Reviews #126-130: early Favorites of 2014

We’re trying a new approach today!  We’ve read tons of 2014 titles already this year.  (Of course there are many more yet to see.)  Out of those that have crossed our paths so far in the first half of the year, here are some favorites, all in one post!  The kids are each going to pick one of the books to highlight... 

Dad:  Evie, why don’t you get us started.  What is your favorite book of the year so far?
Evangeline (age 6):  I like the pictures in this book.  I like how it’s 3D!

Dad:  This is “Jim Curious” by Matthias Picard.

Elijah (age 8):  Oh my gosh.  This book is so cool.

Isaac (age 15):  Dude.  It’s amazing.

Gracie (age 13):  Anything we say is not going to do it justice. 

Evangeline:  I need the goggles. (Puts on the 3D glasses)  Woah, it’s so cool!!!

Dad:  So tell everyone what it’s like to read a 3D book…

Evangeline:  The glasses make it look like this fish is swimming towards you.  It comes closer to you. The fish is coming out at my face!  Oh my word, can I touch this?  I want to stick my hand right under the fish… but it’s not working.

Lily (age 11):  Woah!  Woah!  I keep trying to reach out to grab it.

Dad:  What is the story about?

Evangeline:  It is about “under the sea.”  This guy is swimming.  

Lily:  The pages have a lot of action.  It’s like a movie.

Isaac:  It’s a visual spectacle. The art would still be cool even if it wasn’t 3D.

Evangeline:  It looks like you can try to stick your head into the pictures.  Like I can go under this water and swim with this person and look at this cool stuff.  For real. 
Gracie:  It feels like you shouldn’t be able to turn the pages – because it looks more like staring into a shadow box than a book. 

Evangeline:  But when you take the glasses off, it looks plain.

Dad:  Then when you put the glasses back on...

Evangeline:  KAPOW! 

Dad:  Ka-pow!  Kapoof!

Evangeline:  Not kapoof.  Only kapow.  Kapoof sounds weird.

Dad:  How would you feel if we ever lost the glasses?

Evangeline:  I’d be, like, (voice trembling) "I want to stick my hand under the fish, but now I can't!"

Gracie:  I would cry.

Evangeline:  Only the first half of this book is my favorite book.   At the end there is an underwater tornado.  And it makes me feel like, "Oh cwap.  This tornado is going to make me go into it."

Dad:  Cwap?  Can we say ‘cwap’ on Bookie Woogie?

Evangeline:  Yeah.

Dad:  I’ve never heard you say ‘cwap’ before.

Evangeline:  "Cwap."

Dad:  Now I’ve heard you say it twice.  Let’s wash your mouth out with some of this 3D water.

Evangeline:  It’s actually not wet.

Dad:  Okay Elijah, your turn.  What book do you want to share?

Elijah (age 8):  This book is about dinosaurs. 

Dad:  "The Greatest Dinosaur Ever" by Brenda Guiberson and Gennady Spirin.

Elijah:  One of the dinosaurs said it was the fastest.  One of them said it was the biggest.  One of them said ‘I’ve got armored plates.’  They all thought they were the best.  But I don’t know who was right.

Dad:  How did you do with reading all these dinosaur names?

Elijah:  Heheheheheh…  That’s the tricky part.

Dad:  Why don’t scientists just name dinos things like Bob… and Ed… and Poofer.

Elijah:  Poofer?

Dad:  I don’t know.  It’s better than… Leaellynasura.

Elijah:  All dinosaurs are named weird things.  Like, Spinosaurus.  Actually that’s the easiest name of all of them.

Gracie:  I saw that guy on Jurassic Park… that was freaky.

Lily:  (reading names beneath the pictures)  "Oviraptor..." Gasp!  It’s a chicken-lion-dragon!  You know those chicken-lion-dragon things?  Cockatrice!  Maybe that’s where they got the cockatrice myth from.  Gasp!  That makes so much sense. 

Evangeline:  I don’t like dinosaurs.  Every night I think about dinosaurs.

Dad:  Every night?  I didn’t know that.

Evangeline:  Yeah.  At night I think their heads are going to open and eat me.  But I do think it would be fun to ride a baby dinosaur.

Dad:  Elijah, would you like to have a dinosaur for a pet?

Elijah:  That probably would not be a good idea.

Gracie:  I don’t want him to have one.

Elijah:  I’d accidentally kill everyone with it.

Gracie:  Elijah walks around with a stuffed alligator, beaning people in the head.  Imagine what he would do with a real live predator at his disposal.  That would be horrific.

Isaac:  This book has very detailed art.  The illustrator has a very cool style - you can still see the pencil beneath the paint.

Dad:  This illustrator is one of my favorites.  As soon as I saw that he’d been tapped to do a book about dinosaurs, I thought, That is BRILLIANT!  Why has that never happened before?   Gennady Spirin.  Dinosaurs.  Of course someone needs to put them together.  It’s awesome.

Elijah: (singing to the tune of a Frozen song)  Gennady and dinos… they’re both so intense… put them together… it just makes sense!  Rat da dat, da da dada da doo... 

Dad:  Okay, Lily, pick a book!

Lily (age 11):  “Oliver’s Tree.”

Dad:  By Kit Chase.

Gracie:  This one is really cute.

Lily:  Oliver is an elephant, and he was playing with his friends, a bunny and an owl.  Oliver saw his friend in a tree, but he was too big to climb up with her.  So they try to find a tree that Oliver can climb.  One had bigger branches, but it was too high.  One was too small.  They found a perfect tree, but when he got in it, the branch broke. 

Dad:  Poor guy.

Lily:  It’s so sad -- he just fell on his face.  So Oliver sat on a tree stump and went to sleep.  Then his friends built a tree house around him, and when he woke up -- POOF!  A tree house. 

Kids: (singing to the tune of a Frozen song) Do you wanna build a tree house…

Lily:  I would totally live in a tree house if I could.  Yeah.  If it was big enough.  And if it had electricity.  Except for bugs… I wouldn’t like termites.

Dad:  Do you like climbing trees too?

Lily:  Oh my gosh.  I LOVE climbing trees.  

Elijah:  I do.  I’m just not good at it unless there’s a low branch to start with.  I’m not very tall.

Lily:  I miss that climbing tree at our old house.  I remember when our neighbor Gina came over, we would climb it.  And we would pretend we were cheetahs.  Okay that part was weird.

Dad:  How about the illustrations in this book?

Gracie:  Everything about this book is adorable.  Really cute.

Isaac:  I have nothing against cute things.  People who do are kind of sad.  I like “cute” -- I’m a happy person.

Evangeline:  I like the owl best.  Owls are my favorite animal.  If I ever meet the person who made this book, I would like her very much.  I would want her to draw me 100 owls.  I would want her to make me a tattoo of an owl.

Dad:  Gracie!  What’s your favorite book?

Gracie (age 13):  “Sparky” by Jenny Offill and Chris Appelhans.  I really do like the storyline a lot, but the pictures – the pictures are so, so cool.  

Elijah:  Everybody likes this book.

Gracie:  Sparky is a sloth.  This girl wants a pet, but her mom says she has to get one that doesn’t need to be walked or fed or given a bath.  So she was like, “I’ll get a sloth.”  And she seems to love him... even though he can’t do anything. 

Elijah:  I’d rather have a pet fox. 

Gracie:  She tries to play games with him, but he doesn’t move.  The sloth is... a dud.

Isaac:  He’s a very cool looking sloth though.

Gracie:  Kudos, Chris Appelhans. 

Isaac:  Thumbs up.

Evangeline:  He’s kind of weird.  He looks weird.  He looks like a weird koala bear.

Dad:  Would you want a pet like that?

Evangeline:  No. I feel like he would eat me.

Elijah:  It’s not a very cool pet.

Dad:  Poor Sparky!

Lily:  I like this book because it has “me” in it.

Dad:  You?  I never thought about it…  I guess that does look like you.

Lily:  She looks like me a LOT.

Dad:  Yeah… 'cause you have a flat head, and a big dark nose, and you lay around…

Lily:  NOOOOO… the GIRL.  Ha haha ha…

Dad:  Ha ha... oh, the girl, you say?

Gracie:  The girl is adorable.  You can totally see she’s fun and spunky.  But the sloth just… fails.  Fails.  He doesn’t do anything.  And the book has no resolution to it at all.  The end scene is the girl, just sitting, sad in a tree, trying to play tag with a sloth.

Dad:  You think she’s sad?  Her face is turned away from us.

Gracie:  I don’t know.

Dad:  Or is she happy to accept him as he is?  The sloth looks happy there.

Gracie:  He just ate a cookie, Dad.

Dad:  Ha haa ha hah…

Gracie:  I don’t know, maybe she’s not sad.

Dad:  Maybe *she* just needs a cookie.

Gracie:  I guess it’s not really a sad ending.  That’s a bad word to describe it.

Dad:  So what’s a better way?

Gracie:  It’s kind of like... Life.

Dad:  Oh?

Gracie:  It is!  You can try to really impress people, but it doesn’t always work out, and sometimes you just have to accept that.  And that’s exactly what happened with the sloth. 

Dad:  Alright, Isaac.  Give us another one.

Isaac (age 15):  “Rules of Summer.”

Gracie:  Oh, we love Shaun Tan.

Isaac:  I like Shaun Tan’s work a lot.  Everything he does is cool.  He could do realistic work, but he chooses to make it crazy, just for fun.  And I like that.  I’m attracted to the randomness.

Dad:  What’s the book about?

Isaac:  It’s about these two brothers.  The little boy is probably the main character, but they are both very important.  It takes place in this crazy world where anything happens. 

Elijah:  I was like, “What is happening?  What.  What.  What.  I don’t know what is going on.”

Lily:  Like, where the heck did they get a steamboat-rocketship-car-thing?  And a giant red rabbit?

Evangeline:  That is a humungous bunny. 

Isaac:  There are random rules set to the awesome pictures.

Lily:  So, don’t leave a red sock on a clothesline… or a giant red rabbit will magically appear?

Dad:  See, it’s a good thing you read it here first.  You don’t want to learn that rule the hard way.

Gracie:  I want to go to that park with the magic glowing trees.

Isaac:  My favorite picture is the kids standing on these water tower things with really long nets, and they are trying to catch the stars in a meteor shower. 

Evangeline:  They look like sky jellyfish! 

Isaac:  The pictures seem random, but by the end they tell a story. 

Dad:  And what do you think the story is?

Isaac:  The little boy is making lots of mistakes... 

Evangeline:  He drops all the stuff.  I don’t like how he disobeys all the rules in this book!

Isaac:  He feels sad about it, the brothers get in a fight, the little boy get's trapped and goes away, his brother comes along with bolt cutters and saves him.  Then they are happy and it all resolves.

Dad:  Did you notice the crows?  I read this book a ton of times before I noticed the crow on each page.

Isaac:  I did notice actually.  I didn’t realize it was on every page.  But I noticed it.  At first I thought they were representing “anger.”  Now I’m not sure.  It’s more “sad.”  Like an angry… sad... remorse-ish feeling.  A down-low feeling.

Dad:  Here’s my thought.  I think they represent memories.   The kid screws up and a crow is watching.  The kid screws up and a crow is watching.  Over and over. 

Isaac:  But why are there lots of crow at the end then?

Dad:  Because each time it’s a different crow.  And all the memories are building.  The crows are keeping track, keeping record of all the mistakes, like "strikes," building up, and there’s this big weight of guilt growing.  And eventually it destroys their relationship -- it separates them.  He’s swarmed by all the negatives he’s done.  Then the brother comes along and forgives him.  Forgiveness sets him free.  And after that, there’s no more crows.

Gracie:  Guys… pick up your feet.  It’s getting deep in here.

Lily:  Gracie, I’m never fighting with you again!

Dad:  So think of someone in the family you might have problems with… What if you keep score and let disapproval build and build?

Gracie:  Then you’re just going to have a house full of crows.

Lily:  All that guilt.

Dad:  And what fixes it?

Gracie:  Bolt cutters.

Dad:  Which represented…

Gracie:  Bolt cutters.

Dad:  Or…

Lily:  Forgiveness!!!  I get angry at people, but it only lasts like 5 seconds.

Dad:  So you are very quick to pull out the bolt cutters.

Lily:  Yes.

Dad:  Forgiveness is wonderful.

Isaac:  You need to let it go.

Gracie and Lily: (singing to the tune of the Frozen song)  Let it go… let it go… Getting rid of all my crows!  Let it go…  Let it go… Let forgiveness grow…

Isaac:  Now everyone is going to have that tune stuck in their head.

Dad:  Good golly.  This whole post has turned into a Frozen sing-along.

Jim Curious under the sea, by Evangeline

spinosaurus, by Elijah

Oliver finds a new friend, by Lily

come, Sparky, by Gracie 

catching meteors, by Isaac

And bonus!  Here are five more favorite 2014 titles:


The Adventures of Beekle
by Dan Santat


Some Bugs
by Angela DiTerlizzi and Brendan Wenzel


Lindberg: the Tale of a Flying Mouse
by Torben Kuhlmann


Big Bad Bubble
by Adam Rubin and Daniel Salmieri


The Glorkian Warrior Delivers a Pizza
by James Kochalka

Jim Curious
Author/Illustrator: Matthias Picard
Published, 2014: Abrams Books
Like it?  Here it is!


The Greatest Dinosaur Ever
Author: Brenda Z. Guiberson 
Illustrator: Gennady Spirin
Published, 2014 (oops! 2013): Henry Holt
Like it?  Here it is!

Oliver's Tree
Author/Illustrator: Kit Chase
Published, 2014: Putnam
Like it?  Here it is!


Sparky
Author: JennyOffill
Illustrator: Chris Appelhans
Published, 2014: Schwartz & Wade
Like it?  Here it is!

Rules of Summer
Author/Illustrator: Shuan Tan
Published, 2014: Arthur Levine Books
Like it?  Here it is!

Review #37: The Arrival

Isaac (age 10):  "The Arrival."
Dad:  A wonderful wordless book.
Lily (age 6):  It is written by Shaun Tan.
Gracie (age 9):  This book is about a boy...  a person, not a boy...  well, it is a boy - he's an adult though.
Dad:  A man?
Gracie:  A man!
Dad:  That is what an adult boy is called.
Gracie:  HA ha hahha ha ha!  A man going to a new country.
Isaac:  The man had to leave his family because it was too dangerous where they were.  Later on he would bring his family with him to the new country.
Lily:  There were dragons where the guy lived.  Dragon tails.
Isaac:  Shadows of dragon tails.
Gracie:  A thousand black dragon tails all over the city.
Isaac:  The man had to go days and days on a ship, crossing the sea.  Finally he got to the new country.
Gracie:  This new world is strange.
Lily:  It was weird.  It had different animals and things.
Isaac:  Everything was new.  Including lampposts in the water, which I've never heard of.  And there were floating boats.
Lily:  The new country has animals that are strange and cute.  And some of them were freaky.  And the plants and trees were even different.
Isaac:  When the man first got to the new country, he had to get all checked out, and he had to get a million stickers all over his coat.  Then he got a passport-thing.  And then he went up in this air-balloon-elevator which took him to his new apartment.
Gracie:  His house has weird stuff in it.
Isaac:  I wonder what you use that pot-thing for.
Gracie:  I wonder what you use that giant fire-thing for.
Dad:  The man in the story is probably asking the same questions.
Isaac:  The fire could be for roasting marshmallows.  But they don't have "marshmallows" in this country, so it's for roasting "Garshkallobs."
Gracie:  He feels strange.
Lily:  He feels sad without his family.
Gracie:  Why did he leave?
Dad:  Well, that happened a lot in the olden days.  Even nowadays.  People leave their families to go to a new country, and they try to make enough money so they can send for their families to come join them there.
Lily:  The man was lonely.
Gracie:  "I'm lonely, oh no, what do I do?"
Lily:  But then he got a pet!
Gracie:  His buddy!
Isaac:  He finds a weird little monster.
Dad:  Everyone in that new country ends up with a pet.
Gracie:  All the pets there are really, really cute.  And when the man got his pet he was like, "Now I have a friend.  My friend helps me.  I'm not sad."
Dad:  The man had a lot of helpers in this book.
Gracie:  That makes us want to help people too.
Dad:  After reading this, we have a better idea what someone in a new place feels like.
Gracie:  Next, the man has to find food and a job.
Isaac:  But he was all confused, and he met some people who helped him.  They were trying to be nice.
Lily:  He had to get a lady to help him.  And his pet found a new friend.
Gracie:  What is that lady's pet?  An owl-bunny?
Isaac:  An animal that you've never heard of before.
Dad:  If you moved to a new place, you couldn't let yourself feel embarrassed about asking people for help.
Isaac:  We can all say we've been embarrassed at least once.
Dad:  But you don't have to be embarrassed about not knowing something, right?  It's always good to ask questions.
Lily:  Can I sit on your lap, Dad?
Dad:  See, that is a good question.
Isaac:  When the man went food shopping, more people helped him.
Dad:  These people are helping him even though they will probably never see him again.
Lily:  But they can still be friends for that short time.
Isaac:  He found the weirdest plants in the world.  Including those weird-strawberry-fruits.  Crazy new food.
Dad:  How did things go when he looked for a job?
Isaac:  Not so well.  He tried two jobs, and they did not go well because he couldn't read their language.
Dad:  It was cool writing that Shaun Tan invented.
Isaac:  You know what it looks like?  It looks like Cambodian writing.  Finally the man finds another job, working at a factory that makes baby-bottle-container-things, and he stands all day picking out the bad ones.
Dad:  Not fun, but it gave him the money he needed.
Isaac:  Yep.  And he met a friend at work.  They went out and played a game, and the man did really good on the game even thought he didn't know what in the world he was doing.
Dad:  The man ends up meeting lots of people that moved to this new country for different reasons.
Lily:  There was a guy who ran away from monsters in his country too.
Gracie:  His old country had gi-normous dudes with bazooka-vacuum-cleaner-things sucking people into their air tanks and using them for who knows what.
Dad:  Like a nightmare.
Gracie:  Why were they doing that?
Dad:  Don't know.
Lily:  Because they are naughty.
Gracie:  Because they are monsters.
Lily:  They were worse than the dragon tails.  They suck up everything and they are dangerous!  And the dragon tails are just spiky.
Isaac:  We don't really know what the dragon tails do.
Dad:  So, time passes...  the man has his job...  he saves some money...
Isaac:  And after a while, he was finally able to bring over his family.
Gracie:  They all got happy.
Isaac:  And hugged and kissed and became a family again.
Gracie:  Awesome!
Isaac:  It all ends in happiness.
Dad:  This book is cool because it's almost like we are going to the new country.  We don't understand all the strange new things either.  It's like we're experiencing it all right along with the man.  Instead of just telling us what it's like to be an immigrant, the book shows us.  It makes us feel it.
Gracie:  It's a country of weirdness.
Lily:  It's the country of stickers-on-your-coat.
Dad:  I know what Gracie would think is the worst part about going to a different country.  You wouldn't eat any of the strange new food.
Gracie:  Nope.
Dad:  Even if it was the most delicious food ever -- you'd never even try it to find out, would you?
Lily:  I wouldn't do it either.
Dad:  You wouldn't try new food?  Eventually you'd guys would have to, or you'd starve.
Lily:  I would bring food from my own country.
Dad:  That wouldn't last forever.
Lily:  I'd go back to my own country then.
Dad:  Remember, the man rode a big boat for days and days to get there.  He can't just go back and forth.
Lily:  Then I wouldn't go away from my country.
Dad:  What if there were big dudes with sucker-vacuums?
Lily:  Then I would go into the basement.
Dad:  Forever?
Lily:  Yes.
Dad:  You would rather live in a basement forever, in a country with big sucker-dudes outside, than go to a new country and try new food?
Lily:  Yes.
Isaac:  Lily?!
Dad:  Alright, who wants to tell me about the pictures in this book...
Lily:  The pictures are cool and awesome, and I love them.
Gracie:  The pictures are all black and white.  Sometimes brown and yellow.
Isaac:  But it's not boring.
Gracie:  Because they have lots of detail.
Isaac:  This book must have taken a year to finish.  Or two.  One or two years.
Dad:  In the back of the book it says that it took "four years of research, development, and drawing."  So he was working on this book for longer than Elijah has been alive.
Gracie:  That's a lot of years.
Isaac:  That would drive me nutso.  That would drive me crazy.  Would it drive you crazy?
Lily:  Oh yeah.  It would drive me really, really crazy.
Dad:  But are we glad Shaun Tan did it?
Lily:  If he didn't make this book, I'd be crying my head off.
Gracie:  I want to hang this picture on my wall!
Dad:  Tell everyone about it.
Gracie:  It's a picture of these paper-plate-bird-things flying in some leaf-grass-plants with a huge beautiful sun, and it's really, really pretty.
Isaac:  Shaun Tan has a good imagination.
Lily:  And I really like the cutie animal guys.
Gracie:  Yeah, my favorite part of the book is seeing all the cute little animal-pet-thingies.
Isaac:  I like that one guy's pet in the basket.  It's cool.
Gracie:  I like the vegetable man's pet.
Isaac:  What are those things?  Bunnies?
Gracie:  I think they're bunny-mice.
Dad:  Would you like to go to a new country like the one in this book?
Gracie:  I would like to live in a city like that.  It's cool.  And I could climb on the statue of the giant candycane-bird-thing holding an egg.
Isaac:  It would be cool to go there if you knew the language.
Dad:  What if you didn't know the language?
Isaac:  It would be maddening.
Dad:  It would be scary, wouldn't it?  To set out into a world you didn't know anything about?  Imagine if I just plopped you down in a big city in Germany and said, "Alright, fend for yourselves."  Would you know where to go?  Would you know what to do?  Would you know how to get around?
Gracie:  I would go to a German orphanage.
Dad:  How would you find a German orphanage?
Gracie:  I would find a big German map of the world.
Dad:  But how would you know where the orphanages were?  You wouldn't be able to read the map.
Isaac:  How could the man get a job if he didn't know the language?
Dad:  Are there people that come to our country that don't know the language?  And they have to find jobs.  How do you think they do it?
Isaac:  They learn the language.
Dad:  Over time.  But they would still need a job in the meantime.  Think how hard that would be.  This book is a pretend story, but things like this really do go on aaaaall the time.
Isaac:  They could do painting.  That doesn't require talking.
Dad:  Sure.  And they have to find nice people who are willing to give them a chance... people to be gracious to them.
Gracie:  So far the man in the book has been in luck.  So far he's found nice people to help him.
Lily:  Maybe the idea for this book came from real life.  Maybe the author went to a different country and he explored it.
Gracie:  I know a girl who moved here from China.  She's in my drama camp.
Dad:  Any last thoughts on the book?
Gracie:  This book is a cool adventure.
Lily:  It is a nicely, strangely, weirdish story.
Isaac:  It's a magical new world.
Dad:  Did this book teach you anything?
Lily:  It taught me not to whine when I move to a different country and to try new foods that look disgusting.

the man discovering crazy new food, by Isaac

boat floating over an island, by Lily

the man's daughter finding a new pet, by Gracie

Author/Illustrator: Shaun Tan
Published, 2007: Arthur A. Levine Books
Like it? Find it