Children Make Terrible Pets

Booklist (October 1, 2010 (Vol. 107, No. 3))
Preschool-Grade 2. Lucy, a tutu- and ribbon-adorned young bear, is instantly besotted with a human boy she finds in the forest. After naming him Squeaker (the only sound he makes) and bringing him home, she begs her mother to keep him, and Mom relents on the condition that Lucy take full responsibility for his care. The two have a ball playing together until Lucy confronts some of the less-appealing aspects of pet ownership, such as potty training and dealing with destroyed furniture. When Squeaker suddenly disappears, Lucy follows his trail, discovers that he has returned to his natural habitat of house and human family, and comes to understand, as countless children have, that not all critters are cut out for domestication. (A final spread shows that Lucy hasn’t given up on her enthusiasm by any stretch, though.) Brown’s distinctive multimedia art, featuring text in colored blocks and characters’ asides printed in word balloons, has a playful, old-time style that matches the woodsy setting and the enjoyable story's upbeat tone.

The Candymakers

Booklist (November 15, 2010 (Vol. 107, No. 6))
Grades 4-6. It starts with unmistakable echoes of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) and eventually features a musical candy a la Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’s “Toot Sweets,” but Mass’ latest novel ends up being a treat all its own. Four 12-year-olds gather at a candy factory to participate in the local segment of a nationwide contest to create a new and delectable piece of candy. One contestant is the only child of the factory’s owner, known here as the Candymaker. Another boy is obsessed with allergies and the afterlife, while the third boy is unfriendly and intent on winning. The lone girl, Daisy, seems to be sweetness itself but displays great physical strength as well as odd behavior. Mass skillfully presents the two and a half days of the kids’ apprenticeship from the perspective of each of the four contestants. At over four hundred pages, this is not a lightning-fast read, but it reveals a multitude of mysteries, explaining all the clues about misunderstandings, spies, and sabotage that Mass has dropped along the way. Attentive, candy-loving readers will be richly rewarded.

Biblioburro

Booklist starred (May 1, 2010 (Vol. 106, No. 17))
Preschool-Grade 2. As in The Librarian of Basra: A True Story from Iraq (2005), Winter once again tells an inspiring story about an untraditional library, but here her setting—the lush jungles of Colombia rather than Basra’s war-torn Iraq—makes for a much lighter tale. After amassing piles of books, Luis, a voracious reader, dreams up a way to share his collection with “faraway villages.” He starts with two burros—one for himself, one for books—and heads off. Tough terrain and menacing bandits challenge him along the way, but at last he reaches a remote town, where he holds a story hour and loans titles to eager kids before returning home to his wife and reading late into the night. Winter’s captivating paintings evoke a South American feel in their brilliant palette and dense, green tropical scenes teeming with creatures, including large, orange-winged butterflies on every page. And Winter offers fresh, visual surprises. In a particularly imaginative scene, cartoon bubbles float over the children’s heads, carrying scenes from the story Luis reads aloud. Winter’s text is spare and streamlined, as usual, and here it has a particularly engaging, repetitive rhythm that builds into a lulling bedtime beat, as day turns into night. Both understated and full of life, this satisfying story is a vibrant reminder of the pleasures of books and the difference one individual can make. An author’s note fills in more about the real-life Luis and his biblioburros.

Betsy Red Hoodie

Booklist (September 15, 2010 (Vol. 107, No. 2))
Grades K-3. The little shepherd in the hoodie sweatshirt who starred in Betsy Who Cried Wolf! (2002) makes another appearance in this loopy, laugh-aloud adventure. Traditional story elements frame the tale: Betsy is asked to carry a basket of baked goods to her grandmother. She responsibly brings her sheep along, with the help of her unlikely co-shepherd, Zimmo the wolf, who disappears along the way. Betsy has always known that “wolves aren’t good for grandmas.” Is Zimmo up to no good? After journeying through mountains and mudslides, Betsy finally reaches her grandmother and finds her alive and well, entertaining surprise guests at a full-swing party. Levine’s well-paced, straightforward storytelling plays nicely against the broad comedy in Nash’s color-washed ink drawings, which are filled with comics-style speech balloons printed with asides and complaints from the sheep (“My wool is itchy”). Full of action, zaniness, and a few meta-moments in which characters crawl out of the story, this makes a good companion to David Wiesner’s similarly fractured The Three Pigs (2001).

A Bedtime for Bear

Booklist (October 15, 2010 (Vol. 107, No. 4))
Preschool-Grade 3. Bear needs everything just so at bedtime. When his friend Mouse arrives for a sleepover, he tries to be accommodating, but Mouse’s bedtime toothbrushing, humming, and whispering put him out of sorts. Unable to sleep, Bear hears a shuffling sound that frightens him, and in the end, he is glad that his resourceful friend is there. Children will see their own nighttime fears mirrored in Bear’s expressive face and body language. The watercolor, ink, and gouache artwork captures all the drama and gentle humor of this gracefully written tale, which reads aloud well.

Because of Mr. Terupt

Kirkus Review (September 15, 2010)
During a school year in which a gifted teacher who emphasizes personal responsibility among his fifth graders ends up in a coma from a thrown snowball, his students come to terms with their own issues and learn to be forgiving. Told in short chapters organized month-by-month in the voices of seven students, often describing the same incident from different viewpoints, this weaves together a variety of not-uncommon classroom characters and situations: the new kid, the trickster, the social bully, the super-bright and the disaffected; family clashes, divorce and death; an unwed mother whose long-ago actions haven't been forgotten in the small-town setting; class and experiential differences. Mr. Terupt engineers regular visits to the school's special-needs classroom, changing some lives on both sides. A "Dollar Word" activity so appeals to Luke that he sprinkles them throughout his narrative all year. Danielle includes her regular prayers, and Anna never stops her hopeful matchmaking. No one is perfect in this feel-good story, but everyone benefits, including sentimentally inclined readers. (Fiction. 9-12)

The 3 Little Dassies

Booklist (September 1, 2010 (Vol. 107, No. 1))
Preschool-Grade 2. First things first: dassies, or rock hydraxes, are small mammals native to sub-Saharan Africa. In this “Three Little Pigs” adaptation, three dassies strike out to make new homes. While Timbi takes the time to construct a solid stone dwelling, hasty siblings Mimbi and Pimbi use grass and sticks, respectively. After being pursued by an eagle, the dassies’ natural predator (playing the wolf’s traditional role here), Mimbi and Pimbi find shelter at Timbi’s, where a blast from the chimney sends the villainous bird “home for a nap,” wrapping up the tale with a nonviolent end. The familiar plotline is extended in the intricate watercolor-and-gouache artwork in Brett’s signature triptych layout: each central panel reflects the action described in the text, while wordless panels on either side show equally involving scenes, all handsomely framed by depictions of cloth, beadwork, and vegetation. Brett invokes the African setting with details of the desert landscape and the animals’ colorful, patterned clothing. The last page turns the story into an inspired pourquoi tale about dassies’ habitat and the sootlike coloring of native eagles.