CET Writes

Image from  goodreads.com “Welcome to Stately Academy, a school which is just crawling with mysteries to be solved! The founder of the school left many clues and puzzles to challenge his enterprising students. Using their wits and their growing prowess with coding, Hopper and her friend Eni are going to solve the mystery of Stately Academy no matter what it takes!” - from the publisher Secret Coders is a fast-paced, interesting read that introduces the basic premises of programming in a non-threatening way. This series would be a fantastic accompaniment to an elementary library’s efforts to support a STEAM curriculum, a local chapter of Girls Who Code, or its use of Code.org. Secret Coders by Gene Luen Yang and Mike Holmes Elementary FirstSecond 91 pp. Published 2015 ISBN 978-1-62672-276-7 $17.99

Image from  neilgaiman.com In Murder Mysteries , a murderer is granted an unsolicited gift, forgiveness. During a layover in Los Angeles, he visits and kills a former love interest. Upon returning to his living accommodations, the murderer meets a stranger named Raguel who—in exchange for a cigarette—recounts the tale of the first murder, a crime of passion between angels in heaven. This murder necessitated that Raguel—then an angel—be activated as the vengeance of the Lord. Upon solving the crime, he realizes that God engineered the entire debacle in order to test Lucifer, Captain of the Host. Concluding that although God is infallible he is not just, Raguel chooses to retain his memory of this incident and blesses the narrator with a patchy memory of his own crime. The realistic but simplified art of Murder Mysteries, particularly in its frame story, lends credibility to the narrative, even when it shifts into a fantastical setting. While not suitable for most sec...

Image from  neilgaiman.com Between the publication of the young adult novel by Neil Gaiman and its debut on the big screen, Coraline appeared in graphic novel form, adapted and illustrated by P. Craig Russell. Relating the tale of a self-styled girl explorer who is bored to tears by her busy parents and weird neighbors before discovering her too-good-to-be-true Other Mother just down a magical hallway, Russell renders his version Gaiman's yarn in a lush yet realistic style that is all the more disturbing when things take a turn for the horrific. Of particular interest graphically is the dynamic between the familiar world and the Other World and the look of the corresponding characters in each. While at first the differences are confined to the substitution of black buttons for eyes, as the story proceeds the two diverge in increasingly unsettling ways until even Coraline wonders how she could have ever mistaken the malevolent force she encounters for her real mom. As a narrati...