Anne of Green Bagels - Softcover

Buller, Jon; Schade, Susan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1629914657 ISBN 13: 9781629914657

Publisher: Papercutz, 2016

Synopsis

On her first day at her new school, Anne is saddled with the nickname Anne of Green Bagels, thanks to the health-food sandwich her grandmother has made her for lunch. Can things get any worse? Already her father has left home to try out his newest crackpot invention, the Pedestrian Mobile Home, and her mother has moved them from New Mexico to the cookie-cutter community of Megatown. Then she meets Otto, who shares her interest in music and in her favorite TV show, The Blimptons. Together they prepare to enter the school talent show with an original composition, "Wolfman Stomp." When Anne sees the drawings in a childhood notebook of her father's, she wonders, could it be that he was the real inventor of the Blimptons? And can she somehow get him to come home and claim the credit he deserves?

About this title

About the Author:

Susan Schade has written over 40 kids' books, most of them done in collaboration with her husband, Jon Buller. Susan does most of the writing, and Jon Buller does most of the illustrating, but they both do a little bit of each. For more details of their lurid and scandal-filled lives and careers, visit their website, www.bullersooz.com.

From School Library Journal:

Gr 4–7—Anne feels like an outsider compared to her new sixth-grade classmates, not least because she has recently moved in with her grandparents while her father tests a portable homeless shelter in authentic conditions. Anne plays violin with her new friend Otto, with whom she shares a love of the children's show The Blimptons. As she and Otto prepare to play in a school recital under the name "The Green Bagels," an attempt at reclaiming an insult from Anne's first day of school, she experiences vivid stress dreams about her father, school bullying, and performance anxiety. Silent illustrated sequences depict Anne's dreams, ranging from the symbolically pedestrian to the eerie and evocative. High emotions and key explosions of personality are also inserted into the narrative as brief comic illustrations, with similar varying degrees of success or distraction from the story. Buller and Schade work hard to give the characters psychological depth, a necessity in a book structured around dream sequences, and just about every character is given a chance to prove that they are better than Anne's initial judgements. But the climax of the action falls spectacularly flat, as all the plot threads converge in a hasty jumble, lacking pacing and emotional weight. VERDICT A sincere but unsuccessful attempt at accessible psychological complexity undone by too many disparate elements.—Benjamin Russell, Belmont High School, NH

About this edition

• Publisher: Papercutz
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1629914657
• ISBN 13: 9781629914657
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192