CET Writes

Image from amazon.com Transitioning gracefully from fact to myth and back again, Kellogg’s take on the remarkable life and Johnny Appleseed legend which grew up around John Chapman is an attractive introduction to one of America’s first folk heroes. Hewing close to reality with a linear but episodic narrative, the tale of the most famous nurseryman in the United States is simplified for young audiences and presents as fact not only verifiable details of Chapman’s life but also a handful of digressions into possible but improbable occurrences. Among these is his victory in an impromptu tree-chopping contest which reaches into nigh-surreality when aided by the wordless full-bleed opening showing a legion of woodsmen in an axe-wielding frenzy. Beyond such direct embellishment of the tale, Kellogg’s densely textured art creates a frontier that, if not quite Disney-fied, certainly contains vastly more smiling woodland creatures in picturesque vistas and far fewer instances of hardship...

Image from amazon.com In three parallel strands, Yolen’s near-poetic prose relates the tall tale, the history, and the bare facts of the life of John Chapman, who even in his lifetime was better known as Johnny Appleseed. Simply and rigidly organized, each opening presents a full-bleed, double-page spread, a new verse to a continuing song, a dramatized portion of Chapman’s history, and a briefly stated fact. The five-line song stanzas each end with the refrain “Johnny, Johnny Appleseed,” and serve as the conduit for the traditional tale, albeit in a soft-focus, generalized style without any mention of the specific outlandish acts of derring-do that make the Johnny Appleseed stories so compelling to many. Grouped in a apple-bordered, ragged-edged cartouche with each verse is an entry titled “The History,” which together comprise the bulk of the text, telling the story of Chapman’s life in a narrative which is factual but embellished with unknowable details to round out the tale. D...

The second of four children in a Ojibwa family on the shores of Lake Superior, eight-year-old Omakayas--Little Frog--despises her obnoxious little brother, idolizes her older sister, and adores the new baby. As the family progresses from their birchbark-clad shoreline summer wigwam to their winter village cabin, camping with cousins to make sugar and gather rice along the way, Erdrich primarily follows the protagonist’s struggles and adventures, both internal and external. The text, which is liberally peppered with Ojibwa words and phrases even going so far as to reintroduce the familiar moccasins as  makazins , thoughtfully includes a glossary with pronunciation guide after the last chapter as well as a map of the family’s travels printed on the endpages. The daily work of carving a living from the land is central to the action, including anecdotal descriptions of the tasks necessary to keep Omakayas’ family and clan going such as hide tanning, icefishing, maize farming, an...

Wilder’s  Little House in the Big Woods  is the first book of her series that has come to be known as the “Little House books.”  The story, which is a year in the life of the author who is four years old at the book’s opening, is set in 1871 and mainly occurs in a little log cabin on the edge of the Big Woods of Wisconsin where the protagonist lives with Ma, Pa, her older sister Mary, and her baby sister Carrie.  The intricate black and white line art of Garth Williams and  the green and white gingham endpages compliment the image of the simple beauty and dignity of pioneer life that the text works so hard to cultivate.  Nonetheless, the story is rather oddly told from a third person limited point of view that focuses on Laura.  Consequently, Wilder serves as both the narrator and main character yet she scrupulously avoids referring to her experiences in the first person, choosing to instead effect a childish sense of awe and wonder that an adu...

The House on Mango Street  is a fictional account of the coming-of-age of Esperanza Cordero which is loosely based on Cisneros’ own childhood in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago.  According to Cisneros in an interview that appeared in the Holt, Rinehart, and Winston’s textbook  Elements of Literature , “all my fiction stories are based on nonfiction, but I add and cut and paste and change the details to make them ‘more real’—to make the story more interesting....  I’m doing what every good fiction writer does.  I’m taking ‘real’ people and ‘real’ events and rearranging them so as to  create  a better story, because ‘real’ life doesn’t have shape.  But real stories do.”  Reminiscent of Gloria Naylor’s  Women of Brewster Place  (1982), the first person point of view of this “real story” encourages the audience to intimately connect with the vignettes that have been stitched together to depict Esperanza’s burgeoning maturation in the...

In her preface to this edition of  Forever... , Blume, in addition to cautioning readers to take more precautions than her pre-HIV/AIDS characters do, expresses gratitude that “some things, like  feelings , never change.” The timelessness of teenage drama and awkwardness at the dawn of adulthood contributes to the evergreen quality of a work which references such 1970s staples as fondue parties and vinyl records. The realistic treatment in both word and action of Katherine and her peers as they haltingly progress beyond adolescence appeals to modern readers at the same stage of life with its immediacy and matter-of-fact manner, while providing audiences who have passed through this baptism by fire with a familiar set of tropes which ring true even if the details differ from their own experiences. Temporal affairs and technologies have changed the venues, communications, and risks, but the character-driven interactions remain recognizable from generation to generation. Among...

Image from amazon.com Self-aware from the opening endpages to its closing endpages, Rex’s second volume of Frankensteinian verse is simultaneously the gift and the curse--a paean to the horror fiction of the past two centuries as well as a lyrical skewering of it. Because of the rather broad body of work to which it alludes, younger readers may enjoy and understand the poetry only superficially, while an older audience with exposure to Godzilla, King Kong, the Wizard of Oz, vampires, werewolves, E.T., Alfred Hitchcock, and Edgar Allen Poe will have a much richer experience. While the overarching narrative is that of preparations for the nuptials of the creation and his made-to-order bride, in the tradition of Monty Python’s Flying Circus many digressions are made, some of which are returned to repeatedly. Each segment, no matter its initial appearance, is a poem. These verses come disguised as a letter, sequential art, blog posts, a post card, and even as an advertisement with it...

Although published in crisp black and white, former  Playboy  correspondent Silverstein’s classic collection of poems and drawings  Where the Sidewalk Ends  fairly explodes with colorful language of the kid-friendly sort. Taken by themselves, the poems range in length from a handful of lines up to three pages, and in breadth from a single amusing thought to a narrative arc or a song’s worth of lyrics. Common childhood themes of disobedience to parental and educational authority, trouble with siblings, chores and fanciful play are addressed in a characteristically irreverent manner, with frequent digressions into pure fantasy and fun. Never crossing over into the excessively precious or maudlin, Silverstein prefers to stick to a more self-conscious and unsentimental tone, gleefully exploring the macabre and outright disgusting topics frequented by children. On nearly every last opening, the text of the verses shares space with Silverstein’s expressive and loos...

The wizarding world woven by Rowling in her first volume of the Harry Potter series is inhabited primarily by characters who find its wonders unremarkable. Desensitized to what denizens of the non-magical, “Muggle” world would consider monumental powers and strangely capricious institutions, this parallel magical society is opened to orphan Harry Potter when he receives an invitation to attend Hogwarts, its premier boarding school, freeing him from the comically harsh home life of his aunt and uncle, the Durselys. Potter quickly discovers that he is a celebrity in this insular community, and in short order rejects false friends, finds true ones, and sets about uncovering a mystery which will lead him to confront the one who orphaned him. Keeping a quick pace, Rowling presents Potter as a character riddled with self-doubt as a result of his punishing upbringing at the hands of the Dursleys, certain that around each corner is his expulsion. However, life under such oppression has read...

Image from amazon.com Streamlined without overt bowdlerization, Tarnowska’s The Arabian Nights presents a retelling of the classic story cycle made relatable for western audiences while subtly providing insight into Islamic folkways, reflecting its cultural world view and outlook on life. This text begins with an introduction that explains the oral tradition at the root of these tales, which reach through the ages and continue to captivate readers, and concludes with a glossary and list of source citations that frame the narrative as neatly as Shahrazade’s dilemma itself. Henaff’s simple, graceful acrylics are ever-present, sometimes filling pages with rich hues, but more often framing the artfully set text with geometric patterns and naturalistic flourishes. Moving fluidly between the frame story of Shahrazade’s bold plan for survival to the content of her tales, a transition noted by a change of typeface, the reader sits in on the telling of six adventures ranging from a more...

Image from goodreads.com In The Beginning: Creation Stories from Around the World provides multiple explanations for the origin of life, the universe, and everything as explained by the pre-scientific beliefs of many cultures and traditions. Although this text is bound by space constraints and ease of translation for as Hamilton notes in the introduction not all myths can be “rendered on a level of understanding for many readers,” the author has amassed a representative collection that is marked by her signature clarity. Through memorable stories that address phenomena which confused and intrigued early people, these myths attempt to explain how the world works, demystify the universe, and give meaning to human life. They often portray gods as having human shape, feeling human emotions, and performing human acts, even if they are immortal and more powerful than people are. In this context, the universe seems more understandable than if cold forces that don’t care about peopl...

Image from shauntan.net The Lost Thing is one of three books included in Tan’s omnibus titled Lost & Found . In a faceless metropolis filled with brutalist architecture and steampunk  machinery, a young bottlecap-collecting enthusiast befriends a wayward bio-mechanical being. Several times taller than a man, with a pair of large grasping appendages, it walks on six tentacular legs and has an unknown number of other tentacles which emerge from doors on the deep red potbelly-stove-like shell surrounding its body. Although the lost thing is ignored by most, the protagonist tries to help it find its place in the world, eventually turning to the Federal Department of Odds & Ends (motto: “Sweepus Underum Carpetae”) for help.Warned off of accepting the FDOE’s assistance by a helpful kindred spirit, the boy and the thing are led to a place where the towering red whatsit can be itself, if not exactly fit in. Tan’s detailed paintings make extensive use of yellows and shadows to ...

Image from goodreads.com While it’s evident that most big band and jazz musicians can count 1-2-3-4, Ehrhardt’s all-stars work their way all the way up to 10. Set to the rhythm of "This Old Man," each musician plays his number in his signature style, inserting raucous onomatopoeia into the verse where the “knick-knack, paddy whack” usually goes. Roth’s illustrations, executed in mixed media collages, use swatches of fabric and wallpaper cut into clothes, India ink brushwork, sponge-applied pigments, and jazz-related ephemera to energetically sketch the appearance, personality, and musical stylings of each jazz man in his turn, along with a tiny grey guest star who can be followed from page to page. After finishing their solos and jamming together on number 10, the jazz men are introduced individually in brief biographical sketches. Observant fans would have noticed clues to their identities, but in the end they are revealed to be a nonet of jazz luminaries including Lou...

Image from amazon.com Ben Franklin, His Wit, and Wisdom From A-Z is an unconventional nonfiction book that alphabetizes facts about Franklin’s life and splices them with the wisdom of Poor Richard’s Almanac . O’Brien employs ink and condensed watercolors in a muted color palette reminiscent of days gone by to create highly textured full-bleed, double-page spreads that are as rich and diverse as the subject himself and serve as a backdrop to vignettes and frames of text. Moreover, the informality of the text’s arrangement--weaving around and dallying with the illustrations--complements and extends the everyday wisdom proffered by Poor Richard’s Almanac . In conclusion, each opening’s wealth of detail encourages the reader to savor the beauty while warring with the subtle use of diagonal lines that urge a forward progression and results in the audience’s internal struggle to linger over the minutiae yet race to the end of this fascinating book. Ben Franklin, His Wit, and Wisdom...

Jeyn Roberts’ sequel to  Dark Inside ,  Rage Within  provides vignettes of major protagonists just before massive earthquakes and a mass-murder apocalypse transform the world. Picking up six weeks later, presumably after the events of the first book, it follows the exploits of a band of survivors who have found each other in Vancouver, British Columbia. The Baggers, a subset of humans who have spontaneously become ruthlessly homicidal and well-organized, are hunting survivors down, and taking some to a holding area downtown. Group leader Aries manages her band through the losses and instability of a changed world until the two enigmatic men she has befriended both vanish, prompting her to lead the rag-tag collection of young adults in a raid on the Baggers’ compound. Roberts uses a shifting perspective with each chapter, bouncing back and forth between the main characters’ points of view, with each having several chapters bearing their name, except one. By noting which...

Arras is slipping out of the Guild's control and Cormac Patton needs Adelice to help reestablish order. However, is the price of peace too high? Can she put aside her own personal grievances and let go of her past in order to fight for mankind's future?  This final book in the Crewel World trilogy returns Ad to Arras where she will ostensibly work with Cormac in order to avoid the undoing of existence itself. However, as might be expected Patton is duplicitous, proving that there is no honor among thieves. Unfortunately, this deception not only thwarts the protagonist but also the novel’s plot. Just as she spends too much of this tale mired in the politics of this universe, stymied by her own feelings of inadequacy, and unable to jump start her forward progression, the audience is similarly quagmired in this purgatory of Adelice’s making - hoping for a salvation that is too long in coming and does little to soothe the injuries that were sustained. Unraveled   (Crew...

Book two of the Crewel   World series starts on the exhale as the  audience  realizes that not only has the protagonist's  love triangle escaped to Earth but also that Earth is not the hollow shell that they've been led to believe it to be. Having literally rent the very fabric of her existence,  Adelice is forced to acknowledge the tangled web that comprises her past and future  – finding herself constantly torn between the questionable freedom of Earth and the gilded prison of Arraras, her lover Jost and his brother Erik, as well as her extraordinary potential as a savior and as a weapon. Moreover, she comes to realize that everyone—especially those she loves the most—hides secrets  they would kill to protect. Consequently, Adelice must choose what to fight for.  Similar to its predecessor,  Altered  is extremely engaging after the initial  hundred-page  investment. Furthermore, as this story unfolds, the reader becomes i...

Sixteen-year-old Adelice Lewys has the rare ability to weave the very fabric of her world. Even though her parents have trained her to hide this gift–a treasonous act for which they pay dearly–she doesn’t escape detection. In fact, she is  abducted by the Guild  and forced to become a Spinster, one of the elite cadre of Fates who manipulate the minutiae of everyday life. Entangled in a web of deceit, Adelice must unravel the truth and navigate this dangerous realm in which maiden, matron, and crone live a half-live in Purgatory between all-powerful and powerless.  Although the plot  is  extraordinarily compelling, it ends with a cliff hanger and then arrogantly proclaims “End of Book One.” Not only does Albin assume that her debut novel will be received favorably enough that there will indeed be a complete series, but she also presumes that the reader be willing to continue reading it.    Such arrogance creates an inherent flaw in the narrative; ...

The taciturn peace that the double suicide of Romeo and Juliet imposed on the citizens of Verona is tentative at the best of times as the tension generated by the long-standing feud between the Montagues and the Capulets continues to permeate the atmosphere - seeping into to everyone’s bones and tainting all that it contacts. Burdened by the responsibility of leadership and desperate to save his city, the young Prince Escalus concludes that the only way to truly squelch this nonsense is to SUCCESSFULLY marry a Montague to a Capulet. Unfortunately, the betrothed – Benvolio and Rosaline – are not the paragon of peace that he had hoped for. However, in banding together to undermine the fate they loathe, the couple not only broker peace and save the city but also discover that they are far more willing than either would have anticipated. This lovely blend of romance and mystery adheres to the spirit of Shakespeare’s writing, if not the letter. Taub breathes new life into the well-traver...

In an overt attempt to inspire readers, the story unfolds as three young women plan their post-secondary-education lives while dealing with immediate obstacles and use the many types of love (i.e. romantic, familial, platonic, etc.) as their coping strategies.  Because this novel is heavily laced with every possible tear-jerking scenario – three plucky heroines who overcome what seem to be insurmountable odds, a protagonist who is dying of cancer, a negligent mother, an ill parent, forbidden love, the promise of a gratifying albeit hollow love affair, the lure of long-awaited true love, and an abusive significant other – it seems to pointedly target the traditional audience for “chick lit;” in short, the book is heavy handed and overdone.    Nonetheless, it will surely find an audience who views these plot elements as features rather than bugs. The Year of Luminous Love by   Lurlene McDaniel Secondary Delacorte Press 362 pp. 2013 9780385741712 $18.99 R...

At seventeen, Emery Land finds her life voraciously consumed by physical deterioration resulting from seizures.   Practically living in a hospital under constant surveillance by her scientist father and an ostensibly-skeptical team of doctors, she feels herself a lab rat; consequently, weighing the stifling emotional price of her caged existence against the physically lethal cost of freedom, Emery flees in order to pursue her theory that during her seizures she travels through time and space.  Inhabiting an emotional purgatory that exists somewhere between the heaven of free will and the hell of self-recriminations, she meets Asher Clarke who seems to be intimately entwined with her plight.  Together, they must race against the Doomsday clock to understand the truth of their complicated connection.  Above all else,  Flutter  is a beautifully-written, poignant tale of possibly-star-crossed lovers that questionably ends in death but certainly avoids b...

By age seventeen,  Cricket Cherpin  who is not only  the oldest charge in a Catholic boys' orphanage but also  swiftly approaching adulthood is surly, jaded, and world-weary. Having flouted the legal age of accountability for years, he has—time after time—thwarted even the merest thought of preparing for a future in which he would even remotely be considered a viable part of society. Believing that the few options available to him are solely comprised of a future as a professional boxer, drug dealer, or corpse, he finds the latter increasingly intriguing. Fortunately, Wynona Bidaban’s stepping into his world causes him to think that possibly life doesn't completely suck. Cherpin is a hard character to love. Frequently, the reader finds herself wanting to tell him to “man up” and “just deal,” and yet he worms his way into her heart. Readers who like Julie Halpern’s  Get Well Soon  and  Have a Nice Day  will find Anna Bloom’s male counterpar...

One + One = Blue  is a coming-age-novel that explores friendship, family, fitting in, and synesthesia (a condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another). Even though this novel has all the necessary ingredients to be quite interesting and thought-provoking, it ends up being remarkably ordinary.  Twelve-year-old Basil, who’s been home-schooled all of his life, is secure in his belief that he is the “class loser,” and that having no further to fall from grace, he’s secured the bottom rung on the elementary school social ladder.    Much to his own dismay Basil is befriended by Tenzie, a bossy new girl who—like him—has synesthesia. Furthermore, she “comes to his aid” when his estranged mother returns, upending his otherwise peaceful existence. Albeit Tenzie helps Basil through this difficult time in his life, she’s, unfortunately, not the solution that you would like for her to be. One + One = Blue by   Mary Jane  Auch Second...

Against her better judgment, Diamond Landers disregards all that she’s been taught about strangers, leaves the safety of her best friend and neighborhood mall to pursue an opportunity that turns out to be  too good to be true , and finds herself abducted by a well dressed, handsome pedophile who was supposedly on his way to meet his wife and daughter in order to cast a movie that is in need of a star.  While Diamond is forced to endure an abuse that she could never have imagined, her family and friends experience their own torments as they frantically await even a morsel of news.  Draper’s work walks a  tightrope   attempting to balance desperation and hope, empowerment and powerlessness, sufficient details and information overload, debilitating horror and quotidian life – failing as often as it succeeds.   The reader ping pongs between feeling that she’s trapped in a 1980s after-school special and being genuinely caught up in the whirlpool of the c...

In this sequel to  Get Well Soon , Anna Bloom continues along the path of self-understanding.  She has just returned home from a three-week stay in a mental hospital and is struggling to adjust to life outside of its walls.  Although she misses the near magical realism of life inside and the friends she made there, she is terrified of the implications of such feelings and reluctant to ask about the goings on back at the hospital.  Anna desperately craves a return to “normalcy” and shuns being stigmatized as “the crazy girl. ”   Unfortunately, her return home immediately precedes the dissolution of her parents’ marriage and she fears that she’s the cause.  Miraculously, Anna’s saga comes to a middle and brings the novel to a close with a bittersweet poignancy that avoids feeling incomplete even though there is clearly more to tell.  In addition,  Halpern’s use of first person point of view fosters an intimate connection between the reader and ...

Owl at Home  is one of Harper & Row’s many titles in the  I Can Read!  series.  The inside cover explains the series’ system for promoting independent reading in young children, and the title page is followed by a table of contents that enumerates the book’s chapters.  Young children will enjoy the protagonists’ childlike innocence in this episodic narrative of loosely connected adventures in which he demonstrates his faulty understanding of physics by welcoming winter as a house guest, becoming frightened by his own feet, making tear-water tea, striving to be in two places at once, and discouraging the moon from following him home.  Readers will delight in predicting the outcomes of Owl’s mishaps and recognizing the flaws in his logic.  Lobel’s heavily shaded, representational, cartoonish line art provides a depth and richness that complements and extends the text, facilitating the reader’s comprehension of Owl’s logical fallacies.  Furt...