Help us.” With this book, Gratz accomplishes a feat that is nothing short of brilliant, offering a skillfully wrought narrative laced with global and intergenerational reverberations that signal hope for the future. Mahmoud eventually concludes that visibility is best: “See us….Hear us. Each third-person narrative offers an accessible look at migration under duress, in which the behavior of familiar adults changes unpredictably, strangers exploit the vulnerabilities of transients, and circumstances seem driven by random luck. Each initially leaves by boat, struggles between visibility and invisibility, copes with repeated obstacles and heart-wrenching loss, and gains resilience in the process. Each traverses a landscape ruled by a dictator and must balance freedom, family, and responsibility. Yet these three refugee odysseys have so much in common. Three countries, three time periods, three brave protagonists. In the midst of political turmoil, how do you escape the only country that you’ve ever known and navigate a new life? Parallel stories of three different middle school–aged refugees-Josef from Nazi Germany in 1938, Isabel from 1994 Cuba, and Mahmoud from 2015 Aleppo-eventually intertwine for maximum impact. Wallace’s limping verses are uninspired at best, and the scansion and meter are frequently off. The narrator is depicted with black eyes and hair and pale skin. Elkerton’s bright illustrations have a TV-cartoon aesthetic, and his playful beast is never scary. The final two spreads show the duo getting ready for bed, which is a rather anticlimactic end to what has otherwise been a rambunctious tale. The monster greets the boy in the usual monster way: he “rips a massive FART!!” that smells like strawberries and lime, and then they go to the monster’s house to meet his parents and play.
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Turns out he was only scaring the boy to wake him up so they could be friends. This last works, but with an unexpected result: the monster looks sad. The kid employs a “bag of tricks” to try to catch the monster: in it are a giant wind-up shark, two cans of silly string, and an elaborate cage-and-robot trap. He almost scares me half to death, / but I won’t be scared anymore!” The monster is a large, fluffy poison-green beast with blue hands and feet and face and a fluffy blue-and-green–striped tail.
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When a kid gets the part of the ninja master in the school play, it finally seems to be the right time to tackle the closet monster. If you've done well with the others, you'll want this if not, try Tolkien.
TARAN WANDERER SERIES
This fourth in the series is aesthetically complete without the other three books, but a reader would have a hard time identifying Gurgi (whose gurglings are mercifully less than usual), Dallben, Fflam and the rest with a brief introduction this quest could stand alone.
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Were these commonplaces seen with fresh insight, were the narrative written in a more muscular, less self-conscious style, this version of a familiar theme might work the identity crisis is universal and the adventure leading to its solution moves very well - but the extra elements are missing. Of wisdom, a little, of folly much.a man like any and none other." Taran, the Assistant Pig-Keeper of the first three Prydain books, passes through many Welsh terrors and not a few European cliches - life is: is a smithy's forge, a weaver's loom, a potter's wheel, what you make it - before finding self-knowledge in a reflection of himself. A young man searches for his identity and finds that he is not what he was born but what he is becoming, that he is, in short, himself: "strength - and frailty.