Monster by CJ Skuse

A mythical beast that supposedly roams the land outside of an English boarding school, the mother of all snowstorms and the claustrophobic hysteria worthy of The Shining. This is Monster by CJ Skuse.

Natasha, or Nash as she's known by her friends, is attending the highly acclaimed Bathory Boarding School. Nash is competing to be Head Girl, no easy feat when you consider the competition that surrounds her - conniving, ego-centric girls that will high five you with one hand and stab you in the back with a compass with the other.

Then there's Maggie, Nash's only real friend at Bathory. Maggie has issues, in that she appears to be desperate to leave Bathory under any means necessary. This includes violating every rule possible, resulting in the girls having all of their internet and mobile phone privileges removed by the school's Matron.

Nash has bigger fish to fry, though. Her brother, Seb, has gone missing on a trip to South America, the only contact she has with her parents is on a shoddy pay phone in the school's reception area. Added to this, she's convinced she saw something in the woods one evening after her school netball game. Something big, something with yellow eyes. Her instincts tell her it's nothing, a trick of her imagination, but there's also a part of her brain that tells her it could be the fabled "Beast of Bathory," a gigantic cat-like creature that prowls the area, feeding on unsuspecting tourists and students.

Public School Superhero by James Patterson

 I was fooled. I thought that this next book was about a kid superhero called Stainlezz Steel who went about his hood defeating bad guys. the first few pages showed him bragging about defeating heavyweights super-villains.  I thought yes here is someone the kids can root for and he is a superhero of color also! Boy was I wrong.

Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam

Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam is a collection of letters (and a few poems) written by soldiers and nurses who served during the Vietnam War. The editor, Bernard Edelman, did a wonderful job, and I would've written this review sooner, but I picked up another book, Home Before Morning: The Story of an Army Nurse in Vietnam. It was written by one of the contributors to this volume. Edelman follows each letter with a paragraph about the writer of the letter. He mentioned that one writer, Lynda Van Devanter, had written a book about her nursing experience during the war. It's maybe even more amazing than this one, but I have to say both books are for mature readers.

YOU NEED MORE SLEEP: Advice from Cats by Francesco Marciuliano

From the creator of I Could Pee on This and I Could Chew On This comes a book full of sound advice for a good life. Or a cat's life, anyhow, and don't cats seem to have good lives?

You Need More Sleep, unlike the aforementioned books, is in prose rather than poetry. It consists of an Introduction followed by chapters: "Personal Relationships" (avoid them), "Social Interaction" (avoid it), "Career Advancement" (eliminate rivals), and "You, You, YOU!" (just what you'd expect). The book actually starts sweetly with a dedication to the author's "childhood's cat Bettina, who taught me everything I know except how to lie on top of a refrigerator without falling off." The introduction urges us to "Listen to the Cats", based on their "lives of utter confidence, complete independence, and blissful indifference while people continue to drive themselves to the brink of insanity with self-doubt, neediness, and the horrifying sensation that whatever they just texted, tweeted, or emailed will be the very end of their job, relationship, or reputation."

The first piece of advice in the "Personal Relationships" section is "Always Stay At Least 30 Feet from a Loved One", which extols the virtues of personal space.

A healthy relationship is as much about being together as it is as about personal space. And the best way to accomplish the latter is by never, ever sitting still. If your partner enters the room, get up and leave. If they follow you, make for the stars. If they pursue, do a hard turn into the bedroom, bank off the dresser, double-back into the hall, careen into the home office, swipe the workstation clean, fall into a wastebasket, and go back down the stairs. Keep running until they go to work and you get the eight hours of peace alone you both need for love to bloom.

The "Social Interaction" chapter features such noteworthy headlines as "Don't Be Nice to Unpleasant People", "It's Okay to Be Shy", and "Stay Quiet Just Long Enough to Be Taken Seriously" (possibly all sound advice, actually), interspersed with such things as "Steady Eye Contact is All the Listening You'll Ever Have to Do" and "Befriend People Who Are Good at Things You're Not. Like Opening Cans."

Poking a Dead Frog by Mike Sacks

Recently a childhood friend posted on Facebook that he was struggling to find the humor in Parks and Recreation, a show all his friends had told him was worth watching. After I recovered from my various levels of disbelief (You’re just now watching Parks and Recreation? You don’t find the character of Ron Swanson hilarious? Leslie Knope bothers you?), I thought about that most elemental of questions: What is Funny? The answer (other than farts, of course) may be unknowable, but Mike Sacks provides us with some of the smartest thinking about the question in his impressive Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations With Today’s Top Comedy Writers.

POACHED by Stuart Gibbs

I thought BELLY UP by Stuart Gibbs was terrifically hilarious when I read it a few years ago so I decided to try another one of his books. 

Teddy is back solving mysteries at FunJungle and causing havoc in the process.  Living at a zoo evidently isn't exciting enough for Teddy.  His penchant for playing practical jokes has gotten him in some hot water in the past, but the occasion to investigate the kidnapping of the zoo's borrowed koala, Teddy takes things very seriously.

When it is revealed that Teddy is the prime suspect in Kazoo's disappearance, he knows he must take things into his own hands.  He is suddenly extremely busy dealing with Large Marge, a security guard out to get him, and handling a bully named Vance and his sidekicks who are harassing him at school and at the zoo.  Can he find the kidnapper before the koala starves?  Is it a disgruntled employee or one of the keepers hoping to strike it rich with a huge ransom?

POACHED is classic Stuart Gibbs with plenty of humor, non-stop action sequences, and amateur sleuthing.  It is perfect for middle grade readers looking for a fast, fun read.

Previously posted at readingjunky.blogspot.com.

When Vampires Blog

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown is Holly Black's (The Spiderwick Chronicles, Tithe, Doll Bones) first vampire novel, based on her short story of the same name from the collection The Poison Eaters and Other Stories.

After passing out in a bathtub at a party the night before, seventeen year-old Tana wakes up prepared to be embarrassed about whatever kind of fool she's made of herself. But she's not prepared to find nearly everyone else from the party dead, attacked by vampires and drained of blood. It's horrifying, it's shocking, but it's the scale of the killings that's notable, not the attackers.

In Tana's world--like our own reality in every other respect--vampires are common. When Tana was six vampires were "Muppets, endlessly counting, or cartoon villains in black cloaks with red polyester linings." Sometime after that, a vampire from Springfield, MA, named Caspar Morales set about spreading vampirism as widely as he fancied. And now, the world has "gone cold." In some parts of the world, streets "teem with vampires," held in check only by vampire hunters who take out the undead in the usual ways: beheadings, wooden stakes to hearts, fire.

In the US, the problem is handled differently.

Grab Bag Post: League of Seven sequel, Six of Crows, and Zander Cannon's KAIJUMAX!

   

Just a bunch of quick notes this month about a couple of books and a comics series I've been reading that have me really excited.

All The Bright Places by Jennifer Niven

Violet Markey and Theodore Finch do not meet cute—they meet dire. Atop the bell tower at their school, each looking for a way out. A way out of relentless grief, in Violet’s case, and a way out of the darkness of depression, in Theodore’s case.  For Violet, this is the first time she’s been on this ledge, literally and figuratively. Finch, on the other hand, has become a morbid authority on the subject of suicide. Finch talks Violet down from the ledge and then joins her in safety, gallantly creating the public image that she was only up there to rescue him, someone all his classmates already know to be a “Freak.”

Neither Violet nor Finch jump or fall in the opening of Jennifer Niven’s emotionally charged young adult novel, All The Bright Places. But they do fall for each other, as the manic pixie dream boy antics of Finch prove an elixir for Violet, who has entombed herself in grief since the car accident that killed her older sister, Eleanor. And Violet’s embrace of Finch’s essential goodness allows him to rise above the “Freak” label his undiagnosed bipolar disorder has burdened him with for years.

When Finch offers/insists on being Violet’s partner for their Indiana state history project, one that involves “wandering” around the state in search of notable sites, All The Bright Places becomes, for a time, a clever gender twist on the “manic pixie dream girl” trope. Finch brings a brightness and spontaneity into Violet’s life that chips away been at her grief and survivor’s guilt.

But Finch is more than a manic pixie dream boy—he is also a depressed gnomic nightmare boy, one who has always ridden out his depressive episodes alone, as one would growing up with an abusive father and an emotionally absent mother.  And despite the brightness Violet has brought to his life, Finch finds himself unable to accept help, mostly because of his misguided but understandable notion that to accept such help means to assent to a label. Having endured the “Freak” label throughout his adolescence, Finch fears the yoke the “bipolar” label will add.

Using the shared narration of Finch and Violet, Nevin has crafted a moving depiction of a complicated teenage romance. She has also, to her credit, avoided any semblance of a simplistic happy ending, showing a respect for her teenage (and adult) readers that the young adult genre is too often without, particularly when dealing with weighty issues like mental illness and suicidal ideation.

Finch is a musician and a songwriter, and Violet is a writer, though writing too fell away in her passionless post-Eleanor life. Words, beyond their denotations, mean something to these characters. So I leave you with some words from Scottish songwriter Roddy Woomble, words that would fit well in Nevin’s plaintive author’s note:

“Don’t let the darkness become another form of light.”

Sideways Stories from Wayside School by Louis Sachar

Wayside School was supposed to be a one-story building with thirty classrooms. The builder accidentally made each classroom an entire level, making the building look more like a skyscraper than a school! (Oh, and no matter what anyone tells you, there is no nineteenth story.)

Each chapter in Sideways Stories from Wayside School by Louis Sachar focuses on a different character from one class in particular: the class on the thirteenth story. Mrs. Gorf is known for being the meanest teacher at the school. She turns bad kids into apples. Then something unbelievable happens (shh - only the kids in her class know what happened!) and she is replaced by Mrs. Jewls, a very nice lady who is incredibly nervous about her new job. Luckily, the kids take to her, and she stays.

Mrs. Jewls could not have known how very . . . unique these students would be. Take Sharie, who "spen(ds) all of her time either looking out the window or sleeping," then falls out of the window and stays fast sleep until she is caught by Louis, the yard teacher. Consider Kathy, who does not like anyone, or Maurecia, who is liked by everyone (except Kathy) but only really likes ice cream. Meet artistic Bebe, gum-chewing Joy, mysterious Sammy, the three Erics, and more.

The characters reappear in Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger and Wayside School is Falling Down, each aptly titled, each illustrated in a similar manner. Just when you think things can't get any stranger at Wayside School, they do! Look at the cafeteria food closely, and watch out for the cows. Young readers will wish their school was as silly as Wayside School. Prepare to laugh 'til the cows come home. Really.

The last two books in the line, Sideways Arithmetic from Wayside School and More Sideways Arithmetic from Wayside School combine quizzes and logic puzzles with story bits. There's a new student at Wayside, and she doesn't quite understand how YOU + ME is a math problem. Oh, but it is!

These books are fun to read out loud in an elementary school classroom. Have kids discuss their favorite character, or vote for the character with the coolest-sounding name. The chapters are very short, so it's also great for kids who are just latching on to chapter books as well as reluctant readers. Students could also create a new character - a new student, a new teacher, a new....rat? - and write a new chapter mimicking the author's writing style.

The books in order:
- Sideways Stories from Wayside School
- Wayside School is Falling Down
- Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger
- Sideways Arithmetic from Wayside School
- More Sideways Arithmetic from Wayside School