The Dark

The post Review of The Dark appeared first on The Horn Book.

Elizabeth Bird – “Seven Little Ones Instead”
Luann Toth – “Word Girl”
Deborah Stevenson – “Horrible and Beautiful”
Kristin Cashore – “Embracing the Strange”
Susan Marston – “New and Strange, Once”
Elizabeth Law – “How Can a Fire Be Naughty?”
Christine Taylor-Butler – “Something Wicked”
Mitali Perkins – “Border Crossing”
Vaunda Micheaux Nelson – “Wiggiling”

What’s the strangest children’s book you’ve ever enjoyed? Let us know in the comments!

The post “Different Drums” roundup appeared first on The Horn Book.

—Katrina Hedeen
Assistant Editor, The Horn Book Guide

Calhoun, Dia  Eva of the Farm
235 pp. Atheneum 2012 ISBN 978-1-4424-1700-7
Gr. 4–6 When life on the family farm as twelve-year-old Eva knows it is threatened by a recession, fire blight, and sudden medical expenses, she turns to her great passion — poetry — for comfort, self-expression, and a possible means of making money. Eva’s beautifully constructed, imagistic poems within this novel shine, allaying the minor lyrical inconsistencies of the main verse narration.

Engle, Margarita  The Wild Book
133 pp. Harcourt 2012 ISBN 978-0-547-58131-6
Gr. 4–6  Engle relates, with some fictionalization, her grandmother Fefa’s childhood in dangerous early-twentieth-century Cuba. Fefa suffers from “word-blindness” (dyslexia), but she slowly learns to read and write as a blank book from Mamá becomes her “garden” in which “words sprout / like seedlings.” Spare, dreamlike verse pairs perfectly with a first-person narrator whose understanding of written language is unique.

Hemphill, Stephanie  Sisters of Glass
154 pp. Knopf 2012 ISBN 978-0-375-86109-3 LE ISBN 978-0-375-96109-0
YA  Before his death, their father, a respected glassblower, declared that younger daughter Maria must marry Venetian nobility, leaving elder Giovanna to stay on Murano with the family. The sisters each long for the other’s future (and suitor); creative ingenuity allows for a satisfying resolution. A vivid fifteenth-century Venetian setting, true-to-life family tensions, and fairy-tale romance complete this novel told in elegant verse. Glos.

Hopkins, Ellen  Tilt
604 pp. McElderry 2012 ISBN 978-1-4169-8330-9
YA  Mikayla, Shane, and Harley alternate narration as they struggle to find balance amidst poor choices, family issues, and personal crises; snippets from secondary characters add perspective. The issues-laden plot and labyrinthine web of characters is the stuff of soap operas, which older teens may relish. Hopkins’s free verse, with thoughtful line breaks and word choices, is by turns poised and visceral.

Rosen, Michael  Running with Trains: A Novel in Poetry and Two Voices
102 pp. Boyds/Wordsong 2012 ISBN 978-1-59078-863-9
Gr. 4–6  With Dad MIA in Vietnam and Mom back in school, thirteen-year-old Perry takes the train back and forth between Gran’s and Mom’s every week; Steve is a lonely nine-year-old on an Ohio farm, enamored with the train that passes through his family’s property. Both boys’ alternating voices are unique and poignant in this verse novel about self-discovery and the nature of home.

Rosenthal, Betsy R.  Looking for Me
172 pp. Houghton 2012 ISBN 978-0-547-61084-9
Gr. 4–6  In some free verse and some loosely rhymed poems, Rosenthal tells the story of her mother Edith’s Depression-era childhood in a Jewish family with twelve children. The novel is episodic but gives individual personalities to the many siblings. Edith’s voice is touching and genuine; readers will maintain hope that she someday realize she’s more than “just plain Edith / who’s number four.” Glos.

Tregay, Sarah  Love & Leftovers
435 pp. HarperCollins/Tegen 2012 ISBN 978-0-06-202358-2
YA  Marcie’s dad comes out as gay, and she moves from Idaho to New Hampshire with her depressed mother. Missing her boyfriend and crew of friends nicknamed “the Leftovers,” she struggles to acclimate (and remain faithful). She returns to Boise midyear, but everything is different—including her. The first-person verse narration wrought with satisfying angst makes Marcie’s woes and joys palpable.

Wissinger, Tamera Will  Gone Fishing: A Novel in Verse
128 pp. Houghton 2013 ISBN 978-0-547-82011-8
Gr. 1–3  Illustrated by Matthew Cordell. Sam is excited for his fishing trip with Dad — until little sister Lucy tags along. Poems of varied forms describe the fishing trio’s day: preparations, techniques (“Heeere, fishy, fishy, fishy…”), frustrations (“Lucy’s winning eight to… / none”), and eventual triumphs. Cordell’s buoyant illustrations are a natural fit for the upbeat verse. A “Poet’s Tackle Box” section outlines poetic devices and forms. Bib.

From the March/April 2013 issue of The Horn Book Magazine. These reviews are from The Horn Book Guide and The Horn Book Guide Online. For information about subscribing to the Guide and the Guide Online, click here.

The post From the Guide: Novels in Verse appeared first on The Horn Book.

When I was in nursery school, my favorite bedtime books were two my mother stole from the Unitarian Sunday School library, Martin and Judy, volumes II and III, by Verna Hills Bayley. I loved these books, about two friends who lived next door to each other, because each chapter contained a mildly dramatic story on a subject I could relate to, and each one ended with a lesson. (That’s right, a lesson—the same thing that makes me leery when I see one in a picture book manuscript today. But that’s because I don’t like instruction that tries to pass itself off as something else.) Judy and her brother get distracted while popping corn in the fireplace and forget to replace the screen, causing a fire. A tiny fire that burns a hole in the rug, but it seems scary at first. Judy and her mother sensibly discuss, “How can a fire be naughty? It has to burn the things that are in its way.” Another time, Judy gets her tonsils out in a story that ends with Judy remembering her father’s wise words, “Hospitals may not be much fun, but they are good when you need them.” So satisfying!

When I came across these books again in my twenties, I rolled my eyes at their all-white cast, their overstated prose style, and their obvious didacticism. But now I recognize what they did well. There’s real plot in each story, yet they are short and come to rewarding conclusions. They build a world and characters. Finally, each tale, from the rained-out picnic to the nickel that gets lost under the porch, is one a preschooler can relate to. And don’t many of our very best picture books today explore or celebrate the tiny things that loom so large in a child’s universe?

From the March/April 2013 special issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

The post Different Drums: How Can a Fire Be Naughty? appeared first on The Horn Book.

A freak tent, a dust witch, a quote from Macbeth, and a villain named Mr. Dark. Such was the stuff of Something Wicked This Way Comes. I’d always been fascinated by carnivals. They seemed to spring out of vacant parking lots overnight. So it made sense that I’d be drawn to Ray Bradbury’s novel as a young girl.

In this tale of good versus evil, the mood is bleak. Danger is foreshadowed by the arrival of a man selling lightning rods covered in strange symbols. The bustle of the small town ends abruptly once the clock strikes nine. Posters announcing Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show appear, hung by a creepy man whistling Christmas carols in October. And when the carnival finally arrives, the descriptions are ominous. The slithering train’s grieving sounds, a wailing calliope, and the skeletal poles of the tent drew me into the weird landscape and held me captive.

The young protagonists, Jim Nightshade and William Halloway, are relentlessly pursued by Mr. Dark after witnessing the devastating consequences faced by townspeople whose deepest desires are fulfilled by carnival attractions: a carousel that makes someone younger or older, a hall of mirrors that reveals an inner truth, and a block of ice containing a beautiful woman. Jim falls victim to temptation but in the end is saved by William and his father, Charles. Evil is conquered by a smile. The carnival is destroyed by a warm embrace and laughter.

The book was odd, and not what my friends were reading, but I was hooked. Every now and then, when the wind is particularly fierce and the forecast predicts an impending storm, I still wonder what it would be like to sit astride a painted carousel horse and turn back the clock for one last glimpse of youth.

From the March/April 2013 special issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

The post Different Drums: Something Wicked appeared first on The Horn Book.

In a field that celebrates the works of Maurice Sendak, William Steig, and Jon Scieszka, and in which anthropomorphic animals are regularly clothed only from the waist up, “weird” is difficult to define.

In 1994, I had worked at Junior Library Guild for three years, helping to decide whether the K–5 titles I read seemed fresh simply because they were different or if they were in fact good. When our company was sold and longtime editorial director Marjorie Jones retired, suddenly that assessment was up to me.

On a train to Connecticut to meet with my new supervisors, I read proofs of Dinner at Magritte’s by Michael Garland. It is a fictional story about historical figures, something I’d been taught to be skeptical of — and it wasn’t perfect. Both the dialogue and paintings were a little stiff. But I loved how Garland turned the ordinary happenings described in the text — a boy named Pierre and his neighbors René and Georgette Magritte walk, play croquet, and dine together — into homages to the surrealist’s dreamlike works. For example, as Pierre and friends walk through the woods, their arms and legs weave in and out of the background (as in Magritte’s Carte Blanche), and Magritte attends dinner in a bowler hat, with an apple suspended in front of his face (à la The Son of Man). I felt sure kids would enjoy these weird images, but as a whole was the book better than all the ones I hadn’t yet seen or read that season?

After the fact, when books that cause me anxiety during the decision-making process (kids in a televised fight to the death, bears that eat hat-stealing rabbits) have become established on our list, their innovations become familiar, their existence seems inevitable, and it’s hard to remember that once, like Dinner at Magritte’s, they were new and strange.

From the March/April 2013 special issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

The post Different Drums: New and Strange, Once appeared first on The Horn Book.

This ended up being a challenging assignment, because much literature for youth is pretty weird when coldly explained (kids travel through space and time to duel a giant brain!), and we don’t think twice about it. Saying that I adore Polly Horvath’s wonderful combination of bizarre, perhaps magical, realism and petulant domesticity, which I absolutely do, is just going to elicit yawns: yeah, me and the award committees.

I’m therefore going with a book by an author whose reputation has never really taken off in the U.S. despite her significance in her home country of Australia. Sonya Hartnett’s Sleeping Dogs (1995) is still one of the most horrible, beautiful, shocking books I’ve ever read, pushing not just the envelope but the entire mailbox of young adult literature. The Willows, a hardscrabble, dysfunctional family that runs a trailer park, are so isolated by their abusive patriarch’s cultish control that they have only the vaguest, most unconvincing inklings, from their poorly transmitting TV and from books, that their life isn’t the same as everybody else’s. Commencing with a clearly incestuous dawn cuddle between a brother and sister and moving swiftly into a lovingly detailed scene of sheep slaughter, the book marks its bitter territory right up front. Yet this is no Neanderthal enclave, and there are heartbreaking flares of possibility beyond the family’s strictured life: one son creates delicate nature drawings; another longs to go to college; and the family prizes its monthly reading assignment (currently, portentously enough, Crime and Punishment). Into this mix comes a brash young artist intrigued by the family’s strangeness (and gratified by how superior it makes him feel). The ways in which this does not, to put it mildly, go well would have made Flannery O’Connor blanch and William Faulkner sober up, and it is a savage, traumatic exploration of the way tragedy can lie like kindling in people, just waiting for something to set it alight.

From the March/April 2013 special issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

The post Different Drums: Horrible and Beautiful appeared first on The Horn Book.

Roger wants us to answer this: “People — some people — say your books are weird. Do you think your books are weird?”

This is what I plan to say.

No, I don’t think my books are weird, and it hurts my feelings when people say they are. I was particularly hurt recently when someone described one of my books as “weird even for her.”

Right after reading that comment, I sat down to watch O Brother, Where Art Thou? It wasn’t really my choice. My daughter was home visiting, and she forced me. I love the Coen brothers, but the first time I tried to watch O Brother, Where Art Thou?, I gave up because it was…too weird. In fact, it irritated me that the great American filmmakers would waste their time making such a weird little film.

I settled in anyhow because I wanted a place to sulk and frame responses to “weird even for her.” I figured I’d just ignore the movie. But to my great surprise, I no longer found the movie weird. I’d seen enough Coen brothers by that point to gain a facility with the language Coen. I was no longer sitting there as I had the first time with my arms crossed, muttering, “Oh, you’re just being too weird.” There’s a wonderful scene in the movie where a flood comes and sweeps up everything and everyone in its mighty waters. And that’s what it felt like. That I had volunteered to leave the comfortable footing of my familiar shores and get swept into a Coen flood that carried me somewhere I would not otherwise have reached.

I once read a book about language acquisition that said that people with the strongest egos have the hardest time learning a new language because they’ve already found something that works for them. They are not anxious to give it up to the unknown and where it might take them. When a person becomes fluent in a second language, they actually develop a whole new personality. They are a different person in English than they are in French. This is why people who have experienced trauma or heartbreak often find themselves with a compulsion to learn Italian. It not only gives them a new way of looking at the world and a different frame of reference — it changes who they are. And that is primarily what I think we mean when we say something is weird. We are saying, This is scary because it might make me see things differently and that would change who I am. That is the scariness of weird and also its strength.

Hi, Jack. Martha and Roger want to know if we resent being pigeon-holed (if we think we are) as quirky, offbeat, zany, etc.?

This assumes that we view our own work as weird. But weird is a judgment by someone on the outside of a work. The writer has the first experience of the story and must necessarily be inside of it. Nothing is truly knowable except from the inside. And anything truly known isn’t weird.

But of course it isn’t always easy for either the writer or the reader to move from the outside to the inside. They have to leave behind, in creation or response, all that is fake. Art is, as Sister Wendy says in an interview with Bill Moyers, “a great tester of the fake because it must be the real you that creates or responds. And the more the real you dares to create or respond, the more the real you is there.” This is the great reward, the great moment of being for either the writer or the reader.

For a long time when I got letters from people saying that one of my books had moved them, I couldn’t connect. It bothered me. It seemed ungrateful to feel I didn’t even really care about these letters, that they had nothing to do with me. Recently, I have understood that what I was feeling (although I didn’t understand it) was that these readers were thanking me for creating a catalyst for something deep within them to show up. They weren’t really delighting in me. They were delighting in themselves. And since I didn’t know them and they didn’t know me, I was right: there was no connection. Not in that sense. But there was the work. And that is what art is. The middleman.

Hi, Mr. Gantos,

The Horn Book asks the following: “Jack has a book about obsessive mother love/taxidermy. Polly has a book about bunny detectives. Have you ever had a novel turned down by a publisher? Have you ever been asked to write something with broader appeal?”

Polly has turned this section of the discussion over to me because once again someone has not read the jacket of Mr. and Mrs. Bunny — Detectives Extraordinaire! and is attributing the book to her. Humans! What are you going to do? Can’t live with them and can’t eat them. (Without the proper condiments.)

Well, to begin, this was Mrs. Bunny’s first book, so she has yet to get the “please write something with broader appeal” kind of rejection slip that has caused so many rabbits to hang themselves by their ears from the nearest light fixture. Secondly, Mr. and Mrs. Bunny has very broad appeal in both the human and bunny market and even among foxes — although there it is being marketed as a horror story. And we all know the many-specied popularity of your books, Mr. Gantos.

But let Mrs. Bunny put her thinking cap on. It seems to her that the Horn Book is setting things up as weird vs. mainstream. Mrs. Bunny would ask herself, having delved into a certain amount of human popular fiction, Are bunny detectives stranger than owls delivering letters or some godforsaken creature called a Dementor? Is obsessive mother love/taxidermy weirder than adolescent girls being infatuated with young men who want to suck their blood (never Mrs. Bunny’s idea of an attractive courting ritual) or television shows where the object is to kill everyone else and be the last one standing? I mean, objectively speaking, are they, Mr. Gantos, are they?

So! Mrs. Bunny thinks perhaps we are not talking about weird vs. mainstream. We are talking about something else here. We are talking about a kind of nervousness some books evoke. A kind of apprehension. Some suspicion that one is going to have to work for one’s dinner.

Sister Wendy calls this not weird vs. mainstream, but pure vs. comfort. “Comforting art,” she says, is art that is easy to react to. “Everyone knows exactly what they think about it…Feeling I know I can judge without having to look, without having to take trouble. That is comforting.” You don’t have to dig deep within to show up for it. Sometimes Mrs. Bunny finds she wants this. Sometimes she wants to read Bridget Jones’s Diary. But sometimes she wants to read American Pastoral. It reminds Mrs. Bunny of the time she put a water feature in the garden. Mr. Bunny was not a fan. “Don’t you find it soothing?” she asked Mr. Bunny, but he replied, “Mrs. Bunny, I do not ALWAYS wish to be soothed. Sometimes I like to be WORKED UP!”

Of course Mrs. Bunny is not sure that you or Polly Horvath could call your books pure as opposed to comforting. That is a judgment that must come from others, and only as time will tell. In other words, you’ll be toes up fertilizing the carrot bed, Mr. Gantos, before anything definitive is decided. Mrs. Bunny is sure only that her own book must be of the pure variety because Mr. Bunny is always declaiming that her writing career has been no comfort to him whatsoever.

So if it’s weird and difficult, it is art?

No. It may not evoke any response in you. Twin Peaks was to Mrs. Bunny’s greatly discerning eyes weird, but Mrs. Bunny thinks it is not art, because when she got inside it, it was no longer weird — but it wasn’t really anything else either. There seemed a definite lack of there, there. There, there is a must.

Well, then, what if everyone says it is art, but yet it doesn’t awaken a flowering within you? No sudden understanding that this is something magical and mysterious that you are now in contact with.

Yes, but it could be that you are not ready for this story. And maybe never will be. Your response alone doesn’t define its artiness.

Well, frankly then I don’t know what you’ve been going on about.

I didn’t say this was going to be simple. Leslie Fiedler used to say that when he came upon something that didn’t awaken a flowering within, he would say to himself, “What is lacking in me that I fail to respond to this?” But try that one on some editor slogging through the slush pile.

Jack, help us out here.

Thank you, Polly, for your thoughts on the subject of not being weird. (And please thank your colleague, Mrs. Bunny, for her thoughts as well.) I fully subscribe to Polly’s point that the more you understand a piece of art, and the more you empathize with the world within a book, and the more you give yourself over to an external experience, the more it radiates within you in a genuinely transformative way. This is not weird. It is as profound as early Homo sapiens painting portraits of themselves on cave walls. They discovered their other selves, and thus self-dialogue was born and blossomed. Which was fantastic! Where would we be as a species without self-reflection?

As for me, I can’t say that anything I’ve published thus far is intentionally weird, as I think weird is a very calculated result of a writer’s intent. I certainly don’t want my readers to be weird as a result of reading my books, but if something I write ignites them to reflect on themselves or others, and causes meaningful change and understanding, then I am gratified. When I publish a book, it is a form of sharing myself, and given the range of my publications (from picture books to a prison memoir), I don’t think any of my books are weird.

Besides, to be truly weird I believe a book has to live in the dark full-time, unexposed to readers’ spying eyes. In other words, a truly weird book is an unpublished book — a rejected manuscript, in fact. So let me take you to Bates Hall in the Boston Public Library — a 218-foot-long, forty-two-foot-wide room with a fifty-foot-high barrel-vaulted ceiling, with 224 numbered seats around twenty-eight oak tables. In this room is where, since 1974, I have written the majority of my forty-five published books. Here I have also written three full-length unpublished and thoroughly rejected and unrehabilitated novels, which remain in manuscript form. It is these three cadaverous novels I wish to write about in response to Roger’s query: “To some people your books are weird. Do you think they are weird?”

In Bates Hall I always name my novels after the seat number in which I sit during the writing of the manuscript, and I always change seats with each new manuscript. Recently, I drifted into Bates Hall. Looking out across that vast room is like looking out at an old New England graveyard, with the tall, rounded backs of the captain’s chairs rising up above the tables like flinty, skull-carved headstones. I love this room, and so one by one I visited seat #37, seat #57, and seat #117. I think of the manuscripts written there not as the dead but as unique books that have been buried alive within me, and in this way I think of them constantly as my greatest private works — books so rare that only I will ever know them.

Many years ago, before electronic burglary detection, I used to hide inside a long hollow coffin of a bench with a hinged seat just outside of Bates Hall in the Pompeii alcove. I would wait until the library closed and for the guards to give a final “all clear” to the darkened rooms, and then I would push upward on the seat, crawl out, and quietly creep into Bates Hall. In those days I only had two failed novels, the ones written at seats #117 and #37, and I would sit for hours in those seats without pen or paper. There was no reason to take notes. As I thought about the novels, I was no longer attempting to rewrite them, but to re-remember them and reset their type in the doing. “Seat #37” was rejected many times. At first I used to take out the red-inked and hand-typed manuscript, which lived in a file cabinet I affectionately called “The Triage.” I know this manuscript better than any of my published books because I dwell on it as a wound that won’t heal, and I am not looking for a cure. I wander the familiar streets of sentences and blocks of paragraphs and towns of chapters. I love the labyrinth of misplaced words, decaying architecture, dead-end story lines, and jaundiced weather. “Seat #37” is an exceptionally rare book for me because it is the most flawed, and thus a traveling museum of woeful double chins, gimpy phrases, forced adjectives, excess rants, and corrosive promises masquerading as true love. But for editors who had read “Seat #37”…well, it is as if I took a mighty oak tree in the fullness of summer and painted a letter on each leaf, and then when they dropped in the fall I gathered them up and taped them onto large sheets of paper (seventy leaves to the line and twenty lines to the page, which equals 1,400 leaves). The serendipitous text, with words more unknown than Esperanto, created nothing but chaos. Though this book was rejected by all, I still love it. I wake up at night from a dream and realize I’ve been walking the alleys of the sentences in my sleep.

Over at seat #117 is a manuscript that, like Chernobyl, is encased forever inside my own dome. It is the story of a situational mute touring the Amazon rainforest in an effort to communicate nonverbally with indigenous people — something along the lines of how termites communicate as described by E. O. Wilson in his great book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis and in Karl von Frisch’s book that decodes the language of dancing bees. It would be best to pulp this manuscript and instead affix a book binding onto a small mirror so that the reader could open the cover and stare into a ready-made dictionary of gestural language. Or not. This book is difficult to pin down.

“Seat #57” was written after motion detectors were installed, and so I could never sit at that seat overnight and ponder its endless manifestations. It is a flawed manuscript fitted out with a broken rudder like the wounded German battleship Bismarck in the Atlantic, which could only steer in circles like a carnival marksmanship game while the British Navy pounded it into submission and sent it to Davy Jones’s Locker. This book is about quantum physics and the micro-implanted levers of a charade government scheming within the president’s mind. “Seat #57” was rejected, and because it was the manuscript I submitted to Farrar right before Dead End in Norvelt, the words are still freshly painted on the inside of my skull. It is odd to “abandon ship” on a manuscript and to sit in a lifeboat and stare at the listing hulk as it drifts in and out of sight but never goes away. It never sinks.

I imagine all my rejected books, petting them as I page through and nurture them. They are my abandoned litter of kittens—runts to some but tigers to me, prowling under my skin, their very own Eden where my mind is their lair and my heart is the prey that nurtures them each day. Whenever I sit at seat #57 (where, incidentally, I am writing this), I quietly promise, “I will never submit you again. Inside of me you will always be pure.”

The above ordinary slice of life is what is within the mind of this writer. What is beautiful to me is the fabulous Lovecraft of impossible landscapes where, within each person, the extraordinary resides. The rare-book-room of the mind is a tonic compared to the outside world, which is unrelentingly predictable. Each day I read three newspapers. I can count on the consistency of hate, prejudice, anger, death, cheating, ignorance, crime — all cancers spawned by the foul reign of pulp social behavior. What people think of my books is not my concern. What is beautiful to me is beautiful to me. The undiscovered tombs of Egypt prefer to remain undiscovered. They know that, once opened, their murals will slowly fade to white like skulls bleached out by the sun.

Don’t open the tomb. Close your eyes and imagine it. Nothing could be more beautiful than what you can’t share. Is that weird?

From the March/April 2013 special “Different Drummers” issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

The post Two Writers Look at Weird appeared first on The Horn Book.

Horn Book Editors: What’s the most dangerous creature you’ve ever encountered?

Nicola Davies: My first job as a TV presenter was to swim with a captive killer whale. The whale’s trainer had never swum with her, and seemed a bit nervous, but it was my first job and I didn’t want to seem like a wuss. Plus I had a good feeling about this whale, so I just dived in. She seemed really pleased to have company and she carried me on her back round and round her pool. Then I had to swim to the side of the pool and talk to the camera. Whilst I was doing that, she swam toward me with her mouth open and all those enormous teeth showing and closed her jaws on my arm.

I can’t tell you why, but I wasn’t even a tiny bit scared, and not at all surprised that she wasn’t biting me, just very gently grasping my arm and pulling me back into the water to play with me some more. But I think the cameraman and the producer almost had heart attacks.

I am the world’s biggest wimp and try to keep myself out of any sort of dangerous situation. But I also love seeing animals in the wild, so sometimes by mistake I’ve come close to animals that are dangerous. I was in Kenya a long time ago, travelling in the Nakuru Game reserve in a Honda Civic because I couldn’t afford to hire a 4×4, and almost drove into a buffalo in my teeny little car. Buffalo are responsible for more deaths in Africa than any other animal — they are huge, with enormous horns and absolutely foul tempers. I reversed faster than a racing driver at the start of the Monaco Grand Prix.

Four years ago I was working in the Sea of Cortez on a small research boat with my old friend whale expert Prof. Hal Whitehead. We were studying sperm whales but when it got too rough we anchored off a small island where there was a colony of sea lions. Although the water was pretty chilly I wanted to swim with the sea lions, so I got in the water. I stayed in for about twenty minutes until I got blue and the sea lions had shown they weren’t interested in swimming with the funny creature with the arms and legs. As I got out Hal — my “friend” — announced that all the time I’d been swimming there had been a large bull shark sitting under the boat watching me. Bull sharks are one of the species of sharks known to attack human beings. It was the last time I went swimming off that island.

Baleen whales are gentle giants, but being giants they can hurt you without meaning to if you aren’t pretty careful around them. I was working on a research boat in the Indian Ocean studying blue whales and sperm whales. We came upon a group of blue whales, which was very unusual as they are pretty solitary most of the time. I was standing on the prow, camera at the ready to take fluke shots of their tails as they dove. A blue whale’s tail was right in front of me when the helmsman switched from sail power to engine power. The noise startled the whale and instead of its tail slipping gently under the water it slapped it down with a giant bang. I felt the tail go past my nose and it missed the front of the boat by centimeters. Had it hit us it would have snapped the boat like a twig and we would have gone down in seconds, hundreds of miles from land. In that moment I really understood that blue whales are the biggest animals on the planet.

The post Nicola Davies on Deadly! The Truth About the Most Dangerous Creatures on Earth appeared first on The Horn Book.

Deadly!:

The post Review of Deadly!: The Truth About the Most 
Dangerous Creatures on Earth appeared first on The Horn Book.