Cookie & Poseidon

Today’s book is one my daughter found at the library. She found it on display, read through it, and recognized one of our favorite characters…Chico Bon Bon! It’s not another Chico Bon Bon book, but it is by the same author, Chris Monroe.  Cookie the Walker has the same style-funny little dialogue asides throughout the pages, with occasional panels.  Cookie is a dog who startles and delights his humans and his animal friends when he stands on two legs and walks around. He explains that it’s not just fun and unusual, but also sometimes convenient (as in, reaching treats on the counter.)  Cookie’s talents attract the attention of ever bigger agents, eventually landing him in Hollywood.  Like with many a quick rise to fame, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.  It takes a friend from home to help Cookie figure out the simple answer to his problems.

 

 I haven’t read Poseidon and the Sea of Fury (Heroes in Training #2) by Joan Holub myself, but my son read it this week and enjoyed it very much. He’s definitely interested in the mythology stories (and enjoyed the preview for Percy Jackson:Sea of Monsters) and this seems like a good choice for a younger reader not yet reading Percy Jackson.   He also read (and recommended to his dad!) Jason and the Golden Fleece retold by Nel Yomtov.  I have to say, I wish these retellings in chapter book form, graphic novel, and imagining the Greek gods as kids, were around when I was a kid. What a fun way to learn about the gods and their stories!

The Birthday Boy’s Recommendations

Happy 8th birthday to my wonderful boy! In honor of his birthday today, he will be telling you about some of his favorite books: Introducing, Clark:

The Legends of Zita:  this is good because it has a lot of action and it is fiction 

 

 

 

 

Copper this is good because it is a whole  bunch of short comics

 

 

 

 

The Zack Files: this is about a boy named Zack it is AWESOME

 

 

 

 

BeastQuest this is about two kids they are not related.  they fight monsters it is cool

 

 

 

 

The Secrets of Droon this is about three friends named Eric,Julie and Neal they go to a different world and go on missions.

 

 

 

 

I wish he would tell you a bit more about them, but he is a boy of few words and little details! And, since it is his day I’m not messing with his post and leaving it as is. I’ll add one more book, though, that he got this morning for his birthday that he is delighted with:

Survive-o-pedia by David Borgenicht.  Wonder how to survive an electric eel? a plane crash? alligator attack? rip currents? quicksand? or any other disastrous situation? This book has the answers! From the Worst Case Scenario Handbook people (and possibly adapted from??).  He’s loving all these scenarios and taking the advice to heart.  He especially enjoyed the entry on the running of the bulls, which he’d never heard of before, and we learned will be happening tomorrow! He has a plan in place for how to escape the bulls that includes riding on top of one. And yes, it’s only 10am and he’s already fully into his new book.

Ice in Summer

Twelve Kinds of Ice by Ellen Bryan Obed, with scattered illustrations by Barbara McClintock is a slim little book that caught my eye on the new book shelf.  Reading about ice and winter seemed like a wonderful antidote to hot summer days, so I checked it out.  Longer than a picture book, shorter than a chapter book, I’m not sure what to call this, but I thought it would be nice for reading aloud, and it was.  We read it in two installments.  It begins by describing the first ice that appears in late fall-the thin ice on top of a bucket that easily breaks.  Successive ices are described with a building anticipation and excitement. It’s funny because as the reader your excitement builds along with the children in the story even though you don’t know exactly what they are excited for, though we assume it is for ice skating.  But not just ice skating! Oh, no.  This family lives in a climate where once it gets cold enough it stays cold enough all winter to have an ice rink in their yard.  They skate every day and the winter culminates with an ice show.  It all felt very Canadian, though the author is from Maine, so I guess that’s where this is (since it seems to be her childhood.)  I loved this and the kids liked it too.  We’ve always wanted to have a skating rink in our yard but our winters are not consistently cold enough.  It was fun to enjoy imagining it through this book.

I’m delighted to say that this next book my son gave me to read after he had read it himself, telling me how good it was.  The Sleepwalkers by Viviane Schwarz is a graphic novel about a group of animals that rescue children in nightmares.  A child with nightmares puts a letter under his or her pillow, they receive it, and then they enter the nightmare to save the child by bringing it to their safe house.  The three Sleepwalkers seem to be getting ready for some sort of change, as they each create a new apprentice.  The big bear is first, and he is very nervous about his ability to help children.  There is adventure in how they rescue all the children, but there’s also a bittersweetness to the story as the responsibility is passed to the newcomers and the old ones must leave.

A Couple of Odd Ducks

I’m not sure where I saw Odd Duck listed, but when I saw it was by Cecil Castlucci and Sara Varon I put it on my hold list at the library. It took so long to come in I forgot all about it!  I also couldn’t remember if I’d ordered it for myself or the kids. It’s a bit of a toss up because Cecil Castelucci has written YA books I’ve really liked, and I was the one who read Sara Varon’s Bake Sale (absolutely charming.)  I read it aloud to everyone and we all liked it and it certainly could have been something for my son to read on his own. Theodora is a duck who lives by herself and has a very particular routine.  She swims with a teacup on her head, visits the library and checks out books no one else wants, doesn’t fly south, and is very pleased with herself.  One day a new neighbor moves in who is everything she’s not-messy, sloppy, and rude.  The neighbor is very friendly towards her, but Theodora doesn’t want a friend, especially one like him.  But then it turns out that he doesn’t fly south either and as it’s just the two of them there over the winter they get to know each other and end up having a grand time.  Then one day in the spring (when the rest of the town is back) they overhear someone saying “odd duck”—but who is being referred to? No surprises in the ending, although shockingly, neither one of my kids could guess what was going to happen.  This is a charming story of friendship and quirks and has lots of illustration details that are fun.  Not surprisingly, it’s published by First Second!

Dodsworth in Tokyo by Tim Egan is an easy reader with short chapters.  I was attracted to it by the title alone-an easy reader about Tokyo? I had to see what it was like!  I read this aloud to my younger child and she was definitely interested in the setting, as well as the funny story.  Dodsworth (a pig??) and his duck travel to Tokyo.  Dodsworth is pretty apprehensive about the whole thing because Japan is a land of manners and customs and his duck has proven, in the past, to be uncouth and make a spectacle of himself.  Dodsworth seems to know a lot about the land and culture and points out famous sights to the duck and teaches him a few words. Duck is most interested in the wagashi, colorful Japanese desserts, which Dodsworth promises to him as an incentive to behave.  Of course, Duck ends up causing a scene anyway, but it turns out it’s all for a good reason.I had never read a Dodsworth book so was delighted when we got to the end and saw on the back cover that there are actually several books about Dodsworth’s travels. We’ll definitely be checking out more! Arigato, Mr. Egan!

All Kinds of Comics

I can barely keep up lately with all the books my second grader is zooming through.  His floor is a mess of library books-chapter books, non-fiction, and comic books.  Honestly, it’s hard to know what he has read and what he liked.  He really enjoys comic books and our library has a pretty good and diverse collection.

He just read Legends of Zita the Spacegirl by Ben Hatke and really liked it. I can tell because he was excited that at the end it said another book would be coming out soon and he can’t wait for it. In the meantime it turns out that the one he read was #2, so we’ll go back for #1.  I have to point out that this is published by First Second, which is our favorite graphic novel publisher.  My husband and I have read a lot of their graphic novels and I feel that they consistently publish great stuff.  I’m excited to see their younger stuff is a hit with our kids, too. (Yes, they publish the Guinea P.I. series.) Anyway, Zita is a girl who one day goes through a portal after her friend and finds herself in an alien world.  In her quest to get her friend back she find out that she’s a pretty awesome hero. My husband chose this book and confided to me that one of the reasons he picked it is because it had a girl main character and he wants to make sure that sometimes he reads books about girls! Anyway, since I started this post yesterday morning we did get the other book and he finished it before bed. I’ve noticed he definitely favors books that he can read in one sitting, a day or a few days at most. I got out The Sixty-Eight Rooms for him (which I had read and really enjoyed, thought might be better suited to, say, a 4th grader, but worth a try) and he started it, but gave up. I was not surprised that he said was interested in the story but it was taking too long to get to the action for him to want to continue it.

 

Another series he started and wants more of are retellings of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. He read How the Leopard Got His Spots, retold by Sean Tulien and Pedro Rodriquez and really liked it. Interestingly in the course of searching I was reading reviews on Amazon. Most are fairly negative, with  people complaining that these retellings stray from the original too much and the beautiful essence of Kipling is lost.  Since he likes these I’ll still get him them, but I’m thinking he could also certainly read the original tales. I remember very well thinking these tales were funny and clever when I was a kid.

 

When I was at the library I picked up a few of the Good Times Travel Agency books, including Adventures in Ancient Egypt  and Adventures in the Ice Age, all written by Linda Bailey and illustrated by Bill Slavin.  These are a blend of fiction and non-fiction, so it’s convenient that they are just in the comics section.  These were a big hit with him and we’ll certainly be reading more in the series.  The premise is very similar to the Time Warp Trio books.  Some kids visit an old musty travel agency where the proprietor gives them a special guidebook. They open it and poof! They are in their long-ago destination.  There’s a story as the kids experience society, but every page has sidebars of facts about that civilization. If non-fiction like this had been around when I was a kid I would have read a lot more of it.  Because really, it is completely fascinating to learn about these other times and places, but nobody wants to just read dull chapters about it without any pictures.

 

The Olympians

For some time now we’ve been trying out various books, looking for age appropriate things, that would introduce our second grader to the stories of the Greek gods and goddesses.  Mythology is a well-spring of fascinating stories, but given that a lot of them involve murder, incest, and other crazy things, it can be difficult to find more simplified stories. And Bullfinch’s Mythology is a bit dense. (And the days of Clash of the Titans being on seemingly every Saturday or Sunday afternoon on channel 9 are long since gone.) We’ve come across the graphic novel Olympians series by George O’Connor, which seems to have hit the nail on the head in terms of story and level. I thought they might be too over my son’s head, but when we asked him about Poseidon aside from not knowing how to say the name (“Pose-a-dun”) he was able to tell us all about what had happened to him quite thoroughly.  And he liked it so much he asked me to get the rest of the series from the library.  I confess that I do feel like these might be a bit much for a second grader, but he is captivated by them and doesn’t appear traumatized by reading about Hades, so he may go right ahead and read them all.
I like that the end pages include one page fact sheets about the various gods and goddesses in the stories, including their modern legacy, how they appear in constellations, and more. Presently the series includes Zeus, Athena, Hera, Hades, and Poseidon. I’d love to find something similar to tell the stories of Jason and the Argonauts and the Trojan Horse. And when I do, I’ll be sure to share them with you!

Guinea P.I.–Detective Pants on the case!

Guinea Pig, Pet Shop Private Eye is the real name of this series, but we just call it “Guinea P.I.” since that’s what it looks like on the cover, and that’s the joke of it.  Sasspants* is a guinea pig and when the “g” falls off his sign a hamster thinks it’s a sign announcing him as a private detective.  Welcome to Mr. Venezi’s pet shop, where all the animals are mislabeled (the shop doesn’t really have walruses, llamas, gorillas, koalas, and tractors). Meet the characters:

Sasspants, the reluctant at first P.I., his name alone is hilarious (Detective Pants!) He’s kind of grumpy, likes to read literature, wants to be left alone, eventually he really is friends with Hamisher. He’s the long-suffering smart one in the shop, while most of the other animals are excitable and easily fooled.
Hamisher, the sort of annoying, overly enthusiastic and adoring hamster. He’s the one who makes Sasspants solve mysteries and become friends.
The goldfish, who are very stupid.
Gerry, the snake who makes comments about wanting to eat everyone.
The chinchillas-obsessed with fashion, celebrities, and their hair. One of them keeps a mouse and dresses it up all the time and carries it around like a doll.
Viola, a shop assistant  who actually is great with the animals joins the cast in book #4.

Each book is a small mystery that Sasspants must solve, struggling to make sense of things as all the other animals talk at once and are often idiotic, if well-meaning.  It’s all dialogue in these graphic novels, and there’s a lot of it. At the end of each book a page called “Hamisher Explains” includes information about something that occurred in the book (animals, how mice get through walls, etc.)

This is a very funny series, a little difficult to read aloud, but a lot of fun and we all enjoy these. There are 5 books so far:

#1 Hamster and Cheese
#2 And Then There Were Gnomes
#3 The Ferret’s a Foot
#4 Fish You Were Here
#5 Raining Cats and Detectives

 

 

*Sasspants is an awesome name, right up there with Chico Bon Bon. They are my top two favorite character names.

Series Reading

Earlier this week I wrote about the chapter books I’ve been reading to my daughter, so today I thought I’d share some of the series that my son especially enjoys, or has enjoyed. He’s at a point now where he reads through series rapidly and I don’t even know what the books are. Yesterday he finished a book on the way to the library and was thrilled to get the next ones while we were there and read one of them in one sitting. Obviously, these are not long dense chapter books.  I picked up Fangbone to see what the fuss was about and I can definitely see why a second grade boy would love these.  There are three volumes so far (at least in our library system), they are by Michael Rex, and they are graphic novels. In the first book, Third Grade Barbarian, you get the backstory on Fangbone.  He’s a kid from Skullbania (running joke-everyone says, “Is that in New Jersey?”), a sort of Viking, barbarian, caveman type time/place.  Everyone picks on him, yet he’s entrusted with a big toe of a dead evil leader and sent through a portal to our time/place.  With instructions to fit in he follows kids into a school and joins a third grade class.  Lots of funny jokes about him not knowing about civilized things (“making droppings” in a toilet, meatloaf, games) and a moderate amount of gross humor (eating boogers, the yucky big toe.) All the kids in the class love his sword, helmet, and fur underwear, and he finds out that they all make a great team to defeat the crazy creatures that are also sent through the portal after the toe.

 

He’s also presently working his way through The Littles series, by John Lawrence Peterson. This is an old series from the 60s and The Littles are a family of  tiny people who live in the walls of a house, much like The Borrowers.  I wish I could say I read this myself as a child, but somehow it passed me by.  He’s read several of these and likes them all.  They are pretty short chapter books, so satisfying to go through quickly.

 

 

The A to Z Mysteries by Rob Rob are also fairly short, and my younger daughter actually likes these quite a bit as well.  We have listened to several of them on audiobook as a family, I’ve read some of them aloud, and my son is now reading the special editions by himself.  They are fairly formulaic mysteries, which are all solved by a group of young children. Dink, Ruth Rose, and Josh are standard nosy kids with friends on the police force. They encounter an astonishing amount of crime.  I have to say, though, that it is not always obvious what the solution to the mystery is, which is fun. It doesn’t matter if you read these in order or not, so you can just take whatever is available.

 

A particular favorite this year has been the My Weird School series by Dan Gutman. They all have funny rhyming titles, such as Miss Daisy is Crazy, Mr. Hind is Out of His Mind, and Mrs. Patty is Batty. We’ve listened to a couple of these on audio and they are indeed very funny.  Despite the titles the teachers at the school are not truly all crazy.  These are comfortably funny school stories and remind me in a way of the Wayside School stories by Louis Sachar. There’s a follow up series called My Weirder School as well, for kids who just can’t get enough.  Dan Gutman is a prolific author and he definitely knows what kids like.  We’ve also listened to/read some of his other stand alone chapter books [The Get Rich Quick Club has an outstanding punchline of an ending.]

 

I think series books are great for kids and these are just a few of the ones that have been enjoyed in our house. And, although I doubt those titles are big surprises to my readers, it doesn’t hurt to remind you of them.  Now, I just want to mention one more series that is certainly famous enough that it needs no recommendation.  However, maybe you have a new reader and are looking for something to enjoy together? Or maybe you’ve never considered these. Or maybe you haven’t caught up with the newest volumes. The Magic Tree House books by Mary Pope Osborne. This wonderful series is about a brother and sister, Jack and Annie, who have a magic tree house that takes them on adventures all over the world and all throughout time.  It’s basically just a premise for teaching kids about everything-Pompeii, dinosaurs, ancient China, Abraham Lincoln, the Dust Bowl, the San Francisco earthquake, King Arthur, and so on.  The books are well researched and there are even spin-off non-fiction books.  We started reading these when the kids were pretty little  as read alouds (in one or two sittings), then enjoyed these as audiobooks (narrated by Ms. Osborne herself), and then as independent reading.  I think they are a great introduction to chapter books and, since they weren’t around when I was a kid, have enjoyed them very much myself!

 

 

 

Here They Come, to Save the Day….!

Captain Raptor is a dashing hero who happens to be a dinosaur. He lives on the planet Jurassica, and the other characters are also dinosaurs. This first adventure, Captain Raptor and the Moon Mystery by Kevin O’Malley,  reminds me a bit of Star Wars, just in terms of the generals, the ship Capt. Raptor flies with his crew, how Capt. Raptor is a suave and esteemed hero (imagine Han Solo as velociraptor),and so on. Capt. Raptor and his crew take off in their spaceship, Megatooth, to investigate a mysterious flash of light that seems to have landed on a nearby planet. They have a dangerous adventure just getting there, and once they do the alien planet is full of danger.  I love the storytelling style of this–very 1950s science fiction comic book.  The illustrations, by Patrick O’ Brien,  go along with that style, too. Lots of “could this be the end of Captain Raptor?”  This is a great adventure, with the fun twist of the dinosaurs.  When we first read this I thought of it as a picture book, but it is actually in the comic book section.

Captain Raptor returns to the save the day in Captain Raptor and the Space Pirates.  This second adventure is particularly fun and exciting because of double-crossing and tricks.  When a hoard of fearsome space pirates storm the imperial palace and steal all the jewels of Jurassica, the president calls in Captain Raptor to track them down and reclaim their treasure.

We’ve enjoyed reading these stories aloud together, but they are also great for independent 1st or 2nd grade readers.

 

Halo is also a can-do heroine, but quite a bit different than Captain Raptor.  She is in a series of graphic novels by Michael Dahl, illustrated by Jeff  Crowther.  In the first book, Sugar Hero, you meet Halo, a nice girl who lives with her grandma, a taxi driver. On Halo’s 11th birthday she receives a box from her aunt that is filled with mysterious bottles of candy. Upon trying the first one, she is filled with a superpower of flaming fire and zooms across the sky (they are labeled in Spanish, so that candy was “fuego” something.)  From then on she uses the candies in each of the books to fight evil.  In the first one she battles her school nemesis, Doozie, who is a liar and a cheat and has superpowered hair. The other books in the series are The Evil Echo, The Green Queen of Mean, and The Marshmallow Mermaid. We’ve read them all, but the last one is our favorite.  It turns out that an evil mermaid has been trapped under the school pool for years and she is sneaking out at night to eat up marshmallows-but she’d be happier eating people!

The audience for these comics is surely not 5 year olds, but that’s who loves these in our house. I’ve read them aloud many times to my daughter and she will also sit and “read” them herself over and over again. Although Halo has a crush on a boy, there is nothing that’s inappropriate in them. They are a great elementary school comic book series! Halo rules!

Favorite Animal Friends

Isn’t it funny that so many picture books (and even older children’s books) have animals as characters? It never strikes me as odd that the animals talk, wear clothes, inter-species mingle, and are basically human. I just think it’s interesting that books for adults do not do that (with the striking exception of David Sedaris’s Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk.) Today I thought I’d share with you a few of our favorite animals friends from our collection.

Little Whistle is an adorable guinea pig.  In fact, we have three guinea pigs ourselves and one of them looks so much like Little Whistle that I can’t believe we didn’t name him that.  He is the star of Little Whistle by Cynthia Rylant, illustrated by Tim Bowers.  He lives in a toy shop which lives up to my expectations in that all the toys have active nighttime lives once the shades are drawn.  He is actually the only living creature in the store, but that’s ok-he can still play with the others.  He’s got all kinds of friends in the store-Lion who likes cookies, Bear who likes hats, Violet who sings, and Soldier who reads stories to the baby dolls. This is such a sweet and somewhat old-fashioned story. It’s one I’ve read aloud dozens of times since my kids were quite young, and I always liked the use of the phrase “quiet contentment” in it because I think it is a good description for the book itself.  Little Whistle has two other books-Little Whistle’s Medicine and Little Whistle’s Christmas.

Chico Bon Bon is quite the opposite of Little Whistle.  He is an extremely handy monkey with a toolbelt filled with all kinds of crazy tools with wacky names.  We first met Chico when we read not his first book, but Monkey with a Toolbelt and the Noisy Problem by Chris Monroe.  Chicolives in an amazing treehouse with tons of rooms in it, which you see when he has to go all over his house looking for the source of a terribly loud noise. Arooga Boom Clang! Clang! What could it be? He ultimately finds the improbably source of the problem-a large elephant stuck in the laundry chute. It takes all his most clever handy thinking to get him out.  Now, here’s the kicker for my family and why we had to immediately buy the book. The first time we read this and turned the page to see the elephant stuck in the chute it was a funny visual, but then we read the elphant’s speech bubble, “My name is Clark.” My son’s name is Clark and I can tell you it has never ever come up in any other book we’ve read. So there was much shrieking with laughter and disbelief.  But, even if your name is not Clark, you will still love this hilarious book.

For the record, we also love the name Chico Bon Bon so much that it’s our favorite character name and we named one of our Mii’s that.  Chico Bon Bon has a couple other books, and we also really like Monkey with a Toolbelt and the Seaside Shenanigans. In this one he goes to Clark’s uncle’s seaside resort where all kinds of shenanigans have been happening.  Chico has to figure out the clues and then use his wacky tools to solve the problem.  I guarantee once you read these books you will find yourself saying “Hand me that loosey lou, would you?” the next time you’re doing a home repair.

I’m not really sure what kind of animal/creature Polo is, but he’s definitely a favorite friend of ours. He appears in a series of small books: Polo and the Magician, Polo and Lily, Polo and the Magic Flute, Polo and the Dragon, and a couple of larger books-The Adventures of Polo and Polo The Runaway Book. (For some reason we own all the little ones, but not the big ones. Definitely worth adding to our home collection, though.) They are all by Regís Faller and are wordless panel style books (you will likely find them in your library’s comic book/graphic novel collection.) Polo lives in a treehouse on a little island. He has a little boat and a happy little life that seems to be filled with adventures. The pictures and overall feeling are absolutely charming.  There’s definitely quite a magical element to the stories, for example when he’s ice-bound in Polo and the Dragon he draws a door, goes through it, and finds himself in a warm tropical world. These stories are so much fun that we’ve read them over and over again.  In the bigger books it is fun to see the characters you have met along the way in the smaller books.  I feel like Polo is not super well known here, but he definitely deserves to be. And, because there is no text, these books can be read and enjoyed by a wide range of ages.