2008 Boston Globe–Horn Book
Awards Reviewed

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie, illustrated by Ellen Forney
     232 pp. Little
     Reviewed 9/07
The line between dramatic monologue, verse novel, and standup comedy gets unequivocally — and hilariously and triumphantly — bent in this novel about coming of age on the rez. Urged on by a math teacher whose nose he has just broken, Junior, fourteen, decides to make the iffy commute from his Spokane Indian reservation to attend high school in Reardan, a small town twenty miles away. He’s tired of his impoverished circumstances (“Adam and Eve covered their privates with fig leaves; the first Indians covered their privates with their tiny hands”), but while he hopes his new school will offer him a better education, he knows the odds aren’t exactly with him: “What was I doing at Reardan, whose mascot was an Indian, thereby making me the only other Indian in town?” But he makes friends (most notably the class dork Gordy), gets a girlfriend, and even (though short, nearsighted, and slightly disabled from birth defects) lands a spot on the varsity basketball team, which inevitably leads to a showdown with his own home team, led by his former best friend Rowdy. Junior’s narration is intensely alive and rat-a-tat-tat with short paragraphs and one-liners (“If God hadn’t wanted us to masturbate, then God wouldn’t have given us thumbs”). The dominant mode of the novel is comic, even though there’s plenty of sadness, as when Junior’s sister manages to shake off depression long enough to elope — only to die, passed out from drinking, in a fire. Junior’s spirit, though, is unquenchable, and his style inimitable, not least in the take-no-prisoners cartoons he draws (as expertly depicted by comics artist Forney) from his bicultural experience. R.S.

At Night by Jonathan Bean
     32 pp. Farrar
     Reviewed 9/07
Unable to sleep one night, a young girl follows a breeze and makes her way to the roof of her apartment building. Setting up a makeshift bed with pillows, a blanket, and some chairs, she finally falls asleep — in the cool night air, beneath the moon. The simple story is told through a modest text that quietly lets the art take center stage. Small, square illustrations set inside a wide margin on each page emphasize the closeness of the indoor scenes; as the girl reaches the rooftop (with her mother watching unobtrusively), moonlight shining in the stairway, the margins disappear, making way for full-bleed, double-page spreads. Brown wallpaper, heavy-looking dark furniture, and an ornate ceiling convey the stuffy stillness of the girl's bedroom. In pleasant contrast are the movement and life on the open rooftop: potted plants lining the edges, laundry on the line dancing in the breeze, and an expansive view that opens outward over three spreads as "she lay in her bed on her house in the city, / in the night, under the sky," thinking "about the wide world all around her." Muted shades of blue and orange keep the tone subdued in this bedtime story, perfect reading for a warm night. J.M.B.

Nic Bishop Frogs by Nic Bishop
     48 pp. Scholastic
     Reviewed 3/08
[Review also covers Nic Bishop Spiders.] Amazing photographs are the stars of these volumes featuring popular creepy-crawlies. The texts are informative, covering basic anatomical, behavioral, and reproductive facts about frogs and spiders at an appropriate early-elementary level. On each spread, one of the sentences is in larger, colored type, serving as both a highlight of the main ideas and a pointer to the accompanying photograph (which is captioned with additional information). The text, however, is completely overshadowed by the photographs, which are stunningly crisp, colorful, and beautifully reproduced; it is difficult to stop gazing at them long enough to read more than that highlighted sentence (though those who do will find a fascinating depth of information). A close-up of a tarantula is so sharp you can count the individual hairs, and the luminous skin of a frog will have readers reaching out to touch the page. The frogs, in particular, are irresistible, either in close-ups of their faces peering out from the pages or frozen in spectacular mid-jump photos. At the end of each book Bishop explains the extensive work involved in his nature photography, which includes trekking through swamps and woods as well as raising spiders and frogs at home. An index and glossary are appended. D.J.F.

Fred Stays with Me! by Nancy Coffelt, illustrated by Tricia Tusa
     32 pp. Little
     Reviewed 7/07
A potentially fraught subject — divorce — gets a kid-empowering treatment in this congenial story. The young, unnamed narrator is matter-of-fact about her living situation: “Sometimes I live with my mom. Sometimes I live with my dad.” And where this girl goes, so goes her roly-poly mutt, Fred. Soft red- and brown-hued illustrations, securely bordered by lots of white space, reinforce the self-possessed mood of the text and focus attention on the special relationship between the girl and her dog. In fact, except for an occasional arm or leg, the girl’s parents aren’t ever pictured (reflective, perhaps, of their part-time roles). The adults assert themselves, however, when Fred’s relentless barking (at Mom’s) and sock stealing (at Dad’s) get to be too much. Her parents both try to lay down the law: “Fred can’t stay with me!” But here’s where this simple story triumphs, giving the child a realistic measure of control over this aspect of her life. “Excuse me,” she says, calmly but firmly. “Fred doesn’t stay with either of you. Fred stays with ME!” In the accompanying illustration, a spotlight puts the girl and Fred center stage, with her silhouetted parents as audience. This great understated moment will resonate with many families. K.F.

Shooting the Moon by Frances O’Roark Dowell
     163 pp.
     Reviewed 3/08
Jamie, twelve years old in 1969, is the Colonel’s daughter, U.S. Army through and through. But when her older brother TJ joins the army, she discovers that things aren’t as simple as they seem. She is surprised that the Colonel does not “turn cartwheels down Tank Destroyer Boulevard” when TJ announces that he has enlisted in the medical corps; in fact, the Colonel actively discourages him. When packages of undeveloped film start arriving from TJ in Vietnam, Jamie learns to develop it at the base rec center. First it’s touristy stuff and TJ ‘s familiar moon shots. As the weeks go on, however, troubling scenes begin to appear in the background — injured people and amputees. Dowell tells Jamie’s story in the first person and gets all the details right, from the hooahs to the descriptions of the base to the tone of Jamie’s interactions with the rec-center GIs to the predictable, comforting rituals that families use to steel themselves for whatever happens. For such a straightforward plot, the story arc is complicated and unpredictable — just like war. The climax packs a wallop, and Jamie and her family know how to react; the army has taught them well. An important, timely story, sparely told, that stays true to its course. R.L.S.

A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever by Marla Frazee
     32 pp. Harcourt
     Reviewed 3/08
In this tongue-in-cheek story, Frazee’s text plays straight man to her comic illustrations, and the clever interplay between the two fuels the book’s humor. James and Eamon are staying with Eamon’s grandparents, Bill and Pam, so they can attend a nature day-camp. Though the boys tolerate camp, the real action happens during their unstructured time at Bill and Pam’s beach house. In fact, the illustrations effectively ignore camp activities, relegating those scenes to the endpapers. While the earnest narrative offers one version of events, the energetic illustrations and sound-bite speech balloons provide a boys’-eye view of “the best week ever.” Highlights include zoning out in front of the TV, playing video games (or, as the text describes it, practicing “quiet meditation”), and camping on an air mattress in the downstairs bedroom with a legion of stuffed animals. Bill and Pam remain mostly in the background: Pam comes into focus when she’s offering ice cream for snack and banana waffles for dinner; nature-lover Bill pops up periodically to share his interest in Antarctica or to suggest a trip to the museum to see the penguin exhibit. (Eamon: “Do you want to go?” James: “No.”) This week, and this story, belongs to the boys, which is what makes both week and story so successful. k.f.

What to Do About Alice? by Barbara Kerley, illustrated by Edwin Fotheringham
     48 pp. Scholastic
     Reviewed 3/08
This sassy biography of Alice Roosevelt Longworth validates President Theodore Roosevelt’s famous quip about his oldest child: “I can be president of the United States, or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both.” Spunky and headstrong, Alice “was hungry to go places, meet people, do things. Father called it ‘running riot.’ Alice called it ‘eating up the world.’” Readers can call her actions what they will as they follow Alice sneaking out at night; riding trays down the White House stairs; or diving, fully clothed, into a ship’s pool. With a palette that emphasizes Alice Blue, her signature color, the illustrations often match Alice’s spirit with zigzag streaks, circular pieces of spot art, and slanting figures. Both text and illustrations can depict a demure Alice (on her wedding day, for example), but that decorum is short-lived as she dances the turkey trot or plays poker with “the boys.” An author’s note hints at Alice’s probable unhappiness as a child (her mother died two days after Alice’s birth, and Theodore never spoke her name again); expands on ways that Alice served the president; and details her political influence, and outrageousness, in later life. What to do about Alice? Enjoy! B.C.

Savvy by Ingrid Law
     343 pp. Waldern/Dial
     Reviewed Fall 2008
The Beaumont family is special. So special, in fact, that they each boast a supernatural talent called a savvy — from Rocket's way with electricity to Fish’s power over wind and rain. What will Mibs’s savvy be, and how will it help save her father? With a rhythmic, musical voice, Law takes readers on a fast-moving, fun-filled adventure, including lots of diverting detours. B.D.L.

The Wall by Peter Sis
     56 pp. Foster/Farrar
     Reviewed 9/07
The personal meets the political in this absorbing autobiographical picture book from Czech emigre Sis. Born in 1949, just as Czechoslovakia fell under communist rule and Soviet domination, Sis evokes the childhood of a born artist (“as long as he could remember, he had loved to draw”) in a country where restrictions on what an artist could do grew along with him, where a child’s love for drawing shapes and people was channeled, at school, into drawing tanks and hammer-and-sickles. While the brief main text of each page describes Sis’s own experiences (“Slowly he started to question. He painted what he wanted to — in secret”), small captions illuminate the thumbnail pictures of conditions in the country. Strategically accented with red stars and flags, these black ink drawings, sometimes four or six to a page, are almost entirely composed of short, stuttering horizontal pen strokes. The technique is all the more effective for the contrast it allows to Sis’s — and Czechoslovakia’s — expansive forays into freedom, like the full-color double-page spread depicting the Prague Spring of 1968, which blossoms with images of John Lennon, a Yellow Submarine, and a star-dappled winged horse at the end of a rainbow. The deployment of media choices and color throughout the book is both expert and telling: bold, stark black marker for an invading Soviet tank, dreamy blue crayon for the night the Beach Boys played Prague. It’s a surprisingly comprehensive portrait of an era, an artist, and the persistence of the latter in the face of the former. R.S.

The Arrival by Shaun Tan
     128 pp. Levine/Scholastic
     Reviewed 11/07
From a bleak, sunless city haunted by the threat of scaled and serpentine monsters, a man sets forth to seek a new life in a new land, leaving his wife and daughter behind. His steamship voyage with a host of refugees takes him to a strange shore indeed, a country with its own architecture, alphabet, technologies — even the pets look different. It’s the triumph of this lavish yet somberly monochromatic wordless book that readers are put right into the refugee’s shoes: we’re as out of place as he, learning the customs of the country in step with the protagonist. With him, for example, we figure out how to use the transport system, and once aloft in the steam-driven air-ferry, we sit alongside him as another passenger tells her own story of imprisonment and escape. Small, meticulously composed square panels, sometimes twelve to a page, move the action along while larger pictures and double-page spreads display surreally majestic cityscapes as well as scenes of the disaster and oppression that led the nameless protagonist and others to seek this welcoming land. Subtle shifts from gray to brown to golden tones underline the chiaroscuro of the story’s themes; all is warm light when the man and his family are united once again. R.S.

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