Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

This morning I finished the last few pages of Camp, Kayla Miller’s sequel to Click, and my 10-year-old is going to be all kinds of grabby when she finds out.  (Her obsession with graphic novels is fierce and unfailing.)  My oldest is likely to read it as well, but the story has my second girlie written all over it; Camp, like Click, is a story about figuring out how to be yourself in a friendship and still be a good friend.  This time around, Olive has gone to sleep-away camp with her friend Willow, and while gregarious, fun-loving Olive is happy to jump into the group activities and be friends with her bunkmates, helicoper-parented (seriously) Willow…isn’t.  In fact, she’s downright hostile to other campers’ overtures of friendship.  This baffled me on a personal level–I wasn’t great at joining groups, but I welcomed people including me in a kind and friendly way–but then, I was never the homesick kid either, so I chalked that up to a total difference in personality.  Olive, of course, soon chafes at Willow’s possessiveness, and both girls struggle before eventually finding their way.

I thought Camp had more depth than its predecessor, although I still think art comes more naturally to Miller than skillfully showing, telling, and pacing a story.  Laura-the-Camp-Counselor’s advice to Olive is excellent, and the resolution is nice, even if it is a bit best-possible-scenario-ish.  If you’ve got an elementary schooler who loves graphic novels, this is an appropriate and enjoyable option.  And even though Miller’s skills still aren’t quite up to Telgemeier’s, they are definitely improving!

The first couple of days of school haven’t been this stressful in years, but having a new 7th grader starting junior high and worrying about just about everything is wearing,  you know?  And of course, Saturday was my second girlie’s birthday, and that was a whole different kind of busy.  The good news is that she pretty much loves what she got–new Barbies are getting played with frequently and her new graphic novel barely left her hands for the first 24 hours.  (She likes to just start over when she finishes, AND study the pictures, too.)  The unfortunate news is that I missed TWO posts, which is why you’re getting a quick one on an even-numbered day (books to review are stacking up).  For tonight I chose Teen Boat!, by Dave Roman and John Green, because I am plenty excited to make this one GO AWAY.

Sadly, I’m not even kidding.  John Green’s graphic novels for younger readers have been delightful–Hippopotamister was universally loved at my house–and I was hoping that something with a tagline that read “The angst of being a teen/The thrill of being a boat!” would be weirdly funny.  Weird, yes, because seriously, the kid turns into a boat.  AND everyone knows about it–Teen Boat (TB, for short) is his actual name.  Funny, well–it had its moments, I suppose, but I couldn’t get past TB’s whiny personality (“no one understands what it’s like to be me!”) and his complete and utter shallowness.  Girls are viewed as objects of varying attractiveness, except for his best friend, whom he cheerfully uses without any reciprocity of friendship whatsoever.  Perhaps teenage boys will like this or find this relatable–a kid who’s always trying to get the cute girl but loses out to the jock, and whose best (female) friend adores him and gives him support and caring without receiving anything in return from him AT ALL–but I desperately hope not.  The friend’s perspective is probably supposed to give balance, but TB learns nothing, and whining “no one understands me” when you make no effort to be the sort of person you want people to be for you is extraordinarily off-putting.  Maybe being a 40-year-old mom of 3 girls (and one boy) makes me overly critical, but I don’t need my kiddos reading about shallow and callous jerks who mostly whine about other people being callous to them.  I say skip this one.

My older girls and I finished Matthew Loux’s The Time Museum, Volume 2 this week, and we ALL enjoyed the ride.  My oldest loves adventure, my next oldest loves graphic novels, and I love history; something for everyone, right?  In this second installment, Delia and her epoch squad travel to both the past (Versailles) and the future, they work with a second epoch squad headed by Richard Nixon, and some of them crush on each other.  Loux manages to make the awkwardness and frustration of teen feelings appealing to me as well as my daughters, which is an impressive feat in and of itself, but he also spins a good adventure.  This is a winner for a varied audience, so if you haven’t read the first volume, now’s as good a time as any!

(Pun intended.  Also, I was wondering before I read it if the series would go on; the ending leaves no doubt that Loux isn’t done with this story.)

Yes, you read that right, folks.  I finished Hamster Princess:  Little Red Rodent Hood on Sunday, and it was impressively bizarre.  Also hilarious, of course–Mumfrey’s interjections were especially fabulous this time around–but still bizarre.  It’s possible that the structural differences contributed to that, since Little Red felt more complicated in the ‘who’s the bad guy?’ department, but I doubt they made that much of a difference.  Harriet Hamsterbone is consistently both unexpected and wildly entertaining, so if you haven’t read the “Hamster Princess” series, well–what are you waiting for?

In other news, school starts Monday and kids need haircuts and we haven’t actually packed away what’s in the kid’s school drawers from their last school year.  We’ve got two more sessions of swimming lessons, back-to-school/carnival night, a dinner that my eldest and I are involved in, and a birthday between now and then.  Good times will be had by all, I’m sure.  Best of luck in your back-to-school endeavors!

If you don’t remember Harrison Ford moaning, “Snakes!  Why did it have to be snakes?”, than you may not have grown up in the 80s.  The hero of Carl Hiaasen’s Squirm, however, has whatever the opposite of ophidiophobia is (and yes, I just googled ‘fear of snakes’).  Billy Dickens is a wildlife person in general, but he’s got a particular fondness for snakes.  He knows how to handle them, too, which is about to come in handy, because his life is about to get complicated.  His long-lost father, grizzly bears, an endangered panther, spy drones, a couple of Crow Indians, a dead parrot, a ranch hand named Rusty, and lots and lots of shoes (not his) are about to invade Billy’s summer.  Will you be along for the ride?

Seriously, though.  Carl Hiaasen.  The man’s a crackup, and my oldest is going to love this one!

The first third of The Third Mushroom had me worried.  Melvin was being snarky, Ellie was enthusing over science, there was take-out for dinner…was it just going to be more of the same?  Because while that can be fun, it’s rarely enough, you know?

I shouldn’t have worried.

Third Mushroom ended up being a lovely story about hard choices, different kinds of friendships, and the importance of having people to remember with.  There are pets; there are fruit flies (with and without wings); there are malteds; and there are piles upon piles of dirty clothes.  What matters most, however, is that Mushroom completes what begins in The Fourteenth Goldfish, in a poignant and satisfying way.  The two are a near-perfect pair.  Now–if you’ll excuse me–I’m off to decide if we’re having takeout for dinner.

I finished reading Eunice Tietjens’ Boy of the South Seas last night, and I have to say–my strongest feeling about it is relief.

As in, I’m glad to be done.  What’s next?

It’s not that I hated it, you understand–it was fine.  It just wasn’t any better than fine.  Boy was a Newbery Honor book in 1932, back when stories of young people from faraway places made up a significant portion of the winners, and I’m guessing it won because it was the first book about a Polynesian boy to be published in the U.S.  (I’m guessing this, mind.  I haven’t researched, but I sincerely doubt there was an abundance of books about Polynesian young people in the 1930s.)  I googled the author and she was actually born in Chicago (Tietjens was a married name); apparently she traveled extensively in Asia, but that’s not exactly Polynesia, is it?  I’m generally pretty good at judging books in their historical context, but there were a few phrases that were still grating.  (“Teiki, who like all simple primitive people, was not afraid of silence…”)

As far as the plot, well–Teiki accidentally stows away on a schooner that carries him far from his island.  He ends up on Moorea, where he is eventually adopted by a loving woman and her family, and then finds a mentor and new life direction in an unexpected place.  A phrase at most is spent on his real father’s inevitable grief at his son’s disappearance, and after Teiki finds his mentor, his adoptive parents are almost entirely out of the picture; as a parent, I found this grating as well.  To be frank, Boy of the South Seas feels like a romanticized look at island life by a woman who did some basic research and leaned quite a bit toward the ‘noble savage’ ideal (even if ‘savage’ isn’t quite the right term in this case).  Unless you have a fascination with historical portrayals of the Pacific Islands and their inhabitants–OR a Newbery-related goal–I’d probably skip this one.

Have you ever read Jennifer L. Holm’s The Fourteenth Goldfish?  Because as of tonight, I have.  And it’s weird.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s good-weird.  And funny-weird.  But seriously, when you’ve got a 11-year-old main character whose mother is a drama teacher (divorced from Ellie’s father, the actor, although they’re still friends) with the hippest wardrobe in the house, and whose grandfather, a scientist with his own fan club (in Helsinki!), has reversed the aging process, turned himself into a teenager, and moved in with them, well–you’ve got a weird book.

Here’s the thing, though–it’s Jennifer L. Holm.  And so it totally works.  Melvin (the grandfather/sullen teenage boy) is snarky, blunt, and crotchety in a disturbingly perfect old-man-teenager kind of way, and Ellie is a beautifully normal 11-year-old, dealing with changing friendships, parental expectations, and some unexpected life upheavals.  Add in the question of whether aging ought to be reversible, a performance of the same play Auggie Pullman sees his sister in, and an awful lot of take-out, and?  You get a touch of well-written, strange, and (often) hilarious magic.  If that works for you, you should absolutely read this book.  (If it doesn’t, just try something else by Holm instead.)  Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to the sequel!

I’m going to give myself a free pass for the 1st, because back-to-back posts are tricky, and I only manage it sometimes when a month has an odd number of days.  Plus, I’ve been doing all the things.  Anyway.

Today I finished listening to The Unbreakable Code, the second book in Jennifer Chambliss Bertman’s ‘Book Scavenger’ series.  (Have I mentioned how much I want ‘Book Scavenger’ to be an actual game?  Because I would TOTALLY play it.)  Now, there are two kinds of series, right?  There are the ones where each book reads a fair amount like a standalone, and then there are the ones where the books continue where previous books leave off.  This one feels a bit like a hybrid; the mysteries are solidly standalone, but the character development is most definitively linear–chronology is absolutely important here.  Maddie, Mr. Quisling, and Matthew all grow into more important characters in this second installment, and Emily’s family’s living situation alters as well.  San Francisco continues to feel like a major character, which was more fun for me here because I read Russell Freedman’s book on Angel Island relatively recently.

As for the mystery?  I’m getting on the old side to unreservedly embrace stories of kids solving mysteries that adults have been unable to crack for decades, but it was a fun read, and the ‘who’s the bad guy’ question was handled in a way that I was impressively not annoyed by.  (Misunderstandings that lead to false conclusions drive me nuts if they drag on for a significant length of time.)

My mystery-mad 12-year-old is going to love it.

I so haven’t recovered from being gone yet.  I mean, yes, lots of laundry has happened, and another double batch of plum jam is sitting on my counter, but my to-do list is still overwhelming–and so, yet again, you get another exceptionally short review.

To be fair, though, the 5th book in a series lends itself to a brief one.  Hamster Princess:  Whiskerella is another fabulously entertaining read by Ursula Vernon, featuring everyone’s favorite sword-swinging hamster princess, her best friend Wilbur, and a bat ambassador that I for one would desperately love to see come back in the next book.  This spoof of “Cinderella” made me laugh out loud, folks.  Do not miss out on Harriet!

And now I’m going to do the things.  Wish me luck…