Storytelling and dragons

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

Christmas roundup

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