Days of the Bagnold Summer by Joff Winterhart

Shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award last year, Days of the Bagnold Summer is a poignant graphic novel by Joff Winterhart. It's about the relationship between a single mother and her 15-year-old son. The two of them are unexpectedly spending the summer together after Daniel's father backs out of their arrangement, which had been for the teen to fly from the UK to Florida for his school holiday.

Each page of the book is like a separate chapter made up of six comics panels. Sue Bagnold works at the public library and wears the same kind of sweater every day. She does her best to understand her taciturn son. Daniel Bagnold listens to heavy metal and wears a black hoodie every day. His only friend is rather annoying and Daniel longs for more of a connection.

Winterhart's closely-observed portrait of this pair is extraordinary.

Readalikes: I can't think of close matches, but Perfect Example (John Porcellino) captures a similar ennui; Tamara Drewe (Posy Simmonds) delves into the characters of a larger group of adults and teens; and The Night Bookmobile (Audrey Niffenegger) has a similar melancholy nostalgia, but includes a dark fantasy element that is absent in Days of the Bagnold Summer.

Black Dog by Levi Pinfold

Rather than being an embodiment of depression, the dog in Levi Pinfold's picture book, Black Dog, represents fear. Members of the Hope family see a dog outside that grows more massive with each glimpse. The youngest child -- Small Hope -- is the only one with the courage to face the beast, thereby shrinking it to normal size.

Pinfold's nostalgic tempera illustrations evoke a pre-television era, somewhat in the way of KG Campbell in Lester's Dreadful Sweaters. Pinfold's style is closer to Australian Shaun Tan's than Campbell's however. Pinfold's details -- the lovely soap dish clipped to the side of the bathtub, the Battenburg cake on a plate -- kept me lingering over each charming page. The Hope's house is just so cozy I want to visit the place! Check out Pinfold's work on his website here.

Black Dog is a great book to share with preschoolers... and fearful people of any age.

p.s. The wintery scene on the cover is appropriate to Edmonton's weather today; it's snowing here.

May We Shed These Human Bodies: Stories by Amber Sparks

It's hard to categorize the brief, surprising stories in Amber Sparks' collection. The title story, May We Shed These Human Bodies, is a creation fable, a lament in the first-person-plural voices of trees who have been turned into humans. Never-never is a melancholy retelling of Peter Pan told in multiple viewpoints. All the imaginary people are better at life is surrealist contemporary fiction:

   "Ruby can't stop driving, because if she stops she'll be somewhere. If she's somewhere, she'll be real. All the Ruby atoms in the vicinity will come to a screeching halt in the general shape of her. Then she'll have to deal with all of the issues real people deal with.
   No thank you.
   [...]
   Caleb, her imaginary best friend, calls on the space wires from Chicago to complain about the weather. The best part about Caleb is that he has a direct line into her head so she doesn't incur any long distance charges."

(In a strange coincidence, when I read All the imaginary people are better at life, I had just read a blog post from someone in Chicago who was complaining about the terrible weather they have been having.)

The stories are odd... in the best possible way. There's a great blurb from Ben Loory on the back of the book: "I always love a book that makes me fear for the writer's sanity." This may not always be true for me, but in the case of Amber Sparks, I agree with Loory.

Readalikes: Suddenly, a Knock on the Door (Etgar Keret); Vampires in the Lemon Grove (Karen Russell); Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People (Douglas Coupland) and Anthropology (Dan Rhodes).

37 Things I Love (in no particular order) by Kekla Magoon

37 Things I Love, Kekla Magoon's tender and sweet story of four days in the life of fifteen-year-old Ellis, is told in 37 brief chapters. Ellis enumerates the 37 things she loves as she comes to terms with saying a final goodbye to her father, who has been in a coma for several years. During this stressful time, Ellis also deals with best friend drama, reconnects with an old friend, and explores her sexual attraction to another girl.

Magoon's previous books have featured African American protagonists, and the dust jacket of this one shows two brown-skinned girls floating in a swimming pool, so I assumed that Ellis and her friends are African American. It wasn't until I finished the book that I realized that the ethnicity of any of the characters is open to interpretation. (If I'm wrong, please correct me in the comments. I've been distracted and overtired lately, so I'm not reading with my usual attention to details. I may have missed physical descriptions of hair or skin that confirmed my initial assumption.)

My heart went out to Ellis and her emotional turmoil during a challenging episode in her life. Her complicated relationship with her mother is also done well. The overall tone is optimistic and fresh, balancing the serious underlying issues. Not everything is tied up neatly at the end of the novel, which feels exactly right.
 
Grade 7 - up.

Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon

Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative by Austin Kleon. Actually, lots of people have shared their thoughts on being creative, but if you don't think of yourself as an artist, you might not have realized these things apply to you. Kleon has assembled inspirational quotes from many sources and added his own helpful advice. He encourages his readers to think of themselves as artists, no matter what field of endeavour.

Kleon's basic premise is that no art is original. "The writer Jonathan Lethem has said that when people call something 'original,' nine out of ten times they just don't know the references or the original sources involved. What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before."

If you are looking for motivation, this will fit the bill. It's a quick read too. It was handy that I happened to have downloaded the book onto my iPod via the Edmonton Public Library's Freading e-book database. I read the entire book out loud to my sweetie in the hospital while we were waiting for her to have emergency surgery on Sunday. She came home yesterday and is healing nicely. My blog posts may be shorter and less frequent for a while, though.

The Where the Why and the How: 75 Artists Illustrate Wondrous Mysteries of Science

The Where, the Why and the How is a whimsical book for curious minds. Artists, illustrators and graphic designers were invited to illustrate the brief answers provided by scientists to puzzlers like "What is antimatter?" "Why do cats purr?" "What causes depression?" and "Why do we have fingerprints?"

The editors are Jenny Volvovski, Julia Rothman and Matt Lamothe. From the introduction: "Today we're spoiled with an abundance of information. We carry devices that fit in our pockets but contain the entirety of human knowledge. If you want to know anything, just Google it." I know exactly what they mean, since I love being able to whip out my iPod to look up stuff in the midst of book reading.

The questions in this book are not the sort that have easy answers, however. The editors encourage readers to "enjoy reflecting on the mysteries themselves." I followed their advice and spent time studying each colourful, full-page illustration before reading the text on the facing page. The text itself is in a small font that discourages the eye from quickly skimming the contents. There is so much white space around the text -- plenty of room for a larger font -- that this must have been on purpose in order to focus attention on the art. (Or maybe my eyesight is just getting really bad.)

The answer that surprised me most was to the question "Do immortal creatures exist?" Apparently, there are some. Huh!

Most of the artwork is quite abstract, which suits the questioning nature of the book. Although adults are the primary audience, I think some younger readers will also find it interesting.

Readalikes: A History of the World in 100 Objects (Neil MacGregor) and, especially for younger readers, You are Stardust (Elin Kelsey and Soyeon Kim) and Big Questions from Little People (compiled by Gemma Elwin Harris).

Harvest by Jim Crace

Harvest is an atmospheric novel set in a remote English village during the time of the land clearances. The crofters count back generations on the land, exchanging with the landowner their labour for their share of the harvest. Author Jim Crace employs the distinctive gentle voice of Walter Thirsk, a relative newcomer to the area, who arrived only about a dozen years earlier and then married Cecily, a local woman.

"I wooed her by working at her elbow in her fields, attending to the hunger of her soil. My labour was an act of love. My unaccustomed muscles grew and ached for her. I put my shoulder to the plow for her. I became as tough as ash for her. I had no choice. The countryside is argumentative. It wants to pick a fight with you."

Violence comes from people, not from the land. Strangers arrive and everything is turned upside down over a span of just a few days.

The vivid setting, poetic prose and memorable characters make Harvest a remarkable gateway into another time and place. It is a way of life that is about to be altered irrevocably.

Readalikes: Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks and Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (although Harvest is less than a third the length of Wolf Hall).