What Can You Do with An Idea? How This Book Was Made by Mac Barnett and Adam Rex

At first, this book wasn't a book.

It was an idea.

Most kids probably don't give a thought to how books come to be. It's like they've just always been there on shelves in libraries or book stores. But they have a story all their own.

They start with an idea in the mind of a writer--a piece of a story--it could be the middle, or the ending, or the beginning. It could be a mental image of a character, or an appealing event that makes other things happen. It is the author's job to come up with characters, plots, dialog, and a conclusion that satisfies the reader. Sometimes an artist is called on to help the reader visualize the characters and action.

But that's only the beginning of a book.

So... Mac Barnett, the hopeful author, writes a draft of his book.

I had a bunch of words on paper. The words were the first draft.

But a first draft is not a book.

Neither was the second draft. Or the third. Or the twelfth.

With the twentieth draft I was done. So I sent my words to my editor.

Is it a book then? NO. There's many a slip between cup and lip, and Barnett's last draft is not the last one after all. The editor suggests many changes in his draft. Author Barnett is not pleased.

"You're not the boss of me!" he says.

That line hadn't worked with Mac's dad either, but finally author and editor agree on the final draft. Is it a book yet?

NO. It needs an illustrator to make the ideas easy to understand, so artist Adam Rex is called upon to do some drawings. He gets to argue with the editor while Mac gets to forget about this book and work on another one for a while. At last the manuscript and illustrations are approved. Now the book is ready to be printed and bound.

Now, the fastest way would be to print the book nearby in New York or Philadelphia or maybe Miami.

But NO.

The book was printed in Malaysia.

Malaysia is half a world away from New York. All the freshly printed copies have to be loaded on an ocean-going freighter. There are tiger and pirate problems in between. Mac Barnett has time to grow a very long beard while he waits.

And in Mac Barnett's How This Book Was Made (Hyperion Books), the author admits that "a book is not real until it has a reader." Books have come a long way since a story was mostly a storyteller on one end of the log and a listener on the other, but at the heart of it all that's what happens, and what happens in the creation of a book is a story in itself. Barnett's humorous story of how that happens IS the story of this tour de force of a story-within-a-story. Publishers Weekly says,"Barnett and Rex concoct another self-referential story, this one about the process of bookmaking. As in their collaboration, Chloe and the Lion, Barnett and Rex star as writer and illustrator. With the help of an editor (“she is like a teacher, only she works in a skyscraper”), a tiger, pirates, and a cast of thousands (well, maybe dozens), the manuscript leaves Barnett’s desk, undergoes editing, and arrives at the printer in Malaysia....Rex's artwork features paper models and a painted globe in addition to the pencil-drawn figures, lending the work the three-dimensional texture of a puppet play."

Perfect for Book Week read-alouds for Book Week, this one covers a lot of territory, not all of it on the Road to Mandalay!

Infinite Possibilities: Not a Box by Antoinette Portis

What parent, stuck with the tough job of assembling and setting up a birthday or Christmas gift, hasn't been bemused at the sight of a young child playing with the box the thing came in for hours, while the manufactured "toy" sits untouched in lonely plastic isolation?

Antoinette Portis' Not a Box, winner of the Theodore Seuss Geisel Honor Medal (for books for early readers), takes this familiar scene and turns it into a simple work of art. Wrapped in a symbolically plain brown paper cover, this little book takes only 64 words to explain how, in the imagination of a child, a box is not just a box, but whatever the human mind can conceive.

Portis uses a simple black flat line drawing of a little rabbit sitting in a black line rectangle against a textured white page, while on the facing verso page, done in brown, the supposed adult "voice-over" asks the question

"Why are you sitting in a box?"

"It's not a box."

the little rabbit replies matter-of-factly.

And indeed, in that moment, it is not. It's a bright red race car speeding away, shown on a bright yellow page as an overlay over the black rectangle. Following pages offer similarly clueless remarks from the "off camera" adult: "Why are you squirting a box?" and "Why are you wearing a box," as the opposite page shows the little rabbit as a fireman hosing down a flaming red burning building or inside an imposing red robot constructed around the original rectangle. The answer remains the same: "It's not a box." Finally the slightly exasperated voice asks, "Well, what is it then!"

"It's my not-a-box."

A simple brown cardboard box, as we see, can be the howdah on an elephant's back, the crow's nest of a pirate ship, the gondola of a hot-air balloon, or a rocket ship to the moon, depending upon our fancy, and this little book does an amazing job of exploiting this weighty theme in a few lines and in even fewer words. Design is the key to this book, with the adult's questions on a ho-hum brown page, the little rabbit and his plain-Jane box always on a white page, and his glorious imaginings presented against a vibrant yellow or red backdrop.

Not a Box, is a great book for any preschooler. Just be sure to have a plain brown box to go with it and see what comes from putting the two together!

Crime and Punishment II: This Is Not My Hat by Jon Klassen

THIS IS NOT MY HAT.

I STOLE IT FROM A BIG FISH.

HE WAS SLEEPING WHEN I DID IT.

The narrator is a little fish, brazenly wearing a blue Derby, which he readily admits to swiping from a snoozing fish, who, the little fish optimistically opines, probably won't wake up any time soon. And if he does, he probably won't notice. And the hat didn't fit him anyway. And  the perpetrator is swimming rapidly toward a kelp forest, where the big fish will never find him.

Okay,  so there was an eyewitness to the crime. A little crab with big stalky eyes saw it all, but he has promised the larcenous little fish not to tell which way  he went. It is an almost perfect crime. Except....

Except that none of the thief's hopeful speculations are actually true. The big fish does wake up:, he does look up to check out his chapeau; the crab squeals like a stool pigeon; and the big fish is off to the perp's hideout in the swish of a fin.

Crime will out in Jon Klassen's just-published This Is Not My Hat (Candlewick, 2012), a worthy successor to his best-selling chapeau chase, I Want My Hat Back (E. B. White Read-Aloud Award. Picture Books) (see my review here). Again, Klassen's darkly droll tale is a high point in the picture book genre, with his spare text and simple but evocative illustrations complementing the text exquisitely. Klassen's character's eyes speak volumes, as the big fish looks up to where his hat should be even as the naive little malefactor is speculating that his victim won't even notice the hat snitch. The big fish's eyes narrow as the hunt for the culprit commences, and the crab's bulgy eyes need only look page right to put the pursuit of the perpetrator into motion--and the outcome of this crime and punishment saga is no longer in doubt. We know which fish is going to swim out of that seaweed wearing that hat.

With a text of so few, but such well-chosen words, Klassen's illustrations create the tension and the humor that makes this picture book a winner. An artist who can telegraph the outcome of a tale subtly but shrewdly with  no more than a pattern of bubbles is rare. As in his earlier headgear whodunnit, Klassen discretely lets the certain execution of justice take place off-page in a nod to the sensibilities of his young readers.

Receiving starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, School Library Journal, and Horn Book for  This Is Not My Hat, Klassen has the credentials to show that the success of his first book was no hat trick. A tip of the topper to a master of the art of the picture book.

Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience: Lost Voices by Sarah Porter

It only made sense that the absolute violet blackness all around her must be death. It was cold and silky, and it went nowhere....

After a while, though, she began to realize that the perfect darkness was moving. It was moving faster than she ever could have imagined, swirling past her a amazing speed. Then it wasn't the darkness that was moving. She was the one. She could curve in long, dizzy sweeps.

It was a living, leaping darkness, full of shapes that were just as free as she was. Luce knew at that moment that she'd never experienced anything nearly as beautiful as this power and this gracefulness. And at that moment of deepest joy, Luce began to hear the sound.

The closest word for it was music. She thought the beauty of it must be more than she could bear.

Abandoned by her mother and orphaned with the death of her kind but irresponsible father, Lucette is sent to stay with her uncle, a dark, often drunken and cruel recluse on the wild coast of Alaska. When he finally assaults her and leaves her lying on a cliff above the raging sea, she finds herself falling toward the sea, there somehow to be transformed into another being. Undead but not exactly human, Luce realizes that she has been somehow metamorphosed into a mermaid like the those of the tribe led by the strong and beautiful Caterina, who pulls her from the deep, shares her own breath with her, and explains the world which she has entered.

It first to Luce it seems paradise found, a circle of fantastically beautiful girls who care for her, welcome her, and teach her how to live beneath the sea, nurturing her in a perfect society of sisters, all of them sharing the same human history of indifference and abuse.

But slowly Luce learns that the tribe has another mission, to seek out passing ships, enchant their sailors and passengers with their otherworldly music, and lead them to their deaths, all in revenge for the abuse done to young girls in their world. Luce, as a novice, a metaskaza, goes along on their next hunt, and hearing the superb song of their queen, Caterina, she begins to sing, too, discovering that she has a music within her which already rivals the dominating song of Caterina.

But there is something left in Luce, something of humanity's better nature, which feels sympathy, and even the beginnings of forgiveness, for the people her songs help enchant and draw to their deaths, and she is appalled at the ruthlessness with which the tribe pursues to the death the survivors who resist their siren call. At last she is even compelled to save one drowning boy, dragging him ashore on an island, a thing altogether forbidden by the Timakh, the mermaidian law. And then she secretly witnesses Caterina herself, consorting physically with a beautifully young man before she drowns him, an unthinkable and fatal rupture of the Timakh in their own queen.

And when a new metaskaza, Annais, comes into the group, the close society begins to unravel. Annais is vain and shallow, pilfering the jewels and fine clothes from off the corpses of those she chooses to murder purely for their finery, conspiring to force a schism aimed at the overthrow of Caterina, and Luce comes to see that that spark of humanity which she cannot expunge from her own soul will not allow her to remain in that fallen society.

There has been enough death,, Luce thought. Enough death to last until the world rolls away and leaves the sun forever.

Many authors, most recently Stephanie Meyer in her Twilight series, have attempted to use the timeless tale of the mortal character forced to choose between immortality and power and the divine spark of the human capacity for mercy and forgiveness. It's a difficult task, requiring the author first to create a credible setting that is not exactly of this world, a "middle earth" (or in this case a middle sea ) and then to introduce that fatal choice believably into the plot for his or her protagonists.

In this regard, Sarah Porter's forthcoming Lost Voices (Lost Voices (Trilogy)) (Harcourt, 2011) succeeds in a way Meyer's blockbuster best-selling romance series does not. More the primal tale of fallen angels rather than Meyer's daemon lover reprise, Porter's novel, graced with seductive lyrical writing, beautiful and seemingly effortless in its descriptive passages, does not flinch nor punt (as does Meyer) when it comes to the ultimate moral choice she places before her character. This is perhaps not a book for everyone: there is a depth of theme here which also requires a heavy measure of that "willing suspension of disbelief" required of the fantasy quest. Readers will finish the book with a feeling of dissatisfaction that Luce's coming-of-age transformation is not completely realized until they learn that this is but the first book of a planned trilogy, Porter wisely choosing not to issue the full story in one vast unwieldy volume.

Much depends upon what is yet to be written, but Lost Voices (Lost Voices (Trilogy)) offers an impressive debut and much promise.

It's a Wash! Bad Kitty Gets a Bath by Nick Bruel

"I HAVE WRONGED YOU! AND TO MAKE UP FOR MY WRETCHED BEHAVIOR, I SHALL REWARD YOU...

FOR I AM NO MERE KITTY! I AM QUEEN ESMERELDA, KITTY OF MAGIC CANDY RAINBOW ISLAND!

I HAVE BEEN SENT TO YOUR LAND TO FIND THE ONE WITH THE TRUEST AND BRAVEST HEART, FOR ONLY THE ONE WITH THE TRUEST AND BRAVEST HEART WOULD DARE TO GIVE A DIRTY, SMELLY KITTY A BATH!

AS A REWARD FOR YOUR TRUE AND BRAVE HEART, I BESTOW UPON YOU THE GREATEST TREASURE EVER GRANTED...

THIS FLYING GOLDEN UNICORN STANDING IN A MAGIC CAULDRON FILLED WITH CHOCOLATE-COVERED DIAMONDS!"

We regret to inform you that Chapter Three was a dream.

Bad Kitty is back, and a stinky kitty she is, after a bit of a brou-ha-ha involving Poor Puppy (Bad Kitty) and a lot of spilled garbage. Tongue-washing isn't an option here. This situation calls for a bath, a bath involving a tub of warm water and lots of kitty shampoo.

In Nick Bruel's latest book in the Bad Kitty series, Kitty's owner knows that it's important to prepare Kitty's bath before you "introduce" her to the tub. Necessary supplies? Oh, warm water, kitty shampoo, dry towels, kitty-shaped bathrobe (with hood), the usual stuff, AND... suit of armor, your doctor on speed dial, a farewell note to the family, plasma and lots and lots of bandages, clean underwear (don't ask!), plane tickets to Aunt Pauline's to hide out until Kitty forgets all about it, and an ambulance in the driveway, motor running.

Giving a cat a bath is a bit like making rabbit stew. You know, first catch the rabbit? Catching a smart kitty takes a bit of doing. Bad Kitty disappears at the very sound of the word "bath," disguising herself cleverly as Puppy, complete with dog collar and a dog vocabulary ("DUHHH. ARF?") Luckily, unmasked, Bad Kitty runs for the bathroom where she once successfully hid out behind the toilet, only to find herself cornered before a steaming tub of bath water by a determined owner. There is an unfortunate incident involving failed persuasion and rather effective claws, until reverse psychology is applied. Kitty is persuaded that after her bath she will enjoy the spectacle of Puppy being doused with icy cold water, scrubbed with the chimney brush, the toilet brush, the paint brush and the toothbrush until he cries for mercy.

And with a MEOWR! REOWR! HISS! and a FFT! FFT! FFT! Kitty is given her bath, emerging as a skinny, scraggly, dripping, mess of bedraggled wet--but clean-smelling--fur. After the bath, of course, Kitty's little left fang is in full view, and her distaste with the whole process and its perpetrator is more than evident. As Bruel points out

This would NOT be a good time to pat her.

In fact, Kitty may avoid you altogether for a few hours... or days... or weeks.

Try not to take it personally. After all, you made Kitty do something that she HATED and never wanted to do....

You both hope you NEVER have to give Kitty a bath again.

Bruel's Bad Kitty Gets a Bath, (Roaring Brook Press) features the most laugh-out-loud hilarity yet. Although the author contends stoutly that this is a beginning chapter book, it is actually somewhere between a small-format picture book, a graphic novel, and a beginning chapter book, happily with the best aspects of all three. Bruel's comic illustrations are perfect examples of what we reviewers mean when we say the illustrations extend the text, and if his actual text were not so witty, this book could stand as a "story without words." But the text is really funny. Anyone who has ever bathed a angry cat (and they are ALL angry when soused in a tub of water) will recognize every bit of this humorous how-to book. In addition to the inserted Daily Nooz (Entire Family Flees for Life!), Quick Quiz, Common Cat Sounds and Their Meanings, Uncle Murray's Fun Facts,, and warning notes from The Editor hiding certain scenes he declares unsuited for the young, there is an Epilogue (How to Give a Puppy a Bath), and a Glossary, all part of the non-stop fun in this howl of a yowling good read.

Bruel's next Bad Kitty tale, Happy Birthday, Bad Kitty is forthcoming from Roaring Brook Press on September 1. Live long and prosper, Bad Kitty!

Coulda Fooled Me! This Is Not a Book by Jean Jullien

It looks like a book--until you open the door that makes up the cover.

Inside you have to flip it to the horizontal, because what you see is a laptop, a screen with three file icons (DOG, STUFF, DOG STUFF) on top and the familiar QWERTY keyboard at the bottom.

Turn another "page" and you may find sheet music in the holder above a black and white piano keyboard. Another vertical page turn produces a refrigerator with the door wide open.

One two-page spread only makes sense when you prop the open book, inverted V-style, and peer in to see that you're looking at is the inside of a pup tent. Another double spread opens up horizontally to form the inside of a tool kit.

Some page turns let you look down at a scene--a tightrope walker bravely treading lightly over an abyss between buildings.

Illustrator Jean Jullien even packs a surprise inside a four-page gatefold, which opens into the room behind the door cover, with the other half of the cat exiting the cat door.

Artist Jean Jullien's This Is Not A Book (Phaidon Press, 2016) is filled with different ways to look at familiar scenes, with a surprise with every page turn of this Not-A-Book that shows off the power of changing perspective in a sturdy board book format filled with funny details that will fascinate kids of all ages. Publishers Weekly calls this one "...a tour de force of visual transformation."

While Katrina Comes: Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

I bend over and scrub my face dry with my shirt, but the tears still come.

"I can't," I sob.

"I need you," said Randall.

And then I get up because it is the only thing I can do. I step out of the ditch and brush the ants off because it's the only thing I can do; if this is strength, if this is weakness, this is what I do.

After Mama died, Daddy said, What are you crying for? Stop crying. Crying ain't going to change anything. We never stopped crying. We just did it quieter. We hid it.

This was the only thing we could do.

Jesmyn Ward's 2011 National Book Award-winning novel, Salvage the Bones: A Novel (Bloomsbury, 2011), traces the cataclysmic approach of Hurricane Katrina made concrete in the story of the twelve days in one rural family's lives as the storm grows and strikes.

In the beginning only Daddy is prophetically manic with concern about the storm, raging when his children, all teenagers except seven-year-old Junior, belittle his orders to help prepare for the storm, as yet only a tropical depression in the Atlantic. Oldest son Randall is consumed with his desire to win a basketball scholarship and the upcoming playoff game is his only chance to star and initiate that dream. Skeetah is obsessed with his fighting pit-bull China, about to give birth to her first litter, promising part of his earnings from the sale of the pups to Randall for basketball camp. Main character and narrator, fourteen-year-old Esch is preoccupied with the realization that she is pregnant with a child by her brother's friend Manny, who is oblivious to her situation, oblivious in his interest in another girl.

As the hurricane develops, each of the family's personal storms grows and comes to a climax, until the final approach of Katrina focuses the attention of all upon the storm, breaking with a ferocity that destroys everything they own, stripping them all down to what they really are, a family that in the end helps each other survive and understand that their bonds and their hopes are what they really have to begin again.

Ward skillfully assigns epic, mythical proportions to her story by interweaving the classical Greek tale of Jason and Medea with the struggles of the Baptiste family. In fact, Medea is not the central symbol, but a sort of touchstone, destroyer and preserver, sometimes linked to the white dog China, the mother who gives life and sometimes takes it away, sometimes haunting Esch, who is fixated on the story of Medea as she, the memory of her mother's death still fresh, tries to conceive of herself as a mother, as one who therein holds life and death within her own will, and sometimes seen as the storm Katrina itself.

...Katrina, the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered. She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and salt-burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember....

This is not a book for children, filled as it is with the blood, sweat, and tears of life, but mature young adult readers, high school juniors and seniors, those with a grasp of literary tradition and elements of the novel, will find this book absorbing and intensely insightful. The New York Times reviewer points up the dual nature of this novel, a contemporary story on its own, but also a story as primordial as mankind itself: ..."smartly plotted and voluptuously written. It feels fresh and urgent, but it's an ancient, archetypal tale." The Washington Post says "Masterful… Salvage the Bones has the aura of a classic about it." Indeed, Salvage the Bones: A Novel has the promise of joining iconic novels like Moby Dick and To Kill a Mockingbird among those great American novels, firmly rooted in a particular time and place and yet universal in their theme.

Something Wicked This Way Comes: Illuminate by Aimee Agresti

"Part two of the extravaganza!" cried Joan.

It was the anniversary of the day when I had been found and take to the hospital where Joan was the first to tend to me, to patch up my gashes.

I took the glittering box in my hands and shook it. "So I can open it?"

"You'd better!" said Joan.

I tore at the box and opened it. Its contents sparkled.

"I know you're not into jewelry, my precious little tomboy," she said. "But sixteen is a biggie and I thought you should have something pretty."

I pulled out a necklace, webbing its gold chain around my fingers. It's true, I didn't wear jewelry. But this one already felt different. It wasn't a heart or a dangling birthstone, or any of the typical things I was used to seeing on the girls at school. Instead, this pendant, almost heart-shaped, was something entirely new, a single gold wing, its texture softly rippled to give the illusion of feathers.

Under-the-radar, dorkish high school junior Haven is unbelieving when she and two classmates are selected from their school for a semester-long internship at the Lexington Hotel in downtown Chicago, just refurbished to its art deco Al Capone-age glory. The assembled cadre of young interns and assistants are an incredibly beautiful and aloof group of perfectly turned-out young men and women, presided over by the gorgeous and polished Aurelia, and Haven is bolstered only by the presence of the two other brainy honorees from her school, her best friend Dante, a flamboyant, would-be chef, and occasional classmate Lance, awkward and reserved.

But soon after the new interns are settled in the hotel for their semester, Haven senses something off-kilter in this scene of perfection. Among all the sophisticated and perfectly groomed interns, Aurelia is unusually focused on her and yet somehow off-puttingly manipulative, and when her incredibly handsome assistant Lucian begins to pay romantic attention to her, Haven finds it all hard to believe.

And then, setting up the hotel library, Lance finds a book with her name on the cover and gives it to her, and when she opens it, she finds the pages blank, except for a cryptic, handwritten message on the first page:

I trust you have found the pathway.

You will learn to break rules; your life depends on it. Trust in yourself. Trust in these words, and you will not falter.

Naturally, you will doubt this. Yours is an analytical mind. Take heart, winged one.

One last parting admonition, your necklace has deeper meaning. It defines you.

Haven tries to maintain her own integrity amid the seduction of the flattering attentions of Aurelia and Lucian and struggles to understand and carry out the difficult daily instructions of the mysterious book, orders which lead her into the secret passageways created by Capone's mob beneath the hotel, from which she is able to overhear the evil plans of her boss and the handsome Lucian. Haven is alone is her midnight excursions until she at last confides in Lance, who, it seems, is having parallel experiences, and like her, bears strange scars that warn him of something wicked in their solicitous supervisors. Together they piece together the terrible mission of their mentors--to win their very souls and make them one of them, the Metaphorsofi.

Then Haven opens that mysterious book one morning and finds a terrifying inscription waiting for her:

Haven, you will breathe your last mortal breath on May 27.

Aimee Agresti's forthcoming Illuminate: A Gilded Wings Novel, Book One (Harcourt, 2012) follows both a well-trodden path and forges into some new fantasy territory. For readers who cut their literary teeth on the Harry Potter series, the bare bones of the story will be familiar territory: a lonely young protagonist, a foundling with mysterious scars which burn when evil is near, a sudden and surprising emersion into another realm where the eternal struggle of good and evil is carried out on a grand scale, and a friendship that must stand its own trial by fire before the evil foe is temporarily vanquished--until the next book, that is. All of this is developed in a slow-building storyline in which Agresti ably fleshes out in the detailed setting of a refurbished luxury hotel with seemingly Stepford employees and a dance club with an actual "Ring of Fire" which, we discover, is fed by the eternal fires of the Inferno itself. Just as Harry and his companions grow into their good wizardly powers, so too Haven and Lance discover that they are "angels unaware" and that they must nurture their burgeoning strength even as they prepare for the apocalyptic conclusion of this book, Book One in a planned series.

Such novels, drawing from religious allegory, traditional fantasy, and metafictional realism, have become common, and though they are a genre that is not everyone's cup of, well, potion, they have their following in the many novels featuring vampires, werewolves, faery folk, and, as in this case, angels and devils (cf. even the venerated C. S. Lewis' and Madeline L'Engle's novels), now well represented among books for young adults. While Illuminate: A Gilded Wings Novel, Book One requires a mega-dose of that oft-cited "willing suspension of disbelief" to sustain credibility, Agresti creates plenty of action adventure and a trio of appealing characters which readers will want to revisit in subsequent sequels. As Kirkus Reviews says, "Smart, well-crafted and sophisticated; without a doubt, this belongs on the top of the stack of the current crop of angel books."

Danger in Darkest Delaware! Jasper Dash and the Flame Pits of Delaware (Pals in Peril) by M. T. Anderson

There was not much to do in Pelt. There was a museum in town, but it wasn't very exciting. Its main exhibits were on how people used to churn butter. Now, I have enjoyed my share of incredibly dull museums, but even I found the Pelt Museum unbearable. No one really went there except third-grade field trips during their "Making of Margarine" unit....

Perhaps this is why the town had become so fanatical about their competitive staring matches.

The rules were simple: Pair people off to stare at each other's faces. First person to blink or smile loses. As is said of many games: a moment to learn, a lifetime to master.

Jasper Dash, Boy Technonaut, could stare like no one else.... Jasper was the hero of a series of largely forgotten adventure stories for boys in which he invented startling devices and rolled up his sleeves to plunge into adventure from dizzying heights. His powers of staring were almost superhuman. This is because, in the course of Jasper Dash and the Sponge-Cake of Zama, he had spent almost a year studying meditation and martial arts at a secret mountaintop monastery in somewhere like Nepal or Tibet. Now he stared like a force of nature. No one had ever out-stared him.

That is, until Jasper is infamously defeated in a match with the State Champion Stare-Eyes Team--from Delaware. Now, this is not your father's (or even Joe Biden's) Delaware. No. This is the Delaware of quaint New Dark Age peasants, six-armed dancers, a strange almost vowel-less language, Doverian, spoken in purest form in the ancient capital Dover, and towering mountains which conceal an ancient monastery now in the hands of Doverian gangsters headed by Jasper''s nefarious arch enemy Bobby Spandrel. This Delaware is horrible place to visit and a worst place to be captured and suspended over the Delawarian flame pits, so of course that is where Jasper must go.

With Jasper go his cohorts from the earlier Pals in Peril series, Katie Mulligan, girl hero from the Horror Hollow series, and Lily, who goes along to make sure that Jasper and Katie always have a helpless but loyal heroine to rescue. After a couple of colorful days in Dover, the capital city of deepest, darkest Delaware, the three intrepid heroes trek off into the jungle in a quest for the lost monastery of Vbngloom where Jasper senses that his old fellow acolyte Drgnan Pghlik is in great peril.

In the hand of the master of metafiction, M.T. Anderson, all this parody of every comic book, television series, movie serial, and antique hero novel series you've ever heard of (and those you haven't), finds its final spoofing place in Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware (M. T. Anderson's Thrilling Tales) (Beach Lane Books, 2009). It's droll, it's silly, it's witty, it's fast-paced, and the author's tongue is firmly in cheek with every word. It's not a book for fans of realistic fiction, but for fans of Monty Python-esque comedy, it'll be like a old friend.

In an incredibly chicken cop-out that parallels taking the fifth, I'm not even going to try to describe what happens in this quirky novel. Instead I quote the wise (and equally craven) critic from Kirkus Reviews, who says...

"...there is no way to summarize a plot that includes shards of and snarks at Eragon, Tom Swift, chick lit and sports novels, Galaxy Quest and Indiana Jones movies and so on. Extremely funny, it's for adults, who will get at least half the references, and for children, who will get the other half."

Previous books in the series are Whales on Stilts: M. T. Anderson's Thrilling Tales and The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen: M. T. Anderson's Thrilling Tales, and forthcoming later this year is the next thrilling installment, Agent Q, or The Smell of Danger! (Pals in Peril Tale, a).

The Open Book: The Whisper by Pamela Zagarenski

THERE WAS ONCE A LITTLE GIRL WHO LOVED STORIES.

SHE LOVED HOW THE WORDS AND PICTURES TOOK HER TO NEW AND SECRET PLACES
THAT EXISTED IN A WORLD ALL HER OWN.

The girl is intrigued with a book on a high shelf at school.

"IT IS A MAGICAL BOOK OF STORIES," REPLIED HER TEACHER.
"WOULD YOU LIKE TO BORROW IT FOR THE NIGHT?"

The girl dashes toward home with the book under her arm, oblivious to the fact that the words from the book are floating behind her. Unbeknownst to her, a red fox follows, capturing the intriguing words--"once upon a time, wizard, honey, whale, secret"--in a tall butterfly net. Of course, when after supper dishes are done the girl steals away to her room to open the book, she finds lavish pictures, but no words. There's no story without words, she thinks, dejected.

But then there comes a little whisper, perhaps from the fox peering through the window.

YOU CAN IMAGINE THE WORDS, IMAGINE THE STORIES.

THERE ARE NEVER ANY RIGHTS OR WRONGS IN IMAGINING.

IMAGINING JUST IS.

On the page are two bears, a blue bear, wearing a crown, and a honey bear, with a crown floating over his head, and the girl begins to tell the story of the first day of spring and a promise of a gift of honey....

Pamela Zagarenski's The Whisper (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015) is actually many stories within a story inside a story, a layered book of lavish, opulent, splendid story-starting illustrations, with cities of tall, narrow houses climbing up hillsides and large, fanciful animals--tigers, bears, an ox and an owl, and the ever present fox and rabbit--each providing a wild premise for each page's adventures as the girl, seated at the edge of the frame with the open book before her, spins out the opening phrases of her story from her imagination. Pale, pastel illustrations, gauzy and glorious, suggest many scenarios, as the pages proceed, left to right. And the girl spins out the opening words for a tale for each. ...That very morning Owl told us he would pick us up at midnight and to be prepared for anything. He held a golden key tightly in his beak as we flew into the indigo night....

The girl's imaginings blend into dreams, and when she wakes, dazed and dreamy, she hurriedly dresses and dashes to school, prepared to confess that the book is returned incomplete. But along the way through the woods she meets the fox, clutching a round, golden bag.

"EXCUSE ME, LITTLE GIRL.
I BELIEVE I HAVE THE WORDS TO YOUR BOOK.

NOW, PLEASE, BEFORE YOU LEAVE,
COULD I BOTHER YOU
FOR A SMALL FAVOR?" ASKED THE FOX.

The book is returned to the teacher, and the girl's hurried explanation ends with a rush.

THANK YOU! I HAVE SO MANY STORIES TO TELL.

The two-time Caldcott Honor-winning Zagarenski's story prompts are deliciously illustrated in surreal, expressionistic art, rife with symbols and her own signature images, segmented circles, sun and moon, animals, some of which are fantasy versions of the girl's own toys, teapots and cups, bees and honeycombs, all a feast for the eyes and an intriguing puzzle. The crown on the cover of the book reappears as a symbol of imagination over the heads of the animals, the girl, and ultimately the fox herself.

But that's not all. Inside the imagined stories nested inside the story of the wordless book, there is the real story of a clever fox, with a re-imagined version of her own famous fable:

A Famished Fox saw some clusters of ripe grapes hanging from a vine.  She resorted to all her tricks to get them, but wearied herself in vain, for she could not reach them. At last, she turned away, saying "The Grapes are sour and not as ripe as I thought."

... BUT THIS FOX IS OF THE VERY CLEVER KIND,
SO SHE IMAGINED HER STORY DIFFERENTLY
AND THE GRAPES TASTED EVER SO SWEET.

THE END.

A clever picture book author-illustrator never wastes a good pair of endpapers, and Zagarenski's provide the essential and humorous frame story for this book. The opening endpaper shows the hungry red fox wistfully eyeing the too-high grapes, but as the author reveals, within the story the fox manages to earn "one small favor," a boost from the grateful girl up to the fruit beyond her reach, and the closing endpaper shows her, full of grapes, snoozing under the arbor, with the crown clearly hers.

Depending upon the age and knowledge of the child experiencing this story, some adult guidance may be needed to unpack what is going on in this story within a story within a story, a wryly witty way to drive home the premise of the power of the imagination. A reading of the original Aesop's fable of the Fox and the Grapes would be a good opener.

Watch for this one at award time. Zagarenski's award-winning illustrations may be seen in Joyce Sidman's What the Heart Knows: Chants, Charms, and Blessings and Mary Logue's Sleep Like a Tiger. (Caldecott Medal - Honors Winning Title(s))

Brainteaser: The Potato Chip Puzzle by Eric Berlin

The principal's office was down a short hallway, ending in a door you never wanted to open. Winston had never had a reason to knock on this door, and that was fine with him. He was still trying to figure out some way he might be in trouble. He took a keep breath and knocked softly. "Come in," said a brusque voice. Winston creaked the door open.

Principal Unger was not behind his desk. He was up and pacing. "Ah, Winston. Good. You're still the puzzle person, right? I want you to take a look at this. Here!" Mr. Unger thrust a paper into Winston's hands.

This was not at all what he had expected from a visit to the principal's office. "What is this?" asked Winston.

"I was hoping you could tell me."

Before him Winston Breen sees what is obviously an alphanumeric code of some sort, C3, J5, S2...., as his principal waits impatiently. Can Winston crack this code? And if he does, what does it mean for Principal Unger, Walter Fredericks Jr. High, and its most famous puzzle fan?

Winston Breen, hero of Eric Berlin's first book in this series, The Puzzling World of Winston Breen, again finds himself and his friends Mal and Jake involved in a cerebral mystery. Winston does unlock the code, revealing a local phone number, and when Mr. Unger calls, he learns that by solving the first test, his school has qualified to compete in a day of competitive puzzling sponsored by the eccentric millionaire entrepreneur, inventor of the square potato chip, who is offering a $50,000 prize to the winning team from those local middle schools who qualify by puzzling out the mysterious invitation. Only a handful of schools qualify, and when the day of the contest arrives, Winston finds himself for the first time among his puzzler peers, particularly the over-zealous Brendan Root, who falls all over himself to meet his idol, Winston, whose puzzle expertise in locating a local treasure trove has made him famous in his town.

But extricating himself from the lugubrious Brendan is only the beginning of Winston's problems. Not only is their chaperon, the controlling math teacher Mr. Garvey, consumed with his need to best a rival math teacher whose whizkid teams consistently smash Walter Frederick's math competitors, but the other teams are obviously filled with puzzle wizards and coaches who are equally determined to win by almost any means.

Then things turn take a turn for the worst. Mr. Garvey's car has a flat tire as they set for for the Planetarium to solve their first test, and it turns out that a glass-shard filled bottle was wedged behind their tire to make sure that their team would fall behind the others. Then other teams run into similar tricks: signs are reversed and a critical door locked to slow down another team; one team has a member locked in a bathroom, a handheld device with which each team reports the solution to each puzzle is stolen, at an amusement park the Ferris wheel with the puzzle clues aboard is locked in motion so that members of several teams are stuck aboard until another key can be found, and when Mal pursues a fleeing figure at the scene, he is injured in the scuffle which results in a black eye but in his grabbing a bag with incriminating evidence when the malefactor escapes.

It is obvious that one team is definitely guilty of malice aforethought in its determination to win the contest. Now Winston has two problems to solve: how to help his team complete the list of puzzles first and how to find out and foil the cheaters along the way.

Puzzle/mystery aficionados will find this second in the Winston Breen series, The Potato Chip Puzzles: The Puzzling World of Winston Breen, (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2009) just as exciting and even a bit more menacing than its predecessor. Fans of the riddle-based books in Trenton Stewart's best-selling The Mysterious Benedict Society or The 39 Clues, a popular ongoing series each sequel of which is intriguingly written by a different famous author, or Pseudonymous Bosch's quirky Secret Series which includes cryptic best-selling titles such as The Name of this Book Is Secret (Secret Series),If You're Reading This, It's Too Late (Secret Series), and This Book Is Not Good For You (Secret Series) will surely find the brainy and likable Winston Breen their man.

In addition to the puzzles embedded in the plot of The Potato Chip Puzzles: The Puzzling World of Winston Breen, which readers can solve along with the characters, the solutions to these and many more puzzles are contained in the back matter, and if those aren't enough to keep fans going through the long winter nights ahead, there is a companion website with plenty more here to keep the puzzle addict satisfied.

Whose Alphabet Is This, Anyway? A Is For Musk Ox by Erin Cabatingan

"HEY! HEY YOU, MUSK OX!

DID YOU EAT THAT APPLE?"

“WHO, ME?”

“DON’T LIE! YOUR MOUTH IS FULL OF APPLE! LOOK! YOU’RE DROOLING APPLE JUICE. YOU’RE RUINING MY BOOK!”

Zebra can’t seem to get this alphabet book underway. He’s got a perfectly respectable apple in place for the A word, and some dumb ox eats it. Not only that, Musk Ox demands that page one should read “A Is For Musk Ox.”

“YOU SHOULD THANK ME. I DIDN’T RUIN IT. I SAVED IT!

EVERY OTHER ALPHABET BOOK STARTS WITH A IS FOR APPLE.

SOOO BORING!”

Clearly, this is not your father’s alphabet book, as Musk Ox insists that his species deserves being on the A team, being awesome, living in the Arctic, which includes, you know, Alaska.

Zebra reluctantly concedes the point, and unwittingly opens the floodgates to Musk Ox’s self-possessed possession of the entire alphabet. B Is for Baby? Who wants to think about stinky diapers when you can have a beautiful brown and black musk ox? Similarly, clown is out, replaced by a COOL musk ox, and before he knows it, Zebra has lost control of the whole alphabet.

It gets to be more of a stretch coming down the home stretch. M is for Apple? He has to protest.

”WAIT A MINUTE!"

“I FELT KINDA BAD ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED AT THE BEGINNING OF THE BOOK, WHEN I MUNCHED A MCINTOSH,” EXPLAINS MUSK OX.

Things go from bad to worse as Musk Ox invalidates the “V is for Valentine” and substitutes a “very, VERY cool musk ox," but when at last they reach the letter Z, Zebra feels his time has come. Z Is for Zebra. It’s only fair, right? Musk Ox concurs. And he has just the right picture of Zebra for that slot.

I JUST WANT TO USE THIS PICTURE OF YOU. THREE MONTHS OLD IN DIAPERS.

NOT the ABC book for two-year-olds, but just the one for older primary graders who relish rocking the venerable abecedarius in modern style. In Erin Cabatingan’s A Is for Musk Ox (Roaring Brook, 2012),. it’s A FOR ATTITUDE, as this self-centered musk ox insinuates himself into every spread, and young readers learn more than they ever wanted to know about Arctic oxen. Matthew Myers’ muscularly comic musk ox dominates the day in a slightly mind-expanding (or mind-bending) vocabulary workout. Pair this one with Kelly Bingham’s and Paul Zelinsky’s noted Z Is for Moose [z is for moose] Kelly Bingham, Paul O. Zelinsky (Illustrator) for a wordplaying walk on the wild side through the alphabet.

For a taste of this awesome (and apple-free) alphabet lesson, see the book’s trailer here.