Summertime Roadtrips: 125 Wacky Roadside Attractions and Master-Mind

125 Wacky Roadside Attractions: See All the Weird, Wonderful, and Downright Bizarre Landmarks From Around the World!
National Geographic Kids
2016, 112 Pages, age 8+

As summer begins to wind down and thoughts turn towards getting ready for the first day of school, there might still be time for a road trip or two.  And if you are looking for some unusual ideas of what to do, look no further than this new book from National Geographic featuring 125 attractions from around the world.  There is the upside-down house in Poland that you enter through a window in the roof, or, how about Carhenge in Nebraska, where 39 cars are arranged in such a way that they mimic Stonehenge in England.  In Vermont, you can visit the Ben & Jerry's Flavor Graveyard, or take a step back in time in London's Spooky House, where you will swear the long-ago residents are still living.  One of my favorites is the Pez Museum in California since I'm a Pez person from way back and have even sent them to China in family holiday packages.   New Jersey, a state proud of it's farm fresh produce (and take it from me, it is good), has a wonderful corn maze to get lost in, while in Belgium you can eat you dinner suspended in the air 160 feet above ground.  If you like creepy stuff, you can visit the International UFO Museum and Research Center in, where else, Roswell, NM, or go the Edinburgh to walk through the Underground Chambers that used to house poor people, who may or may not be haunting the vaults there.
Anyway, you get the picture.  There are all kinds of fun, scary, exciting things to do around the world and this is the book that can direct you to all of them.

Mastermind: Over 100 Games, Tests, and Puzzles to Unleash Your Inner Genius
by Stephanie Warren Drimmer, puzzles by Julie K. Cohen
National Geographic Kids, 2016, 176 pages, age 8+

While you are on the road, and the kids are getting antsy in the back seat, you might want to take along Mastermind. Here a book that is chockablock with all kinds of challenges for kids to sharpen their thinking before school begins and to pass the time in the car, at home, or wherever and whenever boredom begins to set in.   But this is much more than just a book of fun puzzles and games.  At the beginning, kids can take a test to determine what their best learning style is - seeing, hearing, smelling, etc, followed by some basic information about the brain.  Each chapter then focuses on one of these learning styles, discussing how a particular learning style works, followed by games, tests, and/or puzzles designed to optimize each learning style.  There are also all kinds of fun facts, information about geniuses we admire and a Test Your S.M.A.R.T.S at the end of each chapter, followed by a "final exam" at the end of the book.  Best of all, none of these tests count for anything more than fun.

Together, these two book make ideal traveling companions, but even it you are having a stavaction, or just don't have time right now to travel, 125 Wacky Roadside Attractions is a fun books to just read and think about, and Mastermind is the perfect book to keep for a rainy day.

Nonfiction Picture Book Challenge is a weekly celebration of 

nonfiction books hosted by Alyson Beecher at Kid Lit Frenzy 

Sisters by Raina Telgemeier

I loved reading Raina Telgemeier's two earlier graphic novels, Smile and Drama, so I was really looking forward to reading Sisters.  And I wasn't disappointed.

Sisters is about a family vacation, a week long road trip from San Francisco to Colorado for a family reunion, with stops in between for sightseeing.  As the girls get ready for the trip, and younger sister Amara begins to really annoy older sister Raina, she reflects on how badly she had wanted this now irritating sister.  So for spite, when Amara asks her if she has any colored pencils to take on the trip, she says no, but then packs a box of them in her suitcase.  Typical sister behaviour!

As they set off, the plan is that Mom will drive, and Dad will be joining the family in Colorado at the end of the week.  Raina occupies the middle seat of their van with her younger sister Amara directly behind her and her little brother Willy in front with Mom.  Oh, and there's no air-conditioning.

To keep her sister out of her life, Raina listens to music using headphones, but Amara being Amara knows exactly how to annoy her anyway (ah-hem, I know this to be so because I am also a middle sister).  But as the trip goes on, and the family runs into problems like torrential rain, a pet snake thought to be dead turning up in the van, older cousins that have changed and outgrown her, and a broken down van in the middle of nowhere,  Raina begins to pull up

more memories of her annoying sister and brother and sibling flashbacks turn into real family memories, like the difficulties when Dad was unemployed.  Meanwhile, Amara, living more in the present reality than Raina, sees the signs that things aren't so wonderful between their parents.

Telgemeier explores a lot of issues surrounding sibling rivalry, parents who don't get along, anticipated events that turn into disappointment, feeling of not fitting in and all the anxiety and tension of being a teen, and she is spot on in capturing the reality of it using spare but humorous text and great illustrations.

What is really nice, is that in all fairness to annoying younger sister, Telgemeier also portrays her Raina character as pretty annoying herself, certainly not the perfect person fictional Raina might have thought she was.  And Telgemeier's honesty in her portrayals of her family are exactly what makes this such a wonderfully relatable book.

Interestingly, none of the incidents in the story are over the top or off the wall, and that is the beauty of Sisters.  Everything that happens, is so ordinary and so true to life.  When Raina is hoping for a little sister,  so sure the baby her mom is carrying will be a girl, it made me remember how my sister and I prayed every night for a little brother, and how often afterwards, when he was super-annoying, we couldn't believe we had asked for him.  Of course, later we couldn't imagine not having him as a brother or for that matter, each other as a sister.  And that is pretty much how you know Sisters will also ultimately turn out.

I loved the cartoon-like illustrations that Telgemeier uses because they can be so expressive even without any text and carry the storyline along so well.  My book was an ARC so not all of the panels were colored in.  I have to admit the story was easier to follow in the colored panels, but what I did see I liked very much.  Color is done by Brayden Lamb, using soft pastel shade for the most part.

Sisters is a book for anyone with siblings, and will definitely make the reader take another look at their family and siblings and rethink their feelings towards them.  No siblings?  You may find you wish you had some.

This book is recommended for readers age 8+
This book was an EARC received from NetGalley