Ten summer reading picks to captivate kids of all ages
Pools, schools and scares — we’ve got page-turners in every genre for the young people in your life
Swim or read? What’s best for summer days? Cartoonist Gary Clement brings both together in his splashy, exuberant picture book illustrating the song Swimming, Swimming( Groundwood, 32 pages, $18.95, ages 3-5) — the next best thing to jumping into the community pool.
Aswim-crazy boy meets up with friends to spend the day at the pool, goofing off with “breast stroke, side stroke, fancy diving too” and finally heading home, hungry, tired and sated with laughter and swimming. Clement limits himself to the words of the traditional song, but in illustrations follows every stage of this swimming outing — loading the backpack, showering in the change room, leaping into water crowded with all kinds of swimmers. Character and detail abound in the pool’s population and in the watery panache of the kids.
Pool, by JiHyeon Lee (Chronicle, 32 pages, $22.99, ages 3-6), evokes the mysterious, fantastical possibilities of the local pool. A timid boy approaches a pool stuffed with boisterous swimmers and swim-toys. To escape, he dives deep beneath them, where he encounters only one other swimmer. Together they explore a strange, delicate underwater world and its inhabitants. Are these creatures real? Are they imaginary? In this dreamlike story it doesn’t seem important to know.
Lee’s light colours and big, empty spaces make the very silence of this underwater world — and the children’s growing friendship — visible. Even tiny creatures take on importance in all that blue space. An exceptional wordless picture book.
Swimming also features in Marie-Louise Gay and David Homel’s The Traveling Circus (Groundwood, 143 pages, $15.95, ages 7-10), fourth in the series begun with Travels With my Family. But not only swimming’s in store for Charlie and Max, because this summer their parents take them to meet old friends in Croatia. This is the trip, Charlie says, “where we visited an island with no vowels, stumbled across awar-torn village and met the mysterious hermit of Vrgada . . .. . . where Max and I almost spent our vacation in prison . . . where Max got lost at least twice, almost drowned once and was nearly captured by a Minotaur.” And that’s only the beginning.
Charlie’s good-humoured annoyance with his parents, his quick-paced storytelling and awareness of matters both serious and comical give this verve and depth. Excellent middle-grade fare.
Astrid Lindgren’s Seacrow Island (NYRB, 245 pages, $21.50, ages 6-11), newly reissued (first published in 1964), is stuffed with quirky, captivating island escapades and the heady, wonderful atmosphere of summer. The Melkerson family rents a leaky house on the outermost island in the Stockholm archipelago. Here older sister (and surrogate mother) Malin is pursued by young men from nearby islands, brothers Niklas and Johan get lost in the fog and younger brother Pelle longs for a pet more satisfying than the needy seal his friend Tjorven has adopted. Melker, their penurious writer father, has his adventures with home maintenance. This is Lindgren’s best family story, with sharply drawn characters and a summer-clear sense of sea and island.
But for those who wish to escape far beyond the Baltic Sea in the 1960s, there’s S.E. Grove’s fantasy The Glass Sentence (Puffin, 489 pages, $10.99, ages 9-14), new in paperback, with its sequel, The Golden Specific to be released in mid-July. Grove takes us to an alternate North America in a very fictional1891, a time in which continents have been thrown into different time periods by a “Great Disruption” years ago. Sophia’s Uncle Shadrack is a famous “cartologer” and reader of maps. When he’s kidnapped, Sophia and her friend Theo travel to Theo’s home country, the Baldlands, to get help from one of Shadrack’s old friends. As quest and road trip this has plenty of action and adventure, but it’s Grove’s reimagined landscape, timescape and especially, maps, that compel interest. Almost anything can be a map here — even an onion.
In haunting, eerie Cuckoo Song (Amulet, 409 pages, $19.95, ages 12 and up), Frances Hardinge reimagines Britain in the 1920s. Triss is recovering from almost drowning — or is she Triss? Her memo- ries are scrambled and she has an insatiable appetite — for her old dolls, trinkets and clothes, which she devours with raging ferocity. Slowly, Triss learns who and what she really is and what her putative father gave up in exchange for his brilliant accomplishments as a civil engineer. Hardinge weaves together a changeling tale, old fairy lore and a recovery story of postwar Britain, her earthy similes and poetic flourishes animating even the most humdrum elements of the setting.
There’s fear aplenty in Allan Stratton’s The Dogs (Scholastic, 276 pages, $19.99, ages 11 and up), and a tantalizingly uncertain element of the supernatural. Stratton’s story begins with all too realistic events — Cameron and his mother are on the run to yet another obscure rental, trying to escape Cameron’s abusive father. But Cameron learns that the new house has its own history and mystery of abuse and even murder. Advised by a ghostly boy, he sets out to resolve unanswered questions. Cameron’s research via newspaper archives, tax records and interviews makes this refreshingly like an old-fashioned mystery, but the passion and terror underlying his own family give it emotional complexity and suspense.
For a deeper, darker thriller . . . Ask the Dark, by Henry Turner (Clarion, 250 pages, $23.99 ages 13 and up). Billy Zeets has a history of petty theft and vandalism, but now his experiences turn out to be useful. Who is kidnapping and mutilating boys from Billy’s neighbourhood? Wandering unnoticed through the streets day and night, using his deftness with breaking and entering to good effect, Billy the bad boy saves the lives of three boys, although he gets “beat and shot doin’ it.” Here’s his story, peppered with “’scuze my language” and shot through with earnest, jaunty goodness and quick, suspenseful storytelling.
School’s at the heart of Normandy Pale’s quest in The Truth Commission, by Susan Juby, with illustrations by Trevor Cooper (Razor Bill, 309 pages, $21, ages11and up). Normandy’s very account is a school assignment, subtitled “How Three Intrepid Art Students Got to the Bottom of One Unexpectedly Dark Secret.” She and two friends are trying to do away with gossip by asking relevant parties outright for the “truth.” The results are funny, surprising but, when Normandy brings her quest into her own family, painful. Juby’s quick wit and easy style, not to mention her full array of humour — dry, sly, slapstick, literary, silly — make this eminently readable, smart and satisfying. An eccentric art school and a seriously confused graphic novelist enhance the mix.
Susin Nielsen satirizes her teenage characters more broadly in We Are All Made of Molecules (Tundra, 245 pages, $19.99, ages 12 and up), when nerdy, kind Stewart and spoiled, it-girl Ashley become a blended family. Ashley can’t stand “Spewart,” but then he becomes acquainted with Jared, jock of her dreams, and self-interest forces her to tolerate him as a go-between. Alternating between Stewart’s voice and Ashley’s, Nielsen plays off a nerdiness and self-absorption that are almost parodically exaggerated.
Underneath the humour, though, are the stronger, longer threads of the novel — Stewart grieving for his deceased mother, but making a go of this new family out of loyalty to his father; Ashley reluctantly coming to terms with her own father’s homosexuality. Both kids are humanized by the turbulent experiences they share, but Nielsen’s conclusion is realistic: “Every now and then, Ashley and I have moments where we genuinely connect,” concludes Stewart.
Charlie’s good-humoured annoyance with his parents, his quick-paced storytelling and awareness of matters both serious and comical give The Traveling Circus verve, depth