New books miss the target

So many people only consider the acts of remembrance or paying tribute to our country's armed forces just once a year. Of course, TV shows and movies about war and being a soldier are far too plentiful to even mention but books are much more enduring. With no shortage of stories to tell, it seems that there should be a wealth of new books that come out around this time of year.

Here is a brief look at two new books on the market, one of which is geared towards children and families. The first is more for older readers.

Canadian Forces: An Historical Salute to Those on the Front Line

Art Montague is used to writing for compendium-style publications like The Old Farmer's Almanac and it shows. His new book called Canadian Forces strives for comprehensiveness but only achieves it in a very superficial, very sensationalized and very strange way.

He quite obviously spent a lot of time researching these stories that extend from the present all the way back to the early days of New France. He culled out the most popular personalities and the most dramatic events to fill this brief volume as an overarching celebration of all things related to the Canadian military. That goal is practically impossible, especially in a 200-page soft cover. This is more of a bathroom reader, a light coffee table book, or something to flip through on the bus, where your concentration doesn't have to catch many details, because only a scant few are provided.

Still, Montague hits all the high marks like he's providing the cheat sheet for a trivia game. Who was Billy Bishop? What happened at Dieppe? What compelled John McCrea to write In Flanders Fields? These are all sections that you'd expect to see, except that Montague did a very good job of boiling the full stories down to 250 words or less for each, for the most part.

That's just fine actually, except that he also goes on to tell other stories that have a dubious relationship to the true and expressed purpose of the book. We get the real story behind the creation of Winnie the Pooh, just in case you missed the Canadian Heritage vignette commercial. What about the explosion in the Halifax harbour that decimated the city? Even though it has precious little to do with Canadian soldiers' actions on the front line, it is still included here for your reading pleasure. Sure, it's a compelling story but its relevance and its brevity make me wonder what Montague was really striving for.

Who's That Man?

This children's book is meant to tug on your heartstrings and pluck the guitar strings at the same time. It's essentially a songbook complete with sheet music and lyrics, all intended to tell the story of a boy who has never met his father. The man went off to war before the boy was born and so they only meet a few years later.

Frankly, there's not much of a story being told, just a series of questions. "Who's that man? Is he my dad? Does he look like me and will he love me?" one page reads.

Author Marny Duncan-Cary is a singer-songwriter and she drives that point home with the song's DVD tucked into one of the back pages. If you don't care for this extra then it's actually really annoying. The rigidity of that one page interferes with all the others before it can be flipped through. Otherwise, it's a nice enough addition but hardly worth the extra material and expense. It's odd then that this book won one of the Moonbeam Children's Book Awards for celebrating the joys of childhood while helping children and families deal with the challenges of an increasingly complex society.

Neither the story nor the DVD are the real value — I really enjoyed the illustrations. Done in clay sculpture relief style by Megan Mansbridge, the pictures take the reader straight into the boy's world, a rustic estate from many years ago where he plays with frogs and sleeps with a picture of his unknown father. Sentimental, yes, but effective.