Children's Books

I'm currently reading a book I found randomly in my library! It's called The Forest in the Hallway. I like checking out random books I've never heard of before. I sometimes find cool things.

This book is being interesting thus far. At first, the protagonist is the sort of Pinball Protagonist slash "Unquestioner" I've rallied against before, where she doesn't ask too many questions about what's going on and just kind of goes with it. But in this book's case, it's OK, because the protagonist actually has other personality traits to go with it. She's rather self-centered and jerkish, which I sense is going to lead into a few Coming of Age moments. Should be interesting. Also, the fantasy world involved is cool, as although it has a rural feel, it's very clearly a modern world, since computers and cell phones are definite things (if not as commonplace).

Does being self-centered go with her Pinball Protagonist/Unquestioner trait? Like she doesn't care what happens, and that's why she goes with the flow?

It could, but she is invested in the journey—she's looking for her parents, who went missing. But she's rather callous to the people helping her—she does care for them, but she always thinks of herself first and doesn't really give them their due.

Well, that was interesting! The ending of the book did something I don't think I've seen before: An attempt to Save the Villain which involved asking herself to hand herself over so they could get her to see a psychiatrist and maybe hook her up with some antidepressants. She was the protagonist's aunt, driven crazy by the fact that her husband left her home alone all the time, coupled with the fact that one of the spellbooks he kept was Real After All and its allure drove her mad. I don't think I've seen Save the Villain pulled off in that way before, but I liked it. It didn't work, because she tore her own picture in half, but it was a good attempt. I also kind of hope the Sequel Hook put in the end pays off, because that particular bit of knowledge puts her uncle in question, since it seems he was a Jerkass to his wife. Also, one of the characters in the book, Rose, is really cool, and I'd like to see more done with her.

Thread Hop: I am so glad I found this thread!

That book sounds interesting. Do you have any reccomendations, as far as Children's literature goes?

Well, what do you like? Mystery? Adventure? Drama? Fantasy? Comedy? Some combination of the above?

As I said earlier, I'm a fan of The Roman Mysteries, the CHERUB Series and the Alcatraz Series. The first is mysteries set in The Roman Empire. The second is a more realistic take on the teenage spy genre, and the last is a rather hilarious fantasy series.

edited 30th Sep '11 5:01:40 AM by Auxdarastrix

My favorite stuff is anything Vindicated by History.

After that, I would generally start at whatever is at the top of someones top ten list, and work my way down.

Oh, and maybe something I can read to my 11 year old brother!

Vindicated by History, huh? I admittedly don't know too many books like that, but here's a couple books I do happen to like:

• Scumble—stupid title, but not a bad book. It's the sequel to an earlier book called Savvy, but doesn't need to be read after it too much. And I sort of recommend skipping on Savvy. It's got some good points (like great narration), but it's sort of pedestrian, and very predictable. Scumble's a bit more interesting in my eyes. It involves a family where everyone discovers a hidden talent at age 13. "Scumble" is the family's nickname for learning to make the most of your talent.
• The Candy Shop War—a fun book. It's about magic candies. It's got some snappy dialogue, and it's pretty twisty and dark for a kid's book. Not so dark it would be off-putting to an eleven-year-old, though. Might surprise them, though.
• Harriet The Spy—OK, so chances are good you've read this one already, but if not, do give it a go. It's famous and beloved and all that, and if you've ever felt "outsider-y," you can identify with Harriet.
• The Magic Thief—I really love this one for its strong characterization. It's one of the few books I've read in a while to really make me feel for its characters the way it has. But it's still the kind of fun story a younger brother might like, and has some lulzy moments (like the hero, a thief named Conn, trying to teach an old staid wizard to pick locks).

Here's my own recommendations, which lean towards contemporary adventure (my preferred genre). You'll likely have to order these online, of course.

• Pyrates: Four kids in New York City come to believe there may be a hidden treasure buried underground beneath the city. They're right, and they're not the only ones searching for it. It's pretty much an adventure story.
• The first My Teacher Is An Alien: Flawed, but a classic. Main character witnesses absolute proof that her teacher is an alien who is planning to take five kids from the class back into space with him. She enlists the help of the local nerd, thinking he's the only one who will believe her (and he does only after she shows him).
• The Castle In The Attic and Battle for the Castle: They're actually two very different books. The first one is about a kid who's given a toy knight and toy castle, but the knight is actually alive, and the castle is a real place that he can visit when shrunk, allowing him to transport to the knight's actual world. The first book is mainly about the relationship between the two. The sequel is a straight-up adventure, when the kid introduces his friend to the fantasy world and they end up having to save it from a very odd threat.
• Nothings Fair In Fifth Grade: Probably my favorite Slice of Life story. Not much to say about the plot, but it's not about the plot, it's about everything else. It moves at a fast pace and there's always something interesting happening, and it's totally true to life. And it's pretty upbeat and fun.
• On The Run: Jason Bourne in the form of two siblings, 15-year-old Aiden and 11-year-old Meg, who are fugitives due to a complicated problem I don't feel like explaining. As they run and hide out, they have to find ways to survive on their own, finding food and money, while also dodging an assassin sent to kill them, and the feds out to arrest them.
• The Stanley Family books: There's widespread differences of opinion on which of these is the best, since each of the 4 books is almost a different genre! The first, The Headless Cupid, is a light-hearted story about how, after the Stanley family first blends and eccentric older sister Amanda becomes a part of the family, she tries to get the kids into the "occult". It's pretty funny and not the horror story you might expect. The last book, Janie's Private Eyes, is a straight-forward mystery story about trying to find out who's dognapping dogs. The main character, David, is not as entertaining as the antics of his little sister Janie, who at age 8 is very snoopy and surprisingly competent in some ways, while also being amusingly naive. The second and third books bored me.
• Latawnya The Naughty Horse Learns To Say No To Drugs: The best book ever written.

edited 30th Sep '11 1:00:37 PM by BonsaiForest

I've heard good things about the Young Wizards series, and I'm considering looking for them next time I am at the library. Would anyone give them a recommendation?

zerky liked them, although not as a kid. It's not that they're filled with sex, violence and drugs or anything, but there was just too much in there that she didn't understand, or that she found depressing.

edited 30th Sep '11 3:32:13 PM by zerky

Seconded. Young Wizards is a good series, but a person will likely get more enjoyment out of them in either their teenage years or adulthood than a kid will, because they are kinda depressing in a cosmic way.

I first read the first around age 10 and just couldn't get into it. I read the series later around 15 and it clicked much better.

I really like oldish stuff. And by oldish I mean pre internet age. For example, Beverly Clearly, Beatrix Potter, The Phantom Tollbooth (many times), etc.

HOWEVER, I really need to expand my modern children literature list. I would really like to see some well written stuff from the last couple of decades. I will look up all of those books, thanks!

Oh yeah, another really good series is Animorphs. It sounds corny at first - a group of teens encounter a dying space alien who gives them the ability to transform into any animal they come into contact with, and they have to use that ability to fight off an alien parasite invasion. But the storytelling is fantastic (until the ghostwriters come in later on, at least). The characters have great personality, there's a lot of complexity in both the individual plots and the overarching story, and even the action moments are well-written and clever. It's a series that was popular in its time, and there's no reason not to check it out.

Teehee. Animorphs is indeed a series I am familiar with.

A blog about it! Nice. I'm not particularly a fan of the "back-and-forth conversation" style of review though, but others would probably find it more up their alley.

*reads title*

*tries to think of books he reads that aren't kids' books*

I recently went back and read "Johnny Coffin: School-Dazed" (about a group of 13-year-olds who suspect something supernatural is going on in their rural town and driving people crazy), and you know what? I found a bunch of menstruation metaphors around one of the female characters which I never could've picked up on as a kid. I'm also fairly sure I saw a reference to Freemasonry.

God, childrens' books are awesome.

Nothing like a good Swiss Moment to make you gain new appreciation for something. I haven't done it with a book in a while, but I remember re-watching The Brave Little Toaster for the first time as someone old enough to get things, and having my mind blown by how much sense the "Worthless" segment made to me suddenly. And how dark it was for a kid's film.

I was a strange kid. A lot of humor that was in kid books flew right past me. Rereading A Spy In The Neighborhood and The Plant That Ate Dirty Socks had me realize "Oh my god, this book is a comedy!"

Okay, with the second one, the title should have made it obvious, but I failed to recognize the obvious humor in so many scenes, never mind the premise. But rereading it, the book is absurd in so many ways, and not only that, but there's a handful of "wedged-in" jokes that seem to be there for the sake of adding an extra joke there (the only painful one is when the younger brother puts on his gorilla mask under the table while at a restaurant, resulting in the waitress saying "And what will your gorilla be having today?" Ack, not funny).

Most of the humor is due to absurdity, such as when the younger brother writes an essay for school about how plants are great pets, only to result in ending up on TV for it, with his enormous plants in the background behind him (narration states "it looked like he was in a jungle") and sparking a plant-buying fad. Or when the brothers decide to make a massive mess with things stolen from a junkyard to prove to their parents how messy things would be without the plants, to convince the parents to let the kids keep them. One of the things stolen from the junkyard happens to be a book called "How to Get Your Kids to Do What You Want", which the mother picks up and reads to quickly learn reverse psychology. So much absurdity, and I, being a realism-focused kid, missed it.

As for A Spy In The Neighborhood, the humor there is mainly from the sarcastic first-person narration, and there's a bit of meta humor in how the author manages to get away with having a first-person story in which the narrator's name and gender are never stated nor referenced. I bet that must have been to try to pull off.

I've always been big on comedy, so a lot of the stuff I read as a kid was basically hijinks books. What can I say? I like to laugh.

Although I did read a number of dramas, too. Including one I only remember because of an extremely specific Character Tic the main character had, where she collected "Esoterica" (I.E., random trivia), but always referred to it as "Esoterica."

Funnily enough, some comedy books didn't appeal to me as much as a child. I don't think I got most of their humor — considering how well I got along with kids my own age, that's probably to be expected.

I've picked up more books than I probably have the time to read — Tom Brown's Schooldays, which the spiritual predecessor (I'm told) to the Harry Potter books (of which I am rereading the first), the last of the Enola Holmes books, and the two latter Hunger Games books. This will be a very interesting cross-section of kid's literature from various eras.

I didn't get along much with kids my own age either, but I still liked funny books. Hmm. I wonder what influences that.

One book I remember a lot, and re-read multiple times, was an early Louis Sachar book. Something he wrote, I think, before the success of both Wayside School and Holes. I could probably look up the name right now, but I'm lazy and won't. For having read it so many times, you'd think I'd remember the plot better, but a baseball cap was involved.

I tried out a book called Belly Up. The plot is that a kid whose parents work at a safari-themed family park named FunJungle, and very early in the story, its mascot, a hippopotamus, is found dead. He sneaks in to watch the autopsy out of curiosity, and finds out it was most likely a murder for who knows what reason. The book then becomes a mystery.

Could be interesting, though I am not an animals person, but so many things about the book just rubbed me the wrong way. Your Mileage May Vary, as this is of course all personal opinion, and the author is clearly going for a mixture of quirk, mystery and exaggeration. But the combination of elements really didn't do it for me.

First off, you know first-person narrators talk like novelists? How they don't talk the way regular people would tell a story? Of course, that's par for the course. Not a problem, and something I'd always come to accept. But here, we get extremely detailed explanations about the business side of running the park, the history of the park, going into detail about how FunJungle started as a cartoon series created to market the park before the park got made ("much like how the Mickey Mouse Club was a blatant ad for Disneyland"), using very adult phrasing. The problem? The hero is twelve. And I cannot imagine any real-life twelve year old phrasing things the way he does or understanding the concepts he does.

But when he's not narrating in Little Professor form, he's shoving poop humor at us. We are told that he gave monkeys water balloons as a prank ("at least they're not throwing their poop at visitors. Seriously, they do that."), that hippos shoot their poop at anyone they don't like, that the dead hippo was surrounded by hippo poop, and so on. So half the time it's Little Executive, the other half the time it's Nickelodeon taken to its logical extreme?

Speaking of extremes, everything is exaggerated. Any character that gets described has some extreme characteristic that's heavily played up or turned into a hyperbole. The kid's parents? They're the best biologists (or whatever exactly they were, I forget) in the world, who would watch gorillas 12 hours a day. The owner of the park? The richest man on earth, who makes tons of money off everything he invests in. And so on. A character doesn't just have a characteristic; that characteristic is exaggerated in great detail, to explain just how and why they are the most whatever they are.

One thing I find ridiculous is the profanity. The dead hippo is referred to as a "bastard", then later in the story, the words "ass" and "hell" are used, and a priest exclaims "Jesus Christ!" during a hippo funeral (and as an exclamation rather than a religious reference). Uh, is this for kids? The frequent snark and poop jokes and silliness seem to indicate it is, but the profanity and adult explanations that no kid would give (would understand, yeah. Would give in the way the narration does? No) make me wonder if this was originally intended as an adult novel that the publisher decided to sell to kids because the protagonist was one.

I got so annoyed by the 4th chapter, that I skipped ahead to see how it ends. The last few chapters were a more enjoyable read. One character, Summer, the daughter of the billionaire who owns the safari park, proves to be a clever ally to the protagonist, and from what I saw in those chapters, a neat character. Exaggerated action occurs, and at one point, a funeral for the hippo is given, and the kid, being chased by security guards, accidentally causes the casket to open, spilling hippo guts all over the audience (resulting in the priest's religiously ironic exclamation). An explanation is ultimately given for what's going on, and it's believable in context. And the billionaire gives a pretty good speech, too, about how everyone he knows has been screwing around and messing things up behind his back.

I can see how others might enjoy this book. To me, it's a mess. The action is exaggerated to the point of being ludicrous; hell, everything is exaggerated, with characters who are living hyperboles. The use of strong profanity in a kids' book strikes me as totally out of place and very questionable. The theme simply isn't my thing, so I can't hold that against the book. But to me, the elements come together to make something that I don't find So Bad, It's Good, but actually aesthetically offensive.

But you know something? That doesn't make this an inherently bad book, just one I personally really do not like, but that others might - if nothing else, it's certainly original. As it is, I have three more books to try out, so we'll see what happens with those. (And if my video games get in the way)