Best children’s and YA books for March
|
Version 0 of 1. A little red car, a patient mother and little boy asking the same question over and over: The setup of Are We There Yet? (Chronicle, ages 2-6) may sound as familiar as its title. But in Nina Laden and Adam McCauley’s imaginative book, a routine car ride turns wildly unexpected. A boy with all the prickly insouciance of a middle-schooler buckles up for a trip to Grandma’s with his mother. Before they get to the end of the driveway, the boy asks, “Are we there yet?” The answer — “no” — becomes cosmically funny as the road unwinds before them through some surreal and astonishing landscapes. Interstates give way to interstellar byways. McCauley’s illustrations are bold and simple and filled with recurring details to discover even after the story ends. “How was your trip?” asks the grandmother when they arrive at last, back on Earth. “Boring,” is the boy’s laconic response. But the question he asks in a cartoon dialogue bubble on the endpapers tells a different story: “Can we do it again?” Readers will feel the same way. — Kathie Meizner Minamoto Yoshitsune’s life was rather nasty, brutish and short, but it makes for an exciting children’s book. Samurai Rising (Charlesbridge, ages 12 and up), by Pamela S. Turner and illustrator Gareth Hinds, boldly shows how a scrawny teenager raised in a monastery became one of history’s legendary samurai. Inspired by stories about his heroic ancestors and a sense of vengeance toward the two most powerful men in Japan, Yoshitsune built a loyal crew, including a warrior monk and a mountain bandit. They helped him lead rebel forces to several astounding victories. Turner skillfully uses some modern-day analogies, but her great accomplishment is to immerse readers in 12th-century Japan in all of its gore and glory. Hinds’s stunning, digitally enhanced brush-and-ink illustrations capture a few quiet contemplative scenes but, more often, the fierce movement of the attacks and counterattacks that made up a samurai’s life. — Abby McGanney Nolan Ruta Sepetys’s riveting novel Salt to the Sea (Philomel, ages 12 and up) chronicles a harrowing wartime journey. In the final months of the Nazi regime, three people — Joana, a young Lithuanian nurse; Emilia, a Polish teenager; and Florian, a Prussian art preservationist — are fleeing Germany together. As with thousands of others, they are desperately seeking safe passage, perhaps to the United States, on one of the German ships conscripted for this purpose: the Wilhelm Gustloff. Can they trust one another? Their terrible losses and secrets make them wary. When they reach the ship, they must deal with Alfred, a punctilious Nazi soldier, and a cruise ship dangerously over capacity. Suspense builds as Sepetys alternates short chapters from the perspectives of each of these characters and slowly reveals their fears and entangled fates. As she did in her first novel, “Between Shades of Gray,” Sepetys skillfully weaves history into her story, here grounding her nuanced characters in the events of winter 1945. Vivid details punctuate the spare prose: a starving man eating a candle, the “crippled doors” of looted homes. But there are moments of grace and camaraderie, too. This powerful novel serves as a haunting reminder of an almost-forgotten disaster and the resilience of the human spirit. — Mary Quattlebaum |