Category: book review

Kids Graphic Novels!

Mad About Meatloaf (Weenie featuring Frank & Beans Book 1) by Maureen Fergus, illustrated by Alexandra Bye. Tundra, 2021. 9780735267916. 56pp. This book is worth buying for the series name alone. Weenie is the dog, Frank (a cat) is his best friend, Beans (a guinea pig) is his other friend, and Bob takes care of them all. Bob made a meatloaf that he left on the counter and that Weenie simply must have. First the friends have to work together to get on the counter, and then they work together to make Bob a new meatloaf. It’s zany fun that’s beautifully illustrated by Bye.       Sir Ladybug and the Bookworms (Sir Ladybug Book 3) by Corey R. Tabor. Balzer + Bray, 2022. 9780063069121. 64pp. An ant delivers a notice to Sir Ladybug that the book he checked out is due at sunset. Turns out it’s in his friend Sterling’s shell (he’s a snail). They set off with Pell, […]

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Book Review: The Skull: A Tyrolean Folktale by Jon Klassen

The Skull: A Tyrolean Folktale by Jon Klassen. Candlewick, 2023. 9781536223361. 108pp. I picked this up at Third Place Books and then had to buy a copy. The free print that came with it had something to do with that, but mostly I was buying it for the illustrations, and because the shelf talker was right, it’s a perfect children’s book. It’s about a girl named Otilla, who runs away in the middle of the night. She runs and runs and falls and in the forest finds a huge house that looks abandoned. But it has one resident, a skull who has lived there a long time. (He can talk and move around with some difficulty, but he needs some help.) There’s a bottomless pit, a bunch of spooky masks, and a tower, and something that comes looking for the skull every night. The story is spooky, but not too spooky. In Klassen’s author’s note at the end, he explains […]

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Board Book Reviews

Happy Halloweenie by Katie Vernon. Little Simon, 2023. 9781665930604. Weenie can’t decide what to be for Halloween, which provides a chance for Vernon to create hilarious illustrations and for young kids to learn some rhyming vocabulary words. My favorite is the Chewbacca-esque “hairy” costume. Birthday Monsters by Sandra Boynton. Boynton Bookworks, 1993, 2014. 9781665925105. Five birthday monsters wake a poor hippo up at 6am and create chaos! My daughter loved it when I used to read this book to her, and then she loved reading it to me. And, good news, it seems like every Sandra Boynton book I remember is back in print now!  Did they ever leave print? At least I’ve seen more out there recently than I remember reading, and I remember quite a few.) My favorites are : Fifteen Animals (I’m sending this one to my friend Bob) Jungle Night (I love Boynton’s hippos best, but the way she draws monkeys is a close second) and […]

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Super Fake Love Song (Book Threat with Sarah Hunt)

Years ago, my friend (and fabulous librarian) Sarah and I talked about books on Book Threat, and I really miss those conversations because I always love the books she recommends. Here’s a conversation we had a few weeks ago about Super Fake Love Song by David Yoon. GP Putnam’s Sons, 2021. 9781984812254. 384 pp.   Gene: Welcome back to Book Threat! I’m very excited. How long a break have we had? Sarah: I was trying to figure it out. Five years? G: And why did you pick this book to talk about? S: I was looking at my book collection and I liked the look of the cover, especially him holding a guitar with a 20-sided die on his T-shirt. And I was in a place in my life where I was like, you know what I need? A romantic book with an Asian male lead. There are a lot of movies out there and not a lot with Asian […]

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a month without book reviews

Just in case you’re wondering what’s up, book reviews will be on vacation until November. If you know anything we should be reading, though, please let us know in the comments.

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Graphic Novel Review: Eight Billion Genies by Charles Soule and Ryan Browne

Eight Billion Genies by Charles Soule and Ryan Browne. Image, 2023. 9781534323537. Publisher’s Rating: Mature Readers. Contains #1 – 8. Includes an extensive cover gallery, The Secret History of…, sketches, and the behind-the-scenes guide to issue 1 including a list of Easter eggs. It’s an ordinary day at the Lampwick Bar and Grill in St. Clair Shores, Michigan. The Bada-Bings are setting up their instruments to play a live show. It’s twelve-year-old Robbie’s birthday, and his dad is passed out at the bar. Mr. Williams is running the place, and he surprises Robbie when he speaks Chinese to help the couple who wanders in. And then a child is born, making the human population eight billion, and suddenly genies appear, offering a wish to each and every person alive. Williams quickly makes his wish, to protect his bar and everything and everyone inside it. Outside, all hell breaks loose. Bombs go off, real and figurative. The human population starts falling, […]

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Book Review: 101 Ways to Read a Book by Timothée de Fombelle, illustrations by Benjamin Chaud

101 Ways to Read a Book by Timothée de Fombelle, illustrations by Benjamin Chaud. Translated by Karin Snelson & Angus Yuen-Killick. Red Comet Press, 2023. 9781636550824. 128pp. This book is just super fun. It’s full of illustrations of people reading, and each of them has an amusing label. The Baggage is in the far back of the car during the trip. The Wiggle Worm is twisting and turning inside and under and on a blanket. The Barbarians are actually tearing up a book to share it, so four can read at once. (I do not endorse this.) It’s hard to say what age this book is for, but I’d have read it to my four-year-old, and she’d have improved her vocabulary, kept looking at the illustrations, and would never have given it away. (And if she had tried, I wouldn’t have let her because I’d want it on my shelf somewhere between the art books and the picture books.) I […]

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Graphic Novel Review: The Horizon Volume 1 by JH

The Horizon Volume 1 by JH. Translation by Ultramedia. Ize Press, 2023. 9798400900297. 376pp. This is a post-apocalyptic graphic novel, but it’s never quite clear what the apocalypse is. There are dead bodies everywhere on some pages, and the art is nearly black and white, so it’s a bit less gory than it might otherwise look. But when the wide-eyed little boy protagonist finds his mother’s body, and then tries to gather her brains up and put them back into her head, that put my imagination into overdrive. And then he concludes that the value of life is just an illusion, and starts to walk through a ruined city, past more bodies and abandoned military vehicles and out into the county. He meets a little girl, and it becomes clear whatever violence they’ve both survived is still happening as bombs fall and people flee. Together they join the crowd (and eventually escape it). And from then on they travel together, […]

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Graphic Novel Review: ¡Ay, Mija!: My Bilingual Summer in Mexico by Christine Suggs

¡Ay, Mija!: My Bilingual Summer in Mexico by Christine Suggs. Little, Brown and Company, 2023. 9780316591966. 328pp. Includes an Epilogue full of photos of Suggs and her family and Chiquito “the most spoiled cat in the world.” This is a graphic memoir of Suggs’ visit to Mexico to see her grandparents (her Mamá and Papá) and tia, Mary, in Mexico during the summer after tenth grade. Her basic Spanish language skills are a source of stress, as is the fact that she looks a bit different from her family (her father is a white American dude her mom met while working at the US Embassy there as a translator). Even when it’s hard for her to follow conversations (she struggles for a while, then improves) there’s so much love (except from Chiquito the cat sometimes) that I was sure everything was going to be okay. Suggs also worries about her weight a bit, though the joy of food (especially bread!) […]

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Graphic Novel Review: Daughters of Snow & Cinders by Núria Tamarit

Daughters of Snow & Cinders by Núria Tamarit. Translated by Jenna Allen. Fantagraphics, 2023. 9781683967569. 212pp. This book stands out on graphic novel shelves; it has so much shelf appeal that I’ve picked it up over and over and flipped through it to look at the colors and drawings. The pages that show the northern lights were my favorites before I started reading it. Men are searching for gold, and two women caught up in that search are the center of the book. Joanna is looking for gold herself; she trades everything she has for supplies and a chance to join an expedition. After she’s rejected because she’s a woman, she meets Tala, who tells her about the only group that will accept her, Matwei’s. Then they leave without her and Tala. Both head out after the group on their own. Joanna soon has a rescued dog, Peg, accompanying her. Tala finds the group and they accept her as a […]

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