Sometimes what makes a love story great is simple and classic, and the plot is exactly what you’d expect. That’s the case in The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight, Jennifer E. Smith’s novel about falling in love with a stranger. On her way to London for her dad’s wedding, Hadley meets Oliver, who’s seated next to her on the plane. By the time they touch down at Heathrow, she’s fallen for him, and in possibly the most romantic moment in the least romantic setting ever, they share a passionate kiss at customs. Then Hadley loses Oliver in the crowd, and, without a phone number or e-mail address, she has no way to contact him: “After all those hours, all those moments between them, how could that just be it?” Of course, it isn’t: over the next few hours, at a wedding and a funeral (both emotionally charged), Hadley and Oliver continue to run into each other. Each time, they don’t know if they will see each other again, so their meetings are honest, raw, and immediate — making the happy ending feel both certain and deserved.

But a love story isn’t always so serious. The first time Chelsea meets Dan in Leila Sales’s Past Perfect, she’s a prisoner tied to a chair. Every year, Chelsea works as a colonial interpreter, and every year she and her fellow colonial interpreters wage war against the Civil War re-enactors across the street. As part of the War, the Civil Warriors have kidnapped Chelsea, and Dan has been assigned to guard her. Their first conversation consists of the kind of awesomely sarcastic banter you wish you were capable of in high school. Romance is inevitable once they’ve discussed, for example, soaking uniforms in urine. (Chelsea, in disbelief: “There is a garment which you wear on your body, after first bathing it in bodily fluids.” Dan: “Just the buttons! To give them an authentic patina.” Chelsea: “What the hell is an ‘authentic patina’? Is that a thing?”) Their forbidden, secret romance continues in similarly hilarious fashion, serving as a light counterpart to the novel’s more contemplative reflections on the nature of history and heartbreak.

A discussion of YA love stories wouldn’t be complete without one by Sarah Dessen; her fans know she can deliver a realistic and affecting love story. And though the romance isn’t the central theme in What Happened to Goodbye, it’s an appealing accompaniment. After her parents’ divorce, Mclean chooses to travel around the country with her dad, a consultant in the restaurant business, and reinvents herself each time — Lizbet, the theater geek; Beth, the student-council secretary; Eliza, the cheerleader. But when at the latest stop she meets Dave, the boy next door, she tells him her real name, which leads to everyone in town calling her by it. And from then on, there’s no hiding who she really is. What it takes for Mclean to be herself is having someone in her life who wants her to stay.

It’s important to point out that though love stories with gay couples aren’t exactly crowding the shelves, there are stellar examples out there. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe is the story of Ari Mendoza’s confused search for meaning set alongside (and intertwined with) his special friendship with Dante Quintana. The two lonely Mexican American teenagers meet one summer and become inseparable almost immediately; their bond is cemented when Ari saves Dante’s life. Dante eventually comes out as gay — and attracted to Ari — but the reader has already begun to see that these two boys love each other as more than friends. We’re somewhat privy to the truths, “secrets of the universe, the secrets of my own body, of my own heart,” that Ari is searching for, and this omniscience heightens our joy when he finally admits to loving Dante back. Theirs is the most coveted kind of love — respectful, loyal, reciprocal, organic — and Benjamin Alire Sáenz develops their relationship with deft subtlety.

Ask the Passengers is as much about the purpose of love and compassion as it is about a relationship. Astrid Jones mentally sends the love inside her to those she has difficulty loving (like her insensitive mother) and also to strangers, specifically passengers on airplanes flying overhead (whose love lives we’re sporadically given snippets of). Even when it’s unreciprocated, Astrid’s ability to love others is remarkable, but she’s tortured by sexual confusion and a lack of love for herself. As with Ari and Dante, readers rejoice when she’s finally able to love her girlfriend Dee openly and receive love in return (“We are a happy couple who are madly in love, and we are kissing the way people kiss on their wedding day. With joy and relief and love…Without shame”). 
A. S. King skillfully and without preaching teaches the reader about love’s true nature: its healing and empowering properties, and the many shapes it can take.

June and Wes’s romance in Pete Hautman’s The Big Crunch starts when they bump into each other, literally: it’s such a hard hit that June gets a black eye. Not an auspicious start, to be sure, but these two have a tough time denying they have a connection. June’s family moves a lot, so when her parents announce they’re leaving Minnesota, she cuts Wes loose and that’s the end — or is it? The straightforward writing style and the fact that these two people are not particularly swoony or romantic builds to an ending that simultaneously recognizes the power of first love and the possibility that it might not last. As June says to Wes, “You will always be the first boy I ever loved…Even if someday we hate each other, I will always love you.”

Like many contemporary YA love stories, The Big Crunch is fairly chaste, but other books are bolder. They address sex as an expression of love, without apology or didacticism. In these stories, sex is often a momentous decision, as it’s usually the first time for one or both of the protagonists, and they discuss it and prepare for it in a mature (but still authentically awkward) way. A good example is My Life Next Door by Huntley Fitzpatrick, in which Samantha falls for Jase, the completely charming, handsome boy next door, and they decide to be each other’s first time. And it’s uncomfortable, sweet, and most of all, real. The novel doesn’t describe the experience in cringe-inducing detail, but neither does it discreetly look away after just a few sentences. Instead, it acknowledges the wonder, tenderness, and importance of the moment. As Samantha thinks when she and Jase first lie down naked together: “When people talk about sex, it sounds so technical…or scarily out of control. Nothing like this sense of rightness, of being made to fit together.” And then: “I say, the girl who has always guarded her heart — I say, for the first time, ‘I love you. It’s okay.’”

An unfortunate part of life is that not all great love stories are blissful or uplifting. Luckily, there are books that reflect that reality — and are more romantic for it. One example is Jandy Nelson’s perceptive, smart The Sky Is Everywhere, a tremendously poignant novel about love triumphing over loss. Lennie’s older sister, whom she idolized, has just died, and Lennie feels incapable of ever feeling joy again. Enter Joe Fontaine, a new boy in school who will “only ever know this new sisterless me.” Joe’s optimistic outlook is infectious (and his crazy good looks don’t hurt, either), and Lennie feels swept away by him, unencumbered by grief. But Lennie’s also drawn to her sister’s boyfriend, Toby, who shares Lennie’s grief. The intensity of this love triangle is accentuated, set as it is against a backdrop of deep, inexplicable loss.

Known for his excellent love stories from a guy’s perspective (An Abundance of Katherines, Looking for Alaska), John Green switches sexes to spectacular effect in The Fault in Our Stars, a consummate tragic love story told from the point of view of Hazel. Hazel and Augustus have the ideal romance — except for the single sad element of circumstance and the unfairness of the universe. They both have cancer, and they’re both going to die sooner rather than later, but that’s not what makes their love so poignant. Their lives may be ending, but their connection is life-affirming. They are artfully vivid characters: smart, sarcastic, eccentric, and self-assured enough that they’re able to love maturely and completely. This may be more the case with these two than other teens due to their terminal illnesses, but they don’t love each other as patients or fellow cancer warriors. Instead, Augustus separates his love for Hazel from his understanding that he’ll soon die. “I’m in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things…I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable…and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.” Augustus’s astuteness doesn’t undercut his feelings. It just makes us cry harder.

Hazel and Augustus’s romance is doomed because of circumstance; in Stay with Me, Céce and Mack’s love is doomed due entirely to human fault — but it’s equally devastating. Céce, a gifted student from a loving family, and Mack, a high school dropout with an abusive father, fall fast for each other. They enjoy a mere forty days together before volatile Mack snaps and makes a mistake that changes his fate, and their relationship’s, irrevocably. Alternating narration allows the reader to see both perspectives on their love, their painful separation, and the blowback from the incident. Mack is the rare protagonist who is almost as endearing for his imperfections as he is for his positive traits. To illustrate this, author Paul Griffin incorporates troubled, sensitive Mack’s talent for rehabilitating abused pit bulls: the wounded creatures can be dangerous when provoked, but when shown kindness and love, their capacity to return love is staggering. Mack’s love for Céce proves the goodness of his soul and the immateriality of his actions on it; that he is so flawed makes Céce’s love for him all the more affecting and their separation all the more heartbreaking.

When discussing tragic love stories, there’s none more classic than Shakespeare’s. The Romeo and Juliet–esque tale has been told many, many times before, but Jenny Downham delivers a superb version of star-crossed lovers from warring families in You Against Me. Mikey’s sister is accusing Ellie’s brother of rape, and even after Ellie discovers Mikey’s true identity as the brother of the girl tearing her family apart, they begin an intense clandestine relationship. Their feelings mount to an intoxicating point, made even more so by the complexity of their situation. But the draw here isn’t the prohibited romance alone: Downham’s accomplishment is that she makes the reader step back from the conflict and invest instead in Mikey and Ellie’s united experience in dealing with its effects; despite their opposing familial loyalties she positions them as comrades, so their forbidden love never feels salacious.

An even darker breed of sad love story is the kind in which love just isn’t enough. Recovery Road is a story of first love, but it’s more a story about healing, growing, and loving oneself. Maddie and Stewart meet in the fragile environment of rehab, and their relationship starts out rapidly and lustfully, turning obsessive and dependent. Author Blake Nelson has their flame cool down naturally and shifts the focus of his novel to Maddie’s burgeoning self-reliance and emotional wisdom. Near book’s end, they have a heartbreaking run-in after Stewart has fallen back into addiction, and Maddie realizes that there’s nothing she can do to save him. Nelson uses his characters’ relationship to exemplify that love alone is never enough to save a person from himself, but also reminds us of love’s influence on who we become, even after moving on: “You don’t see those moments coming, you don’t know it when they’re happening, but later…you realize how important they were. You understand who really changed you, who made you what you are.”

Possibly the most important thing to remember about young love is that it doesn’t always last. There are great romances, but there are also great breakups, and Why We Broke Up is in the latter category. Min recounts her whirlwind relationship with Ed by rehashing tiny moments of their love via a box of memorabilia — a protractor, an empty book of matches, a condom wrapper — that she’s returning to him on his doorstep (with a denunciative “thunk”). Min’s perspective on exactly what went wrong is brilliant: we immediately, but increasingly with every chapter, understand why they broke up, and also why the relationship developed and unfolded the way it did. Most important to the success of a breakup story is not only our understanding of the disintegration but also of the love (however flawed) that came first. And of course, in author Daniel Handler’s case, that we’re convinced of the rightness of Min and Ed’s breakup helps, too.

Though these books are very different, they all take place in the world as we know it with characters that could be any of us. As in the real world, love can take on many shapes. A good romance can be ordinary or extraordinary, uplifting or heartbreaking, sexy or innocent, comfortably formulaic or unusual. But it should always be relatable: readers need to recognize their own romances (or tragedies) and find their experiences validated. In presenting these familiar situations, a good love story manages to broach unfamiliar territory and allows readers to view love anew.

Good YA Love Stories

What Happened to Goodbye (Viking, 2011) by Sarah Dessen

You Against Me (Fickling/Random, 2011) by Jenny Downham

My Life Next Door (Dial, 2012) by Huntley Fitzpatrick

The Fault in Our Stars (Dutton, 2012) by John Green

Stay with Me (Dial, 2011) by Paul Griffin

Why We Broke Up (Little, Brown, 2011) by Daniel Handler, illustrated by Maira Kalman

The Big Crunch (Scholastic, 2011) by Pete Hautman

Ask the Passengers (Little, Brown, 2012) by A. S. King

Recovery Road (Scholastic, 2011) by Blake Nelson

The Sky Is Everywhere (Dial, 2010) by Jandy Nelson

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (Simon, 2012) by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Past Perfect (Simon Pulse, 2011) by Leila Sales

The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight (Poppy/Little, Brown, 2012) by Jennifer E. Smith

From the May/June 2013 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

The post What Makes a Good YA Love Story? appeared first on The Horn Book.

Emily Post was the guardian of etiquette for decades, and now her descendents Peggy Post (Emily’s great-granddaughter-in-law) and Cindy P. Senning (Peggy’s sister-in-law) cover the genteel beat, making their book Emily’s Everyday Manners a tempting choice for teachers of manners. It is filled with practical advice about everyday situations that children encounter, such as playing on a playground, attending a birthday party, or riding the school bus. The book’s characters demonstrate good manners through sample phrases they might use in specific situations. Unfortunately the whole thing backfires because the words coming out of the kids’ mouths are so very unchildlike. For instance, while washing the dishes little Emily says to little Ethan, “Thanks! My mom so appreciates the help.” At best, these kids come across like Eddie Haskell on Leave It to Beaver; at worst, their adult-sounding comments would probably elicit real-life teasing from other children.

One old favorite to ease grownups and kids alike into the subject of manners is Sesyle Joslin’s classic What Do You Say, Dear?: A Book of Manners for All Occasions. The book, which adults may remember from their own childhoods, features delightfully imaginative and childlike scenarios such as this: “You are walking backwards, because sometimes you like to, and you bump into a crocodile. What do you say, dear?” A page turn reveals the answer: “Excuse me.” The accompanying illustrations by Maurice Sendak are very funny, with many of his characteristic touches (e.g., child characters wearing outsize dress-up clothes, a dog craning to lick a wedding cake). Not surprisingly, however, the book is of its time; the little girl plays at being a princess needing rescue, a bride, and other very traditional gender roles that may set off sexism alarm bells. Likewise, the firearm will probably rule it out for use in school, but the scenario makes its point perfectly: “You are a cowboy riding around the range. Suddenly Bad-Nose Bill comes up behind you with a gun. He says, ‘Would you like me to shoot a hole in your head?’ What do you say, dear? ‘No, thank you.’”

What Do You Say, Dear? works so beautifully as a manners book because it’s genuinely funny to both adults and children. It’s also participatory — the child is expected to fill in the answer before turning the page. The book doesn’t lecture children or put unrealistic-sounding words in their mouths. Rather, it gives kids practice with good-manners words so that they may, if backing into a crocodile (or a grandma) in the grocery store, spontaneously come up with the just right thing to say.

Another book an older generation might remember fondly is Munro Leaf’s Manners Can Be Fun. It begins by making the point that “good manners is really just getting along well with other people.” Updated several times since 1936 when originally published, it relies heavily on name-calling, describing children such as “BRAGGER” (“who tells you all the time how great he is”) and “SHOW-OFF” (“who is miserable if everybody isn’t paying attention to her”). The tone is very much that of an adult instructing a child—you can practically see the finger-wagging. The stick-figure illustrations are comical, but overall the book lacks the grace both in writing and illustration of Leaf’s classic Story of Ferdinand.

An entertaining book that melds old-fashioned sensibility with a modern-day twist is Diane Goode’s Mind Your Manners! The text comes from an 1802 spelling book designed to instruct children on etiquette. Still-useful tips include, “Throw not any thing under the table,” “Drink not, nor speak with any thing in thy mouth,” and “Eat not too fast, or with greedy behavior.” Rich watercolor and ink illustrations show the nineteenth-century Abbott family sitting at a long table — and breaking each of the book’s etiquette rules in turn. Goode skillfully conveys humor with a swoop of a line and a squiggle of black ink; readers who carefully pore over the pictures will be rewarded with lots of funny details. Interplay between the text’s heavy-handedness and the illustrations’ humor provides a great opportunity for discussing, with a light touch, current expectations for good manners.

Some books are fine stories on their own that also happen to cover manners. One is Cari Best’s Are You Going to Be Good?, about a little boy who tries his very hardest to be polite at his great-grandmother’s 100th birthday party. Young Robert rejoices in attending this most special occasion, looking very proud in his suit and tie, with newly polished shoes. He’s also all prepped with his manners: “In the car, they practice ‘Please.’ They practice ‘Thank you,’ and ‘Excuse me,’ too.” G. Brian Karas’s pictures hilariously convey both Robert’s ebullience (which would seem to present a challenge to all those expectations of behavior) and his sudden shyness at being faced with a roomful of tall, dressed-up adults. This isn’t a book about a perfect child but one who is trying hard, and in the end he and Great-Gran Sadie get into some welcome mischief. This book could be a wonderful way to prepare children for an important event, for it models not just child behavior but also compassionate, wise adult behavior (sometimes we need a little reminding, too).

Another picture book that is strong in its own right and happens to have some good pointers about manners is Thank You, Meiling, by Linda Talley. Little duck Meiling is behaving much in the way a spoiled human child would. Her mother reprimands her and sends her to run errands with a little boy: “You shall go with him. If you pay attention, you may learn something about courtesy. Remember, stop and think of others.” The duck takes her mission seriously, noticing each polite phrase or action as she and the boy gather items for the Moon Festival. The story is engaging, the Moon Festival traditions enticing, and the manners are clearly portrayed as being more than mere custom but rather a way of taking care of others.

Author Judy Sierra shows a particular affinity for picture books about manners. Her most recent, Suppose You Meet a Dinosaur: A First Book of Manners, depicts a little girl who goes to the grocery store and encounters a dinosaur. The pair copes with a number of etiquette questions, all posed in rhyme, as when the dinosaur wants to turn down an offer of butter brickle: “She does not want it, even slightly. / How does she let you know politely?” The question-and-answer format recalls What Do You Say, Dear? but with an updated look and tone. Tim Bowers’s illustrations portray the dinosaur with a tiny pink purse and glasses, watched by wary-looking humans as she shops. The book combines humor with instruction, as does Sierra’s Mind Your Manners, B.B. Wolf, in which a dapper-looking wolf heads off to a party at the library while trying to remember his instructions: “Sip your tea and never slurp, say ‘Excuse Me’ if you burp. / Smile and have a lot of fun, but don’t go biting anyone!” Fairy-tale characters populate J. Otto Seibold’s digital illustrations, and kids will enjoy finding the ones they know while they follow B.B. Wolf’s attempts at staying polite.

Since the reason for having good manners is to get along well with others, and each of Mo Willems’s books gets down to the fundamentals of the way people (and elephants, piggies, pigeons, ducklings, and others) relate to one another, it’s not surprising that he, too, has written some manners books. Time to Say “Please”! offers advice to a little girl who is eyeing a cookie jar so longingly that her eyes turn into cookies. The words of wisdom are presented by cute little mice, industriously using balloons, signs, parachutes, and other things to show the information: “Don’t just grab it! Go ask a big person and PLEASE say ‘PLEASE’!” The mice continue to list other reasons to say please, and some other useful phrases, too, all delivered with humor and practicality: “You may not get what you want. But it’s hard to say ‘no’ to ‘please.’”

Willems’s newest Pigeon book, The Duckling Gets a Cookie!? also features manners and cookies. Pigeon cannot believe that adorable little Duckling has somehow gotten hold of a cookie simply by asking for it. After Pigeon reels off the many things he himself requires, a tear drops from his eye: “But do I get what I ask for?” A double-page-spread Pigeon-tantrum ensues: “NOOOOOOOOOOO!” He is finally shamed into politeness by the duckling’s kind offer of the cookie. An adult looking for the perfect book to teach a rude child manners may prefer a protagonist without so much attitude, but children will get the point through Pigeon’s own bad behavior.

For those still on their way to Willems there are even some board books intended to teach manners to the very youngest. Manners Time, by Elizabeth Verdick, gives kids not just the words to say but the accompanying physical cues. In one example a little girl offers salad to her friend, and the text reads, “Here’s a nice way to say no: ‘No, thank you.’ (A smile helps, too.)” Changes in typeface help identify the message, with the spoken phrase printed in a different color. The illustrations by Marieka Heinlen show a diverse group of kids with a range of expressions that make meaning clear while not stooping to the cartoony or exaggerated. This book could be used with toddlers as well as with older kids who need some help with social cues, and it also includes some thoughtful tips for parents and caregivers.

Hello Genius, a new series of board books, offers bold graphic illustrations and one manners word or phrase at a time. Titles include Mouse Says “Sorry,” Hippo Says “Excuse Me,” and Bear Says “Thank You.” In Penguin Says “Please,” Penguin starts out being bratty, demanding things without saying the magic word. By the end he learns how to ask politely and is rewarded with the things he requests. It’s a simple lesson that’s useful to learn as early as possible.

There are several contemporary examples of books whose attempts to teach manners are heavy-handed and unwelcome (Whoopi’s Big Book of Manners, for instance, or the new Terrible, Awful, Horrible Manners!). The books that succeed in their mission are the ones that help children learn some of the nuances of polite behavior and are still great stories — entertaining, engaging, and authentic-sounding. One of the best manners books in recent years, combining all the elements of successful etiquette-teaching, is Jane Yolen’s hugely popular How Do Dinosaurs Say Good Night? The volume combines Mark Teague’s very funny illustrations showing human parents and their dinosaur children with Yolen’s impeccable rhymes. Children get enough distance from the moral that they can be caught by surprise when they recognize their own naughty actions; as a little girl in my story time once exclaimed, “Hey! Sometimes I do that!” They get the message; and because it is delivered with sly wit that is funny to both the child and the adult reader, it is a treat for all. And for that, we should all say, “Thank you!”

Good Manners Books

Are You Going to Be Good? (Farrar, 2005) by Cari Best; illus. by G. Brian Karas
Bear Says “Thank You” (Picture Window, 2012) by Michael Dahl; illus. by Oriol Vidal
Hippo Says “Excuse Me” (Picture Window, 2012) by Michael Dahl; illus. by Oriol Vidal
Mouse Says “Sorry” (Picture Window, 2012) by Michael Dahl; illus. by Oriol Vidal
Penguin Says “Please” (Picture Window, 2012) by Michael Dahl; illus. by Oriol Vidal
Mind Your Manners! (Farrar, 2005) by Diane Goode
What Do You Say, Dear?: A Book of Manners for All Occasions (Addison-Wesley, 1958) by Sesyle Joslin; illus. by Maurice Sendak
Manners Can Be Fun (Lippincott, 1936; Universe, 2004) by Munro Leaf
Emily’s Everyday Manners (Collins/HarperCollins, 2006) by Peggy Post and Cindy Post Senning; illus. by Steve Björkman
Mind Your Manners, B.B. Wolf (Knopf, 2007) by Judy Sierra; illus. by J. Otto Seibold
Suppose You Meet a Dinosaur: A First Book of Manners (Knopf, 2012) by Judy Sierra; illus. by Tim Bowers
Thank You, Meiling (MarshMedia, 1999) by Linda Talley; illus. by Itoko Maeno
Manners Time (Free Spirit, 2009) by Elizabeth Verdick; illus. by Marieka Heinlen
The Duckling Gets a Cookie!? (Hyperion, 2012) by Mo Willems
Time to Say “Please”! (Hyperion, 2005) by Mo Willems
How Do Dinosaurs Say Good Night? (Blue Sky/Scholastic, 2000) by Jane Yolen; illus. by Mark Teague

From the September/October 2012 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

The post What Makes a Good Manners Book? appeared first on The Horn Book.

In the same way that talking about fantasy books without mentioning a certain boy wizard would be absurd (see Roger Sutton’s “What Hath Harry Wrought?”), any discussion of YA dystopia must acknowledge the impact of the taut, intricately plotted, and haunting Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. While YA dystopias existed before it (and many of these were spawned by Lois Lowry’s The Giver, for younger readers), there is no discounting the bump in numbers and popularity since The Hunger Games was published, and the movie has only served to draw more attention. Thus, it’s helpful to know what makes for a good YA dystopian novel, and to have some titles in mind when you get the inevitable groan from teens after they finish Mockingjay and want more to read.

A note on definition: while shambling, brain-eating zombies; nuclear holocausts; electromagnetic space pulses that knock out most of the population; or alien invasions all make for compelling reading, they do not necessarily fall into the category of dystopia. Now, if the survivors of those various tragedies form a messed-up society where freedoms are curtailed in order to protect its citizens from imagined future terrible events, then we’re talking dystopia.

There are four major elements that appear consistently in good YA dystopian novels. Certainly a book need not have all of them, but the best do: a setting so vividly and clearly described that it becomes almost a character in itself; individuals or forces in charge who have a legitimate reason for being as they are; protagonists who are shaped by their environment and situations; and a conclusion that reflects the almost always dire circumstances.

In Across the Universe by Beth Revis, the setting is an interstellar spaceship, Godspeed, which is at once wondrous and claustrophobic to Amy, who was awoken from a cryogenic chamber and must now navigate the physical and social anomalies of this self-contained world. The descriptions are riveting, and the layers of lies that are built around the ship (and keep the generations who live and die within its walls docile) make the ship itself as integral an element as protagonist Amy.

In Fever Crumb, Philip Reeve uses gripping, slightly mysterious, complex language to describe his setting. The city of London and its scrambling, scrappy residents, the strange and slowly disintegrating giant head in which the Engineers live, and the very earliest rumblings (this novel is set centuries before Reeve’s Mortal Engines quartet) of the mechanics that will allow for the moving cities are stunning. The humor built into the descriptions is an elegant contrast to Fever’s hyper-rational approach to life, and the setting acts as an impressive foil against which she must struggle to remain the same rather than be shaped by the larger, much more wild and unpredictable but simultaneously much richer world.

A clever setting-as-character example is the world of Incarceron by Catherine Fisher. The prison experiment called Incarceron, a now self-aware and tyrannical entity, shapes the dystopia as much as the people who exist there. Fisher’s protagonists are intriguing and well developed, but even they are less memorable than the brilliantly conceived Incarceron that—having escaped the control of its original creators—sees, influences, punishes, and restricts according to its own standards.

A bad guy with no depth, vulnerability, history, or context functions as a foil for the protagonist but adds little else to the story. Depth of character makes the struggle between good and evil (against an individual or society) far more vivid. In the Hunger Games trilogy, Snow is one of many worthy villains; interestingly, he is perhaps the more blatantly malign but also slightly more sympathetic villain (in comparison to Coin) to emerge from the series. It is clear that he is following in a line of leaders who made similar choices, and it is equally clear that he is an exaggerated representation of the society in which he came to power. The lack of a specific “bad guy” but rather an example of a well-intentioned society gone horribly awry is presented in Ally Condie’s Matched, where the earnest and well-meaning Society has evolved into an entity that has whittled down the world into manageable, easily digestible amounts: this society allows exactly one hundred songs (and pictures, poems, etc.) and arranges carefully planned love matches that take any guesswork out of romance. It is all safe and cozy and may not immediately appear dystopian—until the reality of not being able to shape anything in your own life truly sinks in.

In Ashes, Ashes by Jo Treggiari, Lucy is prepared to acknowledge that ninety-nine percent of the population is gone and that her choices are few. What she isn’t ready to accept, and what makes this novel so complex, is that she is apparently the only immune person left on Earth, and she could best help the planet’s survival by giving her blood—all her blood—for medical use. The pace is superb, and the vivid descriptions of the new attempts at society are well crafted, but it is the choices the amoral but brilliant scientists make that push Lucy to define herself as martyr or survivor. The fact that the key scientist still feels like the kindest person Lucy has recently encountered complicates things all the more, as it lays bare how intensely vulnerable and alone she is in this ravaged world.

It is convenient to the story to have a rebel grandparent or elder who remembers how it used to be “before” and can account for how his or her offspring is different than the average citizen, but for the most part good dystopian novels don’t just take contemporary characters from realistic fiction and dump them into dystopic settings. The characters who clearly cannot see beyond the ways in which they have been raised force readers to consider not only how they might respond in that society, but also to thoughtfully assess elements of adolescence that carry across setting (snark, pushing at boundaries, curiosity about and interest in the newest technology, hormonal adjustments). Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series, set in a dystopian environment where resources are plentiful but the use of them is highly suspect, offers characters shaped by having been raised in this world of enforced conformity. While some resist and others embrace it, Westerfeld’s protagonists are carefully operating within the boundaries of his creepy, image-obsessed world.

Two prime examples from opposite ends of the dystopian civilization spectrum are M. T. Anderson’s Feed and the Chaos Walking trilogy by Patrick Ness. Both address the effects of being permanently tapped into constantly flowing information (in Ness’s world, it is more metaphorical as a virus that causes thoughts to be heard; in Anderson’s capitalist nightmare everything is literally messaged directly into your brain), and both feature protagonists who reflect their environments, even as they catch occasional glimpses of how life could be otherwise. The protagonists are so richly developed, so compelling, and so hopelessly ensnared that they evoke sympathy even as they inevitably exasperate the reader.

Finally, Divergent by Veronica Roth is a movie-ready example of a novel that includes tantalizing snippets of a dystopic society that has led to citizens deriving their identity from belonging to one of five personality-based factions. While much of the focus is actually on Beatrice’s response to not slotting perfectly into one of those factions and her training once she chooses, there is no doubt that she will indeed select from the limited options she is presented, unable to envision what a different path would resemble.

In terms of how a novel wraps up, hopeful is good, and measured optimism works beautifully, but often you just can’t escape unscathed. In some cases, authors are daring enough (or heartless enough, depending on your tolerance for sad endings) to let their protagonists face seemingly insurmountable obstacles and find that they are, indeed, just that. The shocking conclusion of Ashes by Ilsa J. Bick is one of the coolest new examples of this: while the novel is closer to post-apocalyptic than pure dystopia, there is certainly a dystopic community in which Alex finds herself—a settlement that doesn’t try to exist as the world had been before but is shaped by an entirely new set of morals and standards. This paradigm shift, should the members survive their own chilling ethical choices, will surely result in a quintessential dystopic world.

The Eleventh Plague by Jeff Hirsch is also set as an end-of-the-world survival novel, but the strictly controlled elements of the community that has rebuilt itself to resemble how life used to be (complete with creepy baseball games that feel so…eerily incorrect in their very normalcy) seem like an obvious example of dystopia masking as utopia. Life there is better than what exists outside of Settler’s Landing, but the protagonist is forced to conclude that there is no such thing as a true haven anymore.

Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother probably represents the purest example on the list—modern technology meets classic dystopic elements—even while the book itself is part instructional guide, part love story, and part rant at the increasingly dictatorial powers that be that consider safety at any cost a reasonable exchange. Small personal victories for the protagonist and his friends are present, but the power of Big Brother is hardly tempered by their work, and the folks who tangled with the government are all permanently scarred by the encounter.

A bonus element from the above titles is the lingering point of consideration with which readers are left—wondering how and where they would fit (disturbing the universe, representing one of the masses, or somewhere in between), and perhaps also contemplating how near or far their own social structure is from what they just read. All the titles above lend themselves to such musings, and the protagonists within are also likely to give some thought to these issues—it is often how they move from quiet discontent to activism. Of course, these questions are moot when you aren’t sure if you are going to survive at all, and there are several dystopian novels that feature characters who (though the reader knows better) would scoff at the notion of philosophical debate, given that they are literally running, fighting, or competing to stay alive. Well-written dystopias, the most memorable ones, offer both: space for asking big-scale life questions along with plenty of adventure and danger to keep things exciting as one cogitates.

Good YA Dystopias

• Feed (Candlewick, 2002) by M. T. Anderson
• Ashes (Egmont, 2011) by Ilsa J. Bick
• Hunger Games trilogy: The Hunger Games (Scholastic, 2008), Catching Fire (2009), Mockingjay (2010) by Suzanne Collins
• Matched (Dutton, 2010) by Ally Condie (sequel Crossed, 2011)
• Little Brother (Tor, 2008) by Cory Doctorow
• Incarceron (Dial, 2010) by Catherine Fisher (sequel Sapphique, 2010)
• The Eleventh Plague (Scholastic, 2011) by Jeff Hirsch
• Chaos Walking trilogy: The Knife of Never Letting Go (Candlewick, 2008), The Ask and the Answer (2009), Monsters of Men (2010) by Patrick Ness
• Fever Crumb (Scholastic, 2010) by Philip Reeve (sequel A Web of Air, 2011)
• Across the Universe (Razorbill/Penguin, 2011) by Beth Revis (sequel A Million Suns, 2012)
• Divergent (Tegen/HarperCollins, 2011) by Veronica Roth (sequel Insurgent, May 2012)
• Ashes, Ashes (Scholastic, 2011) by Jo Treggiari
• The Uglies series: Uglies (Simon Pulse, 2005), Pretties (2005), Specials (2006), Extras (2007) by Scott Westerfeld

The post What Makes a Good YA Dystopian Novel? appeared first on The Horn Book.

Is interactive—but not too interactive

What distinguishes a picture book app from a traditional picture book or an e-book is the integration of interactive elements. But these should be used wisely, as too much interactivity can overwhelm or distract from the narrative. A busy adaptation of a well-known book, such as Pop-Out! The Tale of Peter Rabbit or Sandra Boynton’s The Going to Bed Book, isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as most users will already have a sense of the story. But the narrative thread of the app-only (and thus initially unfamiliar) tale A Present for Milo may snag on the plethora of opportunities for animations. It may take a child several times through to really follow the trajectory of story.

A straightforward translation, Donald Crews’s Freight Train (see pages 47 to 50) contains relatively few interactive features, mostly sound effects and opportunities to explore the cargo. The train’s journey remains the focus; users move through the book without much delay—or opportunity — for play.

The best approach may be a balanced one, such as Bean Creative’s in When I Grow Up by Al Yankovic and Wes Hargis. Narrator Billy enthusiastically discusses his many improbable career options (e.g., “snail trainer”), with brief interactive moments throughout. More extensive games based on his potential occupations (“EXtreme Snail Race”) may be played as they’re introduced in the story, but can also be accessed from the main menu.

Creates meaningful counterpoint between all parts of the app

Every aspect of an app—text, images, narration, music and sound effects, and interactive enhancements—should be accessible and enjoyable, not distracting. The features should also be interdependent, creating an experience greater than the sum of an app’s parts. In Nosy Crow’s Cinderella: A 3-D Fairy Tale, speech bubbles (separate from the “official” text) pop up when a character is tapped to reveal more information about his or her personality and behavior. Nosy Crow uses interactive elements as a narrative tool as crucial as text or illustration; the deepest understanding and appreciation of the story comes from interplay among all the parts.

In The Monster at the End of This Book, Grover’s narration of the text is enhanced by his reverse-psychology invitations to explore—“If you touched right here, that would turn the page…so do not do that”—and his frantic animated attempts to contain the “monster” lurking at story’s conclusion. Flying dust and tool sound effects ratchet up the humor.

Makes use of the “drama of the turning of the page”— even without physical pages

Loud Crow Interactive’s book apps photographically represent the book itself from cover to cover, maintaining all original page-turns and pacing so that animated elements seem to come to life inside the pages of an ordinary book. Many apps just as effectively display an individual page (or spread), then move to the next when the reader swipes to trigger an animated page turn. Some developers—such as Random House in Tad Hills’s How Rocket Learned to Read — additionally zoom in on one part of each illustration at a time, directing attention to moments as they’re narrated.

Puts users in charge

Users should be able to customize their experience of an app by turning on and off or changing narration, sound effects, or music. Users may prefer to have the story read to them while advancing the story themselves, read it on their own without the narrator, or run “autoplay” with narration and automatic page-turns. All of these options should be available. Pat the Bunny allows users to record their voices reading the story, while Don’t Let the Pigeon Run This App! lets them create and record their own stories.

A convenient feature is the ability to return to or skip forward to a particular place in the story. Thumbnail screen shots accessible in the menu (The Monster at the End of This Book) or in an unobtrusive pull-out sidebar (as in Nosy Crow’s apps) both work well. In Pat the Bunny, meant for pre-reading users, icons in the bottom corners of each screen represent previous and following pages; a “map” of the story at the main menu provides shortcuts to every screen as the narrator gives a brief synopsis of each. Judy Sierra and Marc Brown’s Wild About Books offers a wheel to spin and select a specific page.

Interactive elements that respond to number or duration of touches in the same place are even more fun. In a pre-bedtime bath scene in The Going to Bed Book, the longer the user holds the tub’s faucet open, the steamier the bathroom gets, eventually “fogging up” the screen and inviting users to draw in the “condensation.” Another spread responds to touch by producing stars in the night sky; each star in a sequence of touches plays a musical note in a lullaby. Subsequent taps on the same image result in different animations in A Present for Milo. Some of these animations actually progress through vignettes with multiple taps, as when an egg in a painting on the wall wobbles, then hatches when tapped.

It can be frustrating to wait until one interactive aspect finishes before initiating another, especially if you’ve already seen the first or if you unintentionally triggered it. In Cinderella, multiple interactive elements can happen at once, creating a cacophony of voices bossing Cinderella around.

Don’t Let the Pigeon Run This App! “by Mo Willems and you” makes it clear from the title page forward that the user calls the shots. A friendly bus driver (from Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!) introduces the parameters of the Mad Lib–like story and invites users to create their own by filling in gaps in the narrative. Three methods of generating these variables offer the user a spectrum of authorial control: in “egg” mode, users shake their device to randomize plot points; “chick” mode supplies options to tap and choose; and “big Pigeon” mode lets users record their own ideas to be replayed during the narration. The tiered levels are also helpful when sharing the app across a range of ages.

Is easy to navigate

Good apps are user-friendly and intuitive. They don’t assume or require familiarity with app use, especially when aimed at the youngest users, but they don’t condescend by over-explaining themselves, either. Some apps provide written directions (often found in the menu) or offer verbal help along with the narration. Pat the Bunny’s narrator responds to a tap with “Can you do that again?” and to a long pause during a hide-and-seek scene with “Is Bunny behind the couch?” Others, like Cinderella (which uses pulsing dots to indicate where to touch), communicate visually with arrows, tabs, or buttons to indicate where to touch and to suggest which interactive features to use when. Some apps use both verbal and visual cues: as he holds ropes across the pages of The Monster at the End of This Book, Grover hints, “I do not know what would happen if you were to touch these knots and untie them…Or tickle me on my furry little tummy…”—prompting users to do just that and progress the plot. Meanwhile, subtle lights indicate exactly where to tap the screen. Thoughtfully designed apps promote digital literacy by teaching kids how to use apps even while they use them.

Apps that include easy-to-find credits help out adults: the easier it is to locate information about the writer, illustrator, developer, or narrator of a child’s well-loved app, the simpler it is to track down digital read-alikes.

Provides a surprising and joyful experience

Effective apps balance interactive moments that propel the story forward with others that are just pure fun—but feel natural to the story’s setting and characters. As Milo and a mouse friend play chase in A Present for Milo, other mice zoom around in toy vehicles (including a flying saucer) and appear in animated framed pictures on the walls. Touching blackberries or drifting leaves in the illustrations of Pop-Out! The Tale of Peter Rabbit fills the screen with their realistic photographic counterparts; tilting the device causes the items to tumble around the page. Nosy Crow puts a charming and kid-friendly spin on narration: their apps are voiced by a full cast of child actors (all credited on the info pages).

Great apps also employ innovative technologies as they’re meaningful to the narrative. Nosy Crow’s Three Little Pigs: A 3-D Fairy Tale invites users to help the Big Bad Wolf blow houses down by huffing and puffing into the iPad’s microphone. The two-dimensional illustrations of the picture book Wild About Books are redesigned in the app as vertical layers much like theater scenery; tilting the device shifts the perspective and allows a peek “behind the scenes.”

Withstands repeated use

Some apps cycle through a set of animations or interactive features on each subsequent use, so that (for a limited number of go-arounds, anyway) these are different each time. The structure of Don’t Let the Pigeon Run This App! actively encourages repeat use by creating a vast number of different stories; it also allows users to save a story to revisit later.

Above all, adds to or extends the original book

A successful picture book app fulfills the requirements of a traditional picture book, but with an extra oomph unique to the digital format. Adaptations of print books present faithful representations with all interactive elements enhancing—not undermining—the original narratives.

WHILE I doubt any app meets all of these expectations yet, the digital format allows developers to immediately receive and assimilate feedback from consumers and reviewers alike. Individual apps are improved and expanded even faster than new ones appear. The world of book-based apps for kids may feel wide and fast-paced now, but in a year or even a month’s time, the landscape will be radically different. As ever more (and ever more sophisticated) apps are developed, it will be fascinating to see the directions this new storytelling medium will take. But the most successful picture book apps will remain the ones that keep story front and center.

___________________________________

Recommended Picture Book Apps

A Present for Milo (Ruckus Mobile Media) by Mike Austin review

The Going to Bed Book (Boynton Moo Media/Loud Crow Interactive) by Sandra Boynton review

Freight Train (Curious Puppy) by Donald Crews review

How Rocket Learned to Read (Random) by Tad Hills

Pat the Bunny (Random/Smashing Ideas, Inc.) by Dorothy Kunhardt

Pop-Out! The Tale of Peter Rabbit (Loud Crow Interactive) by Beatrix Potter

Wild About Books (Random/Smashing Ideas, Inc.) by Judy Sierra; illus. by Marc Brown review

The Monster at the End of This Book (Callaway Digital Arts/Sesame Workshop) by Jon Stone; illus. by Michael Smollin

Don’t Let the Pigeon Run This App! (Hyperion/Small Planet Digital) by Mo Willems review

When I Grow Up (Bean Creative) by Al Yankovic; illus. by Wes Hargis review

Cinderella: A 3-D Fairy Tale (Nosy Crow) review

The Three Little Pigs: A 3-D Fairy Tale (Nosy Crow) review

The post What Makes a Good Picture Book App? appeared first on The Horn Book.

The children’s publishing industry is slowly catching up to the trend. Although many “flavor of the month” pop music biographies are published every year (such as Scholastic’s Star Scene series), the number of informative and beautifully illustrated rock-and-roll books for children is still limited. Nevertheless there are a variety of indispensable books, both fiction and nonfiction, for preschoolers to fifth graders that explore rock’s history and its famous legends, celebrating the timeless—and ageless—joy of rock-and-roll rebellion.

Kathleen Krull and illustrator Stephen Alcorn create one of the most comprehensive collections of rock legends for young readers in The Book of Rock Stars: 24 Musical Icons That Shine Through History. Beginning with Elvis and ending with Kurt Cobain, one-page biographies (the Beatles get two and a half pages) chronologically trace the history of rock through the story arcs of its famous innovators. Krull explores the visionary work of each artist, highlighting his or her personal story and musical influences. Acknowledging in her introduction that “not all parents will love this book” because of some of the performers’ less dignified moments, she shines light on the dark matter without judgment in an honest, age-appropriate way for third grade and up. Alcorn’s busy polychrome relief-block prints give each personality a reverential air, freezing the gods and goddesses of rock in swirling psychedelic colors, while adorning them with Greek and religious imagery. The book includes a well-considered bibliography and three or four of each artist’s groundbreaking albums. Any young rock star will pore over these pages in awe.

Not far behind is Holly George-Warren’s Shake, Rattle & Roll: The Founders of Rock & Roll, an entertaining primer that spotlights rock’s original heavyweights. In concise one-page summaries, George-Warren provides vital statistics, presents an overview of the artists’ upbringing and musical influences, and lists the artists’ hit songs. The nearly incalculable debt owed to African Americans and women is acknowledged in this book, with Fats Domino, LaVern Baker, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Wanda Jackson, and James Brown rightfully included. More obvious choices such as Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and Jerry Lee Lewis are on the bill as well. Laura Levine’s mixed-media folk-art-like illustrations offer a joyful brightness that mirrors their subjects, with song lyrics and other details peppered throughout the framed pieces.

Individual rock legends have found their way into children’s books, too. In Forever Young, illustrator Paul Rogers uses the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s 1974 song of the same title to compose a sweet homage to a living legend. Rogers re-creates 1950s and 1960s New York City with muted colors and sharp lines, giving it an earthy, retro vibe. Against the backdrops of Greenwich Village and Washington Square Park, two folk music flashpoints at the time, the story follows a young Dylan: obsessed with luminaries such as James Dean and Odetta, influenced by rural folk and blues music and the era’s cultural and political upheavals, the singer-songwriter begins playing his songs around New York and eventually travels to Washington, D.C., to join in protests and peace rallies.

The illustrator’s intricate knowledge of the time period and his subject is impressive, as the who’s-who of important figures that helped shape Dylan’s creative universe populate the pages. Jack Kerouac, Joan Baez, and many more make cameos. Even the books on the young Dylan’s shelf match a Dylan lyric, with Ezra Pound sitting alongside T. S. Eliot (“And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot / Fighting in the captain’s tower” from the song “Desolation Row”). Such details make this book a standout addition to the mountain of critical and biographical literature on Bob Dylan.

Whenever he’s asked to name his favorite guitar player of all time, Paul McCartney doesn’t hesitate: it’s Jimi Hendrix. The formative years of the legendary guitarist are explored in Gary Golio’s Jimi: Sounds Like a Rainbow: A Story of the Young Jimi Hendrix. A Coretta Scott King Award Honor book, it tells the story of a young Hendrix in a colorful and poetic way, portraying him as a fiery kid who had rock-and-roll dreams much earlier than casual fans might realize. Using the “colors of sound” rainbow theme throughout, the book crackles like an old Tweed amplifier with Hendrix discovering rural blues music, Elvis Presley, and Howlin’ Wolf while growing up in 1950s Seattle. Golio describes Hendrix’s guitar playing so vividly that readers are sure to be left craving the albums to round out the experience (proof positive: I’ve had Axis: Bold as Love on repeat for the last few weeks).

Javaka Steptoe’s colorful mixed-media plywood art explodes off the page. His earthy, psychedelic folk art matches Golio’s poetic treatment of his subject beautifully, capturing Hendrix’s sound with arresting visuals. Steptoe includes a fascinating illustrator’s note, detailing his exhaustive research into Hendrix’s life and music. The book could have multiple uses in the classroom, from music appreciation to an art unit on colors and/or collage. For fun, gift this book with the CD reissue of Are You Experienced? and you’ll be the coolest relative of any young guitarist.

Although you might not believe Elvis was recently seen washing his car in Toledo, the King lives on in Shake, Rattle & Turn That Noise Down!: How Elvis Shook Up Music, Me and Mom. Cartoonist Mark Alan Stamaty’s touching mini graphic novel memoir details when, as an eight-year-old in 1955, he was introduced to rock-and-roll and the music of Elvis Presley through a tiny transistor radio. The new, rocking sound of Elvis sends Stamaty’s mother into a tizzy of confusion and fear, setting up a classic “us vs. them” scenario, with mom criticizing what she can’t understand (to paraphrase Bob Dylan, another Elvis disciple) and Stamaty desperately trying to explain why he’s all shook up. In the end, Elvis and his young fan win Mom over. The sweetness of this mother-son relationship shimmers throughout the story (the book is dedicated to her). Within his own personal history, Stamaty highlights the diverse list of musical performers who all owe a debt to the King. His vivid illustrations burst within the panels.

Very young children have some rocking selections, too. In The ABCs of Rock, Melissa Duke Mooney and the DIY screen print company Print Mafia have created, quite possibly, the most punk ABC board book ever. “A” could be for apple, but to Mooney it’s for the band AC/DC. “C” is for the Clash, and so on. The art is gritty and crusty, like a crude photocopied show flyer disintegrating on a telephone pole. Each letter includes a few visual details about the artist it represents, such as Elvis Costello’s signature black-rimmed glasses. If you’re looking for a quirky read-aloud or the perfect baby shower book for punk rock parents, this is it.

In the fiction picture book world, Jarrett J. Krosoczka’s Punk Farm and the sequel Punk Farm on Tour provide a double shot of rock-and-roll read-aloud craziness. Animals on a Wisconsin farm start a punk rock band (unbeknownst to Farmer Joe). They practice regularly and perform live for adoring crowds. The band looks sharp, dressed in a mash-up of signature styles, such as Born in the U.S.A. bandannas, punk rock chains (with cowbells instead of padlocks), and striped ties straight out of the new wave eighties. Topping it off, each animal hides behind a pair of dark sunglasses.

Preparing for their hometown gig, the band practices their punked-up version of “Old MacDonald” while the crowd lines up outside to buy tickets. When the band takes the stage, the crowd goes nuts. Subsequent pages show each animal with their respective instrument. Krosoczka masterfully uses onomatopoeia to bring each instrument’s sound to life. Close-ups of the guitars, drums, and keyboards could be used in a music unit to point out what makes an instrument work: guitar-tuning machines, strings, bridges, keyboards, drums and cymbals are clearly defined in the pictures.

In the sequel Punk Farm on Tour, Farmer Joe leaves town to attend a tractor conference in Reno, and Punk Farm takes their show on the road. After polishing up their “killer song” (“The Wheels on the Van”) and piling into their tricked-out dilapidated van, the band crisscrosses the nation. The live performances blast off the page. Krosoczka is clearly having fun here, tossing out rock-and-roll clichés of innocent debauchery, such as Pig stumbling out of the barn with lipstick all over his face.

Punk Farm and Punk Farm on Tour truly capture the rock experience in all its ragged glory, from band-mate camaraderie and songwriting to live performance and audience participation. It’s all here, splashed out in thick acrylics. If you’re a guitar-playing teacher or librarian, trade the lazy jangle of “Old MacDonald” and “Wheels…” for grungy power chords and within a minute you’ll have your audience on their feet and rocking out.

If rock music has taught us anything, it’s that wisdom can come from unexpected messengers. Indeed, the most self-destructive malcontent in popular music, Sex Pistols bass player Sid Vicious, had simple advice for the next generation: “You just pick up a chord, go twang, and you’ve got music.”

There’s a children’s book in there somewhere.

The post What Makes a Good Rock-and-Roll Book? appeared first on The Horn Book.

A good space book captures this melding of anticipation and discovery that lies at the heart of space exploration.

Space books generally touch on one or both of two major themes. First, there are books that feature astronomy—the science-focused books—that explain our knowledge of the planets, stars, and the universe, of comets and nebulae and black holes and all sorts of fascinating, mind-bending deep space phenomena. Then there are those that foreground space exploration—the technology-focused books—that introduce the engineering innovations like telescopes, spacecraft, and rockets that give us better access to what’s beyond our atmosphere. Cutting across and anchoring these two themes are people—the scientists engaged in discovery, the engineers who produce the craft, and the astronauts who get to fly them—and the possibility that young readers, too, could take on any of those roles.

Astronomy is first and foremost a visual field. Humans and machines have only physically been to a few extraterrestrial sites, so focusing on images is integral to the practice of astronomy. A good astronomy book puts visuals front and center. From old-school naked-eye stargazing to the latest in imaging technology, what we see is the data on which the field of astronomy rests. It’s hard to resist the beauty of the orangy-red planet Mars, a close-up of the sharp edge of a ring of Saturn, or the swirling stripes and whorls of the storm-produced clouds of Jupiter. The definitive images in this category belong to Seymour Simon, whose books on planetary bodies (Comets, Meteors, and Asteroids; Our Solar System; Venus; Destination: Space, etc.) set the bar so high that the many lower-quality solar system series books quite literally pale in comparison. Of course, others besides Simon have produced excellent image-centric books. Twenty years of distortion-free images from the Hubble Space Telescope, most recently covered brilliantly in Elaine Scott’s Space, Stars, and the Beginning of Time: What the Hubble Telescope Saw, have given researchers and the public alike access not just to better pictures of the planets but to invitingly mysterious nebulae clouds and distant clusters of star-peppered galaxies. First-rate images can also be found in Sally Ride and Tam O’Shaughnessy’s books (Mystery of Mars, Voyager: An Adventure to the Edge of the Solar System, and Exploring Our Solar System)—and who can beat learning planetary science from a physics PhD who also happens to be one of our most famous former astronauts?

A good astronomy book, however, doesn’t let readers just admire the pretty colors and move on. It also assists us in understanding the technical elements of image production, in a way, changing how we “see.” Some of the pictures in these books are not photographs in the sense we’re used to, but in fact number-crunched, color-enhanced renderings of a wider-than-visible spectrum of electromagnetic waves emitted from astronomical bodies. Others are artists’ conceptions that use scientific knowledge but take some liberties in imagining what such places as the surface of a distant planet or the inside of a future spacecraft might look like. Critical information accompanying the illustrations helps readers clearly delineate among what’s real, enhanced, or imagined.

Of course, we can’t forget that, prior to all sophisticated telescopes and satellite imaging equipment, there were centuries of astronomers just staring up at the sky. Historical accounts such as Peter Sís’s profile of Galileo in Starry Messenger and Boy, Were We Wrong about the Solar System! by Kathleen V. Kudlinski explain the impressive amount of astronomical knowledge determined before modern times.

They also introduce the social and historical contexts of scientific inquiry. Ideas are transformed over time not just with better access to data but with changes in prevailing thought and social conventions. Thinking about what lies beyond the earth, and how it got there, has meant significant conflicts with religious beliefs during periods of Western history in particular. These biographical and historical accounts help us understand the many factors affecting scientific practice.

Children begin with just their eyes, too, and are greatly assisted by Franklyn M. Branley’s classic contributions to the venerable Let’s-Read-and-Find-Out Science series (the originals are the best, such as The Moon Seems to Change and What Makes Day and Night?) and the still-in-print constellation guides produced by H. A. Rey (The Stars and Find the Constellations). These books are great because they start children where the astronomers started, learning to recognize the objects in the sky and to notice their patterns of movement. Branley’s books are the definitive example of how to explain space concepts in remarkably comprehensible language, and the match of concepts to target age is absolutely perfect. These books may not have the sleek photo images of the books described above, but the charm of Rey’s star charts, or the friendliness of the Let’s-Read illustrations, certainly do the trick. There are a few recent revisions to the Let’s-Read books, also found in lesser astronomy books, that take the whimsy a bit too far. Overly stylistic, mid-century retro cartoons that violate the scientific principles they’re illustrating are a no-no, and there should never, ever be an alien in a good astronomy book—unless we reach the time when scientists have found some.

Though astronomy books are dominated by, well, astronomy, there are other scientific fields engaged in planetary exploration that when included enhance the quality of space books. Indeed, increasingly more important as we develop newer technologies and focus research efforts beyond just documentation and imaging is the cross-disciplinary potential of fields like planetary geology and exobiology. We have sensors that can remotely assess chemical compositions of rocks on the surface of a planet; we have actual samples from Mars and the moon; and researchers are actively exploring ways in which life might exist outside of the conditions we find normal. Exobiology, in particular, taps into that thrilling thought that there might be life other than us in the universe, and the science is cutting edge and complicated. Two notable profiles of scientists in search of life in outer space include Ellen Jackson’s Looking for Life in the Universe: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which features Jill Tarter, director of the SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) Institute, and Vicki Oransky Wittenstein’s Planet Hunter: Geoff Marcy and the Search for Other Earths. If there are aliens worthy of illustration in a children’s book, Marcy, Tarter, and their colleagues will be the ones to find them.

Or perhaps someday a space explorer will meet them. The fascination we have with actually going to outer space, and the massive technological (and financial) efforts exerted to put humans into space, make for some of the most compelling space books available. The recent fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission—the one where humans walked on the surface of the Moon for the very first time—was the impetus for some truly outstanding space books that capture the wide-open possibilities and space fervor of the 1960s. Andrew Chaikin’s Mission Control, This Is Apollo: The Story of the First Voyages to the Moon surveys all of the Apollo missions, personalized by the inclusion of astronaut Alan Bean’s impressionistic paintings and commentary, and effectively conveys the full scope of the Apollo program as it progressed from rocket building to flight testing to actual scientific missions. Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11 by Brian Floca is a masterful yet intimate telling of the Apollo 11 story, reflecting what it must have been like to be there for the mission, be it as an astronaut in the spacecraft or a spectator watching on TV. Readers can also get the astronaut perspective from Buzz Aldrin himself in Look to the Stars, and can very convincingly place themselves in a virtual mission by reading the second-person narration of Faith McNulty and Stephen Kellogg’s If You Decide to Go to the Moon, winner of the 2006 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Nonfiction.

Not all children have had equal opportunities to see themselves as space explorers, however, as the barriers faced by women and people of color attempting to enter the space program (at least in the United States) were not overcome until the late 1970s. Tanya Lee Stone’s noteworthy Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to Dream presents an unvarnished history of the “Mercury 13”—the accomplished women who tried but failed to get into the American space program in the early 1960s—and the times in which they lived. A good space book like this one compels readers to discuss its implications, perhaps with their elders who lived through this era, to reflect on what still hasn’t changed about our expectations for women in space, and to appreciate what has.

What era are we living in today? Although we’ve had two more prominent space programs—the space shuttle and the International Space Station—there doesn’t seem to be similar enthusiasm in the book world to produce compelling stories about the last few decades of American efforts in piloted space missions. Do peacetime international cooperative agreements and an increased commercial outsourcing lack the frisson of the Cold War quest for space domination? With now hundreds of astronauts walking the Earth, do none stand out in our collective mind? Sure, there are plenty of lower quality books diagramming rocket parts or providing hero bios of various astronauts, but few are noteworthy. Two notable books about more recent space technologies (Floating in Space and The International Space Station) come, not surprisingly, from Franklyn M. Branley and the Let’s-Read series again, this time illustrated by True Kelley, but, published in 1998 and 2000, respectively, they’re starting to show their age.

Perhaps it is because the coolest missions going on right now are the human-free, computer-controlled ones. A series of trips to Mars in the past decade, fronted by the appealing

Wall-E-like rovers, have been featured in superior books such as the latest in this category, Cars on Mars: Roving the Red Planet by Alexandra Siy. Hopefully the upcoming NASA missions, even sans humans, will spark additional interest. Or perhaps it will be the scientists, not astronauts, who serve to inspire and motivate the next generation of space dreamers.

Good Space Books

Look to the Stars (Putnam, 2009) by Buzz Aldrin; illus. by Wendell Minor

Floating in Space [Let’s-Read-and-Find-Out Science] (HarperCollins, 1998) by Franklyn M. Branley; illus. by True Kelley

The International Space Station [Let’s-Read-and-Find-Out Science] (HarperCollins, 2000) by Franklyn M. Branley; illus. by True Kelley

The Moon Seems to Change [Let’s-Read-and-Find-Out Science] (Crowell, 1960) by Franklyn M. Branley; illus. by Helen Borten (reissued by HarperCollins in 1987 with illus. by Barbara and Ed Emberley)

What Makes Day and Night? [Let’s-Read-and-Find-Out Science] (Crowell, 1961) by Franklyn M. Branley; illus. by Helen Borten (reissued by HarperCollins in 1986 with illus. by Arthur Dorros)

Mission Control, This Is Apollo: The Story of the First Voyages to the Moon (Viking, 2009) by Andrew Chaikin; illus. by Alan Bean

Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11 (Jackson/Atheneum, 2009) by Brian Floca

Looking for Life in the Universe: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence [Scientists in the Field] (Houghton, 2002) by Ellen Jackson; photos by Nic Bishop

Boy, Were We Wrong about the Solar System! (Dutton, 2008) by Kathleen V. Kudlinski; illus. by John Rocco

If You Decide to Go to the Moon (Scholastic, 2005) by Faith McNulty; illus. by Steven Kellogg

Find the Constellations (Houghton, 1954) by H. A. Rey

The Stars (Houghton, 1952) by H. A. Rey

Exploring our Solar System (Crown, 2003) by Sally Ride and Tam O’Shaughnessy

Mystery of Mars (Crown, 1999) by Sally Ride and Tam O’Shaughnessy

Voyager: An Adventure to the Edge of the Solar System [Face to Face with Science] (Crown, 1992) by Sally Ride and Tam O’Shaughnessy

Space, Stars, and the Beginning of Time: What the Hubble Telescope Saw (Clarion, 2011) by Elaine Scott

Comets, Meteors, and Asteroids (Morrow, 1994) by Seymour Simon

Destination: Space (HarperCollins, 2002) by Seymour Simon

Our Solar System (Morrow, 1992) by Seymour Simon (revised edition from HarperCollins, 2007)

Venus (Morrow, 1992) by Seymour Simon

Starry Messenger: A Book Depicting the Life of a Famous Scientist, Mathematician, Astronomer, Philosopher, Physicist, Galileo Galilei (Foster/Farrar, 1996) by Peter Sís

Cars on Mars: Roving the Red Planet (Charlesbridge, 2009) by Alexandra Siy

Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to Dream (Candlewick, 2009) by Tanya Lee Stone

Planet Hunter: Geoff Marcy and the Search for Other Earths (Boyds Mills, 2010) by Vicki Oransky Wittenstein

The post What Makes a Good Space Book? appeared first on The Horn Book.

who easily relinquish the eventually embarrassing relics of babyhood like blankies and pacifiers. Children, being by definition immature, instead pitch fits in restaurants, snatch toys away from guests, and push to the front of the line to go down the slide. They talk around a pacifier, and once they have put that aside, they interrupt and don’t seem to notice when adults tell them what to do.

Parents and preschool teachers—misguidedly—turn to picture books to solve these problems. They also look to books to teach their children important values. One parent at my library last week requested a book “to teach him that money doesn’t grow on trees and he can’t have everything he sees in the store.” As with the parent who asked for a book to teach about pouring water, it is sometimes hard not to say, “You don’t need a book for that.” (The huge number of books aimed at persuading children that reading is fun and books are good seems also a bit perverse—wouldn’t it be more persuasive to read excellent, engaging books in a loving environment?)

In one recent storytime I introduced the newly published Martha Doesn’t Share! by Samantha Berger. Several of the children announced with excitement, “I have that book!” or “I have that book at school!” Of course they did: parents and teachers love books about sharing. However, what librarians want to see is a picture book that meets the literary and artistic criteria for excellence—strong characters, an interesting story, some emotional depth. If it has a good point to make, that’s gravy. Joanna Cole’s Sharing Is Fun didactically shows a mother and son deciding which toys to share with company, and then holding to his agreement to share. It says “it’s fun to share with friends,” but it’s doubtful many children reading the stiff text will agree.

Fortunately, it’s possible to write a picture book that communicates the messages that parents and teachers want to convey while still creating picture books that librarians, children, and other lovers of good books want to see. In Martha Doesn’t Share! Berger creates in Martha a stubborn little personality, someone who struggles with the very real issue she faces when her family simply leaves her alone to play with the precious toys she doesn’t want to share. In the end, she shares a little, but it’s clearly still difficult for her, which we see through Bruce Whatley’s tender but hilarious pictures as Martha grudgingly gives her baby brother one of her mountain of blocks. It’s funny and truthful, and acknowledges that it’s hard to share—and it doesn’t pretend that once children share they will always be happy about it.

Another good book places a more positive spin on sharing. Mary Ann Hoberman’s One of Each celebrates both the joys of being alone with one of everything and the joys of sharing “One plum and one apple, one pear and one peach. / Just one, only one, simply one, one of each” with friends. The tension—which children feel strongly—between the pleasures of a more solitary life with everything just so and the satisfaction of being with friends is perfectly balanced. Poet Hoberman can pull off a story in rhyme where many writers fail, and artist Marjorie Priceman gives Oliver Tolliver, the main character, a jaunty flair in his clothes and his exquisite house.

Of course, since sharing is a fundamental issue among all humans, not just small children, folk tales touch on that topic, too. Jan Brett’s modern-day classic The Mitten shows animals squeezing into a mitten until at last a bear causes the mitten to explode. It’s a satisfying recognition that sharing only goes so far, and children appreciate both its humor and its suspense. Similarly, in the great story-hour book Mushroom in the Rain by Mirra Ginsburg, critters take shelter under a mushroom, but in this case the mushroom expands in an almost magical way.

Sharing a toy is hard; sharing your parents with a new sibling is even harder. New babies send parents looking for the right book to give big brother or sister the message that the new baby is a good thing. People who don’t know many children’s books often turn to the  comfortable, familiar Berenstain Bears books. In The Berenstain Bears’ New Baby, Small Bear has outgrown his bed. Fortuitously, while he and Papa Bear are building a new bed, Sister Bear makes her appearance in his old bed. The tone is utterly upbeat: “Being a big brother is going to be fun,” he says, as he lies in his new bed. The pictures have an endearing quality with some funny moments, but the writing is both flat and disrespectful toward a child’s genuinely mixed feelings at the birth of a new baby.

Kevin Henkes’s heroine Lilly handles her new little brother in a very different way in Julius, the Baby of the World. Her parents model the most loving behavior toward both baby Julius and Lilly, but Lilly is angry: “‘If he was a number, he would be zero. If he was a food, he would be a raisin. Zero is nothing. A raisin tastes like dirt. The End,’ said Lilly.” But when Cousin Garland criticizes Julius for exactly the same things Lilly has disparaged, the protective big sister emerges to defend her baby brother. The perfect pacing, characterization, and humor don’t obscure the deep feelings Henkes depicts with truth and insight, which is what a new big brother or sister needs more than bland reassurances.

Similarly, in That New Animal, Emily Jenkins uses a pair of dogs to express similar feelings of disgust toward a baby in the family, but FudgeFudge and Marshmallow spring into action when “the Grandpa” attempts to approach the baby. “It’s our animal,” they say. Pierre Pratt’s comical pictures of the two dogs with the round-headed baby are funny, but the feelings of neglect the older siblings/dogs feel are very real as the parents forget to pay attention to their animals for a while. Using dogs makes the message a little more accessible without being heavy-handed.

In Jeanne Birdsall’s Flora’s Very Windy Day, the whimsical tale of a younger brother floating away carries a lot of emotional truth about an older sibling’s mixed feelings toward a younger sibling. The final picture depicts them moving closer together over a plate of cookies, without text, showing that a message can be delivered with a very light touch.

A related message parents like to send their children through picture books is that giving up baby things is something to be happy about. They want children to delight in growing older and bigger. In I Used to Be the Baby by Robin Ballard, a big brother does all of the right things to help out with his baby brother. When the baby grabs his toys, he hands the baby a baby toy, and he sings songs in the car to distract him. It’s a little too instructional, requiring a very mature older sibling to carry them out, but the ending has a poignant, authentic note when he says, “I am the big brother. But sometimes I like to be the baby too.”

One way authors can send a parent-friendly message through a book is through poking a little fun at their own character, so that children laugh and then want to behave in the opposite way. It can be effective if carried out with cleverness, as with Mo Willems’s Pigeon books. A surefire storytime hit is David McPhail’s Pig Pig Grows Up, in which baby of the family Pig Pig refuses to surrender his baby things: “‘I want my baby clothes,’ he screamed. ‘I’m only a baby!’” McPhail’s ink-and-watercolor pictures depict Pig Pig in a tenderly comic way, and when Pig Pig saves a real baby from danger, children laugh out loud and cheer for the now more mature Pig Pig. It’s a funny book about a character, not a book written to deliver a message.

As frustrating as it may be to the children’s book community, many adults look at children’s books purely for their instructional value. As one children’s book cataloger commented, “I know I’ve seen lots of books over the years that probably fall in this category that were typeset in Comic Sans, with way too much text on each page, and illustrations that look like they were done by someone who has never actually done art for a living but is absolutely certain he knows what sort of pictures appeal to children.” These blatantly therapeutic books are easily spotted and avoided, but it’s important not to be satisfied with books with better production values and better writing that are still not good enough to be used in a story time. For it to be worth sharing, a picture book needs to be excellent in its own right, regardless of what it teaches.

—Susan Dove Lempke

Good Books about Sharing

I Used to Be the Baby (Greenwillow, 2002) by Robin Ballard

Martha Doesn’t Share! (Little, Brown, 2010) by Samantha Berger; illus. by Bruce Whatley

Flora’s Very Windy Day (Clarion, 2010) by Jeanne Birdsall; illus. by Matt Phelan

The Mitten (Putnam, 1989) by Jan Brett

Mushroom in the Rain (Macmillan, 1974) by Mirra Ginsburg; illus. by Jose Aruego and Ariane Dewey

Julius, the Baby of the World (Greenwillow, 1990) by Kevin Henkes

One of Each (Little, Brown, 1997) by Mary Ann Hoberman; illus. by Marjorie Priceman

That New Animal (Foster/Farrar, 2005) by Emily Jenkins; illus. by Pierre Pratt

Pig Pig Grows Up (Dutton, 1980) by David McPhail

The post What Makes a Good Book about Sharing? appeared first on The Horn Book.

My quest to track down the Newbery began a long way from this country. I had been asked to speak at the Mubarak Library in Cairo to a group of Egyptian writers on “The Heartbeat of Children’s Literature.” A gentleman named Yacoub el-Sharoni, one of Egypt’s most famous writers of children’s books, was waiting for me after the program: “You have in your country a Newbery award,” he said in his halting English. “What in your opinion is at the heart of such an award? What makes a Newbery book different?”

It reminded me of a librarian friend who once said to me, “I can always tell a Newbery contender. There is just something about one.” There was that hint again at something unique, almost mysterious, about a Newbery winner.

A swim of Newbery Medal winners passed in front of me: From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Bridge to Terabithia, Maniac Magee, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Holes, Island of the Blue Dolphins, The Tale of Despereaux, Sounder, Missing May, A Single Shard — to name only a few.

But where to begin? I scratched the answer out that night in the notebook that I keep by the side of any bed I sleep in: “At the heart of every Newbery is a remarkable character,” I wrote.

Not just a character who carries the weight of story, but a character original in voice, in spirit, in ideas, perhaps even in looks! Certainly original in imagination.

“What a character!” we often say about someone totally original, the phrase laden with both admiration and uneasiness. In the Newbery Honor-winning The Great Gilly Hopkins, Gilly (or Galadriel, as she prefers to be called), entering her third foster home in three years, makes us more than a little uneasy. She is fresh, sassy, stubborn, guarded. The social worker begs her, “Gilly, give Maime Trotter [her new foster mother] half a chance, OK? She’s really a nice person.” But Gilly is done with nice. “Nobody wants to tangle with the great Galadriel Hopkins. I am too clever and too hard to manage.” She says to herself, “Here I come, Maime baby, ready or not.” What a character!

Or Summer in Missing May, Cynthia Rylant’s Newbery winner, who is in some ways like Gilly. An orphan, too, Summer is sent to live with Aunt May and Uncle Ob in their West Virginia trailer home after her mother dies. But her attitude is totally different.

Home was, still is, a rusty old trailer stuck on the face of a mountain in Deep Water, in the heart of Fayette County. It looked to me, the first time, like a toy that God had been playing with and accidentally dropped out of heaven. Down and down and down it came and landed, thunk, on this mountain, sort of cockeyed and shaky and grateful to be all in one piece.

These words tell us as much about Summer as they do Ob and May’s trailer, because Rylant didn’t give you a description of Summer’s character; no, she gave you Summer herself, thinking, remembering, dreaming. Starting out, then, the reader knows a sweet girl, a girl who knows what it is like to be loved, a girl capable of loving and a girl who is grateful to be living where she’s living. About Summer, you might whisper, What a character.

One of my all-time favorite Newbery characters is Stanley Yelnats in Louis Sachar’s Holes, who is just plain bad-luck Charlie, and he knows why. It is because of his “no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather” who had stolen a pig from a gypsy who then put a curse on him and all his family. Not that he and his family believe in curses. Even so, Stanley blames his pig-stealing great-great-grandfather for just about everything. No wonder, then, that when a pair of sneakers falls on Stanley from the sky, he decides to take them home. How could he know that they were the famous baseball player Clyde Livingston’s stolen sneakers? But the police know; Stanley is judged guilty; and off he goes to Camp Green Lake where, as punishment, he is ordered to dig holes — five feet deep and five feet across — all day, every day, in the desert sun. That darn “no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather” and his curse!

There is nothing else to say about Stanley except, with exasperation and some amazement, What a character!

I was able to have tea with Yacoub el-Sharoni the day after my Cairo speech and share my thoughts about Newbery characters with him. I knew I was only scraping the surface. It was walking through the streets of Cairo afterward that I said to myself: It’s not enough. It’s only the beginning. Characters as rich as Gilly and Summer and Stanley need the right stage.

And that is my second certainty. The stage of a Newbery book is key. It has to be right for the hero or heroine, because it is his or her world. Yes, as in Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage.” Gilly’s world is the quirky home of Maime Trotter, which she totally disrupts in her determined search for her mother. Tree-ear of Linda Sue Park’s A Single Shard has the twelfth-century world of a nascent Korea as his stage. Summer performs in the isolated West Virginia mountain world of May and Ob. Avi’s Crispin comes alive in a feudal fourteenth-century English world where lords still rule the land and where serfs of all ages — including Crispin — do their bidding. Brian in Gary Paulsen’s Newbery Honor book Hatchet is an ordinary kid flying in a small plane to meet his recently divorced father when it goes down, stranding Brian in the Canadian wilderness, his stage!

Rich, textured, fascinating worlds — stages on which wonderfully original characters can play. And live out their usually most unusual lives.

Why, place can be so integral to the story that it becomes a character in its own right! Newbery authors seem to know this secret.

And richly wrought, place can also assure the reader of the authenticity of the story. Consider the detail of the castle in The Tale of Despereaux; the detail in the hard-core cityscape of Jerry Spinelli’s Maniac Magee; the windswept prairie of Patricia MacLachlan’s Sarah, Plain and Tall; the three trailers in Susan Patron’s The Higher Power of Lucky, soldered together so tightly that “not even a mouse would be able to find a crack or an opening anywhere.”

Despereaux, a most particular mouse with an artist’s sensibility and an Arthurian heart, lives in a most peculiar castle where Chiaroscuro the rat is allowed to rule a nether world and where a queen is so smitten with soup that she insists that it be served at every meal.

“[Despereaux] spent his days as he wanted: He wandered through the rooms of the castle, staring dreamily at the light streaming in through the stained-glass windows. He went to the library and read over and over again the story of the fair maiden and the knight who rescued her. And he discovered, finally, the source of the honey-sweet sound.

The sound was music.

The sound was King Phillip playing his guitar and singing to his daughter, the Princess Pea, every night before she fell asleep…

‘Oh,’ [Despereaux] said, ‘it sounds like heaven. It smells like honey.’”

Did Kate DiCamillo leave her hero behind in order to describe so authentically the parts and contents of her wonderfully wacky castle? Not at all. She wove her hero into the place; both hero and castle rising before us, as the brave little mouse discovers “that gilded thing”: music. You get to know both hero and place at the same time.

Character and place are inextricably linked in a Newbery book. However, I have created a still life. An interesting character, a fascinating stage on which the hero can act — but unacceptably a still life. Because a major characteristic of a Newbery winner is that it moves, sometimes exquisitely. The author meets the character somewhere and sends her, flies her, lets her run, from here to there. At the beginning the hero may be an orphan, an outsider, adrift, alone — pick the nowhere spot the hero finds himself in — but invariably we feel the wind in the wondrous wings of Newbery characters as they move through their story.

I like the image of a story arc. Perhaps because it reminds me of a character leaping, through time and space, through tests of one kind or another, taking on the challenges of his or her story in arcs of internal and external action, finally arriving at the highest (or nearly highest) point in the arc, the climax.

I think of Salamanca in Sharon Creech’s Walk Two Moons searching nationwide for her mother. Tree-ear in A Single Shard determined to take his master’s delicate, perfect piece of pottery to Songdo, encountering robbers who break it, but retrieving the single shard and moving courageously to the ancient city. I think of Beetle in Karen Cushman’s The Midwife’s Apprentice, who is determined to find her way up and out of the isolated, lonely, smelly dung heap into the world.

Arcs of action. Powerful beginnings that draw a line in the sand for the character, rising middles created by a hero or heroine faced with more and more demanding choices, and turning-points and climaxes, moments of decision, that at their peaks may well contain “the catch in the breath” that becomes something like reality itself. A storytelling arc. But not just through outer action: not just a run to Songdo, or delivering a baby. Not just hijacking the water truck and escaping Camp Green Lake. This is all outside action, physical action, essential and fascinating, and driving the reader through the pages.

But at a great book’s heart is what Aristotle in his Poetics called praxis. Something driving the character like an arrow: a question, a need, an obsession. Gilly Hopkins obsessively wanting not just a home but a mother. Summer passionately wanting Aunt May, surrogate mother, to come back from the dead. Despereaux determined to woo and win the Princess Pea, as unlikely as that is. Abilene Tucker in Clare Vanderpool’s Moon Over Manifest desperately trying to understand why her rail-riding father left her alone in Manifest, Kansas.

No question: one of the surest marks of a Newbery is its last moments of story. Last scenes. I think of Sounder by William H. Armstrong. Seeing his master whom he adored, mistakenly and cruelly imprisoned, enduring the months he is gone, then, finally, seeing that master come home:

“Suddenly the voice of the great coon hound broke the sultry August deadness. The dog dashed along the road, leaving three-pointed clouds of red dust to settle back to earth behind him. The mighty voice rolled out upon the valley, each flutelike bark echoing from slope to slope…

Sounder was a young dog again. His voice was the same mellow sound that had ridden the November breeze from the lowlands to the hills. The boy and his mother looked at each other. The catbird stopped her fussing in the wilted lilac bush. On three legs, the dog moved with the same lightning speed that had carried him to the throat of a grounded raccoon.

Sounder’s master had come home.”

Armstrong pulled out all the stops. In his simplicity, he used images that were all his own, like “three-pointed clouds of red dust” and “flutelike bark echoing from slope to slope.”And he used authentic dialogue that we could believe. “Lord’s mercy! Dog days done made him mad.” And he used poetry when he needed it: “His voice was the same mellow sound . . . the catbird stopped her fussing in the wilted lilac bush.” Because poetry in prose is how a writer gets to the heart, and those Newbery writers know it.

What is it about this scene and scenes like it? Jonas escaping downhill on a sled in Lois Lowry’s The Giver, Lucky in The Higher Power of Lucky facing the memorial service with the urn of her mother’s ashes, Palmer in Jerry Spinelli’s Newbery honor book Wringer, looking up into the sky, watching, heart beating, as his pet pigeon Nipper floats down toward him into the silvery-clouds of the killing field.

Newbery authors need everything they have to create moments like these: they need rich original images, they need the beat of their own hearts, they need their senses — what they see and smell, what they hear, what they think. Perhaps now you see why I am so comfortable with the word stage. Because as surely as a playwright comes to the end of his play, looking for the rhythms, the lighting and pacing, the magnitude of his or her last moments, a writer does the same.

There is something about a Newbery, the librarian said. “Just something about it.”

I discovered that the American embassy in Cairo has translated almost twenty-five years of Newbery novels for Egyptian children. It suddenly became clear to me why. Not out of arrogance — showing off our good books to those “less fortunate” Egyptians; not to provide facts about life in the United States. I am convinced that the embassy selected these books because they are powerful stories of humanity behaving humanly on powerful stages. It is our culture at its best that we want to share.

Patricia Lee Gauch was editor and publisher of Philomel Books for over twenty years. Her essay is adapted from a speech titled “In Search of the Newbery,” delivered at the Highlights Children’s Writers Workshop at Chautauqua in 2008.

Good Newbery Novels
Sounder (Harper & Row, 1969) by William H. Armstrong; illus. by James Barkley
Crispin: The Cross of Lead (Hyperion, 2002) by Avi
Walk Two Moons (HarperCollins, 1994) by Sharon Creech
The Midwife’s Apprentice (Clarion, 1995) by Karen Cushman
The Tale of Despereaux (Candlewick, 2003) by Kate DiCamillo; illus. by Timothy Basil Ering
From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (Atheneum, 1967) by E. L. Konigsburg
The Giver (Houghton, 1993) by Lois Lowry
Sarah, Plain and Tall (Harper & Row, 1985) by Patricia MacLachlan
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (Atheneum, 1971) by Robert C. O’Brien; illus. by Zena Bernstein
Island of the Blue Dolphins (Houghton, 1960) by Scott O’Dell
A Single Shard (Clarion, 2001) by Linda Sue Park
Bridge to Terabithia (Crowell, 1977) by Katherine Paterson; illus. by Donna Diamond
The Great Gilly Hopkins (Crowell, 1978) by Katherine Paterson
The Higher Power of Lucky (Jackson/Atheneum, 2006) by Susan Patron; illus. by Matt Phelan
Hatchet (Bradbury, 1987) by Gary Paulsen
Missing May (Jackson/Orchard, 1992) by Cynthia Rylant
Holes (Foster/Farrar, 1998) by Louis Sachar
Maniac Magee (Little, Brown, 1990) by Jerry Spinelli
Wringer (Cotler/HarperCollins, 1997) by Jerry Spinelli
Moon Over Manifest (Delacorte, 2010) by Clare Vanderpool

The post What Makes a Good Newbery Novel? appeared first on The Horn Book.

Although there are many possible reasons for reading to babies and toddlers, several general responses immediately come to mind. Sharing books with young children can:

• Nurture a love of books and reading
• Provide sensory stimulation in support of brain development
• Develop language • Impart knowledge of the world and how it works
• Create a joyful and loving connection between babies/toddlers and their grownups.

Certainly these are some big tasks for such small books, tasks that require multiple readings of a wide array of books. Fortunately, the number and variety of board books available is substantial. The challenge is in selecting those that the young listeners will enjoy and the adult readers will happily share time and time again.

Board books, most fundamentally, are a format-specific subgenre of the traditional picture book. Consequently, they are subject to the same evaluative criteria used when considering the larger group, namely the quality of both the text and the illustrations as well as the successful interplay of the two. Board books, however, must also be appropriate for the very youngest child, whose visual acuity, verbal skills, and attention span are in various stages of development. While the target group varies in age by only about thirty-six months, their developmental levels are remarkably different from one end of the spectrum to the other and from one child to the next.

So what is the loving parent, the doting grandparent, the committed care provider to do when selecting board books to purchase and to share? I suggest considering and categorizing the options. Understanding and classifying the board book universe will help you provide a variety of reading and language experiences across the developmental spectrum that describes babies and toddlers.

The Text: Concepts or Stories

Textually board books divide naturally, if not always neatly, between those that contain some semblance of a story and those that support conceptual understanding. There are any number of board books that afford “point and say” opportunities for identifying colors, shapes, numbers, and other concepts. Lois Ehlert’s Color Zoo, originally published in a trade picture book edition and later reissued in board book format, supplies the young child with two conceptual experiences. Although the abstract depictions of the animals may not be obvious immediately, Ehlert’s unique exploration of colors and shapes provides the reader and the listener with a wealth of conversational opportunities. Mem Fox approaches animals from a narrative rather than conceptual perspective in Time for Bed. Her rhyming text introduces a variety of animal babies settling in for the night, culminating with a sleeping child receiving a mother’s wish for sweet dreams. Bill Martin Jr. finds the textual middle ground with both the trade and board book editions of Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, which reinforces color concepts using language that is both patterned and narrative.

The Illustrations: Photos or Drawings

An important visual distinction among board books are those that feature drawings or paintings and those that are illustrated with photographs. For a young child, the jump from a real object to a visual representation of that object is often a shorter distance when the representation is photographic. Margaret Miller, cognizant of both the challenge of this visual jump and the fact that babies love looking at other babies, provides a visual explanation of emotional and sensory responses in Baby Faces. She pairs expressive photographic portraits with simple descriptions such as stinky, yucky, and yippee. Helen Oxenbury populates her books with babies and toddlers as well. Like Miller, she depicts children that are ethnically diverse and have expressive faces, although she draws rather than photographs her subjects. Originally published in 1987, Oxenbury’s quartet, which includes All Fall Down, Clap Hands, Say Goodnight, and Tickle Tickle, was reissued with revised covers in 1999. The series exemplifies a sensitivity to the daily realities of toddlerhood while extending a rhyming text with illustrative nuances.

The Mood: Soothing or Stimulating

Board books speak to the many moods of childhood. Through skillful use of text, illustrations, typography, color, and layout, board book creators establish a mood that can be enhanced with the proper delivery. Amy Hest has created an engaging but soothing bedtime tale in Kiss Good Night. After hearing a story, enjoying a glass of milk, and snuggling in with his stuff ed animal friends, Sam waits for his mother’s good night kiss and then drifts off to sleep. At the other end of the excitement continuum, Sandra Boynton provides lively, stimulating stories that call for boisterous readings and elicit wiggling responses with her books Barnyard Dance! and Moo, Baa, La La La!

Engaging the Senses: Texture or Manipulation

Young children learn much about the world through their senses. And while board books are made to be read, many also invite interactivity by providing textures to explore, flaps to lift, tabs to pull. Illustrator Emily Bolam combines bold colors with embossed textures in her Touch, Look, and Learn! books. The decision to use coated paper and embossed rather than furry or fluff y textures makes these books well-suited to public library collections. They are easily cleaned and thus stay fresh and inviting after lots of handling by lots of children. There are currently two titles in this conceptual series, Colors and Counting. Karen Katz has created a similarly well-designed series of lift-the flap books that stand up to enthusiastic use by multiple children. Her kewpie-doll toddlers can be found searching for their mothers (Where Is Baby’s Mommy?), their toys (Where Is Baby’s Beach Ball?), and even their body parts (Where Is Baby’s Belly Button?).

The Content: Familiar or Unexpected

For a young child just beginning to identify herself within the larger world context, seeing familiar events and routines represented between the covers of a book can be both reassuring and delightful. Mary Murphy depicts everyday toddler activities with the help of a penguin parent and child in her board book I Like It When…. The young listener and her grownup can play out the text as it is read by joining in when the penguins hold hands, play peek-a-boo, dance together, and kiss good night. Although initially unfamiliar to the young child, dinosaurs seem to hold some inherent fascination for kids of all ages. Byron Barton’s Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs offers an engaging but not-too-frightening introduction to these giant reptiles. His simple shapes, saturated colors, and understated text render the beasts less than terrifying even when they have “long sharp claws” and “long sharp teeth.” A side note: like Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, Color Zoo, and a number of other books mentioned here, Barton’s Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs was originally released in a trade edition and subsequently reissued in board book format. Not all trade picture books lend themselves to the board book transformation. In some cases the trim size is significantly, and unfortunately, smaller in the board book edition. Sometimes the details of the illustrations and even portions of the text are lost. However, a close examination of the copyright information should provide details on the publishing history and alert potential buyers to compare the board book with its original trade counterpart.

Putting It All Together

As you have probably discerned by now, the categories suggested above are by no means mutually exclusive. Board books can feature stories as well as concepts. Lilly’s Chocolate Heart by Kevin Henkes, for example, is a simple narrative tale that relies on prepositions of place (under, inside, behind, etc.) for its conceptual underpinnings. And depending upon the personalities of the young listener and your method of delivery, many board books can be stimulating, soothing, or both. Conversely, you may well find board books that expand the boundaries established by the categories listed here. For example, the illustrations in Tana Hoban’s White on Black and Black on White cannot be easily classified as either photographs or drawings. Hoban has used a photographic technique to produce bold silhouettes of familiar objects and lets those objects stand alone without benefit of any explanatory or identifying text. The categories, then, are simply tools to help you understand the board book world. Hopefully, they will assist you as you provide babies and toddlers with a wide variety of literary experiences—experiences that will nurture a love of books and reading, provide sensory stimulation, aid in developing vocabulary and an understanding of the world while creating a joyful connection between the young listener and his grownup.

Good Board Books
Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs (HarperFestival, 1994) by Byron Barton
Colors (Tiger Tales, 2009) by Emily Bolam
Counting (Tiger Tales, 2009) by Emily Bolam
Barnyard Dance! (Workman, 1993) by Sandra Boynton
Moo, Baa, La La La! (Little Simon, 1995) by Sandra Boynton
Color Zoo (HarperFestival, 1997) by Lois Ehlert
Time for Bed (Red Wagon, 1997) by Mem Fox; illus. by Jane Dyer
Lilly’s Chocolate Heart (Greenwillow/ HarperFestival, 2004) by Kevin Henkes
Kiss Good Night (Candlewick, 2004) by Amy Hest; illus. by Anita Jeram
Black on White (Greenwillow, 1993) by Tana Hoban
White on Black (Greenwillow, 1993) by Tana Hoban
Where Is Baby’s Beach Ball? (Little Simon, 2009) by Karen Katz
Where Is Baby’s Belly Button? (Little Simon, 2009) by Karen Katz
Where Is Baby’s Mommy? (Little Simon, 2009) by Karen Katz
Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? (Holt, 2006) by Bill Martin Jr.; illus. by Eric Carle
Baby Faces (Little Simon, 2009) by Margaret Miller
I Like It When… (Red Wagon, 2005) by Mary Murphy
All Fall Down (Little Simon, 1999; Walker Books, 2009) by Helen Oxenbury
Clap Hands (Little Simon, 1999; Walker Books, 2009) by Helen Oxenbury
Say Goodnight (Little Simon, 1999; Walker Books, 2009) by Helen Oxenbury
Tickle, Tickle (Little Simon, 1999; Walker Books, 2009) by Helen Oxenbury

The post What Makes a Good Board Book? appeared first on The Horn Book.