Bea Wolf (Zach Weinersmith)

Bea Wolf

Zach Weinersmith, illustrations by Boulet
First Second Books
Fiction, MG? Fantasy/Graphic Novel/Humor/Poetry
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION:

Hey, wait! Hark now to a tale of heroes and monsters, of foam swords and green soda and tooth-rotting treats, of the ancient King Carl and the many who bore the cardboard crown after he passed into the teen-lands, and of the greatest warrior to ever raise her sugar-sticky fist against the fun-breakers and the bullies: Bea Wolf.
In the high hall of Treeheart, a magnificent stronghold of childhood wonder and hijinks, King Kai and his loyal band enjoy raucous merriment, trading jokes and telling stories and playing video games without parent-approved content... until the enraged neighbor, Mr. Grindle, can stand it no more. His mere touch instantly turns the wildest of children into a dull-eyed, dull-minded teenager, stripping them of their power and joy and ushering them into the doom of gray adulthood. All seemed lost, childhood forever ruined by the mustached monster - until an ally arrives to do battle with the fiendish foe.

REVIEW:

In this homage to the classic epic poem Beowulf, Weinersmith projects age-old concepts of mythology, heroism, loyalty, storytelling, and even the inevitability of entropy and decay of all great things onto the ultimate lost country of childhood.
Intentionally evoking the language and poetry of the original, as well as the alliteration and the dance of words, the tale relates the founding of the "kingdom" by the great king Carl, who - when he inevitably found the chin-whiskers and cracked voice of adolescence upon him, called for a pyre to mark his "death" and passed his crown on to future generations... knowing, even in his "afterlife" checking groceries at the supermarket, that his legend lives on. Heroes of old are evoked throughout, such as the twins who defied bedtime for seven whole days and gained wizardly powers before succumbing to sleep, and the girl whose Halloween candy haul remains unmatched. The current heir to Carl's throne, Kai, has raised the great high hall Treeheart, a place of feasting and merry-making and bedtime-defying for all brave children. But he faces a new threat: Mr. Grindle, "gloom's guardian, teacher of grief," a man who so embodies the epitome of boring, nasty, petty, cruel adulthood that he has become a monster, who only needs to lay one finger on a child to "begeezer" them, leach all their joy and imagination and magic (and there very much is magic involved in this story, which blurs the lines of reality and imagination to create a realm of epic marvels and dangers for the young and a gray, staid "afterlife" for the adults) and make them into phone-staring, rule-following young adults devoid of dreams. Treeheart technically partly overlays his property line, but it's the pure expression of childish joy and anarchy that truly drives the man into a rage, prompting him to defy the traps set to keep grown-ups out - a ladder laced with bug carapaces and boogers and other things repellent to their kind - to savage the very sacred hall itself, until no child dares set foot within. In Kai's time of need and woe, however, an ancient pact is recalled, and an ally from a distant kingdom (another suburb, up the "sliding sea," or river, from his) sends her greatest band of warriors to his aid. The chief of these warriors is the girl Bea Wolf, whose each fist holds the strength of sixty children. But is Mr. Grindle a match even for her bravery and might?
As in the original story, there is, even underneath the moments of triumph and humor, a sense of fate to both victories and defeats, as well as inevitable ending and tragedy, that even the greatest of kingdoms and mightiest of legends will inevitably fade. No child can escape adolescence forever (well, almost no child; there are a few tales mentioned in passing that hint at children who either managed to hold onto their dreams into adulthood or... did not grow up, though I may have been reading a little too much into those). Only the stories survive to inspire and inform the next heroes, passed down by young poets and bards from child to child like Carl's cardboard crown.
At the end, Weinersmith discusses the original Beowulf, the history of the surviving manuscripts, and how Bea Wolf was written to evoke the ancient epic, as well as a few pages of concept art that went into developing the idea. The art itself is worth noting, too, giving noteworthy children their own heraldic shields and creating distinct, occasionally surreal characters and monsters, matching the text in how it blurs lines between realism and fantasy.
The whole is an imaginative ode to timeless classical themes, a story that a clever child should enjoy, but which might speak also to those looking back at childhood from the other side of the teen-lands, hoping perhaps that magic and wonder and adventure yet remain somewhere in this gray and dreamless world, at least for the young.

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Something Wicked This Way Comes (Ray Bradbury) - My Review
Beowulf (Stephen Miller) - My Review
Dragon Magic (Andre Norton) - My Review

Me (Moth) (Amber McBride)

Me (Moth)
Amber McBride
Fiewel and Friends
Fiction, YA Fantasy/Literary Fiction/Poetry
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Once, Moth lived big and bold and bright as the sun itself, full of music and dance, destined for Julliard and a wonderful future... until the car crash that took her family, broke her leg, and left her with the scar across her face. Maybe if she hadn't burned so bright, hadn't taken up more than her share of space and energy and life, Death wouldn't have had to balance the books by stealing her mother and father and beloved brother - or at least Death would've taken her, too. Even the hoodoo magic learned from her late gray-bearded grandfather can't bring back the dead, nor can it undo the great mistake of her survival, so she's stuck living as a shadow of herself in the home of an aunt who hardly seems to notice her, going to a suburban school where nobody bothers talking to her, trying to shrink herself small enough to disappear altogether.
Then the new boy Sani arrives in school, mere weeks before the end of junior year. Like her, he is full of music, pencil forever tapping out rhythms. Like her, he is overlooked. Like her, he is filled to bursting with unspoken pain.
And he, alone of everyone else in the whole world, actually sees Moth - the real her, the girl she's half-forgotten she is at heart.
Summer is coming, and though neither will say it, both know that this will likely be their only time together before the world tears them apart again. Can these two broken souls save each other, or will they end up burning each other to ashes?

REVIEW: This is a poem in the form of a story, or a story in the form of poetry, a tale of deep grief and deeper magic - both the hoodoo traditions of Moth's gray-bearded grandfather and the native Navajo beliefs of half-Native Sani - and how very, very hard it is to heal a shattered dream. Moth blames herself for surviving the crash, for the grief that drives her aunt to drink, for having dared to dream so big that she unbalanced the world... until Sani arrives, a kindred spirit she recognizes from the moment she sets eyes on him. He, too, seems drawn to her, though he hides many secrets and secret pains of his own. More than once, Moth must ask whether his light is the moon to guide her or the flame that will burn her, and the answer is never clear or simple; the traumas that bring them together are the same ones that keep threatening to push them apart. Always, though, is the sense that, however strongly they feel for each other, there will be no long and happy life together; they both hurt too deeply and burn too brightly for their love to last longer than the span of a season, and they both feel driven to squeeze as much love and joy as they can out of that time... and, maybe, possibly, enough healing to keep going on with their own broken lives afterwards. The poetic language lends a surreal sheen to the tale, as does the magic realism that forms the bedrock of Moth's spirituality; there is no doubt that her gray-bearded grandfather's rituals and spells influence her life and fate. A twist at the end nearly drug the story down a half-notch, mostly because it's been overused, but it more or less works here.

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How to Fracture a Fairy Tale (Jane Yolen)

How to Fracture a Fairy Tale
The Yolen's Short Fiction series, Book 1
Jane Yolen
Tachyon Publishing
Fiction, Collection/Fantasy/Poetry
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: An Appalachian daughter confronts a mother risen from the grave as a vampire... a Jewish girl follows the prophet Elijah to a dark place and time in history for an important task... a lamb nurse listens to the tales of the residents of Happy Dens, a home for retired fairy tale wolves... an elderly woman discovers a strange old man with an ancient secret on the rocks near the lighthouse where she lives... These and other folklore-inspired tales written by fantasy master Jane Yolen are collected in this volume, with a foreword by Marissa Meyer and an afterword about the author's inspirations.

REVIEW: Though her stories aren't always my cup of cocoa, nobody can dispute the mastery evident in the breadth and depth (and length) of Jane Yolen's work. As in pretty much every anthology and collection, though, these are a mixed bag, some feeling rounded and complete and others fragmentary and almost dreamlike. Likewise, some feel a bit long for their premises while others seem truncated. Styles vary from the old-school storyteller cadence and repetition of classic fairy tales to lighthearted snark to darker and/or more literary takes. I've read a few before, while others were new to me. Endings are only rarely clear-cut happily-ever-afters, several skewing rather dark, but then the original stories were far removed from the sanitized versions many are familiar with today. I added the extra half-star for the notes at the end, which go into a bit of "behind the scenes" details on how Yolen conceived and developed the included stories, along with poems matching the themes.

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Oddest of All (Bruce Coville) - My Review
Book of Enchantments (Patricia C. Wrede) - My Review
Here, There be Dragons (Jane Yolen) - My Review

The Truth About Dragons (Julie Leung)

The Truth About Dragons
Julie Leung, illustrations by Hanna Cha
Henry Holt and Co.
Fiction, CH Fantasy/Picture Book/Poetry
***** (Great)

DESCRIPTION: At bedtime, a young child's mother tells him a tale of two grandmothers and two dragons, both of which hold their own truth.

REVIEW: This gorgeous picture book celebrates two cultures with two different dragon traditions. Are dragons dangerous hoarders of gold or benevolent river spirits? They are both (and more besides), and for a child with a biracial background, they both have wonder and wisdom to share. The dragon illustrations simply gleam on the page.

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Drawn Together (Minh Le) - My Review
John Ronald's Dragons (Caroline McAlister) - My Review
Tell Me a Dragon (Jackie Morris) - My Review

The Lost Words (Robert Macfarlane)

The Lost Words
Robert Macfarlane
Anansi International
Fiction, CH Poetry
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: When the Oxford Children's Dictionary was updated in 2007, several words were removed as no longer relevant to young readers, replaced with more modern terms related to technology. Acorn, newt, raven, willow... their loss hinted at a loss of nature, a loss of connection to the green world beyond the classroom. With these poems inspired by the missing words, Robert Macfarlane hopes to reforge that connection and spark the sense of wonder that the natural world can bring, even in the internet age.

REVIEW: This is a case where the presentation - in this case, the audiobook - had a distinct impact on the rating. The poems themselves are decent, if a bit variable in quality and content. (I also wonder how much a kid who didn't already know and appreciate nature - particularly the nature of the English countryside - would get out of some of them.) But the audiobook insisted on inserting long lulls between the poems full of birdsong and natural sounds. They comprised at least a third of the total runtime; I timed more than one as longer than the accompanying poem. There's adding atmosphere, and there's just plain overkill... I think this one would work better in the original format, as a picture book with illustrations by Jackie Morris, but as I listened to the audiobook, it's the audiobook version I must review.
(As a closing note, I wonder why the original word definitions weren't included, either with the poems or in an afterword. Wasn't half the point to re-introduce those words to children's vocabulary?)

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Being a Beast (Charles Foster) - My Review
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Lifeboat 12 (Susan Hood)

Lifeboat 12
Susan Hood
Simon and Schuster
Fiction, MG Action/Chiller/Historical Fiction/Poetry
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: When war comes to London, it brings rations, air raid sirens, gas masks, and bombs falling from the skies... all of which could hardly make thirteen-year-old Ken's life much worse, thanks to an overworked father, a stepmother who hardly seems to care for him, and a kid half-sister who steals all the love and attention in the household. Now he's been told that he is to be one of countless children to be shipped away from the city due to the threat of German attacks - all the way across the ocean to Canada. Dad tells him it'll be his own grand adventure, like the ones in the books he's always reading (that of course he can't take with him), but to Ken it feels more like his stepmom has finally found a way to get him out of the house once and for all. Still, once he's on his way, he begins to warm to the prospect, especially when the food aboard the transport ship - luxury liner SS City of Benares, out of India, pressed into national service - is miles above anything he's had in his impoverished, ration-restricted home in memory.
Then the German submarine finds the convoy, and everything goes wrong all at once.
Now Ken is in a cramped lifeboat with hardly any food, not enough water, and odds of rescue diminishing by the hour. What happened to the other passengers and crew of their ship? Where is the British Navy, who was supposed to be following the convoy? And how is anyone ever going to find one tiny, overloaded lifeboat in the middle of the vast Atlantic Ocean?
This story was inspired by true events in World War II.

REVIEW: Melding the horrors of war and ocean survival, the confusion of growing up in turbulent times, and the excitement of discovery and adventure as a young man is pushed into the wider world on his own for the first time (even if that excitement too often runs face-first into the unforgiving chasm of reality), Lifeboat 12 makes a pivotal moment in world history relatable to readers of all ages.
Ken starts out a mere boy, casually selfish in the way of many children, prone to mischief like stealing apples as he acts out anxieties about his home life: he still carries a certain guilt knowing that his mother died shortly after giving birth to him, and has never warmed up to his stepmother, nor she to him. When he finds that his parents are sending him halfway around the world, he sees it as ultimate proof that he's unwelcome in his own home... until the bombs begin to fall, and he realizes the danger they claim they're trying to protect him from is all too real. In the way of children, he adapts quickly to the new reality, becoming obsessed with airplanes and ships until he can identify them at a glance, and thus thinks himself more prepared for the journey to Canada than he really is - even when the trip itself proves at least as dangerous as staying in London, and that's before they even reach the docks and the ship. Along the way, he begins to make new friends and even step up to small leadership roles over younger children. Soon enough, he's forgotten all about the potential dangers of the war... but the war has not forgotten about him, as he learns the hard way in the dead of night. In the mad scramble to escape, he ends up in the wrong lifeboat, one of many crowded into too small of a space with inadequate emergency supplies (there isn't even simple fishing gear on board to supplement canned rations). The emergency levels playing fields almost across the board; boy or girl, passenger or crew, officer or civilian, adult or child, even white English or other (the crew of the luxury liner are Muslims and foreigners, most of them just service crew and not even working sailors), all are literally in the same survival boat. The desperation and tedium are at least as dangerous as exposure and dehydration, and Ken and others try desperately to keep themselves sane... not all of them succeeding.
The story is told in a sort of free verse, with short chapters that have little fat in them, adding an almost surreal overtone. The ending felt a trifle abrupt, and I almost wanted an afterword outlining the original true story and what was kept or changed about Hood's take on events, but other than that it's a solid tale.

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Fragile Things (Neil Gaiman)

Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders
Neil Gaiman
HarperAudio
Fiction, Collection/Fantasy/Horror/Poetry/Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: The months of the year meet to trade stories over a campfire... a mysterious circus proves to be more than it appears... a club of gourmands seeks the ultimate rare delicacy... a man witnesses proof that his reality is not as it seems... These and more tales and poems are related in this collection of stories from modern master Neil Gaiman.

REVIEW: I've mentioned in previous reviews that I find Gaiman a bit hit-and-miss; I can appreciate what he does, but his stories aren't always my cup of cocoa. This is also not the first time I've seen a couple of these; his mashup of Sherlock Holmes and Lovecraft, "A Study in Emerald", I've previously read in another anthology, and the poetic short story "Instructions" has been spun off into a picture book (which I haven't specifically read, but have seen go through the sort at the library shipping center where I work). From those two examples alone, one can infer that there's a broad range of tones and potential target audiences in this collection. As usual for Gaiman, the ideas are always imaginative, and even when the tales weren't quite to my taste they were well executed. In an introduction, he explains the inspirations behind most of them, though part of me wished he'd related them closer to the stories in question; in an audiobook, one can't exactly flip back and forth to an opening section as one reaches a story. The American Gods novella, "Monarch of the Glen", lost some context for me since I haven't read that novel, but stood alone well enough to be understood. Overall, it's a decent collection of tales, even if some of the endings are deliberately ambiguous.

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Odds Are Good (Bruce Coville) - My Review
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Clap When You Land (Elizabeth Acevedo)

Clap When You Land
Elizabeth Acevedo
Quill Tree Books
Fiction, YA General Fiction/Poetry
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Camina Rios lives in the Dominican Republic, but dreams of a future as a doctor with a degree from a prestigious American university. In the meantime, she lives with (and apprentices to) her Tia Solana, practitioner of healing rituals and prayers, and attends an international school thanks to money from her beloved Papi. He spends most of his time in New York City, being a very busy and important man, but tries to get home for a few months every year, even after her mother died. Some day, she wants to follow him back and see the city that seems more fable than reality from his stories... hopefully while she still has a chance to see her dreams come true.
Yahaira Rios lives with her mother in New York City, a solid (if quiet) student and chess master. At one time, she loved her father dearly, until she found a secret hidden in his papers while he was away visiting family back in the Dominican Republic: another wife, married a few months after he married her own mother. It's difficult to love a man who has lied to you since the day you were born, but she wants to love him, almost as much as she wants to expose him for the liar he is... but that will have to wait, as he's already on his flight out of the country. Maybe by the time he returns she'll know how to deal with the feelings tearing her apart inside.
Then comes the horrible news: Papi's plane has crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, with no survivors.
In their separate worlds, the two teenage girls - ignorant of each others' existence - grieve, even as Papi's death threatens to unravel their happiness and their futures.

REVIEW: Clap When You Land is a novel told in free verse, a story of how complicated feelings of love and family can be when the people involved are complicated. Papi was clearly a liar and a cheater, yet he loved his daughters dearly, and provided them with what means he could. Camina never suspected his deceptions, yet has known something wasn't quite right with the arrangement of her life for some time, that there were secrets her tia and other relatives were withholding after her mother's untimely death. She struggles, too, with holding onto her dreams in a place that all too often crushes them, especially the dreams of girls like herself; part of Papi's protection was actually paying people to help keep the leeches and bullies away from his daughter, because girls like her too often get drug into unsavory situations by men turning a buck off the Dominican Republic's tourists. Yahaira, meanwhile, leaves a fairly privileged life in New York City, but has her own problems and struggles, brought to the forefront by Papi's death. Despite mutual shock and distrust when they find out about each other, the girls must pull together if either of them is to have a hope in this world. There are no neat and easy answers, no simplistic moral judgements, but characters who have all been harmed by their great love for a greatly flawed man. The novel is written in verse; the narrators of the audiobook I listened to (one for each girl, as the tale switches back and forth between them) do a decent job evoking that sense of poetry in their reading. I felt parts of the climax were a bit rushed or forced, but overall it's a solid story of two worlds colliding and two people struggling to come to terms with their great and complex grief.

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Paradise Lost (John Milton)

Paradise Lost
John Milton
Blackstone Audio
Fiction, Fantasy/Poetry
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Cast out of Heaven after rebelling against God, the fallen angel Satan broods in Hell and concocts a new plan: revenge himself by corrupting the Creator's newest and most favored creation, man.

REVIEW: From the outset, I admit that I am not the best person in the world to review this classic poem, written in 1674. For one thing, I have all the literary education and awareness of a block of wood. For another, I am not in any way a Christian, and only know of Milton's source material - the Bible - through cultural osmosis (and nothing of his more specific beliefs, influences, circumstances, or worldviews as undoubtedly expressed in this work). That said, it was something I consumed, and therefore, after a long debate with myself over whether it would be worth my while to do so given the aforementioned deficiencies and overall defects in my admittedly non-religious ability to adequately review such an obviously religious epic, I nevertheless shall offer my review. Consider yourself forewarned.
I've been slowly picking away at classics thanks to Overdrive and my local library (and my job being so mind-numbingly dull I need something to do to pass the hours), and it was a day of thin pickings when I needed to restock my loans for work, so this one ended up in the queue. If I'm being honest, I almost stopped early on, with a foreword loaded with classical references that went way over my undereducated head. But at last I got to the actual content, which - while also full of classical references (despite the narrator/author seeming to consider the ages that produced several of them inherently inferior for not being Christian) - at least was more interesting, written in "blank verse" that does not need to rhyme to have rhythm. Milton relates the fall of Satan and of man in epic format, with a nice flow of words and evocative imagery, painting vivid pictures of Heaven, Hell, and other realms and their inhabitants. To an outsider like myself, certain cultural assumptions and quirks of the source material start looking like plot and motivation holes (or simply rationalizations of cultural beliefs and biases, such as an inherent frailty and inferiority of women making Eve the inevitable failure point), with an air of predestination and manipulation about the whole affair. As for matters of sin and salvation and whatnot as related here... again, I'm not a Christian, so I'm not the intended audience to even begin to dissect Milton's theological points. (I will say that I came into this disinclined to practice Christianity, and I depart the same way, and leave it at that.) Though the plot is a bit thin and sometimes meandering and (yes, I'll say it, though it was doubtless one of the main reasons this verse was written) preachy, I wound up rounding it up to a fourth star for some truly resonant verse and imagery that holds up reasonably well given its age, even as I'm aware that an entire library's worth of references and nuance and literary devices were completely wasted on me. It is a compelling work of epic verse, regardless of one's beliefs.

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Lovabye Dragon (Barbara Joosse)

Lovabye Dragon
The Girl and Dragon Books
Barbara Joosse, illustrations by Randy Cecil
Candlewick
Fiction, CH Fantasy/Picture Book/Poetry
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: A princess, alone in a castle, dreams of a dragon friend, while a dragon, alone in a cave, dreams of a princess...

REVIEW: Another quick picture book read during down time at work... This is a quick, fun, cozy little tale told in lyrical prose and imaginative illustrations. Inevitably, of course, girl and dragon meet, becoming best friends. Not much of a plot, perhaps, but that's not really the point of picture books like this. It's about the flow of words and the idea of making friends with a dragon, an idea that still holds appeal to some of us whose childhood bedtime story days are long behind us.

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Beowulf (Stephen Mitchell)

Beowulf
Stephen Mitchell
Yale University Press
Fiction, Fantasy/Poetry
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Rediscovered in the 19th century after hundreds of years in obscurity, the Scandinavian epic poem Beowulf tells a classic story of heroism and loyalty and the sometimes kind, sometimes cruel whims of divine fate. When the monstrous Grendel preys upon the shining great hall of the good king Hrothgar of the Danes, slaughtering his people in their sleep, the brave warrior Beowulf of the Geats comes to fulfill the pact of alliance between the nations and stop the threat, the first of three beastly encounters that will earn him eternal glory - and end in his doom.
This rendering is presented by Stephen Mitchell.

REVIEW: On an academic level, it's amazing that this story has survived at all, given its sheer age and at least one brush with destruction. On a storytelling level, allowing for the style of the day (which, while lyrical, can't help but feel stiff and overly formal and reliant on cultural assumptions and conventions that are no longer common), the tale remains compelling, a clear ancestor to modern epic fantasies with its larger-than-life hero (protected, when needed, by a certain amount of plot armor dressed up as "God's will" or "fate") and monstrous foes and backstories of tangled clan relations and rivalries and treasures from lost eras. The whole, even in moments of triumph, has a certain air of melancholy and loss, how peace and prosperity and alliances will inevitably fall back into blood-rivalries and chaos once the heroes and the good rulers can no longer defend the land from evil's forces, within and without. There is even a hint of sadness for the death of the dragon that ends Beowulf, despite its demonic origins and the destruction its rage wrought.
The author notes in the introduction are interesting, though I personally prefer such things at the end, even on classics: don't assume the reader knows everything (or remembers it if they've been exposed to it before), especially if you're doing your own translation, and let them refresh their memories before diving into trivia and analyses and such. But apparently that's just me, because every classic out there seems intent on front-loading the story with all the notes that would have much more relevance after a refresher... In any event, I enjoyed it for what it was.

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Long Way Down (Jason Reynolds)

Long Way Down
Jason Reynolds
Athenium/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books
Fiction, YA Chiller/Poetry
***** (Great)

DESCRIPTION: The night fifteen-year-old Will's brother Shawn is gunned down in the street, the boy knows just what to do with the grief tearing his heart out. There are Rules for this, taught to him by Shawn, who learned it from others: don't cry, don't snitch, and always take revenge. Will didn't see who pulled the trigger, but he's pretty sure he knows who, and he has the gun Shawn left behind in their shared room. Full of rage and fear and confusion, Will leaves his apartment and takes the elevator to the lobby, intent on following the Rules and exacting his revenge - only to find a dead uncle stepping aboard at the next floor, and another ghost on the one after... It's a long way down to the lobby, and even longer when the dead must have their say.

REVIEW: I listened to the audiobook (read by the author) at work, not quite sure what to expect from such a relatively short piece. The free-form verse tells a story of anger and fear and pain and a self-perpetuating cycle of ultimately pointless payback that destroys lives long after the original injustice (if indeed there was one) has been forgotten. Will has known pain since before he can remember, and known death on a personal level at least as long, as friends and family members have been claimed by the violence that poisons his world like smog. The only way he knows how to deal with grief is by following the Rules that led to the grief in the first place. The ghostly visitors show the scope of the horrors that have encompassed his life since childhood, horrors he never thinks to question until looking into the faces of death all around him. The nightmarish elevator ride has shades of Dickens, but only if all the ghosts were as grim as the Ghost of Christmas Future, with as little hope of salvation. Does Will understand what they're saying, by the end? Is it already too late for him by the time he steps into the elevator car with his brother's gun tucked into his waistband? Did he ever have a choice but to eventually join them, whether today or tomorrow or next year, as the Rules play out endlessly around him, claiming more lives that create more killers that claim more lives? The ending leaves Will's choice and fate unspecified, but there is no doubt that the visions have made him fundamentally reassess his world. It's a powerful, harrowing tale.
The audiobook I listened to included a brief interview with the author, wherein he describes the inspirations for the tale and mentions his own dislike of ebooks, where readers can change font sizes and such in ways that, to his mind, ruin the impact and flow of his verse in an unacceptable way. The ability to change font sizes and types is one of the benefits of ereader devices for people with visual impairments or other issues. For some reason, this broad-brush dismissal irked me subtly. Other than that, the interview (more of a monologue wherein he answered his own questions) was reasonably interesting, though, adding depth and background to the story.

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Day Dreamers (Emily Winfield Martin)

Day Dreamers: A Journey of Imagination
Emily Winfield Martin
Random House
Fiction, CH Fantasy/Picture Book/Poetry
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: A dragon chases the clouds... a tide pool spawns a nautical carousel... unicorns race through a tapestry forest... Imagination takes flight, conjuring all manner of beasts and adventures in all manner of places.

REVIEW: With simple verse and lively illustrations, Day Dreamers is a tribute to the powers of imagination. Dragons, a phoenix, a griffin, and more fly or leap or crawl through the pages, taking daydreaming children on grand (yet safe) adventures. If there's any objection to these kinds of stories, it's that my imagination was never so pastel-colored and bubble-wrapped... but this is a picture book, to be read aloud or enjoyed alone, meant to conjure pleasant imagery and encourage imaginary adventuring, and at that it certainly succeeds.

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The Dream of the Thylacine (Margaret Wild)

The Dream of the Thylacine
Margaret Wild, illustrations by Ron Brooks
Allen and Unwin
Fiction, CH Picture Book/Poetry
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: Caged in a zoo at the end of its life, the last living thylacine dreams of its lost freedom.

REVIEW: Another quick read during a slow stretch at work. This isn't so much a story as an illustrated freeform poem, juxtaposing harsh, often blurred black and white photos of the last known thylacine (Tasmanian tiger) in captivity with bright, dreamlike illustrations of its "memories." It is not a happy story - extinction never is - but a sadly touching one, even as more species teeter on the brink. If you read it with kids, be prepared to discuss why thylacines are no longer alive today, and what one might do to attempt stopping its fate from befalling others.

You Might Also Enjoy:
Heart of a Tiger (Marsha Diane Arnold) - My Review
Last of the Giants (Jeff Campbell) - My Review
A is for Activist (Innosanto Nagara) - My Review

How to Draw a Dragon (Douglas Florian)

How to Draw a Dragon
Douglas Florian
Beach Lane Books
Fiction, CH Art/Poetry/Fantasy/Picture Book
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Dragons are big, but drawing them's easy when you take it in small steps - and when you have a cooperative model. In this rhyming picture book, learn the best way to draw a dragon.

REVIEW: With simple, childlike drawings, this book caters to the young dragon-loving artist who wants to have fun while creating art, without all that bogging down in anatomy or perspective. Each page focuses on a particular part of dragons or their personalities, incorporating both European "Western" and Asian "Eastern" traditions. At the end is a cheat sheet summary. You won't end up with a Picasso or a Whelan, but you will have fun doodling the various dragons for your "art gallery." It's a nice place to start, even if the art was a little simplistic.

You Might Also Enjoy:
How to Draw Your Own Story: The Dragon, The Knight, and the Princess (Don Bolognese) - My Review
Ed Emberley's Big Green Drawing Book (Ed Emberley) - My Review
The Dragons Are Singing Tonight (Jack Prelutsky) - My Review

Dragon Poems for Smiletrain.org 2011 (M. R. Mathias, editor)

Dragon Poems for Smiletrain.org 2011
M. R. Mathias, editor
Amazon Digital Services
Fiction, YA? Anthology/Fantasy/Poetry
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: A selection of poems about dragons, from silly haikus to epic retellings of classic tales. Proceeds from the sale of this volume benefit Smiletrain.org, a foundation providing cleft repair surgeries for children in need.
A Kindle-exclusive title.

REVIEW: It was a free download, and I needed something lightweight to read, so I gave this a try. I enjoyed some of the poems, and the worst of them were merely forgettable. I've read far worse.

You Might Also Enjoy:
Dragon World (Rob Brown) - My Review
Dragons Composed (James Ferris, editor) - My Review
The Dragons Are Singing Tonight (Jack Prelutsky) - My Review