Category Archives: books

Bob ain’t Ivan.

That sounds snarky and negative, so let me say upfront that I thoroughly enjoyed The One and Only Bob, except I really missed the voice of Ivan, the silverback gorilla of The One and Only Ivan, in my head. Bob, Ivan’s close dog friend, is the narrator of this sequel, which centers on a storm and tales of survival.

In the original book, inspired by a true story of a gorilla being kept cruelly captive in a shopping mall, Ivan’s voice is so unique — the use of flow, of language, of pacing, of syntax — that I can still hear Ivan when I pass the book over to students with a “must read” recommendation. Bob, on the other hand, is unique, too, in his way, but he sounds to my ears a bit too much like a person at times.

It’s not fair for me to compare Bob to Ivan, but Ivan will always be the one and the only Ivan.

Luckily, Ivan is still a big part of Bob’s life. He makes not only an appearance in The One and Only Bob, but the gorilla is crucial to the storyline at multiple junctures. Ivan’s presence is everywhere, as it should be. And Bob’s voice, too, emerges more strongly as the story moves into gear. Maybe it took me, the reader, time to get into the flow of Bob, after putting Ivan aside.

Bob’s adventures here unfold gradually, picking up a few years after the first book, and it’s a huge storm that propels Bob into bravery he didn’t know he had and on rescue missions that force him into action he’d rather avoid. We also slowly get his family backstory, a rich narrative that moves into the main plot.

I’d recommend The One and Only Bob for elementary and middle school readers, and maybe pair it up with The One and Only Ivan, too. (I guess a movie version is in the works). You can’t miss with Katherine Applegate, really.

Peace (more than one and more than only),
Kevin

Traveling back by book into Panem, even as protests in real life take to our city streets and the federal government’s threat of a strong-arm military response, is an unsettling reading experience, to the say the least. Suzanne Collin’s latest book — The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes — is a prequel to The Hunger Games trilogy, focusing on the story of the emergence of Coriolanus Snow, 18, who will later emerge the main antagonist of Katniss Everdeen in his role as ruthless president.

Here, the alternative world of Panem is only ten years from the squashing of the violent street revolutions that wracked the world, and the Hunger Games ceremonies are being used to beat down the Districts that rose up against the central government in The Capitol by forcing the children to kill each other on live television. But the games themselves are still in development — one problem is no one from the Districts watches the games, and so part of the problem being tackled by the central government is how to make the games more “entertaining” and “television worthy” — and the terrible elements that we see in the games of the first three books of the series are either hinted at or introduced here (food and supplies sent to players via drone; the betting on winners; etc.)

Might makes right, in this book’s world, and the military power, and the use of it to crush any opposition, has echoes in the rhetoric of the White House right now. Add to all of this my own listening to a podcast version of Malcolm Gladwell reading a chapter from an earlier book of his (David and Goliath), in which he explored how the British heavy-handed use of force in Northern Ireland during The Troubles actually increased, sparked and seeded violent rebellion, not quelled it, and I found myself worrying about the path my country is on.

In The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Snow is likable and sympathetic (an odd feeling, knowing who he becomes) — his once-respected family has struggled since the war, he saw things in the war that he can’t shake, he is barely hanging on to the education he needs to get ahead, he become a mentor to a young woman reaped (chosen) for the games, he falls in love, he protects and betrays his friends, he survives for another day (and we know that he not only survives, but becomes president of Panem, and architect of the ever-deadlier Hunger Games).

Snow lands on top — that’s the family motto and the last words of the novel.

Dystopian fiction is designed to make us think of the world we live in now, by casting shadows and possibilities of a dark future on the present. Collins does this well, and her use of action and character drive this tale forward. Just be ready to put down the book and pick up the news, and see convergence in the most uncomfortable way.

Peace (in Panem and beyond),
Kevin

I wish I could gently rip out every page of Grant Snider‘s new collection — I Will Judge You By Your Bookshelf — and pin them up all around the house and the classroom, and celebrate the love of reading in Snyder’s colors, and wit, and gentleness. But, you know, then I would be both destroying the book (ack!) and maybe other people wouldn’t appreciate the sudden decor (but the people I love would appreciate the theme).

Snider, whose work as a cartoonist with a literary bent is someone I have been following for years with appreciation, dives deep into his love of books with every cartoon in this collection — some have been published elsewhere (his work is often in the New York Times, New Yorker, etc.) and at his blog site, but many of them here are ones I had never seen before. Like his other book collection – The Shape of Ideas — I can see myself coming back time and again for a little artistic rejuvenation and appreciation for the way he explores writing and reading at beautiful angles.

If you love books, you’ll love I Will Judge You By Your Bookshelf.

Peace (in pages),
Kevin

Sometimes, the right book arrives at just the right time.

So it is with The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and the Horse, by Charles Mackesy. At a time when a slower-paced book is needed, to calm the mind if not the heart, this small book — with such beautiful and evocative sketches and watercolors by Mackesy — offers an antidote of love, kindness, friendship and philosophy.

The narrative thread is a lonely boy who meets a cake-loving mole, who then rescues a fox, who then meets the horse, and all four creatures wander through a landscape, asking questions of each other on a range of topics, from what it means to be a friend to what it means to take care of yourself to what it means to love someone else and more.

There’s a quiet gentle, enhanced by the drawings, to the wanderings, sort of like the original Winnie the Pooh stories (before Disney got its hands on it), and that layered simplicity on top of message complexity makes The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and the Horse shine, page after page after page.

I’ve read the book twice in a week, and then shared it with my student book talk yesterday, and showed some of the pictures through video. This book is for any age reader, and while sharing it was the right thing to do, I believe this is one of those books you squirrel away, and take out when the world seems off-kilter, and maybe a little scary, and you need some reassurance that there is a path forward and you find the path with the ones you love, and traverse it together.

See? Perfect book for the times.

Peace (wandering through),
Kevin

Thirteen hundred pages of fantastic adventure. That’s what I dove into when I picked up my son’s massive book of Bone, by Jeff Smith. I’ve read parts of Bone over the years, but never in sequence (so I never really saw the larger story unfolding) and always out of context. Smith’s story is a classic, of course, and reading it from start to finish over 1300 pages gives you a sense of scope.

If you don’t know Bone, it tells the story of three cousins from Boneville — Fone Bone, Phoney Bone and Smiley Bone – who begin the story on the run, driven from Boneville for some political scam (Phoney is always on a con or scam of some sort) when they stumble over the mountains, get separated and discover adventure that includes dragons, rat creatures, magic, a lost Queen and discovered princess, strange locusts, treasure found and lost, epic battles and more.

Told with humor and seriousness, Smith’s Bone book harnesses the power of graphic storytelling in so many ways, it’s hard to know what to focus on. There are allusions to classic stories and classic cartoons, to humous gags that are hinted at early and then re-emerge later, and somehow, Smith juggled it all over the course of more than a decade of writing and illustrating, and publishing in installments.

Given our time of staying inside during the pandemic, the discovery of my son’s Bone collection was a welcome site, and the hours spent with the cousins and their friends (and enemies) was a literary diversion that kept me deep in the story. Bone is worth a visit for readers of all ages. (Note: this huge book is costly – $40 at B/N. I think we picked up years ago at a book sale for cheap — what a deal!)

Peace (beyond Boneville),
Kevin

I could not help reading Laura Shovan’s The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary without thinking of my sixth grade students, now at home, and how our school is now closed (just like the Emerson Elementary is closing, but for different reasons) and traditions (like Step Up Day for us; Moving Up for the kids in the book) have all been rattled by the times.

This book’s premise is two-fold: each entry from the 18 kids of the classroom is part of a time capsule that will be installed on the grounds of the school, which is being demolished to make way for a grocery story; and each entry is written as a poem, with the 18 students represented on different days throughout the school year.

The result is a beautiful tapestry of stories — not just about the attempt to save the school through student protest and civic activism — but also of each student, as their home life and friendships and interests slowly emerge through the poems, and I appreciated the pace of the storytelling, how Shovan lets us settle in with the characters and watch many of them change over the poetic lens of a single year in fifth grade.

Not everything is knotted tight in resolution by the end, but that’s OK, too. We’ve come to trust the characters enough to wish them well on the next stage of their journey. And Shovan helpfully provides some valuable additions for the reader at the end — an overview of the many poetic styles used by her characters in their poems and a collection of writing/poetic prompts that one could use to write their own stories, told through poems.

Note: I was able to ‘meet’ Laura through her facilitation of the Water Poems Project at her blog and on Twitter, a recent daily water-themed poem project which I loved, and I bought her book because of that connection, and I am sure glad I did.

Peace (poetic style),
Kevin

A wife of a teaching colleague sent along her copy of Kent State, by Deborah Wiles, many months ago, with a recommendation that I read it, and there it sat, until last week. I had not an inkling that the anniversary of the shooting of college students by the National Guard was even approaching, never mind the 50th anniversary (which is today), when I picked it up last week. I only had a gap in my reading list, and the book filled a need.

Talk about good timing for a book and a historic event.

I was immediately drawn in by the experimental use of voice in this well-researched book by Wiles, who taps into the concept of the collective Greek Chorus, of giving voice to various factions of the time and place, through use of font style, size and page placement. The way the page looks helps to tell the story. Although somewhat a free verse novel, the passages don’t read like poems, more like gathered voices standing on the page, arguing points about what happened at Kent State on May 4, 1970.

We read/hear different student perspectives (the calm voice of sadness and the frustrated voice of anger; the Black voice of student protest wading into the racial contours of America’s response to the white college students killed by gunfire by the American government); the townspeople (irate businessman and scared mother of small children, the one who remembers the military helicopters most of all); and the National Guardsmen, too, explaining how young they were and how chaotic the college protest was for them.

These voices weave in and out of each other, as the story of Kent State unfolds over a weekend, starting with unrest on the campus over Vietnam and the federal and state government, leading to the shooting on campus that shocked and rattled the nation. Wiles explains at the end of the book how she spent a lot of time with oral biographies and with personal interviews, to capture the tension and confusion, the anger and regret, the voices of the times for her book, and her effort to be true to the event and the people shows.

There is no single point of view in Kent State, as there should not be although we often only know the story of soldiers killing college students, thanks in part to the song “Ohio” by Crosby Stills Nash & Young (a song that my band still plays).

This short but powerful book ends, as it begins, with a call to the reader (to us) to show empathy to all sides of the tragic event, and to be the one (you, I, us) who helps make the changes that make for a better nation.

We hope you’re
on fire
for change
for hope
for love

I would say this book is most appropriate for high school, but some upper middle school readers might enjoy it, too. It could easily find a home in a Social Studies/American History classroom, as an example of how to turn research into a work of experimental art.

Peace (today and every day),
Kevin