A storytelling list

Dear Annie,

Things aren't getting any slower at the toy/book store these days.  Every time I turn around, I see huge gaps in the shelves (oh no! No more Jan Brett books! We're down to two Grinches!  And today someone bought out all five of our copies of A Wrinkle in Time!  Must reorder!).  There are a few more irritating customers than usual: grandparents who have no idea what their grandchildren are like, people with too much money and not enough time, parents who have little interest in communicating with their kids.

But they're definitely in the minority.  There's that lovely moment of wondering, who will this person be, before I offer to help someone.  A quite wonderful woman was in yesterday, to whom I sold a very fine list of books.  She's the mother of a nine and eleven year-old: one of each gender.  She had bought the
Classic Starts Arabian Nights a while ago.  It's part of the series that has a Peter Pan edition you wrote about.  She said her husband was stunned that she'd bring home such an abridged edition, but he started reading it with the kids and everyone really liked it.  It was a little young for them, and they wanted to wander into more magical/folklorish books.

So here's what we ended up with:


Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, by Grace Lin. This was the first one I thought of. I'm surprised that I've never written about it here: it's so wonderful, and appeals to kids of many different ages.  It's the story of Minli, a girl who runs away from home to find The Old Man of the Moon, who determines everyone's fortunes.  She wants to ask for prosperity for her parents.  They're poor farmers, but her father tells lovely folktales to his daughter.  On her quest, Minli meets many characters, human and not: a talking goldfish, a wingless dragon, travelers on the road, a king.  Each new character tells his or her own story, which appears in a lovely old-fashioned typeface.  Lin has also done gorgeous illustrations.  While Minli is searching for the solution to her family's problems, we cut back from time to time to her parents, who are missing her achingly, but they're also reassessing the role of stories in their lives.  Slowly, all the internal characters' stories knit together into one story, which is the one that Minli is in.  The ending has a very satisfying reunion between child and parents.

Since we were looking at fantastical fiction, the next title that came up was
Luka and the Fire of Life, by Salman Rushdie.  Luka has just been published, the sequel to Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which Rushdie wrote back in 1990.  Luka was written for his younger son and tells the story of a boy who journeys through a magical world to steal and bring home the Fire of Life to revive his dying storyteller father.  It's full of a magical cast, governed both by ancient rules of storytelling and by conventions of video games.  Every now and then Luka must hit a gold button that appears in the air in order to save the progress he's made toward reaching the fire.  It has wonderful wordplay and is beautifully written. 

So there we were with two very well-written books about storytelling.  How do the kids feel about scary?, I asked.  They were mostly cool with that.  So A Tale Dark and Grimm by Adam Gidwitz (link is to last month's blog entry), also about the role of stories in kids' lives, became the next on the list.

How about something different, the mom said.  Sticking with the very good writers, we went on to A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park, a very realistic story about children surviving under very hard circumstances in Sudan.  She decided to take that one too. 

I was ready to quit: what a satisfying list.  But she wanted one more, and asked for one I thought was really special.  Given that this is a family that clearly cares about language, the last book on this pile was one I loved as a kid: The Wonderful O, by James Thurber.

I hope I hear what they thought of all those books.

We miss you, Annie, but I know this is the end of the semester and an incredibly busy week for you.  I hope there's some fun in all that grading.

Love,

Deborah

Grimm and good

Dear Annie,

Back in August we had some discussion of fairy tales, their scariness, and what works for what ages.  Over the past two days I finally picked up and read a book I thought I wasn't going to like at all, but which is really quite amazing and completely demonstrates the emotional depth and power of fairy tales, specifically Grimms'.

 
A Tale Dark and Grimm, by Adam Gidwitz, a teacher at St. Ann's School in your fair borough of Brooklyn, is a brilliant book, just published this fall.  It's hard to describe because it sounds contrived and weird and gory, but it knits together the primal creepiness of fairy tales with very well realized and defined emotion.  Gidwitz puts two characters named Hansel and Gretel into six (more or less) of the original Grimm tales, substituting them for the child characters in each story.  He does it in such a way that they become one unified story, ending up with  three chapters of his own original tales which bring the action full circle.  In the first story, Faithful Johannes, a king and queen are guilt-ridden for having caused the death of their faithful servant because they didn't trust him.  They are told they can bring him back to life by killing their own children (Hansel and Gretel), so the king cuts off their heads.  After Johannes comes back to life, "he placed little Hansel's head back on his body, and little Gretel's head on hers, and instantly they began to leap and play as if nothing had happened, and as if they were not covered in blood."

But:

Late that night, they lay in their beds, unable to sleep.
"Hansel," Gretel said.
"Yes, Gretel?"
"Did you hear what Father said?"
"Yes."
"He cut off our heads to save that ugly old man."
Hansel was silent.
"And Mommy was glad that he did.  Do you think they hate us?"
Hansel was silent still.
"I think we should run away," Gretel said.  "In case they want to do it again."
"That's just was I was thinking," Hansel answered.  "Just what I was thinking...."

And so they set off in search of good grown-ups -- and immediately find a baker in the forest with a house made of cake, launching us into the traditional H&G story.  In other chapters there are scenes of cannibalism, dismemberment, serial murder and various other forms of violence. At the end of almost every one, adults have at the least disappointed and often come very close to murdering the sister and brother.  Sounds awful, right?  But the gore and violence have a point: crudely put, it's whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger.  The children grow and learn more, and eventually end up back at the gates of their parents' castle.  More murder and resurrection await -- and redemption and reconciliation in the end. Very satisfying.

Gidwitz uses a device throughout the book which, like much of the rest of this book, sounds like it shouldn't work, but it mostly does.  He occasionally breaks into boldface type and turns and speaks directly to the reader.  It feels a bit like Lemony Snicket at the beginning -- there's a lot of send-the-little-kids-out-of-the-room-it's-too-scary-for-them.  But he also uses it to talk about the feelings of the stories.  The asides give the reader a chance to catch one's breath and consider the larger themes.

As his website demonstrates, Gidwitz has thought a lot about fairy tales and uses of the imagination.  He includes writings of Bruno Bettelheim, G.K. Chesterton and Seamus Heaney to talk about the creative process and the unconscious.  His essays  Tears into Blood and Why Do I Write Fairy Tales If They're So Bloody? explore how he sees children reacting to scary/violent stories.

When I say children here, I'm not talking about pre-schoolers.  The publisher calls it a book for children ten and older, which seems about right to me.  And Gidwitz is quite clear that there are some kids who will never want to read it.  He's not setting out to traumatize readers, but to engage those who want to be engaged in some pretty intense feelings.  And he really does it well.

Love,

Deborah