Funky parents, and a chicken

Dear Aunt Debbie,

After writing briefly about Bob Graham last week, I found myself thinking more about the wealth of detail in his illustrations.  Rereading April and Esme, ToothFairies, I noticed that Fay, the fairy mom, has a small blue tattoo on her right shoulder. (Take an extra moment here to appreciate the household items that have been repurposed as bathroom furniture.)

John, the fairy dad, sports a ponytail. In an early scene, he's shown hanging up the family laundry to dry in front of the fireplace.

They're a little funky.

This shouldn't be a surprise: the parents Bob Graham draws often are.  Here are the mom and dad from Oscar's Half Birthday, moving furniture aside to dance together in the living room after they get home from celebrating:

And here are the parents from Queenie, One of the Family: mom with short pink hair, dad with an earring knitting booties for their coming baby:

Queenie is another favorite of ours, gifted by you.  It's the story of a family living across a highway from farmland, who rescue a hen from a lake and take her home for a bit before bringing her back to the farm where she belongs.  (Again, there's that city/country combination.)

They name the hen Queenie, and she bonds with the family: mom, dad, daughter Caitlin, and Bruno the dog, whose basket she usurps before being taken back to the farm.  But Queenie returns: every morning, she walks from the farmyard over the road, across the highway bridge, and in through the dog door to lay an egg in Bruno's basket.

The drawings show what happens to the eggs, which are used for breakfast and then to make a cake for Caitlin's first birthday. And it is the drawings, rather than the text, which set us up for the birth of Caitlin's little brother.  This isn't a heavy-handed New Baby book: the preparations for the baby take place entirely in pictures, and the focus isn't on Caitlin's reaction to him (though there's a lovely illustration at the end of her trying to balance a stuffed animal on his head).  But the baby's arrival is exciting enough that Caitlin forgets to collect Queenie's eggs, and Bruno the dog accidentally hatches them. Then the chicks need to be returned to their mother, across the highway bridge and over the path -- Graham's refrain in this book is "That might have been the end of the story -- but it wasn't!"  There is so much story here, and so much warmth to be found in rereading.

Love, Annie

Little House, big reach

Dear Annie,

"Mellow" and "oddball" - excellent choice of words when describing Bob Graham's lovely books.  I'm glad April and Esme was a hit.

Bob found a lovely little story in our neighborhood paper the other day, about a kids' writing contest.  The Library of Congress invites students from fourth to tenth grades to write a letter to an author -- not necessarily a live one -- talking about how the author's books "affected them personally."  49,000 kids sent in letters this year, and the winner is from here in Washington DC.  I thought you'd enjoy this story because she wrote her letter to Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Alessandra Selassie is a fifth grader in a DC charter school; she started reading the Little House books as a kindergartener, and has re-read them over the years.  I can't find the full text of her essay, but here are some excerpts:

When I want water, I turn on the tap.  When it’s dark, I turn on the light.  While my life is so different than yours, I was still so touched by your books because they helped me to finally understand the life of someone I love: my father. 

Her father grew up in Eritrea.  "My dad kept on telling me stories about his childhood, but I wouldn't really understand them," Alessandra told the paper.  He grew up without electricity, sometimes without enough to eat.  "When this contest came up, I thought about my dad, and I realized how I have sort of changed over the time that I had read [the series] because I understood them more, and I related to the books."  Wilder, she writes,

gave me a new way of looking at him. ... I know you wrote these books to help children understand the lives of American pioneers, but for me, it helped me see my father's African childhood as being less foreign.

This makes me think of a discussion you and I had back when the blog was young, about books as windows or mirrors.   Author Mitali Perkins spoke at BEA in 2010, saying that some books will reflect readers' own experiences back at them, while others provide a window into unimagined new worlds.  For Alessandra, Wilder provided the window to a mirror reflecting her father back to her.

Love,

Deborah

Alessandra Selassie, holding a mock-up of her $1,000 prize check, with lots of supportive unidentified grown-ups.

Tooth fairies with cell phones

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Really interesting speech from Veronica Roth about the importance of humility as both a reader and a writer. The way she writes about her fans educating her about the problems with her use of sexual assault as a plot device made me think of Kristin Cashore's acknowledgments section at the end of Bitterblue.  Cashore describes the way she came to see her treatment of one of her main characters as problematic when viewed through the lens of the disability rights movement.  This character goes blind towards the end of Graceling, but is endowed with special powers which allow him to effectively hide his blindness from the rest of the world.  While he is physically disabled, he doesn't have to deal with the real-world effects of that disability.  There's something kind of wonderful about this quick and detailed back-and-forth between author and readers, though I imagine something terrifying about it too.

It was lovely to see you last weekend!  The books you brought have already become household favorites; today, in fact, I was asked to read Bob Graham's April and Esme, Tooth Fairies, no less than three times.  (Regular readers will notice that I've put up a brand-new picture of you reading to Isabel; that's the book she's gazing at so intently.)

I love Bob Graham's books.  They have a sweetness to them, a kind of mellow, oddball feel.  His characters are gentle -- not a lot of conflict in the worlds he creates, though there is some drama.  In April and Esme, the title characters are two young tooth fairies, setting out to bring back their first tooth, and leave their first coin.  Their parents, also tooth fairies, worry at first:

"You and Esme?  A tooth in Parkville?" said their mom, Fay.  "Darlings, you're far too young."

"You went by yourself when you were six, Mommy," said Esme.  She balanced a bubble on the end of her finger till it popped.  "Same age as me--and April's even older."

"Well, that was long ago," said Mom.  "Before the highway came.  Foxes still chased hares on the hill, and things were different back then."

"Well, some things haven't changed, Mommy."  Esme took a sip of her dandelion soup.
"Children still lose their first teeth," April said, "and ducklings still have to take their first swim."

So April and Esme set off, with instructions from their father to remember that the boy, Daniel, thinks they are magical spirits, and must not see them, and from their mother to text her if they need to (they do).  Yes, text: one of the things I like so much about Graham's work is the way he combines the old and the new, nature and the intrusion of the modern world.  Fairies carry cell phones, and their home in a field next to a stump is right up next to a busy highway.  In Oscar's Half Birthday, the family lives in an apartment building and has to go past train tracks with graffiti on them in order to get to "the half-country" for their picnic.  There's no fight between these different elements; they simply exist, side by side.

Graham illustrates his own books, and his detailed pictures often hint at elements of the story that he doesn't explain directly in the text.  In April and Esme, the fairies find Daniel's tooth in a glass of water by his nightstand, and April has to dive to retrieve it.  A couple of pages later, we see Grandma asleep with her dentures in a glass of water on her nightstand.  April tells Esme not to try to take the dentures, but no one explicitly says what the drawings show you: that Daniel has put his tooth in water to be like his grandmother. In a drawing of the fairies' living room, you might notice that their rocking horse is a chess piece: a knight turned on its side, with wheels added.  In a bathroom scene, the mom dries her hair in one panel, then holds up the hair dryer to waft Esme higher in the air on her wings as they talk.  There's a lot to find and enjoy, amid the pleasing round-faced characters and ponytailed dads.

Thanks for the gift!

Love, Annie

Reading humility

Dear Annie,

It was so delightful to see you and all of yours this weekend!  I read two books to Isabel; Eleanor read two books to me.  And it was a pleasure to meet the newest relative: young Will was wonderful.

As you know, I was in New York for Book Expo America, the annual booksellers' conference.  It always provides a few unexpected moments that make me glad I was there; this time the surprise came from a wildly successful 24 year-old writer of YA dystopian fiction.  Veronica Roth has sold 3 million copies of
Divergent and its sequel,
Insurgent.  Divergent has a YA-familiar story line: in a future controlled society, teenagers get sorted into different groups which narrowly define them for life.  The government is repressive and more corrupt than originally believed by our teenage protagonist.  There's friendship, betrayal, and a fair amount of hand-to-hand combat.  The book ends leaving fans impatient for the sequel.

BEA's Children's Author Breakfast is often inspirational for the hundreds of booksellers gathered at the Javits Center.  (See Lowry, Selznick, and others.)  In theory, this year Roth had tough acts to follow: she spoke after Mary Pope Osborne (Magic Tree House: 110 million books in print) and Rick Riordan (Lightning Thief and many mythology-based sequels: 33 million books in print).  Osborne's speech had been okay; Riordan's felt like he'd said the same words at every book event he'd ever been to.  Then Roth got up, and with an occasional quaver in her voice, spoke from the heart.

She had, she said, been an obsessive child reader until high school.  She had a boyfriend who felt he was too cool for Harry Potter, ridiculing the excitement around the release of the last book.  She ended up reading it in secret weeks after it came out, not telling anyone that she had.  "After that I became ashamed of a lot of the books I liked and tried to push myself to read the books I felt you weren't supposed to be ashamed of."  This eventually led to her stopping reading for pleasure. "I lost my love of reading at the same moment I started to say, 'I already know' instead of 'I'm here to learn.'  In other words, at the moment that I lost my reading humility."

She said her fans got her back into the love of reading because of their unapologetic enthusiasm for many different kinds of literature.
When I talk about reading humility, I'm not talking about turning off your critical brain. I'm talking about the way you read. Reading like someone who is there to learn means assuming at the outset that a book is valuable and searching it for that value. If, at the end of that search, you don't come up with anything, it's important to be able to figure out why. But it's that starting place, that willingness to love things, that I most admire about young readers.

Roth went on to talk about bringing the "I'm here to learn" attitude to her writing -- both in the editing process, and in dealing with reader reaction.


A few months after my first book came out, several book bloggers in the Young Adult blog-o-sphere made me aware of something. There's a trend in Young Adult books in which a sexual assault is used as a plot device, either to illustrate just how bad an antagonist is or to heighten the suspense, which is harmful for many reasons. Chiefly, that it doesn't engage with the issue of sexual assault with care and respect. The aforementioned bloggers indicated to me that a scene in 'Divergent' participated in this trend.


She went through months of feeling defensive before she acknowledged that she used the assault to advance the plot without incorporating its emotional effect on her character.
 
I couldn't change what I had written, but I could change the way I reacted to it. So, I talked about it on my blog, and it was humbling. That act of humility, painful and uninviting though it was, it was a gift. I realized that if I wanted to write a character whose experience was different than mine, humility could drive me to diligent research, careful depiction, thoughtful revision and openness to critique. It could make me free to say, 'I'm here to learn' instead of 'I already know.' And if and when I failed I could be free to say, 'Maybe you have a point, and I can do better next time' instead of 'your critiques are not valid.'

I think what I like about Roth is the sense of her as a work in progress: someone who's still thinking and working things out even though she's become a star in the YA world.  It made me think I should pick up Insurgent sometime soon and check out the author's evolution.

Love,

Deborah

Here's the whole speech.

Blizzards and budding romance

Dear Aunt Debbie,

The temperatures are climbing in Brooklyn, and this afternoon we set out for our first day of water play in the parks.  At home, however, Eleanor and I find ourselves shivering and worrying about how long food supplies can hold out now that the trains have stopped running.

As you might have guessed, this means that we're deep into book six of the Little House series: The Long Winter.  This makes Little House the first chapter book series that Eleanor has wanted to read straight through, one after the other. Yes, she's also loved the Betsy-Tacy books and The Borrowers, but she's been willing to take breaks between books. Not so with Little House.

The Long Winter may be the most dramatic book of the series.  In it, Ma, Pa, Mary, Laura, Carrie, and Grace (the youngest Ingalls, born between Plum Creek and Silver Lake) are living out in the little town of De Smet, in the Dakota territories.  Pa has a claim a mile or so from town, and the family has been living in a tiny shanty to stave off claim jumpers.  But winter begins early that year, and promises to last for months. The first severe blizzard, in October, convinces the family they need to move to town.  Even in Pa's well-built storefront on Main Street, they are cold and isolated as the blizzards keep coming, sealing them in the house for days at a time.  Then snow stops the trains from running, and soon the Ingalls family is pretty much out of supplies and facing starvation.

The natural drama of the situation is coupled with foreshadowed romantic drama: this is the book where Almanzo Wilder reappears.  (Technically, we get a brief glimpse of him at the end of By the Shores of Silver Lake). Almanzo and his older brother Royal have come out west to stake claims of their own: Almanzo plans to farm, and Royal to be a storekeeper.  While much of the narrative is in close third-person perspective focused on Laura, as are all the other books except Farmer Boy, there are chapters here in close third-person focused on Almanzo as well. We get a glimpse into his head, his experiences, all with the delicious knowledge that he and Laura will some day be married.

Eleanor picked up on the narrative change, and we got to talk about how Wilder, as an author, is making us feel close to both characters by showing us more of what both think. She loves having knowledge of the characters' future, glimpsing the romance to come. It's also helpful when we get to a suspenseful part: "She can't die of starvation, because she has to grow up and write these books!" Eleanor looks ahead at the Garth Williams pictures and reads the chapter titles of this book and the next one, looking for hints of the future ("Mary is going to get to go to the college for the blind!").  Last night, when we had to stop just before reading a chapter whose title and illustration indicated that Pa was going to find Almanzo's hidden seed wheat, Eleanor jumped with excitement. She is utterly engaged. As am I.

Love, Annie

Playing in the Park

Dear Annie,

Eleanor's progress through the early readers is a delight to watch.  She's picking some of the classic authors of the genre: Cynthia Rylant and  Syd Hoff in your previous post, and now James Howe.  Howe is probably best-known for Bunnicula, a chapter book series about a vampire bunny who sucks the juice out of vegetables.  And he's done a more recent series about kids in middle school who are ostracized for different reasons.  He's impressive in a number of different genres.

Not unlike our pal Emily Jenkins, author of the wonderful early chapter book Toys Go Out, a handful of picture books including the mathematically-inclined Five Creatures, and, writing as E. Lockhart, YA novels including the excellent The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks.  She's got a lovely new picture book:
Water in the Park, illustrated by Stephanie Graegin.  Sooner or later, a non-New York-based bookseller can sometimes feel, all roads lead to Brooklyn.  This book was based on a summer's observation of Prospect Park, but the experience is definitely universal.  Going from dawn to dark, Jenkins lists various activities in the park -- most of them having to do with water.

Turtles leave their rocks when early morning dog-walkers arrive -- panting in the heat, the dogs say, "Heh. Heh. Heh."

Mr. Fluffynut is scared to go deeper than his doggy ankles.
He holds a tennis ball tight in his mouth and will not give it up.
"Drop it!" says his human.
But Mr. Fluffynut will not drop it.

By 7 a.m. babies arrive, sprinklers are turned on (one baby cries, the other laughs),and soon a panoramic illustration of the playground shows dozens of children in motion.   In late morning, park workers water plants.  Then it's lunchtime:

Coming up on noon, it's time for lunch.  Maybe a nap.
Some children cry.
Claudie K. clings to the leg of a bench.
"Not going home," she says.  She likes it here.

We'll see more of Claudie in the afternoon.

The grown-ups show up to eat lunches on benches.

On very hot days, the ice cream truck comes early.
By two, its tune is already jingling.
Children coming back to the park get soft-serve cones and bright Popsicles.
Grown-ups buy bottles of water.
Sticky fingers and faces are rinsed in the sprinkler.

Kids dump water on each other and run through sprinklers, someone scrapes a knee, a naked baby runs away from clothing.  When the sprinkler is turned off, the baby who cried when it was turned on now laughs, and the water-loving baby cries.  Dog-walkers and other grownups return, and as it turns to dusk a downpour soaks those who linger.

It's a lovely recitation of the details of life, with many many details to pore over.  I love it for its quiet way of taking everything seriously.  Jenkins' theme of uniting it all with water (pond, sprinklers, bottles, rain) didn't quite work for me.  The human rhythms seem to be the theme of the book.  The detail that's missing here is the drumbeat of cell phones: I can't find even one in the entire day.  Idyllic.

Love,

Deborah

Boy-girl best friends in an easy reader format

Dear Aunt Debbie,

At her new reading level, Eleanor has discovered another series of Easy Reader books that she's really into, and  I've been enjoying as well: the Pinky and Rex series, by James Howe. You blogged about one Pinky and Rex book a while back, when we were writing about gay and gay-friendly YA and middle grade books.  As you mentioned at the time, no one in the series is explicitly gay, but there's some nice gender-bending going on.  

The series focuses on elementary-school-age best friends Pinky (a boy whose favorite color is pink) and Rex  (an active, ponytailed girl).  Pinky has a younger sister, and Rex has a younger brother; their families live next door to each other, and their parents are friends as well.  Each book contains six short chapters, with a decent amount of text on each page, and pictures (by Melissa Sweet) on each facing page.

Howe says in a note at the end of Pinky and Rex and the Double-Dad Weekend: "Writing the Pinky and Rex series gives me a chance to remember what it was like when I was seven. It also gives me a chance to say: It's okay to be different, and it's okay for boys and girls to be friends--even best friends."  Happily, Howe knows how to get these ideas across without becoming treacly.

In Pinky and Rex and the School Play, Pinky wants to be an actor, and has his heart set on becoming the lead in the school play, "Davi, Boy of the Rain Forest."  He convinces Rex, who has no interest in acting, to join him for the auditions.  Rex impresses the director so much that he casts her as the lead, changing the name of the play to "Bahi, Girl of the Rain Forest."  Pinky is cast as a monkey.  Jealousy and bad feelings ensue.  As rehearsals continue, however, Pinky decides to learn as much as he can about acting, even though his character is minor.  He pays attention to everything that Mr. Lacey, the ponytailed teacher directing the play, says.  On the day of the performance, Rex does a terrific job, and Pinky saves the play by ad-libbing and directing the other kids on stage who have frozen up and forgotten their cue.  Hard work pays off: Mr. Lacey compliments Pinky, and offers him the opportunity to be the director's assistant on the next school play.

One of the most interesting moments for me comes with Rex's reaction to her success as an actor.  Pinky's sister Amanda praises her after the show:

"Oh, Rex!" Amanda cried. "You were so-o-o good.  Are you going to be a movie star when you grow up?"

"No way," said Rex.  "I'm through with acting."

"That's too bad," her father said.  "You were very good."

"I can be good at something and not have to want to do it, can't I?" Rex asked.  Her father looked surprised, but nodded his head.  "It's just that there's other stuff I'd rather do, like soccer."

Not the predictable moral, and a nice lesson to pull from this story.

Eleanor was so excited by these books that she came home wanting to read them aloud that evening instead of having me read to her.  She took one on the subway to a birthday party the next day finishing reading it aloud to me, and on the way home, reread it silently while I talked with a friend.  I'm loving this stage.

Love, Annie