of the Center for Children's Books
2002 Blue Ribbon Dissents
Unanimity and consent are all very well and good, but sometimes pure passion needs
its own outlet. I'm speaking, of course, of the passion for a particular title,
a title that didn't manage to make the Blue Ribbons list but nonetheless aroused
in its admirer the desire to praise, to advocate, or maybe even to whine a little.
Here, then, are our consolation prizes, our chance to appeal a book's case to
the world: our 2002 Blue Ribbon Dissents.
--Deborah Stevenson, Editor
- Honey, Elizabeth. Remote Man. Knopf. Gr. 6-10 (October)
Remote Man is the online moniker of thirteen-year-old Ned, an Australian computer geek with a passion for reptiles, a nascent interest in peers and other humans, and a line on an international endangered/exotic animal-smuggling operation. This pomo James Bond thriller features a guerilla International Wildlife Federation that crosses borders and time zones via the internet to thwart the cold-eyed thieves who capture and merchandise wild animals to the highest bidder. Honey skillfully relates the continual interplay between face-to-face and virtual reality, as an informal network of teens from Australia, Jamaica, France, and the U.S.A engineer the downfall of the smugglers and return a rare python to its native Australian outback habitat.The story is told in fifty short and snappy chapters (whose titles include "Revenge with a Vengeance," "Dancing at Starbucks," "Mom dot com," and "E-mail and the Detectives"). The text is an intriguing pastiche of texts: traditional book text, expressive and misspelled email and chatroom texts, newspaper articles, a page from Ned's passport, computer screen displays, line drawings, handwriting, and icons.
The pace is relentless and the pages nearly turn themselves, as readers accompany Ned and his friends on a chase that takes them to outback Australia, middle-class Massachusetts suburbia, a French castle, the hilly terrain of Jamaica, and a Manhattan townhouse filled with endangered animal skeletons. As with James Bond, the readers never doubt the ultimate success of the team's mission, but the unwinding of their tale (including a final elaborate and remarkably believeable sting operation) makes this slalom ride of an adventure one that readers will not want to miss.
--Christine Jenkins, Reviewer
- Oates, Joyce Carol. Big Mouth and Ugly Girl.
HarperCollins. Gr. 7-12 (June)
Often, when adult writers turn to younger readers, they seem either to find condescension irresistible or to bring with them the baggage of adult success that they're unable to let go of in order to write for a new audience. In Big Mouth and Ugly Girl, Joyce Carol Oates avoids both these pitfalls, writing with clarity, sympathy, and realism about her protagonists. It's noteworthy also in what that realism's about: Oates takes a currently relevant topic, school violence, and moves beyond the close-focused problem novels that explore the lives of the troubled, instead exploring the milieu that fear of such situations has created. Her Big Mouth--Matt, the popular junior whose life is destroyed when he's accused of plotting against the school--is heartbreakingly authentic, down to his desperate, ill-conceived humor about his situation, but it's even more the story of Ugly Girl, Ursula Riggs, who moves from her determined and aggressive disinterest in the world and its opinions to truly caring for Matt. While there may be more things to fear than fear itself, that reactive fear can be as destructive as its object, and protection can exact a very high price indeed. That reality may not be as easy to describe or convey as the more concrete forms of danger, but it's one young people, like the rest of us, must live with; there's true brilliance in Oates' evocation of this often-unconsidered threat and of the human bond her hero and heroine find in the face of it.--Deborah Stevenson, Editor
- Waring, Richard. Hungry Hen; illus. by Caroline
Jayne Church. HarperCollins. 3-6 yrs (March)
Maybe it's the potato-shaped chicken staring at me from the cover. Maybe it's the bony fox getting hungrier and hungrier as he waits for the chicken to eat more and more and get bigger and bigger. Or maybe it's the ending that surprises both those characters and me, too! How can I count the ways this book appeals to the three-year-old in all of us--including three-year-olds? Wide open spaces feature a few large, black-outlined figures per spread, which look great from a group distance and are backgrounded by satisfyingly saturated colors on textured paper. Into a book about waiting, you couldn't pack much more suspended motion until the final climactic race toward confrontation: "He ran faster and faster, straight down the hill, through the farm, and crashed through the window, into the hen's house." This is oral justice at its most basic, and the cheerfully spare text begs to be read aloud with dramatic nuance. The total effect is unadulterated fun . . . from a non-fox point of view.--Betsy Hearne, Consulting Editor
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