, which I have yet to check out).

Review: "The Skeleton Man"

Sammy Keyes and the Skeleton Man

by Wendelin Van Draanen

Synopsis: "While living a surreptitious life sneaking in and out of Gram's adults-only apartment complex, Sammy observes the unusual in the usual world. Halloween finds her and her friends mustering nerve to wend their way through dense shrubbery to the front door of scary Bush House to trick-or-treat when they are nearly knocked down by a "skeleton man" scurrying away with his loot in a pillow case. Sammy peers into the house to discover it's on fire, rescues its owner, and becomes embroiled in his family history."

Finally, a book that I actually looked forward to reading, and couldn't wait to read. Then again, I do like easy-going mysteries, for adults or kids. Then too, there's something about Van Draanen's writing that makes it easy to get caught up in the story. It stands in stark contrast to another book I'm reading right now, however, one that has an okay idea, but is just far too slow and phlegmatic to keep me wanting to come back for more (a review on that one later).

And while I typically can't stand it when an author tries to write from the point of view of a kid (the emphasis here is on "try"), I like Sammy a lot. She's got a voice of her own, she's smart, but still a seventh grader. She doesn't sound like an adult attempt at sounding like a seventh grader. 

The only down side for me is the secondary plot dealing with a rival student at school. The way she handled it was still pretty entertaining, but I personally just don't care for silly school dramas between the standard bully and the standard outcast main character. But I'm an adult, I lived through all of that and have no desire to relive it. Kids, on the other, are in the thick of it, and they'd probably eat this sort of thing right up.

Light bulb moments

Sometimes I hear something, something simple, direct and perhaps unremarkable to most other who hear the very same thing, but something that is, to me, revelatory. In answering the question of a reader regarding one's own fictional characters, Neil Gaiman offered the following sentence:

"I think the years I spent as a journalist doing interviews for magazines really helped as well. I learned a lot about speech patterns, and ways of describing people, and letting their words describe them."

For some reason, the phrase "letting their words describe them" lept out at me. I've long been told by those who know better that beginning writers tend to over-describe things, and the real art of writing comes down to mastering an economy or words. Maybe I knew this already, but it definitely struck me today that the words a character speaks can often paint the picture of their personality, motives, even personal history in ways far more rich and deeper than what the author himself can write about them.

In other words, rather than me, the author, spend a paragraph telling the reader how this guy is a jerk with a deep-seated fear of loosing, or this woman is kind but a push-over, I should simply stand back, let them speak and their own words (and actions) will betray them.

This may not be news to many already engaged in the writing arts, but it gave me reason to pause and rub my beard all thoughtful like...

Getting up the nerve

Checking out the "competition" is a double edged sword. On one hand, I need to know whether someone has already published an idea similar to mine (or at least a title that's too similar). But on the other, it can get very discouraging seeing all the great ideas out there, ideas that just seem much better than my own.

This line of thinking came about as I was trying to brainstorm a book title for my next project (the aforementioned idea #3). I was looking around on Barnes and Noble's site to see what title might be similar, or what titles just had the word "zombie" or "dead" in it. There are some interesting ideas already out there in the kidlit word, and it kind of bummed me out. I wondered if my idea was unique enough. Not necessarily "original" (you can manipulate all kinds of details to make something original) but I wondered if there was enough of a "hook" to my idea.

I mean, if you start with a story about "vampires" or "zombies", there's going to be a lot of stories already out there. To make it stand out, to make it memorable, you need to find a hook, something that makes it different from every other vampire story (vampire pirates, for example). I wondered if my idea had enough of a hook to make it stand out.

But sometimes, I've noticed, people try a hook and it doesn't do well. Someone else, takes a stab at something similar, and their version takes off. So you never know.

I know authors always talk about how you should write what moves you, what you're passionate about, stuff that you'd want to read. But at the same time, I think you have to think about marketing, too, at least a little: what can sell, how you're story will fit on the shelf with what's out there, or if you're subject is even in demand. Two sides of a coin that can drive you bonkers when you bounce back and forth.

At some point, I guess, you can over think things. You just have to suck it up, go with your gut, and go. Overall, if ain't fun, why bother?

So far, I think this idea will be fun. I like the characters I've got, and my mind is automatically filling in details almost faster than I can jot them down (and I haven't typed a word of the actual story). Which is a good sign, normally!

The time for preparation is over. Time to write a story.

Review: Tooth Fairies & Button Eyes

Coraline
by Neil Gaiman

Synopsis: "British novelist Gaiman and his long-time accomplice McKean (collaborators on a number of Gaiman's Sandman graphic novels as well as The Day I Swapped My Dad for 2 Goldfish) spin an electrifyingly creepy tale likely to haunt young readers for many moons.

"After Coraline and her parents move into an old house, Coraline asks her mother about a mysterious locked door. Her mother unlocks it to reveal that it leads nowhere: "When they turned the house into flats, they simply bricked it up," her mother explains. But something about the door attracts the girl, and when she later unlocks it herself, the bricks have disappeared. Through the door, she travels a dark corridor into a world that eerily mimics her own, but with sinister differences.

"I'm your other mother," announces a woman who looks like Coraline's mother, except "her eyes were big black buttons." Coraline eventually makes it back to her real home only to find that her parents are missing--they're trapped in the shadowy other world, of course, and it's up to their scrappy daughter to save them."

I read this before I started this blog, so it's been been reviewed, but I thought I just have to, on the off chance someone hasn't read it yet, or even heard of it yet. In my mind, it's an instant classic, pure and simple, the kind you read more than once (maybe around Halloween with your kids). Quirky characters, kinda creepy but not too scary, great illustrations. One to own.

I enjoyed the look of the movie, but the story of the book is better. This, for me, is one of those books I can't wait for my son to be old enough to read. There's also a graphic novel adaptation out, but I've haven't had a chance to check it out (I probably won't like it us much, though. I think the scariness is sometimes better when it's in your own head instead of in a picture on the page or on the screen).


What-the-Dickens
by Gregory Maguire

Synopsis: "When ten-year-old Dinah and her two siblings are trapped by a terrible storm, cousin Gage keeps up their spirits with an unlikely fantasy--that skibbereen, aka "tooth fairies", lived in warring colonies right in your neighborhood, colonies devoted to the planting and harvesting of your teeth. Dinah is skeptical at first, but stories told by candlelight on nights when the real world has become unbearable have a way of becoming real, and Dinah starts to--wants to--believe.

"It's the story of What-the-Dickens, a newly hatched orphan creature who finds he has an attraction to teeth, a crush on a cat named McCavity, and a penchant for getting into trouble. One day he happens upon a feisty girl skibberee who is working as an Agent of Change--trading coins for teeth--and learns that there is a dutiful tribe of skibbereen (call them tooth fairies) to which he hopes to belong. As his tale of discovery unfolds, however, both What-the-Dickens and Dinah come to see that the world is both richer and less sure than they ever imagined."

I'm sort of on the fence about this one. I appreciate the idea (Gregory has mad a career out of re-imagining older ideas), and the notion of telling a story within a story. But for some reason, I had a hard time getting into it personally. I'm reading another book like that currently, as it happens: well-written, fine story, well-imagined, but for some reason my mind keeps wandering and I don't exactly find myself clamoring for the next opportunity to read more. I think that's more to do with personal taste, though, than any fault of the author or the book itself.