Junior Edition: New Books for Younger Readers, #14

By Foundling Friend Celia McGee

I’m My Own Dog

By David Ezra Stein (Candlewick Press)

Ages 5-8

Self-delusion can be the unintended mother of invention, a concept simplified and humorized in David Ezra Stein’s (another of the Caldecott chosen) I Am My Own Dog for the youngest of readers and those who tuck them in at night after reading them a good book. It’s also a story with which most child pet-owners can identify. Yet the canine star of Stein’s book is a mutt without an owner—“I’m my own dog. Nobody owns me. I own myself.” That’s all very well for leaning suavely against fire hydrants while tamer pooches namby-pamby by, some even carried in purses. Such a pampered existence is not for him. He’s a hard-working dog (“I work like a dog,” as he might not know the saying goes in the world he refuses to join), he puts himself nightly to bed (after fetching his own slippers), and his nighttime sleep habits are, he believes, solely of his devising. How could there be such external pressures as physical discomfort? He prides himself on reacting badly to hypothetical situations involving interacting with humans in activities he thinks he enjoys more on his own.

But Stein hints at an inkling of self–doubt in a canine who has to look at himself in the mirror every morning and chant “Good dog. I am a good dog” to psyche himself up for his one-dog independence. It has never occurred to him that there are circumstances where humans are actually desperately needed, like having his back scratched in a place he can’t reach. In contrast to the self-congratulatory self-satisfaction Stein holds up as a dubious but hidebound character trait, in the dog’s eyes tjere’s a pathetic loneliness in the back-scratcher, who follows him home. Another expression that has apparently escaped himis “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” Good deeds sneak up slyly. The dog buys the guy a leash so he can lead him around, introduces him, he thinks, to squirrel-chasing and stick-throwing and sitting on command even though they appear of his budding friend’s own experience and volition. It’s a pleasantly dirty mess to clean up after humans with dripping ice cream cones, but someone has to do it. And someone has to admit to a pleasantly changing dynamic in life. This should ring a bell, or maybe elicit the satisfied sighs of friends snuggling up together, that, if carefully listened to, could last a lifetime. Relationships are not built in a day, and often it takes working “like a dog all day” to get there. But the emotional payoff is worth it.

Leroy Ninker Saddles Up

By Kate DiCamillo, illustrated by Chris Van Dusen (Candlewick Press)

Ages 6-9

Kate DiCamillo provides several tip-offs that, in her rootin’-tootin’ Leroy Ninker Saddles Up, her daffy, soulful and surprisingly spunky squirt of a protagonist lives somewhere you can’t just up and travel to, and that’s the past. Lerpy works the concession stand at a drive-in movie theater. The family cars parked there would be vintage today.  Moreover, though a grownup, he says “Yippie-i-oh” a lot, which you don’t hear much anymore. (In her trademark zippy way, Newbery medalist DiCamilo also coins some droll, cheerful, innocent-sounding expressions exclusive to Leroy that come in handy for letting him largely suppress the scarily different person he used to be, with a past of his own to hide.) Quaintest of all, he dreams of owning Western boots, a twirling lasso, and a ten-gallon hat: he wants to be a cowboy. That’s a pretty tall order for a product of a reasonably urbanized landscape (Leroy lives in an apartment). That he wants to be “never ever afraid,” like the Marlboro men he worships on screen says more about Leroy than them.

After all, there’s little purpose to exciting dreams and aspirations unless they’re acted upon. Sometimes friends have to prod a dreamer from fantasy into reality. For Leroy, that impetus comes from his co-worker Beatrice Leapaleoni, who gets to the heart of what every wannabe cowboy needs to become the genuine article. Like Leroy, who owes his ski jump of a nose, protruding ears, gap-toothed grin and eyes resembling surprised donut holes to illustrator Chris Van Dusen’s graphic sense of humor and giddy-up pace, Beatrice, and the rest of the book’s characters, sport equally goofy yet endearing features, but she also has common sense: Leroy needs a horse.

With a determination that should teach young readers a thing or two, Leroy scours newspaper ads for that very thing, and once he finds it, provides such pointers as repeating the printed address twice, safekeeping it in his pocket, and grabbing “fate” by the tail. Her name is Maybelline, a stubborn old steed that, like most animal versions of humanity, has her quirks—1) she responds only to compliments 2) has a prodigious appetite, and 3) hates to be alone. The first makes a poet out of Leroy, the second a short-order cook of masses of spaghetti, and the third presents the conundrum of how to fit Maybelline into Leroy’s apartment so she doesn’t have to be alone–which he can’t. The solutions he arrives at, and how adaptability and growing mutual affection bring the pair even more friends– including the African-American siblings Maybelline bonds with when she briefly runs away–are funny and endearing, while also opening the shy floodgates enabling Leroy to confess his past sins to the understanding Maybelline. He’s a good way toward his goal of matching his idealized cowboys. It’s a catharsis on the order of the epics he and Maybelline watch, together, on the drive-in movie’s screen. Maybelline, notably, is partial to love stories, a romantic tendency not out of character for a horse that shares a name with a popular cosmetics line. But stasis can hardly set in for these two—Leroy Saddles Up is only the first in a new Katie DiCamillo series.

Fleabrain Loves Franny

By Joanne Rocklin (Amulet Books/Abrams)

Ages 8-12

Fleabrain, the miniscule insect in shining armor who hops in to save the day for an exceptional young girl named Franny Katzenback , is anything but. Joann Rocklin, the best-selling author of this new book is no slouch, either, and she tops herself here. Joining the latest mini-trend of writing young people’s fiction inspired by, in dialogue with, or subtly referencing classic books and their authors, she ostensibly sets up an amusing tale about Fleabrain’s jealousy of Franny’s passion for the newly published Charlotte’s Web, an instant classic and, in Franny’s well-read estimation, “the greatest children’s book of all time.”

Fleabrain Loves Franny gives Charlotte a run for it’s curly pink tail. The reasons Fleabrain loves Franny may be too numerous for even one of his intellectual role models, Pascal, to untangle and enumerate, but in fairness, some of these rationales border on self-serving tactics in Fleabrain’s battle to change Franny’s admiration for a silly spider in a children’s book into true love for a real-life flea who’s learned, romantic, brave, resourceful, a multilingual polymath, admittedly a little smug, but a doting presence close at hand, at the tip of the family dog’s tail.

It’s 1952, and Franny is recovering from polio, first in an iron lung and now her confined to a wheelchair. Rochlin piercingly portrays the plight of a studious girl steeped thoroughly in an understanding of the very affliction she’s suffering. 

Given a wide and superstitious berth by all she  encounters, only her family keeps her company, along a mean nurse to put her through the daily torture of exercises intended to get her legs moving again. In the Katzenbacks’ affluent Jewish neighborhood in Pittsburgh also live the famous and reclusive Dr. Jonas Salk, working on a polio cure, and his associate, Herr Gutman, whom Franny only knows as a an occasional, quiet dinner guest, the great sorrow in his eyes for the wife and daughter lost to the concentration camps. McCarthyism’s specter also hovers, ready to strike.

Thanks to magnifying bottle top from a “Sparky’s Finest”s soda, Franny is finally able to see Fleabrain. Magically—a word not used lightly—he restores friendship to her. Most obviously in common is their love of books. (Somewhat ominously, Fleabrain announces he’s “consumed” almost every book in the Katzenback’s extensive library, and Franny ultimately figures out that the notes, love letters, poems and literary exegeses he leaves her are written in blood.) Rocklin’s knowledge of the science of nuclei and other invisible but living organisms is prodigious.  But that’s merely hardcore erudition. Transferring to a tail hair of Lightning, a sweet elderly horse harboring romantic secrets, Fleabrain teaches Franny to ride, then fly, as if on a mystical sky steed out of Chagall, performing miracles and mitzvahs, saving lives and committing noble acts of daring.

These also represent the sad, sardonic Franny embracing belief—in the miraculous, in human nature, in love, and perhaps a higher being. Anger is disowned, faith accepted, and the future faced. For Rocklin there is such a thing as being born again, and with that to change the world. As for one small creature, a job is complete, a literary prejudice overcome, if not a love requited. To borrow from Charlotte’s Web, which Rocklin does:Some Flea.

Skink–No Surrender

By Carl Hiaasen (Alfred A. Knopf/Random House Children’s Books)

Ages 12 and up

There’s scads of territory where fans of Carl Hiaasen’s gonzo detective fiction might expect to find his occasional character Skink (given name Clint Tyree)—college football star, crusading ex-governor of Florida downed by corruption, eccentric, bibliophile, as odd in attire and demeanor as in huger-than-life personality, nature lover in a shower cap with a fine collection of artificial eyes he pops in and out of an empty socket, funny as a dancing alligator in the disappearing swamps he holds dear, old in years, crazy young in spirit, and smart as all get-out.  But they may not have guessed in a book for young readers.

Yet that’s just what Skink—No Surrender is. It’s Hiaasen’s first, and a yarn for our times.  He hooks up with—or rather hooks, with his undefeatable and frenziedly brilliant know-how—a teenager, Richard (who narrates the story but adolescent-like, divulges not last name) a beach-combing, alienated kid still mourning his father’s death, close to no one (certainly not his Mountain Dew guzzling stepfather) except his cousin Malley, who’s even more bored by their suburban background than he is, and more rebellious. She’s the type to suddenly disappear, this time ostensibly to get out of being shipped off to boarding school, but more likely kidnapped by a weasly character she met in an online chat room.

That’s the Internet as a tricky, villainous fact of modern life, but so are the cell phones through which Richard and Malley are finally able to communicate, Malley conveying clues that only Richard understands, which point to a hiding place way up the Panhandle on a decrepit houseboat, Malley handcuffed by the “creep” she first thought was a cool DJ. “Will the bride be wearing handcuffs,” is one of Skink’s lines.

It doesn’t help Richard and Skink’s in the subsequent pursuit of the bad guy that dead people turn out to be alive, and living ones, dead. A funny off-shoot is the temporarily crippled Skink, who eats mostly road kill but was trying to save a baby skunk off the highway, teaching Richard to drive, propped on one of his thicker books, Steinbeck’s East of Eden. It’s known that many oddballs populate the social fringes of Florida culture—and, with that, Hiaasen’s fiction. Skink—No Surrender turns one of his grandest nonconformists into a boy’s dream companion—and Richard learns to wake Skink from his moaning nightmares of Vietnam.  Thoreau knocks on our memories, but also Hunter S. Thompson.

In Skink—No Surrender it takes a dozens of cops to mess up royally, and a one-eyed outcast and his creator to perceive goodness, generosity, growing up and an alert peace of mind deep down and far ahead. Wherever there’s an open road and a mystery to be solved, Hiaasen’s high opinions of freedom and orneriness are on it. He doesn’t speak down to his new audience, and he also doesn’t sugar coat the America in which they’re coming of age. The future is for the young to figure out. Only some are lucky enough to run into a guiding light who has lasted long enough to help them.

by Carlye Waxman RD, CDN 

Healthy lunches don’t need to be pricey and organic! As long as you follow the basics for balance, you’re kids will get the best formula for a satisfying and filling meal.

Protein: Start with the protein. Turkey, roast beef or ham sandwiches are the leanest of the cold cuts. You can also put together egg, turkey or tuna salad the healthy way. Add some chopped celery, carrots and low fat mayo. If your child is more of the vegetarian type, cheese, hummus and peanut butter are a great protein alternative.

Starch: Balance out your meals with adequate starch. Buy whole grain bread (with >2-3g of fiber per slice), english muffins, pitas, tortillas (6-8 inch), or rolls. Wrap up a vegetarian sandwich of avocado, hummus and shredded vegetables or stuff a pita with tuna salad. If time is of the essence, buy pre-shredded vegetables like cole slaw mix to stuff into a pita or wrap. Macaroni salad also travels well as long as there is refrigeration, and a great way to get kids to eat protein, vegetable and starch all in one shot! Cut up ham, throw in peas and light mayo. Buy whole grain when possible but if your child absolutely refuses it, combine the two together (white pasta mixed with wheat pasta tends to trick them a bit).

Vegetable: Kids can hate or love them, the trick is to find the one your kid actually likes and go with it. Mix it up with baby carrots and a side of peanut butter, slice tomatoes into sandwiches, finely chop celery and throw it into your tuna, egg or macaroni salads are just a few ways to add them to lunch. Leftovers also make a great lunch the next day. Cooked green beans or steamed broccoli with some cheese and butter are some ideas. Lastly, macaroni and cheese with peas or broccoli can be a nice staple.

Fruit/Dessert: It’s ok to give them a little something sweet. A couple of squares of chocolate, a small truffle, 2-3 oreo cookies and low fat chocolate pudding aren’t a bad idea. Surprise them by not putting them in every day (so they don’t expect it). Pack easy to pack fruit like apples, oranges, grapes, berries and bananas. As you know, your kid may not want to eat these unless they are cut up nicely for them….the extra step may make the difference.

Here’s some combinations I like and think your kids may like:

1. Turkey salad with light mayo and tomato stuffed into a Pita pocket with a side of sliced apples, string cheese and a small square of chocolate
2. Macaroni and cheese with broccoli or peas, a side of hummus and carrots and a low fat pudding
3. Wrap: add ¼ avocado, shredded vegetables (cabbage and carrots) and turkey, cheese or hummus to the part of the wrap closest to you. Fold over the food and then fold in the sides. Finish by folding to the end. Pair this with 2 peanut butter and banana cracker sandwiches (4 saltines, 1 tbsp peanut butter, ½ banana).

Carlye Waxman RD, CDN is a Registered Dietitian at The New York Foundling who lives in NYC. She is the owner of SweetNutritionNYC.com, a website with recipes and nutrition tips for the public. Contact her at Carlye@SweetNutritionNYC.com to hear more about her counseling options and rates.

By Foundling Friend Celia McGee

Meaniehead

By Bruce Eric Kaplan

(Simon & Schuster for Young Readers)

Ages pre-K to 8

   Bruce Eric Kaplan’s publisher has allowed him to identify himself as “still a mad genius” in the flap copy of Meaniehead, his third book for children. Whatever his professed image in the mirror—and this is a guy who permanently jokes around with a very straight face, including in the pages of The New Yorker and for shows like “Seinfeld” and “Six Feet Under”—he is certainly brilliant at pushing a hapless situation to  absurd yet satisfying, hilarious and instructive limits. Kaplan’s putative audience, but also their parents and other grownups, will grasp and enjoy the fun Kaplan has with his story of two impossibly grumpy, incessantly fighting siblings, illustrated in his trademark sketchy cartoon style, which aims for laughs along with super-duper insight. Let’s hear Dr. Kaplan’s initial analysis of the state of affairs. “Henry and Eve were going through a new, terrible phase of fighting with each other all the time” (arms crossed, frowning face-off). But allow material objects enter the fray—in this case during a tug of war over a disputed action figure—and just about everything can go wrong. That means in the sense of senseless destruction. Family lamps break, electric drills make their way through the enemy’s bedroom ceiling, entire neighborhoods catch fire, and a little girl on a big bulldozer becomes a dangerous monster. With Kaplan carrying the feud to lengths equal to a flight into space after the world has been destroyed (not a coincidental comparison), a light bulb should suddenly turn on over every little head as the realization strikes just how stupid bad behavior like Eve’s and Henry’s can be.

The Secret Box

By Whitaker Ringwald

(HarperCollins/Katherine Tegen Books)

Ages 9-12

   For all its beleaguered reputation, the United States Postal Service can still come through, and thankfully, in the case of Whitaker Ringwald’s The Secret Box, with far more than cousins Jax, Ethan and Tyler could ever have imagined. The plain, brown-paper-wrapped package that shows up in the middle of Jax’s  12th birthday celebration would seem poor competition for the many presents showered on Jax by her friends and as much family as is left to her. She doesn’t know who her father is, and, besides her mother, who works in a diner to support them, she’s aware only of her cousins and their parents, who, as owners of a toy-testing company, have come into wealth that Jax would resent if she and Ethan weren’t so close. But what most piques Jax’s immediate curiosity is her mother’s frightened reaction to the delivery and her stern directive to get rid of it, unopened, right away. When you’re 12, hyper-active, inquisitive and bossy, that’s simply an invitation to disobey orders, come what may. Once Jax opens the package, sent by someone she learns is her great aunt, there comes a lot. For one, her present, a box with a LED screen irresistibly flashing directives involving distances and destinations, beckons Jax on a quest far beyond her humdrum life. As usual, she browbeats Ethan, a fearful kid who has trouble making eye contact and functioning in groups, into joining her. More surprising, they convince his older brother Tyler—big, mean, a computer and math genius who never leaves his room–to go with them. And bring his driver’s license. Since their trip includes places like Washington, D.C., it bodes well in the tourism department, except that a scary couple in weird disguises and with shifting accents is intent on hot-fingering the box from them. Former archaeologists drummed out of their profession, their greedy interests twist down a terrifying road of revelations about classical myths, ancient cultures, their relationship to Jax’s great-aunt—and that treacherous, primordial box cutter of a woman, Pandora. Yet more remarkable are the transformations that happen to each of the cousins. If it’s evil they will have to fight, they’re now well-equipped.

In the Shadows

by Kiersten White and Jim Di Bartolo, with illustrations by Jim Di Bartolo

(Scholastic Press)

Ages 12 and up

   In a picture-perfect New England, true perfection is hard to come by, and pretty surfaces are bound to crack open for a view into a sinister abyss. Despite its generic title, In the Shadows, set in just such a version of a small, quaint town in Maine is a guess-provoking, time-jumbling, and ultimately romantic novel that comes almost instantly to scary life. The widowed Mrs. Johnson runs the local boarding house, helped by her lovely daughters, the beautiful, gentle Cora and the more “impish” Minnie of 15. Lo and behold, the town also has a local witch. Like most such establishments, the Johnson Boarding Houses attracts an array of more and less transient residents. But it takes the arrival of young, handsome and troubled relative named Arthur, formerly unknown to the girls, to bring the differences among the boarders into sharp relief. The bad apples among them are rotten to the core and somehow linked to the Ladon Vitae, an ancient, secret society of evildoers spread throughout the world. Bizarrely caught in their web are two brothers, one close to dying, sent to board in these supposedly salubrious environs by their father, a rich and powerful Chicago industrialist, whose success appears linked to his having sworn a “blood oath” to sacrifice someone dear. As a gang of villainous conspirators from across the globe and the ages gather in and around town on an unspeakable mission, the close-knit group of young people struggles with different forms of guilt, and some unrequited love. It is the ineradicable existence of evil that Kirsten White and Jim Di Bartolo are committed to portraying, holding it up as an admonishment to do good instead. Di Bartolo’s finely drawn, fever-temperature illustrations not only obliquely tell the novel’s story but also identify evil with all-too-memorable chapters in history—both World Wars, a dusk in New Orleans in 1924 that drips with menace, Las Vegas, Nevada, in 1948, and so on. Evil has not chosen its immortality, but maybe certain good-hearted humans can actually decide to live forever. Theirs is a love that never dies. 

The Vacationers

by Emma Straub

(Riverhead Books)

Ages 14 and up, and adults

   Catch a family trying to choose a vacation spot that isn’t “Wainscott or Woodstock or somewhere else with wood-shingled houses that looked distressed on purpose,” and you know you’re not in the average income bracket anymore. In her second, much-anticipated novel, the sharp-eyed, funny and compassionate Emma Straub makes great use of these kinds of dilemmas for her story of a well-off, well-intentioned Upper West Side family, that, in serious crisis, and accompanied by close friends also tilting at tribulations, ends up for once in an unfamiliar place. (Albeit that Mallorca, where they’ve landed a freebie villa, is as comfortable as a pair of well-worn Tod’s loafer to the international jet-set, rich hippies, and ultra-privileged pleasure-seekers.). On this hot mess, threatening to fester beneath idyllic sunshine, Straub turns the gaze of Sylvia, the Posts’ 17 year-old daughter, fervently counting on college to let her be “a completely different person.” Her parents’ apparently irrevocable breakup, her older brother’s hopelessly squandered life, and the tinder-box efforts of Charles and Lawrence, a gay couple anxious to be “chosen” as adoptive parents, are just several more depressing and only partially understood intrusions into her miserable, irrefutably 21^st-century life. iFilmed the first and only time she got so drunk she hooked up in a group scrum at a party, she has yet to live down her viral notoriety, or her boyfriend dumping her for her BFF. This being a novel that affectionately satirizes many types of fiction, an impossibly handsome and sexy Spanish tutor materializes to distract Sylvia—and stoke her daydreams of losing her innocence– while her mother contemplates plunging an icepick into her disgraced husband’s eyes, for 1) having an affair with a young intern at the magazine he edits 2) getting fired for his trespass from the prestigious position he has enjoyed for most of his career.

Where bookish Sylvia is concerned, Straub also doesn’t pretend for a minute that the private-school graduate’s passion for Austen and Tolstoy will take a backseat to the fondness for pale-pink workout gear favored by her brother’s unexpectedly level-headed, wrong-side-of the-Mason-Dixon-line girlfriend. This isn’t Straub being snobby—if anything, her dry, soft-hearted humor takes the Posts to task—but it does confirm a growing awareness in the reader that Miss Austen has been hovering cleverly behind this spiky, displaced domestic comedy. Its characters come in pairs, and in pairs they remain, but their pride and prejudices suggest that the combinations they started out in are unlikely to stay the same.