Review by New York Times Review
IT'S funny when, as a relatively well-adjusted woman in your 40s, you read two fine novels about intelligent girls who are curious and daring and good-hearted. There is a wrench in your belly - of recognition, or nostalgia. It's appreciation for careful attention paid to a short, mostly underrated phase in the life of women. Suddenly the body armor you've built and polished feels leaden and even cowardly. What seem bold are the characters of Jacqueline Woodson and Pat Murphy, who in their new novels render the knotty friendships of girls with gravity, whimsy, intimacy and melodrama. Both novelists, with their tendency toward straightforward, spare sentences (especially Woodson), create rich worlds with relentless attention to emotional detail. In both books, there are prickly allusions to not fitting inside one's own body. But "After Tupac and D Foster" and "The Wild Girls" aren't novels about first menstrual periods or the cute boy in first period. Instead, the girls in these books encourage one another to write fanciful fiction and tramp through woods, or to take a secret train trip to the big city and back. "It's all quiet now," the unnamed narrator says to her friend Neeka in "After Tupac and D Foster." "You can start working on planning your Big Purpose." These girls have lives. And both books are luscious and dangerous with brand-new moments of self-rule. The girls' rebel fearlessness is without affectation, and tempered by sturdy family ties; they have just begun to realize that the loosening of such cords is even possible. The authors depict the in-between moment - do we still wear matching clothes because we're best friends? do we still play outside? - as the girls' focus on one another, and on their families, becomes sharper and more nuanced with almost every page. The title "After Tupac and D Foster" is more about time frame - the novel takes place between the time the rapper Tupac Shakur was shot and lived in 1994, and then was shot and died in 1996 - than subject matter, which converges around the narrator and her friend Neeka, both girls from solid, if imperfect, families in Queens, and D, their new friend. A lonely, adventurous foster child, D tilts her friends' lives in small but transformative ways. The narrative mostly skips hip-hop's beats and rhymes for the lyrics and loudness of brusque girlhoods, especially the sibling-on-sibling parenting that happens in big families. Youthful parenting, the book murmurs, makes kids grown-ups too soon. At one point, Neeka says to her mother, Irene, "Nobody told you to have all these kids." The narrator is afraid that Neeka will be popped in the mouth by Irene right on the train platform. But Irene cuts to the quick with words. "I guess I should have stopped before I got to you, huh?" Toward the end, D goes away to live with her real mother; the friends don't even learn her real name until she's about to catch the bus. The narrator, though coming to terms with the fact that D's life is not so much romantic as it is complicated, could still agree with something Neeka says early on: "D's cool. She's like from another planet. The Planet of the Free. ... I'm gonna go to that planet one day." "The Wild Girls" winds through a Northern California suburb plush with creeks and culverts. Joan, 12, has just arrived from sedate Connecticut with her parents (quietly selfish father; strong yet depleted mother) and 15-year-old brother, and on a hike into the woods meets a motherless girl named Sarah who calls herself the Queen of the Foxes (her father, created, like so many characters in both novels, with fullness of detail, is a startlingly charming tattooed biker). The girls, responding to each other's lonesomeness, immediately begin catching newts and playing make-believe, and soon graduate to keeping journals and writing stories together that catch the attention of an intense writing instructor at Berkeley. WOODSON, with her tale of three pseudo-tough girls in Queens, cares less about plot than does Murphy, with her longer, more traditionally paced novel about two girls who toughen up by painting their faces with tribalesque "war paint" and learning by the end of the novel that part of growing up is living by one's own axioms, the ones that come from experience: "Sometimes, you gotta believe something crazy," Sarah says, to explain why she obstinately holds on to the idea that her mother, who left the family when she was 2, has turned into an actual fox. "Because all the other things you could believe hurt too much." Joan and Sarah, like the girls of "Tupac," are at the age when ideas like sneaking off alone, especially in the dead of night to stand in a moonlit amphitheater, are an irresistible twitch. There is whooping and squirrel-watching and rock-throwing - on au courant tomboyism that remains free of mocking contemporaries for wearing lip gloss. They are deep in the romance of growing up. Could both these novels, in terms of setting, be more impressionistic and vivid, like those years are? Is there in both a lack of suspense about what will happen? Yes. But in their books Woodson and Murphy have both created moments of humanity that the girls respond to with whole hearts. They wear innocence like polished armor, and it shines. These girls encourage one another to write and tramp through woods, or to take a secret train to the city. Danyel Smith, the editor in chief of Vibe, is the author of "More Like Wrestling" and "Bliss."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
This is literally a follow-up to Not a Box (2007), in which a rabbit notes the imaginary things a box can be. Here, the animal is a pig, and the object is a stick. When the unseen narrator urges, Be careful with that stick, the pig replies that it's not a stick. And sure enough, on succeeding pages, the object is a sword, a fishing rod, and inexplicably, a horse. Once again Portis' very simple black line drawings, set against clean backgrounds, leave plenty of room for imagination. Children will hope for others in the Not a series.--Cooper, Ilene Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Where Portis's Not a Box featured a plain brown wrapper, this winning sequel proffers a faux wood-grain cover. And where the earlier title featured a deceptively boxlike, hollow rectangle (which an inventive rabbit treated as a rocket or a race car), this follow-up introduces a little pig holding a long, forked object. An unenlightened voice offstage suggests, "Hey, be careful with that stick." The pig corrects the false impression ("It's not a stick") and demonstrates the item's many uses. Portis traces pig and plaything in a heavy black line on negative space, then superimposes jaunty blue line drawings that act as overlays to reveal the pig's imaginings. The pig stands astride the stick, and a rearing horse shape appears. The pig holds the stick at its midpoint and it becomes a paintbrush, aiming toward Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night. Where the offstage warnings appear in white italics on a gray ground, implying a drab rejection of fantasy ("Watch where you point that stick"), the pig's statements are printed against a deep and dreamy blue. Portis repeats her previous formula down to the conclusion, where the pig calls the DIY toy "my Not-a-Stick!," once again appealing to those who think outside the box. Ages up to 6. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
PreS-Gr 1-Portis follows up on her successful Not a Box (HarperCollins, 2007) with equally pleasing results. Young listeners will be treated to the imaginative world of a charmingly minimalist pig who appears to be holding an ordinary stick. Following each admonition, "Hey, be careful with that stick," the youngster insists on the following spread that "it's not a stick." Its true nature is then dramatically revealed through clever illustrations. Morphing from a fishing pole to a drum major's baton, a paintbrush, a barbell, a horse, a spear, and finally to a sword, this "Not-a-stick" is clearly a powerful key to other worlds. Portis's simple color palette and playful drawings with never a line out of place represent the best in children's illustration. Perfect for sharing aloud, Not a Stick will inspire youngsters to look for the magic in ordinary objects.-Jayne Damron, Farmington Community Library, MI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
(Preschool) It's not hard to sum up this derivative but still enjoyable companion to Not a Box (rev. 1/07): different animal, different object, same concept. Once again focusing on the transformative power of children's imaginations, Portis here shows a young pig (drawn, like Box's rabbit, in simple black outline) brandishing a stick that, to the offstage narrator, is merely a hazard -- "Hey, be careful with that stick." But in the pig's mind -- as illustrated on alternating spreads -- it's a fishing pole, a drum major's baton, a paintbrush capable of producing Van Gogh-quality masterpieces, etc. The accent color is blue instead of red this time, but its purpose is the same: to highlight the difference between what the adult narrator sees (an ordinary stick) and the fanciful visions the young pig concocts during his creative play. Here's hoping Portis shows as much imagination as her protagonists with her next project and heads in a new direction. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In a near carbon copy of her debut (Not a Box, 2006), Portis brings to life the imaginative properties inherent in an average stick. As a small pig plays blithely with its new toy, an omnipresent narrator questions and warns the animal about the wisdom of waving about the large pointy object. The pig, for its part, repeats again and again its insistence that this is not a stick. Dark blue lines allow readers to imagine--along with the animal--several feats of derring-do and wonder accomplished with the stick-turned-fishing rod/marching baton/cowboy's pony, etc. At the end, the pig triumphantly names its toy a "Not-a-Stick" and leads an imaginary dragon off in triumph. Accusations of Portis copycatting her original book are almost irrelevant in the face of this book's cheer. Certainly one hopes that she will someday find a new format for her creative drive, but at least this sequel has enough charm and understated pizzazz to allow its creator to work her magic one more time. (Picture book. 4-8) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
