Gift Ideas for Kids — The Winners of 2009 Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards for Excellence in Children’s Literature

We won’t know the next winners of American Library Association’s Newbery and Caldecott medals until Jan. 18. But if you’re looking for ideas for children’s gifts before then, you might want to print and save this list of books that won the most recent Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards for excellence in children’s literature. Only American authors are eligible for ALA honors. But the Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards are open to anyone who has had a book published in the U.S., so they can show more diversity than the librarians’ awards. Two examples: The latest winners include Nation, the British Terry Pratchett’s young-adult novel about two 19th-century children who create a society from scratch, and Bubble Trouble, by the New Zealander Margaret Mahy, illustrated by England’s Polly Dunbar. And this month the Horn Book posted its list of the best books of 2009 for children and teenagers, which also includes Bubble Trouble.

Funny Gifts for Readers Today on Twitter

On my Twitter page today I’m recapping in 140 characters or fewer some of the amusing and other gifts for readers that I’ve mentioned on One-Minute Book Reviews and that you can still find, such as the Shakespeare’s Insults Magnets and the Jane Austen Action Figure. You don’t need to have your own Twitter account to see these. Just click on “my Twitter page” in the first sentence of this paragraph.

My Holiday Gift-Book Guide on Twitter

Looking for holiday gift-book ideas? I’ll post mine  on One-Minute Book Reviews closer to Christmas. In the meantime I’m putting up one or two gift-book suggestions a day for adults and children on Twitter (@janiceharayda) at www.twitter.com/janiceharayda, based on reviews posted on this site. Today’s reminder: Fans of Jan Karon’s “Mitford” series might like Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind (Harper, 2000), the first of Ann B. Ross’s “Miss Julia” books about a rich Presbyterian widow in a North Carolina hamlet who adopts a child. I reviewed it earlier this year on One-Minute Book Reviews.

More Good Coupons for Kids in a New Hallmark Gift Book

Just before Christmas, I wrote about a book of tear-out coupons full of good IOUs for children that vanished from stores soon after I found it at CVS. I speculated that the item had been recalled because it contained a coupon that promised a child a lottery ticket when the laws in most states forbid the sale of lottery tickets to anyone under 18.

Now the book is back in slightly different form with a new title, What a Great Kid! Coupon Book: 52 Ways to Tell Kids “You’re Loved” (Hallmark Gift Books, 120 pp., $5.95, paperback), minus the lottery-ticket coupon. As in the earlier version, some coupons would appeal mainly to younger children. (“TRADE THIS IN FOR A ROYAL NIGHT … Good for one evening of being treated like royalty. You’ll be waited on hand and foot, and the entire family will refer to you as ‘your royal highness’ or ‘your majesty.’”) Other coupons might please children of any age, including teenagers. (“Not today! Pick your least favorite chore and SKIP doing it today!”) But the earlier bok disappeared so fast that there’s no telling how long this one will remain in stores, so if you may need a last-minute children’s holiday gift, you might pick one up well before December.

At this writing What a Great Kid! isn’t listed on the Hallmark site. But I found it at a Walgreen’s, and it’s also supposed to be available at Hallmark stores. Watch a video about it here.

© 2009 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Pat Cummings’s ‘Talking With Artists’ Series Lets Children Read About Their Favorite Picture-Book Illustrators and What They Do All Day

Any book in Pat Cummings’s three-volume Talking With Artists series would make a wonderful gift for a 6-to-9-year-old who loves to draw or paint. Each book is a colorful and often amusing collection of more than a dozen interviews (in a Q-and-A format) with well-known picture-book illustrators, typically supplemented by photos of their youthful and mature work and more. Vol. I includes Chris Van Allsburg and Leo and Diane Dillon; Vol. II, Brian Pinkney and Denise Fleming; Vol. III, Jane Dyer and Peter Sis. A winner of the Coretta Scott King Award, Cummings has a gift for getting artists to talk about their work in terms that will engage children. “I love what I do,” William Joyce says in the second book. “It’s like getting paid for recess.”

© 2009 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.twitter.com/janiceharayda

Wrap Holiday Gifts for Free With Items You Have at Home — Ideas From Elaine St. James’s ‘Simplify Your Christmas’

Have you noticed how some of those cute little holiday gift-wrap bags can cost more than the presents you put inside them? In Simplify Your Christmas: 100 Ways to Reduce the Stress and Recapture the Joy of the Holidays (Barnes and Noble, 2003), Elaine St. James suggests that you instead use leftover wallpaper, the Sunday comics, art or photos from last year’s calendar, outdated maps or oceanographic charts, or a basket you want to recycle.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com

Gift Coupons for Kids — Wrap Up Permission to Skip the Vegetables, Have a Later Bedtime or Curfew, or Control the TV Remote for a Night

Low- or no-cost gifts for children and teenagers that you can make with a pen and paper or a laserjet printer

The Awesome Kid Coupon Book: 52 Ways to Say You’re Special and You’re Loved!’ Hallmark Gift Books, unpaged, $5.95, paperback.

By Janice Harayda

O come all ye slackers who have fallen behind in your shopping for a child! Why not wrap up coupons good for the kinds of gifts described in this book — a waiver of a chore, a one-hour bedtime or curfew extension, or the right to “play the music you want for as loud as you want for one hour”?

The Awesome Kid Coupon Book has firm roots in a core principle of child psychology: Kids want to get out of doing some things as much as they want to have permission to do others. So this book has a coupon that lets a child to skip the vegetables at one meal as well one that confers control of the TV remote for an evening.

Most coupons involve free or low-cost gifts, and you can remove easily any that involve a cash outlay too steep for this bare-knuckles economy. (“SUPERSIZE YOUR ALLOWANCE – This coupon entitles you to double your normal allowance for one week.”) Some children may especially appreciate the “TOTAL SLOB COUPON!” that says: “Lounge in your grungiest clothes and do nothing all day! And don’t forget to wad up this coupon and throw it on the floor!” Just make sure your child reads the fine print on that one: “Weekends only.”

Best line: “BAN IT! This coupon entitles you to specify one food you do not want to find on your plate for an entire week.” Also: “A WHOLE NEW YOU — For one whole weekend day, you can be called any name you like, including anything that starts with ‘Super.’” And “BOOKWORM — Buy any book you want with a price up to $____________.”

Worst line: “BE A WINNER — Present this coupon and three scratch-off lottery tickets will be purchased for you. If you win, the money’s all yours!” This coupon seems to encourage adults to skirt the legal ages for buying lottery tickets (18 years old in most states, 21 in a few) by buying them for children. Would Hallmark have said, “Present this coupon and three six-packs will be purchased for you”?

Published: 2007

Warning: I found this book at a large CVS in September 2008 but haven’t been able to find it anywhere, including on the Web, since then. This is unusual: Books rarely go out of print so fast, and this one may have been recalled because of the lottery issue I mentioned above. I decided to post this review, anyway, because a) you might have better luck than I did at finding the book and b) some of its ideas may provide inspiration for homemade coupons.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com

‘Ozzie and Harriet’ Meets MySpace in ‘Apartment Therapy Presents,’ a Coffee-Table Book for Fans of Back-to-the-’50s Décor – Turquoise Naugahyde Chairs, Anyone?

Want to brighten your place for the holidays? How about hanging a fake AK-47 on the wall instead of mistletoe?

Apartment Therapy Presents. Real Homes. Real People. Hundreds of Real Design Solutions. By Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan with Jill Slater and Janel Laban. Chronicle, 264 pp., $27.50.

By Janice Harayda

A red-flocked Jesus coin bank. A mural of pink flamingoes. A paint-by-numbers picture of a black poodle.

These are a few of the things that stylish young renters and condo owners display in their homes today, or so we learn from Apartment Therapy Presents, a coffee-table book based on a popular Web site. The “current aesthetic,” the author says, aligns with the tastes of a couple who bought a 1951 ranch-style house in Skokie, Illinois: “the’50s are back in style.” Call it Cold War Chic or Ozzie and Harriet Meets MySpace.

If chairs covered with turquoise Naugahyde aren’t to your taste, this book shows other items that could earn you style points: a pair of fake AK-47s framed by a rococo-like mirrors, a scary-looking dental chair made around 1900, a thousand yellow Post-Its stuck to a wall like overlapping shingles.

You can’t accuse the author of making any of this up. Apartment Therapy Presents shows “40 real homes decorated by real people” in more than 400 color photographs. It has floor plans and resource lists long on plugs for ebay, IKEA, and Design Within Reach. Nor can you say you didn’t understand the risks of, say, standing on a ladder for days while you stick a thousand Post-Its to your wall. A notice on the copyright page warns that the author, publisher and others “disclaim any and all liability resulting from injuries or damages caused by imitating the ideas described herein.”

Best line/picture: Some apartments in this book shout, “I’m camping out.” Dana Joy Altman’s beautiful place in a converted circa 1902 single family house in Chicago’s Logan Square, says, “I’m home.”

Worst line/picture: The photo of a pair of fake AK-47s framed by mirrors that a young Manhattan tenant hung on his wall. You hope this man never has guests who have lost friends in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Recommended if … you’re planning to redo a small space and have a sense of humor. One picture in this book shows a collection of “’50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s freezer doors” that hangs on a kitchen wall in the East Village.

Published: April 2008

Furthermore: This book grew out of the site Apartment Therapy www.apartmenttherapy.com

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com

Gifts for Cooks – ‘Best of the Best: The Best Recipes From the 25 Best Cookbooks of the Year’ From the Editors of Food & Wine

What can you give somebody who loves to cook but has a lot of cookbooks you don’t want to duplicate? Maybe Best of the Best: The Best Recipes From the 25 Best Cookbooks of the Year: Vol. 11 (Food & Wine Books, 287 pp., $29.95) www.foodandwine.com/books, edited by Dana Cowin and Kate Heddings.

Every year the editors of Food & Wine produce a coffee-table book of more than 100 recipes from the 25 cookbooks they regard as the year’s best. The 11th volume honors a couple of books by internationally known superstars: Alice Waters’s The Art of Simple Food, Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Asian Flavors of Jean-Georges. But Best of the Best also has recipes from Sweet Myrtle & Bitter Honey, a Sardinian cookbook by the Texas restaurateur Efisio Farris, and Crescent City Cooking, the first cookbook by the New Orleans chef Susan Spicer. Then there’s Pure Dessert, by the California baker Alice Medrich, who favors “pure” desserts (without glazes, fillings or frostings) and whose treats sound like a license to indulge: “Her Dried Fruit & Nut Cake, for instance, loaded with dried pears and plums, dates and walnuts, is as delicious with a wedge of Camembert as a cup of tea.”

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

What’s Next? Marijuana-Laced Scent Strips in Children’s Books? — A Picture Book Version of Bob Dylan’s ‘Forever Young’

[If you can’t see the book cover at left, you can see it and hear “Forever Young” by clicking on the link to book trailer on YouTube at the end of this review.]

Forever Young. By Bob Dylan. Illustrated by Paul Rogers. Atheneum Books for Young Readers / Ginee Seo Books, 40 pp., $17.99. Age range suggested on Amazon.com: 4–8. Actual age range: 50–70.

By Janice Harayda

Just in time for the holidays, here comes the latest piece of sucker bait tossed to sentimental baby boomers by publishers: a picture book that has no words except for the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s hymn to youth, “Forever Young.” What’s next, Let’s Read and Find Out About “Lay, Lady, Lay”? Or My First Book of “Everybody Must Get Stoned”?

The kindest thing you can say about this book is that it lacks the appropriate special effects: marijuana-laced scent strips so preschoolers can get stoned out of their minds while reading it. Paul Rogers’s coolly antiseptic illustrations suggest none of the heat Dylan’s music generated: A critic for Publishers Weekly rightly said that “the flat, digitally manipulated compositions recall 1960s low-budget animation.”

Rogers’s illustrations amount to a visual biography of Dylan from his Minnesota childhood through his early years as a singer-songwriter in New York (though you wonder if he and his schoolmates fist-bumped and wore waist-length backpacks as in this book). The pictures show Dylan playing only an acoustic guitar, but some details nod to his later electric years. And the book has so many images of celebrities that children could well come away from this book with the idea that Joan Baez, Ben Shahn, Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney, Edie Sedgwick, Albert Einstein, DA Pennebaker and Martin Luther King Jr. once stood shoulder-to-shoulder at an antiwar march as they do here. Rogers needs two pages of end notes to explain all the visual references that will sail right over the heads of four-year-olds, which makes Forever Young something rare: a picture book with footnotes.

“Forever Young” is a sweet song from its opening lines (“May God bless you and keep you always” / May all your wishes come true”) through its closing refrain (“May you stay forever young”). But its simple rhyming lines don’t have anything close to the energy or poignancy – or just the poetry – needed to sustain a 40-page book without a companion tape or CD. And the words reflect a point of view few children are likely to share.

Although parents may wish their offspring to stay “forever young,” children typically want to grow up as fast as they can. This why psychologists advise parents to use such overworked as phrases as “big girl chair” or “big boy school” in talking about new and potentially frightening situations. Few things are scarier to many children than the idea that they may stay “forever young,” which they may equate with powerlessness.

So here’s a suggestion: If this book tempts you in the children’s section of a bookstore, don’t buy it for the kids. Buy it as a gag gift for one of those second-childhood–themed 50th or 60th birthday parties where everybody brings Mickey Mouse ears or Star Trek DVDs. For all its faults, Forever Young is still a lot cheaper than a gift certificate for six months’ worth of Botox or Viagra.

Best line: An end note quotes a 2004 Los Angeles Times interview in which Dylan said he wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind” in 10 minutes: “just put words to an old spiritual, probably something I learned from Carter Family records.”

Worst line: Some end notes are glorified product plugs: “Highway 61 Revisited (1965) is a great album to listen to when you’re on the road – or not.”

Editor: Ginee Seo

Published: September 2008

Watch the trailer for this book on YouTube, which has Dylan singing “Forever Young” as the pages of the book turn, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCMgDc2uiWI.

Furthermore: Can’t get enough of the sucker bait publishers throw at boomers? Click here to read about Steve Martin and Roz Chast’s 2007 picture book, The Alphabet from A to Y www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2008/02/.

Janice Harayda is a novelist and award-winning critic.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com