Monty Python for the Twelve-and-Unders: Cressida Crowell

I know, I know.  You saw the movie.  “It was a little sad,” I hear you say.  “My kid cried,” you say.  I have no idea what happened when  How to Train a Dragon, by Cressida Cowell, was turned into a movie, but something seems to have been lost in translation.  This book is funny.  Monty bloody Python funny.  It’s not sad.  I didn’t see the movie, so I’m not criticizing it, I’m just sayin’, boys LOVE this book.  It definitely will not make them cry, unless they are laughing so hard a few tears spring from their eyes.  Girls like it, too, if you can get them past the overtly male window dressing (Colors of the dragon breed called the Gronkle:  Snot green, bogey beige, pooey brown.) and into the bones of the story.  Because deep down, it’s universally appealing.   Unlikely hero, whose talents fly in the face of popular culture, overcomes bully-ish peers by virtue of said talent, and saves the day.  It reminds me of Python’s Life of Brian, in which Brian is believed by a whole lot of folks to be the Messiah, and feels wholly unfit for the job.  (In case you want to remember, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zjz16xjeBAA )

Only, nobody believes in Hiccup.

Hiccup is a Viking boy, heir to the royal throne.  His father, the Chief of the Hairy Hooligans, casts a long shadow– he’s a fearsome sword warrior and esteemed leader of a crowd who favors brawn and bulkiness over all else.  Hiccup is more of the introspective, intellectual sort of Viking.  The problem is, of course, there is no such thing as an introspective, intellectual Viking, and most definitely no such thing as an introspective, intellectual Viking chief. Hiccup is routinely ridiculed by fellow tribesman, including his father.  A rite of passage for all Viking boys is to tame a wild dragon to use in battle.  The book opens with the boys being led into a cave to kidnap sleeping baby dragons during their hibernation season.  The popular mode of training a dragon?  Yell at it.  The louder the better.  Hiccup has a wimpy yell, and all his peers know his weakness.  On top of that, he’s captured the smallest of all dragons– and it’s toothless, to boot.  But Hiccup’s strength?  He’s researched and studied, studied and researched, and mastered the Dragonese language.  He’s a dragon whisperer.

What adult doesn’t want his/her child getting the message that brains overpower brawn?  The best part is that it’s camouflaged in kid humor.  The line-up of events at the “Thor’sday Thursday Celebration?”  Hammer-throwing for the Over-60s only; How Many Gulls’ Eggs Can You Eat in One Minute? contest; Ugliest Baby Contest; Axe-fighting Display (“Admire the delicate art of fighting with axes.”).

A whole lot of fun, and just the beginning of a multi-book series.  So forget the movie.  The book is better (she says without having seen the first frame of the film).  Isn’t the book always better?

What? Already finished the “Wimpy Kid” series?

Another Maine author.  It’s a great state, what can I say?  Lincoln Pierce is a cartoonist/author whose comic strip (about–who else?– Big Nate) appears in over 200 US newspapers.   Once your kid spots Big Nate In a Class By Himself on the bookstore or library shelf, you won’t be able to talk him/her out of it.  And why would you? Matter of fact, I challenge you to put it down once you read page one.  Go ahead, try.  Read a sample.

Nate’s a great character, perhaps not one you want your kid to emulate, but definitely someone you’ll remember from your own middle school days. Nate, who tells his story through simple prose and comics, is a sixth grader imprisoned by middle school.  Pierce has the voice of a middle school boy down pat.  “I think we can all agree that substitute teachers are almost always better than real teachers,” Nate pontificates.  “And by ‘better’ I mean ‘more clueless.'”  When describing his dad, Nate notes he’s okay, not as psycho as some he’s seen at Little League games.  But Dad, like many a substitute teacher, is clueless.  “Dad Fact:  Dad handed out rice cakes for Halloween one year.  That was also the year our house get egged.  Connect the dots, Dad.”) Nate is sure he’s destined for better things than middle school is preparing him for.  He read it in a fortune cookie.

Saying more about the book would be overkill.  It’s a quick, hysterical read accessible to kids younger than sixth grade (I’d say third), and there are more Nate books on the horizon.  Also, Pierce, being an artist at heart, maintains a fun, interactive website.  Check it out!  http://www.bignatebooks.com/books

Carl Hiaasen Keeps Them (and Us) White-knuckled

Chapter One is a short story in and of itself.   A brilliant one.  We’re in middle school biology class at a mediocre private day school in Florida, taught by the tyrannical Mrs. Starch– who, Hiaasen alerts us in sentence one, will mysteriously disappear the next day.  But today, she’s twirling her Ticonderoga #2 pencil in a way that inspires fear among her students.  Mrs. Starch is a take-no-prisoners, polyester-pant-suit-clad biology zealot, who “wears her dyed blond hair piled to one side of her head, like a sand dune.”  She takes pleasure in grilling students on assigned reading and humiliating those who fail to answer correctly.  Her target today is Smoke, the Truman School’s taciturn loner who, BTW, has a track record with pyromania. Suffice it to say he hasn’t done the reading, and what ensues is a tension fraught face-off, a bullfight performed in front of an otherwise law abiding class of kids.  The incident, shared with us via the main character Nick, is horrifying both because the teacher finds it so easy to ruthlessly bait a student and because Smoke fumes (excuse the pun) with a dangerous anger unfit for a middle schooler.  I won’t tell how it ends, but I will say I actually gasped I was so surprised. Gasped– no kidding.

Smoke doesn’t show up for the Biology field trip to the Black Vine Swamp the next day.  Mrs. Starch disappears at the end of it.  Was the piercing cry from the woods everyone heard a rare Florida panther, or something more sinister?   Is it Smoke stalking Mrs. Starch?   The half-hearted investigation put forth by Truman’s headmaster turns up nothing. Nick and his friend Marta, unsatisfied with the adults’ handling of the mystery, take it upon themselves to solve it.  It’s a wild ride filled with vivid characters and pierced with heartbreaking realism (Nick’s Iraqi War veteran father, Smoke’s broken home).  Nick and Marta manage not only to find Mrs. Starch and prove Smoke’s innocence, but uncover an illegal oil drilling scheme threatening the Black Vine Swamp and the endangered Florida panther.

Carl Hiaasen has won multiple awards for his books and frequents the NYT Bestseller List, so I may not be introducing you to anything new here.  But if you and your favorite ‘tween don’t know him yet, it’s time.  Hiaasen writes “eco-thrillers”–  books in which empowered kids bring greedy, crooked, defilers of the natural world to justice.  He’s a satirist at heart, and like the best of them he manages to walk the tightrope between the ridiculous and the painfully true, entertaining us all the while. It’s the kind of writing usually reserved for adult audiences.  True, Scat, with its layered, fast-paced plot and multifaceted characters, is best suited to a 10+ audience, but it reminds us of how keen an eye young people have for seeing hypocrisy, and how sometimes it takes clear-eyed, youthful idealism to combat it.

Other books for kids by Hiaasen:  Newbery Award Winner Hoot, and Flush, both highly recommended.

http://www.carlhiaasen.com/young.html

Horrid Henry– Horrid Enough to Hook Reluctant Boys

Horrid Henry is a truly horrid child.  He does all the things grown-ups disdain.  He torments his brother, Perfect Peter.  (“Do you want to be free from the mummy’s curse?” Henry asks Peter after he’s wrapped him in toilet paper.  “Then you must stand still and be quiet for thirty minutes.”)  He ruins the school theater production by being the runaway raindrop.  He strategically plucks the stakes out from all the tents at a family campground.  And yet, something about him is appealing.  Even to grown-ups.  To kids– particularly the target audience of 7-10 year-old boys– he’s so outrageous he’s irresistible.  Just look at him.  I mean, who tricks the Tooth Fairy?  I’ve yet to put my finger on why I like him in spite of his utter lack of conscience, but I suspect it’s the way Simon sets up the situations. Like all comic bad boys, Henry is perfectly contrasted against “straight” characters.  His parents often sigh and wonder why they had children.  Perfect Peter is perfect and therefore loathesome.  His controlling theater teacher is fun to unravel.  In one character Henry’s met his match.  His neighbor Moody Margaret won’t be outdone by Henry.

Horrid Henry is appealing too because each of his twenty (!) books contains four short stories. That’s manageable reading for even a stubborn sort of kid.  Manageable and wicked.  What boy doesn’t love that?  Also, illustrator Tony Ross captures Henry’s mischievous hilarity with wobbly-lined genius.  If  a young someone is particularly resistant to reading stories, there are Horrid Henry joke books.  Simon also has a great website for this series.

http://www.horridhenry.co.uk

Road tested titles include:  Horrid Henry, Horrid Henry and the Mummy’s Curse, Horrid Henry and the Soccer Fiend, and Horrid Henry’s Joke Book.

A Three-Book Series for the Girls

I admit to a weakness for Maine authors, especially when they live in the same town as me, as does Jennifer Richard Jacobson.  That said, I would love her Winnie series no matter what.  First off, I have immense respect for authors who can tell a satisfying story in 112 pages.  What a gift to children eager to read a novel but not ready for the thick, complex books older middle graders read!  Not one extra word in the whole book, I tell you.  Brilliant.

Winnie Fletcher differs from popular Ramona/Judy Moody-type characters– bold and wacky– because she is vulnerable.  Perhaps this makes her a bit more real.  An only child, Winnie’s mother died when she was an infant. For most young girls (and their moms!), this premise is both terrifying and fascinating. Left to navigate the world of childhood friendships, ballet recitals, packing for camp, and such with her loving if hapless dad, Winnie is at once buoyant and self-doubting.  Jacobson never dwells on the sadness inherent to the situation, but rather on spinning situations that keep us rooting for Winnie to find her way.

In Truly Winnie (my favorite of the three), Winnie is off to overnight camp for the first time.  She’s going with her two best friends, but they are assigned a different tent. Winnie’s tent-mate is confident, bubbly, and gregarious, and in an effort to impress her, Winnie inadvertently leads her to believe her mom is alive.  And a famous artist.  Whoops.

The lie gets bigger and bigger as the week progresses, and all kinds of tension bubbles around Winnie’s being able to keep her home friends from knowing her lie or spilling the truth to her camp friends.  Everything builds to Parents Weekend, when she’ll have to keep dad in the dark or blow her new friendships– and risk dad’s disappointment.  The poignancy of this predicament may resonate more with the adult reader than the child, but all kids know what it’s like to get caught up in fibbing.  Winnie manages to learn her lesson and save face at the same time in a resolution that resists moralizing.

The other two books are equally worth reading. Winnie Dancing on her Own deals with a question all kids face at one time or another:  What do you do when two of your closest friends are crazy about an activity you simply don’t enjoy (in this case, ballet)?  If you don’t do it, will they still be your friends?  In Winnie at Her Best, Winnie struggles to find her own special talent or skill.  Why are everyone else’s so obvious?  What if she doesn’t have any talent at all?

Great characters, masterfully tight plotting, universal issues about growing up, and fun details (have you ever heard of a “floating lunch” when campers attach their lunches to flotation devices and eat in the lake?  Cool!)   I hope you can get your mitts on these.

A Boy We All Know and (I) Love

Adam Melon, who prefers to be called by his nickname Melonhead, is the kind of boy who keeps me in the classroom after all these years.  He’s good natured (“These are actually better than Hostess Sno-Balls,” Melonhead tells the owner of a gourmet cupcake bakery), excels at doing stuff rather than just talking about it (like inventing a removable cast that zips so kids can wear one  without having to break a bone– “Who knew that when plaster of Paris goes down the drain it hardens in the pipes?  I didn’t. Believe me.”), and is always game for a new experience (Melonhead’s mom:  “Dr. Bowers said he was in the middle of fitting a patient for false teeth when he looked up and saw a boy JUMPING over his skylight.”  Melonhead thinks, Probably a lot of people take that shortcut, and asks, “What did he look like?”).  It’s true Melonhead is also the kind of kid who inspires gray hairs to sprout out of nowhere.  But, he’s worth it.

Melonhead is narrated in Adam’s voice, which can be stream-of-consciousness at times, and perhaps a bit confusing to early middle grade readers. For kids who have already mastered books of 125+ pages, however, it’s a real crack-up. The paperback version is 209 pages, double-spaced, and is illustrated.  One of my book club members told me she laughed so hard in Chapter 17, when Melonhead sees his escaped mouse climbing on a picture frame behind his mom’s head– of course Mom doesn’t know there is a pet mouse in the first place, let alone an escaped one– it took her two chapters to recover.  The plot is simple and there isn’t much conflict, but boys will likely feel a kinship with Melonhead and his misadventures.  And girls?  Well, they are much more willing to follow a “boy” story than boys are a “girl” story, and they won’t be disappointed here.  Think of Judy Blume’s Fudge series.

The character of Melonhead in fact began in Kelly’s first series for children, the Lucy Rose books, which I also highly recommend (I’ve sold a few boys on them over the years).  Adam is Lucy Rose’s nemesis when she moves to town, but she is won over when he is the only person who can help her recover the class guinea pig Lucy’s lost in her house.  Kelly has four Lucy Rose books and there is a second in the Melonhead series which is still in hardcover.

A Melange of August Reads

Okay, this will be as long as my posts get.  I want to post a little something for everyone just to get things started.  Here are three books that run the gamut of the middle grade reader– early, less experienced readers up to stronger experienced ones.

I’ll start with the latter I’ve chosen, Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, by Grace Lin.  This fantasy reads like a Chinese fairy tale, but it is an entirely new story created by Lin, who in the author notes explains how she scoured Chinese folklore for the core elements of the genre, but elected to use a female protagonist, thus empowering the traditionally repressed of Chinese culture. The result is a captivating character, Minli, who sets out from Fruitless Mountain to change the fate of her family, motivated by a stirring story her father tells of The Old Man of the Moon, a mythic character who holds the fate of all in his hands.  Early in her journey, Minli meets Dragon, whose sadness stems from the fact he cannot fly. Together, not unlike Dorothy and the Scarecrow, they set off to find The One who can help them change their destiny.

How can I describe the delicious prose?  Spare, most often, with then a line of description so poetically beautiful it makes your heart quiver.  I love this book, and the kids in my third grade class hung on each word and begged me to read more every day (multiple times, in fact).  One of the many appealing features of the novel, besides the brilliantly sustained suspense and diverse, captivating characters Minli and Dragon meet on their trip, is the device Lin puts into play right before Minli sneaks away from her village.  The brave young girl fills her pack with several items which puzzle readers (a bowl with a white rabbit, for one), but goes on to use each and every item throughout the adventure.

Oh, there’s so much more to this book, and I’m not the only one who thinks so.  It won a Newbery Honor and several other awards.  Well earned!  If your child isn’t ready to read it for him or herself, read it aloud.  You’ll love it.

YOU HAD ME AT CHAPTER ONE

So, you’re looking for good summer reads for your favorite third through sixth grader?  I have scads to offer, but we better clear something up first.  Middle grade readers, that is kids aged 7-12, come in many shapes, sizes, and colors.  Most importantly, for our purposes here, their passion for reading varies.  A lot.

Books have INTENSE competition these days, and though we grown-ups may long for nothing more than a beach chair and a great book–and a good beach, I guess. . . oh, and good weather, and maybe a cool drink with an umbrella in it. . . delivered by a cabana boy who resembles George Clooney.  Anyway, my point is that a lot of stuff is vying for kids’ attention these days, and at first glance a plain old book with immovable print and nothing to click may not hold the same appeal as a Game Boy or YouTube.  But that’s only at first glance. I feel likes it’s our personal mission as parents and teachers and authors to show kids that a lot of those plain old books are far more satisfying than a temporal– albeit flashy– mission to find the missing puffle on Club Penguin.  I ask my students,  “Did a game on your Play Station ever make you cry? Laugh really hard?  Did you remember that game over and over in your imagination because it illuminated something about life as you know it?  Did it introduce you to an unforgettable character?  Take you on a heart-stopping journey that felt so real you wanted to chew it?”  Some wise guy will try to answer “yes” to my questions.  “Oh yeah?” I say. “What if the power goes out?  Or your batteries die? Then where are you?”

Seriously, kids know what I’m getting at:

THERE IS NOTHING ON EARTH LIKE FALLING INTO A GREAT BOOK.

But sometimes they haven’t experienced it for themselves.  Yet.  That’s why I’m here, and probably why you’re here, too.