review: My Big Book of Spanish Words

My Big Book of Spanish Words written and illustrated by Rebecca Emberley. Little, Brown, 2008 (978-0-316-11803-3) $8.99 board

A typical word book, this one stands out a bit in the crowd because of the vibrancy of its illustrations. Each oversized page features common childhood words in English and Spanish, in categories like "My Colors/Mis colores" and "My room/Mi cuarto." The names of the items are given in thin letters in English and fatter letters in the same color in Spanish, an eye-catching design touch. Cut-paper pictures of the items are simple and easily recognizable, but the bright colors, vivid small details and casual looking layout give them verve. I especially liked the animals page, which features a demure looking cat, a slightly suspicious dog and a pig happily flopped on its bottom. (6 months-3)

planning

This is a terrible time for scheduling (last week of school), but I'm tentatively planning Wednesday as my kid/YA book reading day, with reviews due by Thursday. Please kick me in the ass if I don't follow through.

I checked out the latest kid's offerings at the library today and was not thrilled. I just struck me that I probably enjoyed the book challenge so much because the books were, to a certain extent, preselected. I already knew I was interested in them, had heard really good things about some of them. I probably won't be as lucky just grabbing random books off my pile.

Gentle Reader

Has anyone been following the bru-ha-ha in the blogosphere about unscrupulous and deeply scary Amazon reviewers? I don't want to get into that mess here, but there was an offshoot discussion about Harriet Klausner that piqued my interest. Klausner, for those who aren't familiar with her, is an Amazon reviewer who manages to be continually in their top ten--#1 even--despite the fact that just about everyone appears to pretty much despise her. Include me in: I find her reviews almost completely content-free.

Anyway, the tangent that caught my interest (which I'm not going to attempt to track down amidst hundreds of comments for a link) was a suggestion that because Klausner has a library background, perhaps her reviews are not actually intended to be critical reviews in the sense most of us think of them, but more a form of reader's advisory. Basically she's just saying, "if you like this sort of thing, you'll like this sort of thing." This doesn't address the issue that she is notorious for getting details wrong, and general indications are that she can't possibly thoroughly read all the books she writes about, but I still thought it an interesting point.

Sometimes I review because I have found a book so wonderful, it just cries out to be written about. That is optimal reviewing, from my point of view, and I only wish it happened more often. Much less often, I'll review something because it's so awful I just have to write about it. But most reviewing comes from a sort of in-between place, where there might be something I like about a book, but mostly I'm thinking, "well, someone who likes this sort of book will like this book." And that is a hard, hard place to review from. I often wind up feeling like I didn't really write a review, because I really didn't have much in the way of an authentic opinion to offer. Maybe I should label those "reader's advisory."

Do people have review adult books have this issue? With children's books, the concept of usefulness is hard to escape. Now that I'm a parent, I'm even more aware of it. I used to review primarily from the standpoint of a reader; now I find myself taking the stance of a parent, a librarian, a teacher... I'm all over the place. Does this make my reviews more useful or less?

What viewpoint do you review from? Does it move around? Do you get confused when it does?

Don't Let It Go

I don't think I've ever been chewed out for one of my reviews before. Though admittedly, it's fairly rare for me to write one in which I say absolutely nothing positive about a book. That was not really intentional, and I should probably go back and try to correct it at some point.

Ilene Richards proudly informs me that Let My People Go has sold out. This surprises me not at all. The stuff parents will do and buy in in an attempt to make Judaism "fun" for their kids... well, I can't judge them for it, because I know myself how difficult it is to maintain interest in Judaism in a largely Christian-oriented world. But no matter how well meaning the motivation is, it doesn't make things like stuffed Torahs any less bizarre or tacky.

but seriously now

So this karfuffle clearly begs the question: should reviewers review books about cultures they're not intimately familiar with? If we say no, that leaves such a tidy excuse for mainstream media to ignore books that aren't mainstream. And it's a very hard line to draw in some cases.

I apparently wasn't clear enough in my last post, so let me state directly that I feel very uncomfortable about having unwittingly promoted a book that makes a serious and offensive error, and I have to take responsibility for not knowing enough to recognize that error. But I'm not entirely sure how.

a very merry Book Challenge Day to you!

I told Evan last night that MotherReader's Book Challenge seemed the perfect cure for reviewer's block, to which he replied "Oh, I wish it could be Book Challenge Day every day! But no... I guess we'd get tired of it."

(One of our son's current favorite books is Merry Un-Christmas.)

It actually reminds me of when we were in college and I would be struggling with a long paper; Evan would tell me to pretend it was a USENET post, which I could easily do for 12 pages. ;-) Putting the emphasis on the reading seems to make it all just flow out.

try "Earth Balance." No trans fats.

I came across this comment in the introduction to 101 Damnations--which also contains a contribution by Jon Scieszka, to make it vaguely relevant to kid's books:

"When you praise something--let's say it's hydrogenated vegetable oil spreads--you humbly focus a brilliant beam of endorsement and esteem upon your topic, while you yourself are content to remain in the shadows. But if you aren't so crazy about butter substitutes, what you say about them--your complaint--is no longer an attempt to speak on behalf of all of us butter-substitute devotees. No, in this case it's you in the spotlight, you trying to make a point about butter substitutes, using every rhetorical device and persuasive argument you can in hopes of disabusing us of our benighted ingestion of trans-fatty acids. The spotlight's on you because it's nearly impossible to pan something without showing off. (italics mine)

And so, when you praise, you speak on behalf of others. When you complain, you speak for yourself."

I thought this had some validity in regard to reviewing, though I'm not sure I entirely agree with it; goodness knows I've written negative reviews that were boring as hell.

and still the comments rage on into the night

In the comments of that Read Roger post, which continue to be be thought-provoking, Roger wrote:

"Fuse's point that blog reviewers might ignore a bad book from a blogosphere acquaintance is certainly possible, but isn't it also possible that a mediocre book could be reviewed "because she's so nice" or something? Readers of blog reviews generally have no clue why a certain book was chosen for review. They don't know what universe of books the reviewer is selecting from. I know there has been something of a movement for blog reviewers to tell readers the source of a book being reviewed (ARC, from the library, bought, etc.) but I'm not sure that informational is in itself helpful unless the reader also knows what books in general the reviewer is seeing."

I'm not entirely sure I have anything to add to this, I just thought it a very interesting point. Though perhaps the answer is implicit in the very nature of blogging: this book was chosen because I had something to say about it.

let's not get too comfortable

Read Roger has some pithy comments about the small world of the kidlitosphere. A while back I asked blog reviewers if knowing authors online influenced their reviewing (this question also inspired by a post by Roger) and several admitted that they might shy away from negatively reviewing books by online friends. Perfectly understandable, especially for those of us who aren't editors of major review publications, but also something to be concerned about in the long term.

a question for the kidlitosphere reviewers

This post from Roger Sutton's blog about people uncomfortable with writing negative reviews reminded me of something I've been wondering about lately: now that so many authors and illustrators have their own blogs and are hanging out in the kidlitosphere, does it ever become uncomfortable to review?

This hasn't really come up for me yet--I did write a less than fully complimentary review of Meg Cabot's Party Princess, like she's ever going to notice or care what I think--but it probably will at some point. I have had more authors thank me for reviews in the last year than ever before, usually politely ignoring anything negative I've said. (Julius Lester holds the title for his exceptionally gracious correction of a misconception in one of my review.) And I can't help thinking, someday I'm going to review a book by someone whose blog I read and comment on, and maybe I'll have something negative to say, and what's that going to be like?

Has this happened to you? What was it like? What, if anything, happened?