Operation Storm City, by Joshua Mowll

The final installment in the "Guild of Specialists" trilogy, Operation Storm City, pretty much has it all: Secret societies within secret societies. Clever codes using arcane symbols. Swordfights a mile in the air involving arcing bolts of electricity. Zeppelin sabotage. Vengeful Tsarists. Double-crosses inside ancient labyrinths. Prehistoric doomsday devices. Tattooed lips. Horse-mounted Cossack flamethrowers. (Yes, seriously, HORSE-MOUNTED COSSACK FLAMETHROWERS!)

In Britain (where the series was first published, and where the third book is already out), this trilogy has been called "The Da Vinci Code meets Alex Rider." If, like me, you're not familiar with the British Alex Rider books, you can think of it as The Da Vinci Code meets Johnny Quest meets Lara Croft meets Young Indiana Jones meets Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. The story, set in post-WWI India and China, follows teenage sister and brother Becca and Doug as they search for their lost parents--members of the mysterious Honorable Guild of Specialists--while racing against time and an eccentric rogues' gallery trying to track down elusive gyrolabe "gravity devices" and find the legendary Storm City of Ur-Can.

The cast is over-the-top colorful (from the salty "aviatrix" and oil-heiress Liberty da Vine to the crazed, Bolshevik-hating General Pugachev), and the action is fast-moving and cinematic, told in part through Becca's diary entries and Doug's pencil sketches. It's all the supporting material, though, that makes this series so unique, and the book is littered with diagrams, photographs, portraits, newspaper clippings, historical asides (many even factual!), and letters--not to mention many lushly detailed drawings, including several dense fold-outs.




The series has a wide recommended age range, from 9 all the way up to high school, but it's definitely more PG-13 than PG, with no bashfulness about death (or planetary apocalypse, for that matter). Operation Storm City comes out in the U.S. in May--which should give you plenty of time to catch up on the first two books in the series, Operation Red Jericho and Operation Typhoon Shore!






(cross-posted at Omnivoracious)

Library Lovin' Challenge

Like libraries, or at least the idea of libraries? If so, I hope you'll head on over to the blog of author Jennifer Hubbard, who has organized a "Library Lovin' Challenge". If you check out her post and its comments, you'll find a list of bloggers who have promised to donate their own money to various libraries (ranging from their local libraries to special collections to bookmobiles to Books for Africa). All you need to do is leave a comment on their blogs. That's right - it won't cost you money, just a few minutes' time.

Well? WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?

True Fiction, If You Know What I Mean

Well, this is my tenth review here at GLW, and it's time I reviewed a fiction title. And that means I had to choose a Daniel Pinkwater book.

If you have not read any of Mr. Pinkwater's books, shame on you. He is a funny man. I like to read his books for children, for young adults, and for adults (though his polar bear characters are not among my favorites).

The Education of Robert Nifkin is written in the form of Nifkin's college application essay. He describes his life, in high school, and out. Somewhere in the essay, he uses the word, "quodlibet." I had to look it up - "a ... performance composed largely of familiar tunes." And this book is a quodlibet - Pinkwater revisits some familiar characters and territory in it: On school, for example, "I hated it... I was learning that boredom can hurt like physical pain..."

He describes his teachers, who remind me of some that I endured. You may recognize them, too. And the busy work!

When Nifkin writes that he has gotten into an "alternative school," life starts looking up. He is allowed to pursue what he wants to, not have a curriculum forced down his throat. This is a tried and true way to learn.

The people there are quirky, to say the least. But aren't we all?

If you enjoy his fiction (I'm sorry, I can't help it.), two collections of Pinkwater's pieces for NPR's All Things Considered (and Morning Edition?) are worth looking for. If you can, get audiobooks to hear him read Fish Whistle, and Chicago Days, Hoboken Nights. The books have been reissued in one volume, Hoboken Fish and Chicago Whistle. I love this guy. Hope you do, too.

Attack of the Robot Books

I have just read -- or at least heavily skimmed -- four books on building your own robots:

Robot Building for Beginners
Robotics Demystified
The Robot Builder’s Bonanza
Junkbots, Bugbots & Bots on Wheels

Each book had its own merits and each book might be quite useful to someone who wanted to get serious about making robots.

But -- before I offer thoughts on each book --let me explain that I’m not serious about making robots, nor do I wish to be. But I do want to make a few little bug-type robots that can navigate my kitchen.
The books sort of assume that you’re willing to buy a soldering set, learn to solder, deal with the toxic nature of solder, learn the color codes on tiny resistors, spend money, etc…

No thanks. I just want to have some cheap fun. Emphasis on fun and double emphasis on cheap.

None of the books had what I consider a “Hello World” starter project. Something I can sit down in one evening and do, just to get started and understand a few simple components. (Something like a Bristlebot, for example. Now that was cheap fun!)

With all that said, here’s a mini-review for each book:
Robot Building for Beginners. This book is quite appealing. The whole thing is devoted to building a single robot. A line-follower. He takes you step by step and explains all sorts of underlying robotics concepts along the way. If you wanted to build a good, serious robot, I can see this book taking you a long way.

Robotics Demystified. This book actually kept my interest the longest. It’s the opposite of the previous book. He describes lots of different projects and concepts, but doesn’t actually get into the step-by-step of any of them. You’ll have great respect for the worm gear when you’ve read this one.

The Robot Builder’s Bonanza. Packed with information, but a lot of it left me saying “whuh-huh?” The instructions might be enough for some folks. But definitely not for me. Also, the cover boasts “99 Inexpensive Robotics Projects.” Where are they? Did I miss about 90 of them?

Junkbots…I really dig the idea here. They encourage you to rip open tape players, VCRs and other junk in search of parts. The book is quite nice. And I can imagine a clever person with a few bucks to spend and no fear of soldering having fun with it, learning robotics and becoming a genius.

But I’m afraid it won’t be me. However, I have ripped open some junk, put some pieces together and, yes, made my own robot. He could drive forward and when he hit a wall he’d flail about, but never manage to actually get unstuck. The important thing was he KNEW he was stuck. I’d show you a picture, but I’ve already torn it apart to start my next robot.

So, yes, I’m having cheap fun and the books got me started (along with the Make:Blog and Instructables and Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories… ). I’ve even got hopes of building a real Junkbot someday and for now I’m happy with my junky bots.

The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril

Return to the days of daring adventure in the crowded streets of exotic cities. Return to when a woman's kiss inspired men to fisticuffs, when villains threatened the world, and magic and mayhem were always in the pages of the pulps.

The pulp magazines were cheaply printed periodicals sold by the tens (sometimes hundreds) of thousands in the 1920s-1950s. Many of these pulps showcased various genres, such as cowboy stories, science-fiction, risque adventures, and horror tales. Well-known writers like Ray Bradbury, Jack London, and even Harry Houdini (well, supposedly authored by the famous magician but really ghost-written) appeared in the pages of the pulps.

But the most famous pair of writers of that era was Walter B. Gibson, who penned The Shadow and Lester Dent, who wrote the Doc Savage series. These men, who could sit down and type 100,000 words in a month without fear, are two of the heroes in the clever novel, The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril.

The book is an homage to the Pulp Era. However, you don't have to be an expert on the writers of that time to recognize many of the names mentioned: both H. P. Lovecraft and L. Ron Hubbard (pre-Scientology) are important secondary characters. The author's treatment of Hubbard was a pleasant surprise: boastful, yet sympathetic.

The novel begins with the retelling of a famous murder in New York's Chinatown past. A murder that has never been solved--both in culprit and method. It fascinates both Gibson and Dent to the point of obsession--this is an old tale without a proper ending, a maddening condition for writers. This story is the catalyst that throws both men, as well as the beautiful women that adore them, and several of their peers, into a greater and more dangerous mystery.

All the important elements of the pulps are in the book--and what guy could resist secret military weapons, monstrous zombified sailors, ancient cults, martial arts and gunplay, plenty of punches swung, and some conjuring magic.

The first third of the book is a bit slow compared to the rest--author Paul Malmont spends a good deal of time (perhaps too much) setting the stage. Lovers of the pulps and historical fiction will be able to immerse themselves quickly and easily; readers new to the topic might have to wade through a bit to get to the good stuff. But there is plenty of good stuff--did I mention those creepy zombies?--so be patient.

I kept pausing after every other chapter to hit up Wikipedia and learn more about the pulps and who these men and women were--so actually the book led to some education. How cool is that?

Now I want to buy some of the reprints of those old pulp stories, build a fort out of the sofa cushions, and read them by flashlight.

Hole in My Life by Jack Gantos

Jack Gantos always wanted to be a writer, and these days, he is the well-known author of numerous children’s books, including the Rotten Ralph series and Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key. But his path from aspiring writer to writer was a circuitous one. Hole in My Life is one Gantos’ books for teens, a memoir covering a few years of his life, his late teens through early twenties, when he often got drunk and did drugs, agreed to help two drug smugglers move a couple of tons of hashish, got caught, and ended up in jail.

In a word, Hole in My Life is riveting. Gantos writes matter-of-factly about the mistakes he made, not afraid to show himself in a poor light. During his junior year of high school, his father moved the family to Puerto Rico, where Jack ended up working as an electrician because he couldn't attend the Spanish-speaking public schools and his family couldn't afford to send him to an English-speaking private school. But he was a poor electrician. Deciding he wanted to get his diploma, Jack returned to Florida, without his parents, to finish high school.

At first he stayed with a family who needed the boarding money Jack's father paid, but after missing the toilet one too many times in his alcohol-induced puke-athons, Jack takes a room at an old motel. While his living situation did not, unfortunately, increase his appeal with girls ("maybe it was my whiny Holden Caulfield imitation of a boy in need of carnal therapy that got me nowhere. Or perhaps my sitting in the library with an intensely cheerless, poetic look on my face only scared girls away"), it was while he was living at King's Court that he is invited to the apartment of a friend of a friend, where there would be a weed party.

I had read lots of books where people smoked weed. Some seemed to really enjoy it and got happy and hungry and silly and had deep insights into themselves and the world. I had a sneaky suspicion I was going to be the other kind of smoker—the kind I had also read about who go off the deep end and let life drift way out of control, and become dependent on dope and other users to help them out, and are abused and broken down and the only deep insight they gain from the experience is that they have totally ruined their lives—and I'd end up like that girl from Go Ask Alice who went nuts on LSD and was locked in a closet after she imagined a million bugs were on her skin and to kill them she clawed off all her flesh and nearly bled to death.

By the time I finished restocking the entire canned vegetable section at work, I was convinced I would be a vegetable if I smoked. Yet I went to the apartment.

As weed parties go, it was a disappointment, even to his hosts. But it didn't dissuade him from trying marijuana again. A year later Jack, having decided college, or at least the University of Florida, wasn't for him, reunited with his family in St. Croix, where drug use was rampant. It is in St. Croix that Jack will meet the smugglers who ask if he wants to join them and the lure of $10,000 proves too much to resist. And it is a testament to to Gantos' skill as a writer that even though you know he'll take part in the smuggling before ultimately finding his focus as a writer in federal prison, you're still turning the pages rapidly, holding your breath and unable to put Hole in My Life down until you finish the very last page.

[cross-posted at The YA YA YAs]

Guardian

Julius Lester's Guardian is a slim novel with tremendous impact. At under 120 pages, Lester's book is a powerful story set in one of the darkest periods in America's history, told with economy and an honesty as unflinching and intense as the cover's image.

In Guardian we meet 14 year old Ansel Anderson, whose father owns and manages the General Store in Davis, a small town in the Deep South of the United States. It is 1946, and prejudice runs deep in the community, lurking beneath the surface of day-to-day interactions between black and white neighbors. Ansel feels stuck in Davis, and he wonders how he will ever take up the family business from his father when the time comes. In spite of his father's misgivings, Ansel is friendly with a young black kid, Willie, who works for his family. The two boys like to sneak off to go fishing on the hottest summer afternoons. The story unfolds over 6 days, and proves how lives can be changed forever in the shortest time, especially when people live in a climate of hatred, fear and gross imbalance of power.

Lester establishes an immediate sense of tension and foreboding in his narrative. Part of this comes from the choice for point-of-view. The third-person present tense makes you feel like you are watching things unfold as the characters experience them, like a play. The weather is part of the drama here too. It's hot, really hot and close and "heavy as a broken heart." This gives you the feeling that something nasty and violent is coming, right from the start. And it is coming. Characters are developed in this short novel with as much realism and complexity, if not more, than you often find in much longer works. Once you start reading, it's hard to put this story down, in part because you can sense what is coming.

Guardian is a novel about human ugliness and the power of each person to make choices, even in desperate times. It's about how people come to terms with their actions and their inaction. This is not an uplifting book, but it is not without hope. It should inspire readers to learn more about this historical period, and Lester offers a starting place for further investigations in his author's note at the end of his novel. This is a book that should be passed on after it's read.

If you’re a fan of this site, you know we’re fans of Alan Gratz—but did you know he’s a big fan of baseball?

You might recognize Alan Gratz’s name from a review I did of an earlier book of his; but I’m not the only one who’s reviewed Alan Gratz here. The books in his Horatio Wilkes mystery series crackle with great language; a smart, world-weary, engaging main character; and ripped-from-Shakespeare’s-headlines plots. But before he wrote YA hardboiled detective mysteries based on Hamlet and Macbeth, he wrote a really interesting baseball book called Samurai Shortstop.

Shortstop concerns Toyo, a young man growing up in Japan in 1890, who discovers in baseball a way to link his family’s tradition of bushido to the new industrialization transforming Japanese society. Did you know Japan had baseball before World War II? Before Babe Ruth? Before automobiles? Well Alan Gratz knew, because he knows his baseball history. And it’s that history, that ability to illuminate the oddball corners of America’s most storied sport, that he brings to bear full bore on his new novel, The Brooklyn Nine.


The Brooklyn Nine follows nine generations of the Schneider family, from Felix Schneider, German immigrant and fan of the New York Knickerbockers in 1845, to Snider Flint in 2002, who hunts down the provenance of a mysterious old baseball bat while recovering from a broken leg. Each generation faces problems—some small, some historic—grounded in their specific moment in history. Oh, and each generation has a powerful love of baseball.

I’ve often heard it said that baseball is a writer’s sport, that baseball makes for the best kind of story. Intrinsic to the sport are notions of character, place, conflict that take place at a story’s pace. Games can be diagrammed like sentences and one inning’s close strikeout can foreshadow a late homerun like a gun on the first page of a book signals somebody’s death in chapter seven.

However, Gratz has made the most baseball of baseball books here: nine characters for nine innings, and each character gets three chapters, like the minimum at bats for a team each inning, or three strikes a batter gets before he’s out. And the characters’ situations revolve around baseball—like how Louis Schneider discovers in the middle of the Civil War that he has more in common with the Confederates than he realized. Or how Jimmy Flint’s agony over losing the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles reflects the nation’s agonizing struggle with the changes of civil rights and the cold war.

Readers familiar with his earlier books may initially be struck by the age of Gratz’s main characters—where Samurai Shortstop and the Horatio Wilkes novels follow high schoolers, the Brooklyn nine range from ten to maybe sixteen. But that’s not the whole story. In fact, this is probably Gratz’s most complex novel to date. As I’ve already noted, the structure of the novel is fairly complex. But it’s not just that—each character is given their proper due, whether they triumph in their struggles or not, whether their individual story is one of hope or one of disappointment. I’m convinced that The Brooklyn Nine is an epic, a book of the long now, one that is more interested in looking at stories that only find resolution over generations—the goal of a young man in 1845 may not find completion for a century or more, and no one character, while the hero of their own individual story, can claim to see the big picture.

A couple of notes before I wrap this up and hopefully send you on your way to find this great book. First, Alan’s website has some really interesting bits, including some great background info on the research he did for each section of the book. Second, I think Alan’s a fascinating writer and I’m interviewing him for guyslitwire and hope to have that on the website soon.

Books mentioned in this post:
The novels of Alan Gratz:
The Brooklyn Nine
Samurai Shortstop
The Horatio Wilkes mysteries: Something Rotten and Something Wicked

Guys Lit Wire & Teen Book Drop 2009

Some of you might have noticed the link on our left sidebar for the Teen Book Drop. This event, which involves gathering publisher donated books for pediatric hospitals while also encouraging folks to distribute a YA title of their choice "into the wild" on April 16th for a teen to find, is the brainchild of the ladies at readergirlz who are all fabulous and doing very good things to bring great books to the attention of teen girls. (The Ying to our Yang.) On behalf of GLW I helped to connect some publishers with the readergirlz and YALSA who put the whole thing together for the hospitals. We would also like to encourage folks to leave a book for teen readers in a public place where it can be discovered and enjoyed.

Behind the cut, enjoy the TBD trailer from the very talented Holly Cupala with a killer song and links to more info.

Rocket Boys by Homer H. Hickam, Jr.

October 1957, the USSR launched Sputnik 1, the first human-made object to orbit Earth. The 183 pound satellite, just a winking dot in the sky, terrified Americans, who realized they were behind the Russians scientifically.

As the space race heated up, down on Earth boys were falling for girls and trying to learn who they wanted to be. Homer Hickam, 14 when Sputnik passed overhead, weaves together the atomic age and coming of age in his memoir, Rocket Boys.

Hickam grew up in Coalwood, West Virginia, a town built around a coal mine, where the identical white houses and even the church were owned by the mining company.

In the late 1950's, [the church] came to be presided over by a company employee, Reverend Josiah Lanier, who also happened to be a Methodist. The denomination of the preacher the company hired automatically became ours too. Before we became Methodists, I remember being a Baptist and, once for a year, some kind of Pentecostal. The Pentecostal preacher scared the women, hurling fire and brimstone and warnings of death from the pulpit. When his contract expired, we got Reverend Lanier.

Hickam's father was the mining superintendent, a dedicated, hard-working man, but one who couldn't see very far past their small town and the mine at its heart. He thought his bookish son might make a good clerk for the company, but waved off any talk of sending him to college. Then came Sputnik and American attempts to launch a satellite led by scientist Warner Von Braun. Hickam saw an opportunity. If he could build and launch a rocket on his own, maybe his dad would see he had the potential to follow his dreams.

His first attempt blew up, taking his mother's garden fence with it. But working with a little more than a chemistry textbook and a rocket diagram from Life Magazine--and a lot of trial and error--Hickam and his friends refined their rocket designs and fuel mixtures.

Rocket Boys is, as much as anything, a love note to science, to the joy of learning stuff. Hickam reports on each successive launch attempt, from the materials tried to the equations needed to calculate their altitude. Through the books, he shows his rockets' evolution from crude pipe-bombs to truly amazing things soaring thousands of feet into the air.

And while they figure out the mysteries of jet propulsion, the rocket boys also have to figure out other, more common, mysteries teenage boys face. Rocket building meetings include occasional lessons on how to unhook a bra. When Hickam is partnered with the gorgeous Dorothy Plunk in biology class a couple days after the Sputnik, his yearning for her is tangled with his love of science.

"Are you scared?" she asked me.

"Of the Russians?" I gulped, trying to breathe. The truth was, at that moment Dorothy scared me a lot more than a billion Russians, and I didn't know why.

She gave me a soft little smile, and my heart wobbled off its axis. I could smell her perfume even over the formaldehyde. "No, silly. Cutting open our worm."

Our worm? If it was our worm, couldn't it also be our hearts, our hands, our lips? "Not me!" I assured her, and raised my scalpel, waiting for Mr, Mams to give us the go-ahead. When he did, I made a long cut down the length of the specimen. Dorothy took one look, grabbed her mouth, and lurched for the door, her ponytail flying.

Every teenager is a scientist, dazzled by the world around him, desperate for knowledge. A lot of growing up is trial and error. Occasionally, you blow up the garden fence. But through all their missteps with rockets, with parents, and with girls, the rocket boys stick to their motto, cribbed from Dr. Von Braun, that we learn more from out failures than our successes.