I have a stack of children’s music CDs to review. I’m chagrined to say that by now, none of them are new releases. Still, maybe I can do some good by writing capsule reviews.
I’ll start off with The Brian Waite Band’s concept album, 20,000 Volts Under the Sea. The songs chart the story of the band’s journey to Atlantis City to play at the Neptune Theater, but are almost foiled by the machinations of Disco Don. The album itself is a homage to the seventies and early eighties music of various power-guitar rock bands, plus reggae, funk, disco, blues, and the requisite Elvis tribute. Much of the humor has arch references that mainly grownups who grew up in those decades will understand, especially in the “audiobook” at the end (with a narrator’s voice that sounds suspiciously like an impersonation of Greg Paige of The Wiggles. I initially wondered about the CD’s accessibility for children, but the more I listen to it, the more both my daughter and I enjoy it. We both agree that the songs are well-written and fun to listen to, but don’t care for the surfeit of silly voices. Favorite songs include the Queen-esque “Get Down,” and the hair-band anthem “Tidal Pool Party.” Warning: regardless of how you feel about the song “Disco Don,” it’s an earworm that will follow you and haunt your dreams.
Who I’d recommend this album to: fans of Eric Herman, Recess Monkey, plus my guitar teacher and my younger brother (who doesn’t have a website). I’d recommend the album to El Jope Magnifico too, but I wonder if that’s just a ploy of mine to get him to bring his daughter to the concert next Tuesday, July 20, at the Douglas-Truth Branch of The Seattle Public Library. It’s on a workday morning, but rock and roll often plays at unruly hours.
More reviews to come….
All content (unless otherwise noted) is copyrighted by Farida Dowler and may not be reproduced in any form except for short passages with proper attribution.
I am so out of it that I just found out that there was a KIA commercial shown during the 2010 Superbowl featuring a sock monkey. My godmother’s younger sister, Bonnie Connelly, designed both the sock monkey itself and the large sock monkey costume. Connelly is the creator of In My Own Dream Studio and author of Everything’s Coming Up Sock Monkeys.
I still have my own sock monkey made by my aunt before I was born. Monkey doesn’t look like any other sock monkey in creation. I bit the tassle off when I was a baby, and my aunt has often rued that Monkey has no ears. For some reason, when my friends see Monkey, they start to snicker. Poor Monkey!
All content (unless otherwise noted) is copyrighted by Farida Dowler and may not be reproduced in any form except for short passages with proper attribution.
I’ve started to learn to fingerpick melodies on the guitar using the Homespun Video DVD Easy Steps to Guitar Fingerpicking by Happy Traum. I already know how to play alternate bass notes and have the basics of Travis Picking, so it’s handy to have those skills already, but my playing is still pretty methodical. My current goal is to “have the music flow with variations that sound pleasing to the ear. I’m working on the first song on the DVD, which is “Skip to My Lou.” (You can hear Pete Seeger sing and play the song on the banjo here.) It’s only two chords, and I’m reminded of how I felt when I first started out. I needed to take lots of breaks to let my brain and fingers absorb the new information. I got tired of the song. Every time I returned to the song, I found that I had remembered a little bit more than I had before.
I think I’ll have “Skip to My Lou” underway by the end of next week. After that, “Spike Driver’s Blues” is next (link is to a YouTube video with a Mississippi John Hurt recording).
All content (unless otherwise noted) is copyrighted by Farida Dowler and may not be reproduced in any form except for short passages with proper attribution.
Other than a week of camp in August, I have full daily care of Lucia this summer. I will need to be particularly mindful to make sure that she gets regular social contact with others children. I am fine when other children come over to play and they can entertain themselves fairly well without grownup interference. I took a tip from a friend to tell children that they need to work things out so that everyone is satisfied, rather than stepping into conflicts to propose solutions.
Lucia started weaving with her new peg loom yesterday. At school, she discovered how much she loved weaving, and would come home to exclaim about the new colors on her loom. Yesterday, after she wove three colors, I read aloud the Grimms’ Spindle, Shuttle, and Needle. There are multiple variations of the rhymes that the maiden calls out, and when I studied the fairy tale for my library school storytelling class, I looked for the most satisfying rhymes:
Spindle, spindle, speed away,
Bring my suitor home today.
Shuttle, shuttle, weave and glide,
Bring my suitor to my side.
Needle, needle, sharp and fine,
Come adorn this house of mine.
Other activities planned for the summer are library programs (though they are quite sparse this year), storytimes at bookstores, weekly park days and daily walks. There will be some piano and swim lessons, too. Quite possibly I will dig out the paving stone kit she received as a birthday present years ago.
Through all of this, I need to work on my manuscript, practice guitar, and sew dolls for the shop. Some days all I want to do is read. When I cook dinner, I try to find recipes that don’t require a lot of attention other than occasional stirring. That way, I have no choice but to sit near the stove and read.
All content (unless otherwise noted) is copyrighted by Farida Dowler and may not be reproduced in any form except for short passages with proper attribution.
I was recently interviewed by the Mennonite Artist Project. You may read the featured artist interview here.
Update: I didn’t realize that you needed a Ning account and password to sign in to read the interview. My apologies. If you don’t want to create a free Ning account but want to read the interview, send me an email (see profile).
All content (unless otherwise noted) is copyrighted by Farida Dowler and may not be reproduced in any form except for short passages with proper attribution.
Did you love Tell Me a Secret? Are you looking for more stories of sisters and self-respect? Check out these additional postergirlz recommends. They are perfect companion reads!
Fiction
Jumping Off Swings by Jo Knowles
For Keeps by Natasha Friend
The Sky is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson
Borrowed Light by Anna Fienberg
The Year My Sister Got Lucky by Aimee Friedman
The Secret Year by Jennifer Hubbard
Non-Fiction
S.E.X: The All-You-Need-To-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get
You Through High School and College by Heather Corinna
Holly says, “When Miranda finds support, it’s not at all who she expected. Have you ever found friends in unlikely places?”
One of our readergirlz postergirlz, blogger and rock star YA librarian Jackie Parker, is getting married today! So from all of us at readergirlz…
Happy Wedding Day, Jackie and Kyle!
Rgz SALON member Lyn Miller-Lachmann has been the Editor-in-Chief of MultiCultural Review; the author of the award-winning multicultural bibliography Our Family, Our Friends, Our World; the editor of Once Upon a Cuento, a collection of short stories by Latino authors; and most recently, the author of Gringolandia, a young adult novel about a refugee family living with the aftermath of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. The book is now in it’s second print run and available for order! (Don’t forget to read the fascinating Cover Story for Gringolandia.)
We’re honored to have Lyn here as part of the rgz SALON, a feature where four of the top kidlit experts clue us in to the best YA novels they’ve read recently. Today, she reviews Tortilla Sun by Jennifer Cervantes (Chronicle Books, 2010).
“When her single mother, a graduate student, signs on to a research project in Costa Rica, 12-year-old Izzy Roybal is sent to her grandmother’s house in a New Mexican village even though Mom and Nana ‘don’t see eye to eye.’ Mom is a footloose scientist while Nana has never strayed from her Mexican-American roots and community. Not only has Mom kept Izzy away from her cultural heritage for twelve years, but she has also kept the youngster away from any information about her Anglo father, who died before Izzy was born.
“Before leaving California for New Mexico, Izzy finds her father’s baseball, on which is written, ‘because…magic,’ with the words in between clearly missing. Izzy is eager to find the missing words and with them the truth about her father. Nana and Nana’s friends counsel patience. There are tortillas to prepare and decorations to put up for a birthday party. To pass the time, Izzy works on a story she is writing about a girl whose life parallels hers. Then she meets 13-year-old Mateo, a guitar-playing neighbor with an interest in finding buried treasure, and Maggie, a six-year-old orphan who is cared for by her grandmother Gip, Nana’s best friend. Mateo introduces Izzy to Socorro, the village healer, who offers more clues to Izzy’s past, but Izzy’s desire to discover everything at once puts others in danger.
“Cervantes’s debut novel reveals the rich fabric of the community and a spunky and appealing protagonist. Izzy’s energy and impatience ring true, as well as her feeling of being out of sync with the village at first. The same feeling of being at odds with her surroundings helped to drive away Izzy’s mother, but the youngster’s desire to connect with her past bonds her to people with whom she otherwise has little in common. Cervantes uses elements of magic realism as markers of the characters’ emotional transformation in a way that is subtle and natural. Most compelling, though, is the connection between the athletic, tomboyish Izzy to the father she never knew, a promising baseball player until the tragedy that took his life.” -Lyn Miller-Lachmann
The super-fun Robin Benway has two Cover Stories for our enjoyment. We’ll start with her awesome debut, Audrey, Wait!, and you’ll get the tale behind her new cover (for The Extraordinary Secrets of April, May and June) later this week.
Here’s Robin!
“In my first book, Audrey, Wait!, Audrey is a character who loves music, so I always had an image of a girl’s wrist covered in wristbands. Not bracelets, but the sort of wristbands you get when you have to queue up in line for a concert or to get backstage. I thought that’d be so cool! When Audrey sold, however, my publisher hired Rodrigo Corral to do the cover. I was over the moon at this news, since I had seen so many of his book covers and thought they were beautiful.
“When Razorbill first emailed me the image that would become the hardcover Audrey cover, I was driving down to Orange County and my phone at the time couldn’t download photos. My agent called me and was saying, ‘Did you see it? Did you see it?’ and I was FREAKING OUT because I couldn’t see it and I didn’t have my computer with me and I was an hour away from home and I NEEDED to see my book cover!
“So I did what any rational person would do: I drove to the nearest Apple store, hopped onto a computer, and pulled up the image….”
Read the rest of Robin’s Cover Story and see foreign editions of the cover at
melissacwalker.com.
I’ll start off with The Brian Waite Band’s concept album, 20,000 Volts Under the Sea. The songs chart the story of the band’s journey to Atlantis City to play at the Neptune Theater, but are almost foiled by the machinations of Disco Don. The album itself is a homage to the seventies and early eighties music of various power-guitar rock bands, plus reggae, funk, disco, blues, and the requisite Elvis tribute. Much of the humor has arch references that mainly grownups who grew up in those decades will understand, especially in the “audiobook” at the end (with a narrator’s voice that sounds suspiciously like an impersonation of Greg Paige of The Wiggles. I initially wondered about the CD’s accessibility for children, but the more I listen to it, the more both my daughter and I enjoy it. We both agree that the songs are well-written and fun to listen to, but don’t care for the surfeit of silly voices. Favorite songs include the Queen-esque “Get Down,” and the hair-band anthem “Tidal Pool Party.” Warning: regardless of how you feel about the song “Disco Don,” it’s an earworm that will follow you and haunt your dreams. 
