Guest blogger: Rule Britannia

Dear Aunt Debbie,


It was lovely to see you!  The girls and I haven't stopped reading the books you brought, chief among them the two princess and the pea retellings you blogged about recently.  Good stuff.


Our guest blogger tonight is my cousin-in-law Fabienne, who has written for us before on the books of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler.  Fabienne lives in London, and writes tonight's post with a British flair.  Here she is: 

Last weekend we Brits celebrated Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee. 60 years in any job is worth some praise, right?

And feeling quite patriotic, as one does at such times, I thought I'd write today's guest post about some British talent. British vintage talent to be exact...

My son Sebastien is two and  a half tomorrow and L-O-V-E-S books. His insatiable appetite together with the dearness of new books has meant that 98% of those I've bought for him have all been from various good will stores in our local community. Averaging about 60p (95¢) a pop means I can pick up 3 or 4 in one go and pay for our loot with loose change from my purse. Sweet. You come across a lot of tat of course, but I have been fortunate enough to come upon some real gems that you may not know of over on your side of the pond.

Is everyone ready? Then I'll begin...

The doyenne of today's bunch is Judith Kerr. Born 1923, Kerr is most famous for writing the much  loved British classic "The Tiger Who Came to Tea" as well as 17 volumes in the "Mog" series.

The Tiger Who Came to Tea is an enchanting book about Sophie and her mummy who have a tiger over for tea and how he ate everything he could find leaving nothing for their supper, not even a drop of water in the tap. The tale and its illustrations are very much of their era (1960's) and include the old social stereotypes of mummy at home with the children, with dinner ready for when daddy gets home from work. So if you're fiercely feminist, you may object to this one, but to be honest, what with the cost of childcare incessantly soaring a lot of families have had to revert back to this kind of model in the UK. Either way it doesn't bother me and most importantly, it doesn't bother Seb, who loves the cheek of this wild yet very polite beast who invites himself in and helps himself to... well everything, only to leave and never return.

"Sophie's mummy said, "Would you like a sandwich?"

But the Tiger didn't take just one sandwich.

He took all the sandwiches on the plate

and swallowed them in one big mouthful. Owp!

And he still looked hungry,

so Sophie passed him the buns."

Next up is Shirley Hughes [Annie's note: We love Shirley Hughes!  We've written about her books before here, here, here, and here]. Like Kerr she started out as an illustrator, but went on to write and illustrate 50 stories or her own. You're most likely to know of "Dogger" a book that won her many awards and the first to be published abroad. But two of my favourites are "Out and About" and"Let's join in". Not so much stories but a series of anecdotes following Katie and her baby brother Olly. They have a vivid, real quality about them and depict childhood as it is: not manicured, tidy and fairy-tale-like, but scruffy, dirty and most of all funny. All in all her work is very English and evocative of carefree, simpler times.

"A lot of things seem to hide-

the moon behind the clouds...

and the sun behind the trees.

Flowers need to hide in the ground in wintertime.

But they come peeping out again in the spring.

Buster always hides when 

it's time for his bath,

and so does Mum's purse when we're all ready to go out shopping."

And finally the wife and husband team, Janet & Allan Ahlberg. Janet passed away much too early some years ago now following a battle with cancer, but she was the illustrator to Allan's text, making them an amazing prolific partnership. I'm sure "Peepo" and "Each peach pear plum" are as well known and loved in the USA as they are over here in Blighty. But our favourite these days is "Cops and Robbers", a rip-roaring rollicking tale about a band of robbers stealing children's toys on Christmas night and how they were caught by "upstanding Officer Pugh". The rhyming verse is detailed and funny and and as a whole resembles the structure of a song with many verses. In fact, my father does not read this to Seb, but sings it to a simple little tune he made up especially!

"Here are the robbers of London town:

With crowbars and skeleton keys.

They prowl and creep

When you're asleep

And take... whatever they please.

Ho ho for the robbers

The cops and the robbers Ho Ho!"

Many wonderful children's books are written every year, but let us not forget those little gems that will never go out of fashion... Three cheers for Blighty: Hip hip horray!

Fabienne

And love from me, Annie

Hole-y books

Dear Aunt Debbie,

I remember discovering The Far Side at Grandma and Grandpa's apartment, right next to the Doonesburys.  Total magic, especially once I got old enough to really get the sly humor.  I don't know when or how we all got hooked on Calvin and Hobbes, but I have vivid audio memory of Michael dissolving in fits of giggles as he read them.  Good stuff.

It's interesting to see the ways in which Isabel's reading habits are similar to, and different from, Eleanor's at her age.  Some of the same books are total hits, and some that were Eleanor's favorites leave Isabel cold.  Isabel is far harder on the physical books than Eleanor was (with the exception of our chewed-up Goodnight Moon board book) -- we now have a number of picture books with ripped pages, from Isabel's active page-turning.  Violet the Pilot has had the most egregious damage, i.e. the most love.  Part of this comes from Isabel being left on her own with books more often than Eleanor was: if I'm trying to read a chapter of a longer book to Eleanor, I'll leave Isabel alone flipping pages, rather than rushing over to be part of her reading and to spare the book some wear and tear.  But I think Isabel is also a very tactile reader.  She likes books with flaps to lift and tabs to push and pull.  And she, as Eleanor also did at her age, likes books with holes in them.

You and I, and then you again, have written about Janet and Allan Ahlberg's marvelous Peek-a-boo!  The holes cut into the pages, showing what the baby sees and then enlarging to show the whole scene, are a great size for putting fingers into, and even entire small hands. 

Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar has much smaller holes, holes the size of the caterpillar as he eats his way through ascending amounts of food (mostly fruit, but then a carnival's worth of delicious junk on Saturday, and penance in the form of a "nice green leaf" on Sunday).  It's such a great book: brightly colored, funny, good for counting, with pages of varying sizes and all those wonderful holes.  I remember Eleanor finding it hysterical when I'd press my finger up against the back of a page to touch her finger on the front of the same page through the hole.  Jeff and I continue to be mildly disturbed by the fact that the wings on Carle's butterfly appear to be upside down:

 Aside from this, however, it's a great little book.

Less known, but no less tactile, is  Lois Ehlert's Fish Eyes: A Book You Can Count On.  It begins:

If I could put on a suit of scales

Add some fins, and one of these tails

I'd close my eyes, and then I'd wish

That I'd turn into a beautiful fish!

The narrator goes on to imagine what she'd see through her fish eyes: ascending numbers of different kinds of fish, all with little punched-out holes for eyes, so that the color on the next page comes through.  Again, much fun with small fingers and flesh-colored fish eyes appearing and disappearing.  There's also an almost-invisible dark little fish at the bottom right of each right-hand page, intimating what the next number will be.

Finally, a classic: Dorothy Kunhardt's Pat the Bunny, first published in 1940.  I remember playing obsessively with our copy as a kid: touching "Daddy's scratchy face" (the patch of Daddy's skin made, literally, of sandpaper), looking into the shiny mirror, and putting my finger through "Mummy's ring" (the hole in the book!).  It's one of the most pleasing tactile books I know of, and also one of the easiest to destroy, with its flimsy plastic ring binding.  But totally worth getting a second copy when that happens.

Love, Annie

Reading Aloud

Dear Annie,

The McCloskey books are so great -- and I love that picture of canning blueberries.  All these years that we've been blueberry obsessed in Maine every summer, I've never taken the step to can some.  A combination of intimidation at the amount of work, and fear of messing it up and poisoning everyone.

I'll pick up the McCloskey baton and write next time about his next two Maine books: One Morning in Maine and Time of Wonder.  Must scan a few pictures.

My brother, your uncle Al, has found a lovely video of Allan Ahlberg (who spells his Allan as our Al does) reading Peek-A-Boo!  There was also another video of Ahlberg talking about the book -- called Peepo! in British -- saying it's an autobiographical work, set in Oldbury, in the English Midlands, and that the baby is none other than Ahlberg.  Lovely.  Here he is reading it:

One can totally visualize him with a grandchild on his lap.  Reading aloud encompasses such a wide variety of styles.  I think of this as a classic style: there's inflection, but not a lot of it.  He's clearly paying attention to the words, sharing them with the listener.  There's something very intimate about this reading.

Love,

Deborah

Each Peach ... Peek-a-boo!

Dear Annie,

Ah, the Stupids.  Ah, George and Martha.  James Marshall is so likable, and so wacky.  And such a writer.  In addition to the many reasons many of us love him, our family was thrilled to discover he wrote a book about a moose named Mona.  Not many Monas in literature, so we tend to get kind of excited when there's a great one.  I'll dig it up and write more on it soon.

Speaking of classics, I'm surprised to discover that we've been blogging for almost a year but somehow haven't hit two great books by Janet and Allan Ahlberg. 

Each Peach Pear Plum and
Peek-a-boo!

These are such great snuggle-with-a-toddler books.  They're sophisticated I-Spy books in very British settings with great rhymes.

Each Peach Pear Plum refers to a different nursery rhyme or story on every page.  It starts, "Each Peach Pear Plum/I spy Tom Thumb." Hidden behind leaves and peaches in an orchard we can just make out a blond boy reading a book.  Next page: "Tom Thumb in the cupboard/I spy Mother Hubbard":

 Then: "Mother Hubbard down the cellar/ I spy Cinderella":

It goes on like this through the three bears, Jack and Jill, Little Bo-Peep and many more.  The three bears even make an encore appearance.  Lots to look at, lots to listen to.  I was always fascinated by the title page illustration of hilly countryside.  Every scene in the book takes place somewhere in that picture, and if you look closely at almost every illustration, you can see how Janet Ahlberg, the artist, has kept everything in the right spatial relationship to everything else.  Very cool.

Peek-a-boo! Is a series of wonderfully cluttered scenes of a British family which appear to be set in the World War II era -- at least that's how I've always seen them.  The book starts with a baby standing in his crib on the left side page, looking across at a hole cut through the right side, with PEEK-A-BOO! and a glimpse of the following page.  You turn the page and get a listing of what he sees, starting with his parents still asleep as the sun comes in the window.  I love the pictures drawn entirely from the baby's perspective.  This one starts, "Here's a little baby/One, two, three/Sits on his sister's lap/What does he see?"  Turn the page (and imagine these two side-by-side):

I think I have a soft spot in my heart for books that celebrate the exhausted mother.   And chaos!  Love that dog.

Love,

Deborah