There is a balance in illustrated books between being sufficiently weird, but endearing enough to be of merit to adults, educators and parents. Of course there are some books that are straight up gonzo strange, sappy to the point of Hallmark or unicorn happiness to the max. For the most part, those mass-appeal illustrated books that have legs need to be slightly grounded. However, children need them to be a little odd in order to rope in readers and audiences who might otherwise gravitate towards anything else. Grown With Love is just left-of-center enough to bring in aspects any Tim Burton movie, but has the Earthy tones of Up or other entertaining vehicles that subvert a tug at your emotions.
How to engage young readers? You can mention something slightly inappropriate like a butt. You can make age-appropriate jokes that are a little bit rude. You can involve pictures of animals, early elementary-age readers love animals. You can ask questions. Who doesn’t like to answer a question? It’s a reflexive action like catching a ball when one is thrown to you. Butt or Face? Revenge of the Butts, the target demographic might also call it Butt or Face #2 and are also lining up to see Butt or Face #3, as long as they get to say the name of the book aloud in class.
Jean Luc tried and failed. You will too if you attempt to resist the charm of Chicka Chicka Ho Ho Ho. But, I’m too old for an alphabet book. I don’t need to look at shapes, where’s my cell phone? Chicka Chicka is for babies and the level of creativity and enjoy for that tripe ends when you turn seven. Chicka Chicka Ho Ho Ho says hold my juice box. This is fun. This book runs with energy, has a contained story, but is reminiscent of something classic and punches with seasonal Christmas tidings that forces kids to have fun with a book-something they had unconsciously sworn off when the winter break started.
It’s ok to have books geared more toward girls than boys. It’s also ok for boys to have books that mainly appeal to them. There are also some books that cross-over to both groups with varying degrees, but could have elements that interest each camp. Bunnybirds is a graphic novel, whose genre is typically associated with boys. However, this is one of the rare graphic novels that will appeal to girls just a little bit more than boys. There are dragons and action elements in Bunnybirds, but the main characters are bunnies with wings. If you suspect that your young reader could become a fan of the massive mglit juggernaut, Warriors, this graphic novel is the prep material for them.
I have never eaten a persimmon. It sounds more like an adjective than a fruit to me. The students felt quite persimmon when they realized the difficulty of the test. The Most Perfect Persimmon is an illustrated book that’s a love letter to family, patience, creature comforts and the fleeting search for perfection. That last bit might be too esoteric, but the nature of the young girl in the book and the brief period that a persimmon is perfect brings about comparisons to avocados.
Why do children want to read books? For illustrated book audiences they want to read books because they’re weird, grab their attention, or have characters/situations that they know. It can be any one of those three or a combination of them. Gotta Go! is an illustrated book that runs with weirdness. Well it kind of runs, more accurately it waddles, twists, and oozes originality out of every panel. Panel, yes, Gotta Go! flows like a graphic novel, but is in an illustrated book package. The result is something that’s overwhelming fresh, original and probably not what you’re expecting.
Penelope’s Balloons, an illustrated book about a girl and her red balloons is a strong metaphor about OCD and overcoming aspects of it.
Penelope’s Balloons is a brightly-colored illustrated book about an anthropomorphic elephant and the 10 red balloons she always carries around.
Penelope is a friendly and quiet girl who happily jaunts around town with her ten, red balloons. She’s known for this and has come to depend on them being around at all times. How will she respond when a massive storms hits the park where she’s playing and blows her balloons all over town?
Wimpy Kid is one of the 500-pound gorillas in children’s literature. It’s one of those book series that young readers feel they should read because their siblings read it, or because they’ve seen one of the dozens of entries in their library. Oliver’s Great Big Universe is cut from the same cloth as Wimpy Kid. Volcanoes Are Hot! is the second entry in this series and has placed STEM fun in the place of Wimpy Kid’s family antics. Yes, STEM-fun is a thing. Fart jokes are a natural crossover to volcanology and students avoiding bullies or hall monitors are essentially recreating Pangea on a localized scale. Oliver’s Great Big Universe: Volcanoes Are Hot! has the same degree of laughs as its simian cousin, in addition to the comic-style art and succinct text that keeps young readers locked in.
Locked in, while you can probably infer its definition, means that students focus and concentrate on the thing in front of them. They can be locked in on the study materials, locked in while they’re playing basketball or locked in to the book that they didn’t think that they’d enjoy reading. Upper elementary and middle school students will be locked in when they’re reading Oliver’s Great Big Universe: Volcanoes Are Hot!.
18 pages into the book we discover that Oliver’s friend, Sven, threw up at lunch because he ate too much cobbler, which he absolutely loves. The art shows a gaggle of students lining up to give him their cobbler, which evolves into an eating competition of sorts with the elementary school cafeteria egging him on with chants of “eat it, eat.” He’s looking sort of purple and is pushed into the puke aspect of the Venn Diagram when a classmate offers him a pickle that supposedly calms the stomach. Just like the volcano that has too much magma and pressure under it, Sven blows chunks and forever stains his formative years.
Thankfully middle school is just around the corner and incidents like that are quickly forgotten by this fickle age group. Alas, it’s not, and Olliver and Sven are forced to do other things to change their peer’s perception and hopefully put that puke into the memory hole. What brought on Olliver’s interest in volcanoes was his aunt, who appears very early in the book as a cavewoman. That’s the way she appears to him, but it’s just his active imagination because she is a volcanologist who has just spent 500 days living in a cave.
Volcanoes Are Hot is the book version of short-attention-span theater. It effortlessly entertains ages eight and up who had previously, and perhaps unconsciously, sworn off reading anything scientific for the sole purpose of entertainment. Some of those kids might have intentionally said that being the ‘smart one’ wasn’t possible or they simply bought into the fallacy that it’s cool not to be intelligent. This is for them, as well as, the kids who realize that it’s the people who don’t play the fool that will reap the rewards.
The joke-to-page ratio is something that we calculate in kidlit books. If there are multiple laughs on one page then the joke-to-page ratio is high and provides numerous reasons for young readers to stay with it. Volcanoes Are Hot! has a high joke-to-page ratio, as well as, incorporating science metaphors, STEM facts, and genuine laughs on every page. The bar for this graphic novel-eque book is high and it launches itself over each increment with aplomb. On some of the pages, the illustrations provide the laughter while others rely on its succinct and age-appropriate text to garner the giggles. When Oliver tries digging a hole to use the bathroom he realizes that it’s more challenging than expected. This causes him to “be pooped, as in tired, not like I pooped in my pants. Although honestly, it could have gone either way.” When you add some great cartoon illustrations next the already funny or ironic text it makes the book like butter to that movie popcorn that was already tasty.
There will be some elementary and middle school readers who would enjoy Oliver’s Great Big Universe: Volcanoes Are Hot!, but they’ll presume that because it’s educational that it possibly can’t be entertaining. It’s a pity that some readers will think that, because it’s not. This makes STEM accessible for those who might be scared of it, provides a humor tract for grin-less scientists, proves again the graphic novel-adverse adults that the genre is worth embracing, and gives kids a watercooler book that will up their science grade if they allow it to.
Oliver’s Great Big Universe: Volcanoes Are Hot! is by Jorge Cham and is available on Amulet Books, an imprint of Abrams Books.
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