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.

Junior Edition: New Books for Younger Readers 

By Foundling Friend Celia MCGee

Winston & George

By John Miller, illustrated by Giuliano Cucco (Enchanted Lion Books)

Ages 5-8

Never forget that particular books come with stories of their own.  So it is with Winston & George. Half a century ago in Rome, the American writer John Miller and his friend, the Italian artist Giulano Cucco, produced four children’s books together. But when Miller presented the books to American publishers—this was in the early 60s—they told him the cost of reproducing the full-color illustrations was prohibitive. Miller eventually stored away the stunning artworks in the attic of hi country house, until he came upon them years later and was able to reconstruct the stories that went with them, though learning sadly that Cucco had died.

Winston & George, the first in a series of these collaborations now being published by Enchanted Lion Press, is a cautionary tale of friendship when one friend courts peril by taking advantage of the other. With distant echoes of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” up pop friends and fishing cronies Winston, the tolerant crocodile, and George, a crocodile bird with a few too many practical jokes in his arsenal. Like the time he yells “Danger!” flying over Winston and his fellow crocodiles napping happily in the sun, sending them plunging into the bright blue water of the chilly river. Their re-surfacing comes with a warning: “’A crocodile bird that plays pranks deserves to be eaten up, ‘” growls the oldest, most cantankerous of the reptiles.

But it takes the young and restless and not yet morally conscious often longer than it should to learn their lessons. Persisting in his trickery, George finally puts Winston in mortal danger, earning the wrath of the entire neighborhood’s hippos and crocodiles, and forced to acknowledge the possibility that he has killed his friend. Thanks to a miraculous and communal effort, Winston barely pulls through. The same cannot be assumed of George when a verdict is reached to put him on the death row of a crocodile’s teeth. There is only one surprising way out, dependent on true friendship and even truer change.

Oliver and the Seawigs

By Philip Reeve, illustrated by Sarah McIntire  (Random House Children’s Books)

Ages 7-10

Lots of children have had the experience:  your parents’ professions mean your family moves a lot, but when they finally decide to settle down, you’re rather relieved and actually pretty excited to have a place to call home.

Ten-year-old Oliver Crisp is a very extreme case in point. His parents are explorers, and they have been everywhere—love at first sight atop Mount Everest, wedding ceremony at the Lost Temple of Amon Hotep, and, with Oliver in tow, pushing through to the deepest parts of the densest jungles, where, in one of Sarah McIntyre’s rambunctious illustrations, Oliver has to do his reading hanging upside down from the branch of a tree sporting exotic flowers, slithering snakes, and a far-too-interested-looking crocodile below.

For a boy like this, imagination can run wild at the thought of domestic calm and a life full of BFF schoolmates, especially when the Crisps’ explorer mobile pulls up in front of a rambling yellow house firmly settled in the seaside town of St. Porrocks. But, in a matter of perspective (for Oliver’s: see above), what catches his parents’ eyes are a group of small islands, “’Unmapped!’” “’Uncharted!’” “’Unexplored!” that have apparently popped up in Deepwater Bay. Off they go to investigate, but when Oliver wakes up the next morning, both the islands and his parents have disappeared. 

Filial duty and unconditional love are not easily suppressed, and Oliver doesn’t. Off he goes in search of his parents, only to find that the Rambling Islands are merely the tips of peripatetic if compact land masses that are all headed to the Hallowed Shallows for a momentous ritual, the Night of the Seawigs. Just like certain beauty pageants—or Wigstock in Thompson Square Park in New York City—the island with the most elaborate headgear wins. Oliver and the friends he has made along the way—a talkative Wandering Albatross addressed as Mr. Culpepper, a near-sighted mermaid named Iris, and Cliff, the island itself, are confident of first place since they have braved the denigrating Sarcastic Sea, valiantly diving for, retrieving, and topping Cliff’s contest headdress with the long-lost wreck of the gold-bearing Water Mole.  An unanticipated factor, though, is the mean, deceitful island of Thurlstone, ruled by a cruel lad embarrassingly named Stacey de Lacey, who turns out to be holding the senior Crisps captive to boot. Oliver must call on inner resources he never knew he had—and a peacock feather—to do battle with the enemy.

May the best boy win, and the most steadfast island, too.

The Actual & Truthful Adventures of Becky Thatcher

By Jessica Lawson  (Simon & Schuster Books for Younger Readers)

Ages 8-12

 It’s a transformation chronicle told many a time: how the Western newspaperman and Mississippi riverboat pilot Samuel Clemens became the famed author Mark Twain, and his characters Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn entered the canon. But how Clemens and Twain morphed into 21^st-century, first-time Colorado novelist Julia Lawson is a whole different story.

With The Actual & Truthful Adventures of Becky Thatcher, Lawson provides an ingenious tale purporting to reveal Twain’s characters for who they really were. And also to put not a few in their places: as minor and often measly participants in a rough-and tumble, mischievous, and death-defying tale centered on Miss Becky Thatcher.

Scrap the “Miss.” Lawson’s Becky is a troublemaker, a truant, a tree-climbing scamp, a witch-watcher, a canny gambler, a true friend to the lonely and outcast, a true enemy to a wussy Tom Sawyer. An unreconstructed tomboy, she prefers her dead brother’s overalls to dresses (“fishskins,”), and boys’ company to girls’, except for Amy Lawrence–smart, pretty, and snubbed mercilessly because her father is the town drunk. With a nod to the idea that this novel is really a story about stories, Mr. Clemens is staying with the Sawyers while his riverboat undergoes repairs.

This is a funny, sunny book in which death, abandonment and intractable grieving nonetheless play their Victorian roles to the hilt. St. Petersburg, a provincial town hugging the banks of the Mississippi, is “as boring as a bible lesson” to Becky on first, gruff impression when she moves there with her mother and her father, appointed the town’s new judge. But the re-location is also an attempt to escape the memory of Becky’s charming rogue of an older brother, Jon, and his mysterious demise. The devastated Mrs. Thatcher barely leaves her room, and Becky believes she’s no longer loved. Whether or not she knows it, she’s trying to become Jon. Numerous St. Petersburg families have lost or been left by fathers, and the mortal presence of disease or violence is never far from this edge of the frontier. Hardly heavy-handed, and a good mimic of Mark Twain, Lawson writes with the emotional insight of our later era.  

Comical the novel is as well, what with Becky’s pranks, back talk, descriptions of her slimy teacher and the town folk’s various pretensions, not to mention the bungling pair of murderous grave robbers, the Pritchard Brothers. In this topsy-turvy Twain’s World, Tom Sawyer is a goody-goody, a snitch, and a sycophant, his most dangerous weapon his cowlick, which Becky fears may poke her in the eye.  

It’s important to remember that, in the novel Twain devoted to him, Tom was the narrator. What if, Lawson intimates, his was just a bunch of bravado hokum? She admits in a note that she intended Becky’s as an “origin story” for Twain before his more iconic characters were but a twinkle in his eye. Becky talks a lot with Mr. Clemens about her brother. His nickname, she tells him, was “Huckleberry.” 

Call Me By My Name

by John Ed Bradley (Atheneum Books for Younger Readers)

Ages 12 and up

In 1965, in slumbering Louisiana, heroes are tall and young, star at football , and are white. Rodney Boulet and his buddies haven’t yet reached their full stature but are training hard. One day, a “splash of sunlight fell from the trees,” Rodney remembers, as a lone figure suddenly materializes like some fleet-running apparition of powerful promise. The assembled rookies could be cut some slack for thinking that here was a godsend bearing inklings of glories to come.

But  “That’s a full-blown colored if I ever saw one,” one of the boys yells, and they attack him, chasing him away.  “They don’t let Negroes in here,” Rodney explains as, surprising himself, he walks the boy home. “My name is Tater Henry,” the stranger says. “Rodney Boulet, I answered.” And, against all odds, they become fast friends.

In Call Me By My Name, John Ed Bradley (Tupelo Nights, It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium), calls the plays on Deep South race relations, generational conflicts, sacrificial romance, the rush of football and its overblown rewards, the making of heroes and of myths, the slow changes in American society, the ruinous ways fate has of snuffing out the lights. His novel hits the high points and low points of a perilous sport, the mania it arouses, and the conflicted lives slipped in between.

Vietnam. Flower power. Black power. The assassination of Dr. King. Tater’s reluctant welcome into Rodney’s all-white high school team doesn’t occur until that chapter in American history is underway, five years after their first ugly encounter. Time after time, he leads a formerly mediocre team to victory, and the state championship looms. Coach takes the unprecedented step of anointing Tater quarterback, and once Tater and Rodney are recruited for the legendary–and legendarily segregated–LSU team, there emerges from Bradley’s toughly sensitive story talk of “the first black superstar.”

The words and attitudes expressed by the locals on another topic—the passionate relationship and abiding love between Tater and Rodney’s twin sister, Angie—hits the novel’s harshest notes of virulent bigotry and dual tragedy (notes that, more muted, remain today). Rodney startles himself with his conflicted feelings, and we are spectators to how Pops, his once thoroughly racist father, tries to explain those twisted emotions to him. In a town where straight allees of trees lead to clustered houses where plantation mansions once stood, the immutabilities of an ostensibly commonplace America strike home. That prevents the community a homerun. But Bradley’s novel hits the bases.

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.