A good chapter book is hard to find. This, the reader's first introduction to long-form books, must have a quality mixture of entertainment, depth and reading challenge. If it is too wordy or deep, the young reader will give up. If it is too shallow or cheesy, he or she will lose interest just as easily.
Here are three I just finished reading that I think do a pretty decent job of finding the Chapter Book sweet spot:
Bayars, Betsy. Keeper of the Doves. Puffin, 2004
ISBN 0142400637
It is not an easy task for an author to write a story dealing with heavy subjects (family discord, mental illness, death) that is aimed at 7 to 10 year olds. However, Bayars does an excellent job of not only covering them, but embracing them as an intricate and necessary part of the story. What I loved about this book was that it came from the point of view of a child, as she would see it. Life just seems to come at her from nowhere (family members just show up. Mom is suddenly pregnant and about to give birth. Discoveries about her own story, told through other people...) and yet she has a playfulness and overall contentment throughout.
Amie, the protagonist, has a way with words, and sees the world through her poems. This gives her a special connection to her father and grandmother, and allows her to notice many things others miss. Especially when it comes to the strange old man who lives on their property and takes care of the doves (whom her twin sisters are afraid of, and make up wild tales about).
This story held my interest, and was not overly heavy. It would also be a great story to read aloud to younger readers who are not quite ready to tackle a Chapter Book on their own.
Gannett, Ruth Stiles. My Father's Dragon. Illustrated by Ruth Chrisman Gannett. CreateSpage, 2010 (originally published in 1948) ISBN 1453782052
As an adult, this tale was a tad boring due to the predictive, redundant nature of the story. However, this redundancy is also a useful tool when creating a Chapter Book. Predictability is comforting, and often helps beginner readers push through when the text may seem long.
Still, the characters were fun and interesting. A young boy ("my father" as the narrator of the story begins) finds a talking cat. His mother hates the cat and throws it out, but feeling sorry for the cat, the boy befriends him and agrees to go on an adventure on the cat's behalf in order to save a dragon who is enslaved by talking animals on a wild island.
The creatures are creative, and as the boy meets set after set of them, each time he is afforded the opportunity to use his cleverness to outsmart them, and eventually save the dragon. The illustrations definitely help the story along, as some parts are a bit tough to grasp, and they also provide a bit of comic relief.
Evans, Douglas. Apple Island, or The Truth About
Teachers. Illustrated by Larry Di Fiori. Scholastic, 2002
ASIN: B000VHE3CI
I loved this book! I found it highly entertaining, funny, and extremely clever.
As a kid, did you ever think that there was no possible way your teachers were ever kids, or did normal things outside of school? They practically lived at school, right? And furthermore, they never seemed to age. Some were crabby, and some were nice, and that was that.
In The Truth About Teachers, we discover that this is exactly right! Teachers come from an island, where half live on the nice side and half live on the crabby side. The island is full of school-isms: Chalk Mountain, "Shhhh" Canyon, Office Palace, where Prince Apple ("principal") lives, a Big Book Building where Miss Library rides her motorized sliding ladder from section to section and never sees the light of day...everything that defines school was created and exists on Apple Island.
When a group of students are kidnapped to this island, it is up to one of them to discover the truth about teachers and find a way to bring them all home. A truly fun read.
Green, Bette. Summer of My German Soldier. Speak, 1999 ISBN: 014130636X
In one of my previous posts, I did a somewhat unfavorable review of a book that is garnering critical praise for being relevant and important in tween and young adult fiction. I stated that I disagreed with most critics, and found it irrelevant, shallow, and inappropriate for MOST tweens. (The book in question was Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging, and you can read the review here: http://lneeleylibr264digitalrecord.blogspot.com/2010/06/angus-thongs-and-full-frontal-snogging.html)
In this review, I will change course a bit and do a somewhat favorable review of a book that has been challenged and even banned in some schools.
A twelve-year-old Jewish girl meets and then agrees to hide a German Nazi POW who has escaped from a military prison just outside her small Southern hometown. Sounds like all the makings of a romantic thriller, right? And although I must agree that Summer of My German Soldier IS inappropriate for some audiences, it may be very profound and challenging to just the RIGHT audience.
If I were to recommend this book to a tween, I would need to know that he or she is at a maturity level where there is an ability to process complex ideas, and I would warn against the offensive language which, in this book is more reminiscent of language one would find in To Kill a Mockingbird or Tom Sawyer (also banned books), where the words make sense in the setting and context of the story.
And so does the racism. In fact, this book is ABOUT racism. However, what I like about the story is the challenging viewpoint it takes: the German Nazi is the good guy, the Jewish father is the bad guy, and the daughter is caught somewhere in between.
Another fact about this book you may not find mentioned in other reviews is that the author has an obvious negative bias towards religion. This does not come through strongly at all, but in a very subtle way in specific, non-vital snippets of the story.
Despite all of this, I appreciated and enjoyed the book. Contrary to the cover, it really is not a love story. Instead, it is a story about a very normal girl in very difficult situations. The author uses perfect visual words to create images of a small, isolated southern town in the midst of a stifling hot summer, where the slightest excitement is grasped onto until it spins out of control, landing our protagonist in a very unanticipated predicament.
Some would say this book does not have a happy ending. I think it does. I feel that the realism of this story will inspire certain mature tweens and teens towards questioning their own life decisions, visualizing the fact that every action has an all-too-real consequence. By walking the journey with our heroine that lands her in court and eventually a reform school (rather than a romantic, unrealistic outcome to her choice to hide an enemy of the state unbeknownst to her parents), the reader will see that although life has its difficulties, the rocky parts of the journey are what mold us into who we will eventually become.
Would definitely be a good title for discussions about coming-of-age, race, life-altering choices, and WWII.
Toy Story 3. Walt Disney Pictures, 2010. Starring Tom Hanks and Tim Allen, Directed by Lee Unkrich.
If one thing can by said about Pixar Animation Studios, the creators of the Toy Story trilogy, it is that they have proven time and again to have the uncanny ability to create stories that appeal to a wide range of ages and backgrounds. Like the rest of the Toy Story movies, this one can be enjoyed by children, tweens, teens, college students, parents and grandparents, all of which will be laughing (and perhaps shedding a tear) at various different points of the story and dialogue.
Way to go, Pixar! You did it again.
Sidney, Margaret. Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. Watermill Press, 1988. ISBN 0-8164-1460-6
This book will only appeal to a certain type of tween. I have known ten and eleven year-olds who have both loved and lost interest in this book. A classic, written in 1881, focuses primarily on the daily lives of five poor children living with their widowed mother in a small, dilapidated house. As is typical of novels written for children about poverty, the Pepper children knew they were poor, but did not feel poor, as they were constantly surrounded by love and family.
Small joys, generosity, overcoming illness, and making new friends are all themes visited in this book, the first in the Five Little Peppers series. Anyone who has read the Anne of Green Gables series will understand the ability of an author to take something seemingly mundane to adults (such as baking a birthday cake) and turning it into quite a comical, emotional ride with witty remarks and clever storytelling.
Peppers stands out as a classic, written in simple sentence structure for young readers, that will surely enlighten the reader, teaching moral values and the simple joys of life.
The book can be viewed in its entirety via Project Gutenberg at http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=2770
