Home » Posts tagged "children’s books" (Page 6)

Book Review: Cats vs. Robots: This Is War by Margaret Stohl and Lewis Peterson

Cats vs. Robots: This Is War by Margaret Stohl and Lewis Peterson, illustrated by Kay Peterson

HarperCollins, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-0062665706

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

 

Cats vs. Robots: This Is War is a rare treat at a time when things have gotten pretty serious and scary, and there is a lot of anger and misunderstanding out there. The technologically oriented Wengrod family gets caught in the middle of an intergalactic race between a robot empire and an empire of cats, to acquire the “Singularity Chip,” , which could lead to immortality. Twins Max and Min are nothing alike: Min loves school, order, and inventing robots, while Max hates school and loves videogames and the neighbors’ cat. Despite knowing his parents and sister hate cats, Max rescues two kittens and brings them home, only to discover that their inventor parents have taken off on a work trip to China, leaving them in the care of their cousin Javi, who is willing to give the kittens, a source of chaos, a tryout. Obi, the elderly neighborhood cat, is an agent of the cat empire, but it’s unclear if he’ll be able to survive long enough to thwart the robots and acquire the chip, so he sends the kittens on a mission, but being kittens they primarily create chaos, and they manage, unknowingly, to damage the robot Min has been building (it’s pretty awesome to see Min at work– there should be more science- and coding-loving girls in fiction). In the meantime, the robot empire has managed to subvert the electronic system that controls the house, which tries to convince the Wengrods’ early robot creations to stop the kittens and find and retrieve the Singularity Chip, invented by Max and Min’s parents and hidden from thieves. In the midst of all this, Max and Min have to make peace with each other, and both robots and cats have to accept that not all of them share all the same traits.

Javi, while not a main character, plays an important role in a couple of ways. First, they are the first nonbinary character I’ve seen in a middle grade book, and Stohl and Peterson take the time to explain it in a way kids should be able to understand (Stohl has a nonbinary child). Second, Javi, knowing what it is to not fit inside a single box, is both understanding and encouraging in trying to make peace between the robots and the cats. Stohl and Petersen do a nice job of making Javi a part of the story without making them the focus.

Stohl’s characterization of both cats and robots made me grin. She takes their most common traits and exaggerates them to the point that I had to laugh, but at the same time shows individuals who display differences. This is a funny book and a fast read with a serious theme and plenty of action and wackiness that is perfect for engaging readers of all kinds, in a time when it seems people can find nothing to bring them together.  Highly recommended.

Posted on October 29, 2018 by , Reply

Book Review: Out of the Wild Night by Blue Balliett

Out of the Wild Night by Blue Balliett

Scholastic, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-0545867566

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook

 

Blue Balliett is a gifted writer with a lyrical voice and quirky tone to her books. Typically she writes what I would describe as puzzle-box mysteries– they have many complex and seemingly unrelated pieces that have to be pulled into place at the right time by their child protagonists to solve a crime that involves a literary or artistic work of some kind. Since her first book, Chasing Vermeer,  was published, a number of other children’s books that require the characters to solve puzzles and codes have come out, but hers remained an outstanding and unique voice, although her narratives have gotten more difficult to navigate, and some books have been better than others. I picked this one up when a colleague told me she was unable to get more than 20 pages in. Surely she couldn’t be speaking of a book by Blue Balliett?

In Out of the Wild Night,  Balliett is trying something completely new– a ghost story, told by a ghost, that takes place on Nantucket, where a greedy real estate investor is buying up historic houses and gutting them to replace the original interiors with modern, updated ones, much to the consternation of some local children and, apparently, some very unhappy ghosts. Balliet’s stories often involve object conservation or historic preservation, and in this case, the absent mother of Phoebe, one of the children, is away studying historic preservation while the houses on Nantucket are being subjected to “renovation.”

My original thought was that Balliett wanted to write about Nantucket more than she wanted to write a good ghost story for children, and a well-hidden author’s note at the back bears that out. Balliett lived in Nantucket more than once, as a teenager and young adult, and it is clear that she deeply loves it and wants to share it with her readers… and for her, living in Nantucket is inextricably intertwined with ghosts.  But her choice of a a 100-year-old ghost woman unable to impact her world or even feel much as a narrator, instead of a child protagonist led to a faded story and atmosphere, and the characters seem like they are afterthoughts. It’s unlike Balliett to leave ends dangling, but while I struggled to get through a majority of the book, in which it seemed that nothing happened, after several rereads of the end chapters I’m still unsure of what actually happened to resolve events as they did. You’d have to be a very careful reader to arrive at her big reveal without being completely confused.

Despite her love of Nantucket and its ghosts, and as lyrical as her writing can be, Balliett fails to evoke the sense of place she’s working to create in her fiction that I’ve felt in books that do bring similar locations to life, such as Rass Island in Jacob Have I Loved, where the environment was intimately tied to the protagonist’s emotional intensity. In her follow-up note, Balliett’s evocation of Nantucket is much stronger than it is in the novel, and I’m left thinking that she wrote the wrong book, and would have done better to create a connected collection of ghost stories of and nonfiction sketches about Nantucket.

As much as I love Balliett’s work, especially Chasing Vermeer, she failed her readers in this book. It does not completely develop either the small world of Nantucket or the Gothic feel of a ghost story, but the pieces aren’t there to put a mystery together; the pacing is slow, the characters aren’t given the space they need to develop, the narrator is ineffective at communicating, and the plot does not hang together. As it is, the primary thing it accomplishes is to briefly bring attention to Nantucket, the importance of restoring the interiors of historic houses, and of building a sense of community. Balliett is clever and creative in her writing, but it’s frustrating to get to the payoff, and more work that the children in the target age range for this book are probably willing to do.

I hope to see another great book from Balliett soon. Sad to say, this one isn’t worth the time and work it takes to read it. Appropriate for ages 9-12, and middle school library collections.

Contains: violence, attempted murder

 

 

Posted on September 7, 2018 by , Reply

Book Review: Evangeline of the Bayou by Jan Eldredge, illustrated by Joseph Kuefler

Evangeline of the Bayou

Balzer + Bray, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-0062680341

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook

While the supernatural Southern Gothic tradition and Louisiana setting are well-known in adult and YA fiction, I have never come across a supernatural Southern Gothic middle-grade novel like Evangeline of the Bayou,  that so beautifully evokes the wilderness of bayou country, so that it is almost a character itself ( I was reminded of Carl Hiaasen’s descriptions of the Everglades in Scat and the descriptions of the swamps of  Texas in Kathi Appelt’s Keeper and The Underneath,  also middle-grade novels, but otherwise these are very different kinds of books).

Eleven-year-old Evangeline Clement lives in the bayou with her grandmother. Evangeline is the last in a long line of  “haunt huntresses”, women with the power and skill to defeat the supernatural creatures of the bayou, and is anxiously waiting to come into her powers and meet her familiar, which must happen by the time she turns 12. Her disastrous attempts to overcome supernatural creatures on her own suggest that she’s not quite ready to operate independently, though. When her grandmother volunteers to help with a supernatural problem in New Orleans, Evangeline, as her apprentice and assistant, accompanies her to the Midsomer family’s luxurious mansion to try to discover what might be ailing the beautiful Mrs. Midsomer. At the Midsomers’, Evangeline encounters Camille, the solicitous housekeeper; Julian Midsomer, the maddening, bluntly honest, routine-bound son of her hosts; the skeptical Mr. Midsomer; the distressed Mrs. Midsomer, who is running out of time; and Laurent Andreas, leader of the exclusive krewe to which Mr. Midsomer belongs. She is not impressed with the trappings of wealth, and her inner commentary on it is great, but she has a good heart and genuinely wants to help.

When Evangeline’s grandmother breaks her leg just before things are about to go out of control, it is up to Evangeline, unwillingly accompanied by an unbelieving Julian, to stop things before it’s too late.  The tension builds slowly in the Midsomers’ mansion at first, but once we’ve met all the characters, the story moves at a breakneck pace, and exposition is tied in so skillfully that you almost don’t notice. As dark as the story gets (and it gets pretty dark) it still has moments of humor, and strongly demonstrates the power of love and self-sacrifice. There are certainly some outrageously unbelievable moments; for instance, Evangeline’s grandmother is far more resilient than anyone could possibly expect from an ordinary human being. In a story populated with banshees and revenants, though, I’m willing to cut Eldredge a little slack.

Author Jan Eldredge avoids writing in dialect, which I think works fine for this book, but the names of the creatures Evangeline encounters are so unusual that I didn’t realize that the supernatural creatures in the book are all grounded in Cajun folklore until I reached the glossary at the end (searching the Internet for more information on these creatures was a challenge, and there were many I couldn’t find). As a native of Louisiana, perhaps it didn’t occur to Eldredge that children interested in monsters and cryptids who are not from the area would have trouble tracking additional information down.

While Evangeline, the bayou, and the supernatural creatures of Louisiana are the most convincing characters in this book, as far as I can tell, it is unique in its combination of genres in middle-grade fiction. Try it with kids who are interested in ghost stories, cryptids, supernatural creatures, monsters and monster hunters, books set in the American South, and American folklore. This book has an audience out there, just waiting to find it. Recommended.

Contains: Violence, murder, death in childbirth, blood

Posted on May 3, 2018 by , Reply
First « 45678 » Last