The Cybils Award shortlists for 2011 have been announced, representing blogging volunteers’ judgments of what children’s books offer the best combination of quality and kid appeal.
There’s a new category this year of Book Apps. Nominees include three brand names established for decades (Harold and the Purple Crayon, Pat the Bunny, and The Monster at the End of This Book) and what look like four originals:
The 2010 Cybils Award list was announced this morning. I wasn’t involved in the judging, unlike past years, because of a big writing deadline. But I’m pleased to see the judges liked some of the books that struck me over the past few months, whether or not I got around to writing about them. And I’m delighted to have the whole lists of winners and nominees to consider in the months and years ahead.
And the winners are…
Fiction Picture Books
Interrupting Chicken, by David Ezra Stein
Nonfiction Picture Books
The Extraordinary Life of Mark Twain (According to Susy), by Barbara Kerley
Easy Readers
We Are in a Book!, by Mo Willems
Short Chapter Books
Zapato Power: Freddie Ramos Takes Off, by Jacqueline Jules; illustrated by Miguel Benitez
Poetry
Nifty. Singer uses our familiarity with classic fairy tales to sum up some of those stories in “reversos,” free-verse poems that read the same whether from first line to last, or last line to first. As a bonus, the reversos usually provide a new perspective on the tales: from a different character, or a different point in time. Masse’s illustrations expand on the themes of mirroring and symmetry.
Graphic Novels
I wrote about Shiga as a “math cartoonist” back here, and about the possibilities of branching paths in traditional comics here. Meanwhile has gotten most of its attention for its algorithmic structure. However, the crazy scientific devices that the hero encounters also leave readers with interesting logical questions. For example, if you have a machine that wipes everything out of existence, can you ever experience having pushed that button?
Fantasy & Science Fiction
The Shadows: The Books of Elsewhere, Vol. 1, by Jacqueline West
Middle Grade Fiction
I admire any author who can find fun in middle school. Another interesting aspect of this novel is the notion, raised by some readers, that one crucial character has Asperger’s syndrome. The past decade has brought a number of fine books touching on that condition, some with “Aspie” protagonists figuring out the world and others with protagonists living with “Aspie” relatives. Here the character, if indeed he qualifies, is simply one of many quirky kids in the quirky middle-school culture.
Young Adult Non-fiction
The Secret of the Yellow Death: A True Story of Medical Sleuthing, by Suzanne Jurmain
Young Adult Graphic Novels
My still-somewhat-in-shock review here, and remarks on how Randy DuBurke worked with his collaborators here.
Young Adult Fantasy & Science Fiction
Rot & Ruin, by Jonathan Maberry
Young Adult Fiction
Split, by Swati Avasthi
Both Down, Down, Down: A Journey to the Bottom of the Sea, by Steve Jenkins, and Life-Size Zoo, by Teruyuki Komiya, director of the Tokyo Ueno Zoo, with photographs by Toyofumi Fukuda, introduce readers to various animals. But the two books approach their topics in opposite ways, and each one’s strengths are the other’s weaknesses.
Life-Size Zoo was originally published in Japan, which probably accounts for its attention to pooping and peeing. As its title promises, it offers life-size photographs of a variety of mammals found in many zoos. The book is 10.5" x 14.5", which is oversized to begin with. Some pages are designed to be tilted, and double foldouts accommodate the head of a giraffe and most of the heads of an adult elephant and a rhinoceros.
Although each page spread provides background facts about the animal in simple text and drawings, the photos are the main attraction. The detail is amazing, from the hairs on a zebra’s muzzle to the teeth in a tiger’s mouth. One spread shows images of a hedgehog and an armadillo, each rolled up against predators. The animals all stand out from a blank white background in the old Dorling Kindersley style, and they all look life-size, creating the illusion of being even closer than we can get in zoos.
Which brings me to the two books’ complementary strengths. Life-Size Zoo is all about scale, showing us exactly how large each animal is. In Down, Down, Down creatures that live at the same depth all appear on a spread with no clue about how large they are relative to each other. Only in the back can one figure out the scale. Thus, on one spread the oarfish takes up about the same space as the snipe eel, the nautilus, and the goblin shark. The back pages tell us that the eel and nautilus are comparable in size to an adult human's hand, but the shark is the size of that human, and the oarfish up to 36 feet long.
Down, Down, Down is all about habitat, and the unfamiliar forms of life that have evolved to live at different depths. Life-Size Zoo devotes only a few quick lines to the animals’ habitats. It’s not unlike an antiquated zoo, seeing beasts in concrete cages.
Down, Down, Down highlights creatures we rarely see, and may even have trouble imagining. Life-Size Zoo features very familiar and appealing animals (charismatic megafauna, in zoologists’ terms). We know them well enough that we can fill in their bodies from a look at their giant heads.
Steve Jenkins’s cut-paper pictures represent each species, but he doesn’t put them forward as exact representations. Toyofumi Fukuda’s photographs are precise portraits of individual animals. And the text doesn’t tell us how typical they are. For example, Kometaro the aardvark “lost part of one ear before he got to the zoo.” Is this common? Do aardvarks fight, or was Kemotaro attacked by a predator? There’s no further explanation.
Both books succeed at what they set out to do (as do all the Cybils shortlisted titles). Of this pair, I give an edge to Life-Size Zoo because it does something I hadn’t seen in other picture books. It’s a stunt (which has been duplicated in two sequels), but a very impressive one.
The prose is tight and poetic, its tone a mix of matter-of-fact and awestruck. Pages jump between the astronauts in space, mission control back on Earth, and a family watching the action on their living room TV. This history doesn’t dig back into the geopolitics of the space race, or ahead to the end of lunar missions; it focuses on that human achievement of July 1969.
I enjoyed watching how Floca used his art and design to pace his story. The first illustration after the text starts is a landscape on Earth with the Moon as a distant crescent in the sky. Floca frames this round image in the blank white page, both opening the book slowly and symbolizing how this life is limited to Earth.
Later that image’s blue, green, and white colors make a visual rhyme for the image of a round Earth in the black sky that we finally see at the end of the astronauts' visit to the Moon. And as a coda, the book’s final illustration is also a round landscape, blue and green. But now there’s a full Moon overhead, and the family we’ve seen throughout the book is running across the grass.
Floca breaks down the rocket countdown into six rectangular panels on one spread, ticking off the seconds. Turn the page, and the liftoff is the first full page spread of the book.
Even the endpapers in Moonshot get put to use, in different ways. The front set shows the stages of the lunar rocket while the back set retells the history in more detailed prose suitable for school-report research.
Of course, this is a journey many books have taken before. There’s a lot of source material about the lunar missions, and a built-in market. Moonshot even got published on the fortieth anniversary of the landing. Last year’s Cybils Non-Fiction Picture Book winner, The Day-Glo Brothers, got points from us judges for being the very first book on its topic. But Moonshot is also terrific, and deserves the other awards it’s brought home.
14 Cows for America certainly looks like a beautiful children’s picture book. The full-page spreads glow with Kenyan portraits and Kenyan landscapes. The text is simple and clear, forming events into a fable.
But as I read it, I kept wondering whether this content holds more appeal for children, or for adults? There are no young characters, or child stand-ins. Instead, the central figure is a medical student, and the major decision-makers are tribal elders. The text alludes to the precipitating event of the terrorist attacks delicately; American adults would have no difficulty recognizing the allusions, but most of today’s picture-book readers probably have no memory of 2001.
Does 14 Cows for America offer a meaningful narrative? The “plot” involves a distant conflict, no character growth, and a purely symbolic resolution. (The Maasai actually keep the fourteen cows.) Gonzalez carefully hides the face of the American ambassador, so he can never be more than a symbol.
Picture books are supposed to need at least a dozen interesting, visually varied scenes—not just the same characters talking in the same space. 14 Cows for America basically shows two related events:
The 2011 Cybils season has started with an invitation to bloggers to volunteer as panelists and judges. I’ve been a judge in different categories each year since the Cybils began, and enjoy the chance to sample the best of the latest children’s literature and to discuss those books with dedicated and knowledgeable critics. It’s a very rewarding experience!
This seems to be a good time to finish posting my thoughts on runners-up for last year’s Non-Fiction Picture Book Award. The winner we chose was The Day-Glo Brothers, written by Chris Barton and illustrated by Tony Persiani, as discussed back here. But it was one of an impressive group.
The photos are big, bright, and varied. They come with a lot of verbal information, in the captions on the same page and in the back of the book. Out of 48 total pages, 9 are commentary and glossary and 36 primarily photographs.
In the end, I’m not sure the book gets to the essence of religious faith, however. It shows those parts of the human phenomenon that are (a) photographable, and (b) uncontroversial. The pictures show young people singing, for example, but the captions don’t say what they’re singing. In emphasizing the similarities among the behaviors shown, the book doesn’t acknowledge the differences among religions, or how big people make them.
Indeed, at the end the book states, “We respect others, making friends and building peace,” as a final unifier. It does not acknowledge how people—including people with good intent—have often used religious belief as a justification or accelerant for disrespecting others, making enemies, and going to war.
Readers couldn’t tell from Faith that most religions come with:
As Barton describes in an afterword, this book began when he read an obituary about Bob Switzer, one of the brothers who invented Day-Glo paint sixty years ago. Barton recognized how the Switzers’ history falls into a classic problem-quest-solution structure, which children can easily relate to.
Furthermore, that narrative involved colors, making it ideal for a picture book, one of the genres where our book industry expects books to be printed in full color and budgets accordingly. In fact, Charlesbridge printed The Day-Glo Brothers with Day-Glo inks. Tony Persiani’s illustrations start out in muted grays and pastels, and gradually become brighter—and brighter still.
One reason I thought The Day-Glo Brothers stood out even more from other good nonfiction picture books is that it’s the first popular book on its subject. It required original research from private sources and old articles. It had to explain unfamiliar science about “daylight fluorescence.”
(Though a printed book can go only so far, of course. Charlesbridge posted a video to demonstrate the science. Wish I had that capability when I was trying to explain interference patterns making the rainbow colors on bubbles in Soap Science.)
A lot of children’s nonfiction titles go over the same ground as books that have already been published for adults, sometimes rather recently. Often the authors have done their own research as well, as Tanya Lee Stone did for the Sibert-winning Almost Astronauts. (In that case, the adult forerunner is The Mercury 13, by Martha Ackmann, published in 2003.) Lots of children’s nonfiction focuses on topics that have already been written about a lot, in quite similar ways, as Dave Elzey recently discussed in regard to biography.
Of course, there’s still a lot of art and craft necessary to translate books for adults into stories that much younger readers can understand and relate to. One author can be inspired, even guided, by another yet reach different conclusions with different emphases. But when another book has been published, it’s simply easier for a busy children’s author to locate sources and even a narrative structure. And it’s a lot easier to convince publishers and libraries that ”there’s a worthwhile book here.”
So I give The Day-Glo Brothers extra points for being the first book about the Switzer brothers and their new kinds of paint. It affirms that the best children’s nonfiction depends on the same rigorous research as the best nonfiction for grown-ups.
I’m pleased to share news of the winner of the Cybils Award for Nonfiction Picture Book published in 2009.
by Chris Barton; illustrated by Tony Persiani
Charlesbridge
Nominated by: Cynthia Leitich Smith
It’s hard to imagine a world without Day-Glo’s shocking greens, blazing oranges and screaming yellows. But before World War II, those colors didn’t exist. After an accident in a ketchup factory derailed Bob Switzer’s hope to be a doctor, he and his brother Joe, who was interested in magic, set out to find a paint that glowed. Eventually, the Switzers did what nobody else had — they invented new colors. The war produced a need for fluorescent paint, and today it’s everywhere. The brothers’ invention allowed both to do what they wanted; save lives and dazzle crowds.Helping to judge this Cybils category was a pleasure, and not just because the books are short and colorful. They all have strengths, and I learned a lot. Our final vote was close. I look forward to saying more about The Day-Glo Brothers and the other finalists in the coming weeks.
This book is the first on its topic, a result of original research from family interviews and newspaper clippings. Barton explains the science with a kid-friendly manner and an easy narrative style. Readers can relate to the brothers’ thwarted plans and celebrate their persistence. Persiani’s stylized art evolves with the story, from a dull gray to splashes of color to brilliant Day-Glo tones at the end.
by Shana Corey
Scholastic
Nominated by: Kelly Fineman
Annette Kellerman is a woman who made many waves in her life. The story encompasses her early physical disability, her swimming accomplishments, her introduction of the woman’s swimming suit to the public, and her ability to travel through Europe doing water ballet. Annette Kellerman was a strong and determined woman, which makes her a fascinating study for Corey. This book is delightful also thanks to the illustrator who has created such fun colors on each page. In addition, Fotheringham cleverly includes a wave design somewhere on every page throughout the book, tying in the idea that Annette Kellerman did indeed "make waves" throughout her life. The Author’s Note included at the back of the book is a plus; it gives a far more detailed accounting of Annette Kellerman’s life and accomplishments.
by Chris Barton
Charlesbridge
Nominated by: Cynthia Leitich Smith
This fascinating book tells the story of Bob and Joe Switzer and their invention of the first fluorescent colors. The brothers each had different skills and passions but together they created colors that made a huge impact on the world. The illustrations in this book, which use the colors created by the Switzer brothers, add to the captivating feel of the book. Barton and Persiani have brought an important story to the world of children’s literature.
Created by Teruyuki Komiya with photographs by Toyofumi Fukuda
Seven Footer Press
Nominated by: Anastasia Suen
There are those who claim that bigger is better. If that’s so, then we can stop here: Life-Size Zoo is definitely bigger. Life-Size Zoo is so big that the tiptop will always peek out of your backpack.
But bigger isn’t the only thing Life-Size Zoo has going for it. A table of contents that any teacher would die to teach with in her classroom and that any kid would happily, almost unknowingly, utilize, a table of contents shaped like a zoo map, no less (and oh-so-clever). An information sheet about the animals on the front end papers. Brilliant photographs of zoo animals, amazing close-ups. Lists of details to look for on the photographs. Fun fold-out pages. Oodles and oodles of cool facts about the animals.
And what great choices of animals: a panda, zebra, tiger (those scary teeth), gorilla, rhino (with a horn made of hair?), anteater (what a nose!), koala (much smaller than I would have expected). And more. Much, much more. Kids line up to check out this book. And they don’t just check it out. You can see them everywhere, reading it with their friends. Life-Size Zoo is bigger, yes, and better, too.
by Carmen Agra Deedy
Peachtree
Nominated by: Natasha Maw
14 Cows for America is the story of Masai warrior Wilson Kimeli Naiyomah. An exchange student in New York City, Naiyomah witnessed the tragedy of 9/11 and returned home to Kenya to share his grief with his family and tribe. In the Masai tradition, the greatest gift a man can give is a cow. To help comfort the people of America as we dealt with the destruction, Naiyomah asked the tribal elders to bless his cow to be given to America, as a symbolic gesture of his compassion. Thirteen 13 others did the same. A gentle tale that shows the events of September 11 had world impact. This simple yet moving story is beautifully illustrated with scenes from Africa. The colorful artwork captures the splendor of the continent and the beauty of its people.
by Brian Floca
Atheneum
"Reading MOONSHOT: THE FLIGHT OF APOLLO 11 gave me the feeling I was back up in space," said Michael Collins, the Command Module Pilot of Apollo 11. This new non-fiction picture book invites young readers to accompany astronauts Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin, and Neil Armstrong as they "lock their heads into large, round helmets, squeeze into the Columbia's sideways seats, and blast off into the summer sky." The experience begins with extensive diagrams of the stages of the Apollo 11’s journey on the front end pages and finishes with extensive author’s notes on the back cover. The information is scientific, specific, and technical, yet it reads like poetry. Listen, for example to Floca’s description of the Saturn rocket:
a monster of a machineFloca’s watercolor illustrations beautifully contrast of light and dark, movement and perspective. A terrific addition to any space collection.
it stands thirty stories
it weights six million pounds
a tower full of fuel and fire
Down, Down, Down: A Journey to the Bottom of the Sea
Faith (Global Fund for Children Books)
On the list of titles already nominated in the Nonfiction Picture Book category, I see Unite or Die, which I discussed at length over here.
I once again volunteered to be a judge for the Cybils Awards. In past years I was part of the process for Fantasy and Science Fiction, Graphic Novels, and Middle-Grade Novels. This year I decided to mix it up with Nonfiction Picture Books, and my fellow mixers are:
The call has gone out for nominations for the 2009 Cybils Awards! The invitation reads:
All kids books published in English between Oct. 16, 2008 and the close of this year’s nominations are eligible. Nominations close at 11:59 p.m. on October 15th. . . .This year there’s a handy nomination form, for which you’ll need your nominee’s 13-digit ISBN.
First, some important advice:I mean, geez, if you’re kinda iffy on a book, why would you want to inflict it on us? We want to read books you think we shouldn’t miss.
- Brush and floss daily.
- Nominate only one book per genre.
- Pick a book you’re passionate about.
- See rule #3 above.
Yes, Alvin's in second grade, though the book is written for kids up to age 10--i.e., significantly older than the protagonist. Furthermore, Alvin isn't the sort of second-grader that most other second-graders, or even first-graders, look up to. As with Junie B. Jones, this story breaks the usual pattern of showing young readers a hero they might aspire to be like. Instead, it gives them a first-person narrator they can feel a little superior to.
Look's subtitle lays out two of Alvin's biggest problems: girls and school. But they stand for a great many more fears that he lays out for us early on. Worry about girls is hardly crippling, given that Alvin's a second-grade boy. But in school, Alvin can't speak in class.
The book isn't about Alvin overcoming that fear, however. Nor most of his others. Eventually a secondary goal pops up: trying to be a gentleman. He also manages to (re)make a friend who happens to be a girl. (To be exact, she's a girl with physical disabilities, which gives rise to a nagging suspicion that their friendship isn't a bridge across gender lines so much as an alliance of potential outcasts.)
If anything, in fact, Alvin has more fears at the end of the book than at the start. His parents have signed him up for piano lessons, but he decides the teacher is a witch out of "Hansel and Gretel" and never goes back. There are a variety of other episodes, with Alvin's adult relatives showing their own comic potential. There's even a baseball-through-the-window moment, though without serious consequences. But for me those episodes didn't add up to much more than episodes. I kept waiting for the novel to kick in.
Yes, we've come to expect early novels to show kids suffering a problem and then working to overcome it (or just get over it). That's what we see in the series that Stephanie Greene started with Owen Foote, Super Strongman, for instance: a second-grade boy dealing with common worries in uncommon ways that other early-elementary boys can look up to. Alvin Ho doesn't work like that, which some folks have found refreshing. But I wasn't convinced the book worked in a new way, either.
Of course, if Alvin were to overcome his most significant fears, there might not have been room for a sequel.
Here's a thank-you to all the folks who worked on this year's Cybils Middle Grade Fiction award, starting with the Cybils organizers.
These Middle Grade Fiction Panelists read the nominated titles--far more in total than us judges--and produced a very interesting set of finalists.
My fellow Middle Grade Fiction Judges battled viruses, weather, and frustrating book-distribution systems to read all the finalists with care and reach a consensus by deadline. The discussion was very interesting, both on what folks thought about the individual books and what we thought a Cybils-winning book should be.
Finally, thanks to all the nominated authors (and, in one case, illustrator) for creating their books for kids to enjoy.
The winners of the 2009 Cybils were announced today, and in the category of Middle-Grade Fiction published last year our choice was:
written by Siobhan Dowd
David Fickling Books Brother and sister, Ted and Kat, take their cousin Salim to see the London Eye, the city's gigantic Ferris wheel. While Ted and Kat watch, Salim gets into one of the glass pods, but thirty minutes later he doesn't get off. So the siblings set out to find their cousin.
One of the challenges of this evaluation was that the five nominated books are so diverse: in reading level, in genre, in narrative approaches, in settings, in protagonists. Each book had unique strengths. As I told the other judges at one point, it wasn't like comparing apples and oranges. It was more like comparing apples, grapefruit, tractor tires, pocket lint, and a shade of orange.
Complicating the situation, Ted's brain "runs on a different operating system" from other people's, which makes him a lot better at facts and figures than he is at reading people. Narrated in Ted's voice, this is a page-turner that brings London to life and takes readers inside a powerfully rational mind.
The London Eye Mystery shows off kids' natural ingenuity and proves that difference can be a strength, as Ted and Kat work to solve the irresistible riddle of their cousin's disappearance.
Visit the Cybils website for the complete list of winners.
Willow also lives among the spirits of her dead ancestors, as reincarnated in various animals around her: mouse, spruce hen, lynx, and so on. This aspect of the story was apparently inspired by a Northern Athabascan belief. In American Indian Religious Traditions: An Encyclopedia, edited by Suzanne J. Crawford and Dennis F. Kelley (2005), Phyllis Ann Fast writes: some northern Athabascan traditions include a belief in the reemergence or reincarnation of the spirits of humans and other creatures after death.
Those ancestral animals narrate sections of the book. They look after Willow and her friends, sometimes calling the youngsters’ attention to crucial information. Eventually the link between Willow’s family and animals turns out to be a crucial revelation for readers, though the characters never fully tumble to it.
Diamond Willow presents this form of reincarnation not as the characters’ belief system, but as the way the world works. On her website Frost has written: The spruce hen and the other animals are a protective presence in the story, and are especially helpful when the characters are attentive to their surroundings. They do not represent anyone's spiritual or religious beliefs.
It’s not necessary for a character to believe in that form of reincarnation or belong to the Upper Kuskokwim ethnic group to return as an animal. Willow’s paternal ancestors show up just like her maternal ancestors; people who died as infants are reincarnated alongside people who died after decades of life in central Alaska.
I therefore classify Diamond Willow as a fantasy, like any other story set in a universe of supernatural forces. That label seems especially apt after a little mouse/great-grandfather guides Willow to a piece of paper with crucial writing on it--the supernatural element clearly affects the plot. (That said, this book wasn’t nominated in the Cybils Fantasy and Science Fiction category.)
As far as I noted, Diamond Willow doesn’t depict its characters--even the Upper Kuskokwim grandparents--as talking or thinking about the form of reincarnation its story depends on. When Willow’s family discusses how to treat an injured sled dog or how to get rid of mice, they don’t wonder if those animals hold the spirits of their relatives.
It appears, therefore, that Frost was inspired by the Upper Kuskokwim people’s understanding of how spirits work, and showed readers how such a universe might play out, but didn’t portray those people as sharing in that understanding.
Chapter 1 establishes that Jamie’s birthday is 10 December, and that it’s six months away when she starts a summer job at the rec center of Fort Hood. Page 138 states that the year is 1969. So the first scene takes place in June 1969.
In the first line, Jamie tells us that opening scene also occurs “The day after my brother left for Vietnam.” On page 49, she recalls a conversation with her brother “after TJ enlisted” but obviously before he shipped out, which must be early June 1969 at the latest.
In that conversation TJ explains why he likes taking photos of the Moon: “I think the shadows are interesting. And I like the idea that now there are human footprints on the moon’s surface. There’s something pretty cool about that. And, I don’t know, it’s this place in space that people have actually gone to.”
In the following paragraph Jamie drops the name of Neil Armstrong.
However, Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin didn’t land on the Moon and leave their footprints until 20 July 1969, or over a month after that fictional conversation.
Once I realized this was indeed an anachronism, it stopped nagging at me. I accepted that Dowell's novel takes place in a slightly alternative past in which Armstrong made it to the Moon in the spring of 1969 instead of the summer. That's not the focus of the book.
But the anachronism may point to an interesting dilemma Dowell faced. On the one hand, she could have adhered to the historical events of 1969. Then she would have written TJ's remarks in the future tense ("And I like the idea that pretty soon there will be human footprints on the moon's surface..."). And the Moon landing would have been a landmark event in the characters' lives, as it was for many people in the summer of 1969. Indeed, Betsy Bird at the Fuse noted how another reader felt the book didn't have enough to say about that first Moon landing: I do know at least one person who thought it a little odd that the book didn't concentrate more on the moon landing and how that would have affected the characters. The book is called Shooting the Moon after all. But Dowell covers her bases, having TJ speculate at times about "the idea that there are human footprints on the moon's surface." Classrooms of children will someday be asked what the moon signifies to TJ and to Jamie.
But I think that pausing the narrative for the Moon landing, with Jamie wondering if her brother is watching the TV in Vietnam, yadda yadda yadda, could have made too much of that historical moment. The Moon is an important symbol in the story, but it's a symbol shared between the siblings, not with the whole world. In large part the Moon symbolizes being far away, and the landing would emphasize how it came within humans' reach.
On the other hand, Dowell could have shifted the novel's timeframe to 1970, with the Moon landing in the recent past, as the characters describe it. Since Dowell herself is an army brat younger than Jamie, she might well have been inspired by memories of the early 1970s rather than 1969. But that time setting would have made the politics of the Vietnam War different enough to wreak havoc on the plot. And, as I said before, the first Moon landing isn't what matters most in this book.
Another little bit of lunacy: The title Shooting the Moon refers to TJ’s habit of photographing that celestial body. However, it’s also a term from the card game Hearts. Curiously, Jamie and another important character play gin rummy instead.
So here's a list of the middle-grade novels I'll soon read as a judge in this category of the Cybils Awards. And here are all the lists of finalists. Helen Frost tells the story of Willow, a young girl living in a remote Alaskan town. When Willow gets her first chance to mush the family dogs, everything changes. Told in a series of diamond-shaped poems, with sporadic prose every few chapters, Frost has woven a beautiful coming-of-age story fraught with realism and magic. Braiding the stories of Willow, her family, the dogs, and her family's ancestors, the story is simple and middle-grade students will easily connect with Willow and her family. Three middle school students are brought together along with thousands of eclipse-chasers to witness a rare full solar eclipse. Told in the three voices of Ally, Bree & Jack, the alternating narrations are beautifully written and increasingly weave together. Ally (short for Alpha) and her family own the Moon Shadow campground, and have been preparing for their eclipse-chasing guests for years. Bree's parents have bought the Moon Shadow and are dragging her from city life to try running a campground. Jack is along for the ride as his science teacher's assistant in an amateur astronomy experiment they plan to run during the eclipse. Both the characters and the setting are fully fleshed out and believable in this Vietnam era novel. Born and raised in a career army family, 12-year-old Jamie explores her changing feelings as her brother enlists in the army and is sent far away to fight. While offering no easy answers, this is a thought-provoking page-turner that will have lots of appeal for kids. This story has Ted and Kat searching for a cousin who disappears from the London Eye Ferris wheel. The two siblings must work together to solve the mystery. What's unique about this tale is how Ted's Asberger's doesn't stand in the way of him being active in solving his cousin's disappearance.
Oh, dear. Will I be able to relate? 
written by Lenore Look
Schwartz and Wade Books
Alvin Ho is brave (as long as he has his Personal Disaster Kit), a gentleman (in training), a good friend (but NOT to girls), and an interesting kid (who doesn't talk in public). It's just that he's allergic to everything: girls, substitute teachers, airplanes, escalators ... and anything else that's even remotely scary (like leaving the house). However, he loves explosions, his dog Lucy, Plastic Man, Wonder Woman, the Green Lantern, Aquaman, King V, and all the superheroes in the world.
“Sporadic prose”--what a selling point. 
written by Helen Frost
Farrar, Strauss & Giroux
Not one but two astronomically-themed titles! 
written by Wendy Mass
Little, Brown 
written by Frances O'Roark Dowell
Atheneum
Which reminds me, I should post some of my dad's photos of our "flight" on the London Eye last summer.
written by Siobhan Dowd
David Fickling Books
Espinosa's fantasy adventure quite consciously mixes traditional fairy-tale elements with some modern touches. For example, the title character, Mabelrose, is a princess. But she's not a stereotypical blonde, blue-eyed beauty. Her skin is a freckled tan halfway between her mother's pale pink and her father's light brown, and her brunette hair is usually a mess. (The human cast's visual variety may reflect Espinosa's upbringing in the Philippines.)
In other ways, however, The Courageous Princess doesn't veer far from what most readers probably want. Mabelrose is anime-cute, and spunky as all get out. She attracts cute animal companions. And while she takes care of herself, she also keeps hoping for a prince. On the other side of the conflict, the villain's animal henchmen are lizards and vultures--ugly animals reflecting traditional visual stereotyping.
Similarly, the story takes a lot of familiar fairy-tale plot turns, connected in new ways. A dragon kidnaps the princess. She journeys toward home across a landscape filled with talking animals, castles, and villages of little people. There are knights in armor, magical objects, deposed kings--almost everything a fairy-tale fan would demand.
Mabelrose has apparently read the same stories as her audience. When a warthog asks her for a kiss, she assumes that it will turn him into a handsome prince. But no.
Among the classic fantasies that The Courageous Princess alludes to is The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, though not in a way that fits with the books or movie we all know.
In addition, the people even shorter than Mabelrose are called "Munken," apparently inspired by L. Frank Baum's Munchkins.
Two qualities hampered The Courageous Princess in the Cybils judging. First, the 2007 edition of this comic, published by Dark Horse, contained the same material that had appeared in a 2003 collection from Antarctic Press, except in a smaller trim size. Moreover, before that the same pages had appeared in serial form, and the volume shows its roots in magazines: the saga is incomplete, leaving Mabelrose at the end of a "story arc" but still not home.
Of more concern to me, the story's good guys are able to solve most of the challenges that confront them quite quickly. Mabelrose is constantly meeting nice characters and communities who look after her. A nasty baron besieges her family's castle, but before anything happens her grandparents show up with an even bigger army. Soldiers chase Mabelrose to the top of a tower, but she can swing across a gap to a second tower--a second tower which doesn't appear in any preceding illustration. Thus, while Espinosa's images give off a lot of visual excitement, humor, and of course spunkiness, the story doesn't build as much as I'd have liked.
Similarly, I thought the book established some themes and then didn't follow through. Early on, for instance, a caption and large panel tell us that "most important of all, [Mabelrose's parents] taught her always to pray." But the story doesn't explain what religion they follow (of particular interest since her parents are from different kingdoms), or how that form of faith fits into this magical world. As with the dangers Mabelrose faces and quickly escapes, The Courageous Princess is pleasing in the moment but doesn't reward extended study.
As this New York Magazine excerpt shows, Varon draws simple, uncluttered pictures using a thick, curvy line (cartoony!). She draws anthropomorphized animals and robots with big round eyes (cute!). She uses very few words (though Robot Dreams isn't truly a "wordless" book, as I discussed back here). And she tells her story in comics form (comics!). Therefore, this is a book for younger readers, right?
Wrong. Robot Dreams is the story of a dysfunctional, asymmetric relationship between Dog, who makes impossible demands on all his friends, and Robot, who suffers horribly because of Dog's thoughtlessness yet can't stop yearning to please him.
The story starts with Dog building Robot from a kit and taking Robot to a dog beach. Dog doesn't realize that playing in the water is not good for Robot. Robot lies on the sand, paralyzed with rust. Night falls. Dog doesn't know what to do, and so goes home. When Dog returns the next day, the beach is closed for the season.
Dog tries to make other friends. Duck is useful for getting a kite out of a tree, but then flies south for the winter. The Anteaters are fun for sledding, but they, well, eat ants. The Snowman whom Dog builds is pleasant, and even brings Dog into acquaintance with Penguin, but come spring Snowman melts, and Dog feels nothing in common with Penguin anymore. Not one of Dog's friends is perfect!
Meanwhile, Robot is lying on the beach, fantasizing about being rescued by Dog, then about being rescued by anybody. These are the "robot dreams" of the title. In reality, Rabbits break off one of Robot's legs, Robins build a nest in Robot's chest, and Monkey gathers up Robot's pieces and sells them to a scrapyard.
In June, a month after Monkey has been over the beach, Dog returns and can't find Robot. Dog ends up buying and building Second Robot to be a perfect friend.
Meanwhile, Raccoon has bought the scraps of original Robot and built them into Robot Radio. Raccoon and Robot Radio dance together in comradeship and joy. Yet when Robot Radio sees Dog walking on the street with Second Robot, Robot can't help but play music for its old friend. Dog hears the music, not turning to notice the source, and whistles a happy tune.
I'm not saying that Dog doesn't feel horrible about what happened to original Robot. Dog really does feel guilty. And Dog is careful to stop Second Robot from going into the water and rusting. But I don't think Dog ever learns that being a good friend means compromising sometimes.
Publishers Weekly called Robot Dreams an "elegiac and lovely graphic novel about friendship," and said in particular that "Robot is an avatar for all children who wonder why they aren't receiving the love they think they deserve."
To those children I'd say: Give up on Dog. You deserve much better.
