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The Great Antonio is Elise Gravel's loving tribute to Antonio Barichievich, the Croatian born strong man who was a Montreal fixture for many years. The Great Antonio is also yet another superb beginning reader from the fantastic TOON Books. Gravel begins this fanciful story of the life of this giant of a man speculating about his possible parentage and wondering about his childhood in Croatia. This may seem like an odd subject for a beginning reader, but Gravel tells Antonio's story with a playful tone that is immediately engaging.
To show readers just how HUGE Antonio was, she shows his clothes (a cat could sleep in his shoe, but it was quite smelly) and his eating habits. She also shows reader the various opponents he wrestled and the many enormous, heaving things he lifted and pulled.
Antonio was larger than life and stories about him border on the unbelievable. Reading Gravel's author notes at the end of the book helped me get a perspective on this strange - for a beginning reader, anyway - story. Gravel shares that one of her favorite authors is Roald Dahl, who "got her interested in unusual people and animals," saying that she is, "attracted to anyone who is STRANGE or FUNNY." Growing up in Montreal, Gravel was very familiar with this strange and funny man. Like Sampson, Antonio had magnificent hair - long, thick dreadlocks that fell to the ground and were often used to pull buses. Or, Antonio would put metal in his braids and use them as golf clubs and more.
Gravel gives The Great Antonio the feel of a tall tale, speculating about his life and his feats but also respectfully sharing the stranger aspects of it. Near the end of his life, Antonio chose to live on the streets of Montreal, using a donut shop as his office. Gravel tells readers that, when he died, a mountain of flowers was left at his favorite table at the donut shop. Antonio himself may have created this air of mystery about himself, lending to his larger than life persona. In her author notes, Gravel shares that, after his death, many of his "wild stories" were proven to be true!
Source: Review Copy
Fiona Robinson brings her talents as a picture book author and illustrator (see below for reviews of two of her books that are favorites of mine) to a picture book biography with Ada's Ideas: The Story of Ada Lovelace, the World's First Computer Programer. Last year was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron. Her mother, Anne Isabella Byron, herself a gifted mathematician who was tutored at home, receiving an education equal to that of a man at Cambridge, ended her marriage after two years and kept Ada from her father, raising and educating her alone. 
Robinson details Ada's childhood, working in the changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution. It seems that touring factories where the machines that were "thrilling modern wonders," became a popular pastime for the wealthy. Ada's mother took her on these tours where her "imagination whirred along with the powerful engines! And her mind, so well trained by her many lessons, began to invent!" Ada called one of her ideas for a flying mechanical horse "flyology." Ada even signed off a letter to her mother, "Your Affectionate Carrier Pigeon," causing her mother to fear that some of her father's madness evident in his daughter. But, as Robinson writes, Ada's "imagination could not be confined by math, because Ada was starting to find her own sort of poetical expression . . . through math!"
Robinson shares the same details that Laurie Wallmark, herself a teacher of computer science, does in her book Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine, while bringing a more poetic tone to her writing as well as a more imaginatively creative style to her illustrations. In fact, click over and read - or even just look at the pictures of Robinson's artistic process - in her interview at Design of the Picture Book. 
Robinson takes Ada through her adolescence, her meeting with Charles Babbage and his Difference Engine and into her young adulthood and marriage. Robinson spends several pages writing about the Analytical Engine, making links to the Jacquard Loom when describing the the hole-punched cards (that also make up the fantastic endpapers and case of this book, as seen above) that Babbage fed into the machine to calculate sums. I was Ada who figured out the algorithm that would be punched into the cards, which Robinson illustrates with a very clever page of maze-like swirls and a list of instructions on how readers should navigate the swirls to find the treasures in the maze, which is VERY cool and an analogy that I could grasp.
I can't wait to share this book, and Wallmark's, with my second graders who do reports on people and animals who are heroes every year! Robinson's illustrations and text are engaging and even better, comprehensive.
My favorite picture books by Fiona Robinson:
More about Ada Lovelace:
Source: Review Copy
By: Tanya,
on 8/19/2016
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Honor Girl is Maggie Thrash's graphic memoir that was released last year and garnered awards and attention. Thrash chronicles the summer at an all girls camp where, having just turned fifteen, she falls in love for the first time. 
Maggie's mom and her grandma went to Camp Bellflower, set deep in the Kentucky Appalachians. Every summer, on the first night of camp, the Honor Girl, chosen on the last night of camp the summer before, is serenaded. At the end of the song, the Honor Girl's candle is used to light the candles of all the other campers. Thrash writes, "the criteria for Honor Girl were vague, with no particular definition. It was just the one who seemed, in an unmistakable way, to represent the best of us." Maggie is reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, her favorite Backstreet Boy is Kevin Richardson and she wears a leash at night that tethers her to her bed and keeps her from sleepwalking. The details of 15-year-old Maggie's life are mundane yet so genuinely real. Thrash is a gifted writer, making the quiet, everyday minutiae interesting and engaging. It's easy to get inside Maggie's head, feel what she feels, be fifteen.
Thrash tells the story of her first crush in all its thwarted, unconsummated, painful truth and it happens the way that I am sure most first loves happen, not the way they play out in fiction, especially YA fiction. Her crush, Erin, a 19-year-old counselor and astronomy major at college in Colorado, is not unknown to Maggie. But, she begins to feel differently about Erin after she gives her a routine lice check, running her fingers through Maggie's hair. Thrash uses wordless panels to illustrate this seen and as you scan you can feel something turning on, waking up, or beginning to slowly burn inside of Maggie. Thrash's skill as a visual story teller deepens the story immensely. Her illustration style is markedly different and less polished than many other graphic novels I have read. I'm still learning how to write about the art work in graphic novels and often look to other reviewers to help me shape my thoughts. I turned to Monica Johnson's review for The Comics Journal and found that her words describe Thrash's style (and the unique abilities that graphic novels have over other forms of writing) better than any I could find. Of Honor Girl Johnson writes,
Thrash certainly has drawing skills, but they're her own, and they're specifically savvy for the story she is telling. Her bare-bones line drawings colored with watercolor pencils seem to be channeled directly from her 15-year-old self. The drawings have the rawness and bright-eyed directness of the teenager depicted in them, who can't hide behind a catalog of romantic experience and mastery. This is part of the brilliance of the comic medium itself - the way images work in concert with the literal to tell a deeper, much richer story - and Thrash really hits the mark with it. The drawings are so believably vulnerable, which is maybe why her story feels so devastating.
Johnson's use of the word vulnerable is well placed, both in describing the illustrations, Maggie and Erin. Maggie and Erin have moments of vulnerability and missed opportunities. Erin is a counselor for the junior girls and Maggie is a senior girl, so they don't have many chances to run into each other alone. Then there is the fact that, in the eyes of the law, Erin is an adult and Maggie is a child, not to mention that, even though it's 2000, this is the South and a Christian girl's camp and being openly gay is not accepted. Maggie shares her feelings about Erin with friends and finds sympathy and support. They keep Maggie's secret and also nudge - or shove, in the way that teenage girls do - her toward Erin. In a meeting alone between Erin and Maggie, Maggie knows that Erin has made a move, and now it's up to her to make the kiss happen. But, filled with self doubt, she can't make it happen. She can't be that vulnerable.
While Honor Girl is a memoir about first love, it is also, if peripherally about being gay. Maggie is pulled aside by the head counselor who starts wide, telling her that her parents could sue the camp for statutory rape if her relationship with Erin goes any farther. Circling in for her target, she tells Maggie that it's, "her job to make sure everyone feels safe" because camp is a place where "girls can be totally innocent and free, maybe for the last time in their lives." Maggie assures her that she does feel safe, to which the response is, "Everyone else needs to feel safe, too. From you. . . Don't ruin it for everyone." The brutality of that moment is hard to read, especially because I think most of us, most women, experienced a time in our adolescence when an adult betrayed, disappointed or backhandedly told us not to be ourselves and those words go deep.
Thrash bookends Honor Girl with an event that takes place two years after her summer with Erin, but seems to play itself out the same as it did at Camp Bellflower. As Johnson says wisely in her review, "If you don't let people know that they are wanted, they will go away. Love relationships are fragile opportunities. They need care and attention. They need those moments to happen." Honor Girl is a powerful, bittersweet reminder of this.
Source: Review Copy
It's pretty cool that, on the 200th anniversary of her birth, there have been three books (fiction, graphic novel and narrative non-fiction) published featuring Ada Lovelace. Ada Byron Lovelace is the person considered by many to be the inventor of computer programming and also the daughter of notorious romantic poet Lord Byron. She's also a wonderful role model in this age of GlodieBlox, STEM and Rosie Revere, Engineer. Happily, Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine by Laurie Wallmark and illustrated by April Chu, the third book featuring Ada Lovelace to be published this year, is a biographical picture book that is accessible to readers of all ages. Chu's illustrations are filled with life and movement (and Ada's loyal cat by her side for most of the book) and call to mind the work of Brian Selznick. Add to this the fact that Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine is published by Creston Books, a relatively new publisher dedicated to putting out a broad range of quality picture books - that are printed in the United States - and you have an absolutely gorgeous book in your hands! 
It seems perfectly fitting that a picture book biography of Ada Byron Lovelace be written by a teacher of computer science and illustrated by an architect. Wallmark focuses on aspects of Lovelace's life in a way that will appeal to young readers, beginning with the fact that, while her father was a famous writer, and "Ada was born into a world of poetry," it was "numbers, not words, that captured her imagination." She goes on to share that Ada's mother, who had a passion for geometry, was called the "Princess of Parallelograms." As a child, Ada was fascinated by birds and flight and, through a series of equations and observations, she builds a set of real wings.
Wallmark goes on to write of the case of measles that temporarily blinded and paralyzed Ada. Her full recovery took three years, but her mother was always at her bedside, keeping her mind sharp with mathematical problems. When Ada was ready, her mother hired Mary Fairfax Sommerville, the well known scientist and mathematician who, as Wallmark writes, "was living proof that girls could do math and do it well." It's hard to imagine a time in recent history when this needed to be proved and yet, 200 years later, there is still such a noticeable dearth of women in the sciences that newspaper articles are written about it, organizations and scholarships are created to reverse this and special "girl versions" of engineering toys are created to address this.
Through Sommerville, Ada makes new connections in the world of mathematics and science, including Charles Babbage, the man who originated the concept of the programmable computer. It was Ada Lovelace who, after poring over Babbage's thirty lab books filled with notes about his Analytical Engine, discovered that, without mathematical instructions, the machine would be a "useless pile of metal parts." Babbage never finished his Analytical Machine, so Lovelace never got to see her program run. But, as the final page of Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine tells us, more than "one hundred years beofre the invention of the modern computer, Ada had glimpsed the future and created a new profession - computer programming." What's more, Ada was not lost to the pages of history. There is a computer language named after her and it is used, most appropriately, to guide modern flying machines. I hope that Wallmark and Chu have another book about Lovelace in the works, one that will delve a bit deeper into the Analytical Machine itself, and possibly more about what Lovelace's adult life was like living as a lady mathematician in London in the 1850s.
Other books about Ada, or with Ada as an (anachronistic) character...
The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by Sydney Padua (review to come!)
Source: Review Copy
I was apprehensive about reviewing Fab Four Friends: The Boys Who Became the Beatles, a non-fiction narrative picture book about the Beatles. But, when I learned that it was written by Susanna Reich, author of the absolutely charming picture book about Julia Child's cat, Minette's Feast, I decided to give it a try. The Beatles are iconic while at the same time being, most likely, largely
Swan: The Life and Dance of Anna Pavlova is the first work of narrative non-fiction for Laurel Snyder, author of several picture books and middle grade novels. Illustrated by Julie Morstad, the cover of Swan: The Life and Dance of Anna Pavlova drew me in instantly, even though I never made it past rudimentary ballet classes as a very young child and the most I know about this Russian
The introduction for Untamed: The Wild Life of Jane Goodall by Anita Silvey begins by noting that Jane Goodall "has been chosen as the most recognized scientist in the Western world." Regardless of how accurate that statement is, the fact remains that Jane Goodall is still alive, has been working in her field for over 50 years and her subject is something that is almost universally appealing
Minette's Feast: The Delicious Story of Julia Child and Her Cat, written by Susanna Reich and illustrated by Amy June Bates is scrumptious! Susanna Reich clearly knows and loves her subject matter (both Julia Child and cats) and her author's note reveals a wonderful personal connection while the afterword, notes, glossary and pronunciation guide offer substance for readers who want to know more
By: Tanya,
on 4/22/2015
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Winner of the National Book Award, the Newbery Honor Medal (her third) and the Coretta Scott King Award for Authors, brown girl dreaming is worth every medal and more. Like the Newbery Medal winner this year, Kwame Alexander's Crossover, Woodson's book is a verse novel - two verse novels wining ALA awards in the same year! While Jacqueline Woodson's memoir in verse, brown girl dreaming, is
A Boy and a Jaguar, illustrated by Cátia Chien, is the moving memoir by Alan Rabinowitz of his childhood love of animals and the stuttering that shaped him and informed his life as an adult. Rabinowitz's story is told in an elegantly simple style and has an element of the almost-magical that reads like a fairy tale and Chien's illustrations, sometimes hazy and moody, sometimes brightly
You may know Greg Pizzoli from his fantastic picture books, but his highly readable, crazy fun first non-fiction picture book, Tricky Vic: The Impossibly True Story of The Man Who Sold The Eiffel Tower will knock your socks off. The story of Robert Miller and the brilliant way in which Pizzoli tells his story with words and pictures is superb. Apologies now for the frequent use of
Me, Frida, written by Amy Novesky and illustrated by David Diaz was originally published in hardcover in 2010 and is just now coming out in paperback. Kahlo's paintings are captivating and autobiographical in ways that sometimes overshadowed her accomplisments as an artist. The pain, tragedy and disappointments of her life that are the subject matter of much of her work seem like difficult
In Mary's Garden by Tina & Carson Kügler tells part of the life story of Wisconsin folk artist Mary Nohl, who passed away in 2001 at the age of 87. Readers will appreciate the story of a young woman pursuing a life of travel and art. At a time when most women were marrying and starting families, Mary chose to dedicate herself to creating found object sculptures and paintings, turning her
Becoming an elementary school librarian has changed the way that I read and think about children's books. Instead of reading to or imagining my own children reading the books I review, I now also think about my students and how they will receive and understand a book. Also, as a librarian, I can encourage (or insist) students read a book that they probably would never pick up on their own.
Ivan: The Remarkable True Story of the Shopping Mall Gorilla by Katherine ApplegateG. Brian Karas is an invaluable addition to the shelves and ideal companion to Applegate's 2013 Newbery Gold Medal winner, The One and Only Ivan. Written in free verse, The One and Only Ivan is one of a handful of Newbery winners that can be read and understood by younger readers, which is especially nice. Now,
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Wild Boy : The Real Life of the Savage of Aveyron, written by Mary Losure and illustrated by Timothy Basil Ering can be described as narrative non-fiction
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Bluffton: My Summers with Buster is the newest graphic novel from Matt Phelan. This is Phelan's third graphic novel, The Storm in the Barn and Around the World, being
First reviewed on 1/27/09. Bill Peet's picture books were a huge part of my childhood and that of my kids, thanks to my mother who made sure that we owned the complete works of Peet's long career. His picture books have detailed stories that you don't find on the shelves anymore - they are almost too long to read at story time and almost qualify as short stories in some cases. Peet's Newbery
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There are a handful of decent series of biographies for kids second through fourth grade reading level and they
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Vision of Beauty : The Story of Sarah Breedlove Walker by Kathryn Lasky, illustrated by Nneka Bennet is another fantastic
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Primates: The Fearless Science of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey and Biruté Galdikas is written by Jim Ottaviano, who's very cool website, G.T. Labs, has the tagline, "
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The cover art alone for Jemmy Button by Jennifer Uman and Valerio Vidali made me want to read this book, regardless of what it is about. Everything about it made
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There are a handful of decent series of biographies for kids second through fourth grade reading level and they
Cleopatra : Queen of Egypt is the latest in the Historical Notebooks series put out by Templar Press, an imprint of Candlewick Press, the great publishing house that brought us the wonderful Ologies series, which most often feature fantasy themes, but also cover topics like Pirates, Spies, Egypt, and the ocean, making them great companions to the Historical Notebooks. Other books in this
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I really need to dig out my copy and actually read it now! Thanks for the review. Funny, I don't remember his books from my childhood (in the late 60s and early 70s).<BR/><BR/>I also need to go see an exhibition of his illustrations for his books at the Art Institute in Chicago: http://www.artic.edu/aic/exhibitions/exhibition/peet If you get to Chicago before May 24th, you should go see it.
Wow! Thanks for the link to the Art Institute of Chicago! That is amazing that they are doing a retrospective of his art. I love that museum, but sadly, don't think I'll be there before it ends. Maybe it will travel. <BR/><BR/>Strangely enough, my shabby local library has an original Peet drawing of Droofus that I have often thought about stealing, then making an anonymous cash donation to
We got this book because my 3 year old saw "Katie Caboose" on the cover. He wanted us to read it to him, and he made it through a few pages, but after he went to bed my husband and I kept reading for ourselves. It is a really interesting story and told in an interesting way. Plus, we really love Peet's illustrations.
Thanks SO MUCH for this comment! I am greatly cheered to know that a)You are reading Peet to your son and he recognizes Katie Caboose and b) That you read Peet's autobiography and appreciated it as much as I do!