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Prime Baby (2010)

by Gene Luen Yang(Favorite Author)

3.62 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

1596436506 (ISBN13: 9781596436503)

languge

English

genre

Science Fiction

publisher

First Second

review 1: Cute baby, cute aliens...bad big brother! It's a light story done with compassion and skill. Best aspect of the book, besides the lovable aliens: Yang is not afraid to show an unsympathetic main character, and he manages to redeem him without getting syrupy about it. The mustache is a nice example of Thaddeus acting self-important with his signature new look, and yet by the end it's become so much more than that, being shared, but without becoming saccharine or emotionally fake. That was well done. My one wish is that Yang could have toned down some of the content to make it accessible for younger kids--kids who likely are going through Thaddeus' very experiences. Thaddeus is in third grade and reflects a bit on age 6 as the sad turning point of his life, because that... more's when his little sister was born and ruined his monopoly on his parents' attention. All these emotions feel like material for a second or third grader, yet Thaddeus is rather precocious. In his internal monologues, he proposes having a love child with a class mate, and having other similarly mature experiences. It's all dry humor, but still, third graders don't sound like this. The voice sounds like a high school boy channeling the body and emotional being of a third grader. Yet I think third graders would get a lot out of Thaddeus' core story, more perhaps than the adult audience that this book originally was created for, in serial format. Very whimsical fun for adults, though, I'll have to admit!
review 2: Thaddeus is convinced that his baby sister is an alien. According to his math teacher, aliens communicate in prime numbers. Thaddeus counts his sister's ga-ga's and every time it is a prime number. So, that proves she is an alien. He doesn't prove it to his parents until she spits out 'alien slugs'. They send her to a government research center. After she is gone, Thaddeus realizes he misses her. So, he pretends to spit out a 'alien slug' and he gets sent to the same place as his sister. less

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