The Jewel Collar

“The Jewel Collar is the story of a Maltese dog, Aristotle, who moves from the family beach house to a new home so his Mommy, an attorney,can be closer to the Courthouse and train station. It is the Christmas season and Ari is very sad, missing his garden friends. His Mommy gives him an early gift to cheer him up -- a Jewel Collar. Ari decides to share the jewels on his Jewel Collar with new friends in the Floral Park garden including Steve the Squirrel, Mikey the Mallard, and many others. They decorate their garden Christmas tree and decide to call themselves the Garden Friends Club. The lesson learned is that while moving can be a sad experience, a child can make new friends by sharing and without giving a gift.”

At first, this was a book which I was going to give the “good try” award. From the pages I can see, the book isn't loathsome – it has a pretty (though totally odd cover) and as a dog lover, I can't really entirely fault the sweet photographs of her cute pups. Animals are a pretty safe standby in the children's lit world, so the subjects doesn't necessarily make me gasp either. But when I dig deeper, the reason for this book never appears, and I start to feel a little more discomfort with The Jewel Collar.

After reviewing the available pages, I am still unclear what possessed author Christine Roberts to think that this book had to be (expensively) published for the world to purchase? It is clearly biographical, and I can't fathom why anyone outside her circle would be interested in her life. Sure, little niece or next door neighbor might be charmed, but beyond that, I don't see a real audience. At times, I found her story a little creepy, and not a wee bit desperate. Learning that Ari and his Mommy Christie (don't care about her) live in a “beautiful house overlooking Newport Beach” is TM(Useless)I, and I was uncomfortable viewing photos of someone's actual house within this lightly fictionalized story.

This dogs is not an animal imbued with personality, and as far as I can see, it get little or no character development. Even though I can see her dog is cute, the reason she has an emotional connection to him is that he is her dog. What are readers without that connection to do? Cuteness can only take you so far, and pretty soon it turns into you spending 16 bucks on someone's else's Shutterfly Album.

The second thing that irks me is that within the product description she specifically tells us what we will learn. I think we can all agree that bibliotherapeutic books can be helpful for children and adults to a certain extent, but the condensing of a whole book into a one sentence “lesson learned” suggests that there wasn't much there in the first place. There is also something a little creepy about the pup being given bling to cheer it up. My own dogs bounce around at the sight of a little rawhide, but the suggestion that an expensive consumer good can make a hard situation better seems poorly considered. Oh, and making it a Christmas story? Makes. it. even. more. tacky.

This women is a member of SCWBI. Let us remember her story as we read, write and review children's books.

Silly the Scarecrow

So a funny thing happened - I kind of forgot that I blogged, Ah well, I am back and we shall see if it sticks this time.

The specific reason I am back is a nasty book called Silly the Scarecrow by J.H Willis, JR. I have seen this author spamming quite a few message boards - in my opinion, a sure sign that their book has little chance of succeeding on any of the ways I deem acceptable (reviews, hand selling, quality in general) so I decided to check it out. And, wow, was I right. And if this is right, then I only wanna be wrong. This is a simply awful little book.

I confess to only reading the "sample" pages, but they are so tragically flawed that I can safely say the rest of the book would be equally horrid. Okay, I know grammar is hard - there are so many rules! I myself often need a sanity check from my lovely significant other to ensure that I haven't let slip a tense error or a misplaced modifier. Yet this is beyond those kinds of errors. The wording in this book is just flat out wrong. On the very first page, there is a sentence fragment. Never a good way to start things.

But on the second page, things get downright weird. The word use is so flawed as to be bizarre, and although the thought that English might not be the author's first language crossed my mind, I decided that is *not* an excuse, as a good read through by a writing group (or a college student, or a high school student) would catch these errors. For instance how can a path be "discarded" - did the author mean deserted, or perhaps abandoned? What exactly does the author mean by "social attire? Cloths? Manners? Social class? Huh? Was the word "wondering" meant to be "wandering"? Not only are these word choices annoying and overly pretentious but there is a really egregious comma splice that made me squint with pain. I spent way too much time trying to decode this page.


I am also turned off by the way that this book is marketing itself. It professes itself as an educational text. The book comes with a "great instructional assessment at the end of the book" and "great vocabulary building" exercises. Yuck.  Every child wants to learn in the context of a stinky, overly didactic book that misused most of the words it professes to teach.

The good news is that I still found Silly the Scarecrow educational. Just not in the way that the author meant.

Huh?

Well, I'm not exactly sure what to make of this title. One, it originated out of a blog. Doesn't it seem like that's the key to literary success these days? I can think of cooking blogs, personal confessionals, even children's literature bloggers that have been snagging book contracts lately. But I digress, as the blogger book is sill so new that I'll have to wait to read more before commenting further.

No, what confuses me is that this book - When Sword Met Bow, written by Aya Katz -  about a chimpanzee being adopted into a human family, is that it is being marketed as a "bringing home a new baby" bibliotherapy type book: "When two and half year old Sword first met her baby brother Bow, her reactions were mixed. Would he take away all her mother's attention, or would he be a new playmate? A true story with photos." Ummm... no mention that baby brother is a little extra hairy?

And, okay, I'm not a parent yet, but I'm forced to conclude that "parenting"a chimpanzee would have its differences from parenting a human child, reinforced by this semi-hilarious because I'm not sure whether it's satire or not comment by an Amazon member: "My husband got a pet monkey once, and I didn't like it at all...but the kids did. Messy little critter". Its unfair to market a book on a really odd circumstance as though its usual. Although I do seem to remember that monkey babies were a Dr. Phil special recently. Maybe this author is tapping into a real need out there...

I think what most disappoints me here is what a missed opportunity this appears to be - it could make a great nonfiction, as Aya Katz appears to be a primatologist. I love scientists who really live their field. This book could even introduce children to some deeper ideas - on  the rights of animals or about their relationships to people. Kenneth Oppels' very recent and totally heartbreaking young adult novel Half Brother did just that. But to go with the new baby trope, well that just seems like cheating.

http://amzn.com/1456373765

Where it all began...

A few years ago, while clicking around Amazon, I began noticing a repetition of one title among the recommendations. Indeed, this book, said the author was a magical "everybook", one of those rare titles that manages to be all books for all people. Need the perfect book for a girl fantasy lover? This book fit the bill. Boy sports fans... ummm, yep. Read-aloud for the middle-grade? Check. Teen realism lovers? Oh, them too. Looking for ideas on creating the perfect birthday party or how to talk to children about dead pets? Well apparently, this book was ideal even for that. I was intrigued. This was the first time I had seen an author so relentlessly pursue the Customer Recommendation Forums, and I was either impressed by her marketing tenacity or horrified by what was essentially the spamming of a major business. I had to check it out.

When I got to her page and checked out the book, I was stunned. The book was bad. No, BAD, bad. So bad that it was alternately horrifying (what if a child actually got their hands on and read this crap? It could set their education back years!) to laughable (I spent an entire evening reading this aloud to my friend Rachel, both of us screeching with pained laughter).

 The book was written by Larry Ellis and Denise Brown Ellis and was called "Antigua: The Land of Fairies Wizards and Heroes," and I can't tell you how much it pains me not to insert those commas in there. I'm telling you, if you can't get your title right, there's no much sense going on. The book was an odd mash up of the high fantasy genre - a little Hobbit, a bit of King Arthur, and a whole lot of Robin McKinley and Tamora Pierce. Still, high fantasy is a genre that can't help but borrow from each other and I can forgive that. But the writing. Oh, the writing. Here's a little taste:

The villagers were extremely upset and heartbroken when they saw that their village had been charred and burnt down to the ground by the gigantic monster. Everything that the villagers had worked for and all their worldly possessions were gone in an instant! They had nothing left! The villagers couldn't believe what they were seeing. They couldn't believe that the Sorceress Gwendeviere could be so heartless and treacherous! She had destroyed everything! There was absolutely nothing left! The villagers had lot everything that meant anything to them.  There homes and their lives were gone! There was nothing left to rebuild and besides none of the the people felt safe there anymore.

What does it all mean? Doesn't this read like a trippy stream of consciousness narration? Is anyone else troubled by the odd changes in tone? Or the inconsistent uses of their/there? Heck, the grammar in general? Plus, these people had a problem with names. Didn't they know about the magical Caribbean island Antigua? Or figure out how to arrive at less contrived sounding names than "Aurthorr" or "Arlexjandrio"? Yes, I know... it's fantasy, but really? How about the weird repetitions in information that take the reader... nowhere? Or my personal favorite, the use of the exclamation point. The exclamation point key may have been stuck on their keyboard, as I counted that it was used 20 times on that single page. I can't tell you how disturbing I find this. Really.

Equally disturbing was her five star review of her own book. Keep it classy, self-publishing folk. After several flame wars defending her books, she promised that she was returning to the book to weed out unnecessary exclamation points, but gosh darn it, I thought you edited a book before you printed? Most disturbingly of all, Ellis promises that this is only the first in series. Ominous news.

Thankfully, after about a month, what the Amazon community referred to as the "hit squad" finally stopped this nonsense and removed all of Denise Brown's posts. Thus ended her reign of persistent annoyance and bad taste, but it had opened up the floodgates for more bad self-published taste to come.

Oh, and FYI.  They want 28.49 for this piece of literature.

Take that self publishers!

So I kind of love children's literature. Scratch that, I wholeheartedly adore children's literature. I've devoted the past four years, and more time and money than I like to admit in the dedicated study of books for young people. While working on a Masters Degree in Children's Literature, we treated each text - be it a thirty-two page picturebook or a 300 page young adult novel - as seriously as any play by Shakespeare or novel by Hemingway. Along with this literary criticism, I learned so much more. Whether we were determining what qualities make certain books successful, analyzing their artistic techniques and images, thinking about book design, or learning what these books tell both adults and child readers, I came to an even stronger conclusion that children's books are a subject well worth my time, effort and respect.

So when I see you, bad books, I get pissy. After all, you bring down all good authors with you. So I'm going after bad books. I'm primarily going to be looking at books advertised on Amazon.com, generally books that have been self published. Full disclosure - I won't be reading most of the books. I can't afford to buy them, plus, I don't want to encourage the authors with sales. Instead I'll be using Amazon samples, inside views and product descriptions. I know it's a little unfair to call these books out based on that, but frankly I think I can pick them out based on that much info. I feel especially justified in going after Amazon, since the self-publishing world has been spamming the heck out of the literary community there for a while. Looking for book recommendations on hamsters? Try my self published book on fairies. They're both... small. This irks me, people.

So what will I be looking for in this blog? Bad art. I get it that you love your grandkids drawings. They really are so sweet, but honey¸ there are some images that should stay in the family.  I'll be calling authors out on grammar and syntax. After all, writing is a craft that needs to be finely honed to be successful, and if you can't get it together to write a decent catalog copy, well, I'll notice that. I'll also be exploring common themes that show up in bad books. Must there always be a good Christian girl character? Do picture books need to rhyme?

I've been told that going after self published books is like shooting fish in a barrel, but well, I've never liked fishing anyway. Just the eating part. So bring it on, let's shame us some books!