Published by Feiwel & Friends
Released April 16, 2013
256 pages
Where I got it: ARC received for review from publisher
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Description (from Goodreads):

With his older brother gone to fight in the Great War, and his father prone to sudden rages, 14-year-old Stanley devotes himself to taking care of the family’s greyhound and puppies. Until the morning Stanley wakes to find the puppies gone.

Determined to find his brother, Stanley runs away to join an increasingly desperate army. Assigned to the experimental War Dog School, Stanley is given a problematic Great Dane named Bones to train. Against all odds, the pair excels, and Stanley is sent to France.

But the war in France is larger and more brutal than Stanley ever imagined. How can one young boy survive and find his brother with only a dog to help?

Soldier Dog was a bit of a departure from what I normally read, but it’s good to mix things up from time to time, isn’t it? It’s a middle grade historical fiction novel that takes place during the tail-end of World War I. Fourteen-year-old Stanley lives alone with his angry father after the death of his mother and the enlistment of his older brother. When their prize dog gets pregnant by a local mutt, Stanley’s father writes off the puppies before they’re even born. Stanley, though, loves dogs, and does whatever he can to make sure they’re born healthy. He picks one from the litter to be his own. His father has other ideas, though, and after Stanley’s dad pitilessly gets rid of all the puppies, including Stanley’s, Stanley has had enough. He decides to lie about his age and enlist in the army, to be sent to the front in France.

In the military, everybody seems to recognize how truly young and out of place Stanley is. Fortunately, he learns of a new unit that is training messenger dogs. I have to warn readers who are sensitive about animal death: this book includes dog death. However, the dogs are soldiers and it is treated the same as human death. It is World War I, after all. Being middle grade fiction, though, the death is necessary to the story and never gratuitous.

For being a World War I story, I felt like the war isn’t really at the heart of the book, but serves as a means of escape for the protagonist. While the story might make young readers curious about the war, I don’t think it will teach them a great deal about the major players or the reasons behind the conflict. I love that Angus includes real photographs of the actual messenger dogs and has a historical note and bibliography at the end, though.

Soldier Dog is a bit of a heart-wrencher, but it will have readers sympathizing with Stanley and hoping that he’ll finally get a dog he can keep. This could be a good readalike for fans of War Horse.

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Published by Random House Children’s Books
Released July 10, 2012
208 pages
Where I got it: E-galley received from publisher via NetGalley
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Description (from Goodreads):

The phenomenally versatile, award-winning author, Candace Fleming, gives teen and older tween readers ten ghost stories sure to send chills up their spines. Set in White Cemetery, an actual graveyard outside Chicago, each story takes place during a different time period from the 1860′s to the present, and ends with the narrator’s death. Some teens die heroically, others ironically, but all due to supernatural causes. Readers will meet walking corpses and witness demonic posession, all against the backdrop of Chicago’s rich history—the Great Depression, the World’s Fair, Al Capone and his fellow gangsters.

On the Day I Died felt like a throwback to some of the books I really enjoyed as a kid, specifically Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories series. This book is a series of short stories set in a framework of a living boy hearing the death stories of other teenagers whose lives were cut short. That in itself isn’t very remarkable, but many of the stories are based in the history of Chicago or in folklore. There is a story that retells “The Monkey’s Paw”, we meet the vanishing hitchhiker, and there are references to “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Poe’s “Berenice.” Fleming also incorporates the Chicago gangsters, the State Asylum, and the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893.

The stories move quite quickly, and this will be a short read for many. I’d feel fine giving this to an advanced older elementary-aged reader, because that’s the age I think it would have had the most resonance with me. The stories aren’t entirely spooky, either; there’s a bit of humor thrown in, so I never thought that the book got bogged down in horror. What I enjoyed best of all, though, were Fleming’s notes at the end of the book, much like Schwartz used to have. I really enjoy seeing the historical and folkloric explanations of the stories, and hope that young readers will be curious enough to seek out more information on anything they found interesting.

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Why this guilt? I haven’t yet posted about my friend Lisa’s awesome book, which she was cool enough to send me months and months ago.  I got it right as I was moving apartments, then the cat drama happened, then all of the other drama of the last few months…you get the picture. Bad excuses, all of them. Every time I thought of it, I wanted to do a whole post, rather than just adding it to In My Bookbag.

So here it is! As you can see from the cover, it’s called Leonard & the Telescopic Trachea. Lisa wrote the text, and the art was done by Imin Yeh. It tells the story of Leonard, the lone giraffe among many other animals. Leonard has always felt like an outcast, because he is the only one of his kind and nobody else has a long neck like his. In the end, he learns that the same things that set us apart makes us special and valuable to others.

The book itself is rather hip. More difficult words are printed in bold, and there’s an interactive glossary for kids to look up the terms and write sample sentences using those terms. The back also features the illustrations from the story in black and white, for the kids to color on their own. As you can see, these are quite snazzy art pieces in and of themselves.

I’m really proud of Lisa for putting together this adorable book, and I can’t wait to see what else she’ll write in the future. She’s currently a graduate student in English at Cal State Long Beach.

If you want to snag a copy for yourself, they’re available HERE.

Published by Scholastic Press
Released September 13, 2011
608 pages
Where I got it: ARC received from publisher at BEA
Rating: 3 stars

Wonderstruck features parallel narratives that later intersect in a heartwarming story about family.  Ben feels alone since his mother died, and he has to live with an aunt and uncle who don’t seem to want him.  Deaf in one ear, Ben loses his hearing entirely in an accident in the course of the story.  Armed with only a few items he has found and lacking the ability to hear, Ben sets off in search of the father he never knew.  Fifty years earlier, Rose lives with her father, and must work with a tutor she dislikes due to her deafness.  She pines over one particular movie starlet as she gazes across the water to New York City.  Both alone and unable to hear, Rose and Ben meet under the most unlikely of circumstances and find kindred spirits in one another.

I hadn’t read The Invention of Hugo Cabret, so Wonderstruck was an entirely new experience for me.  I quickly became charmed by the alternating narratives told in text and image, and the story went by very quickly for me.  I also thought that the images representing Rose’s story worked very well, because it was able to better represent her experiences as a deaf child who seemed to experience the world largely through what she saw around her rather than the words that were spoken to her.

Selznick does a great job with characterization in this story.  I was particularly impressed with how fully formed Rose was, even though for the first bit of the book we only saw her through glimpses.

Much of this book revolves around museums, collecting, and curating.  I think this is both an educational idea, and a really fun one for kids who will read this.  Museums are fun, and almost all of us collect items that are dear to us and represent something throughout our lives.  To show the connection between the two might go a long way toward encouraging young readers to take up an interest in history, art, and themselves.

I did pass this book on to my 4th grade sister, and can’t wait to see what she thinks of it.  Her eyes lit up when she first started flipping through it, and I feel confident that she’ll enjoy the experience of reading this book.

Published by Brilliance Audio
Released May 10, 2011
Where I got it: Downloaded audiobook through public library Overdrive service
Rating: 4 stars

This is the story of a young girl named September, who when tired of her dull life in Omaha, is taken away on an adventure to Fairyland by the Green Wind.  There she meets a host of characters, from her beloved Wyverary (a Wyvern whose father was a Library), to a plucky lamp, to a trio of witches, and the wicked Marquess who rules the land.  The purpose of her quest shifts as she goes along, but the real purpose is to have a great adventure in Fairyland, and to bring back happiness to the place.

It took a little while, but I grew to really enjoy and appreciate this story.  I was torn about whether this is a book I could hand to my 9-year-old sister.  On one hand, it’s very fun and imaginative, but on the other hand, there are a lot of really big words.  I think an enterprising child could still read it and get the gist, but you may want to provide a dictionary to go along with the book.

The writing was a bit self-aware at times, as if Valente were entirely cognizant of how clever her audience must perceive this story to be, and acknowledges that fact.  There are also some episodes and statements that are pretty clearly meant for an adult reader (maybe one who is reading this to a child as a bedtime story!)  For example, we encounter death, who complains that people always seem to want to play chess with her, a reference to the Ingmar Bergman film The Seventh Seal.  This helps in its appeal to an adult audience as well as children.

Even though I listened to the audiobook, I am waiting to get a copy from the library just so that I can see the illustrations.  I also had mixed feelings about the audiobook.  Valente narrates it herself, and she doesn’t make a huge effort to do voices, or even to put much liveliness into the narration.  Instead, it felt a bit like when my parents would read me a bedtime story.  It’s pleasant in its own way, but I would love to re-listen to the book with somebody like Jim Dale narrating, and adding his own magical talent to the production.

Overall, this is a really compelling tale that operates along the same lines as books like Alice in Wonderland, The Phantom Tollbooth, and Dorothy and the Wonderful Wizard of Oz.  There is a quiet complexity to the storytelling, and the end with leave you smiling with nostalgia.