Instantly Interruptible

If you have children or if you’re a teacher, then you’re familiar with the desperation that can descend on a very cold or hot day, when you run out of things to do and are stuck indoors. Perhaps sensing your agitation or boredom, the kids become rowdy and unmanageable. In desperation you wonder: What can these cooped up, too-energetic kids do today?

Predictably, Callie and Jesse grow closer as friends, and readers start to expect a romance to develop. (Callie’s “good to know” is one of the big tip offs that she’s falling for Jesse.) But (spoiler alert!), there’s no romance in the conventional sense, because as it turns out, Jesse might be gay too. When Bonnie, the leading lady of the show throws a mongo tantrum during intermission because the leading man, West Redding, breaks up with her, Jesse saves the day by putting on a dress, and jumping on stage. This gifted stagehand has memorized all the songs and moves from backstage, and eagerly fills the missing role, much to the delight and dismay of everyone:


Seeing Jesse in a dress might be funny at first, but readers know what’s coming. There’s a stage kiss on the script! What will happen? Surely they won’t kiss. But kiss they do. Readers will rationalize that it happens because that is written into the script. You can see the audience’s shock below:

When I got to this part of the book, I have to admit it, I was both shocked and thrilled at the fact that Jesse and West kissed. In visually showing this romantic stage kiss between two guys, the novel really pushes at the limits of social convention and what’s deemed “acceptable” in children’s literature. As it turns out, Callie’s beloved Jesse may also be gay. (West might be gay, too.) But he’s not sure, and readers get a good feeling of the agony he’s going through precisely because he doesn’t know.

There’s a lot of online talk by parents who are concerned about giving this book to their children. Because Telgemeier’s previous graphic novel, Smile, was perfectly suitable for an elementary school-aged audience, parents automatically assumed the same was true of Drama, later to realize the book took on such heady issues. Some parents even regretted giving the book to their children, or flat-out disagreed with the topic itself. In my opinion, this book is probably not for the elementary aged reader, but would be a great addition to any middle schooler’s library.

For its courageous presentation of the GLBT experience, Drama received a Stonewall Book Award Honor and is one of YALSA’s (The American Library Association’s Young Adult division) top ten graphic novels for teens.

Sexuality aside, there’s lots of fun for theater-loving readers. Yours truly was a “theater geek” in her time; reading this brought back many memories of working closely with actors, choreographers, and stagehands. Telgemeier represents the hard work that kids and their dedicated teachers put into musical theater productions. The author digs deep to show you Callie’s desire to build a cannon that actually fires onstage, and her friend Liz’s enthusiasm for costume design. Each character is so genuine and sincere. It’s a fine argument for the good that music, drama, and art programs bring to children.

Go, Raina!

Do you have a little builder at home? If you do, boy do I have a fun book for you!

“If they can dream it, they can build it.” So reads the epigraph to Christy Hale’s fun picture book, Dreaming Up. In this idea-inspiring book, Hale juxtaposes two kinds of images: One of a child playing and another of an actual building.  For example, a child placing stackable donut-shapes on a wooden peg is likened to the Guggenheim museum. A cardboard box is compared to a state-of-the art cabin in the Colorado mountains. Young readers will have lots of fun comparing the similarities between the two images. Here’s an example from the book:

There’s so much to look at and notice in each page. At first, readers will probably have fun comparing the child’s play with the architectural marvels on the opposing pages. Yet subsequent readings can also pay attention to what the author does textually. The text is written as a shape poem (also called concrete poetry), where the placement of words on the page resembles the shape of the thing it describes. A girl builds something with blocks that resembles Fallingwater, and the text is stacked on top of rows that jut out this way and that.

This book is perfect for any little
builder. Got a Lego-obsessed kid at home? He or she will be excited to learn that the architect of
a Montreal apartment building got the idea for his design from LEGO bricks. Yes, Legos! The final
product is a fun, geometrical building composed of modular units that stack
on top of each other.

Dreaming Up nurtures the creative spirit all children possess, and reminds us adults to keep having fun. The book’s endpapers identify each building, its architect, and discusses a little behind the design idea. There’s no end to the fun applications of this book. Read it with your child (or a classroom of children), and then get out blocks, Legos, cardboard tubes, and some yarn, and let the building begin!

Let me be honest: I can subsist on a diet of fiction, and have absolutely no problem with stuffing my head with made up stories, characters, and worlds. Who needs the “real world?” Not me.

But one of my New Year’s resolutions is to read more nonfiction. Just a little bit. Since I didn’t know where to start in my search for great nonfiction titles, I went straight for the award winners. I know how…smarmy that might be. Awards get all the praise while other works of equal quality are overlooked, so please do me a favor and recommend other great nonfiction titles for my list.

I’ve just finished Steve Sheinkin’s Bomb: The Race to Build–And Steal–the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon (Roaring Book Press, 2012). Bomb is a 2012 Sibert winner (for best informational literature), a National Book Award Finalist, and a Newbery Medal Honor. I could not put this book down, but after I finished it, felt a growing sense of frustration with the book. Let me try to explain.

Sheinkin is a master of writing tight, suspenseful plots. He’s able to establish that seemingly distinct events in history are interconnected by knitting their narrative threads together, all the while building up the suspense to an almost fever pitch. For example, he shows how the actions of British trained Norwegian resistance fighters directly helped the Americans to build the atomic bomb first. Why? They sabotaged a hydroelectric plant in Norway that manufactured crucial “heavy water” the Germans needed to construct their bomb. It was awesome watching the “architecture” of the book come together, bit by bit.

Sheinkin also creates wonderful visual imagery through his descriptions of events. Here, he has the detailed touch of a novelist. True, said details may not necessarily be accurate. I mean, how do we know if Albert Einstein’s hair was really “windswept?” Or that a German scientist’s expression changed from friendly to nervous? Such controversy concerning the possible fabrication of historical details and the “lazy” attribution of quotes has been discussed at length by others, and is problematic, especially when compared to the dutiful citations of other nonfiction writers.

I was frustrated by two things. The first was the author’s treatment of the Japanese, and the second was the lack of complexity in the portrayal of the moral and ethical implications of the bomb. Sheinkin opted to focus on the racier aspect of the bomb story–that of Russian spies, counterintelligence, and James Bond-style operations instead of tackling the more daunting task of ethical evaluation.

Let’s start with the way the author represents the Japanese. The narrative suspense continues to build until the first bomb is dropped on Hiroshima. I eagerly expected to hear some description of what the Japanese experienced on August 6, 1945. I was very disappointed to find that the chapter “Hiroshima” was a meager five pages long. Two of those five pages focus on Paul Tibbets and the crew of the Enola Gay, as they drop the bomb from the air. The other three pages contain very thin descriptions, which basically reiterate the same ideas: Sheinkin dwells on the flash of light and dark sky. There are random mentions of seeing people with “horrible burns” and swollen faces, of people crying or screaming.

Why does the narrative not delve further into this? Where’s the primary source detail here? It is just about missing altogether. Furthermore, there are intimations of something called radiation poisoning, but absolutely no description of what that is, or how it continued to effect the Japanese after the bomb was dropped. That crucial fact was missing.

I wondered how an American teenager would process this chapter. Would he or she notice that the book basically leaves out one point of view? I wondered what would have to change about this book to accommodate more than one experience of the bomb. Would the grandiosity of the spy narrative lose a bit of its charm? Still, despite my Monday morning quarterbacking of a wonderful book, the chapter following “Hiroshima” does dramatically contrast the elation of the scientists at Los Alamos at the fact that their “gadget” worked with the slow realization of the destruction it caused. Scientists are described as being so disgusted that they actually threw up.

My second problem with this book is the lack of complexity of the historical, moral, and ethical implications of the bomb itself. Sheinkin dutifully traces Robert
Oppenheimer’s criticism of the bomb and the ensuing arms race, but any narrative gesture towards ambiguity is made through a character, rather than as a larger, more philosophical issue. 

If you read other historical accounts of the work at Los Alamos, it’s pretty clear there was a vocal and strong discussion about the ethical implications of developing nuclear weapons. This fact is completely missing from the book. Sheinkin represents the creators of the bomb as historically blind sighted by a desire to defeat Hitler, when in fact they were more cognizant of the moral implications of their work.

Sheinkin concludes his narrative with the statement: “The making of the atomic bomb is one of history’s most amazing examples of teamwork and genius and poise under pressure. But it’s also the story of how humans created a weapon capable of wiping our species off the planet. It’s a story with no end in sight. And, like it or not, you’re in it.”

I waffled back in forth about the implications of writing the history of the bomb in this way. Part of what made the book so compelling was that it was written like a novel. The plot focused on the actions and emotions of key agents in the making of the bomb (or the spy ring that tried to steal the science behind the bomb). Sheinkin has stated in interviews that he feels one of history’s most intriguing characters is J. Robert Oppenheimer. Indeed, he is a tangle of contradictions, but I wanted to see the narrative push itself away from the inner world of characters into the political and ethical realm of nuclear weapons, the arms race, and geopolitics.

All right, all right. It’s easy to go on and on about what’s wrong with a book. If Sheinkin did what I wanted, he’d have to write a much longer book. I realize that is not fair to the author, especially when there’s so much that he did right. Indeed, Sheinkin’s Bomb was so good that I just wanted more.

Despite these frustrations with the book, I’d recommend it in a heartbeat. It brings together just the right amount of science with a nice dose of suspense and thrills. It’s my hope that curious readers will have their interest ignited, and will delve into more of the backstory on their own. As a result of reading this book, I have ordered several of the books cited in the bibliography from my local library.

Remember how I asked for your recommendations? If you have a favorite nonfiction title (for children or adults), please let me know about it!