Short Story Collections, Part Two: Middle Grade Edition

August 22, 2018 |

Back in February, I did a round-up of 2017 and 2018 short story collections for young adults. But middle grade authors are getting in on the action, too. Here are a few from the same two year span.

Funny Girl: Funniest. Stories. Ever. edited by Betsy Bird

A collection of uproarious stories, rollicking comics, rib-tickling wit, and more, from 25 of today s funniest female writers for kids.

What could be funnier than family? Read stories about Ursula Brown’s grandmother driving her on a road trip to disaster, Lisa Brown’s little brother getting a Tic-Tac stuck up his nose, and Carmen Agra Deedy’s mom setting the bathtub on fire.

What could be funnier than friends? Pretty much nothing, as Rita Williams-Garcia shows two besties hatching a bird-brained scheme to get on to a TV talk show, and Deborah Underwood introduces a dynamic dog-and-cat duo teaming up on a pet advice column.

What could be funnier than YOU? Tell your future with Mad Libs, discover your Chinese Zodiac sign with Lenore Look, and learn the best tricks of the comedy trade from professional humorists like Adrianne Chalepah and Delaney Yeager.

With clever contributions from award-winning and bestselling authors including Cece Bell, Sophie Blackall, Libba Bray, Shannon Hale, Lisa Graff, and Raina Telgemeier, this anthology of funny girls will make you laugh until you cry. Or cry until you laugh. Or maybe you won’t cry at all. Either way, you’ll definitely laugh. Funny Girl isn t just an anthology: it’s a cause, a mission, a movement. Girls are funny. Now it’s time for the world to know it.

The Whirlpool by Laurel Croza

Charity takes small steps to escape her controlling father. Jasmine endures the rumors about her at school, even though no one really knows what happened last summer. The Oh! So Perfect Hair Dolly wishes for just the right child to take her home from the store. Nicola has a run-in with a classmate on her first day at a new school in the big city ― or is the classmate a wolf in disguise? A squirrel ruminates on the nature of life and death. Dani fights for her dream, in spite of her father’s insistence that her older brother should be the one to play hockey. Mike finds the kind of family he has longed for in his coworkers at the restaurant where he works.

In these seven stories by Laurel Croza (author of the award-winning picture books I Know Here and From There to Here), five teenagers, a doll and a squirrel break out of the expectations placed upon them. Featuring beautiful black-and-white illustrations by Kelsey Garrity-Riley.

The Wrong Train by Jeremy de Quidt

Light the candles and shut the door, The Wrong Train is a deliciously creepy and scarily good collection of scary stories, complete with terrifying illustrations from Dave Shelton. Perfect for fans of Patrick Ness, R.L. Stine, and Emily Carroll.

Imagine you’ve just managed to catch your train and you realize it’s the wrong one. You’d be annoyed of course, but not scared . . . Yet. Imagine you get off the wrong train at the next station hoping to catch one back the way you came. But the station is empty. Again, you’d be annoyed, but not scared . . . Yet. Imagine someone comes to the station, a stranger who starts to tell you stories to help pass the time. But these aren’t any old stories–they’re nightmares that come with a price to pay. And you want them to stop. Scared yet? You will be.

Us, in Progress: Short Stories About Young Latinos edited by Lulu Delacre

Acclaimed author and Pura Belpré Award honoree Lulu Delacre’s beautifully illustrated collection of twelve short stories is a groundbreaking look at the diverse Latinos who live in the United States.

In this book, you will meet many young Latinos living in the United States, from a young girl whose day at her father’s burrito truck surprises her to two sisters working together to change the older sister’s immigration status, and more.

Turn the pages to experience life through the eyes of these boys and girls whose families originally hail from many different countries; see their hardships, celebrate their victories, and come away with a better understanding of what it means to be Latino in the U.S. today.

Sit by Deborah Ellis

The seated child. With a single powerful image, Deborah Ellis draws our attention to nine children and the situations they find themselves in, often through no fault of their own. In each story, a child makes a decision and takes action, be that a tiny gesture or a life-altering choice.

Jafar is a child laborer in a chair factory and longs to go to school. Sue sits on a swing as she and her brother wait to have a supervised visit with their father at the children’s aid society. Gretchen considers the lives of concentration camp victims during a school tour of Auschwitz. Mike survives seventy-two days of solitary as a young offender. Barry squirms on a food court chair as his parents tell him that they are separating. Macie sits on a too-small time-out chair while her mother receives visitors for tea. Noosala crouches in a fetid, crowded apartment in Uzbekistan, waiting for an unscrupulous refugee smuggler to decide her fate.

These children find the courage to face their situations in ways large and small, in this eloquent collection from a master storyteller.

Totally Middle School: Tales of Friends, Family, and Fitting In edited by Betsy Groban

From literary masterminds Lois Lowry, Gary D. Schmidt, Linda Sue Park, Katherine Paterson, Karen Cushman, Gregory Maguire, and more comes a timeless and inspirational anthology about the sometimes-challenging, always-rewarding coming-of-age years: middle school.

With eleven short stories told in text messages, emails, formal letters, stories in verse, and even a mini graphic novel, Totally Middle School tackles a range of important subjects, from peer pressure, family issues, and cultural barriers to the unexpected saving grace of music, art, friendship, and reading.

Brimming with heart and humor, these poignant stories from bestselling and award-winning authors shine a light on the moments when everything is thrilling and terrifying at the same time–in a way it will never be again.

Flying Lessons and Other Stories edited by Ellen Oh

Whether it is basketball dreams, family fiascos, first crushes, or new neighborhoods, this bold anthology—written by the best children’s authors—celebrates the uniqueness and universality in all of us.

In a partnership with We Need Diverse Books, industry giants Kwame Alexander, Soman Chainani, Matt de la Peña, Tim Federle, Grace Lin, Meg Medina, Walter Dean Myers, Tim Tingle, and Jacqueline Woodson join newcomer Kelly J. Baptist in a story collection that is as humorous as it is heartfelt. This impressive group of authors has earned among them every major award in children’s publishing and popularity as New York Times bestsellers.

From these distinguished authors come ten distinct and vibrant stories.

Scream and Scream Again! edited by R. L. Stine

R.L. Stine—the godfather of Goosebumps—and some of the most popular authors today bring an unrivaled mastery of all things fearsome, frightening, and fantabulous to this terrifying anthology of all-new scary short stories.

Scream and Scream Again! is full of twists and turns, dark corners, and devilish revenge. Collected in conjunction with the Mystery Writers of America, this set includes works from New York Timesbestselling authors telling tales of wicked ice-cream trucks, time-travelling heroes, witches and warlocks, and of course, haunted houses.

Read it if you dare! With twenty never-before-published scary stories from some of the most popular authors today—including Chris Grabenstein, Wendy Corsi Staub, Heather Graham, Peter Lerangis, R.L. Stine, Bruce Hale, Emmy Laybourne, Steve Hockensmith, Lisa Morton, Ray Daniel, Beth Fantaskey, Phil Mathews, Carter Wilson, Doug Levin, Jeff Soloway, Joseph S. Walker, Alison McMahan, Daniel Palmer, Tonya Hurley, and Stephen Ross—it’s sure to leave readers screaming for more.

Graphic Novel Roundup: Summer Vacation Edition

July 18, 2018 |

Be Prepared by Vera Brosgol

In her second graphic novel after Anya’s Ghost, Brosgol tackles middle grade with a more realistic (but perhaps just as terrifying) story about sleepaway summer camp, based in large part on her own experiences. When nine year old Vera hears about Russian summer camp from an older friend, she’s so excited about the prospect that she convinces her mom to send her and her little brother. Finally, Vera thinks, she’s found a place where her Russian culture won’t make her different.

Once she gets there, she changes her tune. Vera is the youngest girl in her proscribed age group and shares a tent with three other girls who are several years older and don’t appreciate having such a young kid hanging out with them. The bathroom is simply an outhouse, the other girls bully her, she’s terrible at capture the flag, and she’s made fun of for not being able to read Russian very well (though she can speak it fluently). In a place she thought she would easily fit in, she sticks out.

Brosgol’s part-memoir, part-fiction is funny and full of heart. Kids who have been to summer camp will recognize a lot of common elements, like the gross bathrooms and “beautiful” nature that seems to want to kill you. Social structures and the struggle to make friends are universal to all kids, even those with no experience with summer camp. The fact that Vera is at a specifically Russian summer camp adds another layer to the story, and non-Russian kids will be fascinated. As part of the back matter, Brosgol reproduces an actual letter she wrote while at camp when she was a kid, begging her mom to pick her up because summer camp is so terrible. It’s hilarious and perfect, and her graphic novel is a wonderful distillation of the summer camp experience.

All Summer Long by Hope Larson

Hope Larson brings us another middle grade graphic novel about summer vacation, this time about staying home while your best friend goes off to camp. Thirteen year old Bina is disappointed (an understatement) when her best friend Austin decides to go to soccer camp for a month during the summer instead of hanging out with her like he usually does. So Bina watches a lot of tv, plays a lot of guitar, and listens to a lot of music. Things start to get more interesting when Austin’s older sister starts to befriend Bina; I felt a lot of familiar feelings when she took Bina on a babysitting assignment and then left her to watch the baby while she went to meet her boyfriend. Were any of us at thirteen years old actually qualified to babysit?

When Austin returns home from camp, he’s acting even weirder than he was before he left. Bina doesn’t know what’s up; the reader might hazard a guess, but she’d probably be wrong. The real reason is more mundane and perhaps also more complex than readers are conditioned to think.

This isn’t an action-heavy, event-heavy comic. It’s a pretty true catalog of what a middle schooler’s summer vacation might look like, but it doesn’t bore. Larson is good at getting inside Bina’s head and making us care about her; thirteen year old readers will definitely identify with the pains of a friendship changing, of feeling out of place when the things you’re used to are all topsy-turvy, even though the adults in your life don’t seem to think any of it is a big deal. I wouldn’t call this a standout story, but it’s fun and real and a great way for a kid to pass a summer day.

Scarlett Hart: Monster Hunter by Marcus Sedgwick and Thomas Taylor

July 4, 2018 |

Apparently I have a thing for graphic novels featuring plucky heroines who fight monsters and other scary creatures. Curiously, all five of these, including Scarlett Hart, are written and illustrated by men. Is it the archetype of the “strong female character” – meaning physical strength and a lot of fighting rather than force of personality or conviction – that so appeals to male creators? It also appeals to me, and certainly did so when I was a kid too. And I’m sure there are graphic novels featuring this kind of girl created by women too, I just haven’t read enough of them. (This is a longer discussion for a different post.)

Scarlett Hart is tons of fun. It’s set in an alternative Victorian England that’s been overrun by actual monsters: mummies, ghosts, killer dogs, and more. Scarlett’s parents, wealthy aristocrats, were the best of the monster hunters, but they were killed during a fight while Scarlett was a little kid, leaving her an orphan. Scarlett is a bit older now, but not old enough to legally fight monsters. That doesn’t stop her, of course – she just has her faithful butler/sidekick, Napoleon White, take the credit. Scarlett and Napoleon have a nemesis in Count Stankovic, who steals their monsters and constantly tries to turn Scarlett in for underage monster hunting. When they discover the Count is involved in a conspiracy to – well, if I told you, that would be spoiling things – they know they must stop him.

The book doesn’t break new ground in terms of the adventure comic, but it retreads existing tropes well. It’s funny throughout: Scarlett has a lot of inventive and innocuous “curse” words that will make young readers giggle, and sometimes Scarlett and Napoleon are just comically bad at monster hunting, which they acknowledge by repeating the phrase “we stink” at well-timed parts of the story. Scarlett uses Napoleon’s beloved car, which he’s named Dorothy, to travel around to find monsters, and Napoleon’s fear that Dorothy will be irreversibly harmed in the course of the hunt is a recurring theme (you can imagine how well a car survives a fight against a twenty foot tall monster). The monsters themselves are creatively depicted, and Scarlett has a number of contraptions to fight them that echo those of Bruce Wayne or James Bond.

Thomas Taylor created the cover art for the original UK edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, and his art is well-suited to the graphic novel format here (it differs slightly in style from the image in the link). Scarlett is characterized by large, expressive eyes and a red braid that always flips out to the side. The determination on her face contrasts humorously with Napoleon’s facial expressions, which usually communicate “This is a very bad idea but I suppose we’re doing it anyway.” Taylor’s monsters are delightfully detailed, toeing the line between silly and scary. Colors are bold with an emphasis on reds, lending a gothic/steampunk atmosphere to the story.

This is the first Marcus Sedgwick book I’ve actually finished. After trying a few, I’ve learned his prose novels just aren’t my speed. But I appreciated his weirdness here, and he certainly knows how to tell a fun, fast-paced story. He wraps up the main storyline in this volume while leaving plenty of stories to tell in subsequent ones, which I hope we’ll get. This is a good pick for older middle grade readers who like their comics a little spooky but don’t want to be truly terrified.

Monsters Beware! by Jorge Aguirre and Rafael Rosado

March 7, 2018 |

I really loved the first previous two books in this fun and funny graphic novel series. In this installment, our hero Claudette has tricked her way into being chosen as her town’s champion in the annual Warrior Games, along with her younger brother Gaston and her friend Marie. Unfortunately for them, the Sea Kingdom has plans beyond simply winning the competition – they want to revive the evil wizard, frozen in amber in a previous volume, and rule the whole land. The Sea Queen’s children are the titular monsters, who transform from innocent-looking kids into creatures that devour the other competitors while no one is looking.

Unlike the two previous volumes, Claudette doesn’t really seem to be the hero of this book. Much of the story focuses instead on Gaston and Marie, who know what’s going on well before Claudette does. She’s off the page being oblivious and refusing to pay any attention to the warnings her friends are giving her. This is Claudette being Claudette; it gets a bit tedious for adult readers but probably won’t bother child readers. Of course, she comes through in the end, but by that point, I felt like she wasn’t really that necessary to the story. It’s nice in that it gives Marie and Gaston their moments to shine, but it also feels strange in a series called “Chronicles of Claudette.”

While there is an undercurrent of seriousness to the story, it’s mostly funny. The monsters look like oversized sea crabs and crack jokes after every meal. Gaston loves to cook and takes it very seriously, opening the door for a lot of puns about food. The Warrior Games themselves are the biggest joke: since Marie is competing, her father decides that the games must be safe, and combat competitions are swapped for activities like churning butter and setting tables. And despite the fact that the monsters gobble up almost everyone in town aside from our intrepid three, the happy ending is never really in doubt. Rosado and Aguirre actually give us even more happiness than we might have expected, with a plot twist that is surprising but also makes sense in context.

The art is fantastic as always, perfectly matched to the text to tell the story. The whole book is colorful and fun and a lot of the humor comes through in the characters’ expressions and movements. There’s an interesting bonus section at the end that describes how Aguirre and Rosado added a piece of the plot to the story after it was already drafted, which will be a great read for kids who want to make their own graphic novel. While I don’t think this volume is as strong as the first two, it’s a great addition, and the whole series is a winner. They consistently tell fun, action-packed stories with characters who buck gender norms, and they feature caring friendships and families, including a disabled father. This is one of my favorite graphic novel series to recommend to middle graders who love adventure.

Finished copy provided by the publisher.

Review and Giveaway: 5 Worlds: The Sand Warrior by Mark Siegel and Alexis Siegel

May 24, 2017 |

Oona Lee is possibly the worst sand dancer in her whole class, which wouldn’t be such a terrible thing if her older sister, disappeared now for many years, weren’t the best, destined to light five ancient beacons and save the Five Worlds from extinction. But she has talents of her own, ones she brings to bear when she joins forces with An Tzu, a boy from a slum with his own history, and Jax Amboy, the Five Worlds’ greatest Starball player. They all live on Mon Domani, at the center of the Five Worlds, a planet now being threatened by war as well as climate change so dire it could cause mass starvation.

The Sand Warrior is the first book in a new graphic novel series by Mark Siegel and Alexis Siegel, with art by Xanthe Bouma, Matt Rockefeller, and Boya Sun. That’s a lot of cooks in the kitchen for one graphic novel, and it shows in a few ways. The story is fairly complicated for a middle grade graphic novel, and it will take both adults and kids a bit of time to really fall into it. But that’s also part of the joy: the world the Siegels have created is complex, and the story has many moving parts that require more careful attention (or perhaps re-reads) than some readers may be accustomed to. It’s a fantasy lover’s dream, in other words.

Art and story work in tandem to build a multicultural world (or five worlds, really) with a detailed backstory and a unique magic system. Within the pages of this graphic novel you’ll find, for example, some people who are more plant than human, advanced robotic technology that conquers the uncanny valley, and sand castles big enough (and magical enough) for people to live in. It’s a really fun mixture of fantasy and science fiction, with all the creativity and weird names – one of the planets is called Grimbo(E) – that go along with that.

I’m a sucker for full-color art in graphic novels, and the art in The Sand Warrior is gorgeous. Even if readers have a hard time following all the nuances of the story, they’ll be riveted by the detailed landscapes and diverse cast of characters, each of whom is distinct and recognizable from panel to panel. The coloring is beautiful; the three artists work seamlessly together, eschewing the bold colors of a traditional superhero book for a softer but no less vibrant palette.

This should appeal to readers who like Kazu Kibuishi’s Amulet (Kibuishi has blurbed this, and it’s fitting), Faith Erin Hicks’ The Nameless City, and Ben Hatke’s Zita the Spacegirl.

We’re giving away a finished copy of 5 Worlds: The Sand Warrior, courtesy of Random House Children’s Books (who also sent me an unfinished review copy). To enter, fill out this form. I’ll pick a winner in two weeks. US only, please.