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 Publisher's Weekly Review
The team that pertly turned the eat-your-vegetables dilemma upside-down with Little Pea again puts reverse psychology to work, this time for the sake of bedtime. Like his legume counterpart, Little Owl has a great life-except for one thing: "All my other friends get to go to bed so much earlier than me! Why do I always have to stay up and play? It's not fair!" This follow-up lacks the full-strength visual quirkiness of Little Pea: the peas' stripped-down roundedness (they were essentially a family of heads) made everything they did even funnier. The considerably more anthropomorphized owl family, on the other hand, feels recognizable, which blunts the comic impact of their bizarro worldview. Even so, this outing is not to be missed. Rosenthal and Krouse plant little gags throughout-when Little Hoot is seen at school, the lesson on the chalkboard reads "who/ whom/ whose"-and they sustain the joke with such twisted-logic gems as this one from Papa Owl: "I don't give a hoot what time your friends go to bed. In this family, we stay up late." Ages 3-up. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
PreS-Gr 2-Rosenthal successfully continues her twisted take on traditional childhood dilemmas that she began in Little Pea (Chronicle, 2005). Little Hoot is a happy owl except at bedtime. All of his woodland friends get to go to bed early, but he does not. "Why do I always have to stay up and play? It's not fair!" Little Hoot tries to convince his parents to let him retire early, only to be forced to play for one more hour. According to his father, he must stay up late if he wants to grow up to be a wise owl. His mother tells him, "Ten more minutes of playing, Mister. And please don't ask me again." Little Hoot flies straight to bed ignoring his parents' offers of bedtime stories and glasses of water. Detailed ink and watercolor illustrations are uncluttered and placed on plenty of white space. Text and art convey parental love, filial annoyance, and everything in between. This fun reversal of traditional bedtime woes is sure to be enjoyed by many children.-Catherine Callegari, formerly at Gay-Kimball Library, Troy, NH (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
Little Hoot is tired, but "when you're an owl you have to stay up late, late, late." Ink and watercolor drawings against expansive white backgrounds delicately delineate the young owl's atypical nighttime routine as he gamely proceeds through his required extra hour of playtime. Young readers will be amused by the story's reversal of the traditional bedtime scenario. (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
Another captivating, crowd-pleasing twist on a familiar domestic issue from the creators of Little Pea (2005). Little Hoot likes school, and doesn't mind practicing pondering and staring like a good owl--but hates, hates, hates having to stay up late. All of his friends go to bed early, so why can't he? "Rules of the roost," says Papa Owl. "Stay up and play for one more hour and then you can go to sleep," says Mama Owl. "When I grow up, I'm going to let my kids go to bed as early as they want," grumbles Little Hoot, slouching off for another hour's fort-building, skateboarding and bed-jumping. Corace puts her big-headed birds in human dress and surrounds them, along with the occasional leaf-decorated bed or chair, with plenty of white space. Even very young children will respond to the outsized outrage that Little Hoot expresses in every simply drawn line and--when the long hour is up at last--the joyous release with which he bounds into bed without even waiting for a bedtime story. Parents too will find this droll switcheroo a hoot and a half. (Picture book. 4-6) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
