Review: Locomotive

Locomotive by Brian Floca

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



This is the first in a pile Lu Benke supplied me of 2014 Caldecott hopefuls.

As a history book (well-sourced), I couldn't help but compare it to Yin & Sontpiet's [b:Coolies|997308|Coolies|Yin|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1309203721s/997308.jpg|982801] which did so much to complicate the story of the transcontinental railroad with underlying cruelties and injustices of labor. Locomotive did absolutely none of that. In a day when we have access to so many historical tools and lenses, all this book did was celebrate the ride.

There are so many tools writers have to present complicated visual and text narratives. I was disappointed even though this book used a variety of visual techniques, none of them were used to create various paths for the narrative to take. Floca hinted at the possibility with one small mention of the buffalo and Indians. But with no treatment he let this thread go. You don't have to villify America to call into question the ugliness that accompanied the great achievements. We have to continue to own these difficulties, or else we learn nothing from history. Bolden's [b:Emancipation Proclamation|13591146|Emancipation Proclamation Lincoln and the Dawn of Liberty|Tonya Bolden|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1344718824s/13591146.jpg|19179179] was very good at challenging the mythology without oversimplifying it into villainy.

Otherwise Floca and the editorial team pulled out all the stops--it was a beautiful visual book. Floca's mastery of watercolor is obvious, and he shows this by presenting a variety of different kinds of images in a believable palette. This is why I rated 3 instead of 2. No designer was credited, which is unfortunate, because it makes me think Floca did all that work. This is possible but shouldn't be in question on a book with this high production quality.

The story was clear and the facts and point of view of taking an early ride were interesting enough that I didn't think it was a waste of time--an enjoyable picturebook. But for a work of history to be in contention for Caldecott or Newbery it should do more to provide alternate readings. In fact, the standard of which books should make it into hard cover, full-color process is always a looming question. I don't think 2nd and 3rd rate books should even go to paper printing in our day and age--we should really push on the market so that only the best books get put to paper and all the rest can go to e-devices.



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Review: Jimmy the Joey: The True Story of an Amazing Koala Rescue

Jimmy the Joey: The True Story of an Amazing Koala Rescue by Susan Kelly

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



This is a fairly plain rendering of what I might have seen in one of Susan Kelly's films. The standard for a documentary book of an individual animal's life is pretty high by now. Sure, not all books have the production luxuries [b:Moonbird B95|12510885|Moonbird A Year on the Wind with the Great Survivor B95|Phillip M. Hoose|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1359803840s/12510885.jpg|17496628] got, but this one could have been differentiated a bit more to offer some variety in the transaction. The story itself is a compelling rescue drama, so it was an interesting read and held together well as something worth spending time with. The back matter provided context as well as a nice varied list of other resources to look into.



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Review: What's Sprouting in My Trash?: A Book about Composting

What's Sprouting in My Trash?: A Book about Composting by Esther Porter

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



The large photos were beautiful and in nice correspondence to the text. The fact that Svetlana Zhurkin (media researcher at Capstone) did this all with stock photos is pretty amazing. Also, the integrated design features for the text boxes made the visual experience even better. The writing for the how-to presentation was clear and concise, but also with a sense there is a personal voice behind it.

Why only 2 stars? For a book like this to be in hard cover, and four-color printing it needs to do support more than one approach to the transaction. This would be a great read-aloud Pre-K-1, but not much for a kid to just sit and read. Because it seems to be designed for a read-aloud only, and because each page has about 20 words on it, the compulsory index in the back is ridiculous.

Overall it's a shame, because as a set of components (by author, media researcher, designer) this should be a good book to read. But when looked at as a whole it just doesn't deliver.



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Review: Courage Has No Color: The True Story of the Triple Nickles, America's First Black Paratroopers

Courage Has No Color: The True Story of the Triple Nickles, America's First Black Paratroopers by Tanya Lee Stone

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



What made me enjoy this was the 'slice of history' approach. Unlike the Tuskegee Airmen, these soldiers never saw overseas combat duty during WWII. As such, the story doesn't have the Hollywood drama you get with fighter pilots over Italy. But it may be a better story about integration in the military, because the story arc shows how racist decision-making remained a military standard through the end of the war.

The long-form picture book was similar in format and design to [b:Emancipation Proclamation|13591146|Emancipation Proclamation Lincoln and the Dawn of Liberty|Tonya Bolden|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1344718824s/13591146.jpg|19179179] by Tonya Bolden. But this book did not get color printing. All the visuals were b/w photos and the design features were minimal. No designer credit? This was unusual for Candlewick for an obviously expensive book. Clean easy to read design, but no obvious hand of a known graphic designer--maybe their in-house designers really wanted the project? Anyway, high-quality hard cover, paper, and dust jacket were signs Candlewick did put money behind the project.

Editors also spared no expense on the back matter pages (source notes, bibliography, timeline, index), including Stone's special section on her historical research methods! (More books need this feature!!) Stone actually did give staff designer Sherry Fatla an acknowledgement in the end matter with her editors, but did not call her out as the designer. Here's a good interview with Fatla by one of her past authors.

The voice and power in the writing was not as strong as Bolden's in Emancipation. But then, Bolden had dozens if not hundreds of existing secondary sources to try to outdo! Stone claims the ground for the first comprehensive historical research on the 555th. Again, it was a pleasure to see a more obscure slice of history with this kind of author attention paired to the high quality production!



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Review: Pomelo's Opposites

Pomelo's Opposites by Ramona Badescu

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This was much better than the last concept book I read. The images and text are loaded with unanswered questions and inferences to make. I felt like I had to stop along the way to 'notice and fondle the details' as Eliot Singer used to day, and then decide how these details made a difference to me. Some of the juxtapositions were laugh-out-loud funny, and were in the same post-modern spirit as [b:People|11423979|People|Blexbolex|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1363658140s/11423979.jpg|16357237]. A favorite is the page where the cartoon elephant is faced by a page with a painting of an African elephant--it's still a painting (not a photo), just in a different style and still slightly cartoony! Very interesting talk to be had around these pictures.

I didn't feel like the text answered all the questions about 'why' these things were opposites (at least not on every page). The book supported my open-ended questions.



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Review: I am Blop!

I am Blop! by Hervé Tullet

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



While I was engaged by the variety of concepts and ways of interacting with this simple design, I kept feeling bullied by the text. The text was fully corresponding with what I saw, and telling me how to interpret it. This book has way better potential as a wordless picture book to talk about with young readers as the pages are turned. I wonder what would be a good way to hide the text for a 'read-aloud' that is all kids' repsonses and talk about the visuals.

This would be a much more powerful multi-modal text if the words had been somehow in a counterpoint relationship to the pictures. For example, on the pages where the Blop is suddenly filled with textures of different kinds of animal skins, a question like 'Where is Blop?' would give away none of the answers, but still prompt the same kind of activation of background knowledge. Instead, he simply labeled it "Animal Blop". Boring.

It was too bad, because this book felt a lot like Blexbolex' [b:People|11423979|People|Blexbolex|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1363658140s/11423979.jpg|16357237] visually. But [a:Blexbolex|1256310|Blexbolex|https://www.goodreads.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-d9f6a4a5badfda0f69e70cc94d962125.png] was much better at creating a readerly experience and not just a set of concepts to deliver didactically.



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Review: Emancipation Proclamation: Lincoln and the Dawn of Liberty

Emancipation Proclamation: Lincoln and the Dawn of Liberty by Tonya Bolden

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I felt like I was watching a good movie, couldn't put the book down. Interestingly, this long-form informational book took me about as long to read as to watch a movie.

Bolden's first-person telling from the black we point of view added a sense of urgency. I enjoyed her decision to problematize Lincoln, presenting him in the context of a. constant pressure by abolitionists and b. seceded states' failure to concede anything in negotiation (sounds familiar given today's congress). It was great to see all the context coming together to make emancipation look to Lincoln more and more like the inevitable conclusion. Arguably it is easier to complicate Lincoln without polarizing people, because he wasn't a slave owner like Jefferson or Washington. It's easier to write him as a conflicted character without villainizing. By contrast, it was this complexity in characterization I felt was missing from Fitzgerald's [b:Children of the Tipi: Life in the Buffalo Days|16293298|Children of the Tipi Life in the Buffalo Days|Michael Oren Fitzgerald|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1379897647s/16293298.jpg|22420863], which I reviewed yesterday.

Bolden's often poetic narrator voice carries the disappointment and eagerness she might have felt inside the movement at the time. She makes no apologies for assuming a personal point of view with a power-based agenda, her quilt frame for patching together all the sources and facts. She presents in quotation the brilliant logic of thinkers like Frederick Douglass who could see the road forward, while not faulting Lincoln for being deliberate and slow and ultimately wrong. (Changing his stance--hmm, don't we call that 'flip-flopping' now?). Many of the quotations she selected sound like they could have been written yesterday. This is probably because so many of them were taken from speeches, and maybe spoken language hasn't changed all that much since the 1800s?

In the end matter a thorough timeline, complete quote sources, and a full two-column page of bibliography all recommend Bolden's careful historical work and the publisher's confidence in this as a book worth spending end paper on (it's an obvious try at an award by Abrams). Also, the entire text is shot through with photos of primary source documents in addition to the engravings and photos. Maria T. Middleton gets a design credit in the front matter. High quality paper, expensive color process, and a fine dust cover all point to a book with a great budget.



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Review: Children of the Tipi: Life in the Buffalo Days

Children of the Tipi: Life in the Buffalo Days by Michael Oren Fitzgerald

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



This book was a deceptively engaging idea on Fitzgerald's part: stitching together a book only of photos and quotations from Native American sources--particularly captivating to look at. But the overall effect of the editing is a normative, redacted view of who the Plains Indians were--an attractive romanticized version.

One of the quotations from Yellowtail let on about this. "You carried a sense of the sacred with you. All of the forms had meaning, even the tipi and the sacred circle of the entire camp. Of course, the life was hard and difficult. And, not all Indians followed the rules."

What he let peek through in that quotation is that a monolithic view of what it meant to be an Indian was often put forward by leaders. They may have needed this kind of unifying rhetoric, but it may not have been shared uniformly by all [i.e., not by all people and not all the time]. More interesting windows on daily life might come not from the prophet, chief, or spokesperson, but from the everyday person who didn't speak in pithy quotes or generalities. Yes, a good number of Fitzgerald's quotations do have this everyday feel to them, and there are plenty of sources out there, including [b:The Middle Five - Indian Boys at School|6870886|The Middle Five - Indian Boys at School|Francis LaFlesche|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1348998784s/6870886.jpg|7087018] by [a:Francis LaFlesche|3077708|Francis LaFlesche|https://www.goodreads.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-d9f6a4a5badfda0f69e70cc94d962125.png].



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Review: The Other Colors: An ABC Book

The Other Colors: An ABC Book by Valerie Gates

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I was surprised by this one, ready for it to be a dull take on the compulsory genre.

But Gates and Cutting were witty in both words and visuals (my favorites were the 'razzamatazz' [pink] rattlesnake, and the xanadu xiphosuran!). Gates is a graphic designer and drew strange color names from a career of fiddling around in Illustrator and Photoshop. There's a nice color guide online where you can see not only these, but also find other odd color names by fiddling with the tools: http://colors.findthedata.org/

The alliterating one-line text was engaging largely because of its repetition of the grammatical pattern. This gave each page roughly the same rhythm, give or take a beat. Alliteration was a good choice, because it allowed the alphabet letters to get more air time than they get in the usual one-word label ABC.

This joins a tradition of 'parody' alphabet books, where the didactic standard is used as a post-modern reference for messing around. Wildly different from [b:The Gashlycrumb Tinies|47558|The Gashlycrumb Tinies (The Vinegar Works, #1)|Edward Gorey|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1327933644s/47558.jpg|3211551], but in exactly the same playful tradition!

Flaws: They couldn't find anything but 'yellow' for letter Y--not really an 'other' color, is it? Some of the visuals felt more forced, like the U page.



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Review: Shimmer & Splash: The Sparkling World of Sea Life

Shimmer & Splash: The Sparkling World of Sea Life by Jim Arnosky

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



What was interesting about this addition to Arnosky's prolific list of titles was the personal everyday writing. He clearly identified that this was an exploration of sea animals mostly based on wading and rowing in small boats near shore. This made it seem accessible. But there were some inconsistencies. While he started out setting this up as an 'anyone can explore the sea' book, he then spent a few pages on animals I wouldn't get to see without a seagoing boat or other equipment. By self-identifying as a 'naturalist' and sticking with the first person voice, he doesn't have to turn so strongly to expert sources. I like the term naturalist, because it suggests someone with professional skills outside the sciences who turns these skills to the study of nature.

He broke voice for a couple of the spreads, which I didn't like. Just when I was digging his first person voice, he slipped into third person description for an entire animal. Also, he could have pared words like 'suddenly' and 'very'--clear narratives and descriptions don't need these words. There was some clunkiness to the prose due to these kinds of issues.

He included several types of text features. The first person narratives were offset both by paragraph-length captions and small captions and labels. This is good differentiation. But I would be interested in seeing the first person voice in the smaller text features, too, because those are the ones less strong readers are likely to do well with--and then they'd get that dose of voice.

The foldouts were great for expanding the visual experience. The expansive spread of a full-size picturebook is still a main challenge to the ebook market, and this will be true for a few years into the future. There's nothing like a full-color double-page spread with its 11x17 span, and then with foldouts on top of that...forgetaboutit. Until we are living the tech from Minority Report, paper picturebooks are superior to anything on a tablet. Although, once again, if anyone is reading I encourage you to look at what Marvel Comics has done to scaffold the reading of comic books in their iphone and android app.



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Review: Gentlemen of the Road: A Tale of Adventure

Gentlemen of the Road: A Tale of Adventure by Michael Chabon

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



At the beginning this buddy adventure reminded me of Allen Quatermain, and also stories by Kipling. I read Kipling's [b:Life's Handicap|1593457|Life's Handicap|Rudyard Kipling|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1348971996s/1593457.jpg|1109958] not long ago, and it was filled with stories that felt like this. But setting it in the peculiar Khazar historical period made it less so an homage to some other author, more Chabon's own. This Jewish history is a fascinating backdrop, filled with speculation and interesting possibilities. Viking bad guys, vengeful elephants, hats! What more could one want in an adventure story? This prompted me to pick up [b:McSweeney's #10|111088|McSweeney's #10|Michael Chabon|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1386925789s/111088.jpg|42866], which had an excellent short story by Elmore Leonard!



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Review: Djibouti

Djibouti by Elmore Leonard

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



I was wanting to dig in and figure out Elmore Leonard's dialog, and it's really tricky in this one. I had a hard time finding the right voices and rhythms for Xavier, who seemed to be one of the vital voices here. I'm trying [b:Tishomingo Blues|147210|Tishomingo Blues|Elmore Leonard|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1172184937s/147210.jpg|2539638] next to see how it goes.

The thing is that without an 'accent' and a real voice in the head, it's difficult to catch onto the ellipsis he relies on so heavily. He tries to portray in writing how people really talk with elisions and omissions of sounds and even whole words, and he writes much of it this way. Unfortunately, he does it mostly by omitting words, not by eliding within words. So the syntax is difficult to figure out until you get an internal voice to go with each character.



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