All age comic books, Kidlit, mglit, movies, entertainment and parenting
Category: Books
These are books that kids will want to read-or should read, but will enjoy doing so. Board book, picture books, kid lit, elementary school books, middle school books, high school books, all age comic books and more will be talked about here.
It goes without saying that books should be entertaining. But, I just said it, so sometimes we need to be reminded of the fact that some books are better than others. The Last Fallen Star is an entertaining, complete book that also opens it up to a larger world. The book is in the Rick Riordan Presents imprint from Disney Books and rewards readers more thoroughly than some of its contemporaries.
It can also be said that there is no bad pizza. There is simply pizza that is better than other pizza. The Last Fallen Star is literary pizza that is better than others. The book is part of the Gifted Clans Novel series by Graci Kim. It’s important not to cringe when you see that the first book in a series is already part of a planned series, much less one that has Rick Riordan Presents, before the title. I am all for letting a series or franchise prove its worth, let the one book be successful, and then deliver more. However, I can also see from the creator’s perspective that a greater story roadmap needs to be laid out so that they, as well as the reader, can let their imagination wander about what could happen to the characters.
Discovery is a great thing and I love it when I find an author that was previously unknown to me. Just to be clear, in this instance I mean an author that’s written and published books and not an author that I discovered down at my local coffee shop. Don Brown is in the third book in his Big Ideas That Changed The World series on Amulet Books. I had seen the first and second books from the series in our elementary school library, and meant to read them, but got distracted by shiny objects or cat videos. A Shot In The Arm! is a non-fiction graphic novel that’s as great as any of the ones that we’ve raved about from :01 First Second books or Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales.
I remember when I was in my early 20’s I had preconceived ideas of how people looked when they were a certain age. When our children were younger we’d ask them how old they thought we were and how old they thought their grandparents are. How Old Am I?, Faces From Around The World is a fascinating book that asks basic questions and illustrates how people look from around the world.
Oh DJ Funkyfoot, get out of my dreams and get into my car. DJ Funkyfoot Butler For Hire! Is a book that our nine-year-old really needed at this time. This is a book that’s a member of The Flytrap Files, which is in itself, a character and series of books created by Tom Angleberger. Inspector Flytrap was the series that started it all, which spun off Didi Dodo Future Spy and now DJ Funkyfoot. I take the first sentence that started all of this back and now invite all three of them to get into my car. Butler For Hire! is madcap silliness that some kids will flock to read and others, like the reluctant reader kind, will love to read.
If this is your first visit to the site we have long maintained that children have the ability to be much smarter than they are. Also, welcome to this kidlit corner of the internet, take off your shoes and relax. By the first statement I mean that if we teach kids as the smart sponge-like vehicles they are and expect more from them, they’ll level up. One aspect of that, as well as, the difficulty and brilliance of the English language is how specific it is. There is a precise word for most anything, that’s one reason why mastering it as a second language is challenging. 365 Words for Clever Kids! is a book whose content fourth and fifth-grade kids need to know. Those fourth-grade kids will know some of the words and fifth-grade kids might know about half of them. However, it will behoove any student in those grades and higher to have been exposed to them.
Pangolina is my favorite Disney Princess. No, actually Pangolin is the commonly referred to name of Pholidota, the scaley-backed creature that looks like a small dinosaur with a really long tongue. When they get scared they curl up into a ball, resembling a massive Roly-Poly, rather than the world’s most trafficked animal. Pangolina, in this case, is also an illustrated book that manages to introduce young readers to this erstwhile mammal. What kids, as well as adults, will enjoy about the book is that it tells a story, has beautiful art, and the stamp of approval from Jane Goodall.
For a couple of reasons, I love wordless books. The art allows readers to use their imagination to propel the story further and gives the artist a chance to use nuanced expressions that might otherwise be filled in by words. Jim Curious and the Jungle Journey is a wordless book with a twist. It’s a little bit Indiana Jones, Fury Road, and steampunk, but is in 3-D. That might seem gimmicky, but the effect really works. As a matter of fact, the 3-D effects in Jim Curious are so effective that you’ll be scratching the pages to see if they’re really lenticular photographs.
Lenticular photos are those photographs that appear to have their subject move as you, or the image change perspective. Dan Kainen has a fabulous series of books about wildlife using this technique. When I was a kid there were also some trading cards that used an earlier form of that technology.
If you look at Jim Curious and the Jungle Journey without the 3-D glasses it will look like a disjointed mess and most likely give you a headache. I’m not even sure why posting images in the post are of any value. THEY DO NOT LOOK LIKE THIS WHEN YOU USE THE GLASSES. What you should do is go to the back cover and use one of the two pairs of supplied 3-D glasses, then open the book.
On the first couple of panels, you’ll see Jim as he’s waking up from bed. He lives near the coast with an idyllic lighthouse that’s just outside of his quaint home. A dragonfly has landed on his head and he’s wearing what looks like a spaceman suit. The suit is padded, quite thick and if it weren’t in the shape of an ‘X’ on his chest he’d resemble the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.
It’s when Jim leaves his house, through a mirror on the wall; that the 3-D magic takes off. He wades a couple of steps into a body of water and heads towards a massive mountain. The huge trees have scales that mirror a 50-story snake. As he walks towards the mountain things get darker, actual snakes appear, baboons the size of cars come down from the trees, Aztec-looking temples are explored, and more. There’s a buoy he has to walk past that’s on a dried-up lake bed. Jim is trying to get to a bright light that’s just beyond a small shack. He knows that he has to enter that shack, but what will he find when he goes in?
Jim Curious and the Jungle Journey is a wordless book, and by definition depends entirely on its images. If you’re new to wordless books that do not mean that they’re devoid of emotion, action, development, or story. The climax in Jungle Journey is a great example of that is the fact that it happens six pages before the end of the book. The ending is also very trippy and would be at home if Pink Floyd were played as you were reading it. In addition to a trippy ending, it’s also fabulous, makes you question things, and begs you to re-read the book again just to see if you missed something.
I was incorrect in my original ‘gimmick’ label with Jim Curious and the Jungle Journey. In hindsight, I would refer to the 3-D aspect as more of a feature that requires those 3-D glasses in order to enjoy it. This is a book that requires a moment to fully appreciate it, but when you do it’s akin to a light going off and that “A-HA” moment when you understand something wasn’t immediately evident.
Jim Curious and the Jungle Journey is by Matthias Picard and on Abrams Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Abrams Books.
If the world were a fair and just place there would be 10 copies of Nerdycorn in the book rack at our local big box store. As mentioned earlier, we were there and saw copies of a book that has a similar theme, but wasn’t nearly as great at Nerdycorn. This is an illustrated book that revels in color, has text length that makes it a great good-night book, funny characters, lessons to learn, and intelligence. It also has unicorns, which for some will be the main reason for reading. If that’s the case then that’s cool, come for the unicorns and stay for the STEM.
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