Category Archives: books

This is the second book in a series about Nick and Tesla, two kids with a Maker ethos who get broiled up in adventures while staying with their eccentric inventor uncle. The series by “Science Bob” Pflugflelder and Steve Hockensmith comes complete with diagrams and plans for building the things that Nick and Tesla build in the story, so an intrepid reader could construct their own robo-hovercrafts or bot-blasting soaker gun or maybe a robo-bug? My son and I haven’t yet made any of these, but we’ve bookmarked a few for the future.

The story in this second book – Robot Army Rampage — moves at a quicker pace than the first book (High-Voltage Danger Lab), which I appreciated, and the characters in the story are bit more lively, too. Here, the story involves a series of robberies of stores in town, the sudden emergence of a bunch of odd little robots, a comic book/Maker store where kids like to hang out, and some off-kilter characters. My son guessed the culprit early on but still thoroughly enjoyed the tale.

I like how the writers really bake in the whole engineering/inventor/Make ideas into the books. It doesn’t seem terribly forced and instead, the kids use their wits and humor to solve problems. It helps their uncle has a fully-equipped science lab in the basement of their home (doesn’t everyone?) but the schematics that are provided here rely on mostly common everyday objects and materials.

So, you could build your own robo-bug. And why wouldn’t you?

Peace (in the make),
Kevin

A few years ago, after reading some Carl Hiaasen with my class, I saw the book Belly Up by Stuart Gibbs in the book store. The cover had the same sort of style as Flush and so I picked it up. It was a fun read, certainly influenced by Hiaasen’s style of humorous writing and focus on hijinks and the environment, albeit with the setting of a zoo, of sorts. Still, it was a fun, fast read, with lots of chuckling on our part. I guess some students liked it too because Belly Up went missing from my classroom library not long after I put it there.

Darn kids.

So, when I saw that Gibbs had another book out (and a sequel), I kept it on my radar. Finally, my son and I dove into Spy School as a read-aloud and as soon as it was done, we were searching for Spy Camp. My son is nine years old, so spying as the source for stories has great appeal (that Gibbs, he knows his audience). The novel tells the story of Ben, who gets invited to join a super-elite school for young spies-in-training, only to find out things are not what they appear to be and suddenly, the hunt is on for a mole in the espionage establishment.

There’s plenty of action, and pretty decent characters, as Gibbs establishes some of the ins and outs of the spy agencies, and puts Ben’s life in danger more than a few times. Luckily, Ben has a protector of sorts in Erica, a beautiful girl whose espionage skills would rattle James Bond on a good day. She’s a one-person wrecking crew of smarts and skills. And Ben is smitten (my son wasn’t all that interested in that element of the story).

Spy School is a good, adventurous read for middle school kids, particularly boys. Gibbs has found a solid topic to build some novels off, and my son and I are going deep undercover … to read.

Peace (this blog post will self-destruct in five seconds),
Kevin

Fortunately, the Milk is another amusingly, bizarre book by Neil Gaiman that was such the perfect read-aloud on our wintry day that we are tempted to read it again (although I think my son and wife might save it for their boys’ book club). A fast-paced, quirky adventure in which a dad goes out to get the milk and returns with a whopper of a story involving aliens, volcanoes, hot air balloons and time traveling nonsense that will have your head spinning. (in a good way).

Coupled with fun illustration, Fortunately, the Milk is a riot. Not very deep in terms of characters or plot, perhaps, but still a rollicking adventure. I also thought it interesting how Gaiman and the publisher used font sizes and styles to denote parts of the story as the narrative moves in and out of the present (kids talking to dad) to the past (the story that dad tells), and the ending reminded me a bit of that last scene in The Usual Suspects but that’s all I will say.

On a day when snow was falling and my son and I were cuddled up on the couch, we were fortunate to have Fortunately, the Milk handy and my admiration of Gaiman as a writer continues to grow.

Peace (in the tale),
Kevin

Tua and the Elephant is a beautiful little novel, and it was such a nice change of pace from my read aloud with my son of action and adventure stories that have a lot of noise but very little depth. Which is not to say that action and adventure are not part of this story in which a little girl, Tua, sets out to rescue an elephant, even as she is being chased by two seedy men who have abused the elephant and want it back. Set in Thailand, this small novel gives such a flavor of setting and character, and moves with humor and humanity, making it a perfect read-aloud for home or the classroom.

Tua is smart and determined, and her heart is what drives the story forward from the first page to the last. You can’t help but root for Tua and care about the young elephant she is intent on saving. Finding a gem like Tua and the Elephant (I saw it on a table at the book store, and was captivated by the cover, and picked it up) is such a refreshing thing, reminding me of the power of story told with compassion and understanding.

Tua lives in our hearts now, too.

Peace (in the story),
Kevin

For all the truth around “not judging a book by its cover,” I admit that sometimes it is the cover that attracts me to a book. So it is with Piers Torday’s The Last Wild. The cover was so intriguing, and the novels’ name, too, that I just had to pick it up when I saw it out at the NCTE convention. I’m glad I did, as my son and I just finished it as a read-aloud, and now we can only wait for the sequel to see how the story ends.

The book is set in a dystopian future, where animals have been killed off by disease (called “red eye” or “berry eye”) and all humans are now huddled around some city centers to avoid contamination. The protagonist, Kester, is a boy who has been stuck inside a children’s boarding “school” for six years, following his mother’s death and his father’s work as a scientist and vet. Kester is mute, unable to talk, but he narrates for us in a loud voice and soon discovers that he has the ability to “talk” silently with insects and, yes, animals.

Because not all the animals are dead, and they have come to break Kester out of his school (jail) so that he can lead the last wild (a group of animals) towards a cure for the disease that has ravaged the world. Torday’s book is full of adventure, and difficult choices, and a re-imagining of the world where man has done nature wrong, and now it is time to fix the problems, and save the animals. Quirky characters, and evil antagonists, abound here.

I’m glad the cover the caught my eye. We thoroughly enjoyed The Last Wild, and wait for the next book.

Peace (in the wild),
Kevin

There is no way you could not fall in love with Jellaby. Not just the graphic novel of the same title, but the monster/creature/alien/thing that forms the heart of this new graphic novel series by Kean Soo (with a great introduction by Kazu Kibuishi).  Jellaby centers on a young girl, Portia, whose a bit lost and lonely in a new place and who discovers in the woods near her house an oversized, yet clearly young, creature that is also lost and lonely. She names the creature Jellaby, and Soo’s artistry really brings Jellaby to life with huge eyes, small wings and a large heart.

The story is a riff on the “Can I have this dog that followed me home – please please please?” idea but Soo has created a real believable world with Portia and Jellaby and then later, her new friend, Jason. The two kids are on a quest to find a portal back to Jellaby’s home, and the perfect cover for transporting a monster on a train is Halloween. This graphic novel — subtitled “The Lost Monster” — is the first part of a larger story of the three friends (and I’ve seen some of Soo’s work in the Flight collections so I know he has a flair for storytelling with heart).

You know what I appreciated?

At the end of the novel, Soo writes a bit about where the story comes from and explains some of the artistic elements. For example, the book is completely dipped in purples and pinks. As I was reading, I thought: that’s a pretty clever way to establish the mood of the story, and it does. Our visual senses see the world of Jellaby through the colors that Soo uses. I was thinking, how smart. But it turns out Soo used that colors because it was cheap, and he had figured that when/if the book ever got published, the publishers could easily turn the purple to black. But the publisher liked the purple and pink hues, and so it was kept. Interesting.

Peace (in the story),
Kevin

I was pleased to also witness the tale of Jacqueline Cochran, who was a pioneering woman aviator who convinced the US military (over strong objections) to allow woman to fly aircraft during the war. The male-dominated military would not allow combat missions, but the scope of the efforts of these valiant women who paved the way for equity in the armed forces is a story that we should not let be forgotten. I had never heard of Cochran before, and the story here had me doing some searching around about her, and she was an amazing woman: fearless, confident, brave. She was not ever in the history books that I remember reading.

The artwork in this collection is just so-so, and some of the writing is weak, unfortunately. The amount of space dedicated to each of the stories makes it difficult to bring these heroes completely alive. It’s barely a taste of those who sacrificed in the war. For some young readers, though, the graphic stories might be enough to pique their interests about the generation that changed the world and lived through times we can’t quite imagine.

Peace (in the book),
Kevin

PS — you can view a sample of the book in Google Books.

Peculiar, indeed.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, by Ransom Riggs (!), is such an interesting piece of art, and I mean art in the finest sense. Riggs has created a creepy, setting-driven story that adds a sci-fi twist (that I won’t give away) to propel the discovery of a very odd school and its inhabitants in motion. What I find most interesting is how Riggs uses real “found photographs” for this novel (the sequel just came out) and a question looms at the end of the book like a chicken and egg question:

Did the photographs inform the story or did the story lead to finding the photographs?

Happily, Riggs has a short piece at the end of the novel where he tries to answer that question, explaining how he poured through thousands of “found photos” as he worked on the novel, and his answer to the question is: a little of both. Some photos he found changed the flow of the novel while in other cases, he was looking for something rather specific. When we talk about ways in which media interact with writing, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is a fine example of a story where those two ideas meshed together nicely. The characters don’t feel all that forced by the odd photos that abound here.

I was struck early on by the establishing of the setting, too, and the feeling of creepiness that settled on me. Not in a bad way, but in a very interesting way. I needed to keep reading, if only to figure out what was going in. I thought the voice of the narrator, Jacob (a boy whose grandfather has died in a mysterious way and whose past leads Jacob into strange terrain) was authentic and real, even as the narrative fabric of the story falls apart on him and reality is questioned.

Peace (in the beautiful oddness of the world),
Kevin