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.
Fourteen Bears 
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