Graphic novels for the reluctant early reader

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Though I never went through a horse phase myself, and so far my kids haven't caught that bug, your horse book recommendations may be the beginning of a new interest in our house. I've requested a few from the library, and the way Eleanor is burning through books these days, I'm pretty sure I'll be requesting more.

Today's reader question comes from Jean, the mom of Eleanor's good friend Casey. During a recent playdate, Jean and I got to talking about our kids' experiences with reading. Casey (also in 2nd grade) is reading some, but it's been a bit of a struggle for her, and she doesn't generally pick up books on her own. Here's Jean:

I think she's resistant to reading on her own for a couple of reasons. 1) You've known Casey since she was 2. She is a very energetic kid. Running around and playing active games is when she is happiest. So she's not a natural bookworm....2) Something you said at your house really resonated with me and it makes sense for Casey: she LOVES when we read to her, which we do every day. And we'll read The Wizard of Oz, or Harry Potter, Magic Treehouse, Jenny and the Cat Club. Books that are (with the exception of maybe the Magic Treehouse books) well beyond her level. She likes a good story, but can't read at the level of a good story yet.

Jean would like to find books that Casey really wants to read:

She loves a good battle, especially when the good guy pulls through at the end. She loves adventures and mystery. She's not a fan of anything with princesses or those kind of stories (unless, perhaps, if the princess is wielding a sword). But she loves magic. And cats, as you know. Anything with cats....We are trying not to force it too much because she'll come into it in her own time. But it would be great to have books around that she may just want to pick up on her own!

Given my kids' recent reading history, it should come as no surprise to anyone that I recommended Casey and Jean check out some graphic novels. Graphic novels have bridged a gap for us, allowing for a variety of different kinds of reading. For both Isabel (who can read very few words, but will pore over pictures for hours on her own) and Eleanor (who reads all the words and doesn't dwell as much on the pictures, but enjoys them), they encourage an independent reading experience, while still making room for reading together.

With this in mind, I scoured our posts and created a new page to add over there on the right: a list of all the graphic novels we've discussed on the blog, by theme and by appropriate age range.

Here are a few I think Casey would love, many with links to previous blogs we've written about them:

Rapunzel's Revenge, by Shannon and Dean Hale. This is the present we've bought for Casey's upcoming birthday: Rapunzel reimagined as an active, braid-whipping heroine. She's awesome and has a sense of humor, and the way the Hales play with the original story is great fun.

Zita the Spacegirl, by Ben Hatke. Zita is a girl from earth whose curiosity and impulsiveness cause first her best friend (a quiet boy named Joseph) and then Zita herself to shoot off to another galaxy. Zita has to find and rescue Joseph, teaming up with a ragtag bunch of aliens and robots. There's a real emotional punch here, too. Sequels Legends of Zita the Spacegirl and The Return of Zita the Spacegirl are also excellent.

Dragon Girl: The Secret Valley, by Jeff Weigel. Alanna, the 11-year-old heroine, finds and protects a nest of baby dragons, dressing up as a dragon herself so that they won't become accustomed to humans and be in later danger. Alanna is another active, strong heroine -- I think Casey would like her. There are clearly more Dragon Girl books coming, but this is the only one out so far.

Ottoline and the Yellow Cat (and other Ottoline books), by Chris Riddell. Though the yellow cat in the first title turns out to be a bit of a villain (sorry, Casey!), these books are quirky and tremendous fun. They contain terrific characters, both human and animal, and each has a not-scary mystery as a central part of the plot. Strictly speaking, I suppose they are only half graphic novel -- many of the pages contain typed text as well as comic book-style illustration.

Guinea Pig, Pet Shop Private Eye, by Colleen AF Venable and Stephanie Yue. All the characters here are animals who live in a pet shop, where Sasspants (the guinea pig of the title) and her sidekick, Hamisher the hamster, solve mild, funny mysteries. In Book #5, Raining Cats and Detectives, the plot involves the disappearance of a large, sleepy cat. Bonus: if Casey likes these, there are a bunch of them.



This week, we discovered Cleopatra in Space, by Mike Maihack. The premise: 15-year-old Cleopatra, who will grow up to be ruler of Egypt, touches a magic tablet and is zapped into the space-age future. It turns out that the future is governed by highly intelligent talking cats (!), who tell her the galaxy is in great danger, and a prophesy says that Cleopatra will come to save them all. In this telling, Cleopatra is uninterested in schoolwork, but highly energetic and a terrific fighter. Like many of the other heroines mentioned here, she is impulsive and stubborn, but ultimately good-hearted. There's not as much emotional depth here as in Zita the Spacegirl or Dragon Girl, and some of the vocabulary in the expository parts feels a little dry/advanced for kids, but overall it's a fun read.

For an early-reader taste of several of the big names in contemporary graphic novels, try Comics Squad: Recess! This is an anthology of eight stories, each centered around something that happens at school recess. It includes a story from Gene Luen Yang (whose American Born Chinese is awesome but won't be appropriate reading for our kids for several years); a story starring Babymouse, by Jennifer L. Holm and Matthew Holm; a story starring Lunch Lady, by Jarrett J. Krosoczka; a story by Raina Telgemeier (whose Smile and Drama will be accessible to our kids in just a few years), and more.

Both of the previous books, along with Dragon Girl, were recommended to us by Holly, frequent guest blogger and mom of Eleanor's best friend Ian. Another of Ian's favorites which has become a hit in our house is the odd little series Tiny Titans, by Art Baltazar and Franco Aureliani. In it, DC Comics characters appear as elementary school-age kids, with appropriately kid-friendly plots. Perhaps "plots" is too strong a word: most of the stories are 2-4 pages long, short sketches, often with punchlines. I'll confess I'm not captivated by them, but Ian, Eleanor, and Isabel certainly are.

I'll close with recommendations for two long, intense series, and another great web resource.

Everything you say about Casey's love of a good battle, magic, and princesses only if they are sword-wielding makes me think she might love Jeff Smith's Bone books. This is the series that completely obsessed Isabel for several months. They are wild, wonderful books, which our entire family ended up reading several times through. Fair warning: the action, especially in the last couple of books, gets violent, and a few characters you come to care about deeply don't survive (though all the main ones do). Characters include the Bone cousins (strange rounded little white people), the sweet and ultimately fighting awesome secret princess Thorn, her tough cow-racing Gran'ma Ben, and a couple of rat creatures whose attempts to chase Fone Bone down are a fabulous excuse for slapstick. Try the first book: Out from Boneville.

The Amulet series, by Kazu Kibuishi, is another captivating read. Where Bone starts on the mellow side and gets progressively darker, Amulet leads with what I find to be its darkest episode.

In Book One: The Stonekeeper, Emily and Navin's father is killed in a car accident from which Emily and her mother escape. Mom, Emily, and Navin move to an old creepy family house, which turns out to contain all kinds of secrets left by Emily's great-grandfather. The greatest of these is the stone bequeathed to Emily: she becomes a Stonekeeper, possessed of great power but unsure whether the force animating the stone is good or bad. As if their father's death wasn't bad enough, Mom is kidnapped by a scary alien thing, and Emily and Navin set out into another world to rescue her.

The ensuing story (which covers six books so far, and isn't over yet) contains a wide variety of animal and robot characters, elves, both good and evil, and people who seem to be real but turn out to be animated by magic. The visuals are spectacular.

Finally, if this isn't enough for you, check out the graphic novel recommendations at A Mighty Girl (which is a pretty great website for other kinds of books, too).

And to think, back in my day we subsisted on Archie comics! Times have changed for the better.

Love, Annie

Grabbing life by the braids

Dear Aunt Debbie,

I hope your visit with John Muth to see the baby panda at the National Zoo went well yesterday -- I can't wait to hear about it! Our wildlife sightings recently have been limited to some chilly squirrels and pigeons, and we're looking forward to spring.

The graphic novel obsession in our house continues unabated, and I'm feeling extremely lucky to be raising kids at such an amazing time in the explosion of the form. I remember the hours I spent with book after book of Archie comics, which I loved despite the bad jokes and reductive gender stereotypes. Instead of reading about the good girl (Betty) and bad girl (Veronica) fighting over Archie's attention, my daughters have spent the last couple of weeks getting to know the active, awesome heroine of Rapunzel's Revenge, by Shannon and Dean Hale.

Our friend and fabulous YA and middle-grade author Tui Sutherland recommended the book in a recent comment on the blog. It's a graphic novel retooling of the classic Rapunzel story, set in an alternate world with a Wild West flavor. In this version, Mother Gothel is a slave-driving overlord who uses "growth magic" to keep the countryside around her green oasis barren and forces locals to work in her mines under dangerous conditions. The growth magic is also responsible for the incredible length of Rapunzel's hair. Rapunzel discovers her true parentage at age 12 (her real mother is one of Mother Gothel's mine workers), and Gothel imprisons her in a tiny room at the top of a giant tree. There's a palpable sense of the difficulty of Rapunzel's solitary confinement, but she uses it to get herself in shape:

At age 16, she breaks herself out of the tower room and goes adventuring, planning to save her mother and defeat Gothel. Rapunzel teams up with the crafty but somewhat hapless Jack (of beanstalk fame). Their relationship is decidedly one of equals: there's mutual respect along with the budding romance, and they work together well to trick and fight their way to a satisfying ending. Rapunzel provides the moral center, expecting the best from people and urging Jack to give up stealing; Jack watches Rapunzel's fighting skills with admiration, and proves to be a quick thinker even when outgunned. A word about guns: as Tui noted in her comment, there are a number of them in the book (Wild West and all that). However, our heroes go farther than not using guns themselves: they actively remove guns from their opponents, Rapunzel by using her braids as a lasso and a whip:

It's pretty badass, in a kid-appropriate way.

Calamity Jack is a worthy sequel. This one is narrated by Jack, and takes place in the city of Shyport, a steampunk world filled with gadgets, floating houses, evil giants, and pixies.

We get Jack's backstory: he's a petty thief, a disappointment to his widowed mother, with a propensity for tricks that don't quite work. He's also Native American, a fact that is woven in thoughtfully but not too heavy-handedly via illustrations and a few references to an inherited war band and a fringed jacket of his father's.  The story here involves Jack and Rapunzel, along with a couple of other good guys, teaming up to fight the giant Blunderboar. (Rapunzel's hair was shorn at the end of the previous book, but she still keeps her braids coiled at her waist as weapons. Another detail I love: in both books, Rapunzel trades her dress for an outfit with pants, the better to climb buildings, leap over rocks, and slingshot herself towards her opponents.) Blunderboar has leveraged the threat of giant ant-people to take control of the city. Our heroes solve a mystery and save the populace, again as equal partners. And my daughters get another awesome heroine to tuck into the pantheon they're creating for themselves.

Love, Annie

Great and ordinary silliness

Dear Aunt Debbie,

For Eleanor's birthday this year, I went old-school to find some good read-alouds. We've just started a book I remember my parents reading aloud to me and Michael, which my mom remembers your parents reading aloud to her and to you: The Peterkin Papers, by Lucretia P. Hale.

The Peterkins are a sublimely silly family. There are Mr. and Mrs. Peterkin, their older children Agamemnon, Elizabeth Eliza, and Solomon John, and the unnamed "little boys" (are there two of them? three? it's not quite clear, as they always speak and move together). In each of the short stories in the collection, the Peterkins get into a small ordinary difficulty, and don't have the sense to figure a way out of it by themselves. In most of the stories, their problems are solved when they ask advice of "the lady from Philadelphia," who is often visiting in a house down the street. She is a paragon of common sense, and offers up the basic solutions the Peterkins are lacking.

The stories which stuck with me in greatest detail are among the first in the book. In "The Lady Who Put Salt in Her Coffee," Mrs. Peterkin puts salt in her coffee instead of sugar. She can't drink it, of course, and the family goes all out to help her find a way to fix it. The whole pile of them troop over to fetch the chemist (who is an amateur alchemist, and is trying to convince his wife to give him her gold wedding ring to melt down for his experiments) and bring him for a house call:

First he looked at the coffee, and then stirred it. Then he put in a little chlorate of potassium, and the family tried it all round, but it tasted no better. Then he stirred in a little bichlorate of magnesia. But Mrs. Peterkin didn't like that. Then he added some tartaric acid and some hypersulphate of lime. But no; it was no better. "I have it!" exclaimed the chemist, -- "a little ammonia is just the thing!" No, it wasn't the thing at all.

After the failure of the chemist, the family goes to fetch the herb-woman:

First she put in a little hop for the bitter. Mrs. Peterkin said it tasted like hop-tea, and not at all like coffee. Then she tried a little flagroot and snakeroot, then some spruce gum, and some caraway and some dill, some rue and rosemary, some sweet marjoram and sour, some oppermint and sappermint, a little spearmint and peppermint, some wild thyme, and some of the other tame time, some tansy and basil, and catnip and valerian, and sassafras, ginger, and pennyroyal. The children tasted after each mixture, but made up dreadful faces. Mrs. Peterkin tasted, and did the same. The more the old woman stirred, and the more she put in, the worse it all seemed to taste.

So the old woman shook her head, and muttered a few words, and said she must go. She believed the coffee was bewitched.

Finally, in desperation, Elizabeth Eliza goes to ask the advice of the lady from Philadelphia. Her response: "Why doesn't your mother make a fresh cup of coffee?" The children shout with joy, Elizabeth Eliza wonders, "Why didn't we think of that?" and the day is saved.

In "About Elizabeth Eliza's Piano," the piano-movers set up the new instrument with the keyboard facing the wall, and Elizabeth Eliza has to sit out on the piazza to play it through the open window, which becomes difficult when the weather gets cold. (This is the picture on the cover of the book.) The lady from Philadelphia triumphs again, asking, "But why don't you turn the piano round?"

One of the joys of reading The Peterkin Papers aloud with children is that a 4-year-old and a 7-year-old can see the solutions to these problems quite easily, and enjoy calling them out before the lady from Philadelphia gets involved.

The stories in The Peterkin Papers were first published in magazine form in the 1860s and 1870s. They feel like magazine stories: episodic, quite short (so good for read-alouds at bedtime!), a little formulaic in a nice way. Most of the stories involve lists of items (see the chemicals and herbs above), and all of them include a moment where the little boys have to put on their india-rubber boots to go fetch someone or something. The general good nature of everyone involved is totally pleasing, as is the absolute ordinariness of the problems they run into.  They're a great precursor to books like The Stupids.

Eleanor is loving them, and Isabel, in spite of her continued protestations against chapter books, is taken by the stories too. I can see "the lady from Philadelphia" becoming a family literary reference for us as it did in my own childhood.

Love, Annie