Category Archives: books

Jarrett J. Krosoczka  has done it again — crafting an intelligent, emotional and powerful graphic memoir from his own life. In Sunshine, Krosoczka tells the story of his time as a counselor at a summer camp for children with cancer and other serious illnesses in Maine.

Krosoczka packs an emotional punch here, that goes deeper than just sympathy with the stories he tells of being a high school student volunteer at this camp. There’s a serious undertone about how to approach people with different needs and how to humanize the terminally ill, particularly children. (read an excerpt: https://www.scribd.com/document/626215662/Sunshine-by-Jarrett-J-Krosoczka-Excerpt#from_embed)

As in his award-winning graphic memoir Hey Kiddo about his own difficult childhood, Krosoczka digs deep into the humanity of the experiences here in Sunshine, surfacing the childhood energy of those at the camp and the unsettling but ultimately life-changing experiences of the young adult volunteers. Krosoczka tells us that he thinks of his camp week (and other volunteer efforts) nearly every single day of his life, many years later. The graphic novel format brings the children and his experiences to interesting levels of reading experiences.

Krosoczka is a true master of this genre (and other graphic stories) and Sunshine is well worth the time.

Peace (and Wonder),
Kevin

I saw the cover. The Unteachables. By Gordon Korman.

OK. I’m in.

And it was another good one by Korman, who knows how to spin a story by focusing on characters. Here, the so-called “unteachables” is a class of behavior and special education students who are deemed unmanageable, and the teacher they get, Mr. Kermit, doesn’t care.

Or so it seems.

Nearing retirement, and never having outlived a scandal years ago involving a former student who now runs a popular car dealership with his smiling face all over the advertising billboards of town, Kermit bides his time towards early retirement in the classroom by passing out worksheets, ignoring the students, and working on crossword puzzles, killing time.

The situation can’t last, of course, and it won’t, as Kermit slowly unfolds out of himself with the arrival of a new teacher next door (the daughter of the woman he once wanted to marry), stepping up to defend the students he doesn’t even really know when the moment seems right, and then coming to grips with his past, and future, as a teacher.

His students, the unteachables, also start to believe in themselves, and in their teacher, and the story plot moves forward at a steady pace, with a nice mix of humor and seriousness, towards an event where the students have to prove themselves are not “unteachable”,and maybe, if they can pull it off, save Mr. Kermit’s job.

As usual, Korman does a nice job with developing the stories of the students, from the boy who drives his grandmother with increasing dementia around town, hoping she will remember his name; to the former star athlete on crutches who realizes what social popularity really is all about; to the student who is not even a registered student at the school but who wandered into the classroom and stayed; and more.

The Unteachables reminds us that there is, in fact, none of those “unteachable” kinds of students in our schools, but reaching out to them, and making a positive impact on their lives, depends upon the shared humanity of us all — that it’s imperative that we find the stories that define us. That includes teachers.

Peace (teaching it forward),
Kevin

Sarah Ruhl’s collection — 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time To Write — has one of the longest subtitles I have come across in some time: On Umbrellas, and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms Children and Theater. And the length of that subtitle made me laugh before even opening to the first essay (in which her children interrupt her essay writing and with that, I was laughing again and, as a parent who writes, hooked).

I suppose that maybe I should have been familiar with Ruhl’s name as a modern playwright but, eh, I am not. Theater is rather unfamiliar terrain for me. I think that unfamiliarity may have played to my advantage, though, as Ruhl’s masterful short essays here bring us deep into the backstage of theater and production, and into motherhood, and into noticing with a childhood wonder at the world’s twists and turns.

I suspect that playwrights naturally observe at the world through a different angled lens, noticing human interactions and the way the unfolding of our days might be framed by curtains and lights and the relationship of audience/observer to actor/participant. Yes, this is all metaphor, and Ruhl is careful in how she constructs these short essays, using metaphor when needed but also, by being a careful observer of the creative spirit.

She writes of theater, but the essays are really about living a full and curious life. I’m sure I won’t be the first review to say that I was glad she found the time to write the essays she didn’t have time to write, and that she shared her often crowded space with us, if only briefly.

Peace (short but sweet),
Kevin

Novelist Peng Shepherd pulls a nice trick with her book – The Cartographers — in that she maintains elements of mystery and surprise in a book that has a single old map at the center of the story. Even as a lover of maps, I didn’t think a single map could fuel an entire story. But here, it does.

And I won’t give the story away, but The Cartographers is an engaging tale that begins with a suspicious death, the discovery of an old road map with an odd marking, and a threading of a deep backstory into the present, all the while keeping a focus on Nell, the main character at the heart of the story. Nell’s father’s death is the event that sparks the tale, but it is also her search for her mother, or a memory of her mother, that propels the plot.

There are plenty of twists and turns, and the writing keeps it all moving forward. Focusing in on a collection of characters with a love of maps — from the old, dusty troves of ancient maps to a modern, algorithmic software program — Shepherd allows us to see how powerful maps can be on our imagination, and our perceptions of reality (or misperceptions, too).

It would give the main story away to share Peng Shepherd’s Author’s Notes at the end of the book, but the story she tells there of a real event that inspired her thinking about this fictional story is really quite fascinating — it’s a story of a map that signaled one thing, only to lead to something else altogether, where the map became a path forward in a place that was never real, until it was.

The Cartographers was a fun, lively read.

Peace (off the edge),
Kevin

It’s nice to see a female hero in the graphic novels for middle school readers. This first book in the 5 World series (which I only found out about through a Scholastic Book order) is a satisfying read on many levels. 5 Worlds: The Sand Warrior is a fast-paced adventure in which our protagonist — Oona Lee — must summon powers she does not know she has in order to start the process to save the worlds.

The story is rather complicated in a summary retelling, but I was not confused during the reading of it (except for all of the odd names of planets and such). While a familiar story arc ensues, I still was rooting for Oona Lee and her friends, and even when I figured out the twist facing her (it has to do with family), I thought the writers (lots of them, apparently) pulled it off quite nicely.

The concept of sand as power, and of how some, like Oona Lee, can summon the sand as magic, and then how that magic can transform a sand dancer into a sand warrior, worked just fine. I appreciated, too, the world building here, and the variety of strange characters — all with important back stories that you can see might unfold in later chapters of the tale.

This book would appeal to girls and boys, in equal measure, and that shows the power of a good graphic novel, where the colorful art matches perfectly with the story on the pages. I’m looking forward to where the story goes from here — there are now five books in the series, I see.

Peace (in magic and sand),
Kevin