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Book Review: The Singing Bones by Shaun Tan

The Singing Bones by Shaun Tan
Arthur A. Levine Books, 2016
ISBN-13: 978-0545946124
Available: Hardcover

 

My most memorable previous experience of Shaun Tan’s work was the surrealist graphic novel The Arrival; a touching, wordless tale of an immigrant arriving in an unfamiliar place. The art and story together have a powerful impact in showing the universality of what it means to be a stranger arriving in a strange land, using unique images to communicate what words are unable to. The Singing Bones is completely different, but it also expresses universality using images with a powerful visual impact.

The Singing Bones has an introduction by author Neil Gaiman and a foreword by fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes, clues that the reader is in for a fascinating tour of the Grimm brothers’ tales. Tan pairs snippets from stories by the Grimm brothers with photographs of minimalist sculptures based on the stories. The sculptures were influenced by the styles used by Inuit and Pre-Columbian people. and are mainly made out of paper mache, found objects, and clay, primarily in red, black, and white. Each is presented in a double-paged spread, with the story snippet on the otherwise blank left hand page and the photograph of the sculpture it inspired on the right. The lines and curves in the sculptures are clean and uncluttered. Some sculptures represent the story fully– the one devoted to “Rapunzel” could be a tower, or a girl, or both. Others show a single moment– the one for “The Frog King” depicts the frog’s head poking out of circular ripples at the moment just before he would have spoken to the princess.  The first look is not enough; while the sculptures may seem simple, reading the snippets and spending time looking at the photographs of the sculptures reveals that there is a lot to see in what might seem like uncomplicated objects. Be advised that these are not Disneyfied stories; Tan includes the story “Mother Trudy”, which has a very unpleasant ending for the child protagonist. There’s a very primal, visceral feel to the experience of going through these pages. The photographic spreads are followed by an explanation by Tan of the process used, and then by an index that fully summarizes the Grimm’s tale associated with each sculpture.

I discovered this book in the children’s section of my library, and I’m not sure it belongs there. As an art book and an exploration of Grimm’s tales, it is outstanding, but in a very nontraditional way, and I think many adults would really enjoy it. However, while my nine year old was enchanted by it, it also gave her nightmares, and required considerable discussion and research as a follow-up. It was a good experience for us together, but would have been difficult for her on her own. I can highly recommend it for elementary-aged and middle school children with an adult as a read-and-share title, and as a stand-alone title for ages 14 and older.


Posted on March 10, 2017 by , Reply

Book Review: The Black Pearl by Scott O’Dell

The Black Pearl by Scott O’Dell

HMH Editions for Young Readers, 2010 (reprint)

ISBN-13: 978-0547334004

Available: Paperback, Audible, Kindle edition

 

Scott O’Dell is best known as a writer of historical fiction for children, particularly for novels set  in California or Mexico. He is most well-known for his middle-grade survival story and Newbery Award-winning novel Island of the Blue Dolphins, as well as three Newbery Honor books: The King’s Fifth, Sing Down the Moon, and The Black Pearl. In addition to winning several additional awards, he also established one: The Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction, which is awarded yearly to an American writer of an outstanding work of historical fiction for children. The Black Pearl, first published in 1967, is indeed a work of historical fiction– but it’s also a pretty terrifying book, with much of it devoted to a legendary sea monster, the Manta Diablo.

Sixteen year old Ramon Sandoval’s father is a pearl merchant, and has just made him a partner in the business. Ramon is eager to learn to dive for pearls, but his father has reservations. His father and the other pearl divers are large, muscled men, while Ramon is still not entirely grown. When Ramon finally convinces his father to take him on an expedition, he meets the Sevillano, a talented diver with a storehouse of outrageous stories about frightening monsters and giant pearls.

During his father’s next absence, Ramon, determined to prove himself, pays an Indian who has come to sell a pearl to teach him how to dive. He hopes to find the great pearl of the Sevillano’s stories: the Pearl of Heaven. The Indian warns Ramon of the Manta Diablo, a vengeful giant black manta ray who guards the pearls in his cave under the lagoon where the Indian dives. Despite the warning, Ramon dives into the cave, pries out a gigantic oyster, and finds an enormous black pearl.  When the Manta Diablo discovers the cave is in disarray,  it’s a race to escape home with the pearl before he is caught.  Once revealed, the pearl garners a great deal of unwanted attention from the town, but despite its size and beauty, he and his father are unable to sell it. Ramon comes to believe the pearl is cursed and that he must return it to the monster, but the Sevillano has other ideas, and they embark on a dangerous voyage by water, chased by the Manta Diablo.

The story is framed by the introduction of the Manta Diablo, a local legend used by mothers to scare their children into behaving. Ramon, while not a believer, loves this story. The Sevillano, who has been out in the ocean, makes this a more believable story, and the Indian’s dread reinforces it. None of this is enough to convince the skeptical Ramon, who is determined to find the legendary Pearl of Heaven– when it comes to legends, apparently greed and ambition outweigh fear. As the novel progresses, the Indian’s dread is infectious, and Ramon actually begins to believe that there might really be some truth to the legend. The manta’s chase and the battle with the manta up the tension, although it’s certainly possible that Ramon is more terrified of the Sevillano than he is of the manta.

While the writing is somewhat stilted and dated, and the book starts with somewhat of a slow pace, once the pearl divers enter the scene the story becomes engaging, not just because Ramon is engaged in the experience, but because it is fascinating, and something most people know little about. As the book progresses, it’s interesting to see how his relationship with both his father and the Sevillano develop. Ramon’s experiences as he learns to dive in the lagoon are immersive; O’Dell’s descriptions are gorgeously written. Ramon’s interactions with the Indian at that time start to ratchet up the suspense, especially once Ramon enters the cave of the Manta Diablo. The legendary manta of terror and its appearances in the novel, be they through story or through Ramon’s perceptions of his experience, snagged this reader from the first page, and O’Dell’s suggestion that something can be both beautiful and evil is food for thought.  Recommended for grades 4 and up.

Reader’s advisory note: Older children and teens who like this book might like The Pearl by John Steinbeck or The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway.

Content note: The representation of the Indians in the book as especially superstitious and violent is a talking point you might want to cover with your child, as well as the religious motivations behind some of the actions (not being Catholic, certain children thought the Madonna referred to in the story was the American pop singer, which caused some confusion).


Posted on February 20, 2017 by , Reply

Book Review: Between Worlds by Skip Brittenham

Between Worlds by Skip Brittenham
G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2016
ISBN-13: 978-0399176890
Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, Audible edition

 

Between Worlds is a YA mash-up of the science fiction, fantasy, and romance genres that markets itself as providing an immersive augmented reality experience. Augmented reality, if you haven’t experienced it, adds new aspects to your existing reality and allows you to manipulate them in a 3D environment. In the case of Between Worlds, you can download an app that uses the camera of a smartphone or tablet to create the illusion that the people and creatures in the book’s color illustrations are three-dimensional and can move around on the page in limited ways, depending on where you move your camera screen.  This is a pretty neat trick that you would expect to engage teens, and when I tried it out with my son, he got very excited about the concept. However, there were a limited number of color illustrations, and the app didn’t work with all of them, so he quickly got frustrated and abandoned the book.

It’s neat to see publishers trying new things and taking risks to create a more immersive and attractive reading experience, and the idea is an interesting one, but it still needs work. I don’t think it would necessarily work on a large scale, since most people don’t want to download an app for every book they read, and having to stop reading to activate the illustrations actually doesn’t create an immersive reading experience– it breaks it down. Based on my son’s reaction, the AR aspect of the book was enough to catch his attention, but not enough to convince him to read it. This might work better with nonfiction: a few years ago we reviewed a nonfiction book called Horrible Hauntings that used this technology very effectively to simulate ghosts moving around in the illustrations on the pages for each entry.

The story itself was okay, but it didn’t impress me. Although it had some interesting ideas, they weren’t fully explored, and the primary characters, Mayberry and Marshall, were flat and unsympathetic. Mayberry was the brainy new girl whose urban “coolness” and obnoxious attitude left her on the fringe in her rural high school. Marshall was the geeky prankster from a well-known and formerly wealthy family that had fallen on hard times, and who has a secret crush on her. The two bond over their outsider status and love of science. When Marshall learns that Mayberry’s mother, a biologist, is studying a local colony of quaking aspen trees, he suggests to Mayberry that they break in to the restricted forest to seek out the mythical Wishing Tree that is supposedly at the center of the grove. Mild teen rebellion, science fiction, fantasy, and a touch of wish-fulfillment romance ensue. Despite packing all that in (and an alternate reality with the potential to be very interesting), the characters and story just aren’t enough on their own, and with the AR breaking the flow of the reading experience instead of enhancing it, the book is only temporarily enticing.

I think it’s great to see a major publisher trying new things to enhance the reading experience, and I hope we’ll continue to see experimentation. However, the story on its own was not enough to carry this reader, and I don’t think this particular experiment was a success. I look forward to seeing what comes next!

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski


Posted on October 26, 2016 by , Reply
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