Children's Books

The Chrestomanci Chronicles in general are pretty awesome.

Agreed. And I especially love the Christopher Chant one, just because Christopher is so... Christopher.

In-deed. I am almost finished, and the way he handles the seige of the castle is made of pure awesome. Very reminescent of Bedknobs And Broomsticks, in that "homegrown magic" sort of way, and I love it.

And I do hope once this is over, he knocks some sense into everyone at the castle and tells them to start treating one another like actual people, because that establishment has got a case of ice queen like damn. Not that he helps, but seriously.

EDIT: Well, I mean, obviously he does (Forgone Conclusion if you start with Charmed Life), but you know what I mean. Even the people who tried to be nice to him seemed to be mostly ignoring him, like Flavian, who dragged him into the whole "hiking several miles in the rain" thing. You would think most people would realize that being miserable like that isn't really "fun" for a lot of people, and then his ignorance about the fire spell*

edited 4th Aug '11 11:01:05 AM by FreezairForALimitedTime

So I started on a new series today called Falcon Quinn. Initially it looked kind of like your standard Harry Potter copycat, but I have to say, this book does have two nice things in its favor right now: 1) Well-written dialogue and characterization, and 2) it is genuinely funny. It's about a school for kids who are monsters, and it's surprisingly fun. I'm not sure if it's that substantial overall, but I can dig it so far.

• "A... pizza genie?"
• "Hooray cake!"
• Prophetic jelly jars!
• "That doesn't sound excellent!"
• And the whole "Are we going to have that conversation?" bit that sends up pretty much every I Am Who? scene ever.

Those samples of dialog sound pretty silly. By "well-written dialog", you mean funny rather than realistic dialog?

I remember being in school when the class was reading Sideways Stories from Wayside School, and the final chapter was about the kids in the weird school being told that, somewhere out there, is a normal school with normal kids who would be considered weird from their perspective. Our class laughed at the line of dialog "Everyone gets turned into an apple at least once. It's a fact of life." We all thought it was funny, though even at the time (5th grade), I remember thinking that no kid would talk like that, though I was pretty familiar with the idea of unrealistic dialog for humor's sake at the time.

edited 8th Aug '11 6:50:07 AM by BonsaiForest

Both, actually. Both funny and not too far off base, and both occur. Reality Is Unrealistic, and I've known people to speak with strangely "scripted" sounding things in real life.

I feel a Runaway Guys moment incoming...

• "First you steal my star, and then you... you ululate in my ear!"
• "...Ululate?"

edited 8th Aug '11 10:59:21 AM by FreezairForALimitedTime

Currently reading Walls Within Walls. It's different from what I expected, and has the problem of kids who don't necessarily talk like kids. On the other hand, it has a reasonably good portrayal of someone with dyslexia that doesn't fall into Very Special Episode territory, and, much to my surprise, the character of Eloise is surprisingly touching and interesting.

Heck, I'm working on writing them.

You too, huh?

What are you writing? I tried my hand at it a few years back, for what it's worth. I ended up writing something that I'd genuinely enjoy reading, but is still flawed. (You can PM me for the link, as can anyone else who's interested)

Anyway, what are you writing about?

Educational stuff mostly. I'm just out of college, so I am unpublished so far, but I have put together one about the lifecycles of mantis shrimp, and at the moment I am working on an alphabet book about (mostly obscure) dinosaurs.

I couldn't write a children's book about mantis shrimp because i find them impossible to describe without using the word Badass.

...Admittedly not a bad point, but I think I did a good job despite this limitation.

Also, I now sorta want Author Buddies to be a page, but am not quite sure specifically what it should be about.

edited 16th Aug '11 5:47:46 PM by CountSpatula

I think our Creator Couples page does everything Author Buddies would, potentially. And That's Terrible (or at the very least sad).

I'm annoyed that I end up not having the time to read late at night, and just end up not doing it. I'm rereading Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great, which I enjoyed, but now I don't know if I should just quit and read something else.

I bought a book called Belly Up, about a kid trying to solve the mystery behind the killing of a hippo. It sounds silly, and the title and upside-down hippo drawing used at the beginning of each chapter seem to enforce that, but supposedly it's also a good mystery.

Which leads to one thing I always - even as a kid - hated about kid books. The constant infusion of silliness. We get Deceptively Silly Title (the book There's a Boy in the Girl's Bathroom made me cry when I was a kid!), blurbs that emphasize humor while briefly touching on the actual (non-silly) plot, and stupid covers that are meant to draw readers in, but which I always found condescending. It pisses me off. Light-hearted is one thing, but silly gets on my nerves.

Actually, there's kind of an amusing inversion in the book A Spy In The Neighborhood. The plot? Three boys - or two boys and a girl - try to prove their neighbor is a spy. The cover looks serious. The blurb looks serious. The book is light-hearted and rather amusing, actually.

Why do I say "three boys, or two boys and a girl"? Well, the cover shows three boys, but the author had fun with narrative here. The first-person narrator's name and gender are never given! And yet, the dialog still sounds natural. Besides that, the main characters' personalities are simple to sum up. Quention is the douche, Paul is the Smart Guy to an exaggerated extent (he goes into detail about mundane things, and even holds a long speech about the advantages and disadvantages of crawling versus running to a window to spy through it, before actual doing it), and the narrator comments on everything mildly sarcastically.

Still, the humor flew over my head when I was a kid. I don't know if it's a kid thing, or a "me" thing (if you read my profile page, you'll know I'm officially diagnosed autistic as an infant, and I'll say I had a bland yet "interesting" childhood), but I missed the silly and just noticed the story. And the story was a group of kids taking time out of their summer spare time to follow around and spy on someone. It was fun. And yet, looking at the cover, title and blurb, and comparing the contents, it's just so strange to me that it used a serious presentation to lure kids into a light-hearted and somewhat silly story, as opposed to doing the more common opposite.

i read Coraline
interesting kids book

Yesterday I found a German version of the Three Little Pigs, which was simple enough that I could read it without having ever formally studied German. It was called Zilli, Willi, und Billi. The wolf ended up exploding, and then there were a few pages of 'the dog eats meat' etc with pictures, ending with a pig exploding from eating too much.

Somewhat tangential, but: Last night I had a strange dream that was sort of cobbled together from the plots of many different kid's books I've read, with a little bit of its own original flavor thrown in. It involved some kind of school/camp that trains kids to hunt those of magical descent, even though the kids were all blatantly magical themselves (shades of Harry Potter and maybe some Chrestomanci there), with a zombie sent to attack us, and a person turned out to secretly be an angel-phoenix (which is a roundabout spoiler for a different book I've read). It was odd, but kind of entertaining, especially when clocked the zombie with a frying pan.

I always worry about going to look at kid's books when I am at the book store. If I don't have someone with me, I always worry that someone's going to look at me like I'm a weirdo or something.

Count: I have that problem myself. An old girlfriend of mine even yelled at me once for wanting to go to the children's section of the library and read some old favorites of mine when we were still together (1998).

Trust me. I've heard enough from librarians to know that sometimes adults spend more time there than children do.

That's... a very wtf and insecure attitude (your ex, I mean).

I... don't understand being uncomfortable in the childrens' section. What do strangers' opinions mean to you? And wouldn't a lot of them just assume you're picking up something on behalf of a child anyways?

I really like the Bearenstein bears books.

The last two books I read for fun this summer were Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Donna Jo Napoli's The Magic Circle. The first book was very good — shocking and sobering, and quite real. It was basically good for all the reasons that this article, titled "Why the Best Kids' Books Are Written on Blood" is absolutely true.

The Magic Circle was more disturbing, but it was everything that I like about Donna Jo Napoli — her beautiful writing, her clear worldbuilding, and her ability to put a completely distinct spin on a well-known story. I mean, Beauty and the Beast from the Beast's point of view isn't shocking... the Trojan War from the point of view of a siren, that's a bit odd... Hansel and Gretel as told by the evil witch? That's a task. What results is a book that's kept in the kids' books section but that would be enlightening and beautiful in any part of the library. (Except, obviously, cookbooks.)

Anyone else know either of these authors? Sherman Alexie also wrote the movie Smoke Signals.

I know Alexie pretty well as an author, and while I prefer his short stories, I also liked his novel Flight. Which is debatably YA.