Book Review: Tankborn

The girl in the bubble.

I admired Karen Sandler's sci-fi novel Tankborn more than loved it. Tankborn is one of a debut line of novels published by Tu Books, a new publisher specializing in fantasy, sci-fi, and mystery books for kids, devoted to showcasing characters and authors of color. (I'll also be reviewing Tu's Galaxy Games in coming weeks).

And Tankborn foregrounds race matters: The futuristic society on the Earth colony planet Loka is as rigidly stratified as colonial India. The heroine, Kayla, and her best friend Mishalla, come from a lower caste called GENs, genetically engineered, literally untouchable slaves. The upper classes puppeteer the GENs as they please, assigning them to jobs, uploading and downloading data into their annexed brains. Upper class Highborns have light brown skin and black hair; the Lowborns and GENs are a rainbow ranging from very dark to red-haired and green eyed, or, in Kayla's case, piebald.

Sandler: dipping her hoof
into Y/A

High Moral Stakes
Both heroines get their class-consciousness raised, of course, and so does Kayla's Highborn boyfriend.

Book Review: Julie of the Wolves, Reissued

One of "Most Frequently Challenged" 
Kid's Classics, Now an eBook

Open Road Integrated Media has reissued Julie of the Wolves as an eBook. Were books just better in the olden days? Nah, probably not. But rereading Julie after all these years (it was first published in 1972, by Harper and Row, and was championed by one of my heroes in the book biz, editor Ursula Nordstrom), it might seem that way. In fact, Nordstrom commissioned Julie after a single brief meeting with author Jean Craighead George. In George's memory:

[Nordstrom] was bent over her desk in concentration, her gray hair grooved where her fingers had pressed. Hearing us, she turned around and her penetrating eyes met mine head on. She nodded to say she knew who I was and why I was there.
"I want to write a book," I said, "about an Eskimo girl who is lost on the Arctic tundra. She survives by communicating with a pack of wolves in their own language."
"Will it be accurate?"
"Yes."
"I'll write you up your contract and advance now."

Monday Book Review: A Bunny Caper

The bulk of my reading is middle grade, YA, and adult, but getting the galleys for Polly Horvath's Mr. and Mrs Bunny--Detectives Extraordinaire! made my week, and I'm not even exaggerating. I haven't howled through a book this way since David Sedaris's Naked. And to think it was a chapter book that left me gasping! Mr. and Mrs. Bunny is targeting two completely different demographics, I suspect: seven- to ten-year-olds, and the adults reading to them. The book is due out February 2012, but you can pre-order it now from Amazon. Do it now so you don't forget.

The under-ten crowd might miss the satire (New Age parents and chain restaurants come in for a lot of goosing; and couples will recognize themselves in the happily married, if long-suffering, Bunnies). But the non-stop silliness is equal opportunity fun. Madeline's parents have been kidnapped by foxes running a rabbit by-products factory; she hires Mr. and Mrs. Bunny to track them down. Half the joke is that Mr. and Mrs. Bunny--who wear fedoras and drive a Smart car--are kindly but incompetent. When a very stupid marmot (named The Marmot) is added to the mix the tangles increase exponentially.

The Marmot Question
Just how stupid is that marmot? Well, for starters, he uses a card printed with a precious secret code to wipe his bottom, then flushes it down the toilet. Horvath knows how to take a good joke and keep drawing it out. The Marmot asks Madeline to call him "The," his first name, but Madeline finds this impossibly confusing. "Listen," she says, "can I call you something else? Don't you have a nickname?"