Posts on books boys like

Our last day in London, we went up in the London Eye, a/k/a Millennium Wheel. My first exposure to this gigantic observation wheel was in the 2005 come-back episode of Doctor Who, at which point I had no idea it was anything other than your run-of-the-mill Ferris wheel.

The original Ferris wheel, built for the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, had a 264-foot diameter wheel and 36 cars, each of which could carry a whopping 60 people. Today’s wheel at Navy Pier has a paltry 150-foot diameter. It practically looks like a miniature.

In contrast, the London Eye—built for the turn of the millennium, originally intended to stand five years, but so popular it will remain indefinitely—has a 443-foot diameter. It is freaking huge. Around the wheel are 32 sealed pods, transparent except for the floor, each of which accommodates 25 passengers. It rotates so slowly and smoothly—30 minutes per rotation—that from a distance it appears not to be moving at all. It’s right next to the Thames, across from Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, but you can see for miles in all directions.

This is all to say that when I returned to the library after my vacation and found The London Eye Mystery, by Siobhan Dowd, on our cart of new books, I was wicked excited.

Aunt Gloria and Cousin Salim are visiting Ted’s family in London for a few days before moving to America. Ted and his older sister, Kat, are expected to entertain Salim. Unfortunately, their very first activity is a bust. Salim gets into a London Eye capsule, and Ted and Kat watch it make its majestic way around. But half an hour later, when the capsule opens, Salim is nowhere in sight.

How could Salim have vanished from a sealed, transparent capsule with so many witnesses? And where has he gone? The police are on the case, but Ted and Kat have a few theories of their own. Will they find Salim before it’s too late?

My usual complaint about middle grade mysteries is that their solutions are either totally obvious from the beginning (at least, to an adult reader) or are completely obscure and fly in from out of nowhere. Where those mysteries fail, The London Eye succeeds, allowing readers to gradually pick up clues throughout the book and formulate reasonable hypotheses along with the characters. Even if readers don’t guess the solution before Ted reveals it, they’ll recognize the pieces were in place all along.

Dowd accomplishes this feat by keeping very close to Ted, driving the novel at least as much by character as by plot. Ted is quirky but likeable, a high-functioning Aspie with a “brain that runs on a different operating system from other people’s.” Like many people with autism spectrum conditions, he has a great eye for detail, a tendency to take everything literally, and difficulty reading people’s emotions. He’s also obsessed with the weather, well-meaning, and a sweet contrast to his prickly (but grudgingly likeable) sister Kat. Throughout the course of the story, Ted exchanges some of his innocence for worldliness, goes out of his comfort zone for Salim’s sake, and makes new friends.

One of my favorite, albeit serious, parts of the book is when Ted’s father goes to the morgue to see if a boy pulled from the river is Salim. Ted is waiting at home. “Something terrible happened in those fifty-four minutes. No amount of making up shipping forecasts could stop me from thinking about it. Death. I realized it was real.” Ted lapses into deep thoughts about his mortality, infinity, and God. I’ll bet you a dollar Frank and Joe Hardy never have.

The London Eye Mystery, being a British mystery with an autistic main character, invites obvious comparisons with Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. In spite of the surface similarities, it’s no rip-off but a solid work in its own right, with an upper middle grade/early YA rather than YA/adult audience. Recommended for boys and girls in middle school and up.

Bestsellers aside, one of the most popular middle grade series at my library is Blue Balliett’s trilogy consisting of Chasing Vermeer, The Wright 3, and, most recently, The Calder Game. I hesitate to call it a mystery series, for the reasons J. L. Bell and friends state, though it does share some of the appeal of mysteries—i.e., mysterious things happen. They’ve also got an appealing intellectual slant, with their focus on great works of art; reading them, you feel like you’re painlessly learning something really cool. And while I’m not a huge fan myself, there’s no denying: the books are darn popular with the kids.

So, when they’ve gobbled those up and are looking for more, hand them Ghost Letters, by Stephen Alter (Bloomsbury, 2008).

Seventh grader Gil Mendelson-Finch has just been expelled from McCauley Prep and sent to live with his poet grandfather, Prescott, in the ancestral Finch home. Initially prepared to be bored out of his skull, Gil learns that Hornswoggle Bay (somewhere in New England) is anything but dull.

As a joke, Gil writes a message, puts it in the odd, blue bottle that washes up on shore, and throws it back into the ocean—only to have it return the next day with a letter from a boy named Sikander, who lived in the Indian province of Ajeebgarh in 1896! And that’s just the first in a series of strange occurrences. There’s also a putrid-smelling skeleton’s hand Gil and his new friend Nargis find in an abandoned mailbox, a ghostly postman who walks the town, and a genie who’s been sleeping in an envelope for more than a century!

Every odd event brings Gil and Nargis closer to understanding the connection between Hornswoggle Bay and Ajeebgarh—a connection nearly 200 years old and rooted in the tragedy of a lost love letter. Meanwhile, Gil receives increasingly panicked letters from Sikander, whose province will soon be attacked by the British Army—all because of a postage stamp!

If you’re looking for a linear plot, you won’t find it here. The omniscient narrator jumps between perspectives and time periods on a chapter-by-chapter basis. Still, it’s a fun ride. Alter works many mail-related tropes—dogs who chase mailmen, carrier pigeons, secret wartime codes—into the plot (though a chain letter disappointingly went nowhere). There’s also a recurring poetry motif that, while not essential to the plot, does not feel out of place either.

Readers (e.g., I) may be disappointed that there is no such place as Ajeebgarh, nor was there ever a Postage Stamp War in India, but they will catch the vibe of British Colonialism and perhaps read into real-life postage stamp wars in other parts of the world throughout history. My other disappointment was the rather Deus Ex Machina ending—but kids who have enjoyed Blue Balliett’s books, with their similarly fantastical and serendipitous conclusions, will probably not be bothered.

All in all, an entertaining read for grades 4 and up.

Yesterday I fielded a phone call from a Concerned Mother. Concerned Mothers often concern me because even though they ostensibly want reassurance, they won’t always accept it. Which leaves me wondering why they asked my opinion in the first place.

This particular Concerned Mother was calling with good news: her sixth grade son, who’d never enjoyed reading, became utterly captivated by Darren Shan’s Cirque du Freak vampire series and read all twelve. Now he wants to read Shan’s Demonata series. Mom has done her research and knows the series promises violence and gore. What she wants to know is should she be worried about her son’s new fixation on horror stories?

So I told her how when my brother was in middle school, he devoured nothing but Stephen King, Peter Straub, Robin Cook. In eighth grade, for language arts he wrote a novella called Scarlet Raid, a horror story about the return of Black Plague. And now, more than twenty years later, he is – to the best of my knowledge – a sane and law-abiding citizen whose literary taste runs toward Russell Banks and Paul Thereux.

In other words, her son – “a very nice, quiet kid” – is perfectly normal. “Just so long as he isn’t painting pentagrams on his bedroom floor,” I told her.

Fortunately, this Concerned Mother seemed very willing to accept my reassurance that horror is a popular genre with middle school boys. She even wrote down my suggestion of Anthony Horowitz’s Gatekeepers series as another possibility for her son.

The conversation prompted me to start revising our department’s list of recommended horror books. This is not a genre in which I read widely. I’m a chicken with a weak stomach for gore.

When I was twelve, I stayed at home while my parents drove my brother to college in another state for his freshman year. Already missing him, I raided his bedroom. I spent all day, alone in the house, reading his old copy of Cujo – not one of my brighter moments. That night I spent the night at a friend’s house and dreamed her cat had been bitten by evil vampire bats. I woke up clawing dream-Leo off my throat.

(I’ve read other Stephen King books since. My favorites are his non-gory paranormal books, particularly Carrie and The Green Mile – except for one chapter I always skip over.)

Anyway, I was surprised that in the past couple years I actually have read a number of scary books – scary for an eleven-year-old, anyway. Some of my favored series to suggest to middle school boys:

• Neal Shusterman’s Dark Fusion series
• Joseph Delaney’s Last Apprentice series
• Anthony Horowitz’s Gatekeepers series
• Paul Zindel’s various later books like The Doom Stone and Loch

We still carry R.L. Stine’s Fear Street series, but my impression is that these are not nearly as popular as they once were. I also suspect that their residual popularity lies in a female readership, but I really have no scientific basis for that – it’s just a hunch I’ve formed based on the shimmery book covers. Anyone know? Anyone have other suggestions of horror for boys who aren’t quite ready for Stephen King?

Reaching waaay back in time (all the way to 2007!), there the YA YA YAs initiated a discussion about social class in young adult literature. Whether/where poverty is depicted in YA lit, whether/how it's tied up with race, etc. Figures that in the month since, I've read several good books that deal with class differences.

1. Mortal Engines, by Philip Reeve.

   I'd tried reading Larklight and just couldn't get into it, so I was intensely surprised and pleased when I discovered I LOVED Mortal Engines!

   It's a steampunk adventure set on a far-future Earth where wheeled cities roam the continents devouring smaller towns. The gentry live on the top tier, slaves operate the engines in the bowels, and everyone else falls somewhere in between.

   Our story’s heroes are Tom, an apprentice historian (middle-class), Katherine, the Head Historian’s daughter (nouveau riche), and Hester, a would-be assassin (outsider/untouchable). All become embroiled in London’s sinister plot to dominate Eurasia. It’s a page-turner with three glorious sequels. Oh, and did I mention the pirates?

   To me, it read most like Kenneth Oppel’s Airborn and Skybreaker, but it will find fans among most literary fantasy/science fiction (Philip Pullman, Garth Nix, Diana Wynne Jones, etc.) lovers, junior high and up.

2. Taken, by Edward Bloor.

   In this near-future suspense, 13-year-old Charity has been kidnapped, presumably for the high ransom her parents will pay. Kidnapping children from wealthy families has become an industry in this America of intense social stratification (yes, even more intense than today). Fully expecting to be returned home safely within the typical 24 hours, Charity is forced to reevaluate everything she knows about her family when the kidnappers stray from protocol.

   In this book, race and class are definitely intertwined. In Charity’s South Florida community, the people living in gated communities seem to be mostly white, while the new servant class is largely Hispanic, African-American, or otherwise “of color.” Taken sort of hits the reader over the head with its social commentary, but it’s still one of the better written and thoughtful suspense novels for the junior high age group available. It should appeal to both boys and girls.

3. Another Kind of Cowboy, by Susan Juby.

   And now for something completely different. This contemporary YA book explores teenagers Alex and Clio’s coming of age. Alex is a reserved, closeted gay teen who lives for horses. Clio is a spoiled and naive debutante at the local equestrienne school. Alex’s lack of money causes problems in his quest to pursue the dressage method of riding, while Clio has more money than she knows what to do with. In spite of their glaring differences, they somehow become good friends.

   I really enjoyed the book’s realism and dry humor. It reaches a very satisfying conclusion, and avoids the obvious solution to Alex’s financial problems by having Clio bail him out.

This week saw the launch of a new gender-related book blog, Boys Blogging Books!

So far, reviewers include 14-year-old Kurtis and 11-year-old Michael. They kicked off with a review of Thirteen Reasons Why and an interview with the author, Jay Asher. I look forward to reading more!

Via Disco Mermaids

First Light, by Rebecca Stead (Random House, 2007) is one of the best books I’ve read this year with obvious cross-gender appeal. By “one of the best”, I mean not only is it well-written, with an interesting premise and three-dimensional characters, it’s a page-turner. I carried it around with me, just waiting for a spare moment in which to sneak another peek. I’m confident it will have the same effect on many upper middle grade readers, too.

First Light follows the lives of two young characters, Peter and Thea, who live in separate worlds. Peter lives in modern-day New York City, while Thea lives in a time and place we can’t quite pin down. All we know is it’s foreign. Cold. Dark. A colony enclosed by ice, called Gracehope.

Both Peter and Thea are looking for answers. Peter seems perfectly ordinary, except for his headaches, which are accompanied by strange visions. There is, however, the question of his mother’s depression, which seems tied to the red notebook she’s always writing in but won’t let Peter see.

As for Thea, she’s concerned for Gracehope’s future. Her people came to Gracehope seven generations ago, and have grown greatly in number. How will they survive without leaving Gracehope and entering the “wider world” to find a bigger place to live, with greater resources? Unfortunately, the elders of Gracehope, particularly Thea’s grandmother, are completely resistant to exploring that option.

It isn’t until Peter and his parents visit Greenland – ostensibly for his father to study global warming, while his mother writes a book on mitochondrial DNA – that Peter and Thea’s worlds are set on a collision course, and all their questions are answered. The hows and whys are the mystery that will drive readers onward.

The Library of Congress has cataloged First Light as an adventure story, but I’m going to call it science fiction. It’s speculative, involving situations and technology outside current reality. Aside from a touch of prophecy, all explanations are scientific rather than magical in nature. It does have elements of adventure and mystery, but I think it shares most of its appeal with speculative fiction such as Lois Lowry’s Giver trilogy, Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Running Out of Time and Shadow Children series, and – the parallels will be obvious to any reader – Jeanne Du Prau’s City of Ember. And boy howdy, do those books have a lot of fans, many of whom would probably enjoy First Light!

To be critical for a moment, the “scientific” elements of the story were, to me, the least interesting or plausible. Without giving too much away, Peter’s mother’s mitochondrial DNA explanation for Gracehope’s people works for the present-day, but I wasn’t sure why it was necessary for the founder of Gracehope to have known about it as well (down to the double-helix, even!). That, along with certain other technology "invented" by the founder, seemed almost magical in an otherwise fairly grounded story. Meanwhile, global warming provides a compelling reason for Peter’s family’s visit to Greenland, but I didn’t feel the full weight of global warming’s consequences for Gracehope. This is probably because the story ends without Gracehope’s people confronting the truth themselves.

If one doesn’t dig too deeply into pragmatics, however, there’s plenty to enjoy here for both boys and girls, grades 6-or-so and up. I look forward to adding it to my library’s list of recommended science fiction titles and talking it up next time someone asks me, “Read any good books lately?”

Also reviewed at:
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Deliciously Clean Reads

The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp, by Rick Yancey, seems like the kind of book that should fly off the shelves. Yet our paperback copies hadn't budged for weeks, I noticed. Time for me to pick it up myself and see what it was all about, so I could give it the talking-up it warrants.

Sixteen-year-old Alfred Kropp doesn’t exactly seem like hero material (except, perhaps, that he’s an orphan). He isn’t smart, handsome, or brave, and he’s a terrible athlete. So why is it suddenly up to Alfred to save the world?

Call it being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Drooling at the possibility of a million-dollar pay-off, Alfred’s Uncle Farrell ropes him into stealing an artifact from wealthy Mr. Samson. It isn’t until after sword-wielding monks attack him and Uncle Farrell ends up dead that Alfred realizes he’s made a huge mistake.

The artifact is the sword Excalibur, legendary sword of King Arthur. Whoever wields it cannot be defeated. And now it’s fallen into the wrong hands. The worst hands, actually – those of Mogart, a knight gone bad. The future of all mankind is in danger, just because Alfred wasn’t brave enough to tell his uncle, “No.”

What follows is a rip-roaring adventure full of sword-fighting, high-speed car chases, and double crosses, as Alfred joins forces with Bennacio, last of the Order that protected Excalibur for a thousand years. Meanwhile, agents of the mysterious (and mysteriously named) OIPEP have their own designs on getting the sword, but are they allies or enemies? And on his journey, Alfred learns there’s a lot more to heroism than being a kick-ass sword fighter.

Coming in at nearly 350 pages, The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp felt slightly long to me, but one action sequence after another keeps those pages turning. Readers will also appreciate the fine taste in automobiles (how many sixteen-year-olds get to test drive a Mercedes, a Ferrari, a Jaguar, and a Lamborghini?), the slightly gory fight scenes, and Alfred’s deadpan humor. For example:

“That was just a lucky punch,” [Barry] gasped, and he slapped my hand away.
“The odds are against that,” I answered. “I’ve never had too much luck.”

Alfred Kropp lives up to the bar set by the Indian Jones movies and, dare I say, exceeds the quality of many other popular adventure tales involving ancient artifacts in modern times (Da Vinci Code or Librarian: Quest for the Spear, perchance?) Suggest it to spy adventure and mythology fans in the 10-14 age range. It shares appeal with the Alex Rider adventures, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, and even Artemis Fowl.

Meanwhile, HipWriterMama just posted a terrific interview with author Rick Yancey! Take a gander to get background on Alfred Kropp, the scoop on its sequels, and plenty of other interesting trivia.

Like a lot of kids, I was never big into poetry. Like a lot of adults, I’m still not. So when I find a book of poetry that not only do I like, but I think kids would like, too? It’s a special occasion.

This isn’t to say there isn’t lots of great poetry for kids out there – poetry kids would enjoy if they gave it half a chance. But when it’s all crowded together on our massive 811 shelves, it’s harder to find. Often I’ll end up steering kids toward Shel Silverstein or Jack Prelutsky when, let’s face it, they already know about those guys.

So I’m planning to participate in Poetry Fridays to actively seek out poetry with kid appeal, especially boy appeal.

Now, on to this week’s selection, remarkable because the poems are:
1) Short
2) Easy to understand
3) Visually interesting
4) Laugh-out-loud funny

I’m talking about Technically, It’s Not My Fault: Concrete Poems, by John Grandits.

Eleven-year-old Robert is the kind of boy who purposefully gives the “you-must-not-have-the-brains-God-gave-a-chicken” answer on multiple choice tests. Who talks backward just to confound his social studies teacher. Whose idea of an amazing roller coaster involves shooting flames, poisonous killer spiders, and a cannon, and is called the “Spew Machine.” Who imagines the autobiography of a fart. He’s a little off-beat, and a lot hilarious.

From the front cover, we’re sucked in, as Robert explains to his parents why there is a concrete block sticking out of the roof of the family car. “See, I was reading about Galileo, a guy who made all these great discoveries and did cool experiments…” This slim volume continues with 27 more concrete poems, recounting Robert’s snarky observations and (mis)adventures.

With the exception of the first poem, “concrete” refers to the poems’ form, not their subject matter. In a concrete poem, the visual layout contributes to the poem’s meaning. For example, “My Stupid Day” evokes the day-in, day-out tedium of school by wrapping Robert’s routine around a clock; he goes to bed at night, only to wake up the next morning and begin again. In “Robert’s Four At-Bats”, each line traces the path of the ball (and, finally, Robert as he runs the bases). The clever forms make the poems memorable and especially appealing to visual learners.

I’m not a person who often laughs out loud at books, so when I do, it’s a sign of true hilarity. Probably my favorite poem in this collection is “Where New Words Come From,” written in a series of cartoon panels and speech balloons. It traces the journey of “snarpy” as a flub from Robert’s irate mother, to school gossip, to the Style Network, to a presidential press conference on U.S. foreign policy, with not a bit of confusion along the way. (“Snarpy? Is that some sort of new slang? Well, it’s what the kids are saying.”)

Another of my favorites is “TyrannosaurBus Rex”, in which Robert envisions the school bus as a vicious dinosaur that hunts children (whose parents have delivered them to the bus stop as human sacrifices) and eventually vomits them onto school grounds. I was also tickled by “The Thank You Letter with Footnotes”, an annotated note to Aunt Hildegard whose footnotes express Robert’s true feelings about her atrocious birthday gift.

These aren’t your typical poems. They aren’t overflowing with figurative language. They don’t rhyme. Most of them read like conversational prose. And being highly visual, they aren’t made to read aloud in class. But for a consistently entertaining sit-down read, Technically, It’s Not My Fault is hard to beat. It’s the kind of book I’d hope middle grade kids would read even when they don’t have a poetry assignment for school. It’s just too bad it’ll stay hidden in the poetry section unless you pull it out and talk it up!

(Readers may also want to check out Grandits’ slightly longer companion book, Blue Lipstick: Concrete Poems, narrated by Robert’s high school age sister Lisa. Again, hilarious.)

You can find this week's Poetry Friday round-up at Mentor Texts, Read Alouds, & More.

“It’s more of a girls’ book.”

That’s how I mumbled my way to the end of my sixth grade book report on Betty Miles’ The Trouble with Thirteen. The last thing I wanted was for one of my male classmates to read it on my recommendation and think of me when he got to the passages about breast size and periods.

But it was a lose-lose situation. My teacher took this comment as a sign of immaturity. And implied such out loud to the whole class. I was mortified after all.

I still can’t remember that exchange without irritation. Can and do boys enjoy The Trouble with Thirteen (or any of its more recent cousins)? I’m sure of it. But as a children’s librarian, I still wouldn’t suggest it to boys asking for a reading recommendation. I’d lose all credibility faster than you can say “training bra.”

In other words, I haven’t changed my mind: it’s more of a girls’ book.

By now there’s a wealth of research, not to mention anecdotal evidence, documenting differences in the way boys and girls learn, the way they read, and the books they prefer. While I don’t believe that any book is “for” only one gender, I firmly believe some books appeal more to boys or to girls. And I believe it's stupid to deny it.

My own reading habits are skewed toward books by women and about girls – books that, I’d wager, appeal more to girls than boys. But I get at least as many readers’ advisory questions from boys (or, frequently, their parents), and I want to be familiar with books that will appeal to them.

That’s why I’ll be writing an ongoing blog feature called “Books Boys Like.” I hope it will raise awareness of books in different genres, with high boy appeal, for librarians, teachers, and parents who want to help boys find enjoyable reading material. (And yes, I do think many girls would enjoy these books, too!) I’ll be back soon with my first round of suggestions...