Ottoline and the Yellow Cat

Ottoline and the Yellow Cat, by Chris Riddell (Harper Collins, 2008, 171 pages but a lot of them are pictures).

I remember as a child how I pored over the illustrations of the Eloise books—there is so much to see in them, and they are so much more than the words but so part of the story. Ottoline and the Yellow Cat offers a similarly wonderful reading/looking experience, but with a very different type of heroine.

Ottoline is the young daughter of eccentric collectors, who travel the world looking for such wonders as four spouted teapots. She stays home with Mr. Munroe, her Norwegian bog troll friend and chaperone, and a host of service personnel who visit at regular intervals, and she passes the time working on her own collections, writing in her notebook of observations and clever plans, and splashing in puddles. The bear in the laundry room is interesting, but the mysterious lost lap dogs and jewel thefts in her neighbor hood offer more scope for an intelligent young girl and her troll companion, who set off into the strange city to crack the case….

That’s the bare bones of the plot; frankly, the mystery didn’t intrigue me all that much. But the book is so much more than its story, because there is more pictured than is told—lavishly detailed drawings (black and white, with bits of red) everywhere, some of which take up both pages, with maps, and three-dimensional cutaways, and an odd sock collection and, of course, lots of pictures of Ottoline and Mr. Munroe. And many of the pictures have little labels, some relevant to the plot, some apropos of nothing much, such as the one pointing out “a mouse called Robert that Mr. Munroe came across in the kitchen last Thursday.” It is absurd, it is smart, and it is also rather sweet.

The reading level is about the same as the Eloise books. It is perfect for the accomplished five-year-old girl (me as a child). And it works really, really well as an independent reading book for an eight-year-old boy with an iffy attention span (all the bits of writing in the drawings are perfect), who can read long words just fine, but who has not yet become comfortable reading longer, more chaptery, books to himself, and who needs reassurance that yes, he is a reader (this was proven at my house last week). Another book that works well this way is Mammoth Academy, by Neil Layton (also from the UK), reviewed here by Jen Robinson.

There are two more books about Ottoline coming—Ottoline Goes to School, and Ottoline at Sea. This makes me happy, because I like smart, spunky Ottoline very much, and I love Mr. Munroe, who is now my second favorite fictional troll (no one can top Moomintroll).

Ottoline and the Yellow Cat has been nominated for the Cybils Awards in the Science Fiction/Fantasy category.

A nice thing about looking to see who else has reviewed a book is finding new blogs that intrigue--here's a review at Children's Books: What, When, and How to Read Them. And here's another review from my co-panelist Amanda, at Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs.

Incidentally, Chris Riddell is one of the co-creators of the Edge Series, which I have never read, but which seem like a good thing to try on my 8 year old in the coming months...opinions, and other recommendations, welcome!

Toon Books -- a graphic way to interest the young reader

(Note to reader: I am going to overuse the colon in the post. Sorry).

Here's what, in my experience, kids who are learning to read like: graphic books. So I think this is an absolutely wonderful idea: graphic books designed for the early reader. This is the premise of a new series called Toon Books ("bringing new readers to the pleasure of comics"), and when the publishers asked if I would like three of these books to review, I said, "Yes please!"

So the following arrived: Stinky, by Eleanor Davis, Mo and Jo: Fighting Together Forever, by Dean Haspiel and Jay Lynch, and Jack and the Box, by Art Spieflman (yes, the same Art who wrote the Maus books). They are really beautiful, high-quality hardcovers, with simple stories and easy words to read. They were greated with much interest by my eight year old. It was the sort of happy interest that results in said child choosing to curl up on the sofa and read, followed by such strong pleasure in one of the books (Stinky) that he asked if he could start his own blog so as to write his own review of it (here)!

I liked Stinky very much as well. It's the story of a swamp monster, who regards humankind with loathing. When a boy invades the swamp, the monster tries to drive him out, but despite all the yucky swamp-ness he throws at the boy, the boy doesn't leave. In the end, they are friends. A very nice easy reader indeed.

Sadly, we both liked the other two titles less well. I found the Jack that lives in the box scary as all get out, and Mo and Jo, about two kids who fight each other while learning to use their super powers to work together to fight crime, not my cup of tea. But this is not to say that other kids might not like them lots, and I will be looking out for other titles in the series, because I do think it's a brilliant premise.


Here's the Publisher's Weekly article announcing the series back in 2007.
Here's a review of the first three in the series, from Comics Worth Reading.

Reading and eating...

Isn't it a terrible feeling when, happily assuming that instinct is all powerful, you leave aspects of raising your children to nature, and it doesn't work? There my older son and I were yesterday afternoon, hustling his way through the last of the summer reading that has to be done by Thursday morning (and this is not the part I feel bad about, as procrastination is our normal way of being in the world), and he allows as how he wants a snack, and can he watch a dvd while he eats it.

"I'll get you something, and you can read while you eat," I tell him.

"But I can't read and eat at the same time!' he cries.

Shock and horror on my part. Every day of his life his father and I have been modeling this behaviour for him, but have somehow failed to link eating and reading in his mind. Sigh.
So I got him his snack, and I held the book for him while he ate with one hand and turned the pages with the other. Sigh again. Like learning to ride a bicycle, it will probably take time, but then, I hope, he will have mastered this useful skill for the rest of his life.

On the other hand, if he doesn't, at least he won't have to go through the same thought process I do: "I'd really like to read new hardcover Book X, but I also want ice-cream, so I will have to settle for ratty paperback book y." This is probably why I re-read my comfort books so often.

But anyway, other parents, watch your children and make sure they are not just snacking in idleness, or in front of the tv! Or you, too, might have to sit on the sofa re-reading the same bit of Encyclopedia Brown four times over, waiting for the page to turn.

The Cat on the Mat is Flat

After leaving the Navy's Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Fest (and a grand time it was) I wrested a living from the hostile earth (i.e. I planted my vegetables, which occupied much of the weekend), and then turned to the long neglected task of returning library books. Although it is true that I work very hard organizing book sales for the library, it is not a labor of love--I do it because I can't afford to pay the fines we rack up--sigh. I'm a bad patron.

Among the books that were overdue was this gem: The Cat on the Mat is Flat, by Andy Griffiths, illustrated by Terry Denton (9 chapters, 166 pages, Feiwel and Friends, 2006).
This book is a series of rhyming stories, illustrated with black and white cartoons. It is utterly perfect for the boy, aged 7-9, who is having a hard time with reading. It is not just that the stories are easy to read--if one wanted that, one could grab any number of books without a second thought. But almost all of them would look like baby books, whereas The Cat on the Mat is Flat looks like a Real Book that a Cool Boy might be carrying around. The front cover, with its scenes of cartoon violence, shows clearly that this is not a book for the very young and very sweet (although my boys often are; perhaps consistantly sweet is closer to what I mean).

Although the words are such as one might find in, say, an Usbourne book like Toad Makes a Road, the cartoons that accompany them and the slapsticky mayhem of the rhyming stories are very boy friendly (which is not, of course, to buy into gender stereotypes, but for whatever reason I truly believe that boys will find a cat being whacked with a baseball bat more amusing than girls will). For example:

Around and around and around the mat
the rat chased the cat with the baseball bat

until...

KERSPLAT!

Never again did that cat chase the rat--
the cat was much too flat for that.

If you, like me, want to see your 7 year old boy sitting reading by himself, try this book.

Andy Griffiths is the author of The Day My Butt Went Psycho, and other books for older kids.

Here are some other reactions to this book (and strangely they all seem to agree with my own opinion. Coincidence or conspiracy?) at BookBoy, at Pink Me, and atWhat You Want to Read.

(and incidentally, these are new blogs for me, and it felt rather adventurous to venture out into new territory. All three looked interesting, and I plan to go back, and explore them further. In my copious free time ha ha).

reluctant readers, again....

Everyday my seven year old must read for 10 minutes. The school says so. Some days it is not easy, and lord knows I don't want to force him to read at knifepoint. So here, for what it's worth, is a tip, which I think is rather a nice one, and which I've never heard anyone else mention it: on nights when I think it might be a struggle, I communicate only in written notes. One can still be sarcastic through facial expressions. And it gets him to read. (Here is the math I use, although I personally was always much better at reading: 3 short notes = 1 minute of reading, so after 30 notes we can stop).

This can also be made into a game--anyone remember the wonderful treasure hunt in Spiderweb for Two, by Elizabeth Enright, where written clue led to written clue over the course of the year? Notes about treasure always get read, and there can be as many clues as you want, ranging from the simple "look under your beg" to the dangerous "look in your closet" (he keeps his rock collection on the floor of it).

Over at Reading Rockets there's a request for suggestions on books to read aloud to two girls who have achieved Reading-ness, and don't particularly have any interest in being read to. I can't think of any books in particular, but I do have a thought. Reading out loud doesn’t have to happen on a sofa--we used to be read to while we colored, painted, sewed...although none of use ever did complicated models meant for much older children, like Petrova did in Ballet Shoes when they were all being read to. So maybe if the new book to be read aloud was begun with a new quite activity, it would give it impetus... (and if the girls in question haven't read Ballet Shoes, maybe that would be a good one....)

Once I Ate a Pie- puppy poems for Poetry Friday

Once I Ate a Pie--13 Dogs Tell All, by Patricia MacLachlan and Emily MacLachlan Charest, illustrated by Kay Schneider (2006, Joanna Cotler Books)

If you have a picture book age child, say 3-7, who loves dogs and is learning to read, this is the book for you. Even kids like mine, who aren't crazy about dogs, loved the sweet puppies, the "Good" Dogs, the "Bad" Dogs (like the pie eater), and the sleepy older dogs featured in this book. Each of the 13 dogs featured has its own picture and its own poem. The pictures are enough to melt the non-doggiest heart. The poems are little vignettes of the dogs' behaviour, rellying on typeface, font, and layout rather than rhyme and rhythm to set them apart from prose. Without being able to do these things in blooger, it's hard to convey the full charm of these poem-lets, but here's an example:

Wupsi

My name is Wupsi, but they call me “cute.”
“Who’s cute?” they ask, smiling.
I cover my eyes with my paws and pretend to sleep.
“Who’s cute?” they call again.
I run to them. I can’t help it.
I am cute.

And he is, as is this book! Which makes it a good one, I think, for people interested in poetry for the uncertain reader.

(When googling for a picture, I found that Mother Reader had also reviewed this book for Poetry Friday, way back when in August of 2006. She thought it was awfully cute too).

This week's Poetry Friday Roundup is at AmoXcalli!

Learning to read with Douglas Florian

It was a slightly sticky week reading-wise for my 7 year old son--he just didn't want to read any of the chapter books I offered him. So I turned to poetry, specifically the animal poems of Douglas Florian, with the happy result that he read.

Poems are more friendly to read than the densely filled pages of chapter books--less intimidating visually, and once you've read a poem, you have clearly accomplished something. Florian's poems in particular, I think, are great for the reluctant reader. They are funny. They are informative. They have a fairly straightforward vocabulary. And I like his whimsically varied illustrations.

Here are a few poems that struck my fancy:

The Cheetah (from bow wow meow meow it's rhyming cats and dogs, 2003, Harcourt)

The cheetah is fleet.
The cheetah is fast.
Its four furry feet
Have already passed.

The Dachshund (also from bow wow meow meow)

Short up front
And short behind
But so long in-between.
The fleas all ride
Upon my side
In my s t r e t c h limousine.

The Diamondback Rattlesnake (from lizards, frogs, and polliwogs, 2001, Harcourt)

Fork in front,
Rattle behind.
The lump in the middle?
Don't pay any mind.

Scales up high,
Scales down low.
The lump in the middle?
You don't want to know.

Diamonds above,
Diamonds below.
The lump in the middle?
A rabbit too slow.

All three of these are pretty easy, quick, and funny to read--great confidence boosters.

My son also decided to bring home from the library Shel Silverstein's Falling Up --apparently the boy who is the Alpha Reader in my son's class has been reading it (having finished Eragon Harry Potter Cornelia Funke etc). Silverstein's poems, thought, aren't as uniformly easy readerish as Florian's; likewise Jack Prelutsky.

Any recommendations for other poets or books we could look for that still unfluent reader who likes science might be able to read easily?

And as a total aside, Shel Silverstein has a new edition of an old out of print book coming out this March-- Don't Bump the Glump which looks rather interesting.

The Poetry Friday round up is at Karen Edmisten's place today!

Learning to read

Over at Jen Robinson's Book Page, there's a great post up on helping kids learn to read--lots of ideas from parents (including moi), teachers, and writers. Another point has just occurred to me, and I think it's important enough that it deserves a post of its own.

So often it seems like reading level is used as a measure in intelligence--"Oh, you're reading War and Peace and you're only 8! How smart you must be!" If you aren't reading "big books" at that age, it might then seem as though you are stupid. My second grader isn't stupid (ask him to explain String Theory, and he'll do fine), but there are many, many kids who are reading books considerably harder than the Magic Treehouse books he's plodding through. So I've made a point of explaining to him that each person's brain develops at its own pace, and in some people, different parts develop faster--some kids talk before they walk, some walk before they talk. I tell him he has a very well-developed math brain, and a great kindness brain (except for whacking his little brother), and tell him that in a few more years, when his brain has developed a bit more, no one will be able to guess that his classmates had ever read harder books than he was reading. I often remind him of what he was reading in past years, so he can fully realize he's making progress. Three December 31sts in a row, he's read A Fly Went By, by Mike McClintock. The first time through, it took three painful days. Next year, 25 minutes, reading out loud. This year, about 20, read to himself. So he can really see he's getting there.

Otherwise, I think it would be so easy for him to just think "I'm a bad reader." A self-fulfilling prophecy if there ever was one.

Ricky Ricotta' s Mighty Robot, a series of books by Dav Pilkey

In my on-going efforts to help my 7 year old make it into the realm of The Reading Public, I have been bravely sitting next to him while he reads Captain Underpants. Blah. So I was thrilled, yes, thrilled, to discover Dav Pilkney's other series. The Ricky Ricotta's Mighty Robot books don't depend on potty humor! They don't make school look horrible! They don't celebrate jokes that are not nice at all! They are more readable!

And lo, my boy now reads them to himself, silently and with deep concentration.

For anyone out there, who, like me before this morning, didn't know that there are lots of Ricky Ricotta books (I only had heard of 4), here's the Ricky Ricotta webpage over at Scholastic.

Here's the list of titles:
Ricky Ricotta's Mighty Robot
Ricky Ricotta's Mighty Robot vs. the Mutant Mosquitos from Mercury
Ricky Ricotta's Mighty Robot vs. the Voodoo Vultures from Venus
Ricky Ricotta's Mighty Robot vs. the Mecha Monkeys from Mars
Ricky Ricotta's Mighty Robot vs. the Jurassic Jackrabbits from Jupiter
Ricky Ricotta's Mighty Robot vs. the Stupid Stinkbugs from Saturn
Ricky Ricotta's Mighty Robot vs. the Uranium Unicorns from Uranus
Ricky Ricotta's Mighty Robot Astro-Activity Book o' Fun
Ricky Ricotta's Mighty Robot vs. the Naughty Night Crawlers from Neptune (unreleased)
Ricky Ricotta's Mighty Robot vs. the Unpleasant Penguins from Pluto (unreleased)

By the way, the books started out with a "giant" robot. However, apparently readers pointed out that the robot wasn't really a "giant" --he was just a lot bigger than a mouse. So now the robot is "mighty" instead, and the titles of the first few books were changed.

(Incidentally, this series is also more instructive than Capt. Underpants books--obviously, we learn a bit about the various planets, but perhaps more unusually, the child reader will also develop a familiarity with the names of various cheeses that (s)he might not be familiar with. They are mostly the milder, more child friendly cheeses too. What's not to like about Munster, for instance. And from "Munster" it's an easy step to get out that map of Germany you just happen to have kicking around so as to do a bit of cheese related geography study :) or throw in a bit of Italian language instruction --"ricotta" means "re-cooked"... etc etc and isn't it so much easier to come up with things for other people to do than to do them oneself?)

Max's Words

Max's Words, by Kate Banks, illustrated by Boris Kulikov, 2006, 32 pages,
ages 4-8.

Our librarian flung this book at our heads a few days ago. It was a happy choice (the book, not our heads). Not only did we enjoy reading it, it inspired an hour of "literacy activities" that made me feel like a Good Parent.

The plot is simple--Max has two brothers, one an avid philatelist, the other an equally avid numismatist. But will they give Max a single stamp or coin? No. So Max decides to start his own collection--of words. He cuts them out of newspapers and magazines, and copies them from the dictionary (it was scary for a minute there. I thought he was going to cut up the book). Soon he has heaps and heaps of words, in pile after pile.

Words are pretty neat things (even banal, overused ones). Words that tell stories are especially nice (a word I will defiantly continue to use, even though my fourth grade teacher told me not too. Darn it). Max begins to use his words together, and the fun really begins as they turn into Stories.

The words are not just any old words, but Illustrated, Colorful, Alive words that are rapidly evolving into concrete poetry. "Baseball" is bat shaped, "hungry" is bitten, "alligator" and "crocodile" have spiky teeth. And when the words make stories, clever and colorful illustrations show how they fit together.

The words are so much fun, in fact, that the two older brothers want their share. They start to make their own story, and the (mild) tension builds--will they get the words together fast enough to kill the worm (bad older brothers) or will Max be able to foil them with a quick arrangement of his own words, and save it?*

The value of words in a more pragmatic sense is underlined at the end, when Max swaps piles of words for a coin and a stamp (which he can perhaps use to send his first ms. off with).

In short, this was a fun, snappy book. But wait, there's more. The real value of this book, I think, is that it makes kids (and me too) want to write words on pieces of paper, cut them up, and make stories and nonsense and poems with them. This is what we did last night--about an hour of all four of us on the living room floor, surrounded by words, and some punctuation. My little boy slept with the question mark and the exclamation mark, and took them to school today. The last I saw of them they were on the Sharing Chair, a tad doubtful, but very excited.

*the worm lives.

PS: My personal favorite book about the power of words is Murder Must Advertise, by Dorothy Sayers. My favorite book in which words come alive is Finn Family Moomintroll, by Tove Jansson.

Still learning to read...

My 6 year old continues to doggedly read his book a day/15 minutes...Last week actually went fairly well, and in a spirit of solidarity with the other parents in the same circs., here's what he read:

Newt by Matt Novak I don't particularly care for amphibians in clothes myself, but whatever. He read it, all three chapters (good for 2 days worth). There were "lessons" for those who like books to teach on multiple levels; the one I liked best was "don't dig up flowers growing wild and take them home." There were good vocabulary words (and how frustrating it is when your child rattles off polysyllabic words and then stumbles over "it").

Small Pig by Arnold Lobel. It only recently occurred to me that, although there were no other Frog and Toad books to find, Lobel presumable wrote other things that might be good. Small Pig is no Frog and Toad, but it is a brisk little story. When a small pig's mud puddle is cleaned up by the zealous Farmer's Wife, off he goes in a huff in search of mud. The illustrations are somewhat muted, which I think is a perfectly reasonable thing for an early reader. When the illustrations are too engaging, the Reading Advisor has to repeatedly draw the child's attention back to the words. I just learned from Sherry at semicolon that today is Lobel's birthday...

The Sun Shone on the Elephant by Gywneth Mamlok (1967) This is a book I loved as a child (how lucky I am that my parents didn't throw out our children's books, although they were no so kind to the paperback books of our middle childhood). This one was a bit of a challenge, but we made it through. It is the story of an elephant who thinks he is ugly. He sees the parrot, and imagines himself with feathers, sees the monkey and dreams of doing tricks, sees the tiger, and wishes for stripes. At last he meets a cat, who happens to know the unhappiest princess in the world--unhappy because she is so tiny. The elephant becomes the princess's Royal Elephant, and bedecked with gems he now thinks he is beautiful. This is, admittedly, an awful message that would probably never sell today. But the pictures are lovely. The elephant does look magnificent...and after the book is finished, one can start yammering on about Asian vs African elephants, what country the book might be set in, etc etc.

Our fifth evening was a Scooby Doo early reader of no literary or artist merit.

Searching for early readers--The Happy Hockey Family

My son has to read for 15 minutes every night for school, which means finding 5 or so books a week that he can read. Strangely (sarcasm alert), over the past few years of bringing home armload after armload of children's books, we ended up with very few Early Readers, because mostly they are unappealing paperbacks (with exceptions). But anyway, every fortnight or so I run through the shelves looking for candidates for the coming week, working on the assumption that he is making progress, so books too hard in April might be possible now, and perhaps we'll be trying Tolstoy by August. Not that we actually own any Tolstoy. I feel I can always get it from the library if I need to.

This week I found The Happy Hockey Family, by Lane Smith. I love this book. It is brilliant. I have read it aloud to my children often, coaching them in the appreciation of ironic humor (so important). I checked the copy at our library (bought by me using Friends' money; I think it was one of my first acts as an official Friends of the Library Member), and it does not have an "easy reader" sticker on it. But it is. Short, clear sentences, some repetition, illustrations that support the text. It was perfect. Of course, since I had read it aloud to him before, he was probably reading from memory, but that's not my fault.
Lane Smith has a website here that is well worth visiting, but he's taking a break from it until his next book comes out...

For more suggestions of books for a six year old to read, visit Kelly at Big A little a for a nice list.

Learning to read

My six year old is not an independent reader. He reads a few pages, grudgingly, and wants to quit. Has he been told too often he is smart, which this New York Times article suggests might be the culprit: http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/index.html Or is there a factor the NYT doesn't mention--perhaps I, having fixed on the idea that he is smart, expect him to just read for crying out loud.

Last night I read him Discover Magazine's top 100 science stories of the year; he read to me One Fish Two Fish.