Five years ago I reviewed my first book by Ben Hatke and I was immediately hooked. You can read my reviews of all of his books here. After a couple of picture books and a mostly wordless graphic novel, I am very excited to be reviewing the first in a new trilogy, Mighty Jack, a play on the old fairy tale with a garden full of enormous plants and some serious sword play. And, as always, you can expect strong girl characters who share equal page time with the titular Jack.
Hatke is a gifted visual story teller and Mighty Jack is driven by the illustrations with spare but meaningful dialogue, including lots of great onomatopoetic expressions. He begins the his story with Jack being awakened from a dream. His mother is out the door, on the way to the flea market. Past due bills can be seen on the counter as Jack grabs breakfast to go. In the car, she explains that she is going to work two jobs this summer and will need Jack to help more with Maddy, his younger sister who is on the spectrum. At the flea market (where fans of Hatke's will spot characters from past graphic novels), Jack's mother gives him money to buy food and the keys to the car in case Maddy needs to get away from the crowds. But when the non-verbal Maddy speaks, emphatically telling Jack that he has to make a deal with the suspiciously friendly man sitting behind a table with a sign that says, "Just Stuff," Jack makes a deal - his mom's car for an ornate wooden box filled with packets of seeds.
Maddy is up and early the next day, planting a garden. Jack helps, happy to see her busily at work, but also apprehensive. What grows from the seeds is both amazing and frightening and Jack is not sure how to handle it, especially since Maddy is so attached to the garden. Happily, a homeschooled neighbor who is also a fencer, stops by. Lilly is soon helping Jack and Maddy while also pocketing seeds and cuttings as she goes. Hatke's marvelous imagination blooms in Maddy's garden, from adorable little onion-headed babies to menacing melons with vine-y legs. The presence of Wormweed, eradicated from earth for thousands of years, even calls forth a dragon from another realm. Jack, Maddy and Lilly even begin to sample the fruits of the garden, reveling in the magical powers each plant gives them. Eventually, though, Maddy is injured and Jack discovers a plant that drives him to destroy the garden.
Thinking that the adventure is over, Jack discovers that both Maddy and Lilly have been keeping secrets and a new adventure begins. This time, though, Jack is well equipped with fencing gear and an equally brave and strong partner at his side.
Ben Hatke, fencing!
Source: Review Copy
Ben Hatke is a gifted graphic novelist who creates stories perfectly balance themes of family, bravery, and belonging with wonderfully detailed illustrations and characters you won't forget. For his second picture book, Nobody Likes a Goblin, Hatke visits a medieval world where even a goblin needs a friend.
Goblin has a daily routine, and his best friend, Skeleton, is part of it. Skeleton lives in the Treasure Room and one day while he and Goblin are goofing around with the treasures, the room is raided! Goblin decides to abandon the safety of his routine and head out into the world to find his friend. He stops to as a hill troll if he has seen anything and in the process agrees to find the troll's "Honk-Honk," which was also plundered. The troll's parting words warn Goblin to be careful because, "Nobody like a Goblin." Across the fields and through the village, with an angry horde (that includes a few warrior women) on his little green tail, Goblin searches and rescues. The two hide out in a cave where Goblin finds his tribe. Together, with a ghost and one of the warrior women, the new tribe delivers Honk-Honk to his owner and settles down in the dungeon for a fine feast.
This adventurous and rollicking story might sound simple, but Hatke's magnificent watercolor and ink illustrations add an an almost cinematic layer to the text. There are many little details to be pored over and humans and creatures alike to be examined. The palette is gently pastoral, making the creatures and the action less than scary, despite the caves, bats, rats and skeletons. Nobody Likes a Goblin is enchanting, entertaining and timeless.
Source: Review Copy
Friendship, connection, danger, adventure, robots or creatures. These are things you can count on in a Ben Hatke book, and these are the elements that I look forward to experiencing through his particular perspective (and paintbrush) with each and every book. In his newest graphic novel, Little Robot, Hatke tells the almost wordless story of a little girl who finds and fights to keep her new friend.
A box falls out of a truck and off a bridge, making its way to a junkyard downstream. A little girl slips out of the window of her trailer home and heads off into the wilds/junkyard, shoeless, where she unearths her tool satchel. There she discovers the box and the robot within.
After getting the bot going, she helps it to master the art of walking. Together the two explore as she gently teaches the robot about the world around them. In a factory far away we see an alarm going off - a robot is missing. A massive, one eyed, multi-legged, yellow behemoth is seen trundling out of a hangar and into the distance. A capture, a rescue and a dramatic ending leave the little heroine with more bots and friends than before along with a very satisfying ending.
Being mostly wordless, Little Robot is so much about feelings and the sometimes wordless connection of friendship. Little Robot is a "meditation on friendship more than a lesson," as Hatke said of his book in an interview with EW. Hatke goes on to say that his heroine is, "a hero for the introverts and the makers." And, while this is a graphic novel about robots, junkyards and machines, the natural world is very much a vivid part of Little Robot. Hatke says that this scenery is "partially inspired by and informed by the landscape around my home in Virginia. The rural area in the Shenandoah valley." Amidst the green fields are forests are cats, birds, frogs, ducks, turtles and newly blooming flowers. There is a six-panel page where the girl and the bot come across a dead squirrel. "XoNX," the bot exclaims (the bot has a fantastic phonetic language, "Jonk," being its most frequent verbalization) and the little girl, completely at home in the natural world, reassures him, "It's just dead is all."
For a book with so few words, there is so much going on in Little Robot. But this is always the case with Hatke's books. His illustration style, color palette, characters and plots are good. That seems like a tired, less than celebratory adjective but I mean it in the best, truest sense of the word possible. If you have ever read Hatke's blog or had the immense pleasure of viewing his wife's Instagram feed, you will experience the well of goodness, from good living to good parenting and educating to good stewardship of and connection to the natural world, that Hatke's creations arise from and/or are fueled by. This is a good world that I want to live in and one that I want the young readers I teach to live in, even if we can only get to it from the pages of his books.
A new picture book coming from Hatke this year!
And a new graphic novel coming next year, maybe...
Source: Purchased
Ben Hatke has written a picture book! Julia's House of Lost Creatures has all that makes his graphic novel trilogy, Zita the Spacegirl, Legends of Zita and The Return of Zita, absolutely winning - strong girl character, cute (and sometimes creepy) creatures and a strong sense of family - and more.
Hatke begins Julia's House of Lost Creatures with the sentence, "Julia's house came to
I am so honored to be part of the farewell blog tour for Ben Hatke's brilliant graphic novel trilogy. Be sure to check out the other fantastic tributes by people like Tom Angleberger and this awesome post at the graphic novel book review blog Good OK Bad where the author's 4 year old daughter spent the last several months learning to read so she could read The Return of Zita the Spacegirl on her
If you do not know Zita, please read my review of the first book in this amazing series by the delightful Ben Hatke, Zita the Space Girl. While I love the story lines that Hatke writes for his graphic novels, I think it is his illustrations that really draw me (and my son, who gobbles these books in one sitting) in. While the space creatures may be odd, and a tiny bit fierce at times,
So looking forward to this one! Our library ordered it and should have it in circulation in the next few weeks. Thanks again for the tip on the first Zita...wonderful stuff.