Flamer by Mike Curato
The simplicity of Flamer is deceptive. There is a lot going on within an image driven story. The text is realistic, and could be from the year 1995 (when the book is set) or today. The black and white illustrations help the story stay the main focus, and the use of fire and the color red is telling. Red is a strong plot mover/plot point as the red color and images becomes its own character. There is even the use of fire and it too becomes its […]
Aubrey McKee by Alex Pugsley
cbr15bingo North America Aubrey is the protagonist in this coming of age tale, set in the early ‘70s. I was definitely getting Catcher in the Rye vibes, I have to admit. The timing isn’t all that far off, only about a decade or so later, but the setting is a far grittier port city than New York ever was – Halifax, Nova Scotia. Aubrey and his friends wander through their high school years with probably more drugs and more female members of the pack but […]
Fearbook Club by Richard Ashely Hamilton
I read R. L. Stine (Fear Street), Christopher Pike, Ritchie Cusick, etc, as a teen. Those teen thriller/horror stories that were fun, not overly serious, bit of romance, but had a bit of ghosts and ghouls and always a climax where the villains are unmasked (sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively). And when I was reading Fearbook Club, I figured this must be the younger versions of those authors. Maybe a more humorous Goosebumps. Richard Ashely Hamilton made a story that was (as I said) a fun […]
Tin Man by Justin Madson
I was looking at some online reader copies the other day. I found one by Justin Madson. And I then saw they had a first book, Tin Man. Or maybe it started another way. I am not sure, because I do not remember even seeing the book that made me want to request this book from my library. But regardless of how it happened to be found, I found myself with a copy of the Tin Man graphic novel. When reading about it, I was […]
Song After Song: The Musical Life of Julie Andrews by Julie Hedlund
Who has not watched Disney’s 1960s Mary Poppins? Or Sound of Music? And who of us did not want to sing like Julie Andrews? Well, even though it sounds like she popped out of the womb doing these kind of things, her life was anything but simple. First, her mother traveled (she was a piano player) and was away a lot. Second, her parents would divorce, and she would eventually be sent to live with her mother and stepfather in war torn London. And then […]
Frontera by Julio Anta
When I first picked up the reader copy of Frontera, even having seen it advertised in multiple newsletters and as an online reader copy, I only noticed the kid on the front cover. I missed the ghost figure in the back. The colors of this cover I am assuming are meant to represent the desert our narrator is traveling through, but it washes out the man in the background. However, this is an interesting design choice as this character is an interesting piece of the […]
