CHILDREN’S FICTION: FANTASY
King Jack and the Dragonby Peter Bently Illustrated by Helen Oxenbury (Dial)
As pint-size knights go, Zak and Jack — well equipped with wooden swords, cardboard crowns and a castle made of “an old sheet and some sticks, a couple of trash bags, a few broken bricks” — make a daredevil and endearing twosome. But the real star of this dragon-fighting drama is the toddler-size varlet they tow in their wake. Downy-haired, pacifier-plugged and romper-suited, Caspar prefers playing with the dragon’s curly tail and tickling the fearsome serpent’s tongue to inflicting anything resembling damage.
Fabulous feasts, fearsome beasts and backyard battles abound until a giant comes by to collect Zak. “Two can fight dragons, no problem, Jack said … Then another giant came and took Caspar to bed.”
As the illustrations make abundantly clear, the giants are a mom and a dad, and equally clear — if unstated — is that the last knight standing, Jack, is about to have his mettle tested … not by flame-spouting monsters but by the “skitter-scurry” of a mouse, the “BRRUP!” of a frog and the “TOO-WHOO!” of an owl in the oncoming darkness.
Peter Bently’s perfectly cadenced rhymes skip blithely from page to page, begging to be read aloud, while Helen Oxenbury’s illustrations — from sepia-toned sketches to unbordered double-page spreads — are generously detailed and gracefully expressive delights. Giants beware! This one is sure to become a full-on family favorite at bedtime. Prepare for repeated readings. Kristi Jemtegaard, The Washington Post
NONFICTION: RESCUE CHRONICLE
Trapped: How the World Rescued 33 Miners From 2,000 Feet Below the Chilean Desert by Marc Aronson (Atheneum)
In a book about Chile’s famously trapped miners, you expect a certain depth of research. But it’s Marc Aronson’s wide, expansive view that is so refreshing. From geology and engineering to economics, mythology and religion, Aronson provides young readers with insights and analogies that can be applied far beyond what happened last year in an undersupervised Chilean mine.
Of course, he has a dramatic story to tell, pivoting between the miners’ situation (profound darkness, scarce food, impressive teamwork) and the rescuers’ complicated efforts to recover the 33 men. Rounding out all the facts, maps and diagrams, Aronson displays a certain storytelling bravado. Besides welcome references to NFL draft picks and future NASA voyages, he also brings up larger points, such as his notion that the Americas should be named not for Amerigo Vespucci but for the silver-rich town of Potosi (in modern-day Bolivia).
Even the captions — “Open pit mines such as this show our capacity to gouge out the earth” — have attitude. Aronson doesn’t call for a halt to mining but for a renewed appreciation for Earth and for the people who “enter the kingdom of the dark.” A year after their rescue, many of the 33 miners are still struggling, and the risks and rewards of mining are still worth studying. Abby McGanney Nolan, The Washington Post
NONFICTION: SEMIAUTOBIOGRAPHY
Dead End in Norvelt by Jack Gantos (Farrar Straus Giroux)
The summer of ’62 proves to be a bumper-car ride through history for young Jack Gantos in this wonderfully wacky semiautobiographical novel by the author of the same name. Grounded by his parents, Jack still manages to be in the thick of small-town doings, thanks to Miss Volker, whose arthritic hands necessitate his services as scribe for her newspaper obituaries.
In her free-ranging tributes, Miss Volker blends details about the deceased with town history (Norvelt was founded in 1934 by Eleanor Roosevelt) and world events (such as the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381). These, in turn, pique Jack’s quirky reflections on gossip, war movies, factories and the gold-crazed Spanish explorers lauded in American textbooks of the time.
As the summer progresses, the number of obituaries and corpses increases suspiciously, and Jack and the elderly busybody Mr. Spizz vie with each other to discover the truth. The darkly comic mystery and oddball characters make for some good laughs, but the riffs on history raise the consciousness as well: Who gets to record events and, thus, shape the public’s perception of the past? Maybe even a fidgety guy who is “a little too drifty in school” can pen his version — and inspire today’s young readers to do the same. Mary Quattlebaum, The Washington Post
