More Chuckles & Guffaws

Dear Annie,

I love your image of Eleanor belly-laughing at The Backward Day. One of the joys of reading with kids is the surprises they can hand you.

I think it's always useful to remember that small children have -- and should be encouraged to have -- very eclectic taste. Eleanor can be captivated by a delightfully silly story like Chickens to the Rescue, then listen in fascination to The Wizard of Oz. Just like grownups, kids enjoy many different forms of writing.

A few additions to your hilarious list:

Backward Day is a New York Review of Books reprint of an out of print classic: they've been exhuming both novels and picture books from earlier eras. This month they released a delightful one: Russell and Lillian Hoban's
The Sorely Trying Day. It's from the folks who wrote Bread and Jam for Frances and sequels, and it has that same sense of families being loving but chaotic and sometimes contentious, always with a large dose of humor. Father comes home from a Sorely Trying Day, only to discover that the children are squabbling miserably. An investigation ensues, with each wrongdoer pointing to a wrong that was previously done to them. Once that circle is closed, a new circle of apology ensues, with everyone trying to outdo the contrition of the previous apologizer. It's just really funny.

Then there's Robert Munsch, best known for The Paper Bag Princess, but he's written dozens of books. He was a pre-school teacher, and his humor is very slapstick. One of my fondest memories of picture book hilarity is of watching my spouse's loving but somewhat taciturn father reading Munsch's
Thomas' Snowsuit to Mona when she was probably around 3 or 4. Thomas doesn't want to put on his snowsuit, and ends up in a series of confrontations (visuals: cloud of dust with hands and feet occasionally poking out) with various adults. When the dust clears, it's always the adult who's wearing Thomas' snowsuit. Mona started giggling, then laughing, then her grandfather started laughing, and he ended up stopping reading and laughing uncontrollably. The power of Munsch.

I'll toss in Katie Davis's
Who Hops here, which appears to be a much younger book. But there's something about it that appeals to many 3 and 4 year-olds' sense of the absurd. "Who hops?/Frogs hop./Rabbits hop./Kangaroos hop./Cows hop." (picture of very startled purple cow, who on the next page thinks, "It would never work.") And it goes on from there.

A quick note on Ruth Krauss, author of The Backward Day. She also wrote the great
A Hole is to Dig, illustrated in 1952 by the young Maurice Sendak. It's sweet and offbeat -- not hilarious, although it has its smiling moments. It's a series of definitions which aren't really, like "A hole is to dig," or "A hand is to hold." Her "a face is so you can make faces" attracted a little flack from critics, who felt Ms. Krauss was encouraging rude behavior. Ah, the Fifties.

Love,

Deborah

Tickling the toddler funnybone

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Before returning to toddler-book world, where I live most of the time these days, I want to mention one more YA fantasy series: the Avatars trilogy (So This Is How It Ends, Shadow Falling, Kingdom of Twilight), by Tui Sutherland. (Full disclosure: Tui and I have been friends since college, and she's already one of our main comment-writers on this blog. But they're still good books.) It's a post-apocalyptic trilogy, in which the only surviving people on earth appear to be several teenagers in different parts of the globe, each of whom has been invested with the powers of a god from a different pantheon. Sutherland clearly did a lot of research into the various beliefs and myths of cultures from around the world, and the resulting mash-up is a lot of fun to read.

And now, back to toddlers.

Last week, we took out of the library the latest book I Must Buy for Eleanor. Why? Because it cracked her up, and she made me read it four times that day and several more in the last week, and I loved it just as much. It got me thinking about what makes a toddler laugh -- I mean, really laugh, belly laugh, get so tickled by something that the laughter comes in spite of themselves. For Eleanor, right now, one of those ticklish points is the idea of opposites and things being backwards. Which is why this book is perfect.


The Backward Day

The Backward Day was written by Ruth Krauss. Before this, I knew her only as the author of The Carrot Seed; I'll be looking for more now. (Fun fact: she was married to Crockett Johnson, who illustrated The Carrot Seed and wrote the Harold and the Purple Crayon books.) It's a simple, short story about a little boy who wakes up and decides it's backward day. He explains to himself, helpfully, "Backward day is backward day." After putting on his clothes backwards (underwear on the outside), he goes downstairs backwards, and sits backwards at the table. When his parents and little sister come in, instead of making fun of him, each of them sizes him up and joins him in backwardness. It doesn't last long. Warning to parents: Eleanor has started making us read the book backwards to her now, too.

Then there's humor via banter and wordplay, as in the Cynthia Rylant series The High-Rise Private Eyes.


The Case of the Desperate Duck

The first of these we discovered (and still our favorite), is The Case of the Desperate Duck, which includes the line, "Hello, I'm Mabel. Let me show you to your table." (Ha! This started one of our first discussions of rhyme, too.) The private eyes are a raccoon named Jack and a rabbit named Bunny. Bunny is smart, Jack is distractable, and they have quirky personality traits throughout. We only read a few books in the series, but the plots seem generally to revolve around theft, and be resolved when the thief apologizes and explains that he didn't do it on purpose. No major crimes here.

Finally, here are two wacky books that you sent Eleanor in the last year or so, both of which remain in heavy rotation.



Monsieur Saguette and His Baguette

We've discovered that Frank Asch's tale of a baguette used for a wide variety of purposes (to rescue a cat from a tree, to rescue a baby from a crocodile, to lead a parade in lieu of a baton, etc.) is especially funny when you read Monsieur Saguette's lines in a very bad French accent. We often provide different accents for the other characters (a construction worker, a robber, a little girl) as well. This book has a blithe spirit.



Chickens to the Rescue

Chickens to the Rescue, by John Himmelman, tells the story about all the things that go wrong on a farm during the course of a week ("On Monday, Farmer Greenstalk dropped his watch down the well."). After each mishap, a giant cloud of chickens flies in and fixes whatever's wrong, and you get to yell "Chickens to the Rescue!" The pictures in this one are awesome, and it makes a great group read-aloud.

Love, Annie