Notable Children's Books of 2007 - New York Times

GLASS SLIPPER, GOLD SANDAL
A Worldwide Cinderella.
By Paul Fleischman. Illustrated by Julie Paschkis. Holt. $16.95. (Ages 5 and up)

Multicultural versions of Cinderella aren’t new, but Fleischman’s text — woven together from some of the 1,000 sources of the Cinderella story — has to be one of the most artful. Here Cinderella puts on glass slippers or diamond anklets or gold sandals, and travels to the ball by breadfruit coach or galloping mare.

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS
By J. K. Rowling. Illustrated by Mary GrandPré. Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic. $34.99.

This book, among the best-selling of all time, brings to a close a 10-year series exceptional for its appeal to fans from 7 to 70. In this final volume, Harry faces his last battle with Voldemort and solves the mystery behind his enigmatic elders, Severus Snape and Albus Dumbledore. The Harry Potter books have won their author “imperishable renown,” as Christopher Hitchens wrote in these pages. “Probably for many decades there will still be millions of adults who recall their initiation to literature as a little touch of Harry in the night.”

EXTRAS
By Scott Westerfeld. Simon & Schuster. $16.99. (Ages 12 and up)

The finale to Westerfeld’s thought-provoking Uglies series, set in a postindustrial dystopia, continues its dissection of a culture transfixed by beauty and celebrity. In the future, everyone tries to raise his or her “face rank” within the fame economy, using personal hovercams, as if would-be star and member of the paparrazi at the same time. There is also plenty of hoverboard derring-do as a band of outsiders confronts a new menace.

THE ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN
By Sherman Alexie. Illustrated by Ellen Forney. Little, Brown. $16.99.(Ages 12 and up)

Alexie’s first young adult novel, winner of this year’s National Book Award for young people’s literature, overflows with truth, pain and black comedy amid lacerating memories of life on the rez. (“My parents came from poor people who came from poor people ... all the way back to the very first poor people.”) Closely based on the author’s own childhood on the Spokane Reservation in Washington, the novel is an unforgettable portrait of getting by in harsh circumstances, then getting out.

HOW TO BE A BABY ... BY ME, THE BIG SISTER
By Sally Lloyd-Jones. Illustrated by Sue Heap. Schwartz & Wade/Random House. $15.99. (Ages 4 to 8)

An ultracharming picture book presented as a kind of comic how-to manual to a baby brother, full of love, self-importance and well-meaning scorn (“You talk, but no one knows what you’re saying”). A shift in tone at the end signals the enduring affection and pride in being the older sibling.

THE ARRIVAL
By Shaun Tan. Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic. $19.99. (Ages 10 and up)

This graphic novel portraying a stranger’s arrival in a strange land draws on landscapes from Australia to America, photographs of Ellis Island and dreamlike imagery from who knows where. Ominous shadows vie with a hopeful vision of a new beginning. “‘The Arrival’ tells not an immigrant’s story, but the immigrant’s story,” Gene Luen Yang wrote in these pages. A New York Times Best Illustrated Book of the year.

Notable Children's Books of 2007 - New York Times