Cristina García’s tween novel I Wanna Be Your Shoebox (which I reviewed yesterday) took its title from the poem “I Want to Be Your Shoebox” by Catherine Bowman, which appeared in The Best American Poetry 2005.  The poem opens with an epigraph:

“Memphis Minnie’s blues line ‘I want to be your chauffeur’ was miscopied in an early Folkways recording song transcription as ‘I want to be your shoebox.’”

The poem then takes off in a series of lines that begin with “I want to be your…”  Initially the lines rhyme, but—let’s face it—“chauffeur” and “shoebox” don’t share much more than an initial sound.  The rhymes relax, and then the structure starts to vary.  Here are some of the best bits:

I want to be your moonlit estuary
I want to be your day missing in February
I want to be your floating dock dairy

[ . . . ]

I want to be your cheap hotel
I want to be your lipstick by Chanel
I want to be your secret passage

All written in Braille.  I want to be
All the words you can’t spell
I want to be your International

House of Pancakes.  I want to be your reel after reel
Of rough takes.

Read the whole poem here.

So.  Hands up if you know what a “floating dock dairy” is.  Well, I didn’t know.  Luckily, there is a “contributors’ notes and comments” section at the end of the Best American Poetry anthology.  Bowman explains that it is “an anchored wooden raft in the middle of a beautiful lake, probably in Vermont or upstate New York, that you can swim out to in July and have homemade ice cream.”

But here’s some poetry of a different sort:  the comment in the “contributors’ notes” section for the poem, this poem that is based on an error in transcription, actually has the line written (twice!) as “floating dock diary.”  For serious.  Just do a quick Google book search for “floating dock diary” and you’ll see what I mean.

That is just too perfect.  Don’t tell me that was an accident.  Don’t.  You.  Dare.

Poetry Friday is at Mommy’s Favorite Children’s Books today.

Cristina García.  I Wanna Be Your Shoebox.  Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2008.  198 pages.  Age 9 to 14.

Let me start by saying, this is a decent book.  Sometimes I get carried away with minor criticisms, and it ends up sounding like I have nothing good to say at all.  Granted, it took me forever to finish it (over a week, though I was busy…) but it did read, at times, like an episode of Gilmore Girls—one of my favorite shows—with its barrage of cultural references, minus the obscurity factor.

Here’s the story:  Ms. Yumi Ruíz-Hirsch, who is just turning 13, is facing a number of life changes.  Top of the list is the fatal illness of her grandfather, Saul, but the runners up include moving out of her childhood home, losing her school’s orchestra to budget cuts, and the intrusion of her mother’s boyfriend in their lives.  She decides to take on the one problem she may have some control over:  the orchestra.  She convinces her peers to hold a fundraising concert to kick out the jams—orchestral arrangements of punk songs.

In each chapter the narration is split between Yumi and Saul, and the Saul sections are strictly his narrative—no contextual cues or input from other characters—so at times he has to represent two sides of a dialog, and it feels a little unnatural.  “What’s that?  You [repeat what Yumi must have just said]?”  That’s forgivable, in the name of oral history, but I was not fond of the way his laughs were written into the text.  His “heh-hehs” sounded kind of leering.

Yumi’s ancestry is 25% Jewish, 25% Japanese, and 50% Cuban, so this is a very culturally-conscious story.  However, it seemed that everyone’s nationality was declared, whether it mattered to the story or not.  Toward the beginning of the novel Yumi makes a remark about their “crazy German landlord” who keeps raising the rent, and I thought to myself, with a degree of indignance, that the fact that he’s German better be relevant to the story later on.  Nope, it wasn’t.  So…am I supposed to be creating a stereotype in my head?  Germans are crazy and/or miserly?  I just can’t conceive of the point of establishing his nationality, in this first and last reference to the character.

The chapters were spread out once per month, which seemed needlessly rigid at times.  Some months are more exciting than others; that’s just the way life goes, fiction or not.  In the February chapter, Yumi sneaks into her old house.  At the end of her narrative leg of the chapter, the police arrive on scene and order her to “come out with [her] hands up.”  Then we’re on to Saul’s narration, and the only reference he makes to the incident is to say, “Yeah, I heard about your rap sheet.”  Never spoken of again.  No resolution, no consequences, totally unreal.

There are other plot points that lack exposition as well, such as Yumi’s parents’ divorce.  It happened when Yumi was a baby, but no one seems to know why. There has to be a reason, or set of reasons.  At one point Yumi speculates that the divorce happened because her maternal grandmother cut her umbilical cord instead of her father, but come on…that’s just dumb.  It’s not as though the reader is meant to believe that theory, but give us something.

So, the reason I bought this (for my library) in the first place, other than the positive review I know I read somewhere, was the title.  If you ask me, punk rock is underrepresented in tween fiction, and any title that starts with “I wanna be your” promises to deliver.  In Shoebox, Yumi’s dad is an aging half-failure of a punk rocker who tunes pianos by day.  García does a great job with his character, his band mates, and how glamorous their lives are (i.e., not very).  It’s in Yumi’s blood, though; otherwise there probably wouldn’t be a punk orchestra show, and that would be a shame.  If you’ve heard of string tributes, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, you should definitely listen to the following potentially life-altering, hand-picked samples:

1. AC/DC – “You Shook Me All Night Long”
2. Bright Eyes – “The Calendar Hung Itself”
3. The Flaming Lips – “Yoshimi, Part 1”
4. Nirvana – “Heart Shaped Box”
5. The Pixies – “Debaser”
6. R.E.M. – “Radio Free Europe”
7. Elliott Smith – “Happiness”
8. The Smiths – “How Soon is Now”
9. Weezer – “Say It Ain’t So”
10. The White Stripes – “Fell in Love with a Girl”

“Bohemian Rhapsody” was going to be on the list, but they cheat and use a piano.

The only letdown about this book is the fact that there is no shoebox symbolism in the story.  Again, here I go judging books by their covers, but the person who created the cover art actually read the book (or had really good notes) because every item in that shoebox is in the novel.  Personally, the few physical items I’m sentimental about are literally stored in a shoebox, so I thought it could be used to represent memories, especially from the whole grandfather-bequeathing-his-oral-history angle.  No such luck.

On the other hand, the title is not random.  It was taken from a poem written by Catherine Bowman.  More about that tomorrow…

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[ Hi! You're probably here because of a link from 100 Scope Notes. That's awesome! Except I just realized there's a major typo in my flow chart. And I can't fix it because I'm at work with no graphic editing software! It's like that nightmare where you're naked in school, I guess. I've never had that one. Anyway, it'll be fixed in a couple hours. Thanks! --AG, 5-11-10 @7pm ]

Kimya Dawson.  Alphabutt.  K Records, 2008.

I don’t pretend to understand what “anti-folk” means (does that hurt my street cred?) but I can offer you this handy flow chart to help you decide if Alphabutt is right for you:

The album’s fifteen tracks amount to fewer than 30 minutes, and that’s ok.  The songs are unpolished silliness, with lyrics that have a stream-of-consciousness vibe.  The album is teeming with mildly subversive potential.  I think when the girls listen to this album their heads will explode.  (School has programmed them against “potty talk.”)  The album is much more than its benign crudeness, though.  It feels genuine and natural, the songs of a mother who writes for her two-year-old daughter.

Album highlights:

• “Louie” – a song about a funny doggie, a special doggie, a really great doggie; the refrain the dog’s name, Louie, repeated 26 times.
• “Smoothie” – the best descriptions of prenatal antics that I’ve ever heard
• “Little Panda Bear” – a love song from mother to daughter, featuring (as any love song should) a kazoo

And—I’m not kidding—pick up some Barry Louis Polisar and/or the Juno soundtrack.

other reviews:
Kids’ Music that Rocks | Pitchfork | Zooglobble

Wendy Mass.  Every Soul a Star.  Little, Brown and Company Books for Young Readers, 2008.  322 pages. Age 9 to 12.

[ Well, this is long overdue, but I promised Wendy and I typically keep my word... ]

Three main characters—Ally (homeschooled campground resident who dreams of discovering a comet), Bree (image-conscious future modeling hopeful), and Jack (self-esteem challenged low-lier)—and a handful of supporting characters are thrown together unwittingly on the eve of a total solar eclipse.  But it turns out (doesn’t it just?) that they’re kindred spirits of sorts.  Kindred souls, maybe?

It seems that eclipses have a bit of a cult following (eclipse chasers, they call ’em).  I am not one of these people by nature; I have a vague memory of a partial eclipse that happened many, many years ago, and the only reason I glanced skyward at all was to feel like a badass for not shielding my eyes.  It is a great credit to Wendy Mass for not making me mind about learning things.  This is not a surprise having read A Mango-Shaped Space, though—she has a talent for seamlessly integrating factual information into her narratives, staying within the realm of relevance, as not to arouse suspicion.  Go science!

This may be a sign of my current interests and preoccupations, but one of my favorite things about this book, and it also follows from Mango, is the ambivalence toward religion.  Take this passage:

“So all you can see is this perfect circle of white streamers billowing out at you.  And it changes everything around you.  It changes you, too, on the inside. . . . Some religious folk even say it’s the Eye of God.  Could be, but all I know is it’s something to marvel at for sure.” (p. 80)

This is not saying anything bad about religious beliefs.  For all I know, it could even be in support of them.  But the validation of unknowingness is something to behold, too.

About the narration:  Sometimes equality is overrated.  While it was extremely fair to each of the main characters to give them an equal number of chapters in sequence, it sometimes broke the flow of the story to do so.  And I guess equality can be underrated, as well, because why didn’t Ryan, who is the same age as the main characters, get a chance to narrate?  Is four a crowd?  Was he not interesting enough?  His grandparents were divorcing after half a thousand years of being married.  I think that’s interesting.  Then again, I would have loved to give feisty old Stella a chance to narrate, too.

There’s one thing that bothered me—the silhouette illustration of Jack.  His character is supposed to be overweight, but the silhouette is clearly of average build.  I think it sends the wrong message, the old, tiresome media-perfection cliché.  Even if it’s a boy, maybe even especially.  That silhouette does not need to drop even ten pounds.

other reviews:
A Fuse #8 Production | The Reading Zone

Yeah, like you need another blog telling you the Cybils winners were announced today.  I get that.  But, in case you missed it, J. L. Bell of Oz and Ends had an excellent comment about judging the middle grade fiction category:

“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.”

I wonder which was which.  Nothing against The London Eye Mystery, but I thought maybe Shooting the Moon or Every Soul a Star (review forthcoming, probably) would win.

In other news, WordPress and I have had a falling out, and I think I’m migrating to Movable Type.  I’m still working out the design bit.  I’ve got the header and the main column shell, so it’s getting there.  The important thing is, I did a test run of the entry that wouldn’t validate, and it worked just fine.  (And, no, I wasn’t using the visual editor.)

My goal is to create a site that looks and functions very nearly the same.  I think I can do that with MT, even though it involves learning a new language.  Lucky me, I live on this geek-type-stuff.

Mark Reibstein.  Wabi Sabi.  Illustrated by Ed Young.  Little, Brown and Company Books for Young Readers, 2008.  n.p.  Age 4 and up.

I think, maybe, I could read Wabi Sabi every day for the rest of my life.  As it stands, I read it at least half a dozen times in the one day it came down for cataloging.  My first read through, anxious to see what all the glowing reviews were about, left me enraptured with the art, but uncertain of the story.  Wabi sabi, as a philosophical concept, seemed much more than this one cat’s journey could express.  As someone who uses a flawed understanding of chaos theory as the basis of her life philosophy, things such as impermanence and imperfection hold great significance for me.

When I reopened the book for a second read I saw the note preceding the title page, which tries to define wabi sabi.  This put me at ease.  It’s very significant that this note comes before the story, rather than after (and not just because there’s a lot of end matter already).  We aren’t meant to take the exact same journey as the cat, subsequently spelled out as an afterthought in case we missed the point.  We’re meant to follow her journey with enough preexisting knowledge to understand as things unfold.

Outside of my own little world, wabi sabi is an aesthetic, not a philosophy.  It lives in quiet understatement, which is about the opposite of my tired ramblings.  So.  Here are a pair of haiku, even though I haven’t attempted any such feat of writing since tickets to see Adam West in legitimate theatre were on the line.  (Unfortunately, mine only got an honorable mention, and thus had to pay the $30 for the tickets.  As if I’d let $30 stand between me and Adam West!)  Anyway, here:

a stain left behind—
a coffee mug, overflown, in
early morning hours.

stillness in motion—
found art—photographs that wait,
that beg to be taken.

Of course, those are completely pointless if you have access to Wabi Sabi right now.  If so—go, grab it, and start by savoring the runny, asymmetrical watercolor backdrop of the title page.  I imagine that’s what inspired the coffee reference.

My actual definition of wabi sabi would be, “the inner desire that motivates people to buy distressed furniture.”  However, purposefully distressed furniture is just about the opposite of wabi sabi, as it has no history; apparently, for most consumers, the wabi sabi desire is defective.

The interesting thing that I did’t notice when I started this post is, the aforementioned poetry contest with the Adam West prize was actually a Valentine’s Day contest.  That was four years ago, and the last time I tried to write a poem of any sort.  So, bonus, for your reading pleasure—the honorable mention:

We bought each other
the same card.  Our love has grown
so comfortable.

Poetry Friday is at Big A little a today.

Wabi Sabi reviews: 
100 Scope Notes | A Fuse #8 Production | Kids Lit | 7-Imp

Lisa Westberg Peters.  Our Family Tree:  An Evolution Story.  Illustrated by Lauren Stringer.  Harcourt, 2003.  n.p.  Age 6 to 10.

[ Foremost, Happy Darwin Day.  Two hundred years is quite the milestone birthday. ]

My primary function as a parent is to raise my daughters to think for themselves.  I’ve long felt this way, and still I can think of no greater gift.  They’re still young, developmentally, to start the journey, but things got kicked into gear this month when my older daughter, not yet six, started talking to me about certain religious concepts like they were facts.  Uncool.  So I brought home Our Family Tree.

I’d have to call it a misfire.

Personally, I love the book.  It’s cohesive, unifying, and beautifully illustrated.  But for preschoolers, at least mine, we struggled with it.  I can think of three reasons why this was the case:

• The author referred to generations upon species of ancestors as “we.”  At nearly every page turn, the girls had to interject something along the lines of, “But not me.  I wasn’t like that.”  And I had to explain about things happening a long, long time ago, before any of us were born, etc.  Then we’d turn a page or two and have to reestablish the concept of ancestors.
• It doesn’t feel much more credible than any other creation story.  Maybe it doesn’t need credibility for our purposes—maybe diversity of opinion is what’s critical at this stage—but on the page that talks about the continents forming, the volcanoes look like they’re dancing.  Fantastic and weird.
• I felt like there was a lot of between-the-lines explaining to do, and realized that I am not the person to be doing it.  I am still unsure of how much of the book was factual, or rather how strong the underlying theories are.  So there I was, editorializing, and having no clue as to the accuracy of what I was saying.  That’s a dangerous situation.

Apparently, according to my spouse who has never once cited a source for me, saying that we are directly descended from apes is incorrect.  And while I’ve yet to verify that (why am I always the one doing the fact-checking?), perhaps this is not a good book for the specifics.

Flight Explorer, Volume 1.  Edited by Kazu Kibuishi.  Villard, 2008.  112 pages.  Age 7 to 12.

Flight Explorer might be described as an anthology or a sampler.  It has ten graphic shorts from different artists.  The content is fun and benign.  Well, excepting that Jake Parker’s Missile Mouse says “crap”—gasp!—twice.  I love that he does.  I think that crap should be decriminalized slang.

Highlights:

• “Copper:  Mushroom Crossing” by Kazu Kibuishi
  

  After less than 15 seconds of dialog:

  “We’ve spent way too much time talking about it, we’d be stupid not to [jump across some mushrooms, Super Mario style, rather than take the bridge]!”

  Fred falls between the caps and is given the whatfor by some cranky stems.  By the way, I love this duo because the person has the dog name (Copper) and the dog has the person name (Fred).  Read more Copper here.

• “Zita the Spacegirl:  If Wishes Were Socks” by Ben Hatke
  

  Zita:  (looking at a sock)  So, I wonder how this thing works?

  Robot Randy:  It looks complicated.

  Zita and her two robot friends, without fully realizing it, wish for companions like themselves.  Either something gets lost in translation, or their mirror is rather unflattering.

• “Wooden Rivers:  Rain Slickers” by Rad Sechrist – A rotund meteorologist cat saves the day, wardrobe-wise, and puts a couple of buffoons in their places.
• “Snow Cap:  2nd Verse” by Matthew Armstrong – A wordless vignette about a girl and her beast.  As one might suspect from a Wild Thing, it’s not quite up on its etiquette, and accidentally swallows the girl; however, intentions were good, and amends are made.

other reviews:
All Ages Reads | Big A little a | Good Comics for Kids | Shelf Elf

Lenore Look.  Alvin Ho:  Allergic to Girls, School, and Other Scary Things.  Illustrated by LeUyen Pham.  Shwartz & Wade Books, 2008.  172 pages.  Age 8-12.

At school, Alvin Ho speaks with his eyes.  He has to, because his voice does not work when he finds himself in a scary situation, and school doubtlessly qualifies.  He carries a personal disaster kit, filled with items that include a whistle, garlic, and dental floss.  He also maintains a set of contingency plans and escape routes.  But really, above all else, he wants at least one friend.  At the end he sort of, kind of realizes that he sort of, kind of had one all along, but (if you can’t tell by the sort ofs and the kind ofs) not to the point of being trite.

Alvin lives in historic Concord, Mass., which he insists is not a normal town:

“A lot of famous dead people live here.  And when you are famous, you don’t get buried like a regular person under a stone that has your name and telephone number on it.  You have to stay in your house to give tours. . . .

“Mr. Emerson died a long time ago, but he still lives in [his] house.  On Thursdays he sweeps his walk.  It is very creepy.”

The book is rife with these entertaining misconceptions, some of which Alvin must indefinitely maintain.  For example, he thinks his therapist is psychotic (she’s a psychotherapist) but no one can clarify this mistake because he is too scared to talk about it.

Flea, the girl who would be Alvin’s friend, is awesome.  She wears a patch, and one of her legs is longer than the other.  These are presented as strengths, because they are pirate-like.  Plus, Pham’s illustrations of her remind me of Louis Glanzman’s Pippi Longstocking, giving her 800 bonus points.

I didn’t talk in grade school, either.  Instead of a general fear, or a collection of smaller fears, I was flat out afraid to be wrong.  And you can’t be wrong if you don’t talk!  But I was neither funny nor clever, so a book of my elementary years is not forthcoming.

other reviews:
emilyreads | A Fuse #8 Production

Frances O’Roark Dowell.  Shooting the Moon.  Antheneum Books for Young Readers, 2008.  163 pages.  Age 9 to 12.

Warning 1:  Do not hand this book to a child who still believes in Santa.  Totally debunked.  That, and perhaps a novel dealing with war, even superficially, may be a poor match for a still-believer.

Warning 2:  Me + Book Dealing w/ Military = Dicey

Jamie Dexter, the 12-year-old combat-ready Colonel’s daughter, describes herself as “Army through and through.”  Hooah, yes sir.  Her older brother just passed up college for a tour of Vietnam, and Jamie thinks he’s made the Right Decision—that is, until he starts sending her rolls of film in lieu of letters.  It’s hard to argue with a photograph.

The key reveal in this story isn’t just a “war is horrible” loss of innocence, though.  Jamie must reconcile with the fact that her father is a hypocrite.  That’s may be too strong a word; it’s possible that the Colonel has been unhappy with his career for years, and Jamie has missed or ignored those cues.  But hypocrisy is not an unfitting term for someone who tries to finagle his son out of combat after signing other soldiers’ orders for years.

The language in this novel is stunning.  The word “crafted” comes to mind.  I actually wanted to do away with the first chapter, so that it would open with this line:

“We were stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, a flat piece of real estate that threatened to burst into flames every afternoon from June to September.”

But it doesn’t quite work, because the story is already expertly paced and sequenced.  In fact, I can’t think of one bad thing to say about it.

I could never read a book about war when I was younger, even into my high school years.  I had this conversation with my mother, somewhere around age 15:

Me:  (putting down Slaughterhouse-Five)  I cannot read this.  Too much war.
Mom:  You do realize that’s an anti-war novel, right?
Me:  (urgent, insistent, nearly interrupting)  Too much war!

Since then, I’m happy to report that I’ve grown a metaphorical pair, and can now tolerate and even enjoy anti-war fiction, but it’s always an aching endeavor, at least when it’s done right.  Shooting the Moon is that kind of story.

other reviews:
100 Scope Notes | The Book Club Shelf | Eva’s Book Addiction | A Fuse #8 Production | The Reading Zone | A Year of Reading