Reviews and Comments

I truly adore Bridget Walsh's work. The characters are fantastic and so easy to imagine; they're all quite lovable in their own ways, and they feel like who they're supposed to be. No one feels out of place (except when necessary by either their personality or the narrative), and they just feel alive. I have to mention this mostly because, while other characters in other works feel fine and still interest me, these ones actually feel like they could be real people (and that is not a feeling that I get very often from fiction).

I also just like the settings she has chosen and how, while Albert and Minnie are the primary detectives, they don't just work cases entirely on their own. Their friends offer to help them in a range of ways; they help train them to mimic people or help create clothing for them that would make them match places. They dig up information in a range of places, with some characters paying a bunch of runner boys to go look into something while others use their connections. I like it because the detecting doesn't feel so solitary; it feels like everyone is involved and, even if they're busy with their actual jobs, they do what they can when they can. As much as I adore other detective novels, I really like that Walsh creates a community and actually utilises their skills and builds their connections to work towards solutions to the mystery.

And I also just like how much you can see the choreography of the case. You can tell the mysteries are planned (albeit with some obvious liberties) because, if you skim back through what you've read, you can actually spot the clues you missed (if you missed them). It's very clear that these books are meant to have a narrative of likable and interesting characters (in as much as you feel compelled to engage with them, regardless of whether you truly like them or not) while also having a mystery you can solve right along with them.

While it's interesting, the writing is all over the place in more than one way. This is literal, where it's sometimes hard to find which direction you're supposed to read; I had a student bring this to me to figure out which direction they were supposed to go, which was made more difficult for them by having different fonts and non-standard locations for parts of the narrative. (This isn't inherently bad, but it is something to consider, especially if you're working with a kid who has a reading-based disability.)

The story is also all over the place, even though it clearly follows the inspiration of Little Red Riding Hood. This is because it's combining that story with being able to tell a story about writing stories, which makes it a bit confusing for some people to follow (and also prompts questions about whether or not something was necessary, which is quite fun as a discussion but can also be annoying to certain readers).

This story is sort of disappointing in comparison to Henkes's other work (like Waiting), especially as it really is of the genre that I feel we should title "School Glaze." It's one of those books that, intentionally or not, really pushes the pro-school propaganda and fails to recognise what the most common response would be to something of this nature.

While I'm sure there are teachers like Mr Slinger (and I'd like to pretend that it's most of them), I don't know many of them. Even the most outwardly kind-seeming teachers that I've worked would not handle this well, and many of them would've held a vendetta against a child who did these actions and without any discussion of or engagement with the ways in which children develop and learn to fit in with the people around them. I wish more kids, since they're coerced into schools and are a highly controlled demographic of people, were around adults who would help them work through these kinds of feelings and behaviours (and also be less visibly/publicly upset when children who are upset with them handle their feelings in bad/harmful ways), but they are more likely than not to find adults who will not handle those behaviours well at all.

I like the messaging of being able to apologise, how you can apologise, and working toward forgiveness, but that messaging is also necessary for adults towards children in order to make it function, too. And we just don't live in a world where it is widely recognised that children are working their way through it, learning as they go (as we all did), and need people who are patient and are willing to guide them.

(Granted, I also think part of the issue is that... if the teacher had done more to help Lilly understand how her behaviours were negative rather than "No, you need to wait," it would've resulted in more appropriate behaviour and understanding. An adult not really explaining to a young child why they need to wait and be patient is not going to see that child responding well. So I don't like the messaging of "just do as your told" that is woven within this story, even if the teacher is kind, patient, and forgiving.)

Rarely do I see a kids' book engage with how kids might deal with a severe injury or illness, even one that is temporary. I think this is pretty good for little kids and could provide a background to a conversation about how to help out, whether what someone does is good/bad/neutral, and how that can be contextual.

Like, Lola knows Charlie and his worries; she understands her brother, so her just doing something to make him feel better and still trying to include him in her games or plays is just normal for them. Having read most of the series with different kids, they've often pointed out to me how it's sweet that Lola would do this; some occasionally say that she should offer instead of just doing it (I agree, as I'd want someone to ask before doing most things for me, like feeding me or helping me drink), but others recognise that their relationship with someone around them is similar enough that they'd also do that for each other.

It's actually been a good book for working through boundaries and contexts with kids, and that's not a very common thing to find (sadly).

This book, at the beginning, highlights all the ways in which it has engaged with research around literacy, but it seems to have forgotten a core element of getting kids to read: making something interesting and engaging.

Yet again, this is another book that is so incredibly boring but is designed to be so simplistic because of how, I think, adults view children. It's not really focused on telling an engaging story; it's focused on trying to bring vocabulary, and it's doing it in a way that disengages the audience entirely. These books are generally some of the worst, and I have yet to work with any kids who like them; the most common feeling is "waste of time."

It's also clear because the first page is a note to parents and caregivers about what kind of book this is; it's labelled as a 'red level' book (as shown by the red circle on the top right of the cover), which means that it'll "present familiar topics using common words and repeating sentence patterns." Ironically, these kinds of readers have a tendency to support poor reading skills and be used in teaching strategies that do not support readers at all.

Based on real events, this book focuses on telling a story about one of Luis Soriano's travels to a remote village with his burros. This book was described to me by many teachers as a "good resource to learn about Colombia," but I find that I disagree.

Luis's story is interesting, and I do think that it deserves to be told. However, I feel like this book structures his work in a way that makes it palatable and includes elements without considering the implications of how it's being done.

Part of what makes me feel this way is that there is a brief scene where a bandit tries to hold up Luis (demanding his silver) and then steals a book instead, letting him go. While I'm not going to discount the possibility of its veracity, I do find that its inclusion would still lead children to the stereotype that everyone making journeys to rural Colombia is constantly held up at the whims of bandits. It feels like the common media depiction of everyday life, when I'm sure the kinds of negative impacts that people endure on the daily basis are of a wider variety.

I also think it undermines the story that Luis, himself, explained; he had seen that the students he worked with, as a schoolteacher (a thing that is conveniently left out of the main text and is only mentioned in a quick biographical note at the back that can be easily skipped over), endured a wide variety of hardships and wanted to do what he was able in order to provide more for many children. Though the writer does have him say, multiple times, that "the children are waiting," it doesn't have those implications (which I think, also, would've been far more engaging to children than a random hold-up by a bandit).

It's also unclear what Luis is doing, especially if you do read the biographical note. The main text makes it seem like Luis is just giving away his books, when the reality is that he developed a kind of library system that focuses primarily on people with limited or no access to books. The library building that is part of this project is located right next to his house and contains thousands of books, many of which were donated to him from people all over. This library's construction was finished in 2009, and I point this out because the book was published in 2011; this is something that could've easily been included and made a more coherent "true story."

I also get this kind of frustrating moral lesson from the book that a lot of older people do to children, and it's reminiscent of the ways in which my parents would always harass me about finishing all of the food on my plate because "there are children starving in Africa." Rather than really focusing on Luis's life and his work toward building the Biblioburro, it practically does the "some children have no books to read, so you should feel lucky that you have them" lesson. I'm not overly comfortable with that for a range of reasons, and I can't help feeling like that's something that kids will walk away with either as an indirect lesson or a direct lesson (especially if this is taught within the realm of a classroom, as I can almost certainly recognise precisely where teachers would point this out to their "ungrateful" students).

I usually go through these books to try to find things that might interest students, and this one was... not a hit? And that's not surprising to me because of where it comes from. When I start seeing these books coming out of DK, I always instinctively cringe but still try them just in case; their books often are the ones that kids bring to me from their schools and complain about because they're so boring (trite, common knowledge, etc), so it's pretty understandable that even the ones aimed at the youngest readers aren't well-liked, either.

Another thing I don't like about DK books is this (from their Wikipedia page):

Most of the company's books are published with "DK" named as the author, as they are produced by teams of editors, designers and cartographers who work with freelance writers and illustrators.

It seems peculiar to me that somehow these kinds of books would not just be attributed to their writers; I struggle to understand how this book was produced by more than three people (two writers and an illustrator), but it also reads like something that was written by consensus and without the actual target audience in mind.

DK has always had this problem where their books don't read like they're for anyone; they just exist to fill a niche for teachers in an inoffensive way.

Overwhelmingly, I rather enjoyed having a historiography and exploration of orientalism presented to me in this form. There were chunks of it that I found massively intriguing and connections I either hadn't previously thought to make or been introduced to that I appreciate learning about.

My one major problem with this book is how much of it is in French or German (but mostly French) without a translation anywhere, which is something that I find perplexing because of how often this book is touted as being the "most accessible" resource on orientalism. Similarly, it often jumps into certain sources as if there is an expectation to have engaged with them; this is something else I'm not super fond of, even if it did prompt me to look into them further as I was reading. But it made for moments where I felt like I couldn't really lock-in and focus on the book.

While I really have enjoyed the rest of the series (which I've been slowly reading with one of my students over the course of the past year), this book finally gave some of the spotlight to Trellis. He has been, for the past few books, the one character where I've felt like I cannot understand or recognise his motivations.

For a while, I found him interesting, and I rather liked how he shifted from his original aggressive behaviour to a more calm demeanor that helped him get to know and work with Emily. He still has his issues, some of which are caused by the in-world discrimination (which feels very muddy because it's like a bunch of people are being punished for the fear that others have of the elf king) and are not things that are his own personal fault. (It also doesn't help that he is the son of the current elf king, even if he is working against his own father. But still, the discrimination toward elves is core to others who are just... ordinary people, not only part of the monarch's family.)

This time, we at least get a glimpse back at Trellis through his memories, and we start understanding him a little bit better. We get to spend some time with the antagonist (first) and then Trellis (second), which provides us some more information on the world of the elves. It's still not enough for me because I think Trellis's backstory could've been its own whole story and that there is a lot more left unsaid in all of the books (and much of it should've been said), but... I appreciate finally getting to spend time with him in the story.