Diary of a Spider
By Doreen Cronin, pictures by Harry Bliss
Joanna Cotler/HarperCollins, $15.99
Ages 5-8 years
The endpapers of this book look like a scrap-book of this little spider, including a photo with a caption that reads: “My favorite book, Charlotte’s Web.” As Doreen Cronin and Harry Bliss did in their earlier Worm diary, they’ve given us a frank and open narrative voice, that of a young spider who’s even bold enough to have a fly for a friend. “Grandpa says that in his day, flies and spiders did not get along.” (Grandpa is an engaging minor character here.) Among the little spider’s list of fears, “Daddy Longlegs,” “Vacuums” and “People with big feet.” Occasionally he also sleeps over at Worm’s house. “I hope they don’t have leaves and rotten tomatoes for dinner again.” You get the feel.
Anne Frank
By Josephine Poole, illustrated by Angela Barrett
Knopf, $17.95
Ages 7-9 years
Readers too young for reading Anne’s Frank’s “Diary” have often heard older friends discussing it, and Josephine Poole’s aim here was to give an overview for younger children of who Frank was and the forces that were taking freedom from her family’s life. There’s a crisp sense of Anne as a very particular girl, not an idealized one. There’s no sweetening up of the anti-Semitism or of Adolf Hitler’s effect on her world, but we see what a young girl might have seen of the larger picture–worried parents, for instance, and constrictions on her activities. Angela Barrett’s illustrations are brilliantly sad. They add great specificity of detail, to help a young reader see this threatened world.
The Journey That Saved Curious George
By Louise Borden, illustrated by Allan Drummond
Houghton Mifflin, $17
Ages 8-12 years
H.A. Rey and his wife, Margret, fled from Paris on bicycles in June 1940. Using this central fact, Louise Borden tells two fascinating and overlapping stories. Who was the author of “Curious George”? And what was life like in South America and Europe in the 1930s and ’40s, dominated by the war? This is not the landscape of broad national statistics but of human-size events, like finding the bicycles, loading them, cycling 48 kilometers the first day out of Paris and really enjoying the nights when they could sleep in a real bed or have a bath. And that curious little monkey? We’re following his story from their early Brazilian years to 1941, when “Curious George” was published in New York. Dense coverage of how writers really write and people really live, in whatever times are given them.
The Mirror of Fire and Dreaming
By Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Roaring Brook, $16.95
Ages 10-14 years
An earlier book, “The Conch Bearer,” started in contemporary India and ended in a remote valley of healers and seers, accessible only to travelers with special powers. Beginning in that valley, Anand and Nish, the boy and girl from that earlier book, now begin a journey through time itself, entering events that happened nearby 300 years earlier. They defeat an onslaught on the sacred Conch (a magical object) by forces of evil. Fortunately, the Conch has a sharp, edgy and sometimes humorous voice, so that the fantasy events, deftly plotted as they are, don’t get overpoweringly grand or remote from these two young people.
Baby Brains Superstar
By Simon James
Candlewick, $15.99
Ages 4-8 years
Simon James is having fun here, not only with parents trying to wedge musical training into their prenatal plan–Mom does classical, Dad does rock ‘n’ roll–but also with the way our culture creates and idolizes its musical stars. The pictures are the heart of the hilarity, as we see Baby Brains composing in his crib, or getting “his hair done”–in this case, he has just one hair to have “done.” And he’s a good kid: He gets his parents free tickets for the big concert. Still, at the key moment, his new song comes out “W-W-Where’s my m-m-mommy?” Brings a large, cheering audience into the drama of raising children, rocks stars or no.
