ANNIE AND AUNT

From memoirist to YA novelist

2012-02-14T23:27:00.000-05:00

Dear Aunt Debbie,

When I was twelve, and we moved into the first apartment where I had my own room, I did some of my decorating with romance novel posters I snagged at an NYC Book Fair. The tagline on one of them read: "Against Fate and Fortune, they found a Love that sealed their Destinies." When I tracked down the book and read it, of course, the star-crossed lovers were barely star-crossed at all -- both from the same social class, with nothing much keeping them apart but attitude. I wonder sometimes whether the writers of those back-cover blurbs have read any part of the book they're blurbing. They're pretty fantastic, though.

I love the Beth Kephart piece you linked to about the promising future of YA novels -- several more titles to put on my reading list. I know Kephart only from her first book, the memoir A Slant of Sun: One Child's Courage. A number of years ago, our friend Beth Tascione adapted it as a one-woman show, which we saw at the NY Fringe Festival. It was a powerful evening of theater, and afterwards I bought and read the book, which I found quite moving. This was before I had children; I'd be interested to reread it and see how parenthood has changed (and, I'd guess, intensified) my reactions.

In A Slant of Sun, Kephart writes about raising her son, Jeremy, who was diagnosed at age 2 with a pervasive developmental disorder. Her account of working through this diagnosis and learning how to bring Jeremy out of himself and reach for human connection with him is straightforward and honestly written, with some lyrically beautiful passages. It's not a book for kids, but it is one for parents, of all kinds of children.

I'm interested to see that Kephart has moved to writing YA novels -- have you read them? Her website (which is great) says she wrote five memoirs first, and this made me wonder about connections between the genres. Does making meaning of your own life lead naturally to plotting the lives of others? Is there something more direct and attractive about writing for teenagers than adults?

Love, Annie

Looking on the bright side

2012-02-12T23:00:00.000-05:00

Dear Annie --

Ah, golden underpants, book bonanzas and more -- inspiration strikes so originally at the kids' books blogs we've passed the Liebster to. And another thank you to The Literary Lunchbox for giving us the hot potato.

I've just come back from Toy Fair, the toy industry's big trade show in New York. Even though I've been working in a toy store for the past 13 years, this was the first time I've gone to it. It's big. It has a lot of stuff I recognize from our stores, and a lot of stuff we don't carry. It's weirdly fun to run into people dressed in Ugly Doll outfits, not to mention some very short people dressed as round, slightly vegetable-ish characters I didn't recognize. And I saw some very endearing stuffed animals of Elephant and Piggie which we'll be carrying.

As I was packing to go, I opened a box of bound galleys, which is what we call sample copies of chapter books, from a publisher from whom I need to order new books that will be coming out this summer. I figured I'd grab a few to read on the bus to New York. I can do a rough sort of one of these boxes pretty quickly. I started reading the blurbs on the backs of some of the books, and the sameness of many of them are I-could-laugh-or-I-could-rant material. I pulled five (from a box of 20) galleys: they're all aimed at the Young Adult market, three have women in big dresses on the covers, one has a woman in a tank top, and the last has a slightly squished-looking heart. Here are the back-cover blurbs:

He's not a vampire. He's not a werewolf.
He's something else...the Temptation.
--
The fate of the paranormal world rests in Evie's hands.
--
. . . gritty alternate reality where vampires make the rules...and one girl dares to break them.
--
There's normal, and then there's paranormal, and neither is Quinlan's cup of Diet Coke.
--
A breathtaking, postapocalyptic romance inspired by Jane Austen's PERSUASION.

That last one's my favorite. Aaagh! It's even conceivable that some of these could be good reading. Maybe. But the way they're being marketed is so symptomatic of the pack mentality of many publishing houses these days. In the words of Beth Kephart, YA novelist:

Teeth sink. Wings ascend. Murderous games hold court. Landscapes are annihilated, and then annihilated again. It's a package deal.

I quote Kephart because she wrote a lovely essay published in Shelf Awareness (an intelligent newsletter for the book industry) offering an optimistic take on current YA writing. Despite the formulaic stuff, she argues, the books which have recently received awards or other forms of attention are getting better and better:

Ten years ago, when I chaired the National Book Awards Young People's Literature Jury, I yearned for the dawning of a movement much like the one that I believe we are seeing today--for a time when the dominant YA books were the risk-taking books, tantalizing in their shape and form, fresh and original in their language, soulful. I believed then, and I believe now, that enduring YA books have the capacity to alert, embolden and inspire; to live outside marketing labels; to stretch young readers' ideas about how words can take them to places they've never gone.

Kephart's essay lists a number of very good recent YA books -- definitely worth taking a look at.

Love,

Deborah

p.s. I ended up taking two other galleys on the bus with me, both middle grade non-fantasy.

A little love for our fellow kid-lit bloggers

2012-02-11T23:55:00.001-05:00

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Interesting question about the current reputation of Strunk & White. We have a bunch in the English Dept. bookroom (or at least we used to), but I'm not sure how often it's taught in high school. My guess would be that most of my students don't know about it. Perhaps it's time for me to break it out again....

Last week, Ali B. at Literary Lunchbox honored us with a Liebster Award. Thank you, Ali!

It's a lovely thing -- an apparently grassroots way for small bloggers to spread a little love for each others' blogs. I haven't been able to find the origin of the award, but there are a lot of blogs out there who have given it to each other, and it seems warm and nice. Think "pay it forward" rather than "chain letter."

Here's what I have found:

Liebster is a German word that means dearest,and this award is given to bloggers with less than 200 followers who deserve more recognition.

The rules:

Thank your Liebster Blog Award presenter on your blog.
Link back to the blogger who awarded you.
Give your top 5 picks for the award.
Inform your top 5 by leaving a comment on their blogs.
Post the award on your blog.

So this is what I'll be doing tonight.

My top 5 picks are all blogs we've been linking to in our sidebar for quite a while; I encourage readers to check them out.

Even in Australia is written by a friend of mine who is also the mom of two small girls. She covers a wide variety of subjects and asks thought-provoking questions about them. I also love the photos she posts of her library book stacks -- totally inspiring.

Storied Cities is written by another Brooklyn mom who reads a ton with her kids and reviews books about cities, set in cities, or in some other way connected to the urban life. Her reviews focus on how the book connects to the city. She has a great, no-nonsense voice.

Vegbooks focuses on books which help parents and teachers support vegetarian and vegan kids in their lives. The reviews are written by several collaborators, each with his or her own perspective; they're thorough and interesting. Jessica Almy, the creator of Vegbooks, lives in your neck of the woods, and has been a frequent and insightful commenter here.

LitLad is focused on the reading life of a mom blogger and her two sons, ages 9 and 5. Especially on days when I feel we're skewing a little girl-heavy here, this is a great place to go. The Boy-Tested Book Bonanza! page gives you a good sense of the feeling here.

Smiling Like Sunshine focuses on natural family living. Much of the blog is devoted to lifestyle ideas, but there's a good amount of talk about books, especially on Book Sharing Mondays.

And I need to add one, who's strictly over the 200 followers limit, but whom I adore: Playing by the Book, hands-down the most creative book blog I know. Zoe is the mom of two girls just a tad older than mine, and along with reading them extraordinary books, she excels in creating and documenting funky craft projects. The latest: a pair of golden underpants meant to be worn on the head.

Inspiring, awesome stuff.

Love, Annie

E.B. White: some writer

2012-02-10T00:14:00.001-05:00

Dear Annie,

Charlotte's Web: wonderful book, intense family experience.

You quoted the book's vivid opening lines. I offer the closing ones:

Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.

We often think of Charlotte's Web when we're in Maine, where large spiders are frequent residents in our big old house and barn. As you may recall, we tend to refrain from banishing all of Charlotte's descendants from our screen porch -- some years they're inside the screen, some years outside.

screen spider at sunset.

I wonder what Eleanor will think of the spiders the next time you guys visit.

I love the way White draws the reader into the world of the farm and the wonderfully individual personalities of the animals. Even as we the adult readers can see the inevitability of death (and what are they raising those geese for?), lives are lived to their fullest. There's Templeton's unapologetic selfishness, the dithering of the geese, Charlotte's intelligence and caring. And Fern and Wilbur, both growing up before our eyes. And the names! Fern and Avery Arable, the Zuckermans, Henry Fussy.

White, like Charlotte, cared deeply about language. I first became aware of
The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr. and White when I was in high school. I have no idea if it's a book teenagers still know about. Do your students? Strunk had been a professor of White's; he had written a small book laying out rules and guidelines for writers. In 1957, five years after the publication of Charlotte's Web and a decade after Strunk's death, White revised the book, adding a few essays of his own, and it's been in print ever since. In the introduction, White uses not a lot of words to create a sense of his professor, and to put the reader there in the lecture hall in a way that feels not unlike sitting on Fern's stool watching the conversation:

"Omit needless words!" cries the author on page 17, and into that imperative Will Strunk really put his heart and soul. In the days when I was sitting in his class, he omitted so many needless words, and omitted them so forcibly and with such eagerness and obvious relish, that he often seemed in the position of having short-changed himself, a man left with nothing more to say yet with time to fill, a radio prophet who had outdistanced the clock. Will Strunk got out of this predicament by a simple trick: he uttered every sentence three times. When he delivered his oration on brevity to the class, he leaned forward over his desk, grasped his coat lapels in his hands, and in a husky, conspiratorial voice said, "Rule thirteen. Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!"

We're all so glad that White kept the needed words in.

Love,

Deborah

Pigs, spiders, and mortality

2012-02-06T23:18:00.000-05:00

Dear Aunt Debbie,

This past Saturday afternoon, we took the girls to a local elementary school (one of the places we're looking at for Eleanor's kindergarten next year) to see a production of Charlotte's Web, as acted by 4th and 5th graders. School plays are a big hit in our family these days, even when we don't know the kids acting in them -- inspiring, especially for our theater-loving Eleanor.

But I wanted Eleanor's first interaction with Charlotte's Web to be with the book itself -- E.B. White's words, Garth Williams's pictures. We started last week, and finished on Saturday morning.

Without the impetus of the play, I think we would have waited -- I wasn't at all sure how Eleanor would react to Charlotte's death, and all of the other questions of mortality the book raises. My father reminded me of my own reaction: we were on a bus coming back from somewhere, and he says they didn't prepare me well enough, and I fell into hysterical, inconsolable sobbing in public. I think I was about Eleanor's age, maybe a little younger.

With this in mind, but feeling from past experience that Eleanor could probably handle it, we embarked. Jeff did most of the reading: we've been taking turns reading chapter books to Eleanor, so that each of us gets the full experience of one book with her, rather than a few chapters here or there. Because Jeff often works late, and Isabel doesn't yet have the patience for chapter books, this means that some weeks, our chapter book reading is pretty slow. I ceded my claim to Charlotte's Web, listening out of the corner of my ear as I read Gingerbread Girl and The Philharmonic Gets Dressed and Niccolini's Song over and over to Isabel. Jeff had never read the book himself, and I knew that I wouldn't be able to get through parts of it without completely breaking down.

It's a brilliant book. E.B. White's language is clear and firm, and he sets a tone of straightforward discussion of tough issues from the first paragraph:

"Where's Papa going with that ax?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.

"Out to the hoghouse," replied Mrs. Arable. "Some pigs were born last night."

"I don't see why he needs an ax," continued Fern, who was only eight.

"Well," said her mother, "one of the pigs is a runt. It's very small and weak, and it will never amount to anything. So your father has decided to do away with it."

"Do away with it?" shrieked Fern. "You mean kill it? Just because it's smaller than the others?"

Death, and the desire to escape it, are there right from the beginning. White is both empathetic and unsentimental: you feel for Wilbur, and for Fern and Charlotte (each of whom saves Wilbur's life at one point in the book), but White never lets you forget that death is a necessary and everyday part of life. Wilbur's first interaction with Charlotte involves him learning about the way she sucks the blood from flies and other insects; he's appalled by her bloodthirsty nature, even as he admires her cleverness and wants to be able to be her friend.

If you're looking for it, foreshadowing of Charlotte's death comes early. In Chapter 15, "The Crickets," White writes about the sad intimations of the crickets' song:

Everybody heard the song of the crickets. Avery and Fern Arable heard it as they walked the dusty road. They knew that school would soon begin again. The young geese heard it and knew that they would never be little goslings again. Charlotte heard it and knew that she hadn't much time left.

That's where Jeff paused in his Thursday night reading to ask Eleanor, "What do you think that means?" We talked about the lifespan of spiders, how they don't live through the winter, and Eleanor said, "But Charlotte will! She's a magic spider, because she can talk!" And I said that, in the world of this book, even though the animals can talk, it doesn't mean that they're magic -- that animals and people in this book are capable of dying. And Eleanor teared up, and resisted, and then seemed to take it in a little, and they went on reading.

So on Saturday morning, when Charlotte died, we were at least somewhat prepared. Eleanor cried. I cried. Jeff teared up. Isabel sat on the loveseat making one Barbie doll dance on another one's head, and singing to herself. Eleanor said, "But I love Charlotte! She's one of my favorite characters!" and we all hugged, and sniffled, and wiped our eyes, and after a couple of minutes, Jeff read the last chapter.

It was a good first real death.

Love, Annie

Dogs in New York

2012-02-05T22:42:00.000-05:00

Dear Annie,

I'm so pleased you like Niccolini's Song with its wonderful lullabies for trains and babies. It is, alas, out of print. Mark Buehner, the illustrator, has done a lot of other lovely books -- although none perhaps as emotionally evocative as Niccolini. He does, however, have some good dog picture books.

The Adventures of Taxi Dog, written by Debra and Sal Barracca, follows a stray dog and the taxi driver who adopts him through the streets of New York, picking up fares in rhyme. I've met a number of people who love this book a lot, but it's never resonated in that way with me. Buehner's art is good (although his version of New York is overwhelming full of white people) -- and Isabel will undoubtedly appreciate the fact that Max the dog is on every page.

Buehner did Taxi Dog in 1990, shortly after he moved to New York from Utah. Fourteen years later, he illustrated
Dex: The Heart of a Hero, written by his wife, Caralyn Buehner. It's a riot. Dex is the ultimate 98-pound weakling -- I suppose in dog terms it would be 9.8 pounds. He's a dachshund who's either ignored or ridiculed by the neighborhood dogs and cats (it looks like we're in New York still, and all characters are animals). He has Walter Mitty-esque dreams of becoming a superhero: "The Mighty Dex flew up into the dark and starry night...." So he starts training: running up and down garbage piles, dragging socks full of sand to the corner and back, doing push-ups, circling five times at night before going to sleep. My scanner is, alas, on the fritz again. I would love to show you the six-panel illustration of Dex doing body-builder poses in front of the mirror: "Faster than a rolling ball, stronger than the toughest rawhide, able to leap tall fences in a single bound!" He gets himself a superhero costume (see cover) and starts his career by helping a puppy across the street. He saves a mouse from falling down a storm drain, tackles a purse snatcher (bulldog), and organizes a neighborhood cleanup day. I love that his superhero-ness is so non-magical, and his heroic deed are so pedestrian. He takes himself very seriously.

He finally gets his wish to fly to the rescue when the cat who has been his biggest detractor gets stuck in a tree and all the animals of the neighborhood run to Dex to rescue him. Dex harnesses the laws of physics: he stands on one end of a see-saw --

"Everybody on the other end! One! Two! Three!"
All the animals jumped together on the other end of the teeter-totter, catapulting Dex into the air. He soared over the crowd, his ears and cape streaming out behind him...

The illustration is of a wide-eyed caped dachshund bouncing straight up, with caption: "The Mighty Dex flew up into the dark and starry night..." He saves the cat, the crowd chants "Su-per Dog!" and the cat and Dex end up partners in matching caped outfits.

Buehner's illustrated some other interesting ones too: a short story by Octavio Paz rewritten for kids, and a delightful tall tale about a man who grows balloons on a farm. Stories for another night.

Love,

Deborah

Lullaby for trains

2012-02-03T23:10:00.000-05:00

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Happily, our stomach bug was not nearly as bad as Ramona's. I have no new ideas on the stomach flu book front, but in conversation with a colleague today was reminded of two lovely Poppleton stories that have to do with being sick. In Poppleton, there's "The Pill," in which Fillmore is sick and convinces Poppleton he has to have his pill inside a piece of cake, which results in a tremendous amount of cake being eaten. In Poppleton Forever, it's "The Cold," in which Poppleton has a bad cold, and his friend, a llama named Cherry Sue, tries to cure him by bringing him a bowl full of oranges. Each time he peels an orange, he sneezes, and the orange ends up across the room, in some different strange spot.

But moving away from stomachs and colds, and back to trains....

One of your gifts for Isabel in Eleanor's birthday package was the lovely Niccolini's Song,by Chuck Wilcoxen. We've been reading it three times a day. It's about a mild-mannered train yard night watchman, Niccolini, who is surprised one night when, after an earlier scare, a steam engine begins to talk to him. It's worried about the next day, and having trouble falling asleep. Niccolini sings the engine a lullaby: "a song about gentle hills, steady tailwinds, and feathers for freight."

After this first night, the other engines want Niccolini to sing to them, too. In Wilcoxen's text, the trains come across very much like children, and Niccolini a tender father:

Niccolini knew that some of the trains were perfectly capable of falling asleep without a lullaby. In fact, there were nights when certain engines (who felt unloved) would wake themselves up just to have Niccolini sing them back to sleep. Niccolini didn't mind. The words came to him easily, the tune was always the same, and it cost him nothing to bring them comfort.

One night, a harried mother walks her sleepless baby down by the train yard; the baby, too, is soothed by Niccolini's song. The story expands: other mothers come, with other babies, in a quieting parade. Then one night, there's a terrible wind, and so many sleepless parents and children come to be soothed by Niccolini that no one can hear them. And so he enlists the engines to whistle his song, while he conducts.

This is a deeply gentle book. Mark Buehner's illustrations all have the feel of dusky night, every page both detailed and dim, so you have to peer at them closely. I love the roundedness of his forms: both the trains and Niccolini himself have depth and heft. Here's Niccolini, early in the book, leaning to listen to the engines:

Isabel's favorite illustrations are the ones with mothers and babies, which she likes to identify and comment on: "There's the mother. There's her baby. Where's the daddy? He's home asleep." For me, though, this is the image that sticks: Niccolini, listening for danger and ready to blow his whistle (look at the tension in his turning form), on the cusp of discovering something miraculous.

Love, Annie

Tummy misery

2012-02-01T23:38:00.000-05:00

Dear Annie,

I'd never thought of The Very Hungry Caterpillar as a cautionary tale on overeating -- interesting interpretation! But the overeating leads ultimately to beauty and flight...

The other illness from overeating I can think of is
The Lady with the Alligator Purse, which is about a baby drinking the bathwater, eating the soap, and being misdiagnosed. Lovely video of three sisters reading it here.

I'm taking you up on the Throw-Up Challenge. (The Upchuck Event?) I still can't think of any in the picture book category.

I return to the Ramona books by Beverly Cleary, exquisitely empathetic portrayals of life from pre-school to fourth grade. I've just re-read Chapter 6 of
Ramona Quimby, Age 8: "Supernuisance." Ramona is in third grade and her loving but overloaded parents are struggling with financial problems. She has overheard her teacher describe her as "a nuisance," which has deflated her enthusiasm for anything in school. So one morning when her parents' car breaks down, she arrives in her classroom with its wall of science experiments (fruit flies growing in colored oatmeal), feeling increasingly bad:

She sat motionless, hoping the terrible feeling would go away. She knew she should tell her teacher, but by now Ramona was too miserable even to raise her hand. If she did not move, not even her little finger or an eyelash, she might feel better
Go away, blue oatmeal, thought Ramona, and then she knew that the most terrible, horrible, dreadful, awful thing that could happen was going to happen. Please, God, don't let me. . . . Ramona prayed too late.
The terrible, horrible, dreadful, awful thing happened. Ramona threw up. She threw up right there on the floor in front of everyone. One second her breakfast was where it belonged. Then everything in her middle seemed to go into reverse, and there was her breakfast on the floor.

Ramona is miserable and humiliated. The teacher sends a student to take Ramona to the office, and she gives the rest of the class permission to "hold your noses and file into the hall until Mr. Watts comes and cleans up."

The school secretary is the mensch of the story, cleaning Ramona up, settling her on a cot, and calling her mother. Mrs. Quimby is at work, leading Ramona to worry that her illness will cause her mother to lose her job. When Ramona throws up again, the secretary gets her to the toilet in time, gives her a cup of water and cheerfully says, "You must feel as if you've just thrown up your toenails."

Cleary charts Ramona's misery -- from willing herself not to throw up in the taxi her mother has brought to take her home, through the days of fever and slow recovery. First she can think only of the secure feel of the clean sheets on her bed. Family members look in on her from the doorway. Then she's aware they're having dinner without her. Next her world expands enough to understand that they're being especially quiet just for her. There's ginger ale, and later dry toast. And when she asks sadly for butter on the toast, we know she's on the way up, at least physically.

Remembering what had happened at school, she began to cry.
   "Dear heart," said her mother. "Don't cry. You just have a touch of stomach flu. You'll feel better in a day or so."
   Ramona's voice was muffled. "No, I won't."
   "Yes, you will." Mrs. Quimby patted Ramona through the bedclothes.
   Ramona turned enough to look at her mother with one teary eye. "You don't know what happened," she said.
   Mrs. Quimby looked concerned. "What happened?"
   "I threw up on the floor in front of the whole class," sobbed Ramona.

She works her way out of misery during her convalescence in the next chapter, and by the time she gets back on the school bus, throwing up is in the distant past.

I trust your misery is also a dim memory at this point. And that it hasn't visited itself on others near and dear to you.

Love,

Deborah

Stomachaches -- a sign of gluttony

2012-01-30T23:20:00.000-05:00

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Thanks for the well-wishes -- after being completely knocked out for two days, I'm feeling much better, and we had a terrific celebratory weekend for Eleanor. (We got your birthday box tonight, and have only opened part of it -- what a treasure trove!)

Coming off of this stomach bug, and watching family and friends fall prey to it and its cousins in the last couple of weeks, I'm surprised that I can't think of any good stomach flu picture books either. It's such a common childhood ailment. Maybe illustrators think it's too gross? Colds and flus provide picture-friendly runny sore noses, but no one wants to draw their favorite bunny hunched over the toilet or reaching for a bucket over the side of the bed?

The only stomachache books that come to mind are about overeating: stomachache as a punishment for gluttony. There's Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar, who overeats (at a fairground?) on Saturday, has a terrible stomachache, then eats a "nice green leaf" on Sunday (repent, caterpillar!) and feels much better. Only then does he get to be a butterfly.

Then there's this wonderful weird old book I had as a kid (out of print now, of course): Mother Mother I Feel Sick Send for the Doctor Quick Quick Quick.
It's the brainchild of Remy Charlip (of Fortunately and Paper Bag Players fame) and Burton Supree, and you can get a sense of its pleasing wackiness from the title.

It's the story of a fat little boy who has a bad stomachache. His mother races him to the doctor, who throws him under a sheet and begins to pull all kinds of things out of him -- apparently, this boy has eaten everything in the house, from food to furniture to a birdcage with a live bird in it.

The drawings are all done in silhouette, and the book provides instructions for how to act it out as a shadow play, which I remember thinking was a cool idea, though I don't think we ever actually did it. Vintage Kids' Books My Kid Loves has a nice entry on it, with more of the evocative silhouette drawings.

So again, not really sickness, just compulsive overeating. But perhaps a book that would make a sick kid feel better anyhow?

Love, Annie

Wheezles and sneezles

2012-01-29T22:51:00.000-05:00

Dear Annie,

A dad asked the other day for a picture book to read to a sick child about being sick. Specifically, she had a stomach flu and he wanted a book about tummy aches. As you know, I love odd requests that force me to rummage through infrequently visited corners of my brain, but the tummy ache brought me up short on this one.

The subject of illness in books seems appropriate this weekend, though, because (as regular readers may have guessed) you've been both sick and hosting Eleanor's birthday festivities. I hope you're feeling better. I have no stomach ailment books to offer, but given the season, here's a sampling of colds. The main take-away in cold books is that they're eased by friendship -- and they're contagious.

Bear was sick, very very sick.

His eyes were red. His snout was red.

His throat was sore and gruffly.

In fact, Bear was quite sure no one

had ever been as sick as he.

So starts
The Sniffles for Bear by Bonnie Becker -- the latest in her quite good Mouse and Bear books. Mouse is aggressively cheerful and friendly; Bear is glum and stand-offish. In this one, Bear dramatizes his cold into being reason to write up a will, and Mouse's glee at being in line to inherit roller skates hastens the process of Bear's recovery. Mouse then ends up with the cold.

In
Pigs Make Me Sneeze! our pal Gerald of the Elephant and Piggie series lets loose a series of sneezes that send pig flying in various directions (she eventually appears on-page with a helmet). He surmises that he must be allergic to pigs and bids her a sneezy sad farewell. A feline doctor eventually sets him straight, and he galumphs back to his pal: "Piggie! Piggie! Great news! I HAVE A COLD!" Which, of course, Piggie has already caught.

We've talked about
A Sick Day for Amos McGee by Philip Stead when it won the Caldecott Medal last year. It's the lovely and gentle story of a zookeeper's animals taking the bus to come see him when he's home sick with a cold. They all understand they have to let him take naps, and they play gently with him.

"I'm too tired to run races today," said Amos to the tortoise. "Let's play hide-and-seek instead."
The tortoise hid inside his shell.
Amos hid beneath the covers.

The animals all spend the night, and there's a plan for all to head back to the zoo in the morning.

No list of friendship through adversity could be complete without good old Frog and Toad by Arnold Lobel. An excerpt from
Frog and Toad are Friends:

One day in summer Frog was not feeling well.
Toad said, "Frog, you are looking quite green."
"But I always look green," said Frog. "I am a frog."
"Today you look very green even for a frog," said Toad.
"Get into my bed and rest."

So I hope you've been resting up, dear Annie, and are getting better soon.

Love,

Deborah

Beyond bread and jam

2012-01-26T23:26:00.000-05:00

Dear Annie,

Well, the Newbery, Caldecott and a lot of other awards were announced by the American Library Association on Monday, and as usual, I was miles off predicting any of them.
Dead End in Norvelt by Jack Gantos won the Newbery for best children's literature. I read half of it back when it was a mere sample copy -- am re-reading now. Gantos is a really good writer. I would have been happier if Jefferson's Sons or Okay for Now had won, but this one is an understandable choice. I was quick on the trigger on ordering, though, and now have two shelves at the store full of almost all the winners and honor books. Whew.

The categories of ALA awards have proliferated in recent years, one of the more interesting being the Theodor Seuss Geisel Award for books for beginning readers. In the seven years they've been awarding it, Mo Willems has won two awards and two honors for Elephant and Piggie books. They're definitely deserving, but happily this year the award went to a book that's definitely a change of pace:
Tales for Very Picky Eaters by Josh Schneider.

THE TALE OF THE DISGUSTING BROCCOLI
"I can't eat broccoli," said James. "It's disgusting."
"Maybe there's something else you can eat," suggested James's father.
"What else is there?" asked James.
"Well, we have dirt. We have the finest dirt available at this time of the year, imported from the best dirt ranches in the country.
"This dirt has been walked on by the most skilled chefs wearing the finest French boots.
"It has been mixed by specially trained earthworms, and it is served on your very own floor."
"Ugh," said James.

Dad goes on to offer pre-chewed chewing gum and a sweaty sock worn by a runner "who was fed nothing but apples and cinnamon for three months before running a marathon in this very sock." The broccoli wins.

When James rejects mushroom lasagna, his father tells him about the hard-working troll in the basement hired especially to make mushroom lasagna. The troll is green with fangs and wears an apron saying "Kiss the Cook." James' ubiquitous basset hound quietly sniffs the heat vent coming up from the basement.

The book has five short chapters -- my favorite is The Tale of the Lumpy Oatmeal, rejected for its lumpiness. The oatmeal, Dad explains, regenerates every day, so that if one doesn't eat it, it gets bigger and bigger and starts eating the desserts around the house. And because Growing Oatmeal, which now looks like The Blob, isn't a picky eater, he could spell trouble for James's dog. The dog looks pathetically at James. He asks for -- and gets -- another bowl of oatmeal "with fewer lumps."

The Tales are (mostly) wacky and charming with good illustrations. The one on Repulsive Milk is a bit too preachy (builds strong bones). The last chapter, on Slimy Eggs, turns the tables a bit and has a satisfying ending. I know, I know: you're thinking, "Slimy eggs! We've been there before!" A year and a half ago you wrote about Eleanor's take-away message from Bread and Jam for Frances (the Ur-picky eater book) being to demand bread and jam all the time. And Frances' b&j habit started with her facing down a plate of slimy eggs. So I don't know if you want to introduce this one to your home, but its flights of fancy are definitely a hoot.

Love,

Deborah

Storytelling and dragons

2012-01-23T23:58:00.001-05:00

Dear Aunt Debbie,

I love Atinuke -- we read Anna Hibiscus' Song on repeat this weekend -- and look forward to her new series. The video makes me think about storytellers we used to see perform when I was a kid: dramatic, hold the room in the palm of your hand performers who could stretch a story out in the best possible way.

Tonight I'm returning to dragons in the company of a storyteller: Shutta Crum, the author of Thomas and the Dragon Queen. I mentioned this book briefly post-Christmas: a gift for Eleanor from my father-in-law, who somehow found a book containing both a Princess Eleanor and a baby sister named Isabel. Perfection!

Eleanor adored Thomas -- we sped through the chapters, which are nice and short, punctuated with illustrations by Lee Wildish. There's a lot to like in the book: an appealing hero, an episodic adventure, accurate medieval detail about arms and armor, dragons and other monsters, female characters with the names of the children in my family. In terms of structure and tone, however, it's an uneven read.

Holly wrote so well last week about adult vs. child expectations of a narrative: as grownups reading to our kids, we want to pick books that are the right level of scary and suspenseful, not too dark just yet, but exciting. We know that the heroes and heroines of children's books will be okay; we know what to expect. Or do we?

Thomas and the Dragon Queen does not seem like a dark book. Early on, you get to know not only small, unprepossessing Thomas, but also his small, unprepossessing friend Jon, who works in the stables, and the king's great horse, Heartwind, and the good old reliable donkey, Bartholomew. It is love for these animals that introduces Princess Eleanor to the plot: she comes to the stables to feed Heartwind and Bartholomew in secret. Towards the end, the dragon queen, Bridgoltha, is revealed to be the mother of twelve baby dragons, who has kidnapped Princess Eleanor to be their nursemaid. All the dragons can talk (one of them in a mildly annoying cutesy way), and things with Bridgoltha are worked out via diplomacy and bargaining rather than violence. This seems like one kind of book.

And yet. The story takes place in a kingdom under siege: though it's never fully explained who is attacking and why, all of the able-bodied men of the kingdom are fighting at its borders. Thomas only becomes a squire, and then a knight, because there aren't many adults around. The king knights Thomas, then feels guilty about it and follows him in his quest to rescue Princess Eleanor; on the way, both parties fight a giant swamp monster with tentacles and many mouths. Thomas defeats him, in a cool and complicated plot twist. When he awakes, he finds out from Jon that when the king's party was attacked, everybody but the king and Jon died. Including Heartwind. Reading this aloud to Eleanor, I was taken aback -- what kind of story is this? But no time to dwell on the deaths: in the next section, Thomas has to get across a body of water to Bridgoltha's island, and there is a several page long episode in which he rescues a baby dolphin from a bunch of floating debris. A baby dolphin? After you just killed off Heartwind? Tonally, it's odd.

When I read in the author bio that Crum is a professional storyteller, among other things, I wondered whether part of what I was responding to in the book was the episodic nature of oral storytelling. You don't tell a novel -- you tell sections, stories, tales. Perhaps I should think about Thomas and the Dragon Queen in that light, as a group of linked short stories. None of this seemed to cause any narrative dissonance for Eleanor. As a parent, however, I know what to expect from a narrative, and I want to trust the narrator who's leading me and my child through the forest.

Love, Annie

Village life

2012-01-22T23:41:00.000-05:00

Dear Annie,

Thanks to Holly for her How to Train Your Dragon guest entry. It's a fun series, and plays into my prejudice that British writers are often just better with language. Even when they're talking about dragon snot.

Today, though, I'm going in another direction.

On the continent of Africa, you will find my country. In my country there are many cities, all with skyscrapers, hotels, offices. There are also many smaller towns, all with tap water and electricity and television. Then there is my village, where we only talk about such things.

Atinuke, author of the wonderful Anna Hibiscus books (see here, here and here) is introducing us to new territory. She has said she wrote about Anna Hibiscus because when she moved from Nigeria to England, she met too many people who thought all Africans lived in mud huts in lion-infested jungles. Anna Hibiscus is a middle class girl in a large, prosperous urban family -- Atinuke wanted to bring the reality of her own African life to children elsewhere.

She's started a new series, The No. 1 Car Spotter. It's set in a village that makes me think of your brother's Peace Corps time in Mauritania. Most of the men of the village have gone to cities to find work, leaving mothers, children and grandparents to raise crops and get them to market. The boy narrator's full name is Oluwalase Babatunde Benson, "but everybody calls me No. 1. The No. 1." The superlative stands for his prowess at spotting and identifying cars:

Who can help spotting cars when the road runs directly past the village? It is what we men do.
Grandfather, sitting under the iroko tree in the center of the village, shouts, "Firebird!"
Uncle Go-easy, waist-deep in the river, pulling in his nets, shouts, "Peugeot 505!"
Tuesday and Emergency, clearing the bush for a new field, hear an engine and shout, "Mercedes 914!"
Coca-Cola and I, high in the palm trees collecting nuts, shout, "Aston Martin DB5!"

(Kind of makes one think of my car-obsessed brother, your Uncle Al, who would be right at home with these guys.) The stories are about No. 1's little community and how they use the few resources they have imaginatively. A junked car is converted into a cattle-drawn wagon when the town's only wooden wagon falls apart. Wheelbarrows given by the NGO man "to improve life in the village" end up in the city where No. 1's father uses them for a delivery business -- and the earnings from the business bring happy changes to the village.

Atinuke's language is always so lovely to read -- and her story-telling turns out (not surprisingly) to be wonderfully high-energy. Here's the beginning of the book, story-teller style:

Love,

Deborah

Guest blogger: Adventure and peril in early chapter books

2012-01-20T22:42:00.000-05:00

Dear Aunt Debbie,

It was an unexpected pleasure to read Grandpa's letter on trains. Made me miss him all over again. Thank you.

Classes end for the semester on Monday, so although I'll still be knee-deep in grading during finals week, I'll be back to blogging then. Here's our last guest blogger for this round: my good friend Holly, mom of Eleanor's friend Ian, who has written for us before about outer space and map books:

I’ve just finished The Hunger Games, and it is no great testament to my cleverness to say that from the beginning I had high expectations that the heroine would survive, despite seemingly insurmountable odds to the contrary. However, for Ian, who is four and a half, reading books where a beloved character is in peril usually brings tears and certainty that they will die, despite all our best arguments and assurances. It reminds me of Eleanor worrying that the bad guy would win at the end of the Muppet Movie. How cool to be so new at all this that you really don’t know how it all turns out!

Maybe it sounds a bit cruel that I inflict this kind of suspense on my sensitive boy, but believe me he loves nothing better than a good swordfight. Also, if I have to read one more Beverly Cleary book, I’ll cry.

One of the first chapter books where we drag Ian onward a bit was How to Train Your Dragon, by Cressida Cowell. The antihero, Hiccup, heir to the Viking Hooligan tribe, and his hapless friend Fishlegs, manage to be in danger of certain death on every page. The following is typical:

“I mean,” continued Fishlegs, “so far today we have narrowly escaped being 1. Torn to pieces by Skullions. 2. Eaten by Cannibal Outcasts. 3. Burned to death on board ship. 4. Drowned at the bottom of the ocean. … And now here we are, trapped in an inaccessible underground cavern facing DEATH BY SLOW STARVATION. … It’s just been a REALLY BAD day.”

Throughout the eight (yes, even the existence of sequels fails to reassure Ian) books they encounter dragons and villians each more [superlative] than the last. I was almost dissuaded from reading them by opening randomly to a page involving a character named SnotFaced Snotlout. There is a bit of gross out going on but the stories are fast paced, the characters flawed and charming and despite the swords, explosions, dragon fire, daring escapes and narrowly averted apocalypses no lives are lost (except one dragon -- I admit we edited that a bit).

The other series with great illustrations, fun characters and constant danger that we sailed through with Ian is The Spiderwick Chronicles, by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black. Twin brothers and their older sister (who is amazingly cool) discover a Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You. It opens up a dangerous and exciting world co-existing with our own where goblins, ogres and faeries try to gain control of the powerful book. Carried forward by the beautiful illustrations, we literally read straight through the series in a matter of days, despite one of the main characters being abducted by goblins and hung from a tree, etc. A few goblins do die actually, but I think I skipped that sentence -- kids don’t seem to bothered when bad guys die, but I sort of am. The future of the world is at stake, of course. Luckily, Mallory, the big sister, has a sword and the twins are brave and clever.

And you’ll have to take my word for it, everything turns out ok.

Thank you, Holly!

Love, Annie

Guest blogger smiling down on us

2012-01-18T22:49:00.001-05:00

Dear Annie,

I took Mark's train post to heart and ordered All Aboard ABC for the store. Thanks, Mark! It sure is an odd mix of grainy stock photos and those hurried train detail shots, some with the little red car that Mark talked about. Sometimes finding those little oddities and wondering about the photographer with the rented car can give a parent a little something extra when s/he's on the thirtieth reading of "Grade Crossing."

Right around three years old is when a lot of kids get into focused (sometimes obsessive) interests -- and there are lots of books that cater to the big ones. You Can Name 100 Trucks is one of my favorite titles in that category. Forget about plot, let's just get to the lists. A lovely combination of 100 train cars, beautiful art, and good writing is Crossing, this poem by Philip Booth illustrated by Bagram Ibatoulline. It's many pages of paintings of a 100-car freight train winding through the countryside. And yes, you can count them with your kids and sure enough, there are 100. The link is to Alibris -- the book is out of print, alas.

All this thinking about train writing turned my thoughts to my father, your grandpa, who was of course a writer. His professional writing was direct mail: letters that sold mostly books. In 1974, shortly before he left American Heritage, where he had worked for many years, he wrote a letter selling a history of trains. I thought I'd invite grandpa's ghost to be a guest blogger, because he sure could conjure up a train:

Dear Reader:

If you're old enough and lucky enough, you can remember lying in bed as a child and hearing, far off, the whistle of a steam locomotive as it pounded through the night. The wail was hoarse, mournful, inimitable. And once upon a time it was a siren song for any youngster.

You could imagine the engineer, red bandana round his neck, eyes riveted on the gleaming rails ahead, wind-blown and ruddy in the glow from the open fire door. You envied oh, how you envied the impossibly glamorous travelers in the spruce train behind, eating five-course feasts in the spotless dining car, ice tinkling in their wine buckets. Or snug in their berths behind swaying green curtains in the long Pullmans, each car lettered with its name. "Someday," you told yourself, "Someday..." It was magic.

Someday, lackaday. Such high-style overland travel is almost gone, as someone has said, with the wind. But as all of us who remember can tell all of us who were a bit too young, railroads were once magic carpets for Americans. The miraculous iron horse changed our modes of life more radically than any mechanical device before or since, from steel plows to airplanes.

The rest of the letter is here. Dad would get a kick out of knowing two 21st century three year-old boys who care a lot about trains.

Love,

Deborah

Guest Blogger: Train books

2012-01-16T23:20:00.002-05:00

Dear Aunt Debbie,

As you bite your nails over the Newberys, I'm plugging away at reading and commenting on huge amounts of fiction by my high school writers, some of whom, I swear, are good enough to wind up on your lists someday....

Here's our next guest blogger, my friend and colleague Mark, father of twin 3-year-old boys:

One odd thing about having children is that I find myself looking for echoes of my own personality and taste in my kids. When I was a kid, I read all the time. So I watch to see how much my kids like reading (or being read to – Sam and Ezra are three years old). Recently, I’ve noticed that my boys approach subject in the same way that I did when I first started reading – that is to say, obsessively.

I loved books about war, particularly World War Two. The first book I remember buying at one of those school-based book fairs was about the Battle of Midway. By the time I was eight years old, I’d read every vaguely age-appropriate book on World War Two that I could find, and moved on to some very age-inappropriate ones. Historical fiction about the Battle of the Bulge? Yes, please! Super-dry tomes devoted to cataloguing every single kind of airplane that flew in the war? Sounds great!

I’m sure my parents were a bit put off by my reading obsession with war. They probably looked on their budding Rambo with horror.

I’ve been thinking about this recently because of Sam and Ezra’s obsession with trains and train books. Somehow, they’ve become those boys. The ones with every single wooden replica New York City subway train. The ones who know the names of every Thomas train (most especially the ones they don’t have). And we’ve read all of the books about trains available in the borough of Queens.

Because of this, I feel well-positioned to write about a couple of train books we like, as well as making some general comments on the overall state of children’s books about trains.

I’ve noticed a few different genres of picture books about trains. One follows the standards of most kids’ picture books: whimsical illustrations, a cute storyline, maybe a lightweight moral at the end. Think The Little Engine That Could, or The Little Red Caboose, a Golden Book with intensely overpacked illustrations by Tibor Gergely (there is basically no blank space on any page) [the Gergely version seems to be out of print -- here's the version sold now]. A somewhat more modern example of this is The Polar Express, in which a boy travels on a mysterious train to the North Pole to meet Santa Claus. The moral: just keep believing, kids!

There are whimsical storybooks without the tacked-on didactic morals, of course. One I like because it manages to hit most of the sweet spots of three-year-old boy reading habits is Time Train by Paul Fleischman and Claire Ewart. In this book, a group of kids on school field trip somehow find themselves on a train that takes them back in time to frolic with dinosaurs. Trains and dinosaurs both! Who could ask for more?

My boys love their train storybooks, but the ones that they come back to over and over are much more literal. Sam and Ezra prefer books that are more concrete, factual, and in some ways, odd. Let me tell you about two.

The first is Subway by Christoph Niemann. The book is based on this wonderful piece Niemann did for the Times a few years ago in which he takes his boys on “endless subway joy rides…” to satisfy their love of trains. Subway is great both because it is about loving the subway system obsessively – the kids end up crying as they’re dragged off the train after an entire day of riding back and forth – and because it is a mostly accurate guide to the subway system. It looks like a typical storybook, but it is really a hard-core introduction to every subway line in the city. In fact, I think that Sam and Ezra’s favorite page is one on which the F and G trains separate at Bergen street in Brooklyn, only to reunite at Roosevelt Avenue in Queens. My boys love this page because they get to fact-check it. The G no longer runs to Roosevelt Avenue, and they know it, and they love to show off their knowledge by telling the book that it is wrong.

Subway is an easy book to love. It looks great and it tells a story that feels completely familiar to train-obsessed kids. Not all factual train picture books are quite so easy to love. I have a long-suffering affection for a book called All Aboard ABC by Doug Magee and Robert Newman. This book was published in 1990, and it is the kind of weird book that makes me wonder how it actually came to be. Who decided to make this book? Who decided to print it? What were they thinking?

All Aboard ABC uses photographs of trains (many of them Amtrak) and parts of trains to teach the letters of the alphabet. For instance, “H” is accompanied by a picture of a train’s horn and the caption “The engineer sounds the horn as the train nears a grade crossing.” What’s a grade crossing? Well, that’s what’s weird about this book – it is oddly specific. “G” is for “grade crossing,” which appears to be the technical term for “where railroad tracks cross a road.” “Q” might be for quiet, but “R” is for roadbed. “B” isn’t just for bridge, but for “trestle bridge.”

The photography of the book is pretty entertaining, too, in that I often find myself wondering about the circumstances of the photography. Many of the pictures seem to be taken in the same place on the same day (if I had to guess, I’d say that place was Bakersfield, California and that the day was an overcast one). “J” is for “junction,” but it might as well also be for all of the “junk” that weirdly appears in the background of the picture. My favorite photographic detail: there’s a red rental car that in many of the shots, giving the impression that the photographer has rented the car (in, say, Bakersfield), driven around looking for trains to photograph, and jumped out whenever something looked vaguely train-ish. At least, that’s the impression I get when I see that red Corolla, driverless, parked at G’s grade crossing.

The book is ridiculous, but my boys love it. They don’t look at it and see a rush job, in the way I do. They look at it and see a trove of interesting, detailed, never-before-imagined information that they love. Where I think they want a story, they really want to know the difference between a hopper car and a boxcar. In a way, I think the book respects them enough to give them the details, to tell them things that most of us would think are too complicated for children, and Sam and Ezra respond to that. Maybe that’s what I was responding to in all of those books about World War Two: they were about real, concrete things, unlike most books that were available to me.

Thank you, Mark!

Love, Annie

Newbery nerves

2012-01-15T23:30:00.000-05:00

Dear Annie,

Thanks to Kim for her Llama Llama entry. I'm fond of the cover of Llama Llama Mad at Mama: if only we could all flatten our ears when we're mad -- so expressive!

There's a rhythm to the year in bookselling: the slow build-up in the fall to the tidal wave of holiday shopping, then coming up for air at the end of December, followed by scrambling to re-order to fill the shelves. And in the middle of this stage: aack! Newbery nerves!

On January 23 -- a week from tomorrow -- the American Library Association announces its many awards for children's books published during 2011. The announcements create instantaneous and prolonged demand for the winners of the two big medals: the Newbery for literature and the Caldecott for illustration. As I mentioned last year at this time, it's the hope of every bookseller that the winners are books which we already have in stock. No finalists are announced, so there's intense speculation about dozens of books which may or may not be in the running. This year I've been fascinated by School Library Journal's awards blog, Heavy Medal.

Every year I tell myself I won't get panicky and bring in five or ten books I haven't read and don't know much about because they're on someone's list of what might win. I confess that I just ordered a few copies of The Freedom Maze by Delia Sherman -- a book, author and publisher I've never heard of -- based on this entry in the Heavy Medal blog. It sounds interesting, and if it does win, its little publisher will take months to get it reprinted. Ten days from now I'll be kicking myself for having done that.

Over the course of any year, a handful of the many many books I read strike me as special. I'll think, this is it: here's next year's winner. And I have yet to guess right. I was close with Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin, which seemed like a clear winner. It won a Newbery honor, and still got a good deal of the attention that it deserved. So here are my guesses this year:

Jefferson's Sons by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley. It's a novel imagining the lives of Thomas Jefferson's slave children. I wrote about it here.

Okay for Now by Gary Schmidt has stayed with me since I read it and wrote this back in February. It's set in 1968: the story of a struggling kid dealing with abuse from his father and his brother. He finds redemption and growth through the caring actions of several adults in his small town, and with his discovery of the prints of John James Audobon. One really cares about the people in this book.

And then there's
Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick, about which I wrote in May even before I had finished reading it. It tells parallel stories of two young people -- one in 1927, the other in 1977 -- who run away from home and end up at the Museum of Natural History in New York. The 1927 girl is deaf: her story is told entirely in pictures, in Selznick's totally absorbing style. The 1977 boy's story is entirely in words. At the end their paths intertwine.

Wonderstruck has been the subject of speculation about its eligibility for the Newbery. The Medal is for "the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children," but the rules refer specifically to the text of a book. So is a book which is told half in pictures and half in words eligible? Selznick's previous amazing book told in pictures and words, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, was the subject of this kind of speculation the year it came out too. It ended up winning the Caldecott Medal, for best illustration. We shall see what, if anything, happens with Selznick's work this year.

In the meantime, I'm off to bite my nails and order more books which I probably shouldn't. But just maybe one will be the right one...

Love,

Deborah

Guest Blogger: Llama Llama

2012-01-13T23:01:00.000-05:00

Dear Aunt Debbie,

What awesome art books! I'm taking notes on subjects to come back to after I'm done with portfolio grading. In the meantime, our next guest blogger is my friend and colleague Kim. Over lunch a few weeks ago, she started talking about her son's latest book love:

My nearly two-year old son, Oliver, is obsessed with Anna Dewdney’s Llama Llama series. So much so that his Llama Llama doll, given to him by my mother, has become a regular bed-fellow, rounding out his trifecta of Curious George and the glowing Fisher Price sea horse (which I affectionately call his glow worm, fondly remembering my own childhood doll).

We discovered the Llama Llama series when my mother, who, full-disclosure, works for the publishing house which puts out the books, gave Oliver a copy of Llama Llama Red Pajama. He took to it right away, riveted by the tale of a young llama, donning red pajamas, tucked into bed and in desperate need of a glass of water. The old, “mommy I want water” trick! Mama Llama, clearly relieved that Llama Llama’s bedtime has finally arrived and she has time to take care of a few chores, is downstairs finishing up the dinner dishes while chatting on the phone. Meanwhile, upstairs in bed, Llama Llama’s anxiety increases as he becomes more and more impatient for mama to bring him his water, finally culminating in a melt-down of epic proportions. Mama Llama’s frenzied arrival after hearing her son’s panicked screams is expressed in a collage of illustrations which speak for themselves. Here is where it gets really good; when she discovers that he is perfectly safe and unharmed in bed, rather than coddle little Llama Llama, Mama Llama lets him have it. She sternly admonishes him: “Baby Llama what a tizzy! Sometimes Mama’s very busy. Please stop all this llama drama and be patient for your mama.” Mama Llama is one tough cookie, but she quickly follows this up with a hug and kiss and the reassurance that “Mama Llama’s always near, even if she’s not right here.”

The other books in the series include Llama Llama Misses Mama, which focuses on the first day of school, Llama Llama Home with Mama, which describes a sick day where Mama also comes down with the flu, Llama Llama Mad at Mama, which brilliantly describes a long day of shopping, and Llama Llama Holiday Drama, which highlights the chaos of the holiday season. All of the books in this series follow a similar pattern. Llama Llama learns lessons in patience, independence, and most importantly, unconditional love from his no-nonsense mama. There’s plenty of kissing and cuddling, but there’s also plenty of firm discipline. Mama Llama seems to be holding down the fort alone; there is no evidence of a papa llama and Llama Llama appears to be an only child.

Perhaps it is because I can appreciate Mama’s parenting style— it certainly reminds me of my own— that I enjoy the series as much as Oliver. Additionally, the rhyming, which permeates the books, makes for fun reading, as do charming phrases such as “llama drama” which are often repeated. I love that the books teach Oliver empathy. In one notable scene from Llama Llama Misses Mama, little Llama cries at the lunch table on his first day of school. My son is always touched by Llama’s tears, gasping when we get to the page and attempting to offer little Llama his own pacifier. These books are in heavy rotation at our house and are certainly worth a look.

Definitely something we'll be checking out with Isabel.

Love. Annie

Playing with art

2012-01-12T23:14:00.000-05:00

Dear Annie -- and Denise!

That was a lovely post from Denise about art books. When our girls were little we used to take them to the National Gallery here in D.C. We'd have the same challenges with trying to interest them in the art, although they loved the buildings. They also loved the opportunity to pick out postcards: more interesting than the real things. The National Gallery eventually became known in our family as The Postcard Museum. Our many purchases decorated their rooms and the kitchen at about knee-level for many years, so I feel we gave them an art education that way.

One of the art books I'm most fond of for older kids (maybe 7 or 8 and up) is
Art Fraud Detective by Anna Nilsen. It's basically a spot-the-differences book with a loose plot. A fictional museum has just learned that most of its classic (real) paintings have been replaced by forgeries, and it's up to the reader to detect them. Most of the book is split pages: on the top are the paintings that are in the museum -- 30 fakes and 4 real ones. And on the bottom of the pages are the real paintings before the thefts. One flips pages until you have the two versions together, then you look to see if any details have been changed. These forgers also leave a rubber stamp-like "signature" on the fakes, so it's fairly easy to spot those little marks, but finding the alterations in the pictures is much harder. Most of the paintings are from the National Gallery in London -- artists include Botticelli, Holbein, DaVinci, Monet, Rembrandt, Vermeer and other Europeans. Nilsen went on to do two more: Art Auction Mystery, also a collection of mostly-European painters over the last three or four centuries, and The Great Art Scandal (now out of print), which is more modern: Monet to Warhol.

Earlier this week, a woman came into the store looking for coloring books "with information in them." It turned out that she's a volunteer in an Alzheimer's facility and some of the residents enjoy coloring. But she didn't want pictures which seemed infantilizing. We went through a number of options before we ended up with great series of coloring books about famous artists from Prestel Publishing. (The link gives you a chance to flip through a few pages.) These slightly over-size books give a page or two of background on the artist, then offer both fill-in-the-colors pictures, and partial pictures with prompts for the reader to draw the rest.

The Matisse book has four pages with big solid blocks of color:

Matisse wanted to represent things using shapes which were as simple as possible. That is why, one day, he had the idea of using scissors and glue. He cut patterns and shapes out of colored paper. You can try it too. You have some scissors and glue, don't you? You might like to add to Matisse's cut-out patterns which you can see in this book.

Another two-page spread shows "The Dance" in color on the left -- five naked dancing women -- and on the right a line drawing of the same painting: "What colors would you like to use to complete these dancers?" A page in the Vermeer book shows part of "Soldier with a Laughing Girl" and asks, "What is the woman laughing about? What is the man telling her?"

One of the things that makes this series so much fun is that despite the examples I've just used, many of the artists are ones which kids aren't likely to meet in basic art classes. Artists include Chagall, Miro, Hopper, Klimt, Kandinsky, Klee, Warhol and more. They're very kid-friendly -- and good for grown-ups too.

Love,

Deborah

Guest blogger: Art Immersion -- Books as Museums

2012-01-09T23:34:00.002-05:00

Dear Aunt Debbie,

It's portfolio time again! This morning, I collected two class sets of writing portfolios from my juniors and seniors, and will be putting my nose to the grindstone in grading and commenting on them for the next couple of weeks. Which means, of course, that it's time for some excellent guest bloggers.

First up is our regular guest Denise, who has written here before about picture books that raise social awareness and picture books that capture the essence of summer. Here she is:

One of the first museums my husband and I took our daughter Jacinta to was the Museu Picasso in Barcelona. It was on a narrow, cobbled, pedestrian street in a Gothic-style brick building with a courtyard; we were fortunate to have come on the one free day of the week, and the line was nowhere as long as the line to Target-free Fridays at the MOMA in Manhattan.

Jacinta was a little over two, so she wasn’t as excited as we were to enter this sacred place. She did look intently and excitedly at a few paintings in the first parlor and made her parents proud by answering questions like, what colors do you see? And what shape is this? After looking at a wall of work, she wiggled out of her dad’s arms and started roaming around, pushing through people’s knees and bumping into their bags. At this point, Sean and I took turns watching her and looking at the decades of work on display.

This was her first immersion in art history, and to remember it, we bought a souvenir: a board book called Painting with Picasso by Julie Merberg and Suzanne Bober. In this book, lyrical, rhyming lines on one side complement a painting on the other side. On the first page: “An artist paints people / in all different places, / and captures the feelings / that show in their faces.” The painting beside this is “Interior with a Girl Drawing." Most of the other nine paintings include young children; each page is saturated with vibrant colors. It is so much easier to appreciate each individual painting when it sits between your hands. And there is an entire series of books like this one that showcase other artists such as Van Gogh and Matisse; the series is called Mini Masters and is published by Chronicle.

It’s been over two years since our trip to Barcelona, and now that we have a two-year old boy, Emerson, visiting a museum has become much more challenging and arduous. We have been to the Cloisters in Manhattan and the Brooklyn Museum, but during these visits, we didn’t really engage with the art work; we did family activities and briefly glanced at some works that caught our eyes. But I’ve realized that we don’t need to visit museums to appreciate art; we can adopt our own artists and fills our shelves and walls with art. And that was my mission this Christmas, to have a renaissance of art appreciation at home.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art publishes some of the most amazing books that expose children to centuries of art. The books I (aka Santa) bought are:

My First ABC, a board book with vibrant paintings spanning continents and centuries; each page zooms in on an object beginning with a particular letter. One of my favorites is: H h Hair; the subsequent painting focuses on the profiles of an Egyptian man and woman in a painting from Tomb of Ipuy, ca. 1279-1213 BC.

Museum Shapes: each section begins, What shape is… and is followed by a painting that focuses on that particular shape; on the next page, the shape, the word, and other excerpts from visual art. What’s unique about this book is that it includes architecture and textiles in addition to paintings.

Can You Find It? is a search and discover book that includes nineteen paintings and a list of details to find in each. The art work is stunningly detailed and finding the individual items is difficult; Jacinta is much better and finding things than I am – I really have to strain my eyes. One we looked at together is a painting of The Feast of Sada from Shahnama by Firdausi. The text beside it states: “In this painting of an outdoor feast, can you find: 1 box, 4 birds, 1 bear throwing a rock… 4 bottles, and 6 beards.” I love how poetic the list is. I also love how there is something in each work of art for both my daughter and son to recognize and appreciate.

The final book is not published by the Met. It is an instructional book:
I Love to Draw! by Jennifer Lipsey. It breaks down how to draw trees and dogs and cars in such a simple way that even I can draw these things.

As the winter ensues and encourages us to stay in our living room, we will have many works of art to enjoy at our own leisure, without having to abide by museum rules. The kids can touch the pages, but not bend them, then march around and sing and scat while still being immersed in art.

Inspiring ideas!

Love, Annie

Kindness

2012-01-08T22:23:00.001-05:00

Dear Annie,

A friend's daughter enrolled in my girls' school in 7th grade and ended up hanging with Lizzie and her group of friends. When my friend mentioned Anne's new crowd to a teacher, the teacher replied, "That's good -- they're all very kind." The choice of words, although true, struck me as an unusual choice. In the world of school social interaction, though, it was high praise indeed.

Wonder, by R.J. Palacio, extends the spectrum of kindness and cruelty in the story of a fifth grader attending school for the first time. It's not a story about middle school mean girls, but it's about wanting more kindness from strangers than one often gets.

I know I'm not an ordinary ten-year-old kid. I mean, sure, I do ordinary things. I eat ice cream. I ride my bike. I play ball. I have an XBox. Stuff like that makes me ordinary. I guess. And I feel ordinary. Inside. But I know ordinary kids don't make other ordinary kids run away screaming in playgrounds. I know ordinary kids don't get stared at wherever they go....
My name is August, by the way. I won't describe what I look like. Whatever you're thinking, it's probably worse.

Auggie was born with massive facial deformities, has gone through 27 surgeries, and still looks far from normal. The description of his face comes out in small details throughout the book, building a full picture of his looks and his personality in parallel. He's a great kid: very brave, very vulnerable, very kid-like. Very observant:

   She had written her name, Ms. Petosa, on the chalkboard. "Everybody find a seat, please. Come in," she said to a couple of kids who had just come in the room. "There's a seat there, and right there."
   She hadn't noticed me yet.
   "Now, the first thing I want everyone to do is stop talking and . . . "
   She noticed me.
   ". . . put your backpacks down and quiet down."
   She had only hesitated for a millionth of a second, but I could tell the moment she saw me. Like I said: I'm used to it by now.

The book is due to be published next month, but I'm jumping the gun because it keeps kicking around in my thoughts. It's narrated by Auggie and a number of other characters, including his fiercely loving but conflicted older sister, two of her friends, and other fifth graders. One understands the allure of Halloween -- masks! anonymity! -- and the pain of being a freak among one's peers. Some of the kids set a "rule" that anyone who touches Auggie will end up with "The Plague" if they don't wash their hands within 30 seconds. A couple of kids befriend him, and they're the last to hear about it. Other attempts at organized ostracism follow.

What makes Wonder work so well is that there are several characters whose actions range from simply treating Auggie as a regular kid, to confronting seriously hostile behavior. Yet none of the good people is perfect. Auggie's first true friend betrays him early on and has to win his way back. His sister doesn't tell anyone in her new school about her brother -- she wants to savor an identity free of him. When Auggie and Jack are getting along, they're far from model students and get scolded for acting up. Fifth grade boys get into fights. They cry. The reader gets wrapped up in Auggie's slog through the school year, wanting him to have an easier time, being impressed with how he's growing up. Then there's a horrifying incident with strangers which forces the entire school population to examine their feelings about the weird kid.

The ending is satisfying and impossible to get through dry-eyed. The glow one feels at the end has to do with being glad that ordinary people act with courage and kindness. And it doesn't even feel far-fetched.

Love,

Deborah

Scary pictures

2012-01-07T00:21:00.000-05:00

Dear Aunt Debbie,

The pictures of the Child's Play book section make me wish we were in DC more often. What a great collection you've set up there! I look forward to hearing about the expansion.

I'm posting late tonight because I've been up talking with my cousin, your daughter, Lizzie, who's visiting this weekend. We had a lovely evening, starting out, of course, with reading the girls some of the new books you sent along with Lizzie. I love the tiny paperback versions of the Robert Munsch books Purple, Green, and Yellow and Something Good. (These links appear to be to normal-sized versions -- are both sizes available?)

Both books are trademark Munsch from the period where he was developing his storytelling skills with classes of preschoolers: lots of repetition and wild plot devices, pitched at a perfect kids' level. In Purple, Green, and Yellow, Brigid badgers her mother for increasingly awesome colored markers, until she gets a whole bunch of "super-indelible-never-come-off-till-you're-dead-and-maybe-even-later coloring markers." Then, of course, she draws all over herself, and when the doctor comes to try to fix her up, she ends up turning invisible. But that's not the end of the story.... I didn't know Something Good before tonight: the story of a father who takes his kids to the supermarket, where his daughter Tyya complains that he never buys them "something good." She piles a shopping cart with all kinds of sugar ("three hundred chocolate bars"), and her father gets so frustrated that he tells her to stand still and not move. This results in Tyya being mistaken for a doll, and having a price tag applied to her nose. Robert Munsch is awesome -- thank you!

A week ago, we had a reader question from Nelly about finding books with scary pictures: "like wolf (or fox) eating pigs (or seven kids or Red Riding hood or birds in Chicken Little) or being pictured with a fat stomach." I've been looking through the books we have at home with this in mind, and am not coming up with much, though I feel like these are images I've seen.

In The Helen Oxenbury Nursery Collection, there are a couple of fairly scary illustrations of foxes and wolves going after other animals. Here's the fox in "The Little Red Hen," bursting in the door to catch the rooster and mouse:

I thought that the wolf in Peter and the Wolf might have a fat belly after eating the duck, but no, not really. I have a dim memory of a wonderful Harriet Pincus-illustrated Little Red Riding Hood in which the hunter fills the wolf's belly with stones after taking Little Red and her grandmother out, and then sews him back up -- an image both gruesome and domestic. It's an interesting question: which illustrators give that extra physical detail, and which don't?

Love, Annie

New Year makeover

2012-01-04T23:02:00.002-05:00

Dear Annie,

Happy New Year to you and to all.

I love your daughters' often very personal reactions to the books you read. Isabel pointing out that she puts on a diaper while the members of the orchestra in The Philharmonic Gets Dressed are struggling into their girdles and garters is so cheering.

I had a lovely discussion of The Philharmonic about two months ago when author Mo Willems dropped in at our store. He signed a number of books and chatted for a bit. On his way out he picked up Karla Kuskin's book and effused over it. He opened it more or less randomly -- I think this was the page:

"He's so brave," Willems said. "I wish I had the courage to draw like that." The reference was to illustrator Marc Simont, but I didn't understand the bravery. Drawing adults in underwear in a kids' book? No, not that. Willems' finger drummed on the woman in the lower left putting on her bra, then on the legs stepping into red underwear on the upper right. The courageous act was to cut these people's bodies off: to draw just half a person going off the edge of the page. Willems was expressing his admiration as an artist for Simont's originality. A lovely moment.

Christmas is over, but life remains busy in the book and toy business. For the last two days, we've closed the store and had it freshly carpeted, and contractors have knocked a ten foot-wide opening in one wall where we're going to expand into a space next door. The book section won't be moving to the new space, but we will get more room to display what we have. Carpeting in a store loaded with heavy shelves turns out to be a major adventure. Everything must go while old ratty carpet gets pulled up and the new stuff goes down.

Here's a photo of the book section from about six months ago, but it looked basically like this yesterday morning:

One can't quite appreciate the many imperfections of the green carpeting, but it was definitely ready to go. An incredibly nice work crew came in, took lots of photos with an iPhone, then started sliding all those shelves to the front of the store. See that white fixture partly covered by the Wimpy Kid's hand? Fifteen minutes later, it was almost all that was left, and the guy in the blue shirt is sliding it out of there:

They pulled up the rug, prepped the floor, covered it with thick blue glue, and -- poof! -- by 2 in the afternoon the book section was beautifully carpeted, still empty, and appearing huuuge. The guys brought all the fixtures back, checking the placement against the iPhone pictures and my somewhat spatially challenged memory (no, I think it was more to the left...). The store was carpeted in four stages, and the following three stages involved fixtures and lots of stuff being moved into the book section while sections of floor closer to the front of the store were worked on.

Today was spent cleaning shelves, scraping off years' accumulation of scotch tape for signs, and reorganizing a bit. There's more to be done, and I look forward to an island of Star Wars lightsabers and action figures returning to its non-book section home: right now it's parked directly in front of the hardcover picture books. One of the nice things about this sort of disruption is looking at the space in new ways, and reminding myself of books that have been quietly hiding in corners (and in a few cases, have fallen behind shelves). Getting re-acquainted with the neighborhood.

I'm looking forward to the expansion, which will probably get in gear a few weeks from now. Will keep you posted.

Love,

Deborah

Christmas roundup

2012-01-02T23:09:00.002-05:00

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Welcome back! It's been a good week off, complete with travel, feasting, family, and fevers (all are well again), and though we took a break from blogging, of course we didn't take a break from reading. A number of new good books have entered our lives, and I thought I'd mention a few tonight.

As promised, you sent us Inga Moore's A House in the Woods. The girls are big fans, and so am I -- such sweetness, without being cloying, and such depth to her pictures! It was accompanied by a picture book about Anna Hibiscus, whose chapter books we've extolled here and here. In Anna Hibiscus' Song, Anna Hibiscus finds herself extremely happy one day, and wants to figure out what to do with her happiness. She asks the various members of her family what they do when they're happy, and gets a variety of responses: they are very quiet, they work, they dance, they whisper. Even in this short book, you're introduced to her warm presiding grandparents, her piles of hard-working, laughing aunties and uncles, and her cousins with all their glorious names -- Benz, Chocolate, Angel -- as well as her black African father and white Canadian mother. At the end, Anna Hibiscus realizes that her own greatest happiness lies in singing. It's a joyful, loving book.

I bought Isabel two books about classical music which you wrote about a while ago: Zin! Zin! Zin! A Violin! and The Philharmonic Gets Dressed. Huge hits, both of them -- we've pretty much been reading them nonstop since Christmas morning. There is something so fabulously child-logical about The Philharmonic Gets Dressed, in particular: all the tiny details of coats and homes and transportation, all the terrific illustrations of lower and upper halves of musicians struggling into complicated underwear or examining the hole in a sock. For Isabel, who likes to narrate her daily experience anyway, this book is a perfect fit. When we read about the musicians drying off, she talks about her own towel. On the next page, she responds to the different types of underwear the musicians put on: "And I wear a diaper."

Just before Christmas, our lovely cousin Ona sent each girl a book with an accompanying stuffed animal, and these two are great hits as well. For Eleanor: Kevin Henkes's Chrysanthemum. This is another mouse-girl/adjusting to school book from Henkes, though Chrysanthemum is far less of a scene-stealer than Lilly and her purple plastic purse. She's just a sweet kid with a sweet family, who has always loved her name, until she enters school and a group of mean girls begin to tease her about it (it's too long, she's named after a flower, etc.). Chrysanthemum wilts, despite the tender, nerdy comfort of her parents (her dad is shown in a lab coat and glasses, reading "The Inner Mouse, Vol. 1: Childhood Anxiety"). It's only the intervention of the magical, extremely pregnant music teacher, Mrs. Delphinium Twinkle, that makes everything right again. I kind of like Chrysanthemum's retiring nature here -- she feels like a normal kid responding to bullying, rather than a particularly precocious one.

For Isabel, Ona sent The Gingerbread Girl, written and illustrated by Lisa Campbell Ernst. It begins with a brief recap of the story of the Gingerbread Boy running off and being eaten by a fox when he tried to escape the people chasing and trying to eat him. This is helpful if you're reading to kids, like mine, who don't know the original tale. Ernst ends the first page: "This is the story of his younger, wiser sister." The lonely old man and woman decide to make a gingerbread girl this time around because she'll be sweeter and better-behaved than the original Gingerbread Boy. Of course, she isn't, and takes off running as soon as the oven door is cracked open. Her story is much like the original: she runs past lots of people and animals who want to eat her, and follow along. My favorite is the calf who turns from its mother's udder to moo, "Mama, I want a cookie to go with my milk!" There's a lot of singing: the Gingerbread Girl tosses out rhymes to each group she passes, ending each with her refrain:

I'll run and I'll run

With a leap and a twirl.

You can't catch me,

I'm the Gingerbread GIRL!

She meets the fox who ate her brother, climbs on his back to cross the river -- and then lassos his mouth with a licorice whip from her hairdo and rides him back to shore, where she leads everyone who's been wanting to eat her back to her parents' place and bakes them all gingerbread to eat (presumably non-sentient).

There's a lesson of female empowerment here, in the Gingerbread Girl's rejection of her parents' expectations and, especially, of the fox's. I have to admit, while I like the book a lot, and the girls adore it, I find the scene with the fox a little creepy in a sexual predator way:

"Ooooh, the water is so deep, move to my back!" he insisted, thinking this cute cookie was even dumber than her brother. Anyone could tell by looking at her that she was an airhead. The Gingerbread Girl did as she was told. "That's a good little girl," the fox said with a snicker. "Oh my, the water is deep, now move to my head!"

On the next page, after she lassos him "with the expertise of a ranch hand," the Gingerbread Girl whispers into the fox's ear: "You're right....I am good." It's an interesting use of language, and makes me wonder about the message it's sending in terms of possible future threats. The Gingerbread Girl with the Dragon Tattoo?

Finally, I'll mention the chapter book my father-in-law bought for Eleanor, which I'm sure I'll blog about at greater length once we've finished it: Thomas and the Dragon Queen, by Shutta Crum. So far (we're about halfway), it's an appealing medieval-ish fantasy. Thomas is a twelve-year old from a leather-worker's family who aspires to be a knight. Improbably, in a kingdom besieged at its borders and in need of fighting men, he becomes one, and is deputized by the king to ride off in search of the very nice Princess Eleanor (you can see one reason we like this book), who has been kidnapped by the ancient dragon queen, Bridgoltha. What will happen? Tune in soon....

Love, Annie

Nativity

2011-12-22T20:40:00.001-05:00

Dear Annie,

What a hard week it's been for the whole Stuyvesant community -- and beyond. I'm so sorry for all of you. Gavin De Becker's book sounds both useful and thought-provoking. I've ordered it for the store. There's so much more to talk about on this topic: we'll come back to it in the new year.

Child's Play has been a busy place this past week. All that drumbeat about the internet eclipsing real stores' sales seems to have been alarmism in our case. From year to year, I forget how much one gets picked up by the wave of holiday shoppers: books disappear from shelves, hours fly by completely in conversation with readers and their parents. The supply of Guinness World Records 2012 which we thought would carry us well into the new year is poised to sell out tomorrow. Our fast reaction to Scholastic running out of their print run of The Invention of Hugo Cabret has led us to have copies on hand when even Amazon has sold out (take that, big guys!). And the big sales of Hugo and Wonderstruck have made me happy that the hot books are also the good ones. Books telling the story of the Nutcracker aren't selling as well as in previous years, but the Twelve Days of Christmas -- never a big hit in the past -- is bigger this year.

Last year, the first holiday season of our blog, we indulged in a festival of Hanukkah and Christmas books, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Tonight I offer one joyful one, illustrated by the wonderful Julie Vivas, whom many of us know as the author of the board book I Went Walking. Her
Nativity is exuberant, even when the characters are exhausted. She uses the King James Bible words, and infuses them with a very human aura. Her annunciation is probably my favorite interpretation, an illustration I wish I had for my wall:

Getting the news over a cup of coffee: perfect. We have a series of three time-lapse drawings of Mary watching her belly grow. And then --

which is tiring:

Curious shepherds show up, shooing away their sheep, and the wise men eventually arrive with camels. The rejoicing combines the hosannah-ing biblical kind and the neighborhood-is-excited-because-you-have-a-new-baby kind. Definite joy is here.

May you and your family have a joyous Christmas, Annie. And I wish our followers much rejoicing, whatever your holiday. We'll take a little break and be back in 2012.

Love,

Deborah

Danger and the impossibility of preparedness

2011-12-19T22:21:00.000-05:00

Dear Aunt Debbie,

A student at my school was hit and killed by a drunk driver on Friday night, a block away from home. He was going home a little late after hanging out with his school friends at the Board Game club he started this year -- his senior year. I didn't know him, but by all accounts he was a sweet, dedicated, hard-working kid. He'd just gotten into college. I teach a number of seniors, so classes today were part English, part grief counseling. Stuyvesant is a huge school; not everybody knew him. That is part of the grief.

So many what-ifs in this kind of situation. If he had been one minute earlier or one minute later, he wouldn't have been standing on that median when the van swerved and crashed into him. And yet it's the kind of situation you can't prepare against. Here was a kid who did everything right, who wasn't acting in a way that should have put him in danger in the slightest. And yet.

Becoming a parent is on some level laying yourself open to the possibility of unimaginable loss at any moment. There is so much more in the game. And so you're faced with the question (among millions of other questions) of how to prepare against tragedy in as many ways as you can.

Last summer, a 9-year-old boy in our neighborhood, walking home alone from camp for the first time in his life, got lost and was kidnapped and killed the next day by the man he asked for directions. Both the boy and the man were Hasidic Jews; the boy had been told to approach someone obviously from his community if he needed help. The one man he chose just turned out to be crazy in the most horrific way.

In the weeks after this horrendous crime, our neighborhood listserves lit up with discussion of how to prepare children against abuse and kidnapping, how to teach them about how to engage with strangers and the world around them. The book cited most often was Gavin De Becker's Protecting the Gift: Keeping Children and Teenagers Safe (and Parents Sane). I put it on my library hold list immediately (as, apparently, did every other parent in Brooklyn), and received and read it a few weeks ago.

De Becker's title is a reference to his other big book, The Gift of Fear. In both, he argues that true fear is a gift, and that we need to trust our instincts in order to protect ourselves and our children. Unwarranted fear, on the other hand, is paralyzing, and can make us blind to the signals of real danger.

I found Protecting the Gift both frightening and useful reading. De Becker takes you through all of the ways in which your child might be preyed upon, by kidnapping strangers (he stresses that this is the most rare, though also the most highly feared), by abusive caretakers, by abusive family members and friends (sadly, the most likely scenario, though also the most willfully ignored). He provides examples of letters to pediatricians, daycare facilities, and schools which request specific information about safety procedures and staff background checks, and encourages frank discussion of difficult subjects.

De Becker's discussion of why "Don't Talk to Strangers" is a terrible piece of advice to give your children was particularly interesting. He argues that this is confusing to kids. Children may hear this message on the one hand from their parents, but on the street we ask our kids to talk to strangers every day: respond politely to the person who says hello, or makes a comment on the toy you're dragging around with you everywhere. What we should be doing, he says, is training our kids to assess who is safe to approach if they need help, and who is not. His simplest advice? Teach your kids to approach a woman for help, particularly a woman with children. Statistically, this is the safest thing to do.

There's a lot in this book about teenage safety, and how to talk with your kids about sexual abuse; how to make sure they know they can talk to you about anything, and that you will hear and believe them. It's a book I feel I might return to when Eleanor and Isabel are a little older.

There's a fine line between seeing danger everywhere and knowing that, while danger might be everywhere, you need to live your life without letting that knowledge consume you. On a day like today, I feel consumed. Also, terribly lucky.

Love, Annie

I don't work for Amazon

2011-12-18T23:55:00.000-05:00

Dear Annie,

Your Amazon outrage is wonderful, and heartwarming to this independent retailer. The Amazon Industrial Espionage Day was outrageous. When Amazon sends consumers into physical stores to look at products then buy them online it's using us as involuntary showrooms for its products. Because they can't hand you the physical object they're selling, they're sending you to a business that's shelled out the money for inventory you can inspect.

This issue sometimes intrudes on one of the aspects of bookselling I cherish most: my conversations with customers. As you know, I talk with lots of children and grown-ups about kids' interests, then recommend and discuss books which might be a good match. I almost always suggest more books than someone buys: the point is to give people an array that they can peruse and choose from. I never expect a customer to get every book I offer -- nor do I expect a sale from every conversation. But my job does depend on our store selling books: that's what pays my salary.

Our store prides itself on customer service: we've read many of the books, played the games, tested the toys, listened to our customers. And people rely on our recommendations. So if I have a ten minute conversation about books, after which the customer leafs through them, then whips out a pencil or an iPhone and makes a list and leaves empty-handed, I feel ripped off. People come to me for something they value -- an opinion -- then they use that information but don't pay for it. They're using my service and then sending their money to an online retailer.

The Harvard Bookstore -- an independent store in Cambridge, Massachusetts -- had a great slogan when I visited it this past fall: "Find it here, buy it here, keep us here." So thanks for doing your shopping through IndieBound and your great-sounding local bookstore.

Love,

Deborah

Shopping independent for the holidays

2011-12-16T22:23:00.002-05:00

Dear Aunt Debbie,

I'm so glad to hear your store is hopping. It gives me great joy to walk into our own local independent bookstore and find it crowded -- in these depressing days of chain retailers and online sales eclipsing actual stores, I worry for the future of the physical bookstore as a place to hang out and browse.

When we started this blog, you made a persuasive argument to me about why we should link to IndieBound rather than Amazon when discussing books: Amazon, in its monstrous size, is a threat to the small independent bookseller. I've always been quite fond of Amazon myself -- it's easy to shop there, it's secure, and their search engine works far better than the one at IndieBound, where you have to get every piece of punctuation in a title right in order to get the system to identify it. I like the Amazon reviews, and they are most accurate about what books are in and out of print. I'll admit, I've kept shopping there even as we blogged.

But this year, I am not buying any books from Amazon. Why?

First, we've built in regular visits to our wonderful BookCourt, and I've gotten in the habit of calling them to order whatever I want to buy, then picking it up whenever we're there. They get books in quickly, and I feel good about supporting the store where my kids get to sit and read for an hour at a time, and everyone is nice to us. Online retail doesn't have child-sized wooden chairs.

Second, Amazon's recent "price check" promotion makes me hate them. Not content with offering bargains online, they asked shoppers to go into real stores, scan prices of the items in them, send that information to Amazon, and be rewarded with discounts. Turn your customers into spies, and take business away from retailers in your neighborhood!

The best discussion I've seen of this idiot idea (for which they've gotten a lot of bad press) was Richard Russo's NYT Op-Ed. He wrote to several of his author friends asking for their thoughts on the matter. Ann Patchett (one of my favorite contemporary novelists) responded:

“There is no point in fighting them or explaining to them that we should be able to coexist civilly in the marketplace....I don’t think they care. I do think it’s worthwhile explaining to customers that the lowest price point does not always represent the best deal. If you like going to a bookstore then it’s up to you to support it. If you like seeing the people in your community employed, if you think your city needs a tax base, if you want to buy books from a person who reads, don’t use Amazon.”

So when buying books for my friends and family in other states, I've used IndieBound to find independent bookstores in their neighborhoods. Yes, it took me a couple of extra minutes to do, but really not that long. My hope is that supporting bookstores in Oregon, Connecticut, and Texas, as well as in New York, will keep those brick-and-mortar stores around in my friends' communities, too.

And if you have a hard time remembering an exact title, you can always search it up on Amazon, then go buy it at your local independent bookstore instead. I'm sure the folks at Amazon will understand.

Love, Annie

Life in sales: always surprising

2011-12-14T23:59:00.000-05:00

Dear Annie,

It's That Time of Year again at the toy and book store. Things are very busy, I'm working huge hours and it's all kind of fun. Around now it just becomes riding the wave until the end -- not much more I can do in terms of ordering; we just hope supplies will last.

So it was especially lovely that in the middle of all the chaos, I was blessed with the Best Customer Complaint Ever. I had helped a very nice, 70-ish woman; she bought an
A. A. Milne boxed set: both Winnie-the-Pooh books and the two poetry ones. As she was leaving, she took me aside and said, "I think you need to talk to your manager behind the counter about language." We're a store with kids in it all day, so we're all very conscious of needing to avoid profanity. The person she was talking about is very mild-mannered. She gave me a steely look and said sternly, "'Him and me' should never start a sentence!"

I thanked her for her grammatical concern, filed it away to smile about with Will, and went on to the next customer. It was funny, because Will himself cares deeply about usage -- I couldn't tell if she attributed the remark to him, or she just felt that he should enforce higher standards with other staff members. I later learned that she managed to confront Will directly and they had a very pleasant discussion of various grammatical errors of this era. On her way out of the store, she found me and said I didn't need to talk to Will after all -- "He's on our side."

So here I am on the side of matching subject and verb, happy that I meet strangers who care about such things, and enjoying the serendipity of my profession.

I hope you and yours are having a pleasant run-up to Christmas.

Love,

Deborah

Lab rats (and mice)

2011-12-12T23:02:00.000-05:00

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Your mention of bats being banded by humans in the Silverwing series made me think about two very different books involving animal-based lab experiments.

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, by Robert C. O'Brien, is an action-packed adventure story. Mrs. Frisby is a widowed mouse bringing up four mouse children, and when one of her kids is sick and she can't move him to their summer house, away from the garden plowing which endangers them, she ends up seeking help from a group of former lab rats who live under a nearby rosebush. It turns out that these rats were bred and trained at NIMH (the National Institute of Mental Health), and have near-human intelligence and capabilities. They've created their own functioning society, complete with siphoned electricity, but are planning to relocate to a utopian farming community (as in Watership Down, there's a certain amount of exploration of what constitutes a perfect society). The rats help her save her son, she helps them avoid capture, and there's a scene about drugging a very scary cat. I haven't read the book in years, and think it may be aimed at a slightly younger audience than your Watership Down-loving sixth-grader, but I remember being captivated by it.

Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes, is written from a human perspective, but features a lab mouse quite prominently. Algernon is the mouse, the recipient of brain surgery which makes him increasingly intelligent, to the point where he becomes a kind of mouse genius, solving all possible mazes. The story is told through the journal entries of Charlie, a mentally handicapped man in his 30s who is asked, and agrees, to undergo the same brain surgery. His writing is at first full of misspellings, and reveals his dim awareness of much of the world around him. After the operation, however, Charlie's intelligence increases by leaps and bounds. He begins to understand his own history, forms complex relationships with the people around him, falls in love, and eventually gets so smart that he becomes a bit of a social outcast in the other direction: whereas once people made fun of him for his stupidity, now he makes them feel stupid. In the second half of the book, Algernon begins to lose cognitive function, and then so does Charlie. It's painful stuff: Charlie is at first terribly aware of his waning capabilities, then ultimately loses the capacity to remember and understand who he was under the effects of the operation. Total tearjerker.

Both books cry to be read as metaphors for human interaction and society; both ask you to think about the results, positive and negative, of trying to change the basic parameters of our capabilities. They stick with you, these speculative fictions.

Love, Annie

Mice, rats, bats and bears - oh my!

2011-12-12T00:09:00.000-05:00

Dear Annie,

Of the Lawson books, Mr. Revere and I was the big hit in our house; the Ben Franklin book never quite caught on. Lizzie went through a brief horse period, and we probably read it then. I loved it: lots of history and excitement. The horse was very far from being a naturalistic horse: she had strong political loyalties, first to the British, then to the revolutionaries. I remember being shocked some years later to discover that Revere's horse wasn't named Scheherazade as she was in the book.

As to your question about animals in books, there are many gradations of anthropomorphizing. There are the Wind in the Willows and Winnie-the-Pooh animals who, as you point out, are just a clever way to present people to kids.

As one gets further into chapter books, there are a number of series that create complex chivalric social structures, with clans, territories and wars, in worlds inhabited by animals. The
Redwall series by Brian Jacques (pronounced Jakes -- honest!) is the best-known of these. Jacques wrote 22 of them: mice, badgers and squirrels are the good guys; rats, foxes and weasels are their enemies. Character tends to be determined by species. I've only read one of them, but we carry them all -- as one gets further into the series the quality varies more. There are other series along similar lines focusing on house cats which have escaped to the wild (Warriors, by Erin Hunter), its spinoff about bears (Seekers) and Guardians of Ga'hoole by Kathryn Lasky, about owls. They're all quite popular with the middle-grade crowd.

The one our family got hooked on for a while was the Silverwing series, by Kenneth Oppel. It's four books about bats and includes a fair amount of behavior and information true to real bats. Different types of bats are distinguished from each other, and the hibernation season figures in the plot. The first book centers on the bats believing that they've been banded for a greater purpose. The purpose turns out to be nefarious human schemes.

Then there are the animals who act pretty much as animals yet interact with people -- dogs dominate this category. I'm thinking of two wonderful classics of the must-get-back-to-my-human genre:
The Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford is the story of two dogs and a cat who cross hundreds of miles of Canadian wilderness to find their old home where they believe their family is. They go through all sorts of adventures and hardships on the way, but they're all things that really could happen. And
Lassie Come Home by Eric Knight is a wonderful story that has nothing to do with the American TV Lassie. Lassie belongs to a family in Yorkshire, but they're forced to sell her to someone who takes her to Scotland. She treks across Scotland and England to get back to the family. Most of the action in the book follows Lassie, but we cut back to the family occasionally. It's very intense, both in the feelings between the boy in the family and the dog, and in her series of scary and harsh experiences during her odyssey home.

Given the thousands of kids' books with animals in them, I know I'm missing lots of other categories. But there's a start.

Love,

Deborah

Animal characters as an entre to history

2011-12-10T23:02:00.003-05:00

Dear Aunt Debbie,

My memory of Watership Down is vague -- I read it in college, on the recommendation of a friend who was captivated by it in 7th grade. I think I was too old at that point for it to change my life. One of the things I remember liking about it, however, was how animal it is. Yes, it's on one level a commentary on human society, but it's in such a clear rabbit-perspective -- my memory is of rabbits who think and observe in a way rabbits really might, if they had a certain level of consciousness. Which got me to thinking.

There are so many books about animals in which the animals act essentially like humans: The Wind in the Willows comes to mind, and of course there are lots of others, especially in the picture book world. The animals chat with each other, have tea, wear clothes. In what other books do animals appear straight-up as animals, interacting only with other animals as part of an animal society rather than in concert with humans? I am drawing a blank here, but wondered if anything springs to mind for you.

I'm at my parents' place tonight, and was scanning their shelves for inspiration when I came across a couple of my childhood books which don't try to depict animal society at all, but anthropomorphize animals as a way to write about famous historical figures.

These two books, both by Robert Lawson, are tales of great men as "written" by their animal companions. The subtitles say it all: Ben and Me: An Astonishing Life of Benjamin Franklin By His Good Mouse Amos, and Mr. Revere and I: Being an Account of certain Episodes in the career of Paul Revere, Esq. as recently revealed by his Horse, Scheherazade.

I read and reread Ben and Me in elementary school. Amos the mouse is a fine narrator, funny and somewhat self-important (a bit like Franklin himself). By his account, Amos helps Ben Franklin figure out all kinds of inventions, from the Franklin Stove to the discovery of electricity. In a climactic scene, Amos goes up in a basket tied to the proverbial kite and is hit by lightning (Franklin tricks him into going up when there's a storm, and won't pull him down out of danger because he's so obsessed with the concept of electricity). Amos is burned and furious, but otherwise okay. The book is a terrific entry into Franklin lore, good, kid-friendly historical fiction, packed with drama.

Mr. Revere and I never grabbed me quite as much. Perhaps it's because a mouse can go more interesting places than a horse; perhaps because Franklin is a more interesting man, on the whole. Still, it's another accessible and interesting entry into American history.

On the slightly pulpier side, Ally Sheedy (yup, that Ally Sheedy) wrote, at age 12, She Was Nice to Mice: The Other Side of Elizabeth I's Character Never Before Revealed by Previous Historians. In it, a mouse living in Queen Elizabeth's court makes friends with the queen, and because of her small size is able to overhear conversations (and more) between Elizabeth and Essex, among other people. I loved this book. I have no idea how good it would be on a reread, but Elizabeth's court is juicy material, and Sheedy has fun with it. I look forward to finding my old copy someday.

Love, Annie

Rabbits small and large

2011-12-08T23:29:00.000-05:00

Dear Annie,

I love The Runaway Bunny with its amazing pictures that one can just climb into. It's a book for a very young child, describing the world a child sees. During those toddler stages of exploring the world then wanting to cling, it reassures. Having said that, I will confess that I didn't read it to my own children when they were that little. As you know, one of the traumatic moments of my early motherhood was when 22 month-old Lizzie walked out the door in our urban neighborhood, closing it behind her, and toddled happily toward a six-lane major thoroughfare at the end of our block. I figured out where she'd gone and caught up with her before she got there, but the whole incident was heart-stopping. Somehow, reading a book where the thrill of running away was so beautifully presented, and the message that mom will always come after you (as I did) led me to fear that the book would encourage her roving tendencies.

An older fan of another rabbit book came to the store yesterday: a sixth grader who loves
Watership Down, by Richard Adams. It tells the story of a group of rabbits who leave their home when one of them predicts its destruction. They go on an odyssey through several different types of rabbit communities before establishing -- and having to defend -- their new home on Watership Down. It's big and rich in adventure, heroism and competing philosophies of what society should be. I wonder if it's one of the books that your high school students talk about having loved a few years earlier. The sixth-grader's father said that in searching for other books she might like as much, he ran into recommendations speaking to the utopian/dystopian themes, like 1984, and Brave New World. He was hoping for something else --- "not as dark" was his request.

I love this kind of request, but I also often wish I had a few hours and several different people to chat with before I charge into recommendations. That's not how it works, though -- so I flailed around for a bit and came up with two possibilities. First I suggested
The Sword in the Stone, by T. H. White (author of Mistress Masham's repose, which we've praised here and here). It's the story of King Arthur's childhood, the first part of The Once and Future King. It's a big meaty book, full of humor and good writing. Wart, as the boy Arthur is called, grows -- literally and figuratively -- through the book. I'm particularly fond of the edition whose cover you see here: it has stunning occasional illustrations which stress Arthur's youth. Merlyn's education of Wart is the element which made me think of it for our sixth grader. He changes Wart into different animals so that he can experience different societies and attitudes toward the world. The boy becomes a hawk, a fish, an owl, a goose, an ant, and a badger.

It didn't quite hit the spot with my 11 year-old customer, so we moved on to the epic element of Watership Down. Next stop: Lord of the Rings. I think it was attractive for its epic proportions, and for its stamp of you're-not-reading-little-kid-stuff-anymore. We discussed for a while whether she should just jump right into The Fellowship of the Ring, the first of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, or if she should read
The Hobbit first. It was written first, of course, and introduces Middle Earth, some of the characters, and it's where Bilbo obtains The Ring. It's a slightly easier read, not quite as dark as the trilogy which follows. She took The Fellowship of the Ring and went off in search of her father to discuss it. It was late, things were busy, and I didn't talk with her again. This morning I noticed that the book was back on the shelf, but The Hobbit was gone.

So there you have it, from rabbits to dragons.

Love,

Deborah

Have a carrot

2011-12-05T22:26:00.000-05:00

Dear Aunt Debbie,

In the context of our discussion about apparently sweet but deeply dysfunctional parent-child love stories, a friend of mine alerted me to Lisa Belkin's Huffington Post slide show about Children's Books Parents Either Love or Hate. (Belkin gives The Giving Tree a longer treatment, and provides a solid opposing viewpoint from someone who loves it, here.)

The Giving Tree tops the list, and Love You Forever is right up there. I was surprised, however, to see The Runaway Bunny at #3, as it's a book I've never thought of as hate-able.

Okay, yes, it's the story of a mother bunny who convinces her little bunny that he can never run away from her, because she'll always find him no matter where he goes. That might sound grasping. The combination of Margaret Wise Brown's simple, lyrical text and Clement Hurd's extraordinary pictures, however, has always made me feel that the mother here is firm and reassuring, rather than creepy.

Here's how it begins:

Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away.

So he said to his mother, "I am running away."

"If you run away," said his mother, "I will run after you.

For you are my little bunny."

I've written before about how much I love Margaret Wise Brown's writing (in Goodnight Moon, Home for a Bunny, Big Red Barn, and Wait Till the Moon is Full). Her sentences are simple and child-friendly and beautifully crafted -- she's really a poet. Half of The Runaway Bunny is her text, with Clement Hurd's black and white line drawings. Every other double-page spread is a giant wordless color painting illustrating how the mother bunny will go after her little bunny.

"If you become a tree," said the little bunny,

"I will become a little sailboat,

and I will sail away from you."

"If you become a sailboat and sail away from me,"

said his mother, "I will become the wind

and blow you where I want you to go."

(The next line is perhaps the only Margaret Wise Brown line I feel the need to edit when reading aloud: "If you become the wind and blow me," said the little bunny....)

The paintings are surreal and beautiful. I remember staring at them as a child, finding the bunny in the crocus when he's hiding in a garden, amazed by the mother tree when he is a bird. There's a playfulness here, a way in which the mother is engaging in her child's imaginative world.

And finally, Margaret Wise Brown is never heading for the tear-jerker ending. No, after all of that, here's where the story winds up:

"Shucks," said the bunny, "I might just as well

stay where I am and be your little bunny."

And so he did.

"Have a carrot," said the mother bunny.

That's a mom I can get behind.

Love, Annie

Good authors, bad books

2011-12-05T00:01:00.001-05:00

Dear Annie,

Your excellent discussion of Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree leads my thoughts to another of my least favorite books,
Love You Forever by Robert Munsch.

It starts with a mother singing to her infant son, telling him she'll love him forever, "As long as I'm living my baby you'll be." He grows into a mischievous two year-old, an inconsiderate nine year-old, an Elvis-obsessed teenager, and finally a grown-up who moves out and gets a house across town. In each of the episodes, the mother crawls into his room at night, checks that he's sleeping, then picks him up (without waking him), rocks him and sings her little song about loving him forever. She even does this when he's an adult:

If all the lights in her son's house were out, she opened his bedroom window [top of ladder visible in window], crawled across the floor, and looked up over the side of his bed. If that great big man was really asleep she picked him up and rocked him back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

and then of course she sings her "as long as I'm living..." song. One can only wonder what happened the nights she looked over the side of his bed and found him (a) awake, or (b) not alone.

So one day she calls him up and says, "You'd better come see me because I'm very old and sick." She's too weak to sing to him, so he picks her up and rocks her in his arms and sings, "As long as I'm living my Mommy you'll be." He goes home that night real sad, picks up his sleeping child out of her crib, and sings her his mom's song.

It's sappy and sentimental and a little creepy. The mother's not being destroyed by her child, but she sure is having problems with separation, and the author is celebrating it. As with The Giving Tree, this is not a book for kids. It's in kids' book form, but aimed at adults and adult sentiment. Don't forget, I'm gonna die -- be nice to your mother.

The thing I find so strange about both these books is that this isn't the way these writers usually are. Munsch is the author of The Paper Bag Princess, Thomas' Snowsuit and many other funny and slapstick books which are very in tune with the pre-school sense of humor. And we've written about Silverstein's poetry, also very plugged in to kids' ideas of what's funny. Maybe their publishers suggested they write something that would sell every year on Valentine's Day and Mother's Day (that's when I get the biggest demand for both of these, from adults who really love them). Or maybe, as your mother (my sister) suggests in her excellent comment, they're displaying their own unresolved issues with their moms. There are wonderful books that present parental love in kid-friendly ways -- why celebrate the ones that aren't?

Love,

Deborah

I'm glad The Giving Tree wasn't my mother

2011-12-02T22:30:00.000-05:00

Dear Aunt Debbie,

With your last post, I realized we hadn't seen our complete Nutshell Library in a while (the tiny books tend to lose their covers and become separated, if you're not careful), and also that we had a BRAND NEW one, still unopened, as a recent gift. So we cracked it open, and pretty much have read nothing else for the last 24 hours. Plus, Isabel got to take all the new covers off and then ask for my help putting them back on again. Jeff's aunt told me once that she kept the Nutshell Library in her purse for several years while raising her three kids -- they're the perfect size for pulling out in waiting rooms or on public transportation. Pierre is our favorite, too, though "One Was Johnny" comes in a close second: all about a boy who lives by himself, and is bothered by a series of animals and a robber who come in to disturb his reading (counting up to 9), then threatens to eat them all if they don't go away, so they do, one by one (counting back down).

I've been thinking about Shel Silverstein again too, courtesy of one of my high school seniors. At the beginning of each of my classes, a student stands up and delivers Minutes from the previous day's class, then gives the class a "gift": a poem, or an interesting article, or a thought-provoking riddle, or a demonstration of some kind of skill -- sort of a grown-up version of show and tell. In my Women's Voices class this week, a boy brought in and read aloud The Giving Tree. It was a sweet moment: the beginning of the seniors looking back at their childhoods through rose-tinted glasses as they focus on the college and adult lives looming ahead of them. He paused on each page to show the pictures to the class, and you could feel the wave of nostalgia.

I tried to feel it too. Problem is, I hate that book. Periodically, I'll forget why I hate it so much, and think, Oh, so many people adore The Giving Tree, and adore Shel Silverstein because of it, and I'll read it again, and then I'll remember how much I hate it.

I understand that it's supposed to be a story about being willing to give everything to those you love, specifically, your children. The tree gives the boy apples, and he swings in her branches, and they have fun. And then he grows older, and when he wants money, and a house, and a boat, she gives him her apples, and her branches, and her trunk, and she's lonely all the time. Finally, she's just a stump, and he's old, and he wants a place to rest, and she can still give him that, so they're both happy.

Except she's a freaking stump.

I said something fairly mild to my class about the fact that I didn't like the book, and connected it to some of what we've discussed in there about female characters in literature: here's the female tree, who sacrifices every part of her being to the ungrateful male character, and it's that total self-sacrifice that makes her happy. Some of my students looked at me like I was crazy; some nodded. The boy who brought the book in said that he thought it was beautiful because the tree was like a mother, giving all of herself to her child. And I said yes, I'm a mother, and that's why I don't like this book.

The boy is ungrateful; the tree-mother is sad and lonely. Her sacrifices don't lead to any lasting happiness for either of them, and their only relationship is based on her giving him things as she wastes away. It's not a model I particularly want to emulate.

I think that my gut reaction to The Giving Tree soured me on Silverstein in general, which is too bad. Maybe when Eleanor's old enough, I'll give his poetry another chance. For now, though, despite my students' fond memories, I'll be keeping that book out of my house.

Love, Annie

Poetry in a nutshell

2011-11-30T23:47:00.000-05:00

Dear Annie,

I'd like to point out a lovely comment on the movie Hugo that's just been posted here by your father, my brother-in-law. Testimony to the fascination of great books and movies for both kids and grown-ups. Thank you, John.

Now on to Nick's question about more poetry, which got me thinking too. In addition to the book lists you referred to in your post, we went on a roll about poetry back in June of 2010: there were four posts in a row: here, here, here and here. Don't know if you found all four of them, Nick -- and they're fun to revisit anyway.

So imagine my surprise when I realized we haven't visited Maurice Sendak's
Nutshell Library. It's four small rhyming books: Chicken Soup with Rice (about months), Alligators All Around (alphabet), One Was Johnny (numbers), and
Pierre: a cautionary tale. They're all delightful, but for the moment I'll stick with Pierre, a boy who responds to all statements -- including his mother's "You are my darling boy/you are my only joy" -- with, "I don't care." When he stands on his head on a chair:

His father said,
"Get off your head, or I will march you up to bed."
Pierre said,
"I don't care!"
"I would think that you could see --"
"I don't care!"
"your head is where your feet should be!"
"I don't care!"
"If you keep standing upside down -- "
"I don't care!"
"We'll never ever get to town."
"I don't care!"
"If only you would say I CARE."
"I don't care!"
"I'd let you fold the folding chair."
"I don't care!"
So his parents left him there.
They didn't take him anywhere.

The parents go, a lion appears, expresses the intention to eat him, with the usual response. The lion then says, "Then I'll eat you if I may," to which Pierre replies, "I don't care!" and is eaten. When the parents come home, the lion is abed and they fear the worst.

His mother asked, "Where is Pierre?"
The lion answered, "I don't care!"
His father said, "Pierre's in there!"

The doctor eventually gets a relieved Pierre out, and now, of course, he cares. It's another Sendak mix of the absurd with intense feeling. And it's all wrapped up in great rhythms and rhymes.

Love,

Deborah

Book lists and rhyme, all the time

2011-11-28T22:46:00.000-05:00

Dear Aunt Debbie,

I really want to see Hugo. Going to need babysitting for that one. We took the girls to their first movie-theater movie this weekend: the new Muppet movie. It was a total hit, both girls mesmerized by the big screen. Isabel didn't say a word, and practically didn't move, for more than two hours. Eleanor had much more active reactions, laughing, squealing, even crying towards the end when it looked like the bad guy was going to win. She knows a lot of stories, but doesn't yet fully understand that comedy means the good guys are going to come out on top at the end.

While movies are clearly a different medium from books, and what they require from an audience is different as well, I can't help feeling that the sustained attention span Eleanor and Isabel have built up in all our reading time has something to do with their ability to follow the narrative of a full-length movie. It certainly informs the way they tell stories. A couple of nights ago, they were in the bath together, each girl playing her own separate narrative game. Eleanor had a Barbie in the tub with her, who she had cast as Cinderella, and there was a complex dialogue going on, Eleanor voicing Cinderella and herself and a small cast of other characters. Right next to her, Isabel swam a rubber crocodile through the water, saying, "And the crocodile swam toward the child, and the child kissed the crocodile" (she picked it up and kissed it) "and took the crocodile home to its mother." I'm a sucker for kids narrating stories about themselves in third-person.

But back to books. Earlier tonight, Nick left a comment asking about more recommendations for rhyming books for 3-year-olds. I'll answer that partially by encouraging readers to check out our Book List pages. Under Picture Books, I have two lists that might be helpful: "Books it's fun to read aloud because of rhythm and rhyme" and "Rhyming books." I've just added a few titles to each from the archives.

Lately, Dr. Seuss has been circulating heavily in our rotation. In an earlier discussion of poetry, you mentioned Green Eggs and Ham, one of Isabel's current favorites. Talk about rhythm and rhyme -- this book has an engine thrumming beneath every page:

I do not like them in a box.

I do not like them with a fox.

I do not like them in a house.

I do not like them with a mouse.

I do not like them here or there.

I do not like them anywhere.

I do not like green eggs and ham.

I do not like them, Sam-I-am.

I didn't realize until I had kids that, of course, this is a book about picky eaters. How many times has every parent played out this same scenario? "You do not like them. So you say. Try them! Try them! And you may."

Dr. Seuss has so much going for him: the strange, effective creatures, the loopy twisting roads and railroad tracks, the rhyme, the repetition. It's funny -- I don't feel the same affection for his books that I do for, say, anything by Margaret Wise Brown, but he is classic, worth rereading often, and a natural place to go to when you want some serious rhymes.

Love, Annie

A book to watch

2011-11-27T22:16:00.000-05:00

Dear Annie,

I hope your Thanksgiving was a good one. We had relatives from Bob's side of the family and our Lizzie here with us. On Friday night, in part because I was so curious about it, some of us went to see Hugo, the new Martin Scorsese movie based on The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick, which we've written about here.

The book is a visual feat: the story is told alternately in words and in pictures. Here are two short sequences:

Both those scenes are in the movie, with the same emotional meaning as in Selznick's illustrations. The film stays very true to the look and feel of the book -- one feels immersed in it, and I don't think that's because it was in 3-D. Hugo is a12 year-old boy living hidden in a Paris railway station, and much of the film is shot from the perspective of someone shorter than the adults around him.

The plot swings around two historical artifacts and the characters' emotions tangled up in them. One is a damaged mechanical man -- an "automaton" -- which Hugo hopes to make work again. The other has to do with the films of a very early movie-maker, Georges Méliès. My recollection of the book was that the suspense surrounding the automaton was primary, and the films secondary. In the movie, the priorities are reversed. Scorsese, a master filmmaker, offers a history of early film -- and some hilarious and fascinating clips from old movies. The history is wonderful, the plot remains mostly true to the book, and true to Selznick's emotionally powerful main character.

I wonder what your father (my brother-in-law), who's so knowledgeable about film, will think of it. John?

It's almost always disappointing to see what the movie industry does to good kids' books, but this time I think Scorsese made a film that's both his own, and one true to the book. My biggest problem with the film was the 3-D. This may be my inner Luddite speaking, but I really didn't see the point of making gears jump out of the screen, snowflakes appear to fall on the audience, or even the crowd scenes be in-your-face. The film itself is enough to pull you in. And it really does.

Love,

Deborah

Animal house

2011-11-25T21:58:00.000-05:00

Dear Aunt Debbie,

You make me excited for Christmas (for which I am otherwise woefully unprepared). I adore Inga Moore.

With winter coming, we've been doing a lot of reading of another book about large animals and small animals trying to live together in a space that doesn't quite work for them: The Mitten, retold by Alvin Tresselt. It's a traditional Ukranian folktale, and the illustrations by Yaroslava in this version give it a very Easten European feel.

A little boy out gathering firewood for his grandmother on the coldest day of winter drops his mitten in the snow. The narrator opines: "Now, how a boy could do this on the coldest day of winter I'll never know, but that's the way my grandfather tells the story."

The boy goes off, and a mouse decides to crawl into the mitten to keep warm. She is soon joined by a parade of animals who increase in size and absurdity: a frog, an owl, a rabbit, a fox, a wolf, a boar. The mitten gets more and more snug; seams start to strain. Then a bear comes along.

"No room! No room!" cried the animals even before the bear had a chance to speak.

"Nonsense!" said the bear. "There's always room for one more."

And without so much as a please or thank you, he began crawling into the mitten.

He put his paw in first, and the mitten creaked and groaned.

He put his other paw in, and one of the seams popped.

Then he took a deep breath and pushed himself in.

So you think it's going to be the bear who makes the mitten explode -- but it isn't! The last straw comes in the form of a tiny cricket, who shows up just after the bear in a very pleasing reversal of expectations. NOW the mitten explodes, and all the animals get tossed out across a double-page spread into the snow.

The boy realizes he's lost his mitten, and comes back to look for it, but all he can find are the ripped-apart pieces. The book ends, "And my grandfather says he never did know what really happened to his mitten." The idea that this reveals that the story is made up is lost on my kids -- kind of a complex thing to explain -- but it has led to some interesting conversations.

Eleanor and Isabel love the repetition in the story, the way the mitten-house gets more and more ridiculous. There's suspense and humor, and Yaroslava draws all the animals in traditional Ukrainian clothing, which is very funny. I also appreciate that the animals are of mixed gender, pretty much half male and half female. Half of the pictures are black line drawings on turquoise-blue pages; the other half are on white pages with the color inked in in a pleasingly solid way. It's high-contrast, and very appealing to the eye. It's also, after you close the book, a fun game to play with a blanket and couch cushions.

Love, Annie

Friendship, homebuilding and peanut butter

2011-11-23T23:27:00.000-05:00

Dear Annie,

"Everything! Everything!" What a perfect reaction to getting the connections in a series of books. Such a lovely time you're having reading with your children.

Tonight I'm spilling the beans on a Christmas gift I'll be sending Eleanor and Isabel. I first read this one as a sample back in the spring, and have been waiting to write about it until it came out last week.
A House in the Woods is a picture book written and illustrated by the wonderful Inga Moore -- I don't know if this is her first foray into writing. You've written about her illustrations for Wind in the Willows and The Secret Garden. She continues to do amazing emotionally descriptive pictures filled with detail. And her characters are full of body language and personality.

We start with two friends:

One morning the two Little Pigs went out walking together. One Little Pig found a feather, and the other found an interesting stick.

After the walk, the pigs find that their homes have been unintentionally destroyed by their large friends Moose and Bear, who were only trying to move in:

There they are, in a pickle, with such expressive human-like bodies, the pigs with the feather and stick, and a Narnia-esque lamppost in the woods.

They decide to build a house together and call the Beavers (old-fashioned phone on nearby tree) to help them with the project:

The beavers are so professional -- and so consistently cheerful. And payment in peanut-butter sandwiches is such a nice touch. They fell trees in beaver fashion, with cheers from the non-chewers, then everyone gets busy:

This size picture doesn't do the scene justice: there's so much going on!

By lunchtime the walls of the house were up . . . and by dinnertime the roof was on. (The lunch and dinner times were on different days, of course. Beavers are fast, but not that fast.)

The house is finally finished and furnished, and the bill is delivered. There's a dash to the local store to buy peanut-butter and bread, and the four friends go to the quite spectacular beaver lodge with six towering plates of sandwiches to which grown-up and child beavers help themselves. Then then the four head back to their new home, have supper, talk by the fire, and go sweetly to bed.

The tone throughout the book is cozily descriptive. Toward the end, the author asks if the reader thinks all that hard work has been worth it. (How could one say not?) And we get to say goodnight to each of the main characters, snoozing in their beds beneath birds roosting in the rafters. A really wonderful book.

Love,

Deborah

Fantastic stories parents tell their kids

2011-11-21T22:31:00.002-05:00

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Julian sounds like an awesome character. We'll have to put him on the list. We've just run through the four linked Edward Eager books that begin with Half Magic, and are back to rereading My Father's Dragon. The end of The Time Garden, which has the scene in which Katherine and Martha's children travel back in time and meet (and rescue) their mothers as children, was a fabulous reading experience. As Jeff read the scene and Eleanor realized what was happening, she got incredibly excited, so much so that she started bouncing and jumping on the couch, sputtering, "Everything! Everything!" I can't wait for her to discover other linked fictional universes.

Your descriptions of Julian's tall tales made me think of a picture book which also involves tall tales and strange, elaborate drawings: Waiting for Gregory,by Kimberly Willis Holt, illustrated by Gabi Swiatkowska. It's a book Aunt Irene and cousin Ona sent Eleanor when I was pregnant with Isabel -- a Preparing for the New Baby book, with a couple of twists.

The book begins:

Aunt Athena is expecting a baby boy.

She says we'll call him Gregory.

The picture is of Iris, the narrator, holding the rendering of Aunt Athena's pregnancy. It gives you the sense of the lovely, odd combination Swiatkowska achieves in her illustrations: her characters have an 18th-century feel about them, and the pages are filled with intricate line drawings of ladders and angels and strange machines -- it feels a little like an artist's notebook.

Iris is eager for her cousin to be born, and curious about when it's going to happen, but no one will give her a straight answer. "Soon, Iris, but not too soon," her father tells her. And then the myths come: Iris's grandfather tells her Gregory will be arriving by stork; her grandmother tells her he's growing under a cabbage in her aunt's garden, her friend Lacey insists it has to do with Aunt Athena eating "a thousand chocolate-chip ice cream sundaes with sour pickles on top." Finally, Iris asks her mother, who pulls out the most accurate information from each story (while still eliding any actual physical facts of pregnancy), and gives Iris a rough estimate.

Iris goes on in the vein of Babies Can't Eat Kimchee to imagine all the things she wants to do with Gregory:

When Gregory arrives, of course, he can't do any of those things yet, but there is the hopeful, pleased sense that some day he will.

Love, Annie

Up from the basement

2011-11-20T23:37:00.001-05:00

Dear Annie,

Bob has gone through a flurry of Fall Cleaning this weekend, digging boxes out of the basement and reorganizing our storage space. Several boxes marked, "Children's books -- take to Maine" have surfaced, and he hasn't been able to resist pulling some of our favorites to have back on the shelves. Some of what we've got on display:

A very worn copy of the wonderful Santore Wizard of Oz,
Several George and Martha books,
Blueberries for Sal,
Spinky Sulks,
Sisters, by David McPhail,
The Watsons Go to Birmingham, by Christopher Paul Curtis (must blog on this one soon),
The Thirteen Clocks,

and on and on. I live with lots of these books at work, but it's so cozy having the dog-eared copies here on the bookshelves in the dining room.

The one I grabbed and happily re-read this evening is
The Stories Julian Tells, by Ann Cameron. The cover has been redesigned kind of unimaginatively, but the internal illustrations by Ann Strugnell are still intricate and lovely. It's an early chapter book -- one of those starter books in which each chapter is a separate short story.

Julian is an older brother who leans toward magical thinking and making up tall tales. The first story refers to corporal punishment in a way that one could be unhappy about. Julian and Huey's father makes a pudding for their mother. "A wonderful pudding....It will taste like a whole raft of lemons. It will taste like a night on the sea." The pudding is beautiful, the boys are told to stay away from it, and of course they consume almost all of it when no one else is around. The last part of the story involves the angry father saying that there's going to be some beating and whipping going on, and the boys are clearly scared he's going to hit them. The beating and whipping turn out to refer to the steps in making a new pudding, which the dad supervises and the boys make. They're tired from the exertion, but physically unharmed and no longer hungry for pudding.

I'm making this sound bad, but the relationship between father and sons throughout the book is clearly loving and teasing. The second story, "Catalog Cats," is one that will stay with many readers for years, if not decades. Dad sends away for a seed catalog, and the younger Huey asks Julian,

"What's a catalog?"
"A catalog," I said, "is where cats come from. It's a big book full of pictures of hundreds and hundreds of cats. And when you open it up, all the cats jump out and start running around."
"I don't believe you," Huey said.
"It's true," I said.
"But why would Dad be sending for that catalog cat book?"
"The cats help with the garden," I said.
"I don't believe you," Huey said.

"It's true," I said. "You open the catalog, and the cats jump out. They run outside and work in the garden."

When the much-anticipated catalog finally arrives, Huey bursts into tears because there are no cats. He explains to their confused father about the cats that will help prepare the soil and plant the seeds. Again we have the apprehension about parental anger.

"Julian!" said my father.
"Yes," I said. When my father's voice gets loud, mine gets so small I can only whisper.
"Julian," my father said, "didn't you tell Huey that catalog cats are invisible?"

The father goes on to weave a much taller tale about the catalog cats, how they move too fast to be seen, and they only work on gardens if people do half the work too. By the end of the succeeding chapter, Julian half believes in them.

Our girls were quite fond of this one -- it was lovely to revisit tonight.

Love,

Deborah

Sesame Street, old and new

2011-11-18T22:35:00.000-05:00

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Press Here gets high marks in our house. At 4 1/2, Eleanor finds it totally amusing and fun -- really gets into pushing the dots, though she knows of course that it's not real. Isabel likes getting her hands all over it because that's what Eleanor is doing, but she doesn't seem to get the apparent causal connection, either to think that her pressing on the dots is doing anything, or to realize that it isn't. My feeling is that it's a book with a very specific perfect age range: say, 3 to 5.

All this talk of self-conscious picture books has made me think of an oldie from my childhood: the Sesame Street classic The Monster at the End of This Book. I'm glad to see it's still around. It's a similarly meta-story: Grover sees the title, and spends the whole book talking to the reader about how nervous he is about the monster that's coming. Of course, you get to the end, and the monster is Grover himself ("Oh, I am so embarrassed.") There's apparently a new sequel to the book, starring Elmo as well as Grover: Another Monster at the End of This Book.

We don't have a ton of TV tie-in books, but I've found the Sesame Street ones to be pretty decent as the genre goes. (It's funny -- I don't remember buying any of them, or even receiving them as gifts, but we have several. They're kind of like mushrooms, growing up naturally in the soil of any house containing kids.)

Isabel's favorite is Sesame Street Ready for School, a 10-page lift-the-flap board book that I think we may have found in our building's laundry room. It's pretty awesome: one double-page spread focuses on shapes in a street scene of kids going to school, one on numbers (counting things in the classroom), one on colors (art class), one on action words (on the playground), and the last on food (snack time). You can tell this is new, politically correct Sesame Street by the fact that Cookie Monster's cookie-shaped lunch box contains only a fruit cup. Sigh.

The other favorite Sesame Street book around here is Animal Alphabet. In it, Elmo and the other Sesame Street regulars walk you through animals whose names begin with every letter, in order. We have a number of alphabet books, but the cartoony nature of this one (and of course the appearance of Elmo, who is like crack to children) has made it a hit with both girls for quite some time. The text of these books isn't terribly interesting, but it's always at least decent, and there is an underlying educational philosophy, which is more than I can say for a lot of the TV books out there.

Love, Annie

Shaking it up

2011-11-17T00:22:00.000-05:00

Dear Annie,

Continuing here with the permeable fourth wall, I'm having a hard time deciding how I feel about
Press Here by Herve Tullet. It's a large-format, sturdy-paged book with lots of dots in it. It starts with one yellow dot and the words, "Press here and turn the page." Two dots appear on the next page, and the reader is encouraged to press a dot again. A third dot appears. One page instructs the reader to tilt the book to the left, and all the dots (there are more by now) end up on the far left side of the page. Then the book holder straightens it out:


Perfect! ... Now press hard on all the dots. Really hard.

Not bad. Shake them up a little.

Pretty, isn't it? Try blowing on them ... to get rid of the black.

Hmmmm. Maybe a bit harder?

And on it goes: clapping makes the dots bigger, and at the end of course, the only thing to do is to go back to the beginning.

One of my colleagues has a three year-old who loves this book. Like Eleanor and Isabel with the cats, he knows it's not real, and he gets that it's a joke. I think there's also something satisfyingly tactile about being instructed to put your hands all over a book. So sometimes I think, this is cool three year-old humor. Yet at other times it feels a little too cute, a little too much like a kids' book that's angling for a museum shop to sell it. Too self-conscious, maybe. What do your girls think of this one?

I have no problems with the hilariously self-conscious
We Are in a Book! by the prolific Mo Willems. This one's my favorite Elephant & Piggie book. The two characters start out sitting back-to-back.

"Piggie!"
"Yes, Gerald?"
"I think someone is looking at us."

So Piggie gets up and takes a look:

After some consideration, they agree that "A reader is reading us," leading them to the joyous realization: "We are in a book!"

Piggie gets a crafty look in her eye and says, "I can make the reader say a word," and demonstrates:

The fact that the reader has said Banana leads them to gales of falling-down laughter and a few repeats of the word. Then the existential realization hits that the book is going to end: Piggie lifts a corner of a page to check how long it is (57 pages).

Gerald, as is his wont, gets more and more upset:

This book is going too fast!
I have more to give!
More words!
More jokes!
More 'bananas"!

The solution, of course, is to send the reader back to the beginning, to "read us again."

I'm so fond of E&P, and to have them speaking directly to me -- knowing I'm there -- it's a treat.

Love,

Deborah

You -- yes, you! -- are reading this book

2011-11-13T22:32:00.004-05:00

Dear Aunt Debbie,

You have your finger on the pulse of the children's book world with your thoughts about superhero books! In this weekend's NYT Book Review, Roger Sutton touches on the same subject (though I must say, he's a little more dour). I'm kind of sorry to see Bumblebee Boy go off by himself -- afraid, I guess, that his solo books will be aimed at boys and perhaps take boy readership away from the Ladybug Girl books, the way Dora was more okay for boys to like until Diego came along.

Writing last week about books that engage the reader with the idea that a book is being constructed as they read got me thinking about a few picture books written in the second person which are big hits at our house.

Right Where You Are Now, by Lisa Montierth, came to us as a family gift: cousin Molly sent it recently to Eleanor and Isabel (she's friends with the illustrator, Ashley Burke). I wasn't at all sure what to expect from the cover, which has a sort of Hansel and Gretel vibe, but the book is based on an interesting idea, and the illustrations are terrific. Each double-page spread includes a scene of today's world on the left, and a scene from prehistoric times on the right:

It gets you talking about prehistory, with all its lava and lush rainforest growth, and it certainly increases your prehistoric animal vocabulary: plesiosaur, merychippus, nimravid. If you're concerned about telling these guys apart or pronouncing their names properly, never fear: the last pages include a visual dictionary, so you can be sure you're not mixing up megacerops and uintatherium (as I did on the first reading). It's kind of awesome to hear your 2-year-old yelling out "Nimravid!" when you turn the page to see the face of a saber-tooth cat-like creature (actually not a feline, but related as much to hyenas as to cats). It's my favorite kind of nonfiction book: well-written, imparting its information in context, leading to lots of questions.

There Are Cats in This Book and its sequel, There Are No Cats in This Book, are purely playful. Viviane Schwarz is the author-illustrator here, and the two books focus on a trio of cats (Tiny, Moonpie, and Andre), who address the reader directly. In the first book, the cats want you to play with them. They tell you when to turn the pages, and ask you to throw them balls of yarn and open the boxes they're hiding in. When they get wet on a page full of fish, they ask you to blow on them, and emerge all fluffy. The pages abound with flaps, and the cats are very good-natured and eager for what's going to come next.

In There Are No Cats in This Book, the cats are antsy. They want to get out of the book, and will try pretty much anything: pushing the side of the page, jumping out (the book becomes a pop-up for a moment), and finally, asking you to wish them out. Then they send you a postcard, before eventually returning to the book. The cats' manic energy is totally engaging. Even though Eleanor and Isabel both know that they're not really changing the content of the book by doing what the cats ask, they get into playing with it. Another way of exercising your superpowers, I suppose....

Love, Annie

Superhero!

2011-11-10T23:47:00.002-05:00

Dear Annie,

Denise, your pal, occasional guest blogger, and mother of a soon-to-be 2 year-old boy, raised this question after your most recent post:

As I have been thinking of books to get Emerson, I have been noticing that he gravitates toward Superman and popular cartoon books that involve action, fighting, and lots of loud glossy pages, books I do not enjoy reading. He likes Star Wars, the Incredibles, all those Nickelodean characters..

I would love recommendations for my lil' boy who loves to pretend fight, play with balls, and turn anything into a bat.

I'm sticking to the superhero part of this question today, starting with
SuperHero ABC, by Bob McLeod, whose day job is being a comic book artist. It's your basic ABC book, but each letter is a superhero, starting with "Astro-Man is Always Alert for An Alien Attack. He Avoids Asteroids! He has Asthma!"

Here are a few more:

Fun sense of humor, occasional gross moment ("The Volcano Vomits on Villains. He's Valiant! He's Vile! It's Very gross!") No plot, but as long as Emerson isn't totally identifying with brand-name superheroes, there's lots to look at.

Parents come to the store frequently looking for books about superheroes or Star Wars characters that they can read to their very young children. The demand is usually there because the kids are aware of the characters, but don't really know who they are. The parents don't want serious violence and they don't want to show their kids the contemporary movies on these characters. Three very basic biographies of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman by Ralph Cosentino hit the spot on this request.

They give enough background information about the characters that other books -- and playground scenarios -- will make more sense. Definitely worth a parental read-through before introducing them, though. The basic stories have a certain amount of destruction and demise of parents. They're in comic book format in small-ish hardcover books and sell incredibly well at the store.

Our friend Bumblebee Boy, last seen negotiating pretend play roles with Ladybug Girl, now has spun off a book of his own:
The Amazing Adventures of Bumblebee Boy, by David Soman and Jacky Davis. Ladybug Girl isn't here, but Bumblebee Boy (aka Sam)'s kid brother Owen is constantly trying to enter Sam's adventures.

While Bumblebee Boy clashes with evil pirates, fights a fire dragon, stops a runaway lion, and has various other adventures, the pajama-clad Owen keeps intervening.

"No, Owen! I am playing Bumblebee Boy," says Sam. You can't be in this game."
"Why?" asks Owen.
This is a bit of a problem. Sam knows that he is not supposed to be mean to Owen, but he feels like playing his own game right now.
Sam must think fast.
"Because," says Sam, "you are not a superhero like me, see?"
Sam dashes off.

Eventually, Bumblebee Boy decides that fighting aliens on the moon is too much for him to do alone, and he and Owen negotiate a deal in which Owen brings along some bank robber monsters to the moon. It has echoes of Even Firefighters Hug Their Moms in its pretend play elements, but lots of good swashbuckling too.

And then there's
The Astonishing Secret of Awesome Man by Michael Chabon (yes, that Michael Chabon).

Hi! I'm a superhero [says the guy flying through an urban landscape in a Superman-style cape-and-tights outfit]. My name is Awesome Man.
I have a cape as red as a rocket,
a mask as black as midnight,
and a stylin' letter A on my chest.
I'm just basically awesome.

He does awesome, totally super-hero-ish stuff --

-- sometimes with his Awesome Dog Moskowitz. He stops trains, vanquishes Professor Von Evil in his Antimatter Slimebot, and gives the Flaming Eyeball his comeuppance. Sometimes he gets a little too wired and starts hitting buildings and throwing trucks around. "I might hurt somebody, or destroy a city or something." So he calms down in the Fortress of Awesome and has something to eat. By the end of the book he's revealed his secret identity -- a slightly airbrushed-looking kid -- and like the firefighter of yore, hugs his mom.

So Denise, these are all definitely action-packed books, but they have more humor, style, and even good writing than the stuff that gets generated by the licensed-product machinery. I hope there's something here that makes both you and Emerson happy.

Love,

Deborah

Breaking the fourth wall

2011-11-08T23:12:00.000-05:00

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Before I move too far away from the subject of books on color, I want to include a shout-out for another Eric Carle book that Isabel adores: Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? Carle is the illustrator here (Bill Martin, Jr. wrote the text), so the pictures are his wonderful familiar streaky collages. It's kind of the proto-version of The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse: lots of illustrations of brightly-colored animals, though here most are the colors nature made them. The question and answer format is rhythmic, and encourages kids to respond when you read it aloud: "Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see? I see a yellow duck looking at me." We read it a lot.

Your discussion of Linda Sue Park and the way she plays with narrative voice in Project Mulberry got me thinking about other authors who address their audiences directly or in other ways consciously engage kids with the fact that they are constructing a book. Sometimes this involves a conversation between author and character, as you write about with Park; often, it happens through a second-person address directly to the reader.

Judith Viorst (of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day fame) has a recent entry in this category: Lulu and the Brontosaurus, which you mentioned briefly last year here. It's a short chapter book, packed with attitude from the first page:

OKAY! All right! You don't have to tell me! I know!

I know that people and dinosaurs have never lived on earth at the same time. And I know that dinosaurs aren't living now. I even also know that paleontologists (folks who study dinosaurs) decided that a dinosaur that was once called a brontosaurus (a very nice name) shouldn't be called brontosaurus anymore, and changed it to apatosaurus (a kind of ugly name). But since I'm the person writing this story, I get to choose what I write, and I'm writing about a girl and a BRONTOSAURUS. So if you don't want to read this book, you can close it up right now -- you won't hurt my feelings. And if you still want to read it, here goes:

Most of the rest of the book is a straight narrative (though it does contain a number of parenthetical asides), about an extremely bratty little girl named Lulu who decides she wants a brontosaurus for a pet. She's spoiled, and won't take no for an answer, so when her parents refuse to get her one, she takes off into the forest by herself. Lulu runs into several wild animals, who she's rude to and then defeats easily: squeezing a snake, bonking a tiger on the head with her suitcase. She finds her brontosaurus, but -- here comes the twist -- it turns out that he wants to make her into the pet, not the other way around. She learns a little humility, and ultimately apologizes to the other animals, and life is better. As so often happens with these Children Behaving Badly stories, she's more interesting when unrepentant.

The catchphrase that has come to us from Lulu is her catchy, repeated rhyme:

I'm gonna, I'm gonna,

I'm gonna gonna get

A bronto-bronto-bronto

Brontosaurus for a pet.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna,

I'm gonna gonna get

A bronto-bronto-bronto

Brontosaurus for a pet.

Fair warning: reading about Lulu leads to lots of chanting of the above.

At the end of the book, Viorst plays heavily with narrative voice again ("Wait! I'm really not all that sure about this ending. It may be a little too mushy, a little too sad"). Eleanor enjoys this telling and re-telling, and I think it's a interesting model to expose kids to when they're making up their own stories all the time.

There are some picture books I have in mind as well, but I'll save them for another night.

Love, Annie

Linda Sue Park

2011-11-06T22:39:00.002-05:00

Dear Annie,

It makes me happy that The Artist who Painted a Blue Horse is a hit in your family. I love all the pictures, but wasn't sure how it would play with kids as a book. There's a whole category of picture books which I see before they're published and I say, "It'll be great when it's a board book," and then I don't buy them as hardcover/paper page books because I can't see the appeal to older kids. I waffled on this one, but Carle's pictures pulled me in. I have a 3-foot tall poster of the blue horse from the cover on a wall at the store -- can be seen from quite a distance.

Maybe because business is getting busier and busier (yes, all the Christmas and Hanukkah books are on display already), I find my focus with the blog bouncing all over the place. This week I've come back to Linda Sue Park, a wonderfully versatile author. I've talked about A Long Walk to Water, set in the Sudan. She's written many books, both picture books and middle-grade novels. She even has a new Christmas book this year: The Third Gift, which taught me a lot about frankincense.

Park is Korean-American, and many of her books include Korean themes. A Single Shard, for which she won the 2002 Newbery Award, is about a 12th century Korean potter and his apprentice. But the one I wanted to talk about today is about a contemporary Korean-American girl:
Project Mulberry. There are two things that make this book engagingly out-of-the-ordinary. First, it deals with kids' feelings about race, in age-appropriate ways. Julia and her friend Patrick want to do a project for the state fair, and her mother (who is Korean) suggests they raise silkworms. Julia doesn't want to be typecast as the Asian kid in her predominantly white small town, but doesn't know how to resist the silkworm idea. "I wanted a nice normal, All-American, red-white-and-blue kind of project," she writes.

Julia also sees that her mother is uncomfortable with black people -- it embarrasses her, but any attempts to confront her mother directly get deflected. There's a lovely scene when Patrick, Julia and her mother visit someone who they've been told might have mulberry leaves to feed to the silkworms. He answers the door, and Julia is surprised then apprehensive to discover he's black -- worried about her mother's reaction. The man is startled, he tells them, because he was expecting them to be white. The book is aimed at the fourth-to-seventh grade age range, and Park presents Julia's thought processes in an empathetic way, saying out loud those things which are often unspoken.

The other lovely unusual element of the book is that between all the chapters, there's a brief two-page discussion between the author and the main character, arguing about the direction the book should go.

Me: Do you want my opinion? I am not happy with the way things are going here. I hate the project idea, Kenny [her brother] is driving me nuts, and I still haven't found another Connecticut.
Ms. Park: Actually, no -- I don't want your opinion. I've written other books, and only once has a character ever talked to me. You talk to me all the time, and I'm finding that hard to get used to.
Me: Like right now, while you're in the -- ahem -- bathroom. Well, I don't care whether you want my opinion or not -- you're getting it. That was a terrible chapter.
Ms. Park: Would it help if I said I'm sorry you're having such a hard time?
Me: If you were really sorry, you'd go back and rewrite it.
Ms. Park: You're the main character. You have to have a problem or two. If you didn't, there wouldn't be any story.

There's a lot of negotiating about plot in these little interludes, and at one point Julia gets so angry that she refuses to participate in the discussion.

Project Mulberry is part of a genre of books which say: you're not a baby anymore; we (the authors) are going to talk to you about real stuff, and we know you'll understand it, but we're also going to remember that you're not a teenager yet. Part of the progression.

Love,

Deborah

Colors!

2011-11-04T23:22:00.000-04:00

Dear Aunt Debbie,

You make an awesome Miss Rumphius. I can totally see Mary Poppins in your future, too.

Aside from reading a ton of college essays my students write, and writing a ton of college recommendations, I tend to allow the application process to be background noise in my classes. My students are all so college-crazed at this time of year that I think allowing too much talk about it into the classroom would be unhealthy -- it sucks all the air right out. So let's move on from the SAT question to a different level of learning.

Colors. I remember when Eleanor was learning concepts that I was struck by the fact that colors didn't come to her earlier. She got shapes first, and opposites, but color recognition lagged. Isabel is the same way, perhaps even more so. In recent weeks, she's started commenting on the colors of things, but she gets them wrong probably 95% of the time. While she knows all the words for all the colors, she seems unable or uninterested in matching them up correctly. We've recently started trying to reinforce the concept that color words refer to specific colors. We'll ask Isabel what color her blue bowl is, and she'll say, brightly, "Pink!" or "Green!" (That is, until Eleanor whispers the right answer.)

So maybe she's color-blind? Or maybe it's just time for us to put a few of our favorite color-related books into the rotation.

We've mentioned the wonderful I Love Colors before. It's one of my top-favorite board books -- so totally joy-filled, especially on the last page:

I also really like the Colors section in Food for Thought:

Skewing a little more in-depth on the concepts, here are three of our favorites:

Blue Hat, Green Hat, by Sandra Boynton. On each page, a series of animals wears items of clothing in different colors: "Blue Hat, Green Hat, Red Hat, Oops." The "Oops" at the end of each page refers to the turkey, who puts on all her clothes wrong: she's standing in her hat, or wearing pants on her head, or sticking socks on her wings, all with this lovely, slightly cross-eyed smile as the other animals grow increasingly perturbed:

Blue Hat, Green Hat has a terrific rhythm to it. Even before Eleanor was old enough to understand why the turkey wearing everything upside down was funny, she liked reading it. Once she got the joke, she found it hysterical.

You recently sent us Eric Carle's latest book, The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse. It is a huge hit. The other Carle books we own are in board book format, but this one benefits hugely from the large-format pages. It has few words, and joyful, bright, large paintings on each page.

The book begins with a painting of a child of indeterminate gender painting on a large canvas. The text reads:

I am an artist

and I paint...

Each successive page is an animal the artist paints, all in unexpected colors: a blue horse, a red crocodile, a yellow cow, a black polar bear. After a series of these great double-page spreads, the artist stands back from the canvas, paint on the floor, to say, "I am a good artist."

It's a simple, clear, exuberant book. Carle credits Franz Marc, painter of the original blue horse, as his inspiration, and includes a reproduction of one of Marc's paintings at the end. Isabel has started saying, "I am a good artist," a catchphrase I'm happy to encourage.

Finally, there is Mouse Paint, by Ellen Stoll Walsh. This one is about color mixing. Three white mice live on a white sheet of paper, so the cat can't see them. One day, they find three jars of paint in primary colors. They climb into the jars, covering themselves, then dance in puddles of paint to make secondary colors: "Look! Red feet in a blue puddle make purple!" The paint makes them sticky, so the mice wash themselves off (in the cat's water bowl, natch) and paint on the paper in both primary and secondary colors.

I love the way the narrative allows you to encourage your child to guess what the two mixed colors will form, and the mice are quite appealing. The one thing I wish this book had is a picture of the final painting: I imagine a Mondrian-like canvas, huge and blocky. I want to know what the mice create.

I'm assuming this will all sink in someday....

Love, Annie

Reading for the test

2011-11-03T00:13:00.000-04:00

Dear Annie,

Your crowd has to have had the best set of costumes in all of Brooklyn, if not in the continental U.S. Superb!

So here I am as Miss Rumphius:

A few customers actually recognized me -- those pieces of paper pinned to the cape were lupine seed packets. And one person thought I was Mary Poppins. She'd be a good character to be sometime.

Life has gone back to normal -- my co-workers are no longer Dr. Who (complete with fez), Katniss from The Hunger Games, or a very business-like young woman with FBI ID card from the X files. So, as promised, I will turn to SATs and vocabulary. On Monday, while I was floating around as Miss R, a teenage customer walked into the store and asked me if we had flash cards for studying vocabulary for the SATs. Right on cue. (No, we don't.) Like you, I don't have a simple answer to the what-to-do-about-the-test problem. Sigh.

If kids read a lot, they'll improve their vocabulary -- we all agree on this. It's a lifetime thing -- I don't know if it makes a difference if you read a pile of novels in the six weeks before you take the SAT. I tend not to think of individual books as having higher vocabulary levels than others. As a wildly generalized rule of thumb, I'd say books written more than 20 or 30 years ago -- all the way back to 200+ -- probably have more vocabulary words unfamiliar to a 21st century teenager. And my own prejudice is that British writers tend to be less hesitant about using unusual or more sophisticated vocabulary. It depresses me that the motivation for reading would be to score better on the SAT. And searching for vocabulary words while reading a good novel seems bound to put a damper on the experience.

Then there's the question of video games sucking away reading time. Sigh again. Many times, I hear parents sounding helpless in the face of their children's computer and video game habits. Often, I think this is because parents didn't have a plan before the games came into their children's lives. Video games are very seductive, and sometimes addictive. Some of them can be fun and interesting too. Two of the most useful words I know for parents facing the digital world are delay and limit. Better that a kid should come to this stuff later than the average child rather than earlier. Gives them more time to experience the world first-hand, be it reading or running around or building stuff with Legos or playing make-believe. Then when games do arrive in one's house, even one little game, the limits should be clear. I know some people who say, only in the car or when we're traveling. Or only on weekends. Or just half an hour a day. If there's some routine that defines when they should stop, it helps fend off the Video Game That Ate My Child's Mind.

Is it interesting to be constantly surrounded by teenagers in the throes of thinking about and applying to college? Or is that usually background noise to the work of the day?

Love,

Deborah

Halloween in Oz

2011-10-31T22:37:00.002-04:00

Dear Aunt Debbie,

I definitely want to see a picture of you as Miss Rumphius.

I've always loved Halloween. Partly it's because my birthday is so close to it, and partly because I've always enjoyed dressing up. Jeff isn't generally a costume guy, but this year Eleanor began planning for an Oz-themed Halloween last March, and we all were cast as characters. Here's how it turned out:

That's Eleanor as Dorothy and Isabel as Toto, plus our good friend Ian as the Tin Man (his mom Holly is the Cyclone in the back).

I cannot overstate how much Charles Santore's Wizard of Oz, the very first book I blogged about on this site, has to do with Eleanor's love of Dorothy. Yes, we've seen the movie at this point, but it was Santore's illustrations and thoughtful abridgement that brought the story to life for Eleanor, and now captivates both my children. An absolute classic.

Happy Halloween!

Love, Annie

Halloween

2011-10-30T22:39:00.000-04:00

Dear Annie,

Vocabulary and SATs. A subject I promise to address next post. At the moment I'm full of the spirit of the season. First:

Happy Birthday! I hope you've been celebrated all day long.

It always seemed special to me to have your birthday so close to Halloween.

Our Halloween tradition at the store involves the entire staff dressing in costume. As the Book Lady, I always try to be a book character. I've been Miss Clavell from Madeleine, Amelia Bedelia, the zookeeper's wife from Good Night Gorilla, the Guinness Book of World Records, and Professor McGonagall from Harry Potter. So, in the constant search for Women of a Certain Age in children's literature, I've decided this year to be the eponymous
Miss Rumphius, world traveler and sower of lupine seeds, striving to make the world more beautiful. The book is written and illustrated by Barbara Cooney; it's a lovely lyrical celebration of living an engaged life. Here's Miss Rumphius distributing lupine seeds:

Fortuitously, I still have the Hobbit cape I made for Lizzie's birthday party 15 years ago -- pictured here. Tomorrow it will belong to Miss Rumphius -- amazing similarity, don't you think? That and lots of hair devices for building topknots, and I'll be a dead ringer. Picture to come next time, if it's not too embarrassing.

Happy birthday and Halloween to you.

Love,

Deborah

Better than SAT prep?

2011-10-28T22:41:00.000-04:00

Dear Aunt Debbie,

I'm glad we're swinging back to YA for the moment, because I have a question for you. I spent three hours last night and two more this afternoon holding Parent-Teacher conferences, speaking with the parents of about half of my students (I teach just over 150 kids each semester). Exhausting, but totally worthwhile.

One of the questions that often comes up in these conferences is how parents can help their high school-age kids prepare for the SATs and college applications. Many parents complain that their kids aren't big readers, or used to be but aren't anymore; that they spend all their time on the computer either playing games or doing homework. At this point in their lives, these kids are learning vocabulary from test-prep courses: rote memorization with handy tricks to game the system.

As I've mentioned before, I don't think this kind of vocabulary study works particularly well. It's good for the short term, but it takes reading a word in context multiple times to understand its nuances, and to retain it. I encourage parents to see all reading that their kids do as positive, and not to pile on the extra homework in an attempt to make their kids into learning machines. Still, I am often asked for book recommendations that will help these high-schoolers succeed academically.

So here's what I'm wondering: are there YA books out there that are both high-interest and high-vocabulary level? My student monitor asked me about this this afternoon, and I couldn't come up with anything off the top of my head. When I read YA these days, I don't pay particular attention to the vocabulary level -- do you?

Love, Annie

Combat, sharks and justice

2011-10-26T23:14:00.000-04:00

Dear Annie,

I'm starting to write this as I listen to your youtube Danse Macabre link. Halloween music.

I'm doing one of those radical turns of subject today, veering over to the death-and-macabre side of things for older kids. I got a note from someone I haven't seen in a few years, the daughter of one of my father's (your grandfather's) oldest friends. She was wondering about books for her 12 year-old son who's a big non-fiction reader, especially history. She mentioned war stories, and somehow she made me think of a book I recommend fairly frequently:
Left for Dead, by Pete Nelson. I'm sort of stunned I didn't think of this one when we were trying to come up with kid-appropriate combat stories. The subtitle of the book is "A Young Man's Search for Justice for the USS Indianapolis." The Navy cruiser Indianapolis delivered components of the atomic bombs to the Mariana Islands in the summer of 1945, and on its return trip was torpedoed and sunk. Distress calls were not reacted to, and hundreds of men ended up in the water for four days before the survivors were rescued. 880 men died, many of them killed by sharks as they tried to stay afloat. The captain was court-martialed for his handling of the ship when it was under attack, although the trial was controversial and some saw him as the scapegoat for Navy incompetence. He eventually committed suicide in 1968. In the 1975 movie Jaws, one character gives a grim four-minute speech about surviving the ordeal of the sinking (shark attacks being the theme here).

Twenty-two years after Jaws came out, Hunter Scott, a sixth grader in Florida saw the movie and started asking questions about the Indianapolis. His sixth-grade history project ended up tracking down some of the surviving crew, publicizing the injustices, and four years later, in 2001, leading to the exoneration of the captain.

The book tells the stories of the ship and sailors, and of Scott's investigation. Some of it is within the context of Florida conservative politics, but it's an amazing story -- two amazing stories. It's also well enough written that a fair number of customers have come back to say how much they liked it. It's got combat and death and scariness; incompetence and accusations and cover-ups; and a kid with curiosity, brains and perseverance. And in the end, there's justice -- in a too-late (but still triumphant) kind of way.

Love,

Deborah

More music (Bug-Gup!)

2011-10-24T22:20:00.000-04:00

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Jim Dale seems to do a pretty good job with Peter and the Wolf. I'm still stuck on my Bernstein, though -- there's a kind of warmth behind his voice that I find very appealing. He sounds like he's enjoying himself, and is happy that you know the piece as well as he does. He's quite encouraging.

One more book with music: Tubby the Tuba, by Paul Tripp, illustrated by Henry Cole. I remember the Tubby the Tuba cartoon from my childhood mostly for Tubby's melancholy voice, and I'm pretty sure the CD recording included with this book is the same one. I'm sure at least that it's not the new recording made by Meredith Viera advertised on the official Tubby website.

The illustrations are new -- nice and cartoony, and a little bit updated. Tubby wears shorts and a t-shirt in rehearsal, and the orchestra's usual conductor shows up in jeans and Birkenstocks with socks. Never fear -- when Signor Pizzicato, the guest conductor, arrives, everyone is in a tuxedo.

It's interesting to look back at Tubby the Tuba from an adult perspective. It's so clearly a story about being an outsider and then figuring out a way to belong: Tubby wants to play the melodies that everyone in the orchestra gets to play, but he keeps squashing the poor little tune, and is relegated to going "oompah, oompah." Yes, he's the fat kid no one wants to play with, and the violins are mean to him. Wandering off at night, he meets up with a frog singing by a pond. The frog's salutation may be my favorite part:

Bug-Gup! Bug-Gup! Lovely evening!

Bug-Gup! I said, bee-oo-ti-ful evening. Hello!

Bug-Gup! Hello! Bug-Gup! Hello!

The frog teaches Tubby a frog/tuba melody, and the next day, Tubby impresses Signor Pizzicato and the rest of the orchestra with it. Everyone wants to play his tune. Maybe it's a little didactic, but when you include the recording, it's a lot of fun.

Along with Peter and Tubby, my girls have Danse Macabre on repeat these days, and do a terrific dance where they pretend to be witches and are frightened away by sunrise at the end. I don't think anyone has yet turned that into a children's book, but I expect Neil Gaiman will get there sooner or later.

Love, Annie

Listen!

2011-10-23T22:05:00.000-04:00

Dear Annie,

I offer you one more Peter & the Wolf, although I haven't listened to the whole thing, so I don't know how it comes out. There's a whole generation that's bonded to anything that Jim Dale says, because he's the voice of the Harry Potter audio books. I've just ordered a version of Peter and the Wolf read by Dale -- here's a quick sample. Am curious how it compares to Bernstein.

The music-and-story audios that had a big effect on our family were a handful of CDs from a Canadian group called Classical Kids. They're stories combining a young child character with biographical information and music of a major composer. The first one we hit was Mozart's Magic Fantasy, featuring a girl who wanders into a production of The Magic Flute. It messes with the plot a bit, given that it's adding a character.

Then we went on to their best-known recording, Beethoven Lives Upstairs, telling the story of the great composer's life and death from the point of view of a boy whose mother rents a room to the almost-deaf composer. Great story, lots of funeral scene.

The girls' favorite, though, was Vivaldi's Ring of Mystery, about La Pieta orphanage in Venice, where Vivaldi taught music to the girls. The central character is a violinist who goes on an adventure at Carnival time to try to discover her past. It has a few scary moments, and vivid images of Venice which stuck with our girls until they were high schoolers and we visited the city.

They're good stories, and they implant the music subliminally. All links above have audio samples attached. I think some of them may have been turned into movies -- or videos you can find on youtube. But just sitting at home or in the car listening is a special event.

Love,

Deborah

Books that come with music

2011-10-21T23:25:00.000-04:00

Dear Aunt Debbie,

We will have to check out some of those coloring books. I'm starting my Christmas list now....

I said recently that I'd identify the book that Michael was reading to Eleanor in this picture. The book itself is new to us, but the story and music behind it have become a staple in our house over the last several months.

Peter and the Wolf came into our lives when my mom told Eleanor (who is now taking ballet classes) about once dancing the part of the wolf in a performance. The pictures of my mom being caught around the waist by Peter's rope hung for years in Grandma and Grandpa's hallway, and I always found them fascinating. Eleanor was intrigued, and pretty soon after that, we checked out the Disney cartoon version on YouTube. The second we put it on, Isabel was hooked. Amazed by the wolf, entranced by the music. They were both a little scared, too, mostly by the wolf's slavering jaws, but it's Disney, so there's a happy ending.

Isabel's interest prompted us to buy the Leonard Bernstein version of the music. Isabel became truly obsessed. We listened to Peter and the Wolf at least three times a day for most of the summer. At the beginning of the recording, Bernstein presents the instruments playing each character in the story as a sort of quiz: "And what's that old bassoon doing? Right, it's Peter's grandfather. You really know this piece, don't you?" Oh yes, Leonard Bernstein, we do.

For Isabel's birthday, my parents found a gorgeous illustrated version of the story, which comes with a CD: Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, illustrated by Peter Malone. The story is largely the classic one: Peter goes wandering out of his house into the fields, though his grandfather tells him not to. The duck wanders out too, and play-fights with the bird; the cat appears and tries to eat the bird; Peter's grandfather sends him back inside. Then the wolf appears. The wolf chases everybody, eats the duck, and is ultimately captured by Peter, with the help of the bird. Hunters come and march the wolf off, and the whole thing ends with a parade.

I love the illustrations in this version: they have a very Russian feel to them, and remind me of Vladimir Vagin's gorgeous drawings in The King's Equal. The text has been sanitized a little: the wolf eats the duck here, but at the end he convinces the hunters that he'll be good, and they agree to let him go (!), and then he feels bad, so he coughs the duck up. Not like any wolf I've ever heard of, but okay. The grandfather is also a little nicer: in the Bernstein version, he's grumpy to the end, complaining at the parade about what might have happened if Peter hadn't caught the wolf. Here, he marches along proud of Peter.

I'm a big fan of Leonard Bernstein's voice, and after so many times through it, far prefer his creepy ending, with the duck's quacking still audible from inside the wolf's belly, as well as his slight upper-crust accent, to the narration on the book's CD. Still, the music is wonderful -- by turns playful, dramatic, and narrative. It bears listening to five thousand times.

Love, Annie

Activity!

2011-10-19T22:53:00.001-04:00

Dear Annie,

Do I sell sticker books? Yes, by the hundreds. So much so that I can recognize the particular DK Ultimate Sticker Book that's pasted all over Isabel in your hilarious picture. Sticker books come under the broad umbrella of activity books: stickers, coloring books, paper dolls, mazes, dot-to-dots, hidden pictures, etc. I have a particular tour of the store I offer people who are looking for travel activities: I ask the children's ages, then we visit various activity book racks, miniature versions of games, audio books, racks of small plastic objects (people, animals, cars...). Activity books, as I've mentioned, are where I try to contain the junky stuff: Barbie, Disney princesses, TV spinoffs.

I wanted to add two kinds of sticker books to your list. There are the paper doll books. They usually have a punch-out paper doll and lots of reusable sticker clothing to put on the doll. Illustrated on the left is an Usborne book that's a little less over-the-top than the Princess/Wedding/Fairy ones -- but they've got those too. Usborne, a British publisher of many different kinds of activity books, also does some good, non-product-driven sticker books. The farm sticker book is on the right; they have concept ones (numbers, letters, etc.), and lots of vehicles.

I want to put in a good word for coloring books. There are those who avoid them at all costs, feeling they have nothing to do with the creativity of doing art. I agree, standard color-between-the-lines books aren't art, but they are a form of more meditative activity that can be engaging on a trip or a quiet afternoon. Good for fine-motor practice too.

And these days there are also several lines of coloring books which are basically prompts to finish and color drawings. Taro Gomi, a wonderful Japanese illustrator, has done many along these lines:

Lots more on Gomi's books -- many of which are very large and thick, but fun -- and downloadable pages here.

Yesterday the mother of a ten year-old came in looking for
Rosie Flo coloring books. They're British, but most are published in the U.S. The books provide clothing and the child provides the people within them. These seem to hold interest of kids of many ages. Sometimes the pictures are whimsical clothing lined up on a page, and other times you get a scene:

Lots to do.

Love,

Deborah

In praise of sticker books

2011-10-17T23:28:00.000-04:00

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Our weekend away (and without internet access, hence without blogging) was lovely: the wedding of good friends, and two nights away from our normal life. I thought about children's books, of course; in fact, I read an excerpt of Home for a Bunny as part of the ceremony.

But what I want to write about tonight are sticker books. More specifically, sticker books as a great savior on plane rides and long car trips, sticker books as activity and bribe and simple, cheap fun. They're less messy than drawing with markers while traveling (though we brought those too), don't take up much space, and can occupy Eleanor for a nice long time, and Isabel for at least the minutes it takes for her to take all the stickers out and apply them to her body:

There are all kinds of sticker books, of course, sticker books for every kids' franchise on earth, product tie-ins up the wazoo. There are the dollar-fifty 6-page sticker books that the girls talk me into buying when we go to the bookstore; those are good for a subway ride, though I find that an inordinate number of them drip glitter. There are the 8 1/2 by 11 full-size books, some with hundreds upon hundreds of stickers. I can't claim to be a sticker book expert, but there are two types of books that the girls have particularly liked.

First, there's the Match the Sticker to its Place kind of book. DK publishes a lot of "Ultimate" sticker books, largely with product tie-ins, and their (now out of print) Disney Animals Ultimate Sticker Book occupied Eleanor for several sittings when she was about 2 1/2. She would find a sticker, peel it off, then hold it carefully while she turned the pages, trying to find the shadow shape where it fit. The Disney Animals one had the added benefit of including characters from all kinds of Disney movies, over a period of perhaps 50 years, and sorting them by type of animal: there was a whole page of jungle animals, a page of fish, a page of dogs and cats, etc. The sorting aspect was very pleasing. We've tried a few other DK books, never with quite as good results, but still well made overall.

Then there's the Here's a Scene, Paste Some Characters and Things On It kind of sticker book. On this trip, we brought along this Flower Fairies Sticker Storybook for Eleanor: pages of fairyland scenes on which you can stick extra fairies, flowers, nuts, berries, etc. The drawings in this one are all from the 1920s, by Cicely Mary Barker, so although the bits of text are dumb ("The picnic turns into a party. Soon the glade is covered with fairy decorations, and there are Flower Fairies everywhere!"), the stickers themselves are quite nice and old-fashioned. Eleanor spent about 20 minutes setting up a fairy picnic and giving all the fairies acorn and star hats.

Do sticker books fall under your purview at the book-and-toy store? Any suggestions for our next big trip?

Love, Annie

The postseason

2011-10-16T22:21:00.000-04:00

Dear Annie,

I hope your weekend away has been good, filled with friends, and relaxing.

Life at the store is starting to speed up, as it is wont to do this time of year. But before I sink into nothing-but-work, I thought I'd tip the hat to the baseball post-season. All the teams our extended family roots for have been eliminated long since, but I seem to be obsessively following the dwindling number of games still available. Baseball is such a pleasure, and the intensity of this time of year is always fascinating. Tonight could be the deciding game in the NLCS, then on to the World Series.

At the start of the 2010 season, I listed a few good kids' baseball books, but I'm adding two more today.

First, we'll travel back to the summer of 1941. My mother (your grandma) was home in New York between her junior and senior years at Rollins College in Florida. She turned 20 that summer, my daughter Mona's current age. Her 28 year-old boyfriend (my dad, your grandpa) was working for Life Magazine -- that might have been the summer they spent a night sleeping in Central Park (that family legend has always been fuzzy). Although the Mets eventually turned Helen into a baseball fan, I don't know if she or Frank was paying much attention to the game that remarkable year.

The Unforgettable Season by Phil Bildner, with illustrations by S.D. Schindler tells the stories of Yankee Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak (the longest ever), and Red Sox Ted Williams' season of batting .406 (.400 hasn't been touched since). It's a picture book -- aimed at ages 5 to 9 -- full of illustrations, statistics and suspense. 1941 also had the bittersweet distinction of being the last summer before World War II changed that generation's lives. By the following summer, my parents were married, your grandpa was in Basic Training, and U.S. involvement in the war was in full swing. Both Willliams and DiMaggio ended up in the military.

Getting back to the game, I offer a baseball novel that immerses the reader in the love of playing baseball.
Six Innings, by James Preller, focuses on the Little League postseason: a regional championship game. The structure of the novel is the innings of the game. We get to know all the players, and the announcer, who's a former team member who now is seriously ill. The book mixes real feelings and character development with evocative description of how it feels to be in the game. It's one of the best-written sports books I know for middle-graders. And while poking around online tonight to find more information about the book, I found this lovely and emotional blog entry by Preller, explaining what led him to write the book.

So, on to the World Series. With whoever's playing.

Love,

Deborah

mutual memories.2

2011-10-12T23:33:00.000-04:00

Dear Annie,

I'm back in DC, recreating the entry I wrote then lost on Sunday in Seattle.

Ah well, I knew I was pushing it with the The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish. I had hoped the repetition and suspense might grab. I know what you're saying about the creepiness of McKean's drawings, although I think the startling differentness of them can engage an older child.

Your mentioning good old Odd and the Frost Giants made me realize that Odd and Wolves in the Walls have the same infrastructure. Lucy in Wolves (or Odd in Frost Giants) is faced with family (gods) who have been summarily evicted from their homes by malevolent stronger beings. The family (gods) dither, while Lucy (Odd), the youngest of the group, summons common sense and courage to regain the territory.

original cover: 1902

We had a lovely small memorial service for Bob's mother on Saturday, and (unsurprisingly in this family) the subject of reading came up. Bob's nephew Pete -- whom you may remember as the wonderful photographer at your brother's wedding last summer -- talked about reading Kipling with his grandparents. Bob's dad read Pete the Just So Stories when he was a kid. Pete remembers fondly returning again and again to one particular story, "The Elephant's Child." Decades later, when his grandfather's health was failing, Pete sat by his bedside and read the story aloud to him. At the service, Bob starting reciting the story's lilting line, "on the banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees," and his brother, Pete, and several others chimed in. Later, my brother Al said he and his daughter Ona exchanged glances on that one, then he recited the same line to me.

It was a time for family and friends to share memories, of course. But there's something so satisfying about sharing words written more than a century ago that have been savored by generations of two families. Gifts given to children that go with them through life.

Love,

Deborah

family reading -- an image

2011-10-10T23:04:00.002-04:00

Dear Aunt Debbie,

I am drowning in work here, and Columbus Day means that tonight is really a teacher's Sunday night, so my larger ideas will have to wait. I hope you are well, and that the memorial for Bob's mom was good. In the meantime, here's one of my favorite images from last month's pictures -- from the evening of Isabel's birthday party, the girls being read to before bedtime by their uncle and aunt:

Isabel and Grace are reading Peek-a-boo; I'll write about what Michael was reading to Eleanor on Friday....

Love, Annie

Mutual memories.1

2011-10-10T00:11:00.000-04:00

Dear Annie,

I'm in Seattle, writing on an unfamiliar laptop, and somehow the computer ate the post I've been working on throughout the day. Rrgh!

It was about Bob's mom's memorial service (which is why we're here) and families and books. I'll re-create it and post next time (too late tonight), but in the meantime, imagine a lovely day in Alaska in 1938, a log cabin, a young woman destined to become my children's grandmother, and a good book:

More soon.

Love,

Deborah

Why I don't like Neil Gaiman's picture books

2011-10-07T22:34:00.001-04:00

Dear Aunt Debbie,

I have to admit it: I don't like the Neil Gaiman/Dave McKean picture books. I want to like them -- I read all of Gaiman's Sandman graphic novels in college, and went on to enjoy Good Omens, his satirical collaboration with Terry Pratchett (very funny, very Douglas Adams in tone). Eleanor and I both loved Odd and the Frost Giants; in fact, Eleanor recently asked me if there were any more books about Odd.

I think it may be largely a question of illustrations. Gaiman's writing has a wit and warmth about it, a sense of humor that I enjoy. Dave McKean's illustrations creep me out.

They're technically beautiful: combinations of drawing and collage and photograph, a melding of different styles, lots of dynamic movement. But there is something very inhuman about his people: the eyes which are nothing but pupil, the shadows and angular lines. They're not pictures I want to look at, and they're not pictures I much want Eleanor and Isabel to see either. For me, they overwhelm Gaiman's wit.

This is true more for The Wolves in the Walls than for The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, which we just received from you in the most wonderful Isabel Birthday Box. I haven't read it to Eleanor yet, but the interesting thing is that she saw it and didn't immediately ask me to, as she did ask me to read her every other book in the box.

About a year ago, we took another Gaiman/McKean collaboration out of the library. Crazy Hair is a poem, and an exercise in hyperbole:

"In my hair

Gorillas leap,

Tigers stalk,

And ground sloths sleep.

Prides of lions

Make their lair

Somewhere in my crazy hair."

The text is kind of cool. The drawings are kind of creepy. Eleanor had zero interest in the book -- didn't want to look at it, wouldn't even let me read it through once. My mom looked through it and pronounced it slightly disturbing.

Perhaps we'll all feel differently when the girls get a little older, and enjoy a disturbing thrill. For now, though, we are clearly not the Gaiman/McKean target audience.

Love, Annie

Gaiman picture books

2011-10-06T22:25:00.001-04:00

Dear Annie,

Ah, the two-year old world. Ah, wolfes.

Isabel has provided me with the perfect segue to two strange and wonderful and not necessarily young-child-friendly picture books by the excellent Neil Gaiman. We seem to have written about him only once, in relation to Norse mythology.

Wolves in the Walls by Gaiman, illustrated by Dave McKean, starts with Lucy hearing things:

(Not a book to read at bedtime.) Her family members dismiss her belief that there are wolves in the walls, but all three tell her, "You know what they say, if the wolves come out of the walls, then it's all over." They finally do, in a burst of black line drawings, causing the family to flee:

(Lucy's father is a professional tuba player.) The family huddles in the garden while the wolves party in the house. Lucy is the only rational one of the bunch. She sneaks back to rescue her pig-puppet, then concocts a plan for the family to return to the house and live in the walls.

"What?" said her father
"What?" said her mother.
"What?" said her brother.
"What?" said the Queen of Melanesia, who had dropped by to help with the gardening.

That's the Queen's entire participation in the book: she's a cameo. Lucy leads the family into the walls, then in an attack on the wolves:

"Arrgh!" howled the wolves. "The people have come out of the walls!"
"And when the people come of the the walls," shouted the biggest, fattest wolf, flinging aside the tuba, "it's all over!"

The wolves all flee and the family eventually restores order. Then Lucy starts hearing new noises... It's creepy and fascinating and wacky.

In the process of searching for already-scanned pictures from Wolves, I came upon a site called Teaching Children Philosophy which discusses "numerous philosophical issues concerning knowledge, metaphysics, and ethics" brought up by this off-beat book. Kind of lovely, actually.

Six years before Wolves, Gaiman and McKean collaborated on
The Day I Swapped my Dad for Two Goldfish, which I sent to you as an un-birthday present for Eleanor. It's another odd one, but higher on the purely funny end of the spectrum.

A boy's friend comes to visit with two goldfish in a bowl. They discuss a trade, but nothing offered by the narrator is acceptable.

I thought for a bit.

Some people have great ideas maybe once or twice in their life, and then they discover electricity or fire or outer space or something. I mean the kind of brilliant ideas that change the whole world. Some people never have them at all. I get them two or three times a week.

"I'll swap you my dad," I said.
"Oh-oh,” said my little sister.
"That's not a fair swap," said Nathan. I've got two goldfish, and you've only got one dad.

But the dad is bigger than the goldfish, so the swap is made. When Mum comes home the kid sister rats on her brother, and both children are sent off with the goldfish to retrieve the dad. Nathan, the goldfish boy, shows the narrator an electric guitar he has just acquired in a swap:

And of course Vashti got the dad in exchange for the guitar. Brother and sister, bickering all the way, find that guitar girl swapped dad for a gorilla mask, and on it goes. Finally the siblings bring a very large rabbit named Galveston to Patti's house, where the bunny is greeted with glee (including enthusiasm from the Queen of Melanesia, in another cameo). The father is found reading his paper in the rabbit hutch and the children take him home, reading the paper all the way.

It's fun and nutty and, like Wolves, much more visually sophisticated than your average kids' picture book. I've never offered it to someone Eleanor's age -- I think of it as a bit older sense of humor. But I'm curious what you guys think of it.

Love,

Deborah

"Who's that?"

2011-10-03T22:47:00.000-04:00

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Animal Faces arrived today. What an excellent book! Isabel sat right down with it to examine the animals. She opened to the page with camels:

"Who's that?"
"That's a camel."
"Oh. Who's that?"
"That's another camel."
"Who's that?"
"That's another camel. They're all camels."
"Oh. Who's that?"

We moved on to the seals, the rhinoceroses, the polar bears, the lions, and the foxes.

"Where's the wolfes?"
"The wolves? I'll find them."

I found the wolves.

"Ohhhh, wolfes. [pointing at each] One wolf, one wolf, one wolf, one wolf, one wolf, one wolf. Aroooo!"

These two reactions -- "Who's that?" and "counting" -- are hallmarks of the reading experience with Isabel these days. She's taken to asking us to read her fairly long picture books, books with text at a level that she doesn't get yet, and we work our way through them with her, narrating around the pictures as much as reading the actual words.

The biggest hit at the moment is our old favorite, Charles Santore's The Wizard of Oz. Isabel can identify all the characters, and explain the high points of the plot. She's excited to dress up as Toto this Halloween (Eleanor planned out our Oz-themed costumes in March, and hasn't budged since then). I think her repeated "Who's that?" is a way of reinforcing knowledge she already has, sometimes gaining new knowledge, and playing with the idea of testing my knowledge and getting me to come around to her point of view.

On the illustration of the Munchkins last night:

Isabel: "Those are goblins."
"No, they're Munchkins."
"Oh. Who's that?"
"Munchkins."
"Who's that?"
"They're Munchkins."
"Who's that?"
"Munchkins."
"Who's that?"
"They're called Munchkins."
"Who's that?"
"Goblins."
Isabel, finally satisfied: "Oh."

We're loving age two around here.

Love, Annie

Escaping the stereotype (with difficulty)

2011-10-02T22:25:00.000-04:00

Dear Annie,

The Sambo story, stripped of its unhappy heritage, is a good story. The imagery stays with readers for a long time. Every few years, some brave soul attempts a new version. In 2003, the lush artist Christopher Bing illustrated Bannerman's words with an African child in an Indian setting:

The over-sized picture book even has tiger claw marks on the cover. It keeps the title and the names, however, which are part of the problematic history of the story. Sambo, Black Mumbo and Black Jumbo were names which became twisted into racist stereotypes.

Two major figures of children's literature of the last 40+ years, Julius Lester and Jerry Pinkney, both African-American, collaborated back in 1996 on a retelling which avoided the name question by calling all the people in the book Sam and their country Sam-sam-sa-mara. So conversations go like this: "Sam looked at Sam. Sam shrugged. Sam shrugged back...."

Sam and the Tigers: A New Telling of Little Black Sambo creates some extra characters and broadens the humor.

Sam had an idea of what kind of a day it was going to be, and when he saw the next Tiger coming, he took off his shoes. "Here you go," Sam said, holding out the shoes.
"Good deal for you. Bad deal for me. I've got four feet. You only got two shoes."
"Feet!" Sam exclaimed. "These are ear-shoes!"
The Tiger put them on. "Ain't I fine!" he declared.
"You are indeed," Sam agreed.
The Tiger went on his way.
Sam didn't see any point in moving, and sure enough, along came another Tiger.

My experience as a bookseller is that this and Little Babaji are the versions most likely to appeal to customers, but even with the modern sensibility, a lot of folks are still uncomfortable.

I finally sent off a box of birthday books for Isabel (with some sisterly additions too) today. One of them, a picture book by Neil Gaiman, is something I'll write about next time.

Love,

Deborah

An old story in a new form

2011-09-30T22:00:00.002-04:00

Dear Aunt Debbie,

I can't wait to check out some of those animal books with Isabel! She's still very much an animal (mostly dog) girl.

We went to the library yesterday, and reading some of our loot this morning, I had a book epiphany -- a moment when I realized that the story I was reading was a new version of a story I knew quite well, but hadn't thought of in years, so dressed up that I never would have known from the cover that there was a connection.

The book we were reading was Anne Isaacs's Pancakes for Supper!, illustrated by Mark Teague. (I'm surprised to find it's out of print, as it's relatively recent; the link is to Alibris.) Isaacs is the author of Swamp Angel, which you wrote about a while back, and its sequel Dust Devil; she has a great knack for tall tales and feisty heroines. Teague is the illustrator of the How Do Dinosaurs series and the marvelous Poppleton books; his paintings are large, bright, and expressive.

Pancakes for Supper! tells the story of Toby, a girl riding on the back of her parents' wagon through snowy woods somewhere in the Northeast. She's making up a song as she goes, about all of the special clothes she's wearing:

I've got a sky-blue coat with purple lining,

A sun-yellow sweater with green leaves twining,

Thick orange mittens with a matching cap,

Buck hide boots to keep out the damp,

Fuzzy red long johns and a dress of brown:

Brand-new clothes for Winter Creek town!

The wagon hits a bump, Toby goes flying way into the sky, and when she comes down, she's far from the wagon and right next to a hungry wolf. After some rhyming dialogue, Toby convinces the wolf that she can make him into "the grandest animal in the forest" by giving him her beautiful blue coat. He takes it and struts off.

After the wolf come a cougar, a skunk, a porcupine, and a bear, each of whom gets another piece of fine clothing, until Toby is left shivering in her red long johns. She rounds a corner, looking for her parents, and finds all the animals fighting over who looks the best.

At this point, I'm starting to think, This seems familiar.... And then I turn the page and see the animals chasing each other in a circle around a big tree:

All their fine clothes fell off as they ran. They caught hold of each other's tails and raced around the trunk of the huge maple tree. Soon they were spinning so fast that Toby couldn't tell which animal was which. Round and round the animals whirled, faster and faster, until at last they melted into a great golden puddle at the base of the trunk.

Because of course, Pancakes for Supper! is a retelling of Little Black Sambo.

Grandma and Grandpa (your parents) had a copy of Little Black Sambo on the kids' shelf in their apartment when I was growing up. I remember having intensely mixed reactions to it: both loving the story and realizing at the time (probably due to my parents' intervention) that there was something uncomfortable and racist about the illustrations. Jeff has a similar memory of the book: he remembers reading it, but knowing at the same time that it was in some way bad to like.

Helen Bannerman wrote the original story in 1899, when she was living in India with her husband, an officer in the medical service there. Sambo is apparently supposed to be a caricature of a Tamil child, but in a number of later pirated versions of the book, he was depicted as African, or African-American, in illustrations which helped cement the image of the happy, none-too-smart pickaninny child. Wikipedia has a good rundown of the controversy. The original is very much in print, and online reviews seem to be split among grandparents who are thrilled to find it for their grandchildren and people who are appalled that its racist drawings are still available.

The story is pretty much the same one Isaacs uses: Little Black Sambo has fine new clothes, which he gives up to four tigers who want to eat him. The tigers get jealous of each other and whirl themselves around a tree, eventually becoming a puddle of butter. Sambo's mother makes the butter into pancakes, and Sambo eats 169 of them. (In Isaacs's version, the animals become maple syrup, which gets soaked up into the tree. Toby taps it, her mom makes pancakes, and she also eats 169 of them.)

There's at least one other contemporary version out there: Fred Marcellino (of Pelican Chorus fame) changed the names of the characters from "Little Black Sambo, Mumbo, and Jumbo," to "Little Babaji, Mamaji, and Papaji," and kept the rest of the text the same in his book, The Story of Little Babaji. I haven't seen it, but apparently it takes care of the racism question quite nicely.

I wish now I had the version I grew up reading and could assess it as an adult. In the meantime, Anne Isaacs's book gives Isabel the animals she loves to look at, gives Eleanor a spunky heroine, and makes everybody white. Progress?

Love, Annie