Let's "book it" to School

School is fun! Well, it can be. Kindergarten, especially. (They still have snacks in kindergarten!) Yet when I was seeking enticing titles about kindergarten, my local librarian offered two titles. Two! The mammoth Amazon came up with fewer titles than I expected, and frankly, fewer still that appealed.

So what's up with the dearth of good, exciting, books about going to school?! If we read about one more kid who is afraid to go to school, my son might get the idea he should be worried about going to school.

Miss Bindergarten Gets Ready for Kindergarten was OK (in case you like it, there's a series) and The Kissing Hand is also nice, if you like that sort of thing. It's kinda' mushy for my taste, however. And it conveys, like, zero excitement about starting school.

Any suggestions? Anyone? (Psst: You don't even have to raise your hand!)

Slice of Indian Life Lacks Compelling Story

I think Karan Mahajan's family planning (c) 2008 is a very realistic farce, but it was hard for me to be sure just what the author was trying to convey at times...fortunately, his prose was pleasing enough to keep me reading through some of the rough spots in this, his first book.

The HarperCollins website offers a lovely synopsis of the book, so I won't try to duplicate it. In a nutshell, family planning is set in modern Delhi, featuring the large and ever-expanding Ahuja family. Father Rakesh, utterly disappointed in his (deceitfully) arranged marriage, finds he is, thankfully, attracted to his wife - but only when she is pregnant. Ergo, the couple has produced thirteen children and Mrs. Ahuja is pregnant again as the book begins.

Fifteen-year-old Arjun is the only one of the children we get to know, following the teen drama of his crush on the girl who rides his bus, his attempt to form a band explicitly to impress said girl, and Arjun's utter despair when he realizes that he can never have the band over to his house to practice, as he's unable to admit to his friends that he has twelve siblings, not six, as he's always maintained.

Ah, adolescence.

Ironically (and comically) Rakesh's antics at work are as juvenile as his son's high school foibles. But again, it's hard to say whether that comparison was intended by the author, or not.

One of my frustrations with this book is that Mahajan seems to have a lot of talent, but instead of showcasing his best talents in this book, he chose to give us a collage.

Mahajan drops readers into modern India on every page, with descriptions of unfinished flyovers, political corruption, plates of chappati. He drops humor into the mix too, with running gags about Mr. Ahuja's hearing problem and Mrs. Ahuja's pronoun usage. (Mrs. Ahuja rarely uses her children's names; instead, she's constantly saying, "tell him to come here" - which is both confusing and useful in a house with 13 kids.) But at odd spots - sometimes in the middle of one of those gags - the author stops to jab the reader with savvy but melancholy observations on love and marriage and the lives lost in between. At such a spot, however, when the jerky pace annoys, Mahajan's well-crafted narrative soothes.

He knew nothing about this woman, this wife of fifteen-odd years. Vague details, yes--the tough jackfruits of her elbows, the sullen hump of her jaw, the bulbous nose she had proudly passed on to each child except Arjun...a fierce protection of her Right to Eat at the table--but nothing more. He twisted and turned in his head the Rubik's cube of domestic details and arrived at no sustainable patterns. His mind was a drawer rummaged of all its contents.
- p 228

family planning had its merits, but unlike some reviewers, I'm not completely smitten with Mahajan's storytelling. His insight is delightful, and he has a tendency to surprise with it, rather than with plot twists or tension between characters. The lack of external conflict was disappointing to me.

family planning is so ripe with potential clashes among its many unique characters that every chapter seemed ready to burst. It never did. You might enjoy it anyway. I did.

More here:

Buying a Book for Mom?

Consider these, for and about all sorts of moms.

(You are doing something for mom this Mother's Day, aren't you?!)

Books for Every Mom

I got lucky: I'm sifting through a few books for a Mother's Day-themed review round-up. All of the titles are for, about, or addressed directly to, moms. Allegra Huston's Love Child, frankly, doesn't appeal to me - but those who long for Hollywood backstory will surely enjoy it.
The stunner of the pack so far has been Margaret Leroy's Yes, My Darling Daughter, a haunting tale the publisher (Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux) had the audacity to suggest was a modern Rebecca. Well, it is. 'Nuff said, for now; I have some more reading to do. Yippee!

There Really Are Cats in This Book!

There are cats in this book by Viviane Schwarz
Candlewick Press (c)2008

"The cats aren't on this page," the book begins.
"The cats aren't on this page, either. They're on the next page. They'd love to play with you. They're very friendly."

And so begins the charming picture book. The first time I read it I was alone in the library, giggling. (Just in case you saw me, and thought I was insane) I brought it home because I knew my son would laugh out loud when we read it together. I was right!

Playful fuzzballs Moonpie, Tiny, and Andre are as interactive as two-dimensional critters can be as they play with yarn, climb in and out of cardboard boxes, have a pillow fight, and go for a whale of an adventure in a fish tank.

Several die cut pages encourage older preschool age readers to turn the pages gently. Moonpie, Tiny, and Andre are very appurrrciative, too.

"I KNEW you were nice," says Moonpie. The whole book is.

Mighty Nice, Those Queens of Freeville

The Mighty Queens of Freeville by Amy Dickinson
Hyperion (c) 2009 225 pages

The Mighty Queens of Freeville is a touching book about a single mom raising a single daughter, with help from her matron-laden family, which apparently accounts for about a third of the gene pool in tiny Freeville, NY.

The "Ask Amy" syndicated advice columnist and NPR contributor skates on trite territory; we've read about mother-daughter relationships, the preschool to pre-college days, many times.

Dickinson's Queens succeeds because it's a good balance of self-effacing irreverence and raw self-reporting. The book also succeeds because it speaks to all mothers (of daughters) rather than specifically to single mothers.

I don't think mothers of boys will relate, however, and certainly, Queens speaks most directly to mothers who have roots in a small town or two. (City chicks may not appreciate the significance of Toads diner, the church barbecue pit, or having encyclopedic knowledge of one's neighbors.)

While I enjoyed Dickinson's light humor and ability to avoid convenient cliches, what I most appreciate is that she steered clear of any man-hating digressions. One can be wronged by a man without blaming the whole gender, but far too many authors bang on the all-girl-band drum.

The Mighty Queens of Freeville is a welcome addition to the shelves full of book-length personal essays on parenting. It could, I think, also serve as something as a liaison between the various factions still (!) fighting the Mommy Wars, by not only illustrating how moms can work together, but how they can work and raise children, which is also work.

Early on, Dickinson explains that divorce "runs through my clan like an aggressive chromosone," but claims she was never exposed to "family ugliness of any sort." [p14] From that perspective, Queens offers some insight into the lives of little girls who grow up knowing little of their fathers. How mom handles dad's absentee status is paramount, of course, and Dickinson provides a rather good example of how to handle life without dad without excessive angst, and how to (possibly) avoid the need for counseling in later life.

My father had limited interest in his children, so there was no question of custody. My mother never pursued him for any sort of financial support - and he didn't offer it. She simply prevailed. Prevailing is underrated. People have the idea that unless they win, they lose. But sometimes surviving is enough. My mother knew this, and I learned it by watching her. [p15]

As an adult, Dickinson acknowledges she maintains a romantic vision of her father, and yet she is clear-eyed about his shortcomings.

My father doesn't see things as metaphors for other things, but I do. As I drove back home to Freeville, I tried not to think about the jobs, the wives, the children he left and the grandchildren he would never know, but about the bees and the honey they make. The honey stands for the sweetness of life, while the bee brings the sting. My father, the self-aggrandizing bear killer, was both the bee and the honey to me. [p195]

Bite Me

Chew On This by Eric Scholosser & Charles Wilson
(c) 2006 302 pages

Sometimes, you can judge a book by its cover. The cover of Chew On This advises it contains "everything you DON'T want to know about fast food." And it does.

At times a tad didactic, more often hard to stomach (sorry; you know my addiction to puns) Chew On This is never subtle, boring, or vague.

Remember the 1993 E. coli outbreak among Jack in the Box customers? Here's a refresher from page 192:

"One of the first kids to become ill, Lauren Beth Rudolph, ate a hamburger at Jack in the Box a week before Christmas. She was admitted to the hospital on Christmas Eve, suffered terrible pain, had three heart attacks, and died in her mother's arms on December 28, 1992. She was six years old."

She was also a month ahead of the curve. In January, doctors in a Seattle hospital noticed an unusually high number of cases of children being admitted with bloody diarrhea - and shortly after health officials connected the dots, Jack in the Box recalled all of the contaminated ground beef.

The authors don't mince words about the fast food business and the enormousness of its impact on health and the economy, but then again, they also didn't point out that gee, it would have been really nice if Jack in the Box (or McDonald's, in 1982, or, or, or...) could have been more proactive, more careful, less driven to sell burgers at all costs. Maybe the book isn't as didactic as it is just plain accurate.

Sure, I'm biased. I don't like grease and I've been avoiding high fructose corn syrup for several years now. I buy "free range" chicken and even harvest a few vegetables from my own (woefully small) garden each year - knowing it's only a nod at the problem. In other words, Schlosser and Wilson had me before I opened the book. Still, I will never look at fast food the same way again.

It's hard to say how individual kids will respond to the book's blatant message - but at least, I think it's very unlikely to make many of them fans of the very, very successful industry. (And the folks at TeenReads.com apparently agree.

Of course, plenty of folks - not surprisingly, many higher-ups at McDonald's, Burger King, et al - don't agree. The industry reacted by creating its own website (long live the fast food giants, but not necessarily their clientele) and campaigning to keep the authors out and pop and branded fries/pizza/etc. in our kids' schools. Sick, sick, sick.

Public relations is about spin more than facts, however, and Schlosser and Wilson did a beautiful job of documenting their facts in a 31-page notes section proving (warning, bad pun coming) meat can be beautiful.

I promise, no more today. Chew On This is highly recommended for readers (12 and up) and contains very, very few puns.

--Can you handle it? More info available here or just buy a copy and dig in.--