Letter Perfect! : Stewart's Best Pen by Stephen W. Martin

When Stewart found Craig at Camp Aye-Wanna-Go-Hom last summer, they became best friends forever!

Craig was a pen with a blue cap, just what Stewart had to have for those required letters home. Craig knew just the right words to use.

Dear Mom,Camp is fun, except for the wolves, but I think we are in the clear....

Stewart and Craig do stuff together. Stewart wears his red cap backwards and Craig wears his blue cap backward, too. Craig makes a pretty fair short sword for duels and is useful for writing random notes about his sisters' doll.

If you want to see Molly again, bring ten unlicked cookies to my room.

But then on the way to school Stewart loses his best friend Craig. He looks everywhere--under his bed, under his cat, even in the detention room at school. Dad offers his favorite yellow pencil, but it's just not the same.

Stewart was at a loss for words.

Then in a few days, Stewart finds a letter for him in his mailbox--from Japan....

Dear Stewart, I'm in JAPAN! Crazy, right? I fell out of your bag and a nice boy named Tadashi picked me up on the way to the airport. Japan is super and the giant monsters are really friendly. Please write soon!

This changes everything!

"DAD! I'M GOING TO NEED THAT PENCIL!"

Stewart has lost his best friend pen but gained a best pen-pal, in Stephen W. Martin's epistolary picture book, Stewart's Best Pen (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Clarion, 2018).  A  friendship between a boy and a ballpoint is an far-fetched premise that is just the stuff of a funny, fantastic storybook, drawn to perfection by artist Karl Newsom Edwards' anonymous but clever pen. There are many forms of friendship, and this story makes a great class read-aloud for a class unit on letter writing in which students invent their own best pen pal and letters or simply create more trans-Pacific letters between Stewart and Craig. "The concise, witty text works seamlessly with Edwards' illustrations," says Booklist.

For more pen-palery, pair this one with Josh Funk's Dear Dragon: A Pen Pal Tale, (See review here).

Fur-Ever Home? Can I Be Your Dog? by Troy Cummings

Dear People in the Yellow House:

Can I be your dog?

I am potty-trained and I have my own squeaky bone. I love to play! I see that you have a cat. I'm willing to work with you.

Whoooo's a good dog? I AM!

Sincerely,
Arfy

P.S.: I know every house on Butternut Street, but I asked you first!

Arfy needs a person. It's lonely in his chilly, leaky cardboard box in the alley, so he takes pen in paw and writes a proper application letter, carefully including his resume' and paw print.

But the Honeywells in the yellow house respond by return post with their regrets, saying that their cat is, er, allergic to dogs.

Resolutely, Arfy forges on. The butcher shop on Butternut Street looks like a great possibility with tasty perks. But Arfy's application is refused posthaste. Butcher Veronica Shank is adamant.

"The last time I let a dog into my shop a dozen meatballs went missing!"

Scratch that! Fire Station #5 looks like a possibility for the position of fire dog, and Arfy already has a certain affinity for fire plugs. But the fire chief fires back a quick form letter, addressed to APPLICANT....

THIS POSITION HAS ALREADY BEEN FILLED.

Prospects for adoption are looking poor. Arfy is down the unenviable position of junk yard dog, not the highest status for pet placement. And the junk yard manager's reply is RRRROUGH!

Dear Mutt: GET LOST!

The one remaining house on Butternut Street is a somewhat of a derelict, unpainted, falling apart, and not a little smelly. Arfy's letter points out that he is not picky, but the mail lady seems rueful when she brings Arfy's letter back to his soggy address, stamped RETURN TO SENDER.

But the kindly letter carrier lady, who has dutifully delivered all of Arfy's letters and their replies, has her own letter for Arfy, offering him a permanent place with her, RAIN, SNOW, OR SLEET, in Troy Cumming's top-seller tale of a proactive homeless pup, Can I Be Your Dog? (Random House, 2018). In a funny and heartfelt story of a persevering pooch, author-illustrator Cummings' story, endearingly illustrated and cleverly written in epistolary style, has both humor and pathos, with a well-foreshadowed ending that will leave young readers both moved and joyful as Arfy finally finds his own forever home. Says School Library Journal, "No bones about it; this humorous picture book will be a hit with storytime audiences and emergent readers."

For his animal advocate readers, author Cummings helpfully adds an appendix, "How to Help a Homeless Animal."

Reminders: Dear Girl, by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Paris Rosenthal

Dear Girl,

Make you room awesome. Make it YOU!

And while you're at it, make your bed!

There are plenty of things we want to say to a beloved child, things we hope are helpful, memorable, and hopeful. There is a world of good counsel here--like "Know when to say NO," or "You won't be invited to every party," or "It's okay not to feel sparkly all the time." If you need to cry, go ahead. You can color outside the lines if you like, but don't forget to clean up your room. You need friends, but you also need to be alone sometimes.

There are no rules, but... I'm giving you some points to remember, just in case. Listen to your heart, be brave when you can, and when you can't, I'll be there for you.

Amy Krouse Rosenthal and her daughter Paris Rosenthal had created a little book for daughters or granddaughters or any much-loved girl, Dear Girl, (Harper, 2017), filled with all the things we want to say to a child, those truisms that rarely get said. Artist Holly Hatam adds spare but expressive illustrations that flesh out Rosenthal's sweet text with free-flowing action. A fine gift for a special girl, and a first choice for library shelves.

Taking Pen In Hand.... A Letter to My Teacher by Deborah Hopkinson

"Dear Teacher,

Whenever I had something to tell you, I tugged on your shirt and whispered in your ear. This time I am writing a letter.

I hope you remember me... I wore a bright yellow raincoat and a dark, stormy frown--because for me, school meant sitting still and listening, two things I wasn't much good at."

Her teacher probably does remember her.

She's one of those "exasperating" students, the one who blurts out odd stuff without raising her hand, gets lost on field trips, gets wet and dirty at recess, and with calculated silliness sabotages silent reading time, the one who loudly begs to take care of the class mice for the Thanksgiving holidays, where they become her cat's dinner instead.

But in her letter, the girl recalls the way her teacher seems to understand, calling her an intrepid explorer, enlisting her love for mud in digging the "first ever" second-grade garden, and getting her to enjoy reading with a book about a famous woman explorer who was "just like her." And by the end of the year the girl realizes how much she has learned and those things she will never forget.

Most of us grownups would like to write our old teachers a letter--the great ones, the good ones, the ones that did they best they could, and even the not-so-good ones--those who showed us the way to be (and the way not to be) along the way. Deborah Hopkinson's epistolary picture book, A Letter to My Teacher (Schwartz and Wade, 2017) takes us adults back to second grade and perhaps gives current primary students a little insight into what their teachers are trying to do to reach and teach all their students. Nancy Carpenter's illustrations are sensitive and low-key, matching the tone of the text. This is another fine book to read at the end of the year, along with Mrs. McBee Leaves Room 3 (see review here). Says Kirkus Reviews, "A valuable lesson in empathy, internalized and paid forward."

What a Difference a Dot Makes! Little i by Michael Hall

WHEN LITTLE i'S DOT FELL OFF.... 1

IT ROLLED DOWN A HILL,

AND SPLASHED INTO THE SEA.

The rest of the alphabet is discombobulated. Little i didn't look like one of them anymore! He looked like a ... number! Weird!

"no way" said n and o and w, a, and y.

There is nothing for Little i to do but follow his missing dot as it is tossed away upon the waves. He finally made landfall and followed the beach all the way around the island, but everywhere he looked, his dot was NOT.

But there were exciting things to see as he searched. He saw a cascade of exclamation points, a garden of green sprouting commas, and a dazzling grotto of bright, gemlike asterisks. And beyond a scary bridge, what did he spot? His DOT.

BUT NOW, ODDLY, THE DOT FELT AWKWARD.

LITTLE i HAD GROWN TO LIKE BEING DOTLESS.

WHAT HAD LITTLE i BECOME?

Something had changed about Little i. Now he was...

A WORD.

"I," SAID BIG I!

Even little letters can can grow up and find themselves, in Michael Hall's latest, Little i (Greenwillow Books, 2017). Author-illustrator Michael Hall's trademark tissue collaged art is gorgeously colored, and his text takes on both typology and growing up, no small feat, sending his little letter out on an allegorical quest literally to find himself, while along the way introducing young readers to quite a few new punctuation marks--hyphens, exclamation points, and question marks, to name a few, with even his outgrown dot re-purposed as the absolutely essential period (which I will now put to use).

"Little i may be a mere cutout letter, but his humanity shines through,” says the New York Times Review."

Other books by Michael Hall which teach and delight are his Red: A Crayon's Story, Wonderfall, Perfect Square. and My Heart Is Like a Zoo. (see reviews here).

Final Arrangements: The Loch Ness Punster (43 Old Cemetery Road) by Kate Klise

It was something Seymour Hope had been wondering about for more than a year, ever since he first met Ignatius B. Grumply. He finally asked it in a note one summer day.

Dear Iggy,

Why are you always so grumpy?

                  ----Seymour

For a year Seymour Hope has lived happily with his unusual adoptive parents, Izzy B. Grumply, best-selling mystery writer, and his co-author, the ghostly Olive C. Spence Despite having been deceased since 1911, Olive is a lively, loving and adventurous spirit, but sometimes Iggy's deadly, dull-as-dirt persona gets on Seymour's nerves.

It all goes down when Iggy receives a warm letter from his Scottish psychiatrist great-uncle who invites him to visit his castle on Loch Ness to re-establish their relationship. He closes with a pun that makes Iggy groan.

"What do you call an old psychiatrist who's on his last breath? A sigh-chiatrist!"

Ignatius is dead set against a visit, on the grounds that Uncle Ian Grumply was a persistent practitioner of the pun, the lowliest form of humor. But when a telegram arrives announcing Uncle Ian's death and declaring Seymour his heir,  Olive C. Spence and Seymour call Iggy a neophobe, and proclaiming themselves neophiliacs, they pack their bags with Olive fondly recalling her enjoyable visit to Loch Ness at age 12,  and  prepare to leave Ghastly, IL, and fly to Scotland via Heir Air to check out the inheritance. Seymour gets a passport, Olive uses her death certificate as proof of citizenship, and soon they arrive at Seymour's charming, if crumbling, castle in Loch Ness.

But the two travelers soon discover that someone else has designs on the inherited property--the unprincipled real estate developer, Macon Deals, who yearns to convert the ruined remains of the castle and grounds into a gambling resort, Loch Vegas. Despite the opposition of the local believers in their venerable tourist attraction Nessie, led by restaurant owner Carrie N. Haggis, Macon Deals manages to convince the locals that his plan will bring fame and lucrative jobs to the area. All that stands in his way are young Seymour Hope and his invisible guardian, Olive C. Spence.

Meanwhile, back in Ghastly, IL, Grumply is being hounded by a desperate life insurance salesman, Garren Teed, who prepares a million-dollar policy for him, throwing in a two-for-one deal covering Olive C. Spence as well. Iggy is unimpressed with the deal at first,  but when he gets an overdue notice from the local librarian, M. Balm, reporting that the tortoise Seymour checked out under their summer pet-loan promotion has turned out to be the oldest on record and demands return or payment of a $10,000 fine, Iggy re-examines Garren Teed's policy and digs up a promising clause buried in the fine print:

This two-for-one policy shall cover Olive C. Spence and Ignatius B. Grumply. In the event of one or the other's death, the survivor shall present the authorized insurance agent a notarized copy of the the deceased's death certificate. In exchange, thew agent shall present to the surviving individual a check for $1,000,000, no questions asked.

Lamentably, author Kate Klise claims that she in laying to rest her lively series with her last testament, The Loch Ness Punster (43 Old Cemetery Road) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015). Told cleverly and completely in letters and newspaper articles and filled with pun-tastic characters such as the local proprietor of the Ghastly Pet Store owner Barry A. Lyve, wiretap expert Eve Strop, media mogul Mo Block Busters, aging movie diva Ivana Oscar, newspaper editor Cliff Hanger, Constable Mike Ondolences, and Ghastly, IL's regular residents, Fay Tality and Shirley U. Jest, this memorable series is sure to be mourned by precocious wordplay-loving middle readers.

Kate Klise closes this unique pun-packed and funny series with a reunion, a family fortune found, and a wedding. Still, I'm dead serious when I say it is melancholy event to see the author put to rest the notable 43 Cemetary Road books, in which the lowly pun is raised to monumental status. The usually intellectual Kirkus Reviews can't resist being a pun-dit about this one, saying "This is a story that will make you feel lochy to be alive in a world full of laughter, love, and legendary surprises."

To relive the experience of Kate Klise's earlier books, see my reviews here.

My Buddy Wrote Me A Letter! Herman's Letter by Tom Percival

DEAR HERMAN,

HOW ARE YOU? MY NEW HOME IS OKAY, BUT IT'S NOT THE SAME WITHOUT YOU.

THE WEATHER IS NICE AND SUNNY AND I HAVE MADE SOME NEW FRIENDS.

IN FACT, THEY HAVE JUST COME OVER!

GOTTA RUN!

YOUR BEST FRIEND,
HENRY

Herman and Henry had been friends forever. They spent all their time together, playing pirate in their treehouse or concocting secret codes and a secret handshake for their hidden clubhouse. When Henry has to move far, far away, the two old friends promise to write each other faithfully.

Herman is happy to find Henry's first letter in his mailbox, but when he opens it, what he reads makes him even sadder. Henry, it seems, has a new life and new friends, while he is just moping alone. He knows he should write back to Henry, but what is there is say? He has no new friends and no fun to report. Miserable, he puts off answering that letter. Finally, he gets another letter from Henry.

DEAR HERMAN,

GUESS WHAT?

I HAD A RIDE IN A HOT-AIR BALLOON! I WISH YOU COULD HAVE BEEN THERE.

I HAVEN'T RECEIVED ANY OF YOUR LETTERS. I MISS YOU SO MUCH!

YOU ARE MY BEST FRIEND IN THE WORLD. I HOPE YOU WILL VISIT SOON.

Herman is filled with hope. Henry is still his best friend! He sits right down and writes that letter to Henry, but when he hustles through the snow to mail it, he finds that the Post Office is closed for the winter. Although his hibernation time is fast approaching, Herman realizes that he must deliver the letter to Henry himself.

Growing sleepier and sleepier, Herman sets out. He crosses frozen rivers, only to find himself facing a climb up a very tall mountain.

"OH, BOTHER!"

Will Herman hand deliver his letter before hibernation sets in? Will the best friends be reunited? In Tom Percival's Herman's Letter (Bloomsbury, 2014), there's some suspense as Herman fights his way over frosty hill and dale, crevasse and cliff, but the main fun in that this story is told through the best friends' letters. Many kids have lost a best friend to a move, and readers need only to lift the flap of the carefully addressed brown envelopes to know what's going on in the best friends' minds. Along with Percival's appealing illustrations, the epistolary picture book has a lot of emotional and interactive appeal for young readers not to mention a curriculum tie-in for kids just learning how to write a friendly letter for themselves.

My Baby Wrote Me A Letter! Greetings from the Graveyard (43 Cemetery Road) by Kate Klise

ROSES ARE RED
VIOLETS ARE BLUE.
IF A GHOST CAN WRITE BOOKS,
WHY NOT GREETING CARDS, TOO?

Things are peaceful at the mansion at 43 Cemetery Road. Residential ghost-writer Olive C. Spence, and her co-author Ignatious B. Grumply are serenely working on their next haunted mystery, and their foster son, Seymour Hope, is happily illustrating a new line of interment-themed greeting cards, Greetings from the Graveyard, at the inspiration of Olive. But their restful writing is interrupted by a letter from Grumply's long-lost love, Nadia S. Richenov:

Dear Ignatius,

I hope you didn't have a heart attack when you opened this letter. I nearly had a heart attack last night when I was at a party and everyone was talking about a wonderful book called 43 Cemetery Road. "Nadia, you simply must read it," my friends said. "It's about a haunted mansion in Ghastly, Illinois." I pretended to be interested. "Who's the author?" I asked with a yawn. "Well," said my friends, it's co-written by a ghost named Olive C. Spence and the man who rented her mansion, Ignatius B. Grumply."

Ignatius B. Grumply? The man who asked me to marry him years ago? The man whose proposal I turned down like a bedspread?

I'm dying to see you, Iggy!

Love always,
Nadia

It seems Nadia's finances are failing, and her old fiance' Iggy is apparently rolling in royalties, plenty reason for Nadia to hotfoot it to Ghastly to try to re-ignite an old flame. Ignatius's heart, however, has grown stone cold after being jilted, and he rightly suspects that Richenov's ardor is purely pecuniary. He commissions a personal reply, via card, stating that their relationship should merely rest in peace.

Meanwhile, there are several mysterious coincidences arising in the vicinity of Cemetary Road. Celebrity art critic, Art Smart, arrives in town. Two escaped felons, Rob Z. Lott and Liza Lott, are rumored to be in the vicinity, just as new residents, Ben and Mia Bizzy, fortuitously open a business, installing home security systems, just in time, in seems, to ride the wave or recent robberies in the formerly peaceful town. While the local librarian, M. Balm, and constable, Mike Ondolences, busy themselves collecting clues around town, the rejected Nadia S. Richenov elects to pen a tell-all book about her affaire de coeur with the noted author, including his literary love letters, still in her possession, illustrated by none other than his son Seymour Hope.  Nadia's ruthless publisher, Paige Turner, also urges Nadia to purloin the famous portrait of the long-dead but still active writer, Olive C. Spence, from the mansion's dining room, while she is in town.

But there is another felonious pair in the neighborhood, the crooked Lott/Bizzy couple, with a sinister plan to swap the original Olive portrait for a skillful replica, and make a killing selling it to Art Smart.

It looks like partners Grumply and Spence will again have to dig up their Sherlock hats and foil some dastardly deeds, coming up with a plot for a new best-selling mystery in the process, in Kate Klise's clever latest sequel in her popular pun-filled series, 43 Cemetery Road, titled Greetings from the Graveyard (43 Old Cemetery Road) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014).

For kids who like their mysteries well-laced with drop-dead funny funereal wordplay, there is no alternative to Kate Klise's dazzling display of deadly double entendres. With characters like robbery victim Shirley U. Jest, Dr. Izzy Dedyet, and Olive's recently, er, revived butler T. Leeves, there are puns aplenty to keep the pages turning as the mystery gets solved and conflicts duly laid to rest in this new installment for literary-leaning elementary readers. Sarah Klise's appropriately comic pen-and-ink pictures illustrate the text, told entirely in letters, making this both a masterful middle-reader mystery and an excellent example of the epistolary tale.

For more reviews of Kate Klise's craft, see my reviews here.

Princess Pen-Pals: Dear Cinderella by Marian Moore and Mary Jane Kensington

Dear Cinderella,

I am so happy we are going to be pen pals. I live in a great big castle with my mean step-mother. Even though I am a princess, she make me work all the time.

I wish I lived in some faraway place where dreams come true.

SIGH. It's not easy being a fairy tale princess. Snow and Cindy have their mean step-mothers in common, and as their letters fly back and forth, the two soon become BFFs. Both counsel the other to keep a positive outlook, smile through their tears, and keep singing as they do their step-mothers' dirty work.

"Singing and dancing when you are scrubbing, washing, and cleaning make the chores seem like fun,” writes Cinderella helpfully.

“I have been singing and dancing ever since I read your letter,” Snow White gushes.

If this were a movie musical, Cindy and Snow would launch into a split-screen duet dance version of "Someday My Prince Will Come" at this point, with chirping bluebirds fluttering all 'round.

The two would-be princess brides share their dreams of a Prince Charming who will take them away from all of these chores, and confide their fears that their step-mothers have more nefarious events than merely scrubbing and sweeping planned for them. When the unwary Snow White confides in a missive that she is so looking forward to a day far away from her tasks, picnicking in the forest with the jovial huntsman, readers will, of course, know what's up, and when later at the Seven Dwarfs' cottage an old apple seller comes to the door, the fairy tale cognoscenti will be crying "No, Snow! Don't eat that apple!!" Likewise, when Cindy gets left behind, still toiling on her homemade gown on the night of the ball, savvy readers will know that she'll soon be dancing the light fantastic in her glass slippers with a certain prince.

Although some reviewers have tagged this fluffy princess tale as "vapid," it can just as easily be read as a tongue-in-cheek spoof of the whole Disneyesque take on the classics. Older (third, fourth, or fifth graders, say) who may have read the original grim Grimm tales, will chuckle at this bubbly parody, and younger readers will enjoy being in the know when famous elements of the plot are foreshadowed in the girls' perky epistles.

Taken as an intermediate step between the literary license of Disney films and the grim realities of cut-off toes and carved-out hearts of the original tales, this story has its niche. Considered as part of the growing "fractured fairy tale genre," Marian Moore and MaryJane Kensington's light-hearted new Dear Cinderella (Orchard Books, 2012) can be good fun for fans of the two venerable fairy tale princesses who keep smiling on the way to their happy-ever-after.

For a preview look, the book's trailer is here.

Don't Forget to Write! Letters to Missy Violet by Barbara Hathaway

Uh-oh! Mama found out I wrote to Missy Violet. Mama told Papa she was going to whup me for being so fast and nosin' in grown folks' business. I think Papa was tickled, but Mama didn't think it was funny at all!

"Viney Eleanor, didn't I tell you not to go worryin' Missy Violet with letters and things while she's down in Tallahassee? I can't believe that gal went behind my back and wrote that letter!" Mama kept saying. "I didn't know that child had such Judas ways!"

Mama never calls me Viney Eleanor unless she's real mad. She made me go out in the yard and get her a switch.

But Missy Violet told her to be sure and write, and besides, there's all these people who need Missy Violet to make them better, and with her down in Tallahassee with her sick brother, there's nobody but Viney, her "best helper girl" in Richmond County to take care of it all. First off, there's Miss Roula, who can't find the big jar of boneset medicine Missy Violet made up before she left, wondering around the graveyard and mumbling in her bathrobe. There's Viney's big brother Claude, getting more sullen and withdrawn every day, saying he's going to have to kill him some white people, and there's daddy's hurt foot that he won't stay off of, and cousin Charles who's always acting biggity and getting in trouble, and all the rest, and Viney's just got to write to Missy Violet and find out what to do for them all. After all, she spent all summer helping Missy Violet "catch babies," saving Teeny William with her special eyedropper and formula, and learning all about medicinal plants, and she is the only helper girl around.

Viney never gets that switching, as even Mama,determined to raise her right, softens as she reads Missy Violet's wise reply, and as the school year goes on, Viney needs all the wisdom she can get from her mentor. There's mean Miss Battle, her teacher, who takes over for sweet Miss Glover who loves her class but gets "snapped up" by a handsome man from out of the county. But then Missy Violet writes to tell her about her friend, Irene Battle, born a slave but dedicating her life to making sure even the sharecropper's children stay in school and get some education.

Then there's the Klan, who catch Viney and Charles spying on them in the woods, and a deformed baby whose mother doesn't have to courage to take care of her, There's Papa, laid off and threatening to move the whole family up North, and folks all around who need something, and Viney can't wait for Missy Violet to come back and take care of things. Viney needs her help to find out what she's supposed to do about it all.

"You know, the world is changing all the time and there is a place for colored
in every trade," Missy Violet writes back.

And in Barbara Hathaway's second novel about Viney, the forthcoming Letters to Missy Violet (Houghton Mifflin, 2012), we do see that world changing through the eyes of Viney Eleanor, who comes to see that there's a place for her in that world that's coming, even a nursing school for colored right up there in the North, and if she learns everything Miss Battle can teach, she knows she's going to ready to go there soon.

Told chiefly as an epistolary novel, with letters from Viney, Charles, and Mama and replies from Miss Violet, Hathaway's beautiful narrative, based on her grandmother's stories, brings her characters to life in the world of 1930's rural Georgia. There are plenty of childhood adventures--the capture by the Ku Klux Klan and unexpected release by a Klansman's little son and a scary escapade in which Charles dares the kids to climb in through the church window and take a peek inside the casket of a dead Chicago gangster brought back to be buried. There are beautiful episodes--of big, slow Ruby Dean, held back with the little kids, whom Miss Battle finds a way to teach-- and of the essay contest in which Viney gets an A and even Charles buckles down to pass, and many small victories in the life of a family and community that despite their roots in that now faraway time and place, are universal to children everywhere.

Although Letters to Missy Violet successfully stands alone, it is best read in tandem with the award-winning Missy Violet and Me as one warm and thoughtful narrative for middle readers.