Charlotte Zolotow

Once there was a little girl who didn't understand about time.  She was so little that she didn't know about Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.  She certainly didn't know about January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December.  She was so little she didn't even know summer, winter, autumn, spring.
   What she did know about was all mixed together.  She remembered a crocus once, but she didn't know when.  She remembered a snowman and a pumpkin, and a Christmas tree, and a birthday cake, a Thanksgiving dinner and valentines.  But they were all mixed up in her mind.

Dear Annie,

That's the beginning of Over and Over by Charlotte Zolotow (illustrated by Garth Williams), explaining the rhythms of a year.  Zolotow died this past week, at the age of 98.  She wrote more than 70 picture books, and edited countless other children's books.  They have a gentle straightforward tone to them -- they feel a little old-fashioned but still very in touch with kids' feelings.

My favorite is Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present, a lovely discussion between a girl and a rabbit (illustrated by Maurice Sendak) about what she should get for her mother's birthday.  It, too, starts wonderfully:

"Mr. Rabbit," said the little girl, "I want help."
"Help, little girl, I'll give you help if I can," said Mr. Rabbit.
"Mr. Rabbit," said the little girl, "it's about my mother."
"Your mother?" said Mr. Rabbit.
"It's her birthday," said the little girl.
"Happy birthday to her then," said Mr. Rabbit.  "What are you giving her?"
"That's just it," said the little girl.  "That's why I want help.  I have nothing to give her."
"Nothing to give your mother on her birthday?" said Mr. Rabbit.  "Little girl, you really do want help."

Mr. Rabbit suggests several different colors, which get narrowed down to objects (red > red underwear > red roof  > red bird > red apple) until the girl ends up with a basket of fruit for her mother.  It's idiosyncratic and lyrical.

Zolotow wrote the iconic (but kinda archaic) William's Doll about a boy who's teased for wanting a doll.  It became rooted in the psyches of a whole generation (not mine -- was it yours?) who grew up listening to Free to Be You and Me.

This Quiet Lady was a favorite in our house.  Anita Lobel's illustrations underscore the intimacy of a child exploring pictures of her mother's childhood.  I was always partial to the drawing of a 10 year-old mom going off to school with a Beatles lunchbox.  It was rooted enough in its era that it eventually became outdated: the Beatles belong to grandma now.

Every now and then I'll be reminded of another special book that Zolotow wrote.  A woman who really cared about communicating with children.  Her daughter, Crescent Dragonwagon has also produced dozens of kids' books.

Here's a little bit of the L.A. Times obituary:

. . . a few days before she died she stopped eating and drinking. 

"She lived a full life and it was like, she had been at the party, and now it was time to take off her shoes," Dragonwagon said.

One of Zolotow's last published books was 1997's "Who Is Ben?" about a boy asking questions about his existence. Dragonwagon said she might read from it at a memorial for her mother.

"The boy asks, 'Why does the day end?' " Dragonwagon said, "and his mother tells him that it doesn't end, it goes on to become day somewhere else."

Love,

Deborah

Surprised by the past

Dear Aunt Debbie,

I'm very fond of George Booth's slightly cross-eyed, loopy dogs.  Clearly, it's time to introduce Isabel to those books.

In between picture books, we keep a chapter book going with Eleanor at all times.  As I've mentioned before, chapter book reading happens in our house in fits and starts: any evening that I'm putting the girls to bed alone, the chapter book is put aside, and we read things both girls will agree to hearing.

Two of our recent chapter book adventures have contained moments that surprised me, one in quite a positive way, and one in a slightly uncomfortable way.

You recently gave us a gorgeous hardcover edition of The Marvelous Land of Oz,the second book in the Oz series.  This was one of the books Jeff read to Eleanor, while I sat on the other couch reading If You Give a Pig a Pancake for the millionth time.  I eavesdropped a bunch, however, getting a sense of the Woggle-Bug and the various other astounding creatures involved in the story.  The main character in the book is a boy named Tip, who escapes from the witch who has raised him and runs off with an increasing band of characters, much as Dorothy does in The Wizard of Oz.  I thought a few times as Jeff was reading how much I liked the book, but was a little sorry that so many of the main characters, including our hero, were male.  There are of course Glinda, who makes several appearances, and the antagonist General Jinjur, whose army of girls takes over the Emerald City for a brief period (some interesting gender stuff there), but Tip is at the heart of the story, and he, unlike Dorothy, is a boy.

Well, sort of.

Spoiler alert: there's a major surprise ending.

In your recent post on the Oz books, you focused largely on Ozma of Oz.  You alluded to Ozma's history, but I must have glossed over it, and it's clear I never read The Marvelous Land of Oz as a kid myself.  Because when it's revealed, in the last few pages, that Tip IS Ozma, I was just as surprised as Eleanor.  It turns out that baby Ozma was turned into a boy in order to protect her from harm when her father was deposed as ruler of Oz.  As Tip, she/he was safe, unknowing of his/her own history.

Glinda reveals the truth, and in the narrative, it's Tip who is most shocked -- who knows himself only as a boy, and doesn't want to be turned into a girl.  Glinda listens to him, but kindly and firmly informs him he has no choice: he must reassume his true form in order to take his place as the rightful ruler of Oz.

Here we are, in 1904, and L. Frank Baum's major heroine is transgendered.

Makes me want to read all the rest of the Oz books, right away, as well as researching where this came from, and what the reaction was when it was first published.  How did I not know about this before?  What an interesting man.

The second book is one I started reading to Eleanor this week: George Selden's The Cricket in Times Square.  I remembered it vaguely but fondly from my own childhood: the story of three animal friends (Chester Cricket, Tucker Mouse, and Harry Cat) who live in the Times Square subway station, and their relationship with Mario, a boy whose family runs a failing newsstand on the S train platform.  There's a lot to love, especially for a New York kid.  Today we walked through that very subway station, and imagined where Chester was found hiding under a pile of garbage, and where the newsstand might have been in 1960, when the book was written.

And then there's the wise old Chinese man who sells Mario a pagoda-shaped cricket cage, and speaks in stereotypical Old Wise Chinese Man English.  Sigh. 

Sai Fong is a  perfectly nice character -- he tells Mario a cricket origin story, and sells him the beautiful cage for very little money.  But there he is, running his Chinese novelties store filled to the brim with exoticized things, and speaking without any articles: "This very ancient cricket cage.  Once cricket who belonged to Emperor of all China lived in this cage.  You know story of first cricket?"  It's slightly cringe-inducing to read.

Eleanor picked up on it right away: "He said, 'I back soon'!" she responded delightedly as I read.  "Why does he talk like that?"  Total specific interest in his use of language, which she doesn't hear as a racial stereotype, but just as an interesting and different way of speaking.  So there I am explaining both that sometimes when people who speak another language first learn English, they put sentences together differently or leave out some words, but also that a lot of people don't really talk like that, and talking like that might sound like you're making fun of someone, and feeling while I'm trying to explain that I'm not doing a terribly good job.

Reading to your kids: you've got to be ready for anything.

Love, Annie

True love, picture book style

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Eleanor spent much of the day helping her cousins bake cookies for her Uncle Mice's wedding.  She has her own kid-sized apron, and has recently been fascinated with helping in the kitchen, especially when it has to do with baking.  Pretend Soup gets a good workout in our house, though the most-requested recipe in it is "Homemade Lemon-Lime Soda Pop."  Quesadillas are a big favorite too.

With all this wedding celebration, I've had love on my mind.  Two classic, slightly offbeat takes on true love keep recurring to me, both illustrated by Garth Williams. The first is a book I've mentioned once before: A Kiss for Little Bear.  It's the only one of the Little Bear books that contains a single story (the others each have four).  Little Bear makes a drawing for his grandmother, and asks Hen to take it to her.  Grandmother Bear loves the drawing, and asks Hen to take a kiss back to Little Bear.  But Hen wants to stop to chat, so she asks Frog to take the kiss.  The kiss is passed on until it reaches Little Skunk, who finds another little skunk, and they pass the kiss back and forth until Hen discovers them: "Too much kissing!"  The book ends with the skunks' wedding, and a fine picture of Little Bear as Best Man.

Else Holmelund Minarik's text is excellent, but what makes the book perfect are Williams's dry, funny illustrations.  The text: "Then Hen saw some friends.  She stopped to chat.  'Hello, Frog.  I have a kiss for Little Bear.  It is from his grandmother.  Will you take it to him, Frog?'  'Okay, said Frog.'"

The illustration:

And then there is the marvelous Home for a Bunny, by Margaret Wise Brown.  It is a poem of a book, about the arrival of spring and one little bunny's search for a home.  The opening lines always crack me up:

"Spring, Spring, Spring!" sang the frog.
"Spring!" said the groundhog.
"Spring, Spring, Spring!" sang the robin.
It was Spring.

Amid all this Spring activity, a bunny is looking for a home.  He asks the robin, the frog, and the groundhog about moving into their homes (lots of great opportunities for different voices here: high-pitched for the robin, low for the frog -- "Wog, wog, wog" -- and grumpy for the groundhog).  Eventually, he meets another bunny, who has a home under a rock, under the ground, and it's a happy ending:

"Can I come in?" 
said the bunny.
"Yes," said the bunny.
And so he did.

Love, Annie

Picturing the working mom

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Oh, dear.  Does "working mom" in picture books mean "absent mom"?  Owl Babies sounds lovely, but as a working mom myself, I hate to think that the absent mom is the best we can come up with in that category.

That said, only two picture books spring to mind for me.  The first is I Live in Brooklyn, which we have been given no less than three times because, well, we live in Brooklyn.  (At some point, I'd love to do a post on place-specific books, so many of which are deeply dull.)

Mari Takabayashi wrote and illustrated this book, and the illustrations are often quite appealing and accurate in depicting aspects of Brooklyn life.  My favorite page has pictures of all the different kinds of street food carts.  Unfortunately, the book is plotless.  It's narrated by a six-year-old girl, Michelle, and she walks you through some things she does in Brooklyn throughout the year: "Daddy takes me window shopping on Fifth Avenue every year.  It is fun to see Santa Claus standing in the crowd with his bell....Whenever my mom makes a sandwich, she saves the edges of the bread for us so that we can feed the ducks in the park.  They are always hungry."  It's not horrendous, just flat -- the voice of an adult trying to sound like a child, but losing any shred of personality by making the language too simple.  Eleanor loves it, of course.  But it's one of the books I sometimes hide at the back of the shelf.

Still, Michelle's mother works!  Every morning, she leaves Michelle's sister Lucy with their grandma (who conveniently lives one block away, sigh), and takes the bus with Michelle: "She drops me off at school and then goes on to her office."  No drama, no emotion, just simple fact.

The other book that came to mind after reading your post isn't really about a working mother, but another animal mother who leaves her kid alone to go forage for food.  It's one of my all-time favorite children's books, however, so I'm going to seize the opportunity to write about it.

Wait Till the Moon is Full is Margaret Wise Brown at her best:

Once upon a time in the dark of the moon 
there was a little raccoon.

He lived down in a big warm chestnut tree 
with his mother -- who was also a raccoon.

This little raccoon wanted  to see the night.  He
had seen the day.

So he said to his mother, "I want to go out in the
woods and see the night." 

But his mother said, "Wait."

"Wait till the moon is full."  So he waited, deep
in his warm little home under the chestnut tree.

As the raccoon waits and grows, and the moon waxes, he hears the sounds of the night, and his mother tells him to wait, and sings him songs about the night.  On one page, his mother is late coming home, and the raccoon "sat there wondering to himself."  But then she returns, "skuttle bump, in came his mother, her pointed ears pushed back on her head" (and, in the Garth Williams drawing, in a shawl and carrying a basket of groceries).  And of course, eventually, the moon is full, and the little raccoon gets to go out and play in the moonlight, and the waiting is rewarded.

As ours will be starting tomorrow with our week of family weddings!  See you then.

Love, Annie