Review: Three Kids’ Books
To make up for Manga Friday being so “adult” and off-limits to kids lately, how about some reviews of books that are made for kids? Here are three very different ones – two of ‘em are even “educational!”
Robot Dreams
By Sara Varon
First Second, September 2007, $16.95
But let’s start off with a book with no particular pretensions of teaching anyone anything – it’s just the story of the friendship between a dog and his robot. [[[Robot Dreams]]] is a wordless graphic novel by Sara Varon, whose Chicken and Cat was similarly wordless, similarly about a friendship between two anthropomorphic creatures, but which was laid out and published as a picture book. Robot Dreams, though, is a trade paperback, and doesn’t immediately announce itself as a book for kids. (Not as blatantly as a picture book does, at least – that cover would garner some glances on the subway.)
Robot Dreams is set in the kind of world where there are some real people, and some anthropomorphic people – dogs, cats, raccoons, elephants – and nobody ever notices. Dog lives in a city, and sends away for a robot kit. It arrives, and he builds himself a new friend.
They are briefly the best of friends, until a trip to the beach for Labor Day. Robot goes in the water, and then rusts solid on his towel on the beach. Dog can’t move him, and has to leave. And, when Dog comes back a few days later – with a repair manual and some tools – the beach is closed for the winter, with barbed wire on top of a tall fence.
The rest of the book sees Dog trying to make new friends, which never works out all that well: a group of ducks heads south for the winter, a snowman has similar trouble with changing seasons, and anteaters are very polite but their cuisine is unpalatable to Dog. Meanwhile, Robot lies on the beach and dreams of other things he could be doing, or could have done. (Robot also suffers various indignities, such as having his toe used to fix a leaky boat and his entire carcass dragged off to a junkyard.)
Eventually, summer comes around again – will Robot and Dog be reunited? (Don’t be too sure that you can easily answer that.)
Robot Dreams is sweet and cute, like the storyboards for a They Might Be Giants video. The “friends get separated and Robot loses a leg” plot might be a bit much for younger readers – that’s the problem with wordless books; even really young kids can read them – but it should be the source of only very, very minimal therapy later in life. It’s fun in that modern all-ages way, and it makes me want to find Varon’s other book [[[Sweaterweather]]].
Houdini: The Handcuff King
By Jason Lutes and Nick Bertozzi
Hyperion, March 2007, $16.99
This is more obviously educational – it’s presented by “The Center for Cartoon Studies,” features extensive endnotes (under the name “Panel Discussions” – har har, what a laff!), and is in general utterly book-report friendly. But it’s a nice little slice of Houdini’s life that manages to encapsulate what’s special about him a bit better than the other CSS book, Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow, did with its subject.
[[[Houdini]]] is set in 1908, on a cold May day when Harry Houdini will jump, handcuffed and leg-ironed, into the Charles River from Boston’s Harvard Bridge. We see his showmanship; his relationship with his wife, the police, the public, and his various employees and helpers; and, of course, we see him defy death.
Lutes and Bertozzi give away Houdini’s trick – or explain one way that he might have done it, since they don’t know for sure – and carefully point out that they are not magicians themselves, so they’re not bound by the magician’s code of secrecy. (I hope, for their sakes, that their next book doesn’t cover the Gambino family and have a similarly cavalier attitude towards omerta. Am I implying that magicians are like gangsters? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps I just take every opportunity I can to squeeze in the word omerta.)
Houdini is shorter and more clearly for schoolkids than Robot Dreams is; it’s got just enough of the important facts to help a ten-year-old write a one-page report without getting bogged down. For adults, the interest will be seeing Lutes and Bertozzi – by the way, the book doesn’t explain how they broke the work down between them – working together to create a stylish historical vignette. It’s not a story that goes much of anywhere, since it’s just one day out of context, but it’s an eventful day happening to an energetic man.
Classics Illustrated #2: The Invisible Man
By H.G. Wells; Adapted by Rick Geary
Papercutz, August 2008, $9.95
The second of the main series of the new Classics Illustrated is another reprint of a Rick Geary adaptation from the late ‘80s First Comics incarnation of CI; if I were running the zoo – even though I bow to no one in my love for Geary’s work – I would have spread my net slightly wider to begin with. A CI series that was entirely Rick Geary adaptations of 19th century British novels would be a wonderful thing, but it wouldn’t be the most commercial thing, and the audience might think that’s what they’re in for.
But the book itself is great – [[[Invisible Man]]] gives Geary more room for action than Great Expectations did, with just as many Victorian frock coats and impressive beards for Geary to render in his inimitable style.
Do I need to give the story details at this point in the history of the world? There’s this guy, see, and he’s invisible. He’s also more than a little crazy, which is more of a problem, so he has to be, eventually, Taken Care Of by the stout yeomanry of England. And it’s all, in typical Wellsian fashion, vaguely allegorical about the place of science in society and of the dangers of unfettered whatever.
Geary’s people, as always, stride across the page in perfect character – he infuses more life into a collection of pen lines than any three other cartoonists. The Invisible Man is also, inevitably, terribly “educational,” but Geary makes that all go down smoothly – and Wells’s The Invisible Man was a great story long before it was ossified by English teachers into the subject of ten-page essays. I hope that this Invisible Man won’t be used in place of the original too much, but, even if it is, at least those kids will be getting something worth reading and quite enjoyable in its own right.
Andrew Wheeler has been a publishing professional for nearly twenty years, with a long stint as a Senior Editor at the Science Fiction Book Club and a current position at John Wiley & Sons. He’s been reading comics for longer than he cares to mention, and maintains a personal, mostly book-oriented blog at antickmusings.blogspot.com.
Andrew Wheeler has been a publishing professional for nearly twenty years, with a long stint as a Senior Editor at the Science Fiction Book Club and a current position at John Wiley & Sons. He’s been reading comics for longer than he cares to mention, and maintains a personal, mostly book-oriented blog at antickmusings.blogspot.com.
Publishers who would like their books to be reviewed at ComicMix should contact ComicMix through the usual channels or email Andrew Wheeler directly at acwheele (at) optonline (dot) net.
Thanks for the reviews. I don't think kids books should be "educational" at least no more "educational" than adult books. Sometimes the line "It's educational," gets used as an excuse for "It's dull" or worse, "It's crap." "Utterly book report friendly" doesn't make me want to rush out and read Houdini: The Handcuff King.It's nice that you can easily find three books intended for younger readers that are clearly creative and engaging for adults as well.
Great review – thanks very much. I'm always on the hunt for great children's books and have recently discovered Bayard and their series of StoryBoxBooks, AdventureBoxBooks and DiscoveryBoxBooks (which is a special Olympic edition) They have work by acclaimed children's books illustrator Helen Oxenbury appearing in the Storybox series for September. In addition to this, they also have some great activities for rainy days: http://www.storyboxbooks.com/potatoprinting.php, http://www.adventureboxbooks.com/macaroni-picture…, http://www.discoveryboxbooks.com/skittles.php Enjoy!