Review: The Sleepwalkers by Viviane Schwartz

I don't want to say that the concept of The Sleepwalkers, by Viviane Schwartz, is better than the execution.  It's more like the execution is just really melancholy and full of the fear of death.

Review: Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson

After reading a number of possibly orientalist fantasy stories, I was looking forward to reading "a Golden Compass for the Arab Spring," as one blurb has it.  However, Alif the Unseen, by G. Willow Wilson, reminds me less of The Golden Compass and more of The Historian.

Review: Broxo by Zack Giallongo

I don't often reread books, but Broxo is a title that I enjoyed very much the second time I read it.  It takes place at the top of an icy, barren mountain that reminded me of "The Wall" in The Game of Thrones ... especially when the zombies appeared.

A young barbarian/Viking-looking princess named Zora climbs to the top of the mountain, on a mission to find the Peryton clan.  But all she finds is a boy about her age named Broxo and a giant, shaggy dog with a single horn, like a unicorn.  His name is Migo.

New GC4K Core Title List and Superhero Comics for Children

When the peeps at the Good Comics for Kids blog published their first core title list, I think I called it the most helpful thing on the internet that month.  Well, it's been updated!  And in addition to pointing you to the new list, I wanted to break out one category and look at the choices.

So let's look at superhero and commercial properties (by which I mean characters owned by companies and depicted across platforms, like Transformers, Avatar, Ninjago).  I want to look at this category, because it's still an overlooked and sometimes maligned category.  Although we know how important these action series can be in the development of readers, I think librarians get nervous about buying series that might just be thoughtless spin-offs of games and TV shows. 

For example, there's a new Avatar GN written by Gene Luen Yang.  Gene Luen Yang, people!  I assumed the librarians would be all over that.  But there isn't a single copy in a public library in RI.  Apparently, a fear of comics featuring commercial properties is stronger than the power of a Printz winner's name recognition.

There are also fewer real comic-y comics published for kids.  Although kids love to read superhero comics, as a school librarian, I only buy comics that are intended for children, and that really narrows the field. That's why I think it's important to know which GN featuring popular characters are worth buying, because there are good ones out there, and they mean a lot to some of our readers.

Here's what the GC4K contributors recommend for grades 3-5:

Baltazar, Art and Franco. Tiny Titans series. Illus. by Art Baltazar. DC Comics.  2009-ongoing. 5 vols.

Fisch, Sholly. The All-New Batman: Brave and the Bold, vol 1. Illus. by Rick Burchett. DC Comics, 2011. 128p.

Star Wars Adventures series. Various authors and illustrators. Dark Horse. 2009-ongoing. 4 vols.
Star Wars Clone Wars Adventures series. Various authors and illustrators. Dark Horse. 2004-2007. 10 vols.

Transformers Animated series. Various authors and illustrators. IDW. 2008-2010. 13 vols.

Walker, Landry Q. Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade. Illus. by Eric Jones. DC Comics, 2009. 144p.

I want to briefly note for purchasing purposes that some of these DC titles will be available in hardcover through Capstone this fall, and the Star Wars hardcovers are available through ABDO (Spotlight). 

So there you go: a focused list with which you can introduce kids to important characters in the American canon.  Add to that the Marvel picture books I reviewed and you've got a nice superhero collection for young children. I'd add the Ralph Cosentino books, too, actually--especially for the Wonder Woman book.  And whatever you do, don't skip the Star Wars, because it features characters of many colors.  (I haven't read all of the others, so I'm not saying they don't.)

Now I'm going to take my own advice and get the Transformers GNs for my library.

Review: Legends of Zita the Spacegirl by Ben Hatke

Here's the short version of my review: Is the second Zita book as awesome as the first one?  Yes.  And since the first one was pretty much my favorite children's GN ever, I'm just going to try not to gush too much.  Ready?  Go.

In the first installment of Zita's adventures, she accidentally zaps her friend to another planet.  Her search for her friend drives the plot, and while she ends up saving the planet, that's mostly a bonus.

However, in this second installment, Zita is famous for her planet-saving.  Everywhere she goes, aliens beg her for autograph.  So when a robot shows up who can do a remarkable impression of Zita, our heroine is happy to take the afternoon off. Unfortunately, by the time the afternoon is over, robot Zita has accepted a mission to save another planet and real Zita's friends have taken off without her.

Despite the "spacegirl" in the title, I read the first Zita book as a fantasy.  When Zita pressed that irresistible red button and followed her friend across the universe, it was like Alice falling down the rabbit hole or Lucy pushing aside the last fur coat.  There was no real scientific explanation for how Zita traveled, and when she arrived, there were alien lifeforms wearing top hats and speaking in Cockney accents--not to mention talking animals and a man with a magical flute.  As a regular fantasy reader, I felt very much at home.

The second book is unmistakeably sci-fi--not because there's any hard science, but because there are  recognizable sci-fi scenes: Zita in an escape pod shooting past stars, robot police stomping down hallways, maverick pilots repairing clunky spacecraft.  There's a beautiful cuteness to all of these scenes that seems Japanese-influenced to me.  This could be a superficial observation.  I see many-tentacled creatures and adorable robots and I think Japanese!  But there's a spacecraft that looks an awful lot like Howl's Moving Castle.  And there are mecha.

Look's like Howl's Moving Castle, no?

The second book is also wider in scope and more action-packed.  It introduces two new characters, and with them, a more complex network of relationships.  I didn't have as strong of feelings for these new characters as a did for the crew in the first book, but that's not necessarily a criticism.  I think it's partly because there's more action than character development, partly because the new characters are less helpless, and partly because the author puts more distance between Zita and the reader.  The characters from the first book make brief appearances at the end, but you have to have read the first book to appreciate their role.

What I mean about the distance between Zita and the reader is this: in the first book, we see everything through Zita's eyes.  This time around, Zita's reputation precedes her.  We see posters of Zita before we see her, and the author gives us glimpses of scenes in which she doesn't appear.  Because we're not inside Zita's head all the time, there are also moments when she seems less noble than she does in the first book, like when she steals a random space craft to chase after her friends.  Also, when she saves the day at the end of the story, she seems driven more by a desire to establish her identity than to protect others from harm.  It's the slightly disreputable nature of both Zita and the motley crew she falls in with that really intrigue me about this series. 

Needless to say, I'm looking forward to seeing what happens next in Zita's saga.  Since Legends ends in a cliffhanger, I'm sure there's more to come.  I wonder whether the series will continue in picaresque form or whether there's an over-arching storyline that hasn't really been introduced.  Is there a reason why the red button landed in Zita's backyard?  Are characters like Piper and Pizaccato looking out for her on purpose?  Are the police after her for more than the stealing of someone's ship?  I'm not saying I think Zita is some kind of "chosen one."  After all, the first book pokes fun at that kind of plot.  Plus Zita's too much of a space cowboy.  I mean girl.  But I'm kind of hoping for an epic battle of good and evil. 

This book is sure to please fans of the first book as well as devotees of the Amulet series.  I also think that the uptick in action will make this a good recommendation for kids who like Missile Mouse and perhaps manga series like Neon Genesis Evangelion ... not that the kids are reading that these days.  I'm trying to think of robot manga that the kids are reading these days and I'm drawing a blank.  But kids still like robots, right?  I know they do.  In fact, Zita is now officially one of the many graphic novels that are making sci-fi cool at my urban elementary school library.  So, go robots! 


Legends of Zita the Spacegirl will be published Sept. 4, 2012.  I got a copy from NetGalley.

Eisner Nominations

Here are the ones I care about:

Best Publication for Early Readers (up to age 7)
Beauty and the Squat Bears, by Émile Bravo (Yen Press)
Benjamin Bear in Fuzzy Thinking, by Philippe Coudray (Candlewick/Toon Books)
Dragon Puncher Island, by James Kochalka (Top Shelf)

I'm thrilled that Dragon Puncher Island has been nominated. It's one of the most delightfully weird books I bought for my library this year, popular across grades. If you haven't read the series (the first one is just called Dragon Puncher), it involves a catlike creature who hunts dragons and a small furry creature who wants to be the catlike creature's sidekick. What the furry creature brings to the table: a spoon, called spoony, with which he will beat the dragons.

Nursery Rhyme Comics, edited by Chris Duffy (First Second)
Patrick in a Teddy Bear’s Picnic, by Geoffrey Hayes (Candlewick/Toon Books)

Best Publication for Kids (ages 8-12)
The All-New Batman: The Brave and the Bold, by Sholly Fisch, Rick Burchett, and Dan Davis (DC)
Amelia Rules: The Meaning of Life ... And Other Stuff, by Jimmy Gownley (Atheneum)
The Ferret’s a Foot, by Colleen AF Venable and Stephanie Yue (Graphic Universe/Lerner)

I was thinking about Colleen Venable's Guinea P.I. series last night as I read one of the Joey Fly Private Eye graphic novels. Unfortunately, reading the Joey Fly GN was like reading one of those kids activity books about fire prevention or Halloween safety. It wasn't even trying to teach me anything, but the heavy handed narration made me feel like I was supposed to learn something. Maybe in this case, it was a lesson in the P.I. trope. Anyway, Guinea P.I. is the opposite: Hilarious! Kids can love a grumpy guinea pig solving mysteries whether or not they get the noir motif.

Princeless, by Jeremy Whitley and M. Goodwin (Action Lab)
Snarked, by Roger Langridge (kaboom!)
Zita the Space Girl, by Ben Hatke (First Second)

Zita the Spacegirl is another favorite from this year. Something crashes out of the sky and presents Zita and her friend with a remote control that has one tempting red button on it. Zita presses it and her friend rockets to another dimension. When I think of the book, the first image that pops into my head is Zita hiding in the woods, hugging her knees and crying, right before she goes back to the scene of the crash and pushes the button again, following her friend into the unknown.

Best Publication for Young Adults (Ages 12-17)
Anya’s Ghost, by Vera Brosgol (First Second)
Around the World, by Matt Phelan (Candlewick)
Level Up, by Gene Yang and Thien Pham (First Second)
Life with Archie, by Paul Kupperberg, Fernando Ruiz, Pat & Tim Kennedy, Norm Breyfogle et al. (Archie)
Mystic, by G. Willow Wilson and David Lopez (Marvel)

Read all about it ...

Now I really need to get my hands on a Princeless. Usually I wait for a TPB, but this one has more buzz than a hornet's nest, and it's, like, so perfect for my library. And I've never heard of the Beauty and the Squat Bears, but now that I've read the synopsis, I'm fascinated.

My Graphic Novel Selection presentation

Thanks to everyone who braved the weather to attend!

Graphic novel selection

View more presentations from xmsbrownx.

Book Review: Marvel Origin Story Picture Books

I picked up three of the Marvel Origin Story picture books at Borders for about $4.50 each. I figured they'd fall into the category of "books with high kid appeal and questionable literary merit." That said, don't ask me why Marvel picture books bother me less than Disney books. I never buy Disney books.

So I read them (The Mighty Thor, The Amazing Spider-Man, and The Uncanny X-Men) and I thought they were solid choices. They're written like fables--all narrative and no dialog. I did feel like there was a huge missed opportunity there. I mean, these are stories from comic books. Why not add some word bubbles to the art? The readers would understand Spider-Man's character better if they got some of his witty banter.

Without the dialog, the characters seem very serious. There's a surprising lack of humor in the stories. But that's not exactly a complaint. You do get a sense of the epic-ness of these comics, which works particularly well with Thor's origin story.

The main thing Marvel got right was the amount of text on each page. Unless you're Patricia Polacco, you can't get away with too many words on the page anymore. At least, not if you want to appeal to 7-year-olds. These are the right length for read-alouds, even if they are 48 pages rather than 32 (wow, I just counted and that surprised me), except for maybe the X-men story. I feel like they could have cut that one off earlier. They tried to cram a lot in.

The way that these work well in a school is that they give you so many opportunities to talk about character traits. Again, the Peter Parker and Thor stories are all about how those characters developed into decent people who took responsibility for their actions, and for their community. Obviously, the Thor story also gives you an opportunity to talk about mythology. In case it isn't obvious, the X-men story is the weak link. I don't really know what you'd do with that. Science? Mutations? Tolerance? The story skims too much. It doesn't give you a lot to work with.

There's also a Captain America Origin Story, but I didn't find that at the Borders where I was shopping. I bought these partly because I already have Ralph Cosentino's picture books about Batman, Superman, and Wonderwoman. I love them, because the art has this really retro vibe. They capture the feeling I imagine 1940s kids having when they read the original Amazing Stories, etc. These Marvel Origin Stories are much better, in my opinion, than the easy readers Capstone is putting out there (although I may buy those, too).

And basically, I'm a fan of introducing kids to this American mythology. People try to say Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed are our mythology, but I believe it's comic books.

"Yeah, I'm an EA Librarian."

I'm imagining saying that to people in 20 years. EA stands for Emerging Adult, because according to a recent NYT article, what used to be "your 20s" is now a discrete neurological stage in the development of human life! Check it out:

"JEFFREY JENSEN ARNETT, a psychology professor at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., is leading the movement to view the 20s as a distinct life stage, which he calls “emerging adulthood.” He says what is happening now is analogous to what happened a century ago, when social and economic changes helped create adolescence — a stage we take for granted but one that had to be recognized by psychologists, accepted by society and accommodated by institutions that served the young."

If "Emerging Adulthood" is a stage with its own psychological profile, it follows that it must have it's own literature. At least, I think. And I can even think of a few examples:

Hearsay evidence re: digital comics

Have you tried reading comics on an ebook reader yet? I would like to, but alas, my ebook reader is giving me an error message. This may or may not be related to my forays into downloading illegal copies of ebooks for research purposes.

So although ebook comics are now available on Overdrive, I cannot partake of them. But here's what I'm hearing from other people:

The most helpful thing on the internet this month

has got to be the Good Comics for Kids blog's core title list. I, for one, plan to buy everything on the list. Seriously. Maybe not all at once. But I just ran the numbers, and in the past 5 months, graphic novels have gone from 4% of our circulation to 8%. That's significant considering the tiny-ness of the GN collections.

And while we're on the subject of lists, I just found a new graphic novel list through a very long chain of emails on the GN listserv: Texas Maverick Graphic Novels. Add that to the Cybils and my beloved GGNFT, and I don't understand why some librarians still lament the lack of tools for GN collection development.

Rape Scenes

I was talking with my sister on the phone last night about rape scenes in books and whether or not they're exploitative. I had a friend in grad school who actually shut the book every time she came across a rape scene. I'm not that hard core, but I definitely sympathize with her stance. For one thing, I read for pleasure, mostly, so why read something so unsettling? Of course, we can't always look away from unsettling things. But there has to be a good reason to look, like a lesson learned or a better understanding of other people, or ourselves.

And then there's the more disturbing issue of rape scenes that aren't unsettling enough. I was reading a graphic novel yesterday that included two rape scenes. While they weren't graphic, something about the art was so pulpy--the woman's clothing clinging to her breasts in artistic shreds, her mouth a perfect "o"--that I couldn't get the images out of my head. They were sexy rape scenes. The more I thought about it, the more angry I was.

I had been considering the graphic novel for my YA section. I do include some books with sex and violence, as long as they are generally worthy and pass the no-false-advertising test. In other words, I'll put books with "graphic" material on the shelves as long as the description and packaging of the book warn readers that it's going to be that kind of book. And frankly, the book I was considering focused on a historical figure who was known for violence, so no false advertising, but ... still. No way can I do it. I didn't know I had this particular criteria for evaluating books, but there it is: no glorification of sexual violence.

Roadtrip to Queens, anyone?

I really need to visit the libraries in Queens. They're always making news--especially for their teen services. And now, Christian Zabriskie, who is on the Great Graphic Novels for Teens committee with me, has made it into the New York Times as part of an article on love for manga among urban youth. I particularly like this point:

"Mr. Zabriskie, 39, now assistant coordinator for youth services at Queens Library, says manga is for these teenagers what punk rock, New Wave, and Dungeons and Dragons were for his generation: a world of specialized knowledge that excludes adults and opens a private creative space for young people.

“This kind of secret, hidden knowledge gives them a power and an empowerment,” he said. “It’s this generation’s esoterica.”

But, he said, unlike other teenage rituals like graffiti or, at the extremes, gang membership, manga fandom increasingly happens at one of the safest places around — the library."

I love the word "esoterica."

Eisner Nominations for Kids and Teens

First of all, read this book, I beg you:
Second, the Eisner noms were announced--I'm a little late with this, but the winners won't be announced until July. Here are the kids and teens nominations (Bold titles are also on the 2010 GGNFT list):

Why I'm no longer afraid of Naruto

When it comes to buying manga, for a long time I felt like I had to follow Maria Von Trapp and "start at the very beginning--it's a very good place to start." So I'd buy volumes 1-5 of Negima, Naruto, One Piece, etc.

And then all my readers hated me.


Most of the fans had already read the first 5 volumes, and if they hadn't, it's not like it took them very long to get to volume 6. But I just couldn't bear to spend three times as much money on Naruto as I did on other series. It's that classic librarian dilemma: give the people what they want or give the people choices. You know what I mean?

Anyway, the point is that story arcs are my new thing.

What your shelving style says about you

I've already thought a lot about how to catalog and shelve graphic novels--I even wrote a post about it for the YALSA blog. But my brother just pointed me to a series of articles on Popmatters that addresses this issue from the perspective of comics readers rather than librarians. (OK, so in the article below, the comics reader sat in on a discussion among librarians, so maybe it's more of a cross-section of perspectives.)

Peep this:

"Regardless of how to interpret different ways of categorizing comics in a library, what underlies such questions is how readers read, and what comics means to them. Do they follow writers (what one librarian at the session I was at called the “Neil Gaiman problem”)? Do they follow publishers (as above)? Do they follow pencilers (or some other artist)? Do they follow a particular character (what another librarian called the “Wolverine problem”)?