Possibly My Favorite Unicorn Book

I'm always delighted when I enjoy a book written by an acquaintance or Facebook friend. That is the case with Pacey Packer Unicorn Tracker by Connecticut author and artist J.C. Phillipps. It's a terrific middle grade graphic novel about a smart, tough girl who is trying to be an awesome babysitter for her younger sister, when said younger sister disappears out the window on a unicorn. Pacey immediately heads off to save her with the assistance of her sister's plush unicorn toy, which is now alive.

This book has witty repartee, narrative drive, strong young women, and lots of purple.

I am aware that unicorns are popular, though I don't get it, myself. Here is what unicorns were in my youth:  Beasts in medieval stories who laid their heads in virgins' laps, which is how they were caught and killed. They struck me as stupid animals,. Not in the sense of them not being humans and thus must be stupid but in the sense that smarter animals know not to put themselves at risk like that. 

Unicorns appear to have come a long way.

We have a unicorn fan in the family, but she is too young for this book. I ordered a copy of it yesterday for her older brother 

Pacey Packer Unicorn Tracker is the first book in a series. The fourth one is coming out next year.

Sickbed Reading

Where I lived for 5 days.

Well, I lost an entire week of my life to an illness that wasn't Covid. I was out of commission for four days, though, and the following two days were up and down. I imagine I'll be napping this afternoon, too. I was sick enough that I even had to give up tweeting virtual author appearances, because I tagged a random guy with the same name as an author involved. I was able to read, but I kept moving back and forth between books. Not a lot of concentration.

Though maybe I do that, anyway.

I did, however, finish some interesting things. 

The Best American Essays 2012 I've had this thing on my Kindle for, I don't know, seven or eight years? Whenever it became available as a deal. I'd read a few of the essays, but it wasn't something I looked forward to getting back to, obviously.

Recently, I've been reading essays on Medium, where I've wondered if essays aren't just a bit different. I find them longer than I'd prefer. Rambling. Not staying on subject. Sometimes more personally focused than I'm interested in reading.

The essays in 2012 were also longer than I'm interested in reading. Sometimes authors will write about something, then relate it to books they've read, which should be enlightening, but... There was one essay about boredom that put me to sleep at least twice one morning on a particularly sick day. I woke up in the night, couldn't get back to sleep, thought, I'll try some more of that boredom essay. Knocked me right out. It was great.

Another essay was of interest to me, because it was about the author's friend who was beautiful. Doesn't sound as if the guy was someone you'd want to know, though. The author veered off into discussions of beauty. I didn't love the essay, but it made me think that maybe I'm not all that interested in beauty as a subject. That's significant because there is a character in 143 Canterbury Road whose beauty is remarked upon. I need to think about that.

Two essays I particularly liked: Killing My Body to Save My Mind by Lauren Slater and Outlaw by Jose Antonio Vargas. Both these essays are very personal. But they stay on task, making them on the short side for these kinds of volumes, and they deal with subjects that I am aware of, but haven't read about over and over again.

I walked away from this book--metaphorically, because I wasn't doing much walking last week--with a question--How do you go about choosing subjects for essays? Things like boredom and beauty or things much more from personal experience?

Suffering Succotash: A Picky Eater's Quest to Understand Why We Hate the Foods We Hate by Stephanie V. W. Lucianovic  I started this a couple of months ago, because we have a few truly picky eaters in our family, and it does have a big impact on their lives. My response to this book is interesting, because while with the essays I preferred the ones that were personal, I found this too memoirish for my taste. I was hoping for more help. Maybe there just isn't any.

I'm mentioning this here, because Lucianovic now writes children's books, and next month she has one coming out called The League of Picky Eaters. I don't think I've ever seen this subject in a children's book, though there may be some out there. This one sounds very clever. I've sent a request to NetGalley, though I'm behind on posting about other NetGalley books, so I don't know how this will turn out.

Skunk and Badger by Amy Timberlake with illustrations by Jon Klassen. This is an example of social media marketing working. Amy Timberlake ended up in my September Virtual Opportunities post, because she has a new Skunk and Badger book out right now, Egg Marks the Spot. While scrolling through available e-books from my library, I recognized her name on the first Skunk and Badger book and borrowed it. So the author and her book series got a reader, because of social media marketing, and now it is getting more social media marketing by way of this blog. 

Somehow I got the impression Skunk and Badger was going to be like Frog and Toad. I wouldn't make the comparison, myself, because I think it's for a much older age group, and is much more sophisticated. Which is not a bad thing. Not bad at all. 

Skunk and Badger are two loners who definitely need each other, though they're not at all alike. The reclusive and studious Badger struggles with coming to grips with the much more outgoing and somewhat chaotic Skunk. They inhabit a world with a village populated by other animals, and they have mail! Also, there are lots of chickens. 

A really lovely book.

Environmental Book Club

I wish I could recall why I requested Outside In by Deborah Underwood from my library's e-book service. Was it on one of my 2020 monthly book release posts? Deborah Underwood and I follow each other on Twitter, so I may have heard about the book there. Or, since it appears the book has picked up a number of awards, it may have crossed my psyche in other ways. For instance, it's a Caldecott Honor Book for illustrator Cindy Derby's moody artwork, which really melds with the moody text. Since I read library e-books on my iPad and not on my ancient Kindle, I was able to enjoy said artwork.

Putting aside the mystery of how I found this book, reading it was a true experience. I was not terribly impressed with the first line. "Once we were part of Outside and Outside was part of us." Then came the next two. "There was nothing between us. Now sometimes even when we're outside...we're inside." With a perfect illustration.

It was at this point that I felt the top of my head come off, so to speak. If you are knowledgeable about Emily Dickinson, which I'm not, or have been watching the TV show Dickinson, which I have, you may be familiar with Dickinson's definition of poetry. If she is reading a book, she said, and "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry."

I don't want to claim this book is poetry. I don't know enough about poetry to do that. I've seen nothing to indicate Underwood considers herself a poet, and her attitude is the all important one. But last year I developed a modest interest in prose poetry, and that's how I read this book--as a prose poem expressing a specific thought in an intense way.

Maybe that was because I had that top-of-my-head-off feeling while reading it.

Why Is This An Environmental Book Club Post, Gail?

Well, Outside In, is, I think, a description of how we live with the outdoors even when we don't know that we're doing it. I wrote off the first line as just the beginning of another cliched nature tale, about how humans have lost nature. But "Once were were part of Outside and Outside was part of us" isn't a lead in to that kind of story at all. Because what I think Underwood is saying here is that Outside has come in with us. That's how we live now with the Outside In with us.

Back on Earth Day, I wrote (twice) "In environmental children's literature, the environment is something that's not part of our general day-to-day life." This led, I believed, to A. Children needing to learn a lot of facts about the environment so a lot of children's environmental books are nonfiction; and B. Children needing to fight evil corporations in environmental fiction, needing to do something about some Other that's causing problems.

But Outside In most definitely is about day-to-day life and how we live with the outdoors now. It doesn't require readers to do anything. They don't have to learn anything. They don't have to become outraged about a bad guy. They are just led to see.

Who Would Like This Book, Gail?

The publisher describes this book as being for ages 4 through 7 and grades Pre-K through 3. I tried reading it to a nearly 4-year-old whose tastes run to Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and Pete Oswald's Hike. In spite of the multitude of mini-hikes he did during the pandemic, Outside In was lost on him. Keeping in mind that one is not a statistically significant number, perhaps this book would be better for the readers on the older end of this age range.

Or how about:

• Using this book as a classroom read aloud?
• Using this book as part of a classroom unit on nature?
• Using this book as part of classroom unit to encourage writing about nature?
• Using this book as part of a nature writing workshop for adults?
• Giving this book as a gift to an adult outdoorsperson?

Yeah, I'm kind of enthusiastic about this one.

 

 

Gail's Sense Of Snow

I grew up in central Vermont, as my loyal readers probably know. I headed a little further north in the state for college. I've lived all my adult life in central Connecticut, which is southern New England, which often is no stranger to rough winter weather. That backstory explains, I hope, why I have a love/hate relationship with snow. I love snow if I can be inside watching it or outside frolicking in it for a bit. I hate it if I have to travel through it, either as a driver or a passenger. I hate it if any family members are out driving in it.

By which I mean driving through a snowstorm.

I found  Five Total Strangers by Natalie D. Richards intense and disturbing, which is what any writer wants from a reader, totally because it involved five people driving through a snowstorm. The main character is a teenage girl on her way home for Christmas who accepts a ride from a slightly older young woman she'd met on a plane that had just landed. Their airport is now shutting down because of an expected snowstorm, and older woman has rented a car and offered rides to four people, including our narrator. None of them know one another.

I stayed up too late reading it one night. All because of the snow.

There is a secondary story line related to a stalker. I don't think that was necessary. This could have totally worked as a snowpocalypse survival story.

Oh, on top of the snow issue, these strangers were driving through Pennsylvania. I've driven in Pennsylvania in the fall, not the winter. I don't know if I have been on one of the highways named in the book, but I find whatever Pennsylvania route we always end up taking when we're going to the Midwest an ordeal, because the exits are few and far, far between. All I can think of when I'm on that highway is how long it would take emergency vehicles to arrive in any kind of weather--on a beautiful summer day--because it's been so long since we passed the last on-ramp and there's no sign of another one.

I'm getting stressed just writing this. I believe anyone who's lived in a northern state would. I don't know of anyone old enough to have a driver's license who doesn't start hunting for help from a higher driving power when a snowstorm is predicted.

Well, except for my late Uncle Gerry who worked for a public works department. I once heard him refer to snow as white oil, because of all the over time he collected--driving a snowplow.

How Does A Zombie Story Fit In With Black History Month?

Deathless Divide, the sequel to Dread Nation by Justina Ireland, is a work of alternative history dealing with the rise of the undead after the American Civil War. That's right. It's a zombie story. Why would I consider that an appropriate book to discuss in relation to Black History Month? Because in an Author's Note, Justina Ireland writes that she feels the one goal she is sure she accomplished with this book is putting "Black people back into history."

Ireland loves the western genre but says she felt that while Black people "lived throughout the West, they are rarely the heroes of any popular narratives." Given the author's goal, and the sense that Deathless Divide appears to have been as meticulously researched as a traditional historical novel, and the fact that, as with Dread Nation, Deathless Divide is about race and gender more than it's about zombies, I think it's a good title to bring to readers' attention this month.

The family member who recommended these books to me felt that the sequel wasn't as good as the original. I think Deathless Divide is as good as Dread Nation, but it is different structurally, which some fans of the first book may find disappointing. 

Dread Nation was told from the point of view of Jane McKeene, an outsider antihero type who is engaging the way outsider antiheroes often are. Deathless Divide is told from alternating points of view, moving between Jane and Katherine Deveraux, another excellent character from the first book. Like Jane, Katherine is a powerful young woman, but she manages her power behind a facade of traditional womanhood, while Jane is right out there. For me, alternating points of view often slow down narrative drive, and that may be an issue in the second book for some readers.

People who have read the first book are also probably going to want Jane and Katherine to get back together, which  takes a while. This is more of a journey book, with both Jane and Katherine on separate journeys to arrive at the same place.

I think you could argue that the author took an admirable risk structuring the second book so differently. I think it worked. I definitely felt I was reading a different book, while sequels and, particularly series, are often so similar to the original and each other that it's hard to pinpoint what happened in which book.

Not the case here. I think these will be memorable books. 

I've Done 48 Hikes This Year! And, Yes, That Does Relate To Children's Books

I am not a major fan of wordless picture books. But I definitely enjoyed Hike by Pete Oswald, possibly because I've been out for minor hikes one to two times a week this year. (I prefer to call them walks, truthfully, because the longest was only 4 miles, but that wouldn't work in this blog post, would it?) .  A number of the shortest hikes were with a very small person suffering from being housebound these many months.

That's what Hike is about--a hike with an adult and child, in this case a father and a young one who I think could be of either gender. The illustrations are terrific and carry a very coherent and simple story line regarding the characters' day trip. There's plenty to talk about on most of the pages, especially with a little listener who has been out on trails.

Oh, and this is a 2020 book! A pandemic book about my major out-of-house pandemic activity.

Book Launch For "Seven Golden Rings"

While putting together the second post for October's book releases, I discovered that author Rajani LaRocca was having a book launch last week for her new picture book, Seven Golden Rings. You all know that when a virtual book event catches my fancy, I am in. So I did, indeed, register to attend. And showed up on time.

This was an excellent event on a couple of different levels.

As A Virtual Book Launch

Zoom event vs. webinar. Another book launch I attended this past summer was a traditional Zoom event, with the people attending showing up in the Zoom boxes a la The Brady Bunch. However, the Seven Golden Rings event, as a staff member from the bookstore sponsoring the launch (The Silver Unicorn Bookstore in Acton, Mass.) explained, was a webinar. The people running it could not see or hear the attendees, nor could any of us see or hear anyone else.

This means, folks, that not only did I not have to dress up for this thing, I could have washed my hair and sat there with it drying, as I would have if I'd known how this was going to go down. Seriously, not only do I not want to have to drive to go anywhere ever again, I don't want to have to get dressed or comb my hair while I'm taking part in it from home. 

By the way, 100 people registered to attend. By a few minutes after 7, when the show got on the road, 60 of us had shown up. More could have come later. But, you know, 60 people. Good work.

Interviewer and interviewee. So the bookstore staff person turned everything over to LaRocca, who was seated in what looked to be a whole lot better home office than I have, and the person who was going to interview her, author Hayley Barrett, who was somewhere else, since we're in the midst of a pandemic and all. Barrett and LaRocca are critique partners and have known each other for some time. A situation like that has the potential to go really badly, with all kinds of inside jokes and drifting off to their shared interests that listeners couldn't care less about. But au contraire. Barrett had the inside dope on what happened while this book was being written and knew just what to ask to get that information out.

The reading. LaRocca did a reading of the book. She did not just awkwardly hold the book open in front of a camera and turn the pages. She had her book loaded onto some kind of techie thing that kept it open and turned the pages. I don't know what it was, but it was terrific. 

A surprise guest. LaRocca's son turned up, coming to us from his dorm room. It made sense why he was there. I once had two college-age boys. They are terrific, too.

A model. I think this was an excellent model for how a virtual book launch can operate so it isn't just the author talking. Bring in your own, prepared interviewer. Have some good technology. Bring in a guest. 

As Exposure To A Lovely Book

I have now actually read Seven Golden Rings while it was being read to me by its author and have seen every page. It's a terrific story centering around a math/logic issue that I was actually able to understand. The illustrations by Archana Sreenivasan are wonderful. It's very, very possible that someone in my family is going to receive a copy of this book for Christmas. I will then share with him all the insider info I have about it, because I attended this book launch.

You Can Binge Read The "Truly Devious" Trilogy Now

I was definitely a fan of the first two books in the Truly Devious trilogy by Maureen Johnson, Truly Devious and The Vanishing Stair. I liked the two mysteries, one set it in the 1930s, the other in the present. I liked the Vermont and school setting.

The finale, The Hand on the Wall, is well reviewed, but not my favorite of the books. The reasons:

• Romance. I liked the mystery. I wanted mystery, and I wanted everything in the book to serve the mystery. I know there is a feeling among some YA people that YA books must have a romance. But with a lot of mysteries, both YA and adult, I find romance a tack-on. It distracts from what is, to me, the real story. In The Hand on the Wall there is one plot point that the romance supports. Maybe there are more points in the first two books that I don't remember. The romance wasn't a great element for me.
• Politics. These books include a political element that involves a cliched bad-guy politician. In the second and third books, the politician does support a plot point. But we have to put up with a lot of him for him to do that. 
• Serial, not series. The Truly Devious trilogy is definitely a serial, not a series. I had read and, remember, liked the first two books and still found it difficult to recall material that needed to be recalled to make the last book really work for me.

But that third problem can be by-passed now, because all three books have been published. Read them one after another. Maybe my romance and political issues would be resolved with a binge read, too.

Me And Mother Jones, We've Got A Thing Going On

Until this spring, all I knew about Mother Jones was that it was the name of a magazine I'd never read and didn't know anything about, though I can tell you now that it does investigative journalism. Then this spring,  I was reading A People's History of the United States, and the author, Howard Zinn, starts in about "Mother Mary Jones, a seventy-five-year-old white-haired woman who was organizer for the United Mine Workers of America," I thought, Aha! That can't be a coincidence. And it wasn't. The magazine was, indeed, named for Mary Jones, known as "Mother" during her later activist years.

Stick With Me, Folks. There's A Mother Jones Childlit Connection Coming

A couple of months after reading A People's History, I'm reading the March/April issue of The Horn Book and what do I see but a review of Mother Jones and Her Army of Mill Children by Jonah Winter with illustrations by Nancy Carpenter! The book deals with an incident that appears in both the AFL-CIO bio of Jones and the Mother Jones magazine material about her in which Mother Jones organized child workers in a march from Philadephia to President Theodore Roosevelt's home in Oyster Bay, New York.

Two Points

• I love it when something new to me repeats in my life, the way Mother Jones did in the Zinn book and this picture book review. I'm sure I've written about this before here. And I'm guessing there is a word to describe this experience. Not deja vu, since that deals with the experience of feeling you've been somewhere before or lived an experience before. Perhaps the Germans have a word for this, since they are quite good at coming up with words for odd experiences.
• Though I have not read Mother Jones and Her Army of Mill Children, the set up for this book sounds like a classic way of introducing children to a historical figure we wouldn't necessarily expect them to connect with. The author finds something about the subject children should be attracted to, in this case, other children. That aspect of the book reminds me of Susanna Reich's Minette's Feast, in which child readers are introduced to Julia Child by way of her cat. 

 

Oh, And Since We're Discussing Introducing The Young To Adult Subjects...

 

A family member who is a middle school librarian brought  A Young People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn with Rebecca Stetoff  to my attention. It's a young adult edition of Zinn's original book. I would not say that this is the only history of the United States a young person, or anyone else, should read, but it certainly will give someone who already knows something about American history something to consider.