Picture Book Reviews: Be Accepted for Yourself: Gustavo & Red

Drago, Flavia Z. Gustavo, the Shy Ghost. Candlewick, 2020.

Intended audience: Ages 3-7, Grades PreK-2.

Visit the publisher’s page for links to order, summary, sample pages, reviews, activity kids, teacher’s guide, and author’s bio.

From its cover and because it entered my library’s Libby catalog at the same time as a few other stories about Día de los Muertos, I expected Gustavo, the Shy Ghost to be about the Day of the Dead. It is not. Instead, Gustavo is a lonely ghost in a world of other supernatural “monsters” who feels unseen. This is a story of putting yourself out there, being brave, and making friends. Gustavo decides to play his violin in the cemetery and invites everyone that he wishes were his friend to come listen. At first it seems as if no one will come, but Gustavo glows with happiness as he plays anyway.  The whole group arrives late with flowers for Gustavo, having gotten lost in the graveyard. After that, he is included in the monsters’ play, he becomes their friend, but he is never asked to be more outgoing or to act differently: “everyone discovered that even if he didn’t talk much, he was the best at helping and protecting his friends. But mostly, Gustavo never stopped surprising them. And they never stopped loving him.” The introverted Gustavo gets to remain an introvert and is included anyway.

Book Reviews: The Problems of Overconsumption

Brockington, Drew. CatStronauts, Book 1: Mission to the Moon. Little, Brown Ink-Hachette, 2017.

Visit the author’s page for links to order and swag.

This book was a bit of a letdown, honestly, but I think because I was too excited to finally have a chance to read it: CatStronauts—cat astronauts—how could I not love that? The plot though was predictable, its twists foreshadowed, broadcasted in plain sight. I was not given enough time dwelling on the story’s problems to truly expect the CatStronauts or the plan to end the world’s energy crisis to fail. The cats themselves did not have well-defined personalities beyond their role in the group and their personal passions—nor did they have compelling arcs and experience growth, the one exception being Major Meowser, who grows to respect his team as individuals more by the end of the book. The story itself was an odd mix of outlandish hijinks and realistic training and mission sequences.

Book Reviews: Times Between: The Singer of Apollo & Those Left Behind

Riordan, Rick. “Percy Jackson and the Singer of Apollo.”  Guys Read: Other Worlds, edited by Jon Scieszka. Walden Pond-HarperCollins, 2013.

Visit the publisher’s page for links to order the anthology, summary, excerpt, discussion guide, and editor’s and authors’ bios.

I struggled to put this short story in chronological order when I read it. I looked up the publication order, and that places it between “The Son of Sobek” and The House of Hades. Publication order then is not helpful. Percy was otherwise occupied in the very brief chronological time between The Mark of Athena and The House of Hades. So where does this story fit? 

In it, a birthday celebration in Central Park for Grover Underwood is interrupted by the god Apollo (this then must be before The Blood of Olympus. In fact, for Percy to be in New York and Apollo a god, this must fit before The Lost Hero, perhaps in that odd time between the end of Percy Jackson & the Olympians and the start of The Heroes of Olympus (Goodreads calls this Camp Half-Blood, Book 5.1 which would seem to agree with this placement), or otherwise after The Trials of Apollo (the finale, having been published in 2020, I find it unlikely that this story is meant to happen after The Trials of Apollo).

Representation in My Reading from 2021, 2022, & 2023

2023:

In 2023, I read 185 books. 38 included a character who identifies as LGBTQIA+ (20%!). In 27 of the 185, a protagonist identified as LGBTQIA+ (14%). 32 of the 185 were by creators that identify as LGBTQIA+ (17%). Those 32 books were by about 61 creators (one of these books—Be Gay, Do Comics—was an anthology with at least 40 contributors).

102 of the 185 included a character of color (55%). In 56 books of the 185, a protagonist was a character of color (30%). 29 were by creators of color (15%).

Book Review: 40 Years of Little Ponies

The book My Little Pony 40th Anniversary Celebration collects three stories: “Friendship is Forever,” “Tales of Dream Valley,” and “Bonnie,” with “Friendship is Forever” by Sam Maggs, Keisha Okafor, and Rebecca Nalty being by far the longest. 

In “Friendship is Forever” four best friends take on middle school in 1984, the year that the first animated special in the My Little Pony franchise aired. 

The summer before is filled with hours of playing together with their favorite My Little Pony figures and with the real ponies that they have leased for the summer. When they learn that the barn where their ponies are boarded is in danger of being torn down to make way for a shopping mall, they promise to do whatever they can to prevent the destruction. 

Book Reviews: Picture Books from Afar: Herbert from Australia and Patches from the Netherlands

Alexander, Rilla. Herbert Climbs to the Top. Hippo Park-Astra-Penguin Random, 2023.

Intended audience: Ages 2-5.

Visit the publisher’s page for links to order, summary, and author’s bio.

I won a copy of Herbert Climbs to the Top in Goodreads giveaway. It was not what I expected. Rather than a board book, what I received is a hand-sized picture book. That’s no problem for me, but it did make me rethink with which small child I would share this book; a picture book with paper pages is not as sturdy as a board book.

Herbert, brother to Fiona, is a purple hippopotamus. At his friends’ urging, he conquers a new piece of playground equipment, but at the top, Herbert drops his teddy bear! He and his friends climb down the ladder and down into their imaginations, where Herbert imagines himself a rescue helicopter as he reclaims the bear. Proud of his achievements, Herbert looks for his sister but cannot see her. She calls out to him from the underside of the monkey bars and proclaims herself a roller-coaster car. Fun continues until the final page where Herbert, Fiona, and Herbert’s friends are all sitting or standing at the top of bars. Herbert proclaims, “This is the best part,” a saccharine but heartwarming ending.

Book Review: Competition at All-Girls’ School Ellsmere

The first thing to note about One Year at Ellsmere is that the story seems somehow not fully complete. I expected to find an announcement about a sequel, but I couldn’t find anything to that effect. There are a few threads that remain loose: the story of the two brothers, the creature in the forest, how Jun and Emily’s story progresses….

This is a fairly realistic, contemporary school story, with just a dash of mystery and fantasy thrown in for flavor. 

Jun is attending Ellsmere on a scholarship, the school’s first substantial scholarship. Ellsmere is a private, girls’ middle school with a reputation for being competitive, its alumnae in prestigious universities. Jun, whose father passed seven years earlier, wants to get into medical school and wants to prove herself equal to Ellsmere’s rigorous education, but she knows from the beginning that her place at Ellsmere will come with social as well as educational challenges.

Book Reviews: Percy Jackson’s Guides to Greek Mythology

I mentioned Percy Jackson’s Greek Heroes and the myth told there of Psyche and Eros in a review of East of the Sun and West of the Moon. Percy Jackson’s Greek Heroes and the earlier Percy Jackson’s Greek Gods are written as if they are stories collected and written by Percy Jackson, the eponymous hero of Rick Riordan’s first independent middle grade series, and include occasional aside mentions of adventures Percy and his friends have in the works of fiction. In these, Riordan focuses each section on a single hero or heroine, god or goddess. Riordan remarkably pulls together threads from various ancient Greek and Roman sources, and he crafts a linear story with action and consequence, which I find not always to be the case in collections of mythology, which are often laid out as a series of disconnected stories: “This happened and this happened” rather than “this happened because this happened.” Occasionally in the narration there are mentions of conflicting myths, and Riordan as Percy chooses from among these the versions the one that make the most sense for the story that he is telling, and he defends his decision. The stories do not cling to the best known stories of the heroes or gods either but draw sometimes on less well-known, less frequently referenced stories and sources, like Hestia’s rescue from Priapus, a minor god who protects vegetable gardens (according to Greek Gods the source of today’s garden gnomes). Have you ever heard of Priapus before this?

Book Review: The Hagues’ East of the Sun and West of the Moon

East of the Sun and West of the Moon is based on a Norwegian fairy tale, collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Engebretsen Moe, who published the tale sometime between 1841 and 1844. It was translated into English by Andrew Lang in The Blue Fairy Book, published in 1889.

I find the similarity between fairy tales across the world fascinating. I re-read Percy Jackson’s Greek Heroes, a collection of myths retold by Rick Riordan, this summer, and perhaps that is why I was so forcefully reminded of Eros (or Cupid) and Psyche’s story when reading East of the Sun and West of the Moon.

The basic tale type, Aarne-Thompson-Uther (ATU) 425A, “The Animal (Monster) as Bridegroom,” has, generally, a woman asked to wed an animal or monster. In East of the Sun and West of the Moon, the unnamed bride is traded away by her financially struggling family in exchange for great wealth. Psyche is abducted by the West Wind and brought to Eros’ palace.