Author Study: Stuart Gibbs
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| Stuart Gibbs Image from https://api.curtisbrown.co |
Gibbs’s greatest strength is his fantasy-style world building grounded firmly in realism. In Belly Up, and its sequels in the “Fun Jungle” series, Poached (2014), Big Game (2015), and Panda-monium (2017), Teddy lives at “a place that claimed to be ‘America’s Most Exciting Family Vacation Destination.’ FunJungle was the biggest, most elaborate zoo ever built.” (p.11) The books include opening maps of FunJungle suggesting high-fantasy and a cheeky version of Tolkien-like adventure.
Retrieved from: www.Stuartgibbs.com
The universe to explore is expansive, but the information and details are the juicy bits. With Gibbs’s expertise in zoology, Teddy is both informative and authentic. He shares information that children will relish as factual and interesting. Much like Andy Wier captures the imagination of adults in The Martian, Gibbs weaves insider zoology information throughout the book in the voice of young Teddy:
“The hardest thing about starting a zoo from scratch isn’t building it; it’s getting the animals. You can’t walk into the closest pet store and ask for a couple hippos. A hundred years ago, when zoos were a new concept, they all used to simply capture animals in the wild—and when those animals died, they’d go back and get more. Today, most zoo animals are endangered, so regulations have been established to prevent taking them from their natural habitats. Instead, most animals are procured from other zoos or official breeding facilities. These places aren’t like puppy farms, though, churning out new animals as fast as they can. Hippos only give birth to one or two young a year, tops. Hippo River had enclosures for four hippos, but it wasn’t until construction was almost completed that anyone discovered procuring even one hippo might be difficult." (Belly Up, p. 42-43)
While interesting facts and insider knowledge abounds in Belly Up, the reader is never mired in heavy-handed learning. The authenticity of science is balanced with fast-paced action, Teddy’s audacious voice and rebellious spirit, as well as good, old-fashioned, crass, physical humor. When the prized hippopotamus, who is the spokesperson for FunJungle, turns up dead, Teddy commits to solving the murder mystery. He sneaks onto a catwalk to watch the autopsy and describes the stench and gore with aloof fascination and a stoic acceptance of the scene. “Doc returned to his work. He’d finally cut through the fat and reached Henry’s internal organs. I leaned out a bit from the catwalk, angling for a better view. I’d seen plenty of dead bodies in Africa—even a couple dead hippos—but they were never exactly pristine.” (p. 65) Gibbs moves the plot quickly, introducing Teddy, some cartoonish secondary characters that work at the zoo, setting the mystery with the dead hippopotamus, and a gruesome and smelly autopsy within the first three chapters. The pace, humor, and adventure are well-suited to reluctant readers and children living in a face-paced, digital world. Gibbs has a clear understanding that his audience is impatient and unlikely to suffer boredom gladly. His chapters are small and end with enticing, mini cliff-hangers, and notably, he begins his books with well-baited hooks. Belly Up begins, “I’d just been busted for giving the chimpanzees water balloons when i first heard something was wrong at Hippo River,” Space Case begins with the enticingly jaded, “Let’s get something straight right off the bat: Everything the movies ever taught you about space travel is garbage,” and Spy School begins with, “‘Hello, Ben,’ said the main in my living room. ‘My name is Alexander Hale. I work for the CIA.’ And just like that, my life became interesting.” Gibbs’s central characters have a voice that entrances a child’s imagination while respecting the need to explore and grow toward independence. His main characters are smart and kind, but they all have a rebellious spirit and a disillusioned view of the adult world. When talking about FunJungle’s creation, Teddy shares, “Finally, there was the merchandising. To be really profitable, J.J. knew FunJungle had to keep making money long after people had visited it. To do this, he stole an idea from Disney: The park shouldn’t just have animals. It should have characters . To most people, one hippo was exactly like any other. But if you created a personality—à la Henry the Hippo—people wouldn’t simply want to see him: They’d buy anything with his picture on it.” (p.39)
A great source of enjoyment for children reading Stuart Gibbs is the exuberant experience found between the world of realism and fantasy. It is difficult to categorize his novels. Gibbs takes pains to create a fantasy-like world of living at a zoo as a realistic possibility. In Belly Up, Teddy’s mother is an expert on primates and works at the zoo. His father is a “renowned wildlife photographer.” It’s plausible that two such people could meet “when National Geographic had sent him to photograph Mom’s gorillas.” (p. 11) Here, fantasy realism is the space between the debunking of Santa Claus and the acceptance of everyday drudgery. Our young readers are taught information about space travel, histories about spies, Congo safaris, and yet they still experience magic and adventures at amusement parks, camps, and sleep-away schools. At this boundary between fantasy and realism, the magic lives on and Gibbs creates stories that seem perfectly plausible if the world would only be as much fun as older children still hope. Traditional, realistic stories that pit youngsters on their own against nature amid tragedy have roots in William Golding’s classic Lord of the Flies. For older, young adults, these worlds without parents are often the result of dystopia. However, for middle grades, a handy device that explores a child-governed world is the idea of parent sanctioned boarding schools and sleep-away camps. Harry Potter, Reynie Muldoon, and Percy Jackson all enjoy adventures at schools and camps within fantasy worlds. Gibbs’s characters are far more grounded in realism and embark on wild adventures without magic, but where children still enjoy a disproportionate amount of freedom.
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| Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney |
This world is no doubt adventurous and fun, and Gibbs cleverly avoids patronizing the child. The middle school angst is real and shared from the point of view that honors a child’s sensibility. In Belly Up, Teddy is likeable, resourceful, witty, and daring. He is a protagonist worthy of admiration. Even so, he’d been bullied since the first day of seventh grade, confessing, “Vance stole my lunch. He gave me wedgies. He flushed my homework down the toilet.” (p.423) What connects to young readers as real is an understanding of the mundane experience of middle school coupled with the fears of aggression in a world without protective parents and the terrifying concept of first romance. In Spy School, Ben Ripley describes his day as such, “I had dragged myself out of bed, eaten breakfast, gone to middle school, been bored in class, stared at girls I was too embarrassed to approach, had lunch, slogged through gym, fallen asleep in math, been harassed by Dirk the Jerk, taken the bus home…” (p. 1) Our heroes bumble their way through conversations with girls, and try to keep a low profile. In the face of Summer’s rejection, Teddy thinks, “I couldn’t bring myself to admit the truth; the feelings I had embarrassed me.” (p. 333) Like the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, our readers empathize with the plight of the middle schooler. In the middle grades, many kids are mean to each other, and they tend to forget or not notice when they are mean, but they all suffer deeply each slight. With greater self-awareness, it quickly becomes an environment where everyone is bullied, but no one is a bully. This bring a universality to the middle school experience. It’s easy to dismiss the lighthearted fantasy adventure plots, but the feelings that our middle school heroes explore, at the cusp of puberty, are collective and excruciating. In talking about young adults and reading, Aronson writes, “A book that seems to take this world for granted is a great relief to them. It is in that sense real. But that realistic quality has nothing to do with realism in the limited sense that parents and critics use. It is real because it goes beneath the surface, because it tells a truth people don’t want to see, because it doesn’t settle, it provokes.” (Aronson p.82) While Gibbs plays to the middle child’s short attention span and baser humor, he does provide an outlet for social anxiety and the misgivings that come with middle school drama. These are powerful worries for older children and Gibbs creates a world where they can be acknowledged and prodded.
We cannot ignore that the breakneck pace, sprinkling of real-world facts, potty humor, and adventurous escapism is a read that is well-suited for boys.
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| From The Complete Calvin and Hobbes |
Gibbs infiltrates a world of sports, Xbox, comics, skateboards and YouTube videos and offers similar excitement and entertainment in a book. On the surface, it’s easy to say that the protagonists are all boys, but Gibbs taps into elements that contribute to pleasure reads for boys. In an article for the School Library Journal, Michael Sullivan writes,
“If we want to transform boys into lifelong readers, we need to discover what makes them tick. Equally important, we need to have a better grasp of the kind of reading that attracts them. Boys read comic books, baseball cards, and cereal boxes. They are less likely to read books; and when they do, they often don’t read the ones we want them to….What boys like to read springs naturally from their experiences and reflects how their brains are wired. . . when boys read, they need an extra jolt of sound, color, motion, or some physical stimulation to get their brains up to speed. Given boys’ internal wiring, is it surprising that they enjoy reading sports and adventure stories? Or fantasies, in which the hero is searching for his place in the world? Nonfiction titles also satisfy boys’ innate desires to make sense of the universe and to test its boundaries.” (Sullivan 2004)
In this vein, Stuart Gibbs provides books that are a wonderful suggestions for parents looking to entice boys and reluctant readers away from comic books, baseball card stats, and the comic, graphic worlds of Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants series. This is not to say that a child shouldn’t read comics, facts and graphic novels, but Gibbs provides an opportunity for those with limited attention spans to settle down for a text-based read. There are no bright colors, sound and motions, but there are plenty of sense-making facts, dangerous parent-free adventures, and potty humor across the FunJungle, Spy School and Moon Base Alpha Series. In this last, 12-year-old Dashiel Gibson lives in a human outpost in space that he describes as “like living in a giant tin can built by government contractors.” (p. 6) Dashiel begins by describing the most pertinent issues he faces while living in space--which is the toilet situation, of course. The “toilets look as though some sadistic plumber mated a vacuum clean with an octopus.” He describes the suction and recapture process, delighting young readers with the thought, “Yes, we drink our own urine in space. They left that out of Star Trek, too.” (p.13) Across Stuart Gibbs’s series, the boys all explore a world where parents are blindingly supportive in the face of danger such as Teddy’s parents, or completely absent, as is the case of Ben’s parents. Even with these fantastical explorations, Gibbs tempers make-believe with real world adventures. Teddy often shares fascinating anecdotes about his time in Africa and prior to Moon Base Alpha, Dashiel lived on the exotic island of Hawaii, both real and relatable 12-year-old adventures. In talking about books for boys, author Jon Sciezka notes, “the world of elementary school is probably like 85% women -- teachers and librarians. So some of that's just the natural effect of women promoting the kind of reading that they enjoy. And a lot of times, that's not the reading that boys enjoy.” (McAlpin 2005) Authors like Stuart Gibbs are important for librarians to be aware of especially as they have the potential to engage readers with tastes that lie beyond realistic fiction that explore feelings and real-world problems.
While it’s important for librarians to understand the potential benefit in suggesting Stuart Gibbs to boys, it’s important to be aware that Gibbs is not intentionally writing for a male audience. When interviewed in 2016 by Musings, Gibbs states, “I don’t like to think of my books as “boy books” even though they have a boy protagonist. I try to write strong boy and girl characters, so I hope that my books appeal to boys and girls alike. (Musing 2016) While there is a substantial amount of content across the books that may appeal to boys, it’s important to offer Gibbs to young girls as well. Gibbs makes an effort to include central female characters that exude strength and cunning. In Spy School, the exemplary spy protege and deadly fighter is Erica Hale. She is developed as an intelligent and courageous character and saves Ben a multiple times. Similarly, Teddy teams up with Summer McCracken, daughter of the owner of FunJungle and finds her to be smart and equally knowledgeable about animals. While these books can solve a very specific need to lure reluctant boys to settling in for a quiet read, they hold undeniable appeal across genders.
Belly Up is an outstanding book for this age group and Spy School is entertaining, but the reader can sense that Gibbs has greater facility and expertise in zoology versus espionage. Spy School falls short of the informed and educational adventure that is Belly Up. Like quality nonfiction books, Belly Up compels you to learn more about animals and the history of zoos in a way that isn’t well replicated in the Moon Base Alpha and Spy School series. Moreover, as all three series continue to grow, one senses a formulaic result. Upcoming releases for 2018 are Book #3 in the Moon Base Alpha series, Book #6 in the Spy School series, and Book #5 in the FunJungle series. It’s hard not to feel some disappointment that the books may become bland and repetitive, but series can have a real value to readers as well. Sutton & Parvano point out that series can maintain an accessibility to readers and create a camaraderie amongst friends giving both good readers and struggling or reluctant readers shared experiences. Series such as these can “throw us into the pool with the other kids, and the multitude of series and characters create a body of shared experience.” (Sutton & Parvano, p. 113) More importantly, these book are fun and enjoyable and reading for pleasure “has been positively linked to reading attainment and writing ability, text comprehension and grammar, breadth of vocabulary, positive reading attitudes, greater self-confidence as a reader, and pleasure reading later in life. (Clark and Rumbold, p. 9) Gibbs creates works that offer light-hearted mystery and action adventure grounded in real world middle school concerns. His books combine the lure of information books, with fantasy, realism, and the comfort and camaraderie of a series. He is an author that librarians should be familiar with as a great opportunity to introduce young children ready to move beyond easier chapter books toward heftier, yet entertaining, pleasure reads.
Fantasy Realism Series:
Also by Stuart Gibbs:
Fantasy Realism Series:
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