Puss Reboots: Blog: March 2010: Return of the Homework Machine

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Reviews:
Amulet 2: The Stonekeeper's Curse by Kazu Kibuishi
Arthur's New Puppy by Marc Brown
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Cat Dreams by Urusla K. Le Guin and S. D. Schindler (illustrator)
Clementina's Cactus by Ezra Jack Keats
Creepy Crawly Crime by Aaron Reynolds and Neil Numberman
Dinosaur Train by John Steven Gurney
Duma Key by Stephen King
Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Death and Dementia by Edgar Allan Poe and Gris Grimly
Frankie Pickle and the Closet of Doom by Eric Wight
Gravitation Volume 2 by Maki Murakami
Gunnerkrigg Court: Orientation by Tom Siddell
Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill
Hour of the Olympics (Magic Tree House #16) by Mary Pope Osborne
If You Take a Mouse to the Movies by Laura Numeroff and Felicia Bond
Is it Just Me or is Everything Shit? by Steve Lowe and Alan McArthur
Henry's 100 Days of Kindergarten by Nancy Carlson
Hip Cat by Jonathan London
Knuckleboom Loaders Load Logs by Joyce Slayton-Mitchell
The Last Dickens by Matthew Pearl
King Matt the First by Janusz Korczak
Muse and Reverie by Charles de Lint
The Mystery of Grace by Charles de Lint
No Mad by Sam Moffie
Odd and the Frost Giants by Neil Gaiman
Pharaoh's Flowers by H. Nigel Hepper
Planting a Rainbow by Lois Ehlert
Private Eye by Albert E. Cowdrey
Return of the Homework Machine by Dan Gutman
Salmon Doubts by Adam Sacks
The Shrinking of Treehorn by Florence Parry Heide
The Silent Boy by Lois Lowry
Snowfall by Jessie Thompson
Songwood by Marc Laidlaw
Sun of Suns by Karl Schroeder
Tonight on the Titanic (Magic Tree House #17) by Mary Pope Osborne
What Pete Ate from A to Z by Maira Kalman
When Cats Dream by Dav Pilkey

Previous month

Return of the Homework Machine: 03/04/10

With all the recent hullabaloo over the whitewashing of covers for tween and young adult literature, I've been paying more attention to the cover art in the children's wing of my library. Return of the Homework Machine by Dan Gutman jumped out at me because of it's diverse cast of characters on the cover. The title also reminded me of The Secret Science Alliance, a graphic novel I was reading for the Cybils.

Return of the Homework Machine is the sequel to The Homework Machine which I haven't read but plan to. The story is told as a series of interviews just as Anita Shreve's Testimony is. I think Gutman did a good job of finding individual voices for each person testifying especially since it's a mixture of sixth graders and adults.

What pulled me into the novel though was the delightful combination of location (the Grand Canyon), and exotic treasure (and Egyptian burial) and danger (a strange man who is after the indestructible chip that made the homework machine so powerful). Seriously, this was like reading a tween version of a Clive Cussler mystery. I loved it.