A surprise in your illustrated books is OK. You comic book fans know what I’m talking about. The cover doesn’t exactly match the content inside or has text that infers something that might be direr. The Most Haunted House in America is an illustrated book that follows that comic book playbook to the letter. This is a beautifully illustrated book with art that drags you in with the skeleton hands that you’ll quickly see once you open it.
An anthology doesn’t always have to be allegorical. Windswept is a fantasy book that combines elements of those two categories into something that also crosses over in fables and fairy tales. To add to the trippy attitude of the book it has the all-seeing eye that’s firmly placed below a tree. And this is before you know anything about the plot, which is about children being literally swept away by the winds, never to be seen again.
The cover of Dear Wild Child immediately catches your attention. It’s the silhouette of a young girl whose long hair is whishing in the wind. Inside her head’s outline are the shapes of a forest in the grip of autumn’s peak with cabin shapes that are inlaid where her eyes, nose, and mouth should be. It’s a nature person’s Picasso, with just a hint of mystery-and that’s just the cover. Once you open Dear Wild Child and start reading it you’ll find a story about nature, family, and loss. This illustrated book also has a curve that readers aren’t expecting.
Aspects of middle and high school represent the worst parts of agar. Agar is the gunk that’s collected in a petri dish. The school equivalent of agar gone bad are typically the entitled, popular, pretty without a conscious folk, jocks, bullies or those kids that have a chip on their shoulder for no meaningful reason. They’re the great heels in popular movies and will resonate with all readers in Witch For Hire. Witch For Hire is a graphic novel by Ted Naifeh that is 100% current, with real-world peer pressure and social strife that teens will encounter. It also adds a fabulous sense of dread, witches, and monsters that are just as real as the weight that popularity and social media add to today’s teens.
You don’t need to enjoy anime to appreciate its art or entertainment value. For example, I’ve only seen a dozen or so anime films, but have enjoyed each one of them for different reasons. Those film fans who don’t know anime at all still enjoy the work of Mamoru Hosoda. The Man Who Leapt Through Film is a coffee table-style book for movie fans, anime people, Japanohpiles, as well as animation fans who are curious about the creative process. It’s also a clever head nod to one of Hosoda’s most popular films, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.
We recently got back from a weekend trip to the city. It felt odd simply calling it, ‘the city’ because there are thousands of cities and to give it such a distinctive article makes it seem like it’s special simply by its size. These are some of the random things that puddle through my mind. Ride, Roll, Run-Time for Fun! is a picture book that features bold, geometric shapes and a group of kids playing in a big city. This is rhyming picture book fun that’s going to hammer down enjoyment to pre-k kids through kindergarten.
One reason why mglit realistic fiction is challenging for some middle school readers is that life is not always 100% happy. There are sad, chaotic, confusing, and disappointing moments that everyone lives through. On the surface, those feelings don’t exactly roll out the reading red carpet to those 12-year-olds who are juggling their own personal issues, locker combinations, family issues, school work or sports. However, dig just a bit past the surface and those readers will discover that their issues, despite how unique and utterly end-of-world they might seem, actually have commonalities with realistic fiction characters. Coming Up Short easily falls into that category. It’s mglit that seems unique, end-of-world, and happens in a place where it could never really happen, but again, dig just a bit past the surface.
When I saw the cover to The Extincts, Question For The Unicorn Horn it was an immediate connection to The O.W.C.A. Files. For a period in our life, when our kids were older than five and younger than 11, we saw Phineas and Ferb at least once a day. Thus, we’ve seen The O.W.C.A. Files, which was a stand-alone episode that aired after that series finale. In The Extincts, Quest for the Unicorn Horn, we see a cat, bird, frog, and wooly mammoth-looking creature all wearing spy gear and running towards the reader. It’s a graphic novel by New York Times Bestselling Illustrator Scott Magoon that does much the same in that it jumps into your hands like a kitten that wants its belly rubbed. And I say that in the best of all ways possible because I love it when a cat or kitten jumps near my hand and wants to be scratched.
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