Kate
The illustrations in this, and all of Steve Jenkins and Robin Page's books, are so lovely. The layout is beautiful, and the facts are fascinating. Eggs are cool. I learned that there is a species of fish that lays fertilized eggs and non-fertilized eggs at the same time, so that when the former hatch they can eat the latter. Awesome.
This book was as cute as the others in the series. I think the more I read of them the less I like the series as a whole though, for some reason. Cloud, Wind, and Sun were adorable. They had to teach Flare that it's ok to cry because his tears have healing abilities but they don't tell him until he actually heals somebody with his tears. It seemed weird to me that they wouldn't lead with that? Especially since they think that tears must come from pain or sadness (because Sun is too happy to teach Flare how to cry), you'd think it would make him more willing to try it if he knew there were benefits. Anyway! Cute illustrations, the story is ok but nice in the end.
Cute! Again, the illustrations really did it for me. The story was pretty good, Spark the dragon needs to learn not to breathe such large flames. Like in [b:Splash 25838000 Splash Kallie George https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1435861405s/25838000.jpg 45700897], where Splash stops splashing by being herself, Spark learns his lesson by growing older. Sure, that's fine.
This is the story of the Cheer-Up Bird as told by two fingerprint bird-fish.
Cheer-Up Bird flies around Australia allowing the sad animals to take her cheer - such as some grumpy wombats, one of which injured his hand and really need his dressing changed.
Or the suicidal koalas, who have been struck with a strong ennui, until the Cheer-Up Bird shows them that lady koalas exist! Finally, a reason to live.
And then poor Grandma and Grandpa Emu, who someone has trapped suspended above the ground in some sort of torture device.
Cheer-Up Bird gives them all her cheer, because it's her job, and trudges back to her nest, where she is cheered up by her cheery Cheer-Up Bird birdies and I guess the cycle begins again the next day!
This book did really nothing for me. I don't like the idea that my possessions are being tortured by my method of folding or stacking or whatever. I get enough of the particular sadness of possessions having emotions from the Toy Story movies. Also, none of this seems life-changing to me. I mean, granted, I didn't read the whole book...I skimmed a bunch of it though...and I haven't actually gone through the steps but it just sounds like cleaning to me? Am I wrong? Aren't there lots of books about cleaning that have different cleaning methods that might work better or worse for different types of people and this is just one of them? For my next big clean, I am planning on getting rid of as much stuff as possible, because it just sits there doing nothing. Weeding is good for all collections of stuff. But I can't say that reading this book gave me this idea. I don't think that emptying my bag out every single night only to put most of that stuff back inside will make me feel more at peace with my life. So I'm glad that this book helped some people, but I don't really go in for self-help books in general so this one is no exception.
This book is really awesome. The bold colours kill me, and the fact that we don't even know why or how this war started - and the one lizard who dared to ask was squished. He became a martyr, presumably, causing the war to escalate, until only a few pages later when peace is brokered. Would peace have happened anyway? Did that one lizard give his life to speed up the end of the war, or was it a senseless death?
After all these thoughts, I noticed the back endpapers included a lizard with a bandage on...and it turns out, this is the same squashed lizard who appears on every page after the squashing sporting a bandage. So, no one had to die! That's good. Also, the endpaper shows a budding romance between this lizard and a lucky red rectangle, so obviously whatever prejudices they were harboring during the war were quickly forgotten after the peace treaty. Unless this is a long-term romance that they are only now allowed to pursue publicly! Maybe this is how the war started in the first place, and the lizard's cry of “What are we fighting for?” is actually a plea for lenience and understanding.
There are a lot of layers to this book.
I find this book hard to review because so much surrounding it is beautiful and heartbreaking. The foreword by [a:Lawrence Hill 20411 Lawrence Hill https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1233783749p2/20411.jpg] is a poignant remembrance of his sister, and Karen Hill's essay “On Being Crazy” included after the novel is very real. Unfortunately, the writing in the novel didn't quite do it for me. The conversations felt stilted and false. The story was a fictionalization of Karen's own life which I felt was much better written about in her essay. I wasn't too moved by it; but her real story, the one about a beloved sister and daughter and mother who was full of life and struggled with mental illness and died too soon, was incredibly touching.
The main character's face is very, very expressive. The art in this book is just beautiful...so detailed and wonderful! It's about a little girl somehow abandoned in the forest, who is taken in by the forest creatures and lives a happy, feral life. Until one day she's discovered by some hipster hunters (or, I guess, they caught her in their bear trap? Only her hair was caught but that's pretty harsh, hipsters. Is using a bear trap really sporting? They take her to live with Famed Psychiatrist and his wife (presumably I'm supposed to assume the man is Famed Psychiatrist because he's the one measuring her head and taking notes while the lady just brushes the kid's hair and tries to cut her meat...but technically the lady could be Famed Psychiatrist while her significant other is her assistant. But I don't think I'm supposed to think that) and they just get mad at her for not learning even though it doesn't look like she's been there very long and so when she runs away they're just like “good riddance” which will be hard to explain to the papers but whatever. Famed Psychiatrist's dog and cat escape with our friend as well and live happy lives in harmony with the animals of the forest because this is a magical forest where predator and prey hang out and don't kill each other. I don't know what the bears and foxes eat but that's not the point of this story - the point is, you do you. I really like the magic in this book actually, because I would love to imagine that there are forests that exist where all the animals love each other and never die and people can have plants for hair. Probably somewhere in Europe.
ETA: of course I know what the bears and foxes eat, because there was a whole page dedicated to it that I apparently forgot, they eat fish. Sorry fish, you don't belong in our happy family of animals!
This book has a cute story - boy meets dog, dog find real owner, boy gets new friend. It's one of those cute picture book universes where adults only exist as backdrop, and children go about their days finding dogs and buying dog food etc. The illustrations were so bright and welcoming, despite the fact that it was raining sometimes. It was such a joyous depiction of city life, I thought - brightness and colour everywhere, bustling, but also calm at night, when Oliver is looking at everyone winding down in their apartments. It was pretty beautiful.
Since watching the movie was what made me want to read this in the first place, I can't help but compare the two.
While the movie did do some whitewashing what with Keiji's character being made into a white Tom Cruise (bleh), and despite the movie actually having fewer female characters, the movie felt much more feminist to me than the manga. The two female characters in the manga other than Rita were the girl who works in the cafeteria, whose purpose was to appear cheesecake-y, and the girl who designed Rita's armour who was described to us as really smart, and was also a cute-girl archetype (one with glasses and braids). Rita herself is I guess not exactly an example of waif-fu, if you assume that the suits provide much of the power so anyone could use it for strength given enough training and technique, but she still seemed like a waify-archetype. Not that Emily Blunt isn't tiny, but maybe I just wasn't into the archetype of the little girl being an epic warrior. I might have been more ok with it had the other lady characters been less cliche.
Also I found it hard to follow a lot of the action scenes because of the art. I haven't read enough manga to know if it's because this was poorly drawn or if I'm just bad at reading manga! The story seemed to go by pretty quick as well - I wasn't really invested in the ending.
I'll probably read the novella that both this and the movie were based on to see how different it is. Right now, I'm on the side of the movie!
There are a lot of things I really like about this book, and some things I'm kind of meh about.
The illustrations are beautiful. Really gorgeous. I got a lot of pleasure reading this book despite any shortcomings of the plot just from the illustrations.
While set in a fictional south-east asian-ish country, the twin children that Mark (which, actually I'd like to mention that in the reviews of this book his name is give as Mark, Mike, and Max by different people and I honestly don't remember the name that I read because I returned the book already???) encounters are based on real-life twins Johnny and Luther Htoo who led God's Army, a guerrilla group in Myanmar in the late 90's. They were said to have magical powers and be invincible. I like the fictionalization of their story in this book, I think the inclusion of magical elements was a good idea.
I wasn't a huge fan of Mark, though. He seemed like he was supposed to be a “good guy”, in that he saved an injured child and risked his life to make sure the kid got home safe, but he's also a creep enabler when it comes to his asshole friend. They appear to have been friends for a while, long enough that Jason keeps trying to recruit Mark to this shadowy mission, and Mark just seems to humour this guy for some reason. Mark eventually does take his boringly mean friend up on the mission, because...? Mark decides to go to Quanlom for a couple weeks for a secret mission after his promotion destination is changed (which he and his wife are disappointed about), leaving his pregnant wife behind, lying to her about where he's going and not even consulting her about the decision (which rightly pisses her off), because he's mad about his promotion, or he feels trapped, or something. Who knows. Also, when he's kidnapped by the twins in Quanlom, he remains unconvinced that magic exists despite seeing it happen right before his eyes. Maybe he's in denial and just can't accept it, but he didn't seem that shook. Basically, I don't like Mark. He seems fake or poorly written or both.
The twins were interesting characters. I love that they fought for their beliefs but I'm always wary about stories like this told from the perspective of the westerner. The story was pretty flat in the end anyway... the kids win and Mark gets to go home, with a memento from his journey for his own kid. I feel like this story had more potential and I wish it had lived up to it. But I'm definitely going to read more from the Hanuka twins because their art was just so kisses fingertips
I couldn't rate this book, because I keep oscillating between giving it 1 star and 5 stars, and averaging at 3 is just too wrong. I want to give it a 1 for the writing style which was clunky and weird, and a 5 for how hilarious I found some of the clunky, weird descriptions of characters (“Alone in the room, Kylo Ren - saturnine of aspect, lithe of build, tortured of mien, and troubled of eye -gazed at the silent recipient of his confession” - I MEAN HOW PERFECTLY HILARIOUS IS THAT), and so much of the dialogue that I was hella pleased didn't make it into the movie.
I really couldn't get used to BB-8 being spelled “Beebee-Ate” whenever a character said it out loud, and I wish I'd started counting how many times the author uses the word “countenance” from the beginning because it's FAR TOO MANY. That is a word I used when I wrote poetry in high school after looking up a synonym for “face”. AND I ONLY USED IT ONCE. There's also a lot of referring to Rey as “the girl”. Also a lot of getting inside the minds of the droids, weirdly: “Capable of comprehending the causes of nausea, the droid was fortunate it was not a condition his kind were subject to, but his internal gyros were being forced to work overtime.” “While he was in his own way equally disappointed, C-3PO was not programmed to display it. Instead, he merely expressed a rational regret.”
And this long and basically useless description: “Only on very rare occasions did C-3PO encounter a need for forward speed. This was one of them, but his ambulatory programming restricted him to a gait that was less than satisfactory. If only, he mused, he could move as fast as he could talk. Despite his motive infirmity he eventually found General Organa deep in intense conversation with a tactical specialist.”
I can give C-3PO “musing” a pass because he seems like a droid who might muse, though I'm more likely to believe that he never thinks anything that he doesn't also say out loud - but that is a lot of words for saying that he walks slow and none of those words were “walk” or “slow”. I'm not saying that all writing needs to be simple and to the point, but if I'm going to read something with so many synonyms in it, I really need for it to roll off the tongue a bit better.
Basically - the way this book was written reminds me of what my writing looks like when I write fiction, and I am bad at writing fiction. But, I read the whole thing and I didn't rate it because it legitimately amused me!
After skimming the reviews, I tried to go into this book with an open mind. I usually like “message” books, I think it's important to talk to kids about subjects like this, but I couldn't really get behind this book.
I think it was around the time when the dog and rat think about bringing the rabbit's body back to the rabbit house, but decide against it because it would look bad. Maybe they thought the rabbits would blame them for the death of their family member? Regardless, I wish someone had said, no, that's exactly what you should do, inform the family of the death of their loved one, I'm sure they'll want to know!
The flying of the rabbit as a kite could have been fine for me, if, say, the dog and rat had known the rabbit in life and were friends, if the rabbit had dreamed of flying while it was alive, if the rabbit loved flying kites while it was alive, etc. As it is, they flew a stranger as a kite without knowing if the stranger even would have wanted that...maybe the rabbit was scared of heights when it was alive! If the rabbit was a close friend of the dog and rat, and this was their way of processing their grief, I'd be into that too. But here, I can't help but think about the rabbit's family who may never find out why their loved one never returned home one day. Or maybe they'll go outside and see the body of their family member flying in the air and freak out about it because now they think someone murdered their family member because they had a psychopathic desire for a corpse-kite. Anyway. Put me right in the “I didn't get it” camp for this one!
I hadn't read anything about this book before I picked it up, so foolishly thought it would be a comedy book, maybe some funny essays or an autobiography about Aziz's love life. Instead, as the introduction laid out for me, Aziz actually teamed up with a sociologist to do legit social science experiments in order to explore modern romance. This immediately made me like Aziz even more, because people were like, you should write a funny book! And he was like, yeah, let's set up some focus groups and gather data!
Not to say this book isn't funny, because it is; it's a sociological look at dating in the modern age filtered through Aziz's voice. So it's funny, and it's enlightening. Everyone knows that dating is different now; the internet exists, women have more choices when it comes to careers and reproduction, economic and social changes mean that young adults are in school longer, living at home longer, etc. This book lays out some of those differences and what they mean for people of dating age nowadays (basically focusing on people 22-30ish, in New York, and in straight relationships). He also looks a bit at what dating looks like internationally, in Paris, Tokyo, and Buenos Aires. It's pretty fascinating. There's a lot of stuff left out, but a scope of “dating culture” in general is much too broad.
I did find interesting the fact that most people, if the person they're dating isn't really into them, would prefer that person be honest and just say sorry, not interested. But those same people, when they're not interested in someone, mostly use the “I'm really busy right now” or just ignoring them methods. So we all want people to be honest, but we are never honest. It's hinted at later that we may not actually want people to be honest. It's really telling that we tend to do the opposite of what we say we'd want in the same situation.
Also, the book itself was pretty slick. I like the cover, the pages were nice and thick, and I liked the simple blue and black text colour scheme.
Hm. I don't think I get it. Does power create racism? Or did Louis I's new-found power just allow him to finally act on his racist tendencies? Presumably, before the crown, he was just fine grazing alongside the black and brown sheep. I guess the message is that power corrupts? That all the sheep would be happier with their anarchic society, with no ruler? Or is the message that we, the people, should not act like Louis I's fellow sheep by doing whatever the guy with the crown says? Because I guess it's implied at the end that all the sheep are just going to blindly follow the wolf's orders to march right into his mouth. So maybe it's an argument for democracy - don't just follow the person with the crown. But it's not implied that some other sheep might have been a better ruler, so it still seems like an argument for having no ruler. But I'm also not sure that we learned that racism is bad, necessarily. Louis I wasn't really punished for his racist policies, and the sheep didn't appear to be suffering under the racist rule, except maybe in the one picture where all the sheep are running away from Louis I (but that includes the white sheep). All that happened was that Louis I by accident lost his crown and became a regular sheep again. Which doesn't really seem like fated comeuppance. And now the sheep are left with the strife of segregation and no ruler but it doesn't seem to bother the sheep too much. Louis just looks kind of sad without his crown and everyone goes back to grazing. Was the racist part only in there to really bring home that Louis I was using his power for evil? There are other ways to show that, especially in a kids book. Not that I'm against kids books tackling issues like racism, I think it's really important actually...but Louis I's progression of things his did didn't seem all that bad until the racism part, and there was no explicit punishment for it. I'm curious to hear what kids would say is the point of this story because I'm clearly baffled.Especially since Tallec also wrote [b:Waterloo & Trafalgar 13592379 Waterloo & Trafalgar Olivier Tallec https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1350960127s/13592379.jpg 19180463] which is a great book.I think it's time to end this review because I've thought too much about this book by now.
*this review is of an ARC from NetGalley.
THIS BOOK IS SO CUTE. The illustrations are bonkers (especially the blue-jay lookin' hippogriff), in the best possible way. The rhymes make me want to read this book out loud. I love that the main character is a non-white girl. But mostly I'm just staring at the pictures and giggling. Especially the jolly kraken holding onto the thoroughly unimpressed whale. And the phoenix's aluminum foil nest. And the manticore's gross green mouth.
It's definitely inconsistent in terms of writing style and narrative, but I like so many of the ideas. I also just really like reading fantasy/magic realism/sci fi set in uncommon places and cultures (for those genres). I really liked The Black Stain and Spider the Artist in particular. Many others I liked at the beginning but they sort of trailed off at the end. Not a solid collection necessarily but I like Okorafor and will be reading more of her stuff!
The illustrations are beautiful and interactive part seems fun. I tend to judge picture books by how good they'd be to read for storytime, and this kind of interactive book doesn't work so well. You can't get 10+ kids up to tap each page, unless you're trying to kill a lot of time. I would definitely read this with one or two kids though!