(++++) ENDEARING MISBEHAVIOR

Grow Up, David! By David Shannon. Blue Sky Press/Scholastic. $17.99.

No, David! By David Shannon. Cartwheel Books/Scholastic. $6.99.

Shorty & Clem Blast Off! By Michael Slack. Harper. $17.99.

     In real life, friends and family members who always get in the way, constantly mess things up, and are loud and obnoxious, are very little fun. In books for ages 4-8, however, kids have a chance to see their irritating friends and/or siblings in a different light that may, just may, make their shenanigans easier to tolerate. That is the underlying premise of all the David Shannon books about – well, about David, since Shannon says the books all grow from an idea he had when he himself was a child and created an entire book containing only the words “no” and “David.” Apparently Shannon realized, early in life, that there was humor as well as a touch of pathos in constantly being told all the things not to do. He continues realizing that in Grow Up, David! This book is told from the perspective of little David’s big brother, whose face is never seen. David’s own face is seen, usually with mouth open in a gap-toothed expression of joy at some new deviltry. It may be two pencils stuck like fangs into that open mouth while big brother tries to do homework, or a mouth-wide-open scream as David claims, rightly or wrongly, “He hit me first.” Or David’s mouth may be closed and completely smeared with chocolate from his big brother’s Halloween candy. Or there may be no David in a picture at all – just an overflowing toilet stuffed with paper, toys and a plunger, with the words on the page proclaiming, “David did it!” The many irritations of David are expressed loudly and clearly, both in words and in drawings in which Shannon unerringly channels (or copies) the ones he did as a five-year-old. So where is the necessary balance of warmth here, showing that siblings ultimately do care about each other, despite everything? It comes at the end of the book, after David and his big brother are sent to opposite sides of a room into time-outs, with the words, “Thanks a lot, David!” Then, in one of those quicksilver changes typical of family life, David and his brother (whose hands are the only thing seen) are about to play football, which the brother previously refused to do with the comment, “You’re too little.” David is seen smiling – but on the next page he has been knocked flat on his back, his brother is worried (“David, are you okay?”), and on the very last page, all is well and there is just enough warmth to counterbalance (almost) all the trials and troubles that have gone before.

     The concluding warmth in Shannon’s “David” books has been there from the start, and No, David! – the first of them all – is now available in a new board-book edition for families to enjoy (or re-enjoy if they remember the 1998 original version). The hilarity-with-a-purpose here involves David (looking just as intense and gap-toothed as he does 20 years later in Grow Up, David!) getting into not-tremendously-exaggerated forms of trouble while his mom shouts variants of “no” at him. A simple “No, David!” goes with his reaching for the cookie jar on a high shelf, but that becomes “No, David, no!” when he tracks enough mud to plant a garden into the house (in fact, it seems to come from a garden, based on the plant bits adhering to David’s legs). Later there is “Come back here, David!” as the boy runs, stark naked, along the sidewalk outside his home. And “Don’t play with your food!” when he creates an elaborate character with chicken-leg legs, green-bean arms, a potato head, and a fork in the middle to hold everything together. Again and again, David’s mom finds ways to call back her over-exuberant, always-misbehaving child, and Shannon’s pictures are hilarious: the one of open-mouthed David about to chew an unimaginable amount and variety of food, for example, is a marvel. The book comes to a climax when David, warned not to play baseball in the house, does so anyway, with the predictable result of smashing a vase, destroying the flowers in it, scattering water everywhere, and being sent to a tearful time-out. The boy’s single tear is what changes the mood here: the next page has David’s mom saying, “Davey, come here,” as the sad little boy – who clearly meant no harm while doing so much of it – reaches up for a hug. And he gets just that on the book’s final page, along with the affirmative reassurance, “Yes, David, I love you!” It is with that warm conclusion, as much as with the trouble permeating the rest of the book, that Shannon produced a classic in No, David! The later series entries, whether school-focused or holiday-themed or including siblings or otherwise varied, have all built successfully on this exceptional debut.

     The digital characters Shorty and Clem do not appear to be siblings – Clem is a flat-topped blue bird, Shorty a glasses-wearing sort-of-tyrannosaur – but friends can have the same sorts of issues between them as siblings. These two certainly do in Michael Slack’s Shorty & Clem Blast Off! Clem is the careful, thoughtful character here, and in this book is involved in a complex building project: he has a spaceship to put together from a boxed kit. Outgoing and accident-prone Shorty starts getting in the way even before Clem has unpacked the parts, shouting so loudly that Clem, startled, leaps into the air. Shorty, who is nothing if not well-meaning, offers to help, as Clem studies the assembly instructions. Clem says no, but Shorty is insistent, showing his “helpful chompers” (his teeth are large but are rounded, not sharp), his “bendy tail” (with which he accidentally smacks Clem), and his “super-powerful arms” (which are notably scrawny). Clem say thanks but no thanks, and Shorty, disheartened, leaves, only to return to show Clem all the ways he has helped other friends – ways that, in Slack’s amusing illustrations, are clearly not helpful at all (the scooter “fixed” with a dripping showerhead is a gem). Clem insists he can handle the project himself, but when Shorty gets down on his knees and begs to be allowed to help, Clem finally gives him assignments: first, to “make sure no one bothers me,” and later, “to tell me when my spaceship is finished.” Shorty objects to “watching” and “waiting,” however, and keeps pushing into the area where Clem is working, until Clem firmly sends him away. Shorty goes, tearfully, but of course matters cannot end there: a big crash, the almost-finished spaceship model comes apart, and now Clem asks Shorty for help. So Shorty gives Clem a hug, which helps, and then the two friends reassemble the spaceship and play with it together, and all ends happily – until the two mismatched buddies reappear in another book, which they are sure to do.

(++++) DAILY WORDS OF WISDOM (OR JUST DUMB)

Calendars (page-a-day for 2019): Shakespearean Insults; Medical Bloopers; Church Signs. Andrews McMeel. $14.99 each.

     Page-a-day calendars are typically thought of as visual items, offering a single-panel cartoon, comic strip, or picture of some sort to look at each day of the year. But not everyone wants a pictorial display every day – it can be more enjoyable to have a few thoughtful words. Or amusing, silly, or even insulting ones. In fact, if the insults come from Shakespeare’s works, they can be erudite and informative as well as funny, and sometimes devastatingly pointed – as Shakespeare was so very capable of being. The 2019 Shakespearean Insults calendar is great fun for lovers of the Bard of Avon, and can provide a useful corrective for students and teachers who spend most of their time focused on Shakespeare’s extreme seriousness of perception and expression. What makes Shakespeare the greatest of all English-language authors is, among other things, the tremendous diversity of his writings, which range from the extremely intense to the tremendously lighthearted to the overtly sexy to the downright scatological. There are insults aplenty in Shakespeare, including some that are worth thinking about for a moment: “If we offend, it is with our good will. (A Midsummer Night’s Dream)” Some of the words here have clearly contemporary resonance: “Who is here so vile that he will not love his country? (Julius Caesar)”  Some require wading through obsolete words to get to their core – a worthwhile journey: “A wightly wanton with a velvet brow, With two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes. (Love’s Labour’s Lost)” A few are delightful in their dismissiveness: “Small winds shake him. (The Two Noble Kinsmen)”  “Her blush is guiltiness, not modesty. (Much Ado About Nothing.” “Poor prattler, how thou talk’st! (Macbeth)” Some are decidedly bitter: “He’s mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse’s health, a boy’s love, or a whore’s oath. (King Lear)” “There is no leprosy but what thou speak’st. (Timon of Athens)” And some have a hint of the sort of humor that often emerges quite unexpectedly in Shakespeare’s works: “We know each other well. We do; and long to know each other worse. (Troilus and Cressida)” Lovers of Shakespeare’s works will enjoy a full year of words like these, which have lost little of their potency after four centuries.

     The language is modern, as are the concerns, in the 2019 Medical Bloopers calendar, and if there is nothing profound here, there are plenty of anecdotes and comments to provide something health-care-related to think about every day. Pages called “Lessons Learned from Patients” include, “Complete all roof repairs during daylight hours,” and “If you are prescribed an inhaler for your cat allergies, it is not intended to be sprayed on the cat,” and “Do not try to remove tattoos with sandpaper. Sandblasters are even worse.” There is a silly comment about Mrs. Potato Head going over her annual yammogram. There is the real story of a patient who, told to limit diet to clear liquids, suggested gin and vodka. There is another about a hospital visitor who fell asleep in the patient’s bed when the patient went to the bathroom. There are suggested board games for medical professionals, including Crazy Eights for psychiatrists, Tic-Tac-Toe for podiatrists, and Twister for rehab therapists. There is this suggested medical motto for the frustrated doctor: “Not all patients are annoying. Some are dead.” There is the (hopefully imaginary) patient who says, “I entered what I ate today into my new fitness app, and it just sent an ambulance to my house.” And then there are the medicines that patients request, including “the one that starts with an ‘S,’” “the one you break in half,” and “name a few – I’ll know it if I hear it.” This calendar mixes the funny with the wry and the real-world with the imaginary, offering medical professionals – and anyone who interacts with them regularly – a daily chance to remember not to take the serious business of health care seriously all the time.

     Many people are serious about religion only on churchgoing days, and not always then. Churches know this – and some try to keep faith in people’s minds, however briefly, every day. They do that using “Little Sayings to Help You on Your Way,” that being the subtitle of the 2019 Church Signs calendar. These pithy remarks, comments and admonitions really do appear (or have appeared) on signs in front of churches at one time or another. “Pray now, ask questions later,” suggests one. Another thoughtfully suggests, “We could take a lesson from the weather. It pays no attention to criticism.” Or, on a different weather-related note, “When life gives you a rainy day, play in the puddles.” That one strikes the same theme as this: “Anything that annoys you is teaching you patience.” And this: “Every day will not be good, but there is something good in every day.” Some of the signs are overtly religious: “God’s delays are not denials,” and “I was going to waste, but Jesus recycled me,” and “In God we still trust!” Some rhyme: “Be the labor great or small, do it well or not at all.” Some are amusing in a think-about-it way: “The difference between heaven and hell isn’t the temperature, it’s the management,” and “The outcome of a rain dance has a lot to do with timing,” and “There is a reason the rearview mirror is small and the windshield is big.” There is room here for occasionally poking fun at oneself: “Our congregation is like fudge – mostly sweet, with a few nuts.” And there is also room for a bit of genuine seriousness: “It is an art not only to say the right thing at the right time but also to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.” As one of the signs here puts it, “Life is too important to take seriously!” Church Signs will make sure that you heed those words, day in and day out, throughout the year – faithfully.

(++++) THE ROAD TO TOMORROW

The Land of Yesterday. By K.A. Reynolds. Illustrations by Jensine Eckwall. Harper. $16.99.

     A poetic, beautifully written novel of genuine sensitivity whose only significant flaw is that its issues may be too “adult” for the preteen audience at which it is aimed, K.A. Reynolds’ The Land of Yesterday is one of those rare books that fit neatly within their genre while repeatedly bursting its seams. In this case, that means expanding the genre – of fantasy/adventure – in ways that are sure to make the many other entries in the field pale by comparison for young readers sensitive and thoughtful enough to find themselves lost in Reynolds’ world building and her lovely prose.

     Reynolds in fact has a firm grasp of the genre: this is a quest tale, a repair-a-broken-family tale, a story of the place where imagination and reality intersect. It is also a through-the-rabbit hole story that is well aware of being what it is: “Many books about magical rabbit holes existed, and Cecilia had read them all.” Cecilia is the book’s protagonist; her full name is Cecilia Andromeda Dahl, a moniker that quite deliberately calls up images of starscapes and is also a sly reference to Roald Dahl – that would be the Dahl of Matilda more than the Dahl of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The family name also makes possible the wonderful notion of becoming a “paper Dahl” – one important theme here involves the ways in which paper and writing and real life intersect and transform each other into a mutuality of wonder, with Cecilia at one point being described as “the Daughter of Paper and Tears.”

     Reynolds names her characters splendidly. Cecilia’s father is Aubergine Illustrium Dahl, being not only filled with light (another important theme, to which Illustrium refers) but also associated through his name with a dark purple, eggplant-like color (aubergine). Cecilia’s mother is Mazarine Ignoscentia Dahl, with her color (mazarine is a very deep blue, almost black, the color of the hair of both mother and daughter) being highly significant – as is her middle name, which implies lack of knowledge (a portmanteau of “ignorance” and “science”). Reynolds offers the names in dollops of authorial communication: there is no single page presenting them, and Reynolds never explains their significance directly, allowing their euphoniousness alone to speak for them if readers choose not to delve more deeply into their meanings.

     And then there is Cecilia’s brother, Celadon Ignatius Dahl. Celadon is a jade-green color and also refers to pottery, which is inherently breakable, which encapsulates Cecilia’s brother all too well: early in the book, he dies (this is not a sweetness-and-light novel) when he falls down the steps, because Cecilia broke a banister knob and did not repair it as she had promised she would. This makes Cecilia responsible for Celadon’s death and all that follows – including Mazarine’s departure for the Land of Yesterday to try to recapture Celadon, or at least stay with him.

     Why did Cecilia not make the repair? She thought, or hoped, that the house would do so itself. The house is named Widdendream, another marvelously evocative-sounding word that also has a real meaning: it is an old Scottish term for mental confusion, madness or frenzy, which is exactly what the self-aware and initially benevolent Widdendream exhibits when first Celadon and then Mazarine have gone.

     The Land of Yesterday is so rich in references and cross-references that it constantly teeters on the edge of, Ouroboros-like, consuming itself. But it never does. Again and again, Reynolds, with apparently offhanded grace, throws in another small bit of delight: a passing reference to a hamster named Professor Rick Von Strange; the invented word “parchmentify” to explain how a character is (for better or worse) losing human solidity and becoming paper-like; a view of a place where “tarnished watches frozen in time, wedding rings with bony fingers still attached, and swarms of lost baby teeth drifted by”; an observation that the sun was “the shade of fresh orange juice”; languages consisting solely of question marks or of great gusts of wind – the richness of this book is truly wonderful. Some of its references are clearly for adults, such as the one in which a balloon landing leaves the passengers “shaken and definitely stirred” – a reference to the famous James Bond line about martinis and a subtle reminder that Ian Fleming also wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which itself is echoed in some of Cecilia’s magical travels. Indeed, the subtlety of The Land of Yesterday is more likely to be its undoing than any of its oddities, such as the major plot-structural importance of daisies and of Cecilia’s hair (whose color is mazarine, as is Mazarine’s; but Cecilia’s hair has a mind of its own and is a significant character in the narrative). Hopefully many young readers will pick up on Reynolds’ rethinking of elements of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. And hopefully at least some young readers (and adults, who really should read this book to find out just how good a novel allegedly for preteens can be) will note the meaningfulness of Cecilia’s encounter with the Little Prince, which Reynolds emphasizes in her super-subtle way by having Cecilia mention at one point that she “once resided happily at 2734 Saint-Exupéry Way” and by later having Cecilia discover words written to the boy by “your friend, A.” on “1^st August, 1944,” the day after Saint-Exupéry is believed to have died after disappearing in his unarmed plane on a wartime reconnaissance mission.

     All these thoughts and references and cross-references are a lot for a book, any book, to contain, much less to juggle with the skill with which Reynolds juggles them. It is perhaps not surprising that the workmanlike illustrations by Jensine Eckwall detract from the narrative instead of adding to it: the full-page ones render the marvels mundane, although the small ones that introduce the chapters are unobtrusive enough. It is words, and the pictures they produce in readers’ minds, that truly matter here. What ultimately happens to Cecilia, even before The Land of Yesterday winds to its thoroughly satisfying conclusion, is that “hurt and love and loss and friendship and laughter and thankfulness thrummed as one new emotion inside her being.” And so will they, or it, within the being of any reader, of any age, who is fortunate enough to accompany Reynolds to the marvels of The Land of Yesterday and then onward to now and beyond.

(+++) IN SEARCH OF IDENTITY

The Turning. By Emily Whitman. Greenwillow/HarperCollins. $16.99.

Courage. By Barbara Binns. Harper. $16.99.

Why Can’t I Be You. By Melissa Walker. Harper. $16.99.

     The question “who am I?” is pervasive in novels for readers ages 8-12, and it emerges in a wide variety of guises. Fantasy is one way for preteens to explore the reality of feeling conflicted and unsure of oneself – an example being The Turning. This is a book with a common theme, of being caught between two worlds and unsure where one belongs, but with a fantasy twist: the central character, Aran, is a selkie, a seal/human creature who lives at sea with others of his kind. He is 11 and has always thought of himself as a selkie pup even though he was born not wearing his pelt, as selkies in this novel usually are. Despite his mother’s reassurances, Aran is constantly reminded that he is not like the other selkies, being unable to swim as far or as fast as they do or to hold his breath as long underwater.  The truth eventually comes out: Aran’s father was human, so he really is torn between two worlds and may not fit into either one. The selkies’ Moon Day passes and Aran still does not have a pelt, so his mother heads north to ask advice from the ancient wise ones living there – and perhaps to obtain a pelt from them for her son. The journey is too far for Aran, who is therefore left with a kindly old human woman named Maggie and, predictably, develops a friendship with her; with a girl named Nellie; and with Nellie’s grandfather, who is used mainly for the narrative purpose of filling readers in on what selkies are and what the legends about them include. Eventually Aran gets his pelt, brought back from the north by his mom, and has to choose whether to return to the sea in fully-fledged selkie form or remain with his newfound land family and friends. Emily Whitman insists that this is a one-or-the-other choice, which makes sense from the perspective of the typical “who am I?” preteen book. But the starkness of the decision makes the novel less interesting, because when Aran, rather predictably, chooses to remain on land but transform to a seal from time to time, in a place where no one will see him, the result feels like a failure to reconcile opposites – although a reconciliation of conflicts is exactly what young readers in the target age range will likely be hoping to achieve. The Turning is pleasant enough and told without major, unnecessary drama, but its conclusion rings a bit false.

     Water figures in a different way in Barbara Binns’ Courage, one of those books clearly designed to be gritty and socially aware. The story takes place entirely on land, mostly in one of the tougher parts of Chicago, and is intended to be realistic; but water matters a great deal, because the protagonist, 13-year-old T’Shawn, loves diving and wants to be on a diving team. And lo and behold, he is so good, so naturally talented, that he is offered a scholarship that will allow him to join an expensive and prestigious diving club. Everything would be wonderful if it were not for a few non-diving-related matters. T’Shawn has a troubled past, having been raised by his mother after his father’s death from cancer – a hugely expensive as well as emotionally wrenching experience that landed the family in a shelter because of overwhelming medical debt. Equally troubling is the gang involvement of T’Shawn’s older brother, Lamont, who has been sent to prison – but is coming out just in time to move back home and ruin everything for T’Shawn. Binns trots out every possible politically correct element in this help-the-worthy-but-downtrodden novel. There is police brutality, domestic violence, sickle-cell disease, and the lure of Lamont’s old life, to which T’Shawn is sure his brother, whom T’Shawn calls “the biggest villain I know,” is returning. The writing is forced and is weighted with heavy discussions of social concerns; the inherent goodness of African-Americans and cluelessness-to-evil of whites is pervasive; and the notion that awful, persistent American racism is solely responsible for gang violence and the problems of contemporary African-American life is a large part of the book’s primary theme. Courage is clearly aimed at young African-American readers who believe that they, like T’Shawn, could be hugely successful if only someone would give them a windfall that would let them pursue their dreams. Binns is so determined to skew the reality for those assumed readers that she gives short shrift to matters that could actually help the novel reach out to a wider readership: the importance of home and family, middle-school angst, early-teenage crushes, and more. There is nothing courageous about an author mining the rich vein of “poor me” victimhood as Binns does here. The “who am I?” question can be, and has been, handled with far greater sensitivity than this.

     The “victim” element in Melissa Walker’s Why Can’t I Be You is an economic rather than racial one (although one major character is mixed-race), and the emotional interaction among Walker’s characters is less fraught and seems less author-manipulated than in Binns’ novel. Walker does, though, go through highly familiar territory for preteen readers – it is to Binns’ credit that she at least tries to introduce people and themes outside the norm of books for this age group. In Why Can’t I Be You, protagonist Claire and her friends are all turning 12 and trying to figure out, yes, who they are and what seventh grade will be like. Clair is finally allowed to stay on her own at the trailer park where she lives while her mother works. That should give her more time to spend with best friend and next-door neighbor Ronan, but since Ronan’s father returned home, Ronan has suddenly taken to social media to make his life seem better than it is. As if that is not confusing enough, Claire’s other best friend, Brianna, recently moved into a big, fancy house, complete with a pool, and is starting to behave with an aura of assumed sophistication that Claire cannot understand. Brianna is having a boy-girl birthday party instead of the single-gender one of the past, and Brianna too is becoming active on social media, friending boys as well as girls. Adding to Claire’s confusion is Brianna’s cousin, biracial Eden, who is visiting Brianna for the summer and seems already to possess the more-adult outlook on life that Brianna and Ronan seem to be trying on for size. Claire is overly naïve – at one point, Eden actually has to explain to her why she looks different from Claire – but her struggle to figure out where she fits in a world that seems to be changing around her has resonances of reality. And her imperfect-but-caring parents, a refreshing change from the typically feckless or overwhelmed ones usually found in novels for preteens, actually care enough to help Claire become a better listener to Brianna and Eden, seeing past their surface appearances and activities to their inner life. The parents also help Claire understand what is going on with Ronan and his father. Claire, of course, eventually finds out that the only one she can be as she grows older is herself, and the eventual happy ending seems less forced and manipulative than the endings of both The Turning and Courage. Walker plows no new ground in Why Can’t I Be You, but she handles the familiar territory of the book with enough care and sensitivity to produce an attractive presentation for the middle-school girls for whom the book is clearly written.

(+++) THE VOICE TWISTS, THE VOICE TURNS

Patrice Michaels: The Long View—A Portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg; Lori Laitman: Wider Than the Sky; Vivian Fung: Pot Roast à la RBG; Stacy Garrop: My Dearest Ruth; Derrick Wang: You Are Searching in Vain for a Bright-Line Solution. Patrice Michaels, soprano; Kuang-Hao Huang, piano. Cedille. $16.

Walter Steffens: Two Cells in Sevilla, or Don Quixote Is Hungry; Five Songs on Hölderlin. Members of the Greenbrier Consortium conducted by David Kirk; Sonja Bruzauskas, mezzo-soprano; Tali Morgulis, piano. Navona. $14.99.

Michael Wittgraf: Manifold; Improvisation 2; Improvisation 4; Summer and a Half; Topographic Timepiece; Pythagorean Triple. Amanda DeBoer Bartlett, voice; Jesse Langen, guitar; Michael Wittgraf, computer. Ravello. $14.99.

Gina Biver: Mirror; Girl Walking; We Meet Ourselves; The Cellar Door; No Matter Where. Ravello. $14.99.

     Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has become a darling of the political Left in the United States for her unashamed and unapologetic determination to interpret the Constitution in accordance with modern society and what she perceives as modern social needs. The politicization of the unelected Supreme Court has a very long history, dating back nearly to the Constitution itself, but the focus on Ginsburg – now sometimes referred to as “the Notorious RBG,” as if she is a rapper or other entertainment celebrity – has reached new heights, as shown on a Cedille recording devoted to unceasing praise of her on both a personal level and a professional one. Within the U.S. political system, there is nothing wrong with any of this: certainly presidents are moved by political considerations in making appointments to the court, and even Franklin Roosevelt’s notorious, failed court-packing plan of 1937 (designed to expand the court so he could appoint more justices guaranteed to back his initiatives) has recently been given new life by some on the American Left. Clearly, the music composed and performed by Patrice Michaels is intended as a tribute to Ginsburg, and the CD is aimed only at those with specific political views – an unfortunate propaganda orientation for music, whatever the merits or demerits of the underlying political arguments. As it happens, Michaels’ extended nine-song cycle is nicely written and conveys a rather well-fleshed-out portrait of Ginsburg as a person, intermingled with excerpts from her opinions that are accepted unquestioningly by Michaels and are intended to preach to the choir through settings that focus on the words and often relegate the musical accompaniment to a wholly subsidiary level. Michaels includes touches of pathos in the cycle, in words from a letter written by Ginsburg’s late husband; touches of humor, in a song about Ginsburg’s prank-playing brother; and touches of cleverness, such as the punning, almost-rap-titled “Dissenter of de Universe.” Michaels sings and declaims the material well and receives careful backup from pianist Kuang-Hao Huang. What is missing in the cycle, clearly intentionally, is any sense of nuance, any indication that perhaps there might be a way to see things that is not Ginsburg’s way (obviously and by definition, dissents mean that most Supreme Court justices disagree with Ginsburg’s views of the cases in which she dissents). Ginsburg is in fact a subtle thinker who happens to hold a position on the Constitution that differs strongly from that of many other justices and many legal scholars – and that is fine and, indeed, strengthening for the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, The Long View is hagiography rather than any sort of considered or balanced biography, and while this will certainly make it attractive to those who agree 100% with Michaels (and by implication with Ginsburg), it makes it unlikely that the work will reach the ears of people of differing political views – the very people who might benefit from hearing it and might even find they enjoy the music, if not the viewpoint. The CD also includes two pleasant tributes commissioned for Ginsburg’s 80^th birthday: Vivian Fung’s Pot Roast à la RBG and Stacy Garrop’s My Dearest Ruth. Lori Laitman’s Wider Than the Sky, using words by Emily Dickinson, is included as well, and stands out here for its interesting (and nonpolitical) text and its consideration of issues not directly (or not solely) related to Ginsburg. Finally, the disc offers a very interesting excerpt from the comic opera Scalia/Ginsburg by Derrick Wang. This piece, You Are Searching in Vain for a Bright-Line Solution, offers Ginsburg’s perspective on constitutional matters in an intelligent, well-argued way that, in the opera, contrasts with the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s equally valid viewpoint on how the document should be interpreted. What is heard here is, unfortunately, one-sided, but then that is the way this entire recording comes across – as a bright-line tribute to one single way of looking at one of the United States’ founding documents, arguably both the most complex and the most important of them all.

     A contemporary opera of a very different sort, with literary rather than political pretensions, Walter Steffens’ Two Cells in Sevilla uses a highly intriguing premise and an amusingly conceived libretto to present the imagined thoughts of two famous Spanish authors. The libretto – by the composer’s son, Marec Béla Steffens – imagines that the creators of Don Quixote and Don Juan are in cells of two different types that happen to be served by the same cook, whose culinary favors the authors try to win by producing their most famous works. Miguel de Cervantes’ cell is in a debtor’s prison, while Tirso de Molina (real name: Brother Gabriel Téllez) has a monk’s cell in a cloister. The two men’s differing circumstances are reflected in their differing authorial penchants, and the matter-of-fact elements of their daily lives are contrasted with the fantastical creations they bring to life through their writing. The music is largely tonal, although there is enough dissonance to make its modernity clear, and the singers’ delivery mixes conventional operatic declamation with bits of Sprechstimme. The ensemble seems to have a good time with the material. Tenor Todd R. Miller is Cervantes; bass Octavio Moreno is Brother Gabriel; mezzo-soprano Sonja Bruzauskas is the cook; and baritone Benjamin LeClair sings the role of a servant. The instrumentalists for this chamber opera are Anne Leek on oboe and cor anglais, Alexander Potiomkin on clarinet, Masahito Sugihara on saxophone, Erika Johnson on cello, and Paul Boyd on piano – an instrumental combination that echoes Baroque ensembles that use melody instruments plus continuo, even though the music itself does not nod in any significant way to the time period in which the opera, which was written in 2016, is set. Opera in general is not for all tastes, and modern opera reaches out to an even smaller audience, but Two Cells in Sevilla is a clever and involving enough work to be worth hearing by listeners familiar with Don Quixote and/or Don Juan, even if not with their creators or with the operatic form. Also on the Navona CD are Five Songs on Hölderlin (2008), sung by Bruzauskas with piano accompaniment by Tali Morgulis. These are highly contrasted expressions of poetic sentiments ranging from the idealistic to the painful, written in traditional art-song form, sung in German, and ranging in length from the short to the very short indeed. The settings here are sensitive and in large measure traditional, although the shortest of the songs, arranging a fragment of poetry in just over a minute, has a particularly interesting contrast between its opening of voice without piano and its continuation of a dissonant chord and a piano part that fades into nothingness. Slow in pace, more pensive and less immediately accessible than Two Cells in Sevilla, the songs provide a complementary auditory experience for listeners seeking to hear additional ways in which Steffens handles vocal material.

     The voice appears in only two of the six works by Michael Wittgraf on a new Ravello CD, with the guitar participating in all six and computer-generated sounds (created by Wittgraf himself) being heard in three. Improvisation 2 and Improvisation 4 have a surprising connection to Steffens’ opera in one way: the sounds of vocalist Amanda DeBoer Bartlett are based on medieval chants. But of course those sounds, and indeed the sounds of all the works on this recording, are about as far from older sensibilities (musical and otherwise) as Wittgraf and the other performers can make them. In fact, even the voice itself is “modernized” here, being processed for inclusion in the tracks; whether that constitutes an improvement of any sort is a matter of opinion and taste. The electronic sounds in the two Improvisation tracks and in Topographic Timepiece are nothing special, although the way the guitar actually seems to evoke rather than imitate some of the electronics in Topographic Timepiece is interesting. However, at nearly 12 minutes, the piece is much too long for what it has to say. The non-computer-containing works here are generally more interesting. Manifold is another piece that outstays its welcome: at 13 minutes, it is the longest work on the CD, and sustaining a piece for solo guitar for such a time period would be difficult even if the material had more heft to it than Wittgraf’s does. The other guitar-only pieces are somewhat more modest in scale, a circumstance from which they benefit. The two movements of Summer and a Half are mostly explorations of guitar techniques and will in that regard be of interest to guitarists; certainly Jesse Langen handles the material stylishly and attentively. Pythagorean Triple, the last and shortest work on the disc, is in many ways the most effective piece of them all, from its strummed opening to its hesitant progress toward linear material that never quite becomes thematic. This is one disc among many intended, apparently, mainly for performers (in this case, guitarists) looking for new material that they might consider playing, and for listeners who are either familiar with the composer already or who simply want to hear something new being produced on the contemporary-music scene.

     Another such CD, also from Ravello, features five works by Gina Biver, who, like Wittgraf, participates in some of the performances – once as speaker and once on electric guitar. Mirror (2012), the spoken-word piece, is the only one here using the human voice, and actually includes two of them: Biver’s and that of Colette Inez, whose poem, “Empress in the Mirror,” inspired the work. The voices mingle, deliberately disconcertingly, with violin (Greg Hiser) and piano (Ina Mirtcheva Blevins). The instrumental sounds are typical for contemporary compositions, and the overall effect of the work is one of displacement and uncertainty – again, nothing especially unusual in today’s music. This is the shortest piece on the CD and, in part as a result, seems more tightly knit than the other works. The work on which Biver plays electric guitar is Girl Walking (2014), which also features Jennifer Lapple on flute, Ethan Foote on bass, and Scott Deal playing “found percussion,” notably two teacups that are out of tune with each other. The electric-guitar opening expresses itself in near-vocal sounds to which the other instruments are added over time, but aside from the differing sounds as instruments emerge and drop out of the grouping, the work has little sense of progress or forward motion. We Meet Ourselves (2015) has an unusual inspiration – the psychoanalytic works of Carl Jung, who is best known for his concept of the collective unconscious – and is a piece for Scott Deal, to whom it is dedicated. Deal performs on marimba and “triggered audio,” meaning that Deal brings in pre-recorded sounds by gestural cues or by touching specific parts of the marimba. The marimba’s otherworldly sound here fits nicely with the triggered ones, but the work’s essentially static pace means that it does not seem to go anywhere in particular. The Cellar Door (2011), another Jung-inspired work, is played by Blevins on piano and Pam Clem on cello. Biver’s idea here is to use an audio track to represent the unconscious, while the instruments stand in for conscious life. Knowledge of this intent makes the piece somewhat more comprehensible, although heard purely as music, it comes across as a work in which modest efforts at thematic entry and development are interfered with again and again by electronic sounds. Finally, No Matter Where (2010) is played by Hiser on violin, Blevins on piano, and Angela Murakami on clarinet. Underlying pre-recorded train sounds make it clear that the work represents a journey, and various musical influences – Asian ones being particularly noticeable – indicate something of where the trip takes place. Not really a sound painting or a travelogue, the piece, like the CD as a whole, seems to be aimed at a narrow audience: listeners fond of electro-acoustical composition in general, and ones who are curious about the sounds wielded in various ways by composers in the 21^st century.

(++++) DESKTOP DELIGHTS

Calendars (desk for 2019): Get It Together! with Sarah’s Scribbles; Cartoons from “The New Yorker.” Andrews McMeel. $14.99 (Together); $16.99 (New Yorker).

Calendars (page-a-day for 2019): Comics Every Day; Peanuts. Andrews McMeel. $14.99 each.

     The question inevitably arises when planning every new year: how best to keep track of one’s appointments, plans, phone calls and all the details of everyday life and/or work? Increasingly, the answer is “on a mobile phone,” or in some other electronic manner. And the electronic life has its attractions, especially if you move around constantly, have no fixed work location, are constantly updating and changing plans and appointments, or are otherwise firmly enmeshed in a world where nothing remains the same for long and you need to be connected at all times and always ready to make new plans or remake old ones. On the other hand, if you would like to slow down just a bit from time to time, if you realize that there is something unsatisfactory – and inherently subject to hacking or crashes – in keeping everything you need to know in electronic form, then you may want to step back from being ever-connected-everywhere and consider the joys of actual, physical, desktop planning books. They are definitely still around, and they can be quite wonderful – and thanks to “ancient” inventions such as the Post-It note (which dates to 1974), it can be quite simple to move an appointment from one day, week or month to another in a desktop book. In fact, making changes is often faster in a physical medium than an electronic one.

     If you are considering a desktop planner for 2019, one of the easiest ways to decide if it will work for you is to start using it in 2018. That is quite simple with new planners featuring cartoons from Sarah’s Scribbles and The New Yorker, since each is a 16-month book, running from September 2018 through December 2019. And each offers its own distinct and distinctive form of enjoyment through the year (or 16 months). Sarah’s Scribbles is the brainchild of Sarah Andersen, who chronicles the everyday life, thoughts, worries, obsessions, joys and yuckinesses of a young 21^st-century woman. Andersen’s giant-eyed characters look nothing like the anime-influenced creations so common in cartoons today, and their bodily proportions (huge heads relative to bodies, huge eyes relative to heads) give them a kind of charming insouciance that works well with Andersen’s offbeat perceptions. One cartoon, for instance, has cartoon Andersen opening a box of feelings and finding, cowering in the corner, a tiny but huge-eyed blob labeled “regret,” which comments, “Shouldn’t have done that.” Another set of panels encapsulates typical human-cat relationships: Andersen’s cartoon alter ego gets angry at her cat for knocking over her food bowl yet again, but as soon as the cat flips over to show her belly, cartoon Andersen’s eyes glaze over and she says, “I love you I love you.” This 2019 planner does a great job of reflecting the cartoons that appear on every right-hand page: instead of simple blank boxes for each day of the week, there are, for every day, three columns marked “Appointments/Misc,” “Stuff to Do,” and “My Social Life.” The bottom right of each two-page spread has a box labeled “Notes and Stuff.” There are Sarah’s Scribbles stickers bound into the planner, too. And at the very end of the date pages of the spiral-bound, lie-flat book, there are pages that pretty well sum up everything that requires some thinking throughout any year: “Notes,” “Goals,” “Ideas,” “Remember,” “Thoughts,” “Dreams,” “Contacts,” “Favorites,” “Stuff,” “Memories,” and “Misc.” That about covers it – but if anything is not covered, you can save it at the very end of the book, where there is a neat little pouch in which receipts, ticket stubs and the like can easily be saved.

     If you are of a more-traditional bent where cartoons and desktop planners are concerned, consider the more-conventional, typically distinctive look of Cartoons from the New Yorker for 2019 (and the final third of 2018). A defiantly un-busy design, with elegant black cover and a binding that lets the book open flat even though it is not spiral-bound, this planner has a New Yorker cartoon on each left-hand page and seven open, unlined boxes bearing each week’s days and dates on the right. There is a bookmark strap bound into the planner in case you need to take it somewhere while keeping your place, and there is the usual famous (or notorious) New Yorker humor throughout. On one page, a super-busy techie is being told, “Bad news – some kid just created an app that creates apps.” On another, two elderly men walk together in a park, leaning on canes, and one says, “I don’t know about you, but I say it’s time we started experimenting with drugs.” Elsewhere, seagulls approach a beachgoing couple and the lead bird tell the people, “We can do this the easy way or the Hitchcockian way.” And then there is the doctor’s-office scene in which the doc turns his computer screen toward the patient sitting across the desk from him and declares, “So, as you can see, health care is so complicated you may never get well.” The cartooning styles vary significantly from panel to panel, representing, as a totality, many of the contemporary artists who give The New Yorker a look that remains unique among magazines. The underlying sophistication of the material, however, is the same throughout, if differently expressed and focused on different themes. Not everyone gravitates to the brand of humor in The New Yorker, but anyone who does will find this handsome desktop planner just the thing to make it easier to keep track of everything that needs tracking for a full 16 months.

     To be sure, there are ways to keep a cartoon presence on your desk – or any other flat surface – even if you choose not to use a physical desktop planner; and there are ways to increase the percentage of space devoted to cartoons if you do use a desktop planning book. All that is necessary is a page-a-day calendar, which provides a different bit of comic (and/or thoughtful) artistry every day. With these tear-off calendars as with desktop planners, there is a more-contemporary approach and a more-traditional one, so you can choose whatever works better for you. Comics Every Day is the up-to-date way to get, well, comics every day. This calendar offers 52 different comics, one per week, taken from the even-more-numerous offerings at the GoComics Web site. You can visit the site for a larger helping of any calendar comic that strikes your fancy – but the neat thing about the calendar is that it gives you a chance to see cartooning you probably would not see if you simply went to the site, since the selection there is so vast that you would be unlikely to stumble upon any specific strip you did not already know. True, the calendar comes with the risk of being saddled with a week of strips you do not care for, but that is a small matter beside the potential pleasure of encountering one or more you have never seen before and will truly enjoy discovering. Perhaps you will like Everyday People by Cathy Thorne, in which a woman eating from a bag of pork rinds comments, “I am eating healthy – they’re organic.” Or Lug Nuts by J.C. Duffy, which shows a man whittling a forget-me-not moose for his love. Or Four Eyes by Gemma Correll, which in one strip shows a “mantra ray” chanting “om, om, om.” Then there is Break of Day by Nate Fakes, in which one woman tells another about being on “an all-condiment diet.” And there is Too Much Coffee Man by Shannon Wheeler, wherein a crowd shows up in a couple’s bedroom and the woman asks the man, “Did you mess with my privacy settings?” And there are many more offerings here – even including a week of Sarah’s Scribbles.

     However, if you prefer the tried-and-true (more accurately, the tried-and-true-and-truly-wonderful), you can opt for the Peanuts page-a-day calendar for 2019, which shows for the umpteenth time that Charles Schulz’ characters have lost none of their ability to amuse, delight and occasionally inspire introspection in the years since Schulz’ death in 2000. Each page of the calendar has a Schulz strip in full color, although the dailies were in black-and-white when originally drawn. The familiar, indeed classic, characters are all here, their adventures fitting their personalities as perfectly as ever. In one sequence, Lucy throws Schroeder’s beloved piano into a tree, which turns out to be the notorious kite-eating tree, and sure enough, the tree eats the piano – leaving Charlie Brown to wonder what Beethoven would have done. Then there is Snoopy appearing in a spacesuit, intending to be the “first beagle on the moon.” Lucy laments not knowing the answers to life, so Linus gives her a page on which he has written the number 5. Charlie Brown tries to improve his baseball team’s performance by having everyone consume an electrolyte-rich drink, and the team loses by 200 to nothing. Elsewhere, Charlie Brown comments to Snoopy on the dog’s many adventures possibly making a good book, so Snoopy seats himself at a typewriter and begins, “It was a dark and stormy night.” Classic Peanuts lines like that crop up periodically throughout the year, but even strips without such lines are delightful. There is the one in which Woodstock, the little yellow bird, practices diving into Snoopy’s water dish, than complains “because the pool isn’t heated.” And the one in which Snoopy notes, “I have lots of sentimentality. It’s my stomach that’s practical!” And the sequence in which Snoopy has to appear before “the head beagle” because he has not been chasing his monthly quota of rabbits. The gentle absurdity of the Peanuts world always brought a welcome contrast to the everyday activities of mundane existence, and with the new 2019 calendar, Schulz’ characters and situations can continue to delight desktops (and anywhere else you may choose to display them) throughout the coming year.

(++++) HOLIDAY CRITTERS

Lots of Cats. By E. Dee Taylor. Harper. $16.99.

Bear’s Spooky Book of Hidden Things. By Gergely Dudás. Harper. $8.99.

I Love to Gobble You Up! By Sandra Magsamen. Cartwheel Books/Scholastic. $7.99.

Merry Christmas, Little One! By Sandra Magsamen. Cartwheel Books/Scholastic. $7.99.

     Animal-focused kids’ books are fun at any time of year, but they take on new dimensions when tied to specific holidays and celebrations. E. Dee Tylor offers a Halloween-themed animal story for ages 4-8 in Lots of Cats, complete with some especially attractive illustrations. The tale is about a very small, independent-minded witch named Margaret, first seen sitting with a picnic lunch on a tree branch, who is always busy but wishes, from time to time, for someone with whom to play. Eventually she decides to cast a spell to make a playmate, and starts putting various ingredients into her cauldron – then decides to add even more of each ingredient to be sure the whole thing will really work well. And it does – too well. Margaret ends up with not one but fully a dozen cats – each of a different color and given a distinctive personality in Taylor’s charming pictures. The cats take over Margaret’s house, as cats will – the plump white one with a black eye patch, seen sitting in human posture in Margaret’s chair while daintily nibbling a cookie, is especially amusing. And Margaret is very happy indeed: the two-page picture of her with all the cats, flying about thanks to a “broomstick-extension spell,” is a delight. But Margaret soon realizes (as will children who see all the cats and start asking for a dozen for their own home) that the cats require lots of food, shed lots of hair, and produce lots of poop (Margaret has to wear a face mask when dealing with that). In fact, the cats create a major mess in the little witch’s formerly orderly house: “Margaret couldn’t find magic words that would make cats follow directions,” because as any cat owner knows, such words do not exist. So she scares them all out of the house – by simply using a vacuum cleaner – and soon is alone again. But “alone” is less fun now that it was in pre-cat days, so she casts a spell to bring them back – but mistakenly gets bats instead of cats. So she searches everywhere for the missing cats, without success; but of course there is a happy ending, thanks to a dream one night, and at the end of Lots of Cats, Margaret is again surrounded by lots of cats – to which she presumably manages to adjust. The front and back covers of the book, beneath the wraparound paper jacket, offer wonderfully individualized portraits of each of the dozen cats. And the story, although vaguely Halloween-themed because of its central character, is really quite appropriate and amusing at any time of year.

     Bear’s Spooky Book of Hidden Things, on the other hand, is strictly a Halloween book, and a very clever one. Gergely Dudás here offers a series of can-you-find-it pictures along the lines of Where’s Waldo? And these are not simple ones to search. The story is that Bear loves Halloween and looks forward to getting some honeycomb when trick-or-treating. But before that happens – at the very end of the book – Bear receives lots and lots of other treats from his various animal friends. Bear knows he will be given many things, so the book starts with a search for a red wagon that he can use to haul everything. And then the find-it pages really begin in earnest. Young readers need to help Bear find a caramel apple on a page packed with hay bales, on which four of Bear’s fox friends are dressed as ghosts. Finding candy corn on a page filled with real corn is the next challenge, followed by locating a lollipop on a page that “the Frankenstein bunnies” have filled with “ew – eyeballs.” There is a carved pumpkin to be found on a page packed with autumn-colored leaves; a bottle of witch’s brew concealed on a shelf in a haunted library; a toy skull in a big pile of toy bones; and more. Dudás takes all the spookiness out of every potentially scary scenario: he has an excellent sense of the fun and very slightly shivery nature of kids’ Halloween. Page after page, Bear’s red wagon fills up with all sorts of enjoyable goodies, and the items kids need to find become quite challenging: a donut might seem easy to spot on a page filled with cobwebs, but it is not; nor is it at all simple to find the magic wand on a page packed with candy – including a lot of stick candy that almost, but not quite, looks like magic wands. Bear’s Spooky Book of Hidden Things is for ages 4-8, and kids at the younger end of that age range may become frustrated in the search for some of the harder-to-locate items. So parents should go through the book and find everything first – if they can! By the end of the book, after all the parties and all the treats, kids and parents alike will enjoy a non-puzzle page that simply shows Bear relaxing in his room, happily eating the honeycomb that his friends have brought him.

     The enjoyment is for even younger children, from infants to three-or-four-year-olds, in a new Sandra Magsamen board book, I Love to Gobble You Up! No, this is not a scary Halloween-themed book – the word “gobble” might carry some frightfulness with it for the October holiday, but by November, Thanksgiving month, it means something very different. And this book is indeed a Thanksgiving-themed treat. As she usually does in board books, Magsamen offers very simple, brief, age-appropriate text that is “made with love,” as the cover here says. And the book is designed to be cuddly: soft plush turkey tail feathers, tightly bound into the back of the book, stick out of the top, and every page of Magsamen’s drawings incorporates the bright orange feathers into the design. The simply drawn turkey on the cover is surrounded by hearts, and then on the first open page, the hearts – representing kisses of the “gobbling you up” type – are all over its body. Hearts flow and float everywhere in the book as the word “gobble,” always shown in six different colors, is used again and again: “I’d gobble you here, and I’d gobble you there,” for example. Like other Magsamen board books, this one is super-short, with a super-simple message that should be exactly what very young children will love to hear – especially if parents read the book with the child in their lap and punctuate the writing with lots of little tummy gobbles (and other sorts of gobble kisses) during the reading. The turkeys here are not for eating – they are strictly for the hugs-and-kisses style of gobbling and for offering kids a heaping helping of love and fun.

     The same heaping helping of love is also on display in Magsamen’s Merry Christmas, Little One! Here it comes from snowpeople – snowmen, snowwomen and snowkids – who decorate a nicely rhyming board book that is more conventionally designed than Magsamen’s one for Thanksgiving: it is a lift-the-flap book. One left page, for example, says, “Wreaths are strung with twinkling lights” – with the word “wreaths” in multiple colors – while the right-hand page shows a multicolored wreath that kids can lift to reveal the words, “Friends sing songs that warm our nights” (the friends being snowpeople and the word “friends” being in multiple colors). These pages are a bit larger than usual for board books, and are made thickly to be easy to grasp and turn and difficult to tear. The book eventually leads to a left-hand page that says, “A day of laughter, love, and fun!” (The multicolored words here are, of course, “laughter,” “love,” and “fun.”) The right-hand page then shows a stylized Christmas tree with a star on top and otherwise decorated entirely with little red hearts. Lifting it reveals four words, the first two in multiple colors: “Merry Christmas, little one!” The joy-to-the-world and joy-to-the-family messages are simply and very pleasantly communicated here – and just to be sure the book does have a Magsamen touch, the front cover sports the same heart-decorated tree shown on the book’s last page, but in a soft plush design quite suitable for pushing and poking and maybe even for hugging. Magsamen’s books all do seem to be particularly huggable, whatever their characters and whatever the season.

(+++) A SMATTERING OF MYTH

City of Islands. By Kali Wallace. Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins. $16.99.

     A nicely paced novel with some genuinely interesting elements – placed, unfortunately, within some genuinely stereotypical ones – Kali Wallace’s City of Islands is most involving when it is less a fantasy adventure and more an exploration of the way in which such adventures are perceived. “Even the best legends were a weave of truth and lies, memories and wishes, and few people ever had a chance to revisit the foundations of their most cherished beliefs to learn how they withstood the test of time.” This perceptive comment, simply a narrative aside near the end of the book, speaks to what is best and most thoughtful in City of Islands: an approach that almost helps it rise above what is essentially a thoroughly standardized plot acted out by one-dimensional characters.

     The basic story here is typical preteen fantasy: a young orphan girl proves to have powers far beyond her imagining or the expectations of anyone else in the book, especially adults; and as she starts coming into those powers, she makes great things happen and single-handedly changes the world for the better. Surrounding the protagonist, 12-year-old Mara, are the usual friends/foils, notably an older girl named Izzy and a boy called Fish Hook. The adults are the usual blend of cruel and/or uncaring and/or feckless and/or ambition-driven; they include the ruling Lady of the Tides, a “bone-mage” named Bindy who takes Mara in after the girl’s parents die, and a dark sorcerer known as Lord of the Muck. The characters act and interact in entirely predictable ways that include arguments and fights, lies and betrayals, and the typical error in books of this sort of underestimating Mara and her abilities.

     City of Islands would be eminently forgettable were it not for the setting and some of the details of the narrative. Wallace’s world here is indeed a set of islands, each supposedly with its own character (although only a few are actually visited in the course of the book). In this world – and this is interesting – there is magic, yes, but it is so mundane a part of the world that people use it all the time, albeit in small ways. And it is evoked and shaped, and used to shape other things, by means of music – specifically songs. That is a very intriguing premise that could have drawn on the whole notion of the power of music to mold the mind, had Wallace wished; and even though she does not use it that way, preferring simply to have music be a tool for calling forth magic, itself a tool for accomplishing everyday tasks, the notion that music is something special pervades the book and lends it more character than most preteen fantasies possess.

     The concept here is that the City of Islands is a degraded form of a once-greater land created through potent magic by a race of water beings known only as the founders (not even a capital F). The magic that still exists is but an echo of what the founders possessed, and while most people are content to use what magic they can to aid their everyday lives, some power-seekers strive for ever-more-potent magic and go to great lengths to try to find or develop it. This is a standard power-hungry-adults trope, and the Lord of the Muck’s insistence on explaining his nefarious designs in detail to Mara, who has just shown up unexpectedly in his Frankensteinish laboratory, is almost laughably formulaic: young readers who have encountered nearly any cardboard-character bad guy anywhere will have heard speeches like his many times.

     They will have met heroic young people like Mara many times, too. In fact, Mara is a rather weak central character, constantly self-questioning and having no real idea of how anything in life works, even though Wallace says she is a determined-survivor type. For instance, Mara comes up with a clever idea to get her captive friends away from the Lord of the Muck, but when she has a chance to present the plan to the Lady of the Tides, it does not even occur to her to do so in a way that will pique the Lady’s interest, which is not in lowly servant Mara or her equally lowly friends: “She needed them to understand that rescuing Izzy and Fish Hook was more important than the Muck, more important than his magic, more important than anything he thought he could do.” A smarter protagonist would have focused on the exact opposite of this: how the Lady, by helping Mara, could outmaneuver the Muck and undermine his plans. But not Mara – who, rather unrealistically, gets the help she wants anyway.

     City of Islands moves along at a good pace and has a few genuinely intriguing scenes, such as one that echoes Pushkin’s The Stone Guest as Mara discovers a statue that seems to shed tears – a prelude to something more significant that is still to come. But the book has no truly compelling characters, and it suffers from a number of editing errors, such as one in which, while Mara and a girl named Feather search for the missing Fish Hook, there occurs this line: “‘We didn’t find her,’ Fish Hook said.” No – Feather said, Fish Hook being nowhere in the scene. A little more care in editing would have been in order here. Even then, though, City of Islands would be a pleasantly involving, sometimes dramatic adventure that fits firmly in the preteen-fantasy genre while bringing very little new to it. It is not one of a kind but one among many of its kind.

(+++) SELF-CARE AND PSEUDO-SCIENCE

Close Your Eyes, Get Free: Use Self-Hypnosis to Reduce Stress, Quit Bad Habits, and Achieve Greater Relaxation and Focus. By Grace Smith. Da Capo. $15.99.

     Self-help books are, by definition and to a greater or lesser extent, paeans of praise to their authors. Like books about “the one investment secret you need to know,” self-help and other personal-growth books point to their authors as having knowledge and abilities that they have discovered through their own remarkable acumen and that they are now, out of the goodness of their hearts, sharing with the world. The fact that not a single self-help book (or, for that matter, a single investment book) actually works for all people is what keeps the field going – and the fact that many books work for some people to at least some degree guarantees an endless supply of eager writers hoping to cash in on their particular expertise.

     So there is nothing particularly surprising in the extent to which hypnotherapist Grace Smith engages in social-media self-promotion and refers readers to the audios, videos and other “bonus content” that she makes available online at a site associated with the hypnosis practice that she founded. Nor are her chatty style and her clever way of giving a scientific veneer to her suggestions unusual or likely to be off-putting to people who have tried many other forms of self-help for their psychological concerns, have found them wanting, but who still think someone, somewhere, has the answer.

     A lot of the “science” here is once-over-lightly and not particularly accurate, but it does not have to be: it creates a framework within which readers who so choose can believe in Smith’s approach. That is in fact an important component of hypnotism: agreeing to be hypnotized means you are pre-selecting yourself as someone predisposed to be hypnotized. Agreeing to learn self-hypnosis to deal with life issues means you are pre-selecting yourself as someone predisposed to believe that self-hypnosis can help you solve life’s problems. This is precisely how stage hypnotists arrange their acts – and it is also how medical hypnotherapists incorporate hypnosis into psychotherapy.

     That is not quite what Smith does, however. To the extent that Close Your Eyes, Get Free is science, it is very much popular science, with the emphasis on “popular.” Smith, for example, offers a three-part brain model (reptilian, limbic, neocortex) and suggests readers associate each unsatisfactory area of their lives with one of the three parts and work on issues based on that association.

     In reality, though, a good deal of what Smith presents is not science at all – it is closer to astrology than astronomy. Smith, for instance, discusses “past life regressions” and how she tends “to lean toward the idea that they are real” because she has gone through many of them with clients. That is about as unscientific a way of declaring something “real” as it is possible to find, but dedicated readers of Close Your Eyes, Get Free are unlikely to mind. Instead, they will revel in the sort of encouragement that Smith provides again and again: “I can only imagine the wonderful benefits you’re already experiencing from having given your time and energy to learning how to close your eyes and get free.” Smith certainly does have a vivid, and carefully directed, imagination.

     Imagination and the willingness to go where it leads you are a must for Smith’s readers, too. Hypnotism is essentially a guided form of meditation that allows increased focus on specific matters to the exclusion or diminution of others. Therapists know that the word “guided” is important and that hypnosis is a method of, in effect, allowing yourself to take actions that you would like to take, at some level, but feel you cannot take, at others. For instance, you would like to stop smoking, but cannot break what everyone agrees is a powerfully addictive habit. Hypnosis can help with a situation like that, but not if you truly enjoy smoking and have no desire to do what those killjoy scientists and doctors tell you to do. Hypnosis cannot take you where you are not already predisposed to go.

     As for the “guided” element, Smith attempts in Close Your Eyes, Get Free to be the guide that all her readers need, showing them how to take themselves into a hypnotic state – which, in the context of this book, is essentially a meditative one in which you tell yourself to accept personal responsibility for whatever issues you have and then guide yourself to dealing with them. Smith mixes (or mixes up) matters of hypnosis with various New Age-style recommendations for life: be kind to everybody; do only what brings you joy; spend a day loving yourself as much as you love your pet. These life prescriptions, while well-meaning, are so naïve that they trivialize the underlying seriousness of a book intended to help readers cope with and overcome some serious personal issues.

     Like many other self-help books, Close Your Eyes, Get Free will be useful to some readers and useless to others (who will go on to seek out other self-help books, thus perpetuating the self-help-book cycle). To get what benefits Smith can provide, it can be helpful to regard self-hypnosis (and hypnosis in general) as a way to help your mind turn its attention more strongly toward issues that compromise your quality of life – and thus help your body (and your mind itself) deal with those matters. On that basis, Smith’s book is really about harnessing the placebo effect – a very real form of mind-body connection – and using it to improve everyday existence. That is a perfectly worthy goal: the placebo effect is the reason that 20% to 30% of the control group in medical trials generally improves even when not given any sort of medication or other genuine intervention. But just as the placebo effect does not work for everybody, even the sort of guided or self-guided placebo effect that underlies Close Your Eyes, Get Free will not help all readers. Smith’s ideas are certainly worth a try, but no one should be disappointed to find them far less useful than she makes them out to be.

(++++) GOING IT ALONE

The Celtic Lute. Ronn McFarlane, lute. Sono Luminus. $13.99.

Hampson Sisler: Family Days Suite; Popular Monastics Suite. Michael Koenig, organ. MSR Classics. $12.95.

Lowell Lieberman: Nocturnes Nos. 8-11; Variations on a Theme of Schubert; Two Impromptus, Op. 131; Piano Sonata No. 3. David Korevaar, piano. MSR Classics. $12.95.

Douglas Anderson: Solo Instrumental Music. Ravello. $14.99.

Mind and Machine, Volume One: Organic and Electronic Works by Doug Bielmeier, Jon Bellona, Julius Bucsis, Herbert Deutsch, Bill Whitley, and Schliestett & Bliss. Ravello. $9.99.

     Simply hearing a single instrument played with consummate skill can be enough to make some recordings worthwhile, even if the specific music performed is less involving than the manner of playing it. That is the case with a new Sono Luminus release featuring lutenist Ronn McFarlane. The 26 tracks, which collectively last only 56 minutes, include 11 works by Turlough O’Carolan (1670-1738), the famed blind Irish harpist, along with eight traditional Scottish pieces, six traditional Irish tunes, and one piece by James Oswald (c. 1711-1769). All are played masterfully in McFarlane’s own arrangements, which give the disparate works a greater feeling of cohesion than they would otherwise have. McFarlane’s complete mastery of his instrument is everywhere apparent in his fingerings, his expressiveness, his ability to contrast bright and dancelike material with inward-focused pieces, and his overall sensitivity to the nuances of compositions that, especially in the case of the folk tunes, are generally straightforward and harmonically and rhythmically simple. There is generally greater depth to the O’Carolan pieces than to anything else here, and McFarlane translates the ethereality of some of the harp material to the lute in a way that is thoroughly engaging to hear. This is less a disc to be listened to for the sake of the specific musical works presented than one to hear to consider, or reconsider, the wide adaptability of the lute in the right hands: far from being a simple, archaic serenade-accompanying instrument of the sort so notably parodied by Wagner in Die Meistersinger, the lute can be a communicator of sensitivity and considerable emotional scope when played with as much attentiveness and flair as it is here. The Celtic Lute is a tribute to the instrument and to McFarlane more than to any individual work on the disc, and more even than to O’Carolan – although certainly the arrangements of his material inspired McFarlane to produce transcriptions of considerable beauty for his lute to bring forth.

     There is somewhat greater balance between interest in performer and music on a new MSR Classics CD of two organ suites by Hampson Sisler (born 1932). Sisler has written a considerable amount of sacred choral and organ music, but these two pieces have a somewhat more-secular bent than many of his others. Family Days Suite (1992) includes four movements titled “Mothers Day,” “Fathers Day,” “Celebrate the Children,” and “A Salute to Grandparents,” while Popular Monastics Suite (1994) is a five-movement work: “At Candlemas (Winter’s end; Gopher’s out) (February 2^nd),” “Saint Valentine (February 14^th),” “Saint Patrick (March 17^th),” “Nature St. Francis (of Assisi) (October 4^th),” and “All Saints’ Day/All Hallows’ Day (November 1^st).” The titles of the movements in both suites point more toward the everyday than toward the religiously elevated; but interestingly enough, Sisler never trivializes any of the dates and in fact never truly becomes playful or entirely lighthearted in exploring any of the material. There is an underlying seriousness and thus meaningfulness to every one of these days in Sisler’s handling of them, and that requires an organist to find just the right balance between solemnity and lighter (if not light) expressiveness throughout both the suites. Michael Koenig does just that, producing sensitive and very involving world première recordings of both the suites, drawing listeners into Sisler’s sound world and his foundational solemnity without allowing any movement in either suite to drag or become dull. Sisler does not accept any opportunities for easy amusement or delight, not even in the movements about children and the groundhog. In fact, it is notable that the designations of Candlemas and All Saints’ Day, not Groundhog Day and Halloween, are used to give those dates their due. Sisler’s music is well and carefully constructed and reflects a consistent worldview in which, even in our modern age, the sacred and the profane coexist at all times; and Koenig brings forth Sisler’s vision and his careful, thoughtful exploration of organ sonorities and capabilities to very fine effect.

     The works on another MSR Classics release are also world première recordings and are also very well performed, but the music of Lowell Liebermann (born 1961), at least as heard on this disc, is somewhat less interesting than Sisler’s, resulting in a (+++) CD. At its best, as in Nocturne No. 8 (2003), Liebermann’s music is delicate, sensitive, even sensual in its near-devotional sensibilities. Even here, though, the material tends to drag after a while; and Nocturnes Nos. 9-11 (2006, 2007, 2010) are from the start somewhat less affecting. More interesting musically is Variations on a Theme of Schubert (2007), which is based on Schubert’s setting of Goethe’s Heidenröslein and includes 10 often-inventive approaches to the attractive original (plus a coda). David Korevaar, whose care and sensitivity are evident throughout this disc, does an especially fine job with the contrasts inherent in this work – which, taken as a whole, comes across better than the more-monochromatic Nocturnes. Also on the CD are the Two Impromptus, Op. 131 (2016), written as exam pieces for a piano competition and offering plenty of opportunities to display technique, although the musical material itself is rather thin. Thinness is also apparent in the most-substantial work on the disc, Piano Sonata No. 3 (2002), whose four movements are assembled from a series of brief sections in a way that prevents the piece from having a strong sense of continuity. The movements’ sequence is rather odd: the first reflects its tempo indication of Inquieto, esitante, rather well, but both the second (Dona nobis pacem) and the third (Lullabye) partake of similar sensibilities, and the fourth, marked Interlude, appears for most of its length to be deliberately inconclusive. There is a feeling of meandering throughout the sonata, its tonal uncertainty being paralleled by a stylistic approach that never seems really to settle – it is ultimately a work that, after a strong beginning, declines in musical interest as it progresses, at least until its highly virtuosic final few minutes. Those will repay listeners interested in contemporary solo-piano music who have stayed with the work through its less-interesting sections.

     Listeners who enjoy modern solo-instrument music as a genre will be intrigued by the offerings on a (+++) Ravello CD featuring works by Douglas Anderson. There are plenty of performances on a single instrument to choose from here, including five with similarly designed titles. Maureen Keenan plays flute on “…increasingly, physical…” (1980). Jill Collura is bassoonist for “…procession, emerging…” (1984). Debbie Schmidt plays French horn in “…springing, gradually…” (1988). Violist Ina Litera offers “…mood, enough…” (2007). And Richard Cohen plays bass clarinet in “…vikings, unless…” (2011). It is tempting, in view of the titles and the solo-instrument nature of these five works, to see them as part of a series, but in fact they do not come across that way, since each is quite different in approach and effect: the solo-flute music is jazzy and passionate, for example, while the French horn work is larger-scale and dramatic. There are other solo-instrument pieces here as well, including two for piano that Jin-ok Lee plays pleasingly: Five Bagatelles and a Synopsis (1979), a work that lurches somewhat uneasily between jazz and standard atonal composition, and Abe’s Rag (1981), a deliberately paced piece offering a somewhat similar stylistic mixture. The five movements of Wedding Music (1994), played on trumpet and flugelhorn by John Charles Thomas, are more effective in their combination of suitable pageantry with the occasional sly aside and, in the concluding “Recessional,” a touch of bright liveliness and bounce. Also here is a sort-of-solo work called Piece for Clarinet and Tape (1975), in which Gary Dranch’s instrument engages in the usual wide leaps and squawks typical of a certain kind of contemporary extend-the-instrument-beyond-its-comfort-level composition, while the electronics blip and burble above, below, in front of and beyond the wind instrument. This work sounds much like many, many others written in the 20^th century by composers who at the time were fascinated by the soundscapes made possible by electronic rather than acoustic manipulation of aural material.

     In fact, electronic music, now often called computer or electroacoustic music, does not seem to have progressed a great deal in the past 50 years or so, as listeners will discover if they sample another (+++) Ravello CD, this one called Mind and Machine, Volume One. It is a bit difficult to say for sure whether the works here are for solo instruments or not – do the electronic additions and manipulations constitute additional instruments, or no? Listeners can contemplate the philosophical elements of this while listening to a series of works whose primary interest is generally not in their electronic material but in the way that material interacts with the non-electronic instruments with which the composers connect it. Thus, Costa Mesa Rocking Chair by Doug Bielmeier shows how lap steel can sound almost electronic on its own, while Currents by Jon Bellona mixes electronics with a traditional string quartet (Jannie Wei and Wyatt True, violins; Kimberlee Uwate, viola; Eric Alterman, cello) in such a way that the strings seem to be elements of the electronic sounds and it is often difficult to determine what sort of audio (some of which is outright noise) is coming from which source. In the Interest of Time by Julius Bucsis is strictly electronic, while Abyss by Herbert Deutsch includes a poem by Sonia Usatch performed by mezzo-soprano Grace Anderson, a piccolo played by Patricia Spenser, and various sounds that fit well with the poem’s exploration of the troubled relationship between a mother and her schizophrenic son. Also on this CD is Absent Light by Bill Whitley, which expands the instrumental elements associated with electronics to an unusual degree and produces some electroacoustic material of genuine cleverness as a result – although the work goes on much too long. The performers here are Elena Talarico on piano and celesta, Francesco Zago on electric bass and electric guitar, Fedele Stucchi on trombone, Federico De Zottis on soprano saxophone, Stefano Grasso on vibraphone, and Giuseppe Olivini on electronic tanpura (an electronically modified version of a traditional Indian stringed instrument). Even without electronics per se, this instrumental combination invites a very wide variety of sounds and many sorts of interplay among performers, making Whitley’s work an intricately fascinating one until it wears out its welcome. The final piece on this CD is the purely electronic Sunrise Sonata by Jim Schliestett and Bob Bliss, which reproduces the effect of the rising sun in what is essentially a nine-minute crescendo that proves rather less compelling and effective than similarly themed works by composers using traditional instruments – Nielsen’s Helios Overture, to cite a single example. Indeed, a reasonable question for listeners to these electronic works and others using similar techniques to ask is to what extent the pieces truly represent a new way of making music and exploring its capabilities, and to what extent they simply allow composers to repackage, in a kind of “old wine in new bottles” way, what earlier composers have done as well or better.