The Sable Quean (Redwall)

By Brian Jacques, illustrated by Sean Charles Rubin

Philomel Books, 2010

$23.99, ages 12 and up, 368 pages

What happens when two battle-crazed hares, one an expert with a sword, the other a champion with a spoon, set off for adventure in Mossflower Wood and run into a pack of vermin that is up to no good?

A rousing good tale of good versus evil, with plenty of breaks in the ruckus for plum duff and cordial, ditties and marching tunes, and a riddle to aide our humble heroes in uncovering what is hidden.

In this splendid 21st book in the epic, best-selling Redwall series, we find yet another vicious band of no-gooders trying to upset the bucolic world of the squirrels, otters and other gentle woodlanders of Mossflower.

Buckler Kordyne, a brave warrior hare, has been sent away from the mountain fortress Salamandastron with his food-guzzling scout Diggs to figure out what he wants from life when he stumbles upon a sinister plan to steal away Mossflower's young ones and take over Redwall Abbey.

Until now, the woodlanders had been enjoying peace in Mossflower and believed the days of battling their enemies the Ravagers were over -- which made for a pleasant time inside Redwall, but had amounted to a dull life for Blademaster Buck, who hungered for adventure.

Salamandastron's Badger Lord could see that young Buck was frustrated with teaching sword fighting; Buck disparaged it as "playing at being a warrior" and was acting rebellious. So the Badger Lord ordered him to take time off to travel with his trusted assistant, the hare Subaltern Digglethwaite, Diggs.

Buck is told to travel to his brother's farm and along the way to stop by Redwall to give the Abbess Marjoram a gift of new ropes for its bell tower, but the closer the young swordsman and his chunnery friend get to the monastery-like Redwall, the less tranquil the countryside seems to be.

First they run into a scoundrel fox and weasel trying to kidnap a shrewmaiden named Flib then meet up with a family of actors, The Witherspyk Performing Players, whose raft has run aground and before there's time to help them refloat the raft, the family's hedgehog twins and Flib go missing.

Hoping that the gentle folk at Redwall may have seen the little ones, Buck, Diggs and the Witherspyk family decide to head downstream to the abbey, aided by an army of compassionate Guosim shrews who lash their longboats to the side of the raft and join in the paddling.

But at Redwall, the news is bleak: two more babes are missing there as well. A vermin caught inside the refuge confesses that a vixen known as Vilaya the Sable Quean and her ruthless warrior Zwilt the Shade are sending Ravagers into the woodland to steal young ones.

Unless Buck, Diggs and the woodlanders can find Althier, an underground cave where the children are hidden, before a horde of Ravagers descends upon the abbey, they could lose Redwall, and worse yet, their young ones. But who is this mad hog Triggut Frap doing prowling around the babes?

It will take all of the good creatures in Mossflower, including its late savior Martin the Warrior mouse, a warrior mole, an old volewife and a heavy-handed badgermaid, to save the day.

The Sable Quean was a delight from the moment I opened it. I loved how richly the Mossflower world was imagined, from the woodlanders' brogues to their savory feasts and ballads. But the greatest draw for me was observing the animals interact, the banter that goes on, the harmless jabs, the camaraderie.

I had this strange and wonderful feeling that I was there too -- that the gentle folk had laid out a welcome mat for me to join in their adventure, a figurative pat on the back and boisterous "Over here, friend," before passing a scone and leading me along on their quest.

The Storm in the Barn

Written and illustrated by Matt Phelan

Candlewick Press, 2009

$24.99, ages 9-12, 208 pages

Phelan uses the graphic novel format to great effect in this mythical story about a boy who saves his family's farm from ruin by defeating an elemental villain during the 1930s Dust Bowl.

Set in Kansas in 1937 near the end of the disaster, the story of 11-year-old Jack Clark and his family's struggle to survive the dust and drought is told through spare dialogue and sweeping sequences of action that capture the haunting mood of the time.

As the story opens, Jack's neighbors are fleeing from their Kansas farm as clouds of dust roll into town. Their sedan has just taken off through a brown haze, when a figure in a blue cape suddenly appears in the headlights. The father hits the breaks, only to find no one there, and brushes it off as nothing.

Then the story jumps to the next day. Jack has just been slugged by bullies in the center of town, when another dark cloud falls over them. The bullies take cover in the general store, but Jack, wanting to get far away from them, races down the road to his neighbor's abandoned barn, only to find the door jammed. With the dust storm at his heels, he flees to his house, barely getting inside before the cloud can envelop him.

The doctor is there with his parents, checking on his older sister Dorothy, who is coughing in the next room from dust-induced pneumonia. They are perplexed why Jack didn't take shelter sooner in the store and the doctor assumes Jack was intentionally trying to run into the storm. As Jack goes to Dorothy's bedside, he overhears the doctor suggest he has "dust dementia."

That night, Jack overhears his parents talking about packing up and leaving their farm, and finds himself staring out of his window into the darkness. Suddenly a blinding light flashes from inside his neighbor's barn, and Jack rubs his eyes in disbelief, wondering if the doctor is right and he is losing his mind.

Each day, Jack finds himself increasingly preoccupied by the barn.

First he finds his baby sister, twirling outside the barn with an umbrella, singing about rain she's never seen, and later, he manages to yank loose the barn's door. Inside, he steps into a puddle and thinks he smells rain. Then in the night, another burst of light lures him back to the barn and he spots a bag rumbling in the rafters and a spooky visage drenched in water.

The face belongs to a greedy storm king, bent on depriving the land of rain until everyone is so desperate for water that they bow to him as a god. Already, the townsfolk have resorted to nailing snakes to fence posts, a superstitious offering to invite rain, though they have no idea this phantom exists.

The Storm King senses that Jack is a timid boy and, when confronted, taunts him about being useless, while Jack -- desperate to feel valuable on the farm and to hold his ground with bullies -- grows increasingly angry and begins to believe there's a way to make the phantom release the rain.

First Dorothy, who spends her days reading L. Frank Baum's Oz series, unknowingly helps Jack to see the villain for who he is. While at her bedside, Jack asks Dorothy why the wizard left Kansas for Oz, and she guesses that he wanted to become special and powerful. Then the owner of the general store spins a tale about another Jack who outsmarts the king of wind by squeezing milk from stone and goes on to defeat him with his own weapon.

The next day Jack passes a huckster selling a contraption he claims will produce thunder, then in turn unleash rain, and Jack begins to understand what the mysterious bag in the barn could hold.

Rain, of course, was not a cure-all for the real Dust Bowl. As we know, the disaster was rooted in unsound farming practices and drought only exacerbated it. But as Phelan states in an author's note at the end of the book, his desire was not to simply replay history, but to reimagine it from a children's perspective and key into their love of folklore, as well as their fascination with the Wizard of Oz movie, which debuted two years after this story occurs.

And indeed, he does just that -- and along the way, demonstrates the literary power of the graphic novel.

It is said that silence speaks louder than words, and interestingly it's the panels of wordless images in Phelan's novel, created with charcoal and earthy watercolors, that really pull me in. As I follow one panel to the next, the suspense builds (much like in a silent movie), and I sense how consuming the dust must have been for those who lived it. I can almost feel grit on the page and hear the ghostly wail of the wind as it leaps from frame to frame.

There is one particularly dark moment in the book, when the farmers, crazed by the drought, round up and kill rabbits that are eating what is left of their crops -- a panel washed in red conveys the brutality. Phelan also uses a few strong words at the beginning of the story to evoke the farmers' frustration. Yet nothing seems gratuitous; these spare, edgy moments bring to bear the torment endured by farmers and help make Phelan's first graphic novel a powerful glimpse into this haunting time.

To learn more about Phelan, the illustrator of the 2007 Newberry Medal winner, The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron, visit http://www.mattphelan.com. View Candlewick's video trailer of the book below!

Wonderland

By Tommy Kovac and illustrated by Sonny Liew

Disney Press, 2009

$19.99, ages 13 and up, 160 pages

A Wonderland sequel that refers to Alice but doesn't bring her back might seem as curious as a grin without a cat -- especially, when the main character of the book is a lowly housemaid who was mentioned but didn't actually appear in the original Lewis Carroll classic.

But the moment you follow Mary Ann, the White Rabbit's housemaid, into Kovac and Liew's graphic version of Wonderland, you realize how perfectly sensical -- and clever -- it was to re-enter Wonderland without Alice and to choose this particular secondary character to fill her shoes.

As you may remember, in Chapter 4 of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the White Rabbit mistakes Alice for his handmaid Mary Ann and Alice begins acting like her even though she dislikes the idea of being thought of as a mere maid. In light of how offended and confused Alice was then, it's wonderfully ironic that Mary Ann is now the girl who journeys deep underground.

In this followup, Mary Ann -- a compulsive cleaner who sweeps her feather duster, a bird with a feather crest, over everything in her path, including the dirt path itself -- discovers that Alice created a lot animosity when she pretended to be her. Now it's up to Mary Ann to dust her way out of the mess, though Mary Ann is not at all happy about Alice's past impertinence. As you may recall, after Alice drank the potion that caused her to blow up in size, Alice kicked Bill the Lizard out of his master's chimney, then got in a fix with the Queen of Hearts, which in this sequel has made the queen extra feisty.

When we meet Mary Ann, she is running late to the rabbit's house and decides to take a back way (that proves to be a long way) through a hole in a tree. There she find the rabbit anxiously waiting to receive his gloves so he can tend to the queen. But just as the White Rabbit is about to leave for the queen's chambers, the clock in the house (which grins like the Cheshire cat) warns the rabbit that he's been incriminated for suspicious dealings. Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum, sentenced to death for being ridiculous, have slandered the White Rabbit in order to spare themselves from being beheaded. They've told the queen that the rabbit secretly met with "the Alice monster" before she wrecked the queen's castle, and now the queen is so livid she wants to decapitate the White Rabbit instead.

Before Mary Ann and the White Rabbit have time to react, the Queen of Hearts shows up at the rabbit's house to have his head lopped off and gets into an altercation with Mary Ann (the queen accidentally soils Mary Ann's perfectly white apron with a cupcake so Mary Ann clocks her over the head with her scepter). Fleeing for their lives, Mary Ann and the White Rabbit head into the thick, dark Tulgey Wood. (Mary Ann assumes the queen now wants her head as well, though the rabbit insists maids are too forgettable for the queen to care about.)

Right away -- as you might expect from the Tulgey Wood, where the Jabberwock is said to dwell -- Mary Ann and the rabbit run into trouble. First the Cheshire cat appears in a tree and dupes the White Rabbit into reciting a curse (the Jabberwocky poem), which brings to life the monster "with eyes of flame." The Jabberwock, a dragon-like fellow with three green eyes and teeth like a piranha's, chases the rabbit into the queen's yard, where he's taken custody by her card soldiers. Then Mary Ann, who gets separated from the rabbit and remains in Tulgey Wood, falls into the Treacle Well and is led underground by ghouls (resembling old maids of the afterlife) to the deposed Queen of Spades.

The Queen of Spades, previously thrown into the well by a pair of hearts, decides to turn Mary Ann into her slave and just as Mary Ann is trying to figure a way out of the well, the White Rabbit falls from above. (The card soldiers were too queasy to behead the rabbit so they disposed of him in the well instead.) Soon, all manner of wondrous things, familiar and not-so-familiar, start to happen. The queen, king, Mary Ann and the rabbit sneeze on shrinking dust and become small enough to ride a pipe-puffing butterfly (the transformed Caterpillar character) out of the well. Once above-ground they return to normal size and crash land on the Mad Hatter's tea table. But now that the Queen of Spades is out of the well, will the two queens pull each other's hair out? And what's this talk of a Chaos Queen? A shift in power is afoot in Wonderland, and it'll take a pair of giant scissors to set things right.

It's not hard to sing Wonderland's praises. Even before it was published, all six chapters were nominated for the Eisner Award after being published as single-issue comics by SLG Publishing. This is a wonderfully wacky book and even if you don't read graphic novels, you'll find the humor irresistible and the richly colored cartoon panels (so full of physical humor you almost think the characters move on the page) too spectacular to miss.

Psst. Parents might want to sneak a read before passing this one along.