Unrestrained id: so attractive!

Dear Annie,

I think kids can distinguish fairly early between outrageous unlikely-to-happen or flat-out impossible stuff in books, and more realistic fiction.  And some of the outrageous stuff -- like the scary stuff we've written about -- is a direct line to the subconscious.  I suspect Eleanor knows that it's highly unlikely that a ten year-old girl can live alone and carry a horse around with one hand.  But it's cool.  Pippi, like another classic character, the Cat in the Hat, is both funny and attractive because she's so unrestrained, so beyond the rules.  And Tommy and Annika, like Sally and her unnamed narrator/brother ("I"), have to process the craziness and still live by their own rules of behavior (e.g., going home to bed every night), even as the crazy one enables them to push the envelope a bit.  Tommy and Annika have the internalized parents to help restrain them; Sally and I have a Very Serious goldfish invoking the name of Mother:

But our fish said, "No! No!"

Make that cat go away!

Tell that Cat in the Hat

You do NOT want to play.

He should not be here.

He should not be about.

He should not be here

When you mother is out!"

 So there you have it: id and superego, with ego (split into siblings) getting to process it all.  And when you're in the thick of the Processing It years of childhood, it's wildly entertaining to watch behavior you're learning not to do.

Not to say that all writing about beyond-the-rules behavior is a good thing.  You've got to have good writing and some engaging characters too -- which both Astrid Lindgren and Dr. Seuss provide quite nicely.  One of the more love-her-or-hate-her characters in kids' literature these days is
Junie B. Jones, by Barbara Park. She's rude, she has terrible grammar, she rarely learns from her mistakes, and she's in 27 books, which follow her through kindergarten and first grade.  I'm in the hate-her camp on this one.  But the people who love her, and whose children love her, do so for that titillation of bad behavior.  Look, she's more clueless than I am! 

And on another Pippi-inspired note, I'd like to point out an excellent post after your previous entry from our own guest blogger Rachel of Even in Australia.   Here's the central question, and it's wonderful food for thought and discussion on another day:

So, here's the question - which books do we read to our kids and which do we let them read and discover on their own?

I encourage our readers to read the entire comment.

Love,

Deborah

Revisiting Pippi: the right book at the right time

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote about trying to read Pippi Longstocking to Eleanor, and discovering that she wasn't quite ready for it yet.  I attributed this partly to Eleanor not having had school experience, as a certain amount of Pippi's humor comes from resisting and rejecting the structures adults have planned for her.

We picked it up again a few weeks ago, and suddenly it was the only thing Eleanor wanted to read.  She's still on the young side for some of the humor (she's 4 1/2, and Pippi and Tommy and Annika are, I think, about ten), but the spirit of independence and the hilarity of Pippi's behavior have totally captivated Eleanor.  So now I find myself thinking about Pippi in other ways.

Pippi Longstocking is a fascinating character.  Like so many other heroines we've discussed here, she's an orphan: her mother died early, and her father, a sea captain, was swept overboard.  She lives in a little house her father left her, with only a horse and her monkey, Mr. Nilsson, for company, but she never seems lonely or upset.  In this sense, she's more the Ottoline kind of lone child heroine than the Sara Crewe kind.  Pippi misbehaves like crazy in this book: she refuses to follow kids' rules, and won't let the townspeople take her to a children's home; on the one day she tries going to school, she speaks out of turn and is rude to the teacher, then draws all over the floor; at the circus and at Tommy and Annika's mother's tea party, she's insanely disruptive and gets all the attention in the room by making up wild stories about her grandmother's disobedient, ankle-biting maid.

And then there's the bit that I'd forgotten: Pippi is the strongest girl in the world, and utterly fearless.  She can lift her horse down from the porch without breaking a sweat.  Over the course of several chapters, she picks up policemen, robbers, bullies, and a circus strongman; rides a bull and breaks off his horns to keep him from goring Tommy; and rescues two little boys from a raging fire.

Astrid Lindgren writes Pippi as a sort of naif.  When she's bad, she's unaware of why she's causing such disturbances; when she's heroic, though she's self-congratulatory, you feel like she still doesn't quite understand why what she's done is particularly special.  She's a little otherworldly.  The only times Pippi gets upset are when she realizes she's upset other people -- on some level, she knows that she can't quite behave properly, and feels a little bad about it, though not bad enough to change.  Pippi is perfectly herself.

All this makes Pippi an interesting role model.  Jeff commented on how he didn't particularly like the bad behavior is funny aspect of some of the stories, and on one level I agree, but man, I love having an inexplicably strong female character in our pantheon.  Good manners are great to reinforce, but sometimes a girl just needs to lift her horse down from the porch and go for a crazy ride.

Love, Annie

Death, religion, and the afterlife

Dear Aunt Debbie,

I'm so sorry the Comment Challenge happened when I was ostriched in my end-of-term work.  Maybe I'll have to challenge myself unofficially during summer vacation.

The books you and Denise have been talking about sound extraordinary and powerful, and are certainly some that I will want to read with Eleanor and Isabel when they get a little older.  War and slavery and the terrible things people do to one another are certainly tough topics to broach with kids; I know there are many difficult conversations ahead.

Right now, for me, the issues that are looming large and difficult are those of death, religion, and the afterlife.  The Christmas season brought with it a first-time awareness on Eleanor's part of the story of Jesus, and there were plenty of nativity scenes in our neighborhood for her to notice ("Look!  It's Baby Jesus!").  As you know, I come from a non-religious family.  While I want my kids to be exposed to and understand various religious traditions and beliefs, I'm not teaching them that one religion is the right path, or that I, or anyone, knows what happens after we die.  Sometimes I'm sorry I don't have this certainty, and can't pass it on to them.

Our conversations about death have stemmed sometimes from books -- fairy tales in particular, where people are always dying and coming back to life -- and sometimes from real-life conversations.  Eleanor understands, sort of, that my grandparents all died before she was born.  Recently, we were talking about Grandma Ruth, and I said I missed her, and Eleanor said, "That's okay, Mommy.  You'll get another grandma." and I had to explain that no, unlike in so many stories, death is permanent.

Last weekend at my parents' house, Eleanor wanted me to read her one of the books from their kids' bookshelf (happily, they saved everything from Michael's and my childhood): The Clown of God, by Tomie dePaola.  I had itchy I don't like that book feelings about it, but couldn't remember exactly why.  The visit before, I put her off, but last weekend we sat down and read it.

dePaola's drawings are, as always, beautiful and expressive.  The Clown of God is a retelling of an old French legend about a poor boy who raises himself up by becoming a talented juggler and clown.  He performs all over the country, making audiences happy with his act, which culminates with a rainbow of balls, the last a golden sun.  His success fades as he ages, and he gets to a point where he stumbles, and the audience throws things at him.  He quits juggling and wanders the country, begging, until he ends up at a monastery, where he sees a statue of Mary and baby Jesus being worshiped during a church service.  After the rest of the people leave, the old clown puts on his makeup and juggles for the stone-faced baby statue.  The show is amazing, best he's ever done.  Then he drops dead.  When a scandalized monk comes to see the sacrilege that is happening in the church, he finds the Jesus statue holding the golden ball, a smile on his face.

There's a lot going on here: death, the idea of doing something beautiful to make God happy, the question of why people would throw things at an old man.  I'm not sure what aspect of the book left me with my initial negative feelings about it; it's quite sweet in a number of ways.  But then there's the question of how Eleanor is taking this talk about God, coming from our house: is this a story to her like all the other stories we read?  Or does the fact that her friends are starting to talk about their belief in God make religious stories read differently to her?  (She has, in the last week, attached two necklaces to the headboard of her bed, and when I asked her why, she said, "To make God happy.")

The other book that came to mind for me on this topic is a very different one, a chapter book for older readers about a pair of brothers, aged 10 and 13, who embark on a saga-like adventure after death. The Brothers Lionheart was written by Astrid Lindgren, of Pippi Longstocking fame, though it bears little resemblance in tone to its more famous cousin.  The narrator, Karl, is a terminally ill 10-year-old boy; his older brother Jonathan is strong, smart, and brave.  Karl learns at the very beginning of the book that he is about to die, and Jonathan tries to reassure him by explaining that after death, they will both go to Nangiyala, the land where sagas come from.  In saving Karl from a fire, Jonathan unexpectedly dies first; Karl follows him, and the two brothers find themselves in an afterlife filled with adventure, battles of good against evil, and traitors.  It is, and is not, the land they were hoping it to be.

I remember loving this book as a kid; tonight, rereading bits of it, I was immediately sucked in again.  There is an immense seriousness to Karl's narration -- it's an adventure story, but a weighty one, and even the ending is not easy or happy.  The Brothers Lionheart, too, makes me itch a little uncomfortably, but in a productive kind of way.  It's a vision of the afterlife which, I'm sure, will spark all kinds of interesting conversation down the road.

Love, Annie

Pippi and Poppleton

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Your thought about the age at which books become funny to a child makes me think immediately of two we've picked up recently.

The first is an example of the Stuart Little problem: remembering my own love of the book, but forgetting at what age I enjoyed it, I bought Eleanor a copy of
Pippi Longstocking, by Astrid Lindgren.  Turns out that Pippi's kookiness doesn't fully translate until you've had some experience with school.  Sure, it's kind of odd that she lives with a horse and a monkey, but without the context of rules and expectations that Eleanor will understand later in childhood, the book takes too much explaining, and just isn't funny yet.  We're putting it away to try again in a few years.

The second is a series that hits the funny bone of child and adults in this house at once: Cynthia Rylant's Poppleton. Rylant is also the author of the High Rise Private Eyes series I've written about before; her sense of humor is quirky and odd and totally pleasing, and happily, she's prolific, so there are always more books to check out.  We've read three of the Poppleton books so far; there are eight.

Poppleton is a pig who moves from the city to a small town peopled by a variety of animals: Cherry Sue, the llama next door; Fillmore, the hypochondriac goat; Hudson, a mouse who likes to go to the shore.  The stories are highly random: in our favorite in the first book, Fillmore is sick but refuses to take his pill unless Poppleton hides it in his food:

"I'll put it in the soup," said Poppleton.
"No, it has to be in something sweet," said Fillmore.
"Sweet?" asked Poppleton.
"Sweet and soft," said Fillmore.
"Sweet and soft?" asked Poppleton.
"Sweet and soft with raspberry filling," said Fillmore.
"Sweet and soft with raspberry filling?" asked Poppleton.
"And chocolate on top," said Fillmore.
"Chocolate on...Fillmore, are you talking about Cherry Sue's Heavenly Cake?" asked Poppleton.
Fillmore smiled.


This passage reduces Eleanor to giggles every time.  

Our favorite in Poppleton and Friends is titled "Dry Skin," and is entirely about Poppleton believing he has dry skin, and trying to fix it by covering himself with oil (which makes him want french fries) and honey (which makes him want biscuits).  Each book contains three stories, with brightly colored and personality-filled illustrations by Mark Teague on every page.  We are clearly going to have to read them all.

Love, Annie