(+++) A LESSER LIGHT IN OPERETTA

Carl Michael Ziehrer: Die drei Wünsche (The Three Wishes). Volker Vogel, Ariana Strahl, Donna Ellen, Valeriy Serkin, Lorena Espina, Klemens Slowioczek, Anna Siminska, Michael Heim, Alfred Berger, Cornelia Zink; Chorsolisten und Orchester der Musik Theater Schőnbrunn conducted by Herbert Mogg. CPO. $33.99 (2 CDs).

     The turn of the 20^th century brought with it an interregnum in the world of Viennese operetta. Johann Strauss Jr. died in 1899; his final operetta, the pastiche Wiener Blut (which he did not arrange and for which he did not compose any new music) was mounted five months after his death. Franz Lehár was just starting out in the field: The Merry Widow would not be produced until 1905. Into this brief gap stepped a number of less-distinguished composers, including Carl Michael Ziehrer with Die drei Wünsche in 1901.

     Like Wiener Blut, this is a pastiche operetta, using a variety of tunes that Ziehrer had previously composed. Ziehrer was no orchestrator – it seems that the arrangements for Die drei Wünsche were done, at least in part, by Alexander von Zemlinsky. Indeed, Ziehrer was not by temperament a composer. Stately and physically attractive, he was an early media-made star rather than the possessor of raw talent: Carl Haslinger, Johann Strauss Jr.’s publisher, deliberately set the musically untrained Ziehrer up as a Strauss rival during a dispute with his most famous composer. Ziehrer was a quick study and did become a competitor for the Strauss family. He never seriously challenged them in musical popularity, but he looked good in front of an orchestra and was by all accounts an effective conductor.

     Ziehrer’s music, despite some oom-pah-pah propensities, is generally pleasant and often rather sweet. In Die drei Wünsche it is at the service of a serviceable, very bourgeois libretto by Leopold Krenn and Carl Lindau, with whom Ziehrer frequently worked. The plot turns on the three wishes of Lotti, an innkeeper’s daughter who joins a theater company, for happiness, love and wealth: Lotti is told by a gypsy fortune teller that all three wishes will come true if she confides them to a falling star; she does so; and, after suitable complications, she gets everything she has wished for. This is a slight plot even by operetta standards, but there is some charming music to propel it, including finely crafted waltzes, a multilingual Tanzlied and a lovely “audition song” (Schön Gretelein) for Lotti, a delightful ditty praising the irresistibility of soldiers to young women, and the theater director’s couplets praising to his wife (Dünn, dünn, war die Leopoldin). The mostly young performers in CPO’s recording are enthusiastic, generally light-voiced, with a fine penchant for comedy. Cornelia Zink as Lotti and Anna Siminska as Käthe, the woman in operetta’s inevitable “second couple,” are particularly bright and bouncy; Volker Vogel as Hummel, the theater director, has a fine buffo style and plays nicely against Donna Ellen as a baroness who has a theater-related secret of her own (which helps produce the happy ending). The 15-voice chorus and small orchestra perform with enthusiasm and give the operetta an intimacy and warmth that are very pleasing, and Herbert Mogg paces the music with an experienced and expert sense of balance within the orchestra and between the singers and the instruments.

     Unfortunately, CPO’s presentation of this rarely heard work is simply execrable, from a sketchy and incomplete plot summary (there is no libretto; none is even offered online) to mentions of characters who do not appear in the cast list to incorrect timings given for some sections – this is amateurish sloppiness. The dialogue is more extensive in this operetta than in many others and also more important – it carries all the action forward – but non-German speakers will have no hope of understanding it and no ready access to a printed libretto or helpful Web site (this is, after all, not a commonly performed work). Those fluent in German will find the performers’ clear pronunciation and high-quality verbal acting a big plus, but anyone else will be simply unable to follow what is going on. CPO in years past did a wonderful job of producing recordings of little-known, outside-the-mainstream works such as Die drei Wünsche. But while the management of Classic Produktion Osnabrück used to place a high value on giving non-German-speaking listeners enough information to help them thoroughly enjoy unfamiliar repertoire, now CPO seems to produce everything except its CDs themselves on the cheap. That is a real shame. Ziehrer may not have been a great composer, and Die drei Wünsche may not be a great operetta, but there is a great deal of enjoyment to be found in this music – including the sense of rediscovery of a work from a less-explored time in operetta history. It would be wonderful to hear more Ziehrer – perhaps Die Landstreicher, his most successful stage work – but CPO needs to return to its previous presentation quality if it hopes to increase the interest of non-German-speaking listeners in the neglected works that the performers in Die drei Wünsche and other recent CPO releases deliver with so much enthusiasm.

(++++) THEMES AND VARIATIONS

The Zoo I Drew. By Todd H. Doodler. Random House. $14.99.

There Was an Old Monster! By Rebecca, Adrian & Ed Emberley. Orchard Books/Scholastic. $16.99.

     Big pluses for creativity go to both these books, even though neither has an original theme. What is original is the way the authors handle subjects that have frequently been done in kids’ books before and will no doubt appear again (and again and again). The Zoo I Drew, for example, is simply an alphabet book. But it’s not that simple – not at all. From the accordion-like pleated cover through the doodle-like pictures by the unbelievably aptly named Todd H. Doodler, the book is filled with oddly impressionistic drawings of animals, oddly skewed poetic descriptions, and not-odd-at-all genuine facts. It’s a winning combination all around. For example, “B is for Beaver, living in rivers and streams./ It knocks down trees/ and, of course, builds dams/ because that’s its expertise!” Or: “F is for Fox, with a red bushy tail,/ it’s thought to be crafty and sly./ But if people keep wearing fox coats,/ soon it’ll be in short supply.” Or how about this? “N is for Newt – the newt is small and slimy,/ it’s a type of salamander./ It lives on the forest floor,/ where it’s easier to meander.” Not many alphabet books for ages 2-5 include so much factual information, and not many use such words as “meander,” “toupee” and “marsupial.” The drawings are very clever, too, with the animals drawn more realistically (in their doodle-like way) than in alphabet books that anthropomorphize their subjects. The sideways giraffe (which “barely fits” even when shown that way) is a highlight, as are the snake that “constantly flicks its tongue” and the vulture with its “bald, wrinkled head.” The bane of all alphabet books – the letter X – is cleverly handled here with a digression; and the letter U offers a deliberate bit of misdirection by standing for Unicorn, which “isn’t really real,” but “I’m just seeing if you’re paying attention.” Kids will have more fun paying attention to this alphabet book than to many of the others out there.

     There Was an Old Monster! is a family book throughout: Ed Emberley is author and illustrator of more than 75 books; his daughter, Rebecca, is a well-known children’s book author in her own right; and her daughter, Adrian, is a singer/songwriter. Among the three of them, they have created a silly and charming version of the old song, “There was an old woman who swallowed a fly,” which builds from swallowed item to swallowed item and repeats everything previously swallowed – along the lines of “This is the house that Jack built” and other so-called cumulative rhymes. There Was an Old Monster! starts with the creature eating a tick, which “made him feel sick.” So he swallowed ants, which “had him dancing in his pants.” Then he swallowed a lizard, a bat, a jackal and – well, you get the idea. The big-eyed, big-horned monster, shown throughout against a black background and with a black stomach (an unusual stylistic approach), eventually gets his comeuppance when he tries to swallow something that ends up swallowing him. But the silly drawings and words – the ants go “scritchy-scratch, scritch, scritchy-scratch” all the way to the last page – make it impossible to find the book anything but funny. And where does singer/songwriter Adrian come in? The book comes with a free downloadable song, which Adrian performs with a delightful lilt and a catchy (and scritchy-scratchy) tune. The download adds an additional dimension to a book that is plenty of fun on its own, turning There Was an Old Monster! into a multimedia experience that is amusing no matter how kids experience it.

(+++) YOUNG LIVES, SERIOUSLY

Notes from the Dog. By Gary Paulsen. Wendy Lamb Books. $15.99.

Born to Fly. By Michael Ferrari. Delacorte Press. $15.99.

     Plenty of books for teens and preteens are lightweight, but the lack of depth is by no means inevitable, as these new releases show. The prolific Gary Paulsen is especially good at packing a lot of drama into a small number of pages – the story in Notes from the Dog is told in just 132. This is a book about cancer, but it is not about the disease: it is about how the illness affects not only those who have it but also those who come into contact with them. The protagonist is Finn, a 14-year-old boy who relates well to his dog, Dylan, but not so well to human beings. This is a story set in summertime – the book is unusually serious for a summer release – and shows how Finn’s life is changed for the better when a graduate student named Johanna moves in next door. Johanna has breast cancer – but despite that and the difference in their ages, she and Finn form an immediate friendship. She pulls Finn into her world: he helps raise money for breast-cancer research, and he and his friend Matthew help take care of Johanna after her chemotherapy treatments. For his part, Finn pulls Johanna into his world, which is more loving and filled with caring people than Finn had previously realized. Johanna keeps sending Finn uplifting notes by giving them to Dylan to deliver; hence the book’s title. Johanna also plays matchmaker for Finn, and helps him re-connect with his father. This is all so glowingly positive that it is a little much to take – Johanna is nearly saintly in her goodness, for all that Paulsen makes it clear she is suffering from her illness. “Don’t question the miracles; they just might stop coming,” reads one note from Johanna to Finn, and the book is a series of little miracles, right up to a climactic race that Finn and Matthew win for Johanna, who cannot compete in it herself. The book is designed to make readers ages 12 and up shed a tear or two, and Paulsen is expertly manipulative in keeping the tone positive while making it clear that Johanna’s long-term prognosis is not good. The book’s flaw is that it is manipulative, dripping with so much sentimentality that some readers may find it hard to take, however good the cause (Paulsen appends a list of half a dozen Web sites to which readers can go for breast-cancer information). Notes from the Dog is enormously well-meaning, but pounds home its message a touch too fervently.

     Born to Fly, the first novel by Michael Ferrari, also suffers from formulaic elements – some intentional (Ferrari wanted to write an adventure story with a strong girl as protagonist) and some less so (subsidiary characters who are so two-dimensional that it is impossible to believe in them). Ferrari’s novel is set in World War II, and it tackles a lot of tough subjects: discrimination against Japanese-Americans, limitations on girls and women, spies, bigotry, deaths in wartime, the perversion of justice, and more. That’s a lot for a 205-page book to contain. The protagonist is 11-year-old Belinda “Bird” McGill, whose father is an airplane mechanic. Bird loves flying with him, and is ecstatic when her Rhode Island town’s airstrip is made into a military flight school after the Pearl Harbor attack brings the United States into the war. One part of the plot has Bird persuading an airman to let her enter a flight class, even though girls were not allowed to do such things at the time. Another plot element involves a Japanese-American boy named Kenji Fujita, with whom Bird becomes friends despite the blatant hostility toward him: the townspeople are sure he is a spy. Then there is a mysterious submarine that Bird and Kenji discover but that no one else believes is there and no one else ever sees; and there is a murder; and the dead man’s son, who happens to be the town bully, is absolutely sure that Kenji’s uncle, Tomo, is the killer; and there is a court scene, and Bird’s discovery of the real killer, and her capture by him, and eventually Bird in an airplane following the killer’s car to prevent him from committing an even worse act of terror. The seams of this plot (or these plots) do not always fit neatly together, and Bird’s eventual successful piloting adventure is really a bit over the top even for an adventure novel for preteens (the book is intended for ages 8-12). Ferrari certainly knows how to build excitement and how to make his central character appealing; and he can develop a scene carefully and realistically at times: the trial of Tomo, for example, is well done. If Born to Fly tries to do a few too many things for Ferrari to be able to pull them all together neatly, that may simply mean that this first-time author will create an even more effective book on his second try.

(+++) MUSICAL MEMORABILIA

The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal. By Mark Ribowsky. Da Capo. $26.

Precious Metal: “Decibel” Presents the Stories Behind 25 Extreme Metal Masterpieces. Edited by Albert Mudrian. Da Capo. $18.95.

     The death of Michael Jackson sent pop-music fans into an orgy of grief and adulation, even though – objectively speaking – the vast majority of Jackson’s best work was long behind him and he had become, in recent years, a caricature of himself as well as a prototype of the isolated, withdrawn and increasingly bizarre celebrity. And it is celebrity, greater or lesser, that has always driven pop music: songs are inextricably linked with particular performers even when the performers themselves do not write the pieces that make them famous (and that they make famous), and even when others sing the same songs. Beatles songs are always Beatles songs, even when reduced to elevator music.

     So celebrity-focused books on the pop-music scene are an enduring staple of its culture, especially for older listeners who are still willing to read thick volumes and are trying to recapture the enjoyment they felt when certain performers and their songs were new. The Supremes fits neatly into this category for fans of “Stop! In the Name of Love,” “You Keep Me Hanging On” and “Baby Love” (all written by Lamont Dozier and Brian and Eddie Holland), and many other songs – as well as, of course, fans of Diana Ross, who became the group’s lead singer. But readers had better be committed fans, because in addition to the expected “how they did it” and celebrity backbiting elements, The Supremes contains a great deal of highly detailed insider information that is likely to be of interest primarily to nitpickers: “[O]n the Supremes’s box-set, producer Harry Weinger, faced with the impossible task of adumbrating exact recording dates, ran with some problematic documentation, one result of which was that the liner notes insist that ‘Baby Love’ and ‘Come See About Me’ were cut at different sessions: August 13 and July 13, respectively. The problem being that the Supremes were on the Dick Clark tour on those days.” Mark Ribowsky is nothing if not thorough, but his attention to minutiae can and often does sap the story of forward momentum. He takes his time getting through the tale of the Supremes – the book runs 440 pages – and will not disappoint readers looking for the backbiting and catfighting that are an integral part of show-business biographies: “Not for public consumption were the fissures within the group caused by Diana’s rising star and Flo’s envious, booze-fueled antagonism toward her; that was effectively plastered over in the ‘glitz, glam, and gowns’ fable of the Supremes.” Ribowsky also has a good feel for the business practices (not all of them savory) of Motown in the 1960s, and of some of the larger-than-life characters who shaped the hits of the time. The Supremes is more descriptive than analytical, and sometimes assumes a kind of gee-whiz tone, but it is not hagiography – Ribowsky does discuss the flaws of the group and the hangers-on around them. “It was a strange brew, for sure,” he writes at one point in a remark that could stand as a motto for his entire book as well as its subject matter.

     Precious Metal is also, in its own way, a story of “dreams, success and betrayal” – dozens of stories, in fact. The book deals with music perceived as much newer than that of the Supremes (although metal’s roots are actually in the late 1960s), and begins its overstatement of metal’s importance in its subtitle – with the word “masterpieces.” Within the narrow confines of heavy metal (which evolved, or at least changed, into death metal, black metal, metalcore, etc.), the 25 essays here – all of whose titles begin with the words “The Making of” – are certainly describing important works. But it is questionable whether devotees of this form of music will want quite so much detail on it. Decibel magazine, of which Albert Mudrian is editor-in-chief, of course exists for the sole purpose of promoting and glorifying heavy metal, but this is experiential music that does not translate particularly well to the dullness of the printed page, even when metal musicians do their best to stir things up: “Eyehategod was started as a way to piss people off” (Brian Patton); “You can be as pretentious as you want if you’re growling lyrics” (Nick Holmes); “It felt so good to play live – it felt like you were killing somebody” (Josh Homme). A great deal of this music involves poses, and many of the musicians are expert poseurs – Ozzy Osbourne’s antics, both before and after Black Sabbath, still define the genre for many people. But the articles collected in Precious Metal – which are in the form of extended interviews rather than traditional essays – take everything in the field at artistic face value. The writers are too immersed in heavy metal to bother speaking to anyone beyond the core fan base. Thus, Chris Dick, in “The Making of Cannibal Corpse’s Tomb of the Mutilated,” opines that “album-opener ‘Hammer Smashed Face’” was “heavy, heavy, heavy. And catchy, too. As in H5N1 catchy. This is one of those songs you can’t forget. …Big-time stuff for a small-time band.” J. Bennett, in “The Making of Kyuss’ Welcome to Sky Valley,” writes that the Mojave Desert is “the birthplace of ‘stoner rock.’ And Sky Valley is the album that perfected the then-nonexistent form. …Sky Valley also marked the departure of [Brant] Bjork, who split the band immediately after recording his drum tracks. What he left behind is one of the most deserving Hall of Fame legacies in the history of forever.” This sort of writing wears very thin very quickly for anyone not already strongly committed to heavy metal and the Decibel style. Fans of both the music and the magazine will find Precious Metal golden; everyone else will more likely see it as cheap electroplate.

(++++) THE SCHUMANN-MENDELSSOHN CONNECTION

Schumann: Symphonies Nos. 1-4; Scherzo in G Minor. Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Douglas Bostock. NCA. $34.99 (2 CDs).

Mendelssohn: String Quartets (complete). Gewandhaus-Quartett (Frank-Michael Erben and Conrad Suske, violins; Olaf Hallmann, viola; Jürnjakob Timm, cello); Volker Metz, viola (in Op. 44, No. 1). NCA. $69.99 (4 CDs).

     The mutual support and admiration of Robert Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn is no secret. Schuman brought the manuscript of his Symphony No. 1 (“Spring”) to Mendelssohn for a critique, and made changes in the work on the basis of Mendelssohn’s remarks; Mendelssohn then conducted the work’s first performance. Schumann, an adept music critic as well as a composer, helped bring Mendelssohn’s String Quartets, Op. 44, Nos. 2 and 3, instant success with a review offering his fellow composer “the highest accolade” and saying the works “occupied as beautiful a human sphere as we have come to expect from him as an artist and human being.” And these are but two of the many elements of the composers’ relationship. Small wonder, then, that the music of these two contemporaries, despite their very distinctive styles, often shows signs of cross-pollination, especially in terms of Mendelssohn’s influence on Schumann’s harmonies and orchestration.

     The orchestration element is important to the new set of Schumann symphonies on the NCA (New Classical Adventure) label, because these recordings, made in 2002, were the first to use the new Brietkopf & Härtel critical edition of the works. Most of the performances in this Urtext (original text) version will not sound significantly different to listeners already familiar with Schumann’s symphonies, except in one particular: Schumann’s orchestra was only about half the size of a modern symphony orchestra and had far fewer strings. As a result, the winds and brass of the Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra really stand out, not because Douglas Bostock is overbalancing, say, the Symphony No. 3 (“Rhenish”) to emphasize them, but because they are naturally a more prominent part of the work when they are up against fewer strings. All of Bostock’s performances are strong: he nicely captures the dancelike lilt that pervades Symphony No. 1, the classical balance of No. 2 (whose troublesome first movement sounds both more delicate and more propulsive than usual here), the juxtaposition of seriousness and folklike tunes in No. 3, and the carefully integrated forward flow of No. 4. Bostock, like most conductors, uses Schumann’s revised version of No. 4, which is often criticized for being heavy-handed and even overbearing in its orchestral doublings – but here, thanks to the restoration of the original orchestral size, comes across more as emphatic than as overdone. These are very fine, poised performances that capture Schumann’s symphonic spirit quite effectively, and even show hints of Mendelssohnian lightness in some passages (such as the scherzo of No. 2). The one irritation of the set is the near-absence of pauses at the ends of symphonies – instead of a reasonable 10 seconds or so after a finale and before the start of the next work, NCA includes only about two seconds. This is very disconcerting if you play a CD straight through. On the plus side, the two-CD set includes a small bonus: a Scherzo in G Minor that is the only surviving movement of one of Schumann’s early, incomplete attempts at a symphony. The orchestration is a reconstruction, and the movement is pleasant but rather characterless; however, it is a nice additional element to have.

     There are “additional elements” galore in NCA’s set of all Mendelssohn’s string quartets, which not only includes the early Op. 12 (in E-flat) and Op. 13 (in A minor), the famous three of Op. 44 (in D, E minor and E-flat), and the strange, dark and exceedingly emotional Op. 80 (F minor), but also the composer’s earliest quartet (in E-flat, without opus number) and a collection of four unconnected quartet movements (the first two from 1847, the third from 1843 and the fourth from 1827). The Gewandhaus-Quartett, which consists of leaders of Mendelssohn’s own Gewandhaus Orchestra and has existed under the same name for 200 years, knows the ins and outs of this music viscerally and plays it beautifully. The earliest recording, of Op. 44, No. 1, dates to 2000 and was made with violist Volker Metz; the other recordings were made from 2006 to 2008 and include violist Olaf Hallmann. The playing is in every case exemplary: these musicians offer a seamlessly integrated approach to the music, their instruments blending beautifully and their ensemble playing so smooth that it seems intuitive rather than rehearsed. Contrapuntal sections are clearly delineated (for example, in the scherzo of Op. 44, No. 3, which includes a fugue and double fugato); the famed Mendelssohnian lightness is as fleet as it can possibly be (for instance, in the 1847 scherzo from the Four Pieces for String Quartet); and the influence of earlier composers on Mendelssohn is brought out with subtlety and careful attention to detail (for example, in Op. 13, which reflects Beethoven’s Op. 95 and Op. 132 quartets). The Gewandhaus-Quartett brings a particularly high degree of intensity to two of the minor-key quartets: the aforementioned Op. 13, which tends to be overshadowed by the more overtly appealing Op. 12 (actually composed two years later, despite its lower opus number); and Op. 80, one of the most intense cries of despair in all chamber music, written after Mendelssohn’s beloved sister Fanny died suddenly and featuring all four movements in the same dismal F minor. It is hard to think of comparisons to this quartet’s intensity – Haydn’s Symphony No. 49 (“La Passione”) is in the same key, and three of its four movements are in F minor; and many years after Mendelssohn, Mahler, employing larger forces with chamber-music delicacy, brought similar intensity to his Symphony No. 6 in A minor. But in truth, comparisons are inapt: Mendelssohn’s Op. 80 is unique in its anguish and unique among Mendelssohn’s chamber works; indeed, it does not sound “Mendelssohnian” at all. What is remarkable about the Gewandhaus-Quartett’s performance of this and the rest of the quartets here is the players’ underlying understanding of the composer’s development. Mendelssohn is sometimes critiqued as not having progressed significantly from his outstanding teenage compositions to his mature ones, but this recording gives the lie to that canard. The early E-flat quartet clearly shows the influence of Haydn and Mozart and attentiveness to classical compositional models; by the Op. 44 quartets, Mendelssohn’s grace and his stretching of traditional forms are quite evident; and in Op. 80, in addition to the unending outpouring of grief, the formal structure itself moves in entirely new directions. The quartets are not presented on these CDs in order of composition, but a listener who takes the time to hear them in that order will be rewarded with new comprehension of just how much Mendelssohn’s works changed over time – and will also gain the reward of hearing some truly outstanding and perceptive readings of everything he wrote in string-quartet form.

(++++) CUTIES AND UGLIES

Dr. Seuss Lacing Cards: How the Grinch Stole Christmas! Scholastic. $14.99.

Dr. Seuss Puzzle Story: One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. Scholastic. $14.99.

Ugly Boards: ABC U Later; 123 4 U. By David Horvath and Sun-Min Kim. Random House. $6.99 each.

     The good Dr. Seuss continues to inspire endlessly inventive repackagings more than 17 years after his death. And it is a tribute to the guardians of his memory that the various entertainments based on Theodor Seuss Geisel’s books have by and large been respectful of the unique nature of his themes, characters and even his rhymes. (Thank goodness, no one has created The Cat in the Hat Comes Back Yet Again or any similar monstrosity.) Kids too young to read the Dr. Seuss books themselves – as young as age three – can get a delightful introduction to the works with such activity offerings as the Dr. Seuss Lacing Cards and Dr. Seuss Puzzle Story. The card set includes five scenes taken more or less from How the Grinch Stole Christmas! – a closeup of the Grinch’s green face; a picture of him carrying a bag of toys; a view of his dog, Max, dressed in a Santa Claus hat rather than the antlers he is made to wear in the book; a stylized Cindy-Lou Who; and Cindy-Lou peeking through a Christmas wreath. Parents will notice that none of these pictures quite matches anything in the book – in the case of the Grinch’s face, for example, his scowl has been toned down. This is typical of Seuss repackagings for young children, and will not really interfere with kids’ enjoyment of the scenes or of the full-length story (when they later encounter the book itself). The lacings here – five colors of laces are included – do not help create the pictures, but simply outline them. These cards will be most enjoyable for young children just developing motor skills. The enclosed booklet not only helps parents teach their kids lacing but also includes additional Seussian activities, such as a maze and a counting game. It’s fun all around (all around the lacing cards, that is).

     The approach of the Dr. Seuss Puzzle Story will intrigue slightly older kids. This package includes four separate jigsaw puzzles, already partially assembled but easy to take completely apart if you wish, and all based on characters from One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish (although, as in the Lacing Cards, not necessarily showing exact scenes from the book). Very cleverly, the puzzles have four different backing colors (red, blue, green and yellow), so the pieces are easy to sort and difficult to mix up. The booklet here gives solutions to all the puzzles and also includes counting and find-the-picture games. The sturdy, magnetic-strip-closure packaging of both new Dr. Seuss items should keep them in good shape for plenty of uses and reuses – until kids become curious enough about the books themselves to want to hear, and then read, the stories.

     Dr. Seuss characters have their own undeniable form of cuteness, but so do some characters described by their creators as ugly: the Uglydolls and the cartoon characters drawn (so to speak) from them. Uglydolls are misshapen blobs in moderately blah colors, sometimes with one eye or three (or one that works and one that doesn’t), occasionally with snaggle teeth or a pronounced overbite, with lumpy bodies and tongues perpetually sticking out and all sorts of unappealing characteristics…but, gosh darn it, the whole is cuter than the sum of its parts. David Horvath and Sun-Min Kim never quite take ugliness seriously, and the dolls and drawings maintain a kind of innocently appealing outlook on life that makes them the diametric opposites of Jim Benton’s Happy Bunny character, who looks adorable but is deeply steeped in cynicism and sarcasm. Young kids (ages up to four) who like Uglydolls (the playthings) will also like Ugly Boards (board books featuring the playthings) – and the books make a nice introduction to the alphabet and to counting. ABC U Later, for example, starts traditionally with “A is for Apple,” but then has “B is for Bargain,” with two of the Uglydolls taking low-priced apples to eat so they can “keep the doctor away” – but then comes “C is for Checkup,” with the same Uglydolls getting sick from eating too many apples. That sort of story continuity continues through the book: “M is for More Sugar, N is for Nonstop Candy, O is for Open Up!” And the last of these shows the Uglydoll in the dentist’s chair. For P and Q, we get “Mind Your P’s and Q’s,” with nine interpretations of what that might mean. And so on, very amusingly. 123 4 U is funny, too: “4” offers four bones given to four one-eyed Uglydogs; “5” has a five-armed character complaining that mittens only come in packages of four or six; “8” has an Uglydoll eating a cookie shaped like the number while saying, “I ate 8.” No one would really call the Uglydolls pretty, but they do manage to transcend their misshapen bodies to come across as…well, pretty adorable. And they definitely have a cute way of explaining letters and numbers.

(++++) MYSTERIES OF THE UNIVERSE AND THE MIND

Why Does E=mc²? (And Why Should We Care?) By Brian Cox & Jeff Forshaw. Da Capo. $24.

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Demystified: An Essential Guide for Understanding and Living with OCD. By Cheryl Carmin, Ph.D. Da Capo. $15.95.

     There is a reason the equation E=mc² is the best-known physics formulation in the world – for many people, the only known one. It is simple, easy to remember and elegant, even for people to whom its actual meaning is obscure. People who understand what the equation means – the energy that binds an object equals the object’s mass times the square of the speed of light – are likely to be even more impressed with its elegance and simplicity. But go just the tiniest bit beyond the equation itself, to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, and things quickly get murky for almost all non-physicists. To the rescue come particle physicist Brian Cox and University of Manchester theoretical-physics professor Jeff Forshaw, who despite their formidable accomplishments and obviously outstanding intellects are willing – and able – to unravel some Einsteinian thinking for the benefit of mere mortals. Why Does E=mc²? is a joy to read in part because of its juxtaposition of breeziness with complexity. On one page, Cox and Forshaw write, “Einstein was still working at the patent office in 1906, where his reward for changing our view of the universe forever was to be promoted to technical expert, second class.” On another, they analyze the time-stretching effect of a real-world train ride: “If the train is moving at 300 kilometers per hour, then you can check that v² / c² is a very tiny number: 0.000000000000077. To get the ‘time stretching’ factor γ we need 1 /[square root of] 0.000000000000077 = 1.000000000000039. As expected, it is a tiny effect: Traveling for 100 years on the train would only extend your lifetime by a matter of 0.000000000000039 years according to your friend on the platform, which is slightly above one-tenth of a millisecond.” After four chapters of their complex but lively presentation, they arrive at the question posed in the title of their book: “All of this talk of objects in spacetime may sound rather abstract but there is a point to it.” Using a billiard-ball example, they explain what Einstein’s equation really means, and in particular the importance of its “energy” component: “Ask someone on the street to explain what energy is and you’ll get either a sensible answer or a pile of steaming New Age nonsense.” And then they move to a chapter called, “And Why Should We Care? Of Atoms, Mousetraps, and the Power of the Stars,” in which they discuss real-world and out-of-this-world applications of Einstein’s formulation, eventually getting into some detail regarding the remarkable experiments planned using Europe’s highly ambitious Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Cox in fact heads a project at the LHC; he and Forshaw clearly know whereof they speak – although at this point they must speak speculatively, since the LHC encountered problems at startup last year and is not expected to be operational until sometime this fall. Nevertheless, the excitement associated with this project – and the excitement felt by physicists as they delve into the secrets of the universe by any means – are everywhere apparent in Why Does E=mc²? Reading it is an intellectually exhilarating experience.

     Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Demystified is a more ordinary book about a more everyday matter – and is more likely to have real-world applicability to many people’s day-to-day lives. Cheryl Carmin directs both the Stress and Anxiety Disorders Clinic and the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and has considerable first-hand experience both in treating OCD and in researching its causes. She tends to write using clinical language that may be off-putting, or at least distancing, for some readers: “OCD involves experiencing repetitive thoughts that range from annoying to extremely distressing and responding to those thoughts with similarly repetitive behaviors or thoughts – also called rituals.” This approach does have the advantage of sounding objective in the discussion of a condition that is experienced subjectively and, partly for that reason, can be difficult to diagnose and treat. The difficulty has to do with OCD existing on a spectrum of order and disorder: “While most of us want clean clothes and a home where things are arranged so that we can find them easily, people with OCD take their symmetry and ordering compulsions to the extreme, becoming distressed whenever they are prevented from achieving their notion of what constitutes ideal symmetry or order.” Despite her penchant for long sentences, Carmin is capable at times of refreshing directness, as when she opens a section on trichotillomania (hair-pulling disorder) with the simple statement, “Our hair adorns us.” And she does include some case histories, which are easier going than many of her analyses. The most useful parts of the book are ones that can actually be used diagnostically or in treatment – by people with OCD themselves or by ones with OCD family members. There is, for example, an “exposure hierarchy” form that is filled out to indicate anxiety-generating triggers that result in ritual behavior. Carmin also discusses varieties of OCD (comparing the pediatric form with the adult type, for instance), talks about the pluses and minuses of medication, and offers a list of resources to which families can turn for further help. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Demystified gets a (+++) rating: although highly useful for people dealing with OCD (their own or someone else’s), it can be somewhat difficult to wade through, and Carmin’s attempt to be comprehensive means that readers will have to seek out sections relevant to their particular circumstances. The good news is that readers who do find the elements that are applicable to their own situations can count on finding ideas and advice that are both intelligent and useful.

(+++) TEENS WITH A TWIST

Alyzon Whitestar. By Isobelle Carmody. Random House. $17.99.

Fairy Tale. By Cyn Balog. Delacorte Press. $16.99.

     Will teens ever tire of supernaturally tinted coming-of-age novels? Apparently not anytime soon, if the ongoing production of these books is any indication. Both experienced writers, such as Isobelle Carmody, and newcomers, such as Cyn Balog, clearly feel there is still plenty of life in this fantasy subgenre – and certainly these authors’ new books are lively enough, even if neither really offers anything new or unusual.

     Carmody’s Alyzon Whitestar – the title character has a perfect name for this subgenre – features an ordinary girl with an out-of-the-ordinary family, who then has an accident that makes her something beyond the ordinary, too. Accidents in novels like this, as in superhero comics, rarely destroy or disfigure – they add powers. The nature of Alyzon’s new ability is the cleverest thing in the book: she develops an extraordinarily heightened sense of smell. Yes, all her senses become more fine-tuned, but smell – which tends to get short shrift in both mainstream and romance writing – develops the most strongly. She does not simply smell body odor or perfume – she smells people’s essential natures, their moods, their intentions. Some of what Alyzon discovers is not exactly surprising: readers will figure out quickly why the cutest boy in school smells so bad to Alyzon. And some of Alyzon’s reactions to her newly developed powers are straight out of superhero comics – she “cursed her carelessness” after almost revealing her smell-related abilities to a friend, because “I didn’t want her to change the way she acted toward me. Wasn’t that the whole reason I had decided to keep my extended senses secret?” Alyzon soon finds her heightened abilities putting her in touch with the depths of other people’s imaginations – and dredging up thoughts and emotions that shake her to the core. Furthermore, it turns out that Alyzon’s own family (musical father and artistic mother) may be in danger. Alyzon does end up confiding in close friends, who believe her about her powers (perhaps a shade too easily), and she finds herself getting even more deeply into people’s essences (“I had the utterly strange and dreadful impression that something dark and ancient was looking at me out of [his] eyes”). A grand confrontation and a major sacrifice by Alyzon lead to a well-paced conclusion that neatly ties up the book’s many threads – but these are threads with which many other self-discovery books involving the supernatural have been sewn.

     The bland title of Fairy Tale leads into a story that, if not dull, is thoroughly familiar. It’s one of those torn-between-two-worlds tales, about what happens to two almost-16-year-old lifelong friends when it turns out that one of them is not human after all – and is destined to become king of the fairies. That would be Cam Browne, who lives next door to Morgan Sparks and has been her best friend forever…and now, with hormones doing their predictable teenage thing, is bound up with Morgan in all sorts of mutual attractions. Morgan, although thoroughly human, is a much more interesting character than Cam, the changeling who starts changing into what he needs to become in order to be Fairy King. Morgan realizes that something is wrong even before Cam explains his heritage and destiny; Morgan comes up with a plan to fool the fairies and keep Cam with her; and Morgan is the one who starts to have doubts about any future with Cam as it becomes increasingly evident that he is indeed one of the fairy race. Morgan is the book’s narrator, and she’s good at it: “My parents are the world’s youngest senior citizens.” “I’m sitting in the front office with a bald Goth girl in a Kill Your Mother T-shirt and a dude who appears to have forgotten to wear his pants today, since he’s just wearing white boxers.” “She looks like hair gel to me.” “Relaxing, not completely but just enough so that my heart isn’t pounding out of my chest, I go back to my Fluffernutters.” Morgan comes across as a real-world, grounded person – but instead of that making her situation somehow more believable, it makes it less so. Complicating the book is the character of Pip, the healthy human boy taken by the fairies when Cam, who was sickly and not expected to survive, was left among humans. The fairies return now-teenage Pip so Cam can come back to them, and Pip is key to the plan to outwit the fairies so Cam can stay with Morgan, but it turns out that fairies cannot truly love, and everything involving Pip and Cam gets (predictably) tangled, and of course there is a fairy enemy for Morgan to drive everything to a climax, and – well, pretty much everyone except Morgan is pretty much predictable pretty much all the time, and pretty much everything that happens is pretty much to be expected. Balog has managed to create an attractive and interesting protagonist – but even Morgan’s spirited narration cannot make Fairy Tale come across as much more than formulaic.

(++++) WINDS PLUS

Mendelssohn: Complete Organ Sonatas. William Whitehead, organ. Chandos. $18.99.

Rosetti: Concerto for Two Horns and Orchestra, Murray C61; Concertos for Horn and Orchestra, Murray C50 and C48; Andante from Concerto for Two Horns and Orchestra, Murray C55Q. Klaus Wallendorf and Sarah Willis, horns; Kurpfälzisches Kammerorchester conducted by Johannes Moesus. CPO. $16.99.

Brahms: Clarinet Quintet; Piano Quintet; Sonatas Nos. 1 and 2 for Clarinet and Piano. Ralph Manno, clarinet; Alfredo Perl, piano; Michaela Paetsch Neftel and Rahel Cunz, violins; Hartmut Rohde, viola; Guido Schiefen, cello. Oehms. $16.99 (2 CDs).

     The largest wind instrument of all is the largest instrument, period: the organ, which is so intertwined with its setting that it is in a sense the size of a building – often a very large church or cathedral. Mendelssohn’s adroit use of wind instruments is well known, but the organ is not one with which he is usually associated. And that is too bad, as the excellent new recording of his organ sonatas by William Whitehead shows. These six works are the most substantial for the organ written between Bach’s time and Liszt’s – and that is a fair statement even though Mozart, among others, wrote for this instrument. Mendelssohn was himself a fine organist, and an English publisher therefore commissioned him to write six organ “voluntaries” – which grew in the composition into full-fledged sonatas. Mendelssohn played Bach’s organ works and also liked to improvise, and these sonatas clearly show a mixture of styles, from the contrapuntal to that of sacred songs and choral pieces. Despite the organ’s longtime identification with the church, the sonatas are mostly secular, although the first movements of No. 1 (in F minor), No. 3 (in A) and No. 6 (in D minor) incorporate church melodies. Bach’s influence is strong in No. 1 as well as No. 2 (in C minor) and No. 4 (in B-flat), but No. 2 also shows a strong Handelian orientation. And No. 5 (in D), as well as some of the other sonatas, also includes self-borrowing, notably from Elijah. These are not works in a single style but ones in which Mendelssohn adopted and adapted varying approaches to create sonatas that looked to the past while also incorporating the composer’s own techniques and preferences. They are not often heard, certainly not in a complete cycle, but they should be: individually and as a group, they are fascinating, and quite unlike other organ music of the Romantic era.

     Antonio Rosetti predates Mendelssohn: he was a contemporary of Mozart and was in his time ranked both with Mozart and with Haydn. Like Mendelssohn some years later, Rosetti extended the reach of wind instruments and gave them prominence even beyond what Mozart had brought to them. Rosetti wrote 16 concertos for single horn and seven for two horns, and they are difficult pieces to play on today’s valve horns – which means they required supreme virtuosity on the natural horn of Rosetti’s time. The three complete concertos on CPO’s new CD are fine samples of Rosetti’s sensitivity to the instrument, with C61 in F offering deeper emotion than is usually found in 18^th-century wind concertos. C50 in E is distinguished by an especially unusual twist for the horn at the end, and C48 in E-flat by the particularly high writing. Also on the CD is an E-flat movement of questionable authorship (hence the “Q” in C55Q), possibly by Rosetti but also possibly by Michael Haydn. This is a pleasant romance that emphasizes cooperation rather than competition between the soloists. Both the players, Klaus Wallendorf and Sarah Willis, bring warmth as well as virtuosity to these charming, neglected works.

     Brahms’ wind pieces – in particular those for clarinet that he wrote late in life – are anything but neglected, but there is always room for another well-played version of them, and the two-CD Oehms set featuring Ralph Manno and Alfredo Perl is not only beautifully played but also a bargain. Manno and Perl are especially happily paired in the two Clarinet Sonatas, with Manno’s expressiveness making a strong case for playing these works on clarinet rather than in their alternative instrumentation for piano and viola. Manno’s expressiveness in much of the first sonata is quite wonderful, standing in strong contrast to the liveliness of the work’s finale. In the second sonata, in which clarinet and piano function more as equal partners, Manno and Perl throw the themes and accompaniments back and forth with ease and grace, producing a glowing interpretation. The Clarinet Quintet is also very fine, its ebb and flow sometimes gentle, sometimes impassioned, and its overall impression being one of warmth and tenderness. In contrast to these three late works, the earlier Piano Quintet fits somewhat uneasily into this set, not because of any deficiency in the playing – it sounds quite wonderful – but simply because it is so different in tone. Originally conceived as a string quintet, the work has in its finished version more brightness than is often found in Brahms, and a well-thought-out balance between the piano and the strings. The performers meld with apparently effortless grace, with the impressive ensemble playing contrasting pleasantly with the highlights that Brahms offers from time to time to individual instruments, notably the piano. These CDs are reissues – the quintets date to 1995, the sonatas to 1992 – but that takes nothing away from their quality. Overall, this is a lovely recording of lovely music, both with winds and without.

(++++) THREE FOR A SILLY SUMMER

Egg Drop. By Mini Grey. Knopf. $16.99.

The Grumpy Dump Truck. By Brie Spangler. Knopf. $15.99.

I Don’t Want to Go to School! By Stephanie Blake. Random House. $12.99.

     Among the good ways to keep kids occupied with books during the summer is: silliness. It’s fine if books have a message, but it helps if they communicate it in a soft-pedaled, amusing way. For example, Egg Drop could be described as a warning about becoming overly ambitious. That’s true – and completely misses the point of Mini Grey’s very funny story of an egg that is determined to fly. No, not the chick inside: the egg itself is going to fly, even though “it didn’t know anything about aerodynamics or Bernoulli’s principle” – which Grey illustrates so clearly that even a four-to-eight-year-old will be able to understand it. Grey’s delightful illustrations show the egg (which has eyes peeking out near the top of its shell) dreaming up all sorts of ways to fly, from rocket fins and engines to helicopter blades to a parasail. Then the egg realizes that what matters most is height, so it climbs all 583 steps of a nearby tower and leaps joyfully off – and its expression (yes, this egg has expressions) is pure joy until it realizes it is not flying but…falling. The inevitable happens, but we don’t see it – we just see the many attempts to put the egg back together, using string, chewing gum, even tomato soup. Nothing works, of course, but there is nevertheless a happy ending – of sorts. Oh, and the whole story is narrated by a chicken. This is silliness at a truly inspired level.

     The Grumpy Dump Truck is a more overt “lesson” book, but it too has enough silly elements to keep young children (ages 3-6) interested. The truck of the title is named Bertrand, and even though he does his job well, he complains about it constantly: “Everything is the PITS!” Kids will find it funny when Bertrand is mean to the other construction equipment – but a little sad, too: the crane even sheds a tear. Bertrand isn’t very nice to the animal construction workers, either, shouting at the rabbit foreman and honking at the bricklayers. But Brie Spangler makes sure that Bertrand gets what is coming to him: he scares one bricklayer, Tilly the porcupine, so much that one of her quills shoots right into Bertrand’s tire (porcupines don’t really shoot their quills, but dump trucks don’t talk, either). Tilly is very apologetic, no matter how grumpily Bertrand responds to her saying she is sorry. In fact, Tilly offers to help get the quill out of Bertrand’s tire. And when she does, she discovers lots of other stuff in the tire – stuff that is making Bertrand’s feet (well, tires) hurt and making him (you guessed it) grumpy. Bertrand ends up smiling and helping everyone out, his grumpiness becoming a thing of the past – but his appearance (and the look of the other characters) remaining silly enough to keep the story amusing right to the end.

     You might think there is nothing funny about a young child’s fear of going to school for the first time, but kids of the same age to enjoy Bertrand’s adventures will also be amused by “Simon the Super Rabbit” in Stephanie Blake’s I Don’t Want to Go to School! This is a book perhaps best suited for late summer, when young children are about to start preschool or kindergarten. It features Simon repeatedly telling his parents “no way!” when they explain about school and all the things he will do, learn and (they promise) enjoy there. A nine-panel illustration in which Simon, trying to sleep the night before school starts, alternately tells himself he is or is not scared, is a high point of the book – and can give parents a fine teachable moment. But it is also amusingly silly enough to keep the whole experience of preschool jitters light. Blake does not pretend that Simon gets over his fears immediately: his voice gets tiny when his father leaves him at school, and the first thing he does there is cry. But then Simon gradually gets into the spirit of school, enjoying himself so much that by the time his mother comes to get him, he doesn’t want to leave. Not quite as silly as the other two books considered here, Blake’s can be a good transition out of the effervescence of summer and into the school days ahead.

(++++) JOYS FOR ALL SEASONS

The Polar Express. By Chris Van Allsburg. Houghton Mifflin. $18.95.

The Fabulous Feud of Gilbert & Sullivan. By Jonah Winter. Illustrated by Richard Egielski. Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic. $16.99.

     Reading or rereading The Polar Express in summer can be a wonderful family experience. Although this is avowedly a Christmas tale, it is more than that: it is a story of faith, not religious-dogma faith but belief in qualities that children affirm but that adults too often forget – warmth, generosity, and a sense of wonder. Chris Van Allsburg’s highly detailed but strangely surreal paintings for this book won him a Caldecott Medal in 1986, and the illustrations have lost none of their power in the more than two decades since then. Children today may know The Polar Express from the rather disappointing 2004 movie, which retained some of the look of Van Allsburg’s book but missed out on its skewed perspective and oddity. If so, the book itself may be revelatory. The story is simple, with the cadence of fairy tales: a young boy whose friend has challenged his faith in Christmas sees a train, pulled by an old-fashioned steam engine, in front of his house on Christmas Eve. He boards the train, which is filled with children, and journeys all the way to the North Pole and back – in the process receiving the first gift of that Christmas season, a modest token that remains meaningful to him all the way into his adult life. What Van Allsburg does so well is to pull readers into this fantasy through pictures that do far more than illustrate the words. In the dining car, a mustached waiter serves some of the young passengers in the foreground while steam curls enticingly from a container, perhaps of warm milk, on a wheeled cart pushed by another server; three wolves are in the foreground as the train, in softer focus, passes through their forest; the text has a child exclaiming with wonder at the elves at the North Pole, but the illustration is packed with dark red, elaborate buildings, the elves seen only as brighter red blobs at street level far below, clustered around the steam engine that, like the elves themselves, is almost obscured by falling snow. The children on the train appear both lifelike and odd, and are as likely to be looking wide-eyed away from the central focus of a picture as they are to be looking at that focus. The blend of the homey and the strange pervades this thoroughly charming and slightly unsettling book, which can be a delightful reading experience at any time of year.

     The operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan are fine anytime as well – in fact, amateur companies often perform them enthusiastically (if not particularly well) during the summer, when most professional ensembles take time off. The Fabulous Feud of Gilbert & Sullivan is a more-or-less factual account of the genesis of one of the pair’s best and most popular operettas, The Mikado. In this book as in The Polar Express, it is the pictures that lend depth and enjoyment to the text. In truth, the work by Richard Egielski (who won a Caldecott Medal for Hey, Al the year after Van Allsburg won his) is more interesting than the sometimes careless writing of Jonah Winter – who, for example, calls the Gilbert and Sullivan works operas rather than operettas. Although this book is for younger readers, Egielski is effective in showing why “jolly old England was not so jolly” in the Victorian age, portraying a dark daytime street with dripping rain and, within one building, a sweatshop using child labor. Winter overstates by saying that “everything was dark” except in Gilbert and Sullivan’s “make-believe kingdom of Topsy-Turvydom,” but he does a good job of explaining how the famed operettas brought lightness to an often-dismal time. Winter says that lyricist Gilbert presented Sullivan with “always the same story,” which is not quite right – Gilbert did love the idea of a “magic lozenge” and propose variations on it several times, but it was used only in The Sorcerer. And Winter bolsters his “sameness” argument, which he posits as the reason for the “feud” of the book’s title, by citing the plots of operettas written both before and after the team created The Mikado – an idea as full of tortured logic as many in the operettas themselves. Kids and most parents probably will not notice these inaccuracies, but it is a shame to find them in a book for which Winter clearly did his research – he even correctly mentions in his “Author’s Note” that Gilbert and Sullivan wrote 14 operettas, including the now-lost Thespis. In any case, The Fabulous Feud of Gilbert & Sullivan improves after Gilbert and Sullivan have an argument in the office of impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte and go their separate ways. The book talks about the Japanese exhibits that were all the rage at this time in Victorian London, and how they inspired Gilbert to write the libretto for The Mikado – which then inspired Sullivan to work with his old partner again. Egielski’s two-page spread showing what The Mikado could initially have looked like on stage is a highlight of the book, and Winter’s note at the end that the pair wrote five further operas but still fought from time to time offers a good lesson for children who sometimes argue with friends and siblings. If The Fabulous Feud of Gilbert & Sullivan gets kids interested in actually seeing The Mikado sometime, so much the better – this is one Gilbert and Sullivan operetta that, when well staged and sung, is as fresh today as when it was first performed in 1885.

(+++) ANIMAL AMUSEMENTS

Funny Farm. By Mark Teague. Orchard Books/Scholastic. $16.99.

Billy Bully: A School-Yard Counting Tale. By Alvaro & Ana Galan. Illustrated by Steve Simpson. Cartwheel Books/Scholastic. $3.99.

News for Dogs. By Lois Duncan. Scholastic. $16.99.

     Each of these books is fun in its own way for its intended readership – but each has at least one element that is a little off-kilter, so parents should consider carefully how their children will react and whether the books will have their intended effect. Funny Farm, for instance, is a city-kid-in-the-country story, featuring the dog family that runs Hawthorne Farm. City cousin Edward shows up for his very first farm visit ever, and he is dressed quite inappropriately, in a dark suit, white shirt and bowtie rather than outdoor or farm clothes. All sorts of embarrassing things happen to Edward: he falls into the mud of the pigpen, gets chased by the chickens when he gathers eggs, gets his foot (or paw) stuck in a bucket while trying to help make maple syrup, and so on. The farm animals, especially the pigs, find Edward’s attempts to fit in amusing. He has some very interesting experiences – the book’s best illustration shows Edward’s face, huge in closeup, as he looks at two insects plowing an insect-sized field while Uncle Earl drives a tractor in the background. And certainly the farm family is kind to him, teaching him to knit and tend sheep and so forth. Edward and Cousin Judy eventually have a great time at a barn dance, after which the exhausted city dog falls asleep. Nice story – but no one suggests that Edward change his clothing to something more appropriate (even when he is painting the barn), and no one helps him clean up (his clothes are spotted and stained even at the barn dance). There is not in fact very much that is funny going on at the farm, unless the idea is that Edward’s experiences and inappropriate dress are themselves funny – but Mark Teague never makes that clear. A child may even feel sorry for Edward as his shepherd’s crook gets caught in the tail of an angry ram and his suit gets splattered with yellow paint (although Teague never actually suggests that there is any reason to feel sorry for Edward). The tone of Funny Farm is just a little off – and some children may find it a little off-putting.

     Billy Bully is supposed to teach two things: counting to 10 and not being a bully. That’s a lot to do in a 32-page paperback (and one page is devoted to a note directly to parents and teachers about “consciously addressing the causes and effects of bullying”). The young children at whom the rest of the book is aimed may respond in any of a number of ways to the display of Billy Bully’s line cutting, pushing, ball hogging and more. Or they may focus on the “counting” elements of the book – although that could be a bit difficult, since Billy Bully has kids count down rather than up at first, and never says that the starting number is 10 (only that “his friends are down to 9” after he grabs a toy that isn’t his). The idea of the story is that each thing Billy does costs him one friend, until he has no one to play with and is sad until he figures out that he can get his friends back by being nice and cooperative. So the count of friends starts upward, going from one to 10. This part of the book works well – assuming kids accept the notion that Billy, all on his own, would decide to become a nicer bull (he is actually called “Billy Bull” rather than “Billy Bully” by the end of the book). But in the real world, where many kids do encounter bullies, the chance of a nasty, domineering child having a sudden change of heart is very small, and parents really should not encourage kids to believe that this will happen – although this book could be a first step toward discussing real-life problems with bullies. Still, Billy Bully does not quite work as either a counting book or a story about bullying and its consequences. It tries hard, but parents will need to add a lot of input to its simple rhymes to help children get both the counting and the anti-bullying messages.

     There is no particular message in News for Dogs, a companion to Lois Duncan’s Hotel for Dogs, except that dogs are cute and fun and should not be stolen. Andi – Duncan’s alter ego – is back in this book with her brother, Bruce, trying to decide what to do now that their dog hotel is closed. They come up with the idea of creating a dog-focused newspaper called The Bow-Wow News, complete with gossip column and poetry. Andi’s first poem causes problems for the kids – it shows the nasty Tinkles being, well, nasty – but it also makes them money, because the Tinkles buy all the copies they can, at inflated prices, so their neighbors won’t see the poem. Soon there are stories about what dog owners are doing in their everyday human lives, whether people are using pooper-scoopers or not, and assorted other canine trivia and near-trivia. Then things get more serious: the newspaper is posted online, and pets start disappearing. There is a dognapper out there – and despite what the kids initially suspect, it is not Mr. Tinkle doing the dognapping. Dogs become hostages; the kids want to find the culprit using fingerprints, until they realize that “we don’t know how to life fingerprints”; a banker is eliminated as a suspect because “he wouldn’t want dog hair on his suit”; and eventually the kids and Aunt Alice figure out who must be behind the crimes – which leads to a freeway chase, a cell phone that goes dead at precisely the wrong time, and a burst of violence that comes with an intensity that is lacking elsewhere in the book. News for Dogs doesn’t quite hang together, and the ending is not particularly satisfactory even though all the dognapped animals get to go home. Fans of Hotel for Dogs, either the book or the movie made from it, may enjoy this further adventure, but News for Dogs is even thinner in plot and less satisfactory in outcome than Duncan’s previous book.

(++++) CONTRASTED CONTEMPORARIES

Zemlinsky: The Mermaid—Symphonic Fantasy; Sinfonietta. New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by James Judd. Naxos. $8.99.

Webern: Vocal and Instrumental Music. Tony Arnold and Claire Booth, sopranos; David Wilson-Johnson, bass; Simon Joly Chorale, Twentieth Century Classics Ensemble and Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Robert Craft. Naxos. $8.99.

     Alexander von Zemlinsky lived from 1871 to 1942, Anton Webern from 1883 to 1945, but they might as well have been born in different centuries, if not on different planets. Each pursued musical ideals with considerable intensity, but the nature of those ideals differs so much that it is exceedingly difficult to see how two Austrian composers, both natives of late-19^th-century Vienna, could have developed such diametrically different aesthetics. Zemlinsky’s is the more conventional and accessible of the two. He was Alma Schindler’s lover when she was his composition student, before she met and married Gustav Mahler, and Zemlinsky’s earlier music has much that is Mahlerian about it. The scale of the 1903 fantasy Die Seejungfrau (“The Mermaid”), based on Hans Christian Andersen’s gentled but rather dour fairy tale, is not quite Mahlerian, but the 40-minute work is certainly symphonic in scope, developmentally complex and written for large (although, again, not quite Mahler-size) orchestra. The New Zealand Symphony plays the piece expansively, James Judd highlights the niceties of the scoring to good effect, and the fantasy’s pervasive melancholy comes through effectively. But the work as a whole is less telling than the much shorter Sinfonietta, which dates to 1934 – by which time Zemlinsky had come to favor more-compressed forms. There is nothing programmatic about this three-movement work, in which Zemlinsky balances post-Romantic yearning and expressiveness against thematic fragmentation and poignancy. The piece is perhaps more interesting than emotionally compelling, but it is well structured – Zemlinsky was a fine musical craftsman – and uses the orchestra effectively.

     And yet, in the same year Zemlinsky composed his Sinfonietta, Webern began his transcription of the Ricercata from Bach’s Musical Offering (completed in 1935), and had long since written his Two Songs, Op. 8 for voice and eight instruments, to texts by Rilke (1910); Four Songs, Op. 13 for voice and orchestra (1914-1918); Six Songs, Op. 14 (1917-1921); Five Sacred Songs, Op. 15 (1917-1922); and Two Songs, Op. 19, to texts by Goethe (1926). Webern’s music, aphoristic in the extreme, comes from a sonic world barely recognizable as related in any way to Zemlinsky’s. Tightly knit, delicately scored and with excruciating attention to detail, Webern’s works remain difficult to perform even today – and often difficult to hear, too, since so much happens in so short a time span. There is a purity to Webern’s music that nicely complements Bach’s – which, by the way, Webern called “abstract” and “unapproachable,” adjectives far more applicable to his own work for many listeners. Webern uses voices as instruments: the Op. 8 songs, for example, were inspired by love but contain none of it in any obvious way, instead interweaving the soprano with clarinet/bass clarinet, horn, trumpet, celesta, harp, violin, viola and cello. Similarly, the Op. 19 songs – each just over a minute long – make the voices part of the ensemble of celesta, guitar, violin, clarinet and bass clarinet. For all its careful construction, Webern’s music is often most notable for its sound rather than any underlying emotive content. And Robert Craft, who is the expert in Webern, brings out that sound beautifully throughout this new CD, whose generous 80-minute length makes it difficult to hear straight through (Webern wrote in small bits and is best heard that way). The purely orchestral works here are particularly distinctive and effective: Five Movements for String Orchestra, Op. 5 (1909-1929); Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 10 (1911-1913); and Variations for Orchestra, Op. 30 (1940), whose tone row Webern worked on with very considerable care. It is Op. 30 and two works to texts by Hildegard Jone (1891-1963) that show Webern at his most intense. Das Augenlicht, ‘Through Our Open Eyes Light Flows into the Heart,’ Op. 26, is for mixed chorus and orchestra and dates to 1935; and the Second Cantata, Op. 31, a six-movement piece for soprano and bass solos, mixed chorus and orchestra, which dates to 1941-1943. This is one of Webern’s greatest works as well as his last, pushing even his harmonic and rhythmic extremes beyond their previous bounds, and including at one point a chord of all 12 pitches played by 11 different instruments. Webern’s music is far less easily “listenable” than Zemlinsky’s – or even than that of Webern’s mentor, Arnold Schoenberg – but it remains a uniquely intense experience, especially in small doses, and Craft turns it into both an aural and intellectual fascination.

(++++) SCIENCE FICTION, FAITH FICTION

The New Space Opera 2: All-New Stories of Science Fiction Adventure. Edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan. Eos. $15.99.

Days of Little Texas. By R.A. Nelson. Knopf. $16.99.

     It is only by encountering the “other” that we can truly know ourselves – this is one of the major precepts underlying science fiction. Stories of the far future, of alternative histories, of wonders previously unknown, and of alien contact are all ultimately stories about us puny earthlings and the ways in which we rise to difficult occasions or are overwhelmed by them. “Otherness” may be found in unexplored parts of our own planet, within the depths of our own minds, or – of course – in the form of alien creatures from somewhere “out there.” One particular form of SF, disparagingly called “space opera” until some of its creators appropriated the term and turned it positive, has long had a strong “out there” focus: space operas are essentially adventure stories, and many of them were extraordinarily crude and xenophobic during SF’s so-called Golden Age (hence the poor longtime reputation of the subgenre as a whole). Nowadays, though, many high-quality SF authors have developed adventures filled with subtlety and genuine wonder, in which the huge events and gigantic time spans long favored in space opera are merely background for the smaller, more intimate and more affecting stories of human beings – individually or as a species – discovering what they really are. The second New Space Opera collection from Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan contains 19 stories that span…well, just about everything. Realities collide in Cory Doctorow’s “To Go Boldly.” Con artists risk their lives at every step and with every word in John Barnes’ chilling “The Lost Princess Man.” Motherhood and human-machine competition are but two of the elements facing a galactic construction crew building transport portals in Peter Watts’ “The Island.” Failure is the start of something very interesting indeed in John Meaney’s “From the Heart.” The concept of hiding in plain sight gets some twists in Elizabeth Moon’s “Chameleons.” The entire future – and past – of our universe and other universes is the macrocosmic backdrop against which Robert Charles Wilson’s “Utriusque Cosmi” plays out the microcosmic story of a frightened 16-year-old girl. Each of these stories – and each of the others here – handles world-spanning and time-spanning themes differently. Not all work equally well: Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “Defect” is predictable, Bruce Sterling’s “Join the Navy and See the Worlds” is unnecessarily obscure, and Bill Willingham’s “Fearless Space Pirates of the Outer Rings” thinks it’s funnier than it is. Academics may even want to argue whether all the tales in this book fit the “space opera” subgenre. Yet despite their differences in both style and substance, nearly every story in The New Space Opera 2 is well written and well paced, and all are ultimately focused less on the sheer adventurousness of their characters than on what happens within and between them – that is, what in their outré experiences makes them more or less human. As a result, this is a book that is every bit as thoughtful as it is thrilling.

     One expects fiction with a scientific orientation to push boundaries and think about the world creatively, but this is not what one expects of stories about faith. Faith is revealed truth, capable of being tested by circumstance and thus strengthened or diminished (or lost altogether), but not capable of being developed or molded into something new, except in subtle or marginal ways. Wholesale changes in the meaning of faith undermine its foundation, which consists largely of unquestioning belief. This makes what R.A. Nelson does in Days of Little Texas quite remarkable, for this is a novel that starts and ends with faith, but what emerges at the end is not what was there in the beginning. This is also a mystery and a ghost story, and although nominally for readers ages 12 and up, it is filled with themes that are likely to make plenty of adults as well as teenagers uncomfortable. “Little Texas” is a faith healer, a 15-year-old boy who has been preaching since he was 10, when he survived a lightning strike and revived a man thought to be dead. This happened in Texas – hence the name adopted by young Ronald Earl King. Nelson takes Little Texas and the others on the revival circuit at face value: their professions of faith are by and large sincere, their wish to do good is genuine, and their human flaws are seen within the context of a close-knit group held together by worship. Besides, Little Texas really can heal people, but not all people – and that is where the book gets interesting. For it is Little Texas’ stirring but ultimately failed attempt to heal a young girl named Lucy that leads to a series of increasingly bizarre occurrences in which the healer – whose faith forbids him to believe in ghosts, much less benign ones – is tested again and again, both as a vessel of the Holy Spirit and as a teenager approaching manhood. The connection between Little Texas and post-death Lucy (whatever she or it may be) grows both physically and psychologically; and Lucy’s certainty that she remains near Little Texas so the two of them can accomplish a specific thing together deepens the mystery of what she is and what Little Texas himself is capable of becoming. The book’s events become increasingly strange as Little Texas and Lucy move toward their shared destiny, but there is an underlying sense of solidity to the story that helps anchor its more fantastic elements. The climactic confrontation with a thing that is scared and vulnerable, for all its evil, is highly unsettling, and the way in which Little Texas responds to the event – both within himself and in his relationship with the adults who have been the only family he has known – strikes a chord of reality. It is only the last three of the book’s 84 short chapters that button things up a bit too neatly and betray Days of Little Texas as designed for younger readers. Taken as a whole, this exploration of faith and of some of the people who make a living at it is a powerful foray into an area where fiction has not often gone since the days of Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry, published in 1927. But Little Texas, unlike Gantry, is no fraud: he is a true evangelist with genuine power – who, like a character in good science fiction, comes face to face with his own innermost being only after being forced to confront things beyond his understanding.

(+++) MYSTERIES, ONGOING AND SOLVED

The 39 Clues, Book 4: Beyond the Grave. By Jude Watson. Scholastic. $12.99.

Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars, Casebook No. 2: The Mystery of the Conjured Man. By Tracy Mack & Michael Citrin. Orchard Books/Scholastic. $6.99.

     It was bound to happen: there was no way The 39 Clues could sustain its cleverness and headlong pace through all 10 planned volumes, the last of which will not be published until September 2010. The fourth book in the series, Beyond the Grave, falters and chokes a bit, getting a little too caught up in its own twists and turns to be as satisfying as the first three volumes. Its tie-ins – a Web site and set of six cards bound into the front cover, with the promise that young readers will eventually share $100,000 in prizes – remain as intriguing as ever, but simply as a story, Jude Watson’s book falls a little flat. Each of the books has a different geographical focus, this one’s being Egypt. Each book involves two siblings, 14-year-old Amy Cahill and 11-year-old Dan, struggling against other members of the far-flung and enormously powerful Cahill clan to discover clues that will eventually lead someone to some source of ultimate power. In each book, Amy’s claustrophobia and Dan’s asthma are used as personal difficulties that the searchers must overcome. And each book is full of betrayals and backstabbings galore, as the various branches of the Cahills – Ekats, Lucians and others – compete for the glory of their families as well as personal power. But this has all become more than a bit formulaic in Beyond the Grave. We know that one crucial character who helped Amy and Dan before and was later thought dead will reappear – and he does. We know that one particularly deadly character will literally threaten their lives, but will not take them – and that is what happens. We know that some of the many important historical figures to whom the Cahill branches are related will come into the story, and so they do – Napoleon is especially significant here. And because the book is set in Egypt, we know there will be at least one semi-spooky tomb scene, and there is. Amy’s and Dan’s tendency to wander into danger without letting anyone know what they are doing or where they are going has gotten a little old by now, though – you would expect them to have learned something from all the times they did that in the earlier books and got into serious trouble, but no. This book’s title refers to the one element that sets it apart from the first three: Amy’s and Dan’s doubts about whether their dead grandmother, Grace, really loved them as deeply as they always believed – and their discovery of information that indicates that yes, she did. But this one distinctive item is not enough to make Beyond the Grave more than a moderately interesting entry into the young searchers’ saga.

     Young searchers are crucial to Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars as well. The books postulate that the street urchins who got some passing mentions in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories were actually far more important to Holmes than Dr. Watson revealed in recounting the legendary detective’s exploits. The first “casebook” in this series, The Fall of the Amazing Zalindas, suffered from a tendency to make Holmes less observant and less acute than Doyle made him, with an eye toward elevating the role of the street kids. The Mystery of the Conjured Man handles the relationship better: except for one important scene in which Holmes is caught entirely off guard in a way that Doyle would never have allowed, this entry allows Holmes his analytical skills while also giving his young helpers plenty of chances to be brave. Unfortunately, the mystery this time is not particularly mysterious: readers find out fairly quickly that the “medium” and his helpers who can supposedly contact the dead are charlatans and thieves, and from then on it is just a matter of unmasking them and ending their nefarious schemes. Still, wife-and-husband authors Tracy Mack and Michael Citrin pace the book well and keep the writing at a level that preteens will enjoy. And they manage to give some character to two of the Irregulars and a girl who assists them – sort of an irregular Irregular – even though the rest of the kids have little personality. This is the sort of book that makes enjoyable summer reading: light, quick, satisfyingly concluded (in terms of the mystery), and with the promise of future volumes (in terms of the personal quest of one of the main young characters). Older kids who find The Mystery of the Conjured Man intriguing may even be ready for some real Sherlock Holmes tales.