The only Easter book you'll ever need

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Our brief beach vacation was lovely and restorative.  I did no kind of work at all, and finally gave myself time to read Monsters of Men, the final book in the Chaos Walking trilogy you introduced me to last year.  What a final book!  Patrick Ness does an extraordinary job of presenting characters who grow in complexity throughout the series, and his vision of the New World planet he's created is subtly and brilliantly observant about our own world.  Like the best science fiction, these books made me think more deeply about real life, the workings of society, and the machinations of people in power.  They're unsparing books, but so, so good.  I am a total convert.

So much to respond to!  I can't believe we haven't touched on the Ahlbergs yet either.  Each Peach Pear Plum was one of Eleanor's early I-Spy favorites, and actually introduced her to some fairy tale and nursery rhyme characters for the first time.  We didn't know Peek-A-Boo! until you sent it recently for Isabel, but it is one of her absolute favorite books right now.  In fact, during her long nap refusal on our plane ride home this morning, she spent quite some time clutching it to her chest and saying, "My Peek-A-Boo!"  Usually, her interactions with the book are far more, well, interactive.  She loves to turn the pages with the peepholes in them, calling out "Peek-A-Boo!", and there are small details on almost every page that she'll comment on: every time the dog appears, of course, but also a bird on the roof of the garage, the baby's rubber duck on the bath page, a small margin drawing of a car.  On the page with Dad putting his finger to his mouth to motion for silence, Isabel puts her finger up too, for a "Shh."  Jeff and I are fascinated by the narrative running under this book -- it appears to be WWII-era London, with Dad bringing in a bucketful of coal, and the general sense of happy crowdedness throughout.  But is Dad going off to fight at the baby's bedtime?  There he is, kissing baby goodnight in full uniform, which he hasn't been in throughout.  Do you get what's going on in that last family picture?

I'd love to post next time about Robert McCloskey, both Make Way for Ducklings and Blueberries for Sal.  But Easter approaches, and through conversations with a few friends I've recently come to realize that not everyone in the world knows about my absolute favorite Easter book of all time.

I grew up with The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes, by DuBose Heyward.  It's a surprisingly feminist and anti-racist children's book, especially for having been published in 1939.  Then again, Heyward was the author of Porgy, the novel on which Porgy and Bess is based, and apparently wrote a lot of the lyrics to that great operetta as well.

The Country Bunny is the story of a little brown girl bunny who wants to grow up to be one of the five Easter Bunnies who hop all over the world bringing Easter baskets to children.  The male bunnies, white and brown, laugh at her and tell her she can't possibly be an Easter Bunny -- she can't be swift or kind or wise enough, and she should go home and have babies.  At first, that's what she does, 21 of them (that's the line-up in Marjorie Flack's inspired cover picture).  Talk about absent fathers; the father here isn't even mentioned.  But the Country Bunny raises her children beautifully, and trains them to do all the jobs that need doing around the house: two mend clothes, two cook, two wash dishes, two paint pictures, two play music, and on in a nice combination of the practical and the artistic.  When they're old enough, the Country Bunny brings them with her to the next Easter Bunny auditions, and the wise old Grandfather Bunny sees her uber-competent mothering skills as evidence of her readiness to be an Easter Bunny herself.  She is chosen, and joins four tall male bunnies in delivering Easter baskets.

The message of equality gets a little more complicated toward the end.  The old wise Grandfather Bunny tells the Country Bunny he's saved the most important egg for her to deliver: a gorgeous iced confection of a thing with a little glass window in it through which you can see a tiny diorama.  The egg is for a little boy who lives on top of a steep hill, and who has been very ill but uncomplaining for a whole year.  The hill is impossible to climb; the Country Bunny tries her best but falls, hurting herself, and dawn is approaching....  Enter Grandfather Bunny, with the magic gold shoes as reward for her effort and bravery.  She springs up the hill, leaves the egg by the (extremely blond and rosy-cheeked) ill boy, and springs back down in time to bring Easter baskets to her own children.

My feminist, post-colonialist self is not utterly satisfied here, but the whole of the story is worth it.  What stuck with me most as a kid were all those little bunnies, fulfilling their bunny duties happily and well in Flack's drawings.  We'll be reading my old copy this weekend, up at my parents' place, and speculating about whether Eleanor and Isabel's Easter Bunny is a girl.

Love, Annie

The technology of reading

Dear Aunt Debbie,

First off, Happy New Year!  I hope you all rang it in joyfully.  We saved your Christmas box until last night, and devoured much of it immediately -- I'll post on a few soon.

I know exactly what you mean about that itchy preposterous feeling.  I'm having trouble as well coming up with more good examples, but my most recent one came while reading The Knife of Never Letting Go, which I otherwise found gripping and thought-provoking.

MINOR SPOILER ALERT for those who haven't read it yet -- you might want to skip the next paragraph if you don't want to know something about the plot, though I'm not giving away any of the book's biggest secrets.

For much of the book, Todd carries with him his mother's journal, which his adopted father Ben gives him when he's sent running away from Prentisstown, and which tells the story of her life on New World up to the day of her death, when Todd was a baby.  Ben also includes a map and a brief page of writing and tells Todd to read them when he gets far enough away from his hometown to be somewhat safe.  Trouble is, Todd can't read well -- it's serious work for him, and his macho instinct kicks in and he doesn't want to ask for help.  But when it becomes clear to Viola, the girl he ends up traveling with, that one of the things Ben has written is "You must warn them," I find it extremely hard to believe that Todd wouldn't immediately hand the book over to Viola and ask her to read the whole page.  And why doesn't she take it out of his bag and read it when he's comatose for five days and she's just sitting there watching him?  I spent much of the book wanting to know more about what was in that inner book, and the lack of use it gets feels ultimately uncomfortable to me --weirdly dismissive of Todd's mother and anything she might have had to teach Todd or Viola.

We spent much of the first day of the new year reading, and Isabel practiced for the land-speed record of pulling books off shelves as quickly as we reshelved them.  Eleanor played as well with one of her new Christmas presents: a Tag reader, a generous gift from Jeff's aunt.  Are you familiar with the system?  It's a chunky pen which you can load up with software and then use with special Tag books in astonishing ways: the pen will read individual words aloud, or make sounds when passed over an object, or read the whole story, or ask questions as part of identification games.  I am both awed by the technology and a little uncomfortable with it -- I'm an old-fashioned book person, with no interest myself in electronic readers, and I'm not sure how this kind of reading experience will fold in with all of Eleanor's others.  The pen also somehow takes in data about how Eleanor is using it, which raises privacy concerns for me.  It makes me feel pretty old-fashioned (she said, writing on her public blog).

The book we got with the pen is Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, by Bill Martin Jr and John Archambault.  It's a nice alphabet rhyme of a book, and I like the fact that all the letters are lower-case, as Eleanor is less familiar with them than with capital letters.  She played with it a bit this afternoon, but spent the most time touching the pen to the sample page catalogue that came along with it, getting glimpses of a Tinkerbell book and jonesing for Disney Princess books.  We've ordered the interactive world map for her birthday -- not  what she most wants, but what we'd rather have in the house than sparkly princess noises.  I'm curious to see how this pans out.  I'll report back.

May the first days of 2011 bring you much joy.

Love, Annie

Chaos Walking

Dear Annie,

Reading with Isabel sounds so delightful -- such a great stage.

I though I'd fast-forward about 15 years to a great YA trilogy which I've just finished.  There are two excellent just-completed YA trilogies floating around these days, both of which I wrote about back in May.  The one which has been getting all the attention these days is the Hunger Games trilogy, of which
Mockingjay is the newly-released conclusion.  That one's still on my bedside table -- I haven't read it yet but would love to hear from our YA fantasy fan readers what they think of it.

The series that's been keeping me from reading Mockingjay is called Chaos Walking; the three books of the trilogy are The Knife of Never Letting Go, The Ask and the Answer and Monsters of Men,  to be released at the end of this month.  The author, Patrick Ness, grew up mostly on the U.S. west coast, but has been living in London for the past decade.  Like the Hunger Games series, it pits teenage protagonists against manipulative controlling political leaders in a dystopian future.  In Chaos Walking, the future is on another planet where people from our planet have gone to create a new society.  The settlers discovered two unexpected facts about the new world: it was inhabited already, by a populace they name The Spackle, and a native virus has made all men's thoughts constantly audible -- but not women's.  The first two books explore how the inequality of privacy -- which is how the humans experience "the Noise" -- affects the society.  The third book brings in both new human settlers unfamiliar with what's been happening among the local humans, and two fascinating Spackle characters.  It turns out that audible thoughts are the Spackle's only -- and very effective -- means of communication, both one-to-one and across the entire planet.

These books start with personal violence, and move on to repression and war -- lots of blowing things up and death, especially in Monsters of Men.  But that's kind of like saying that the Hunger Games books are about a TV reality show where teenagers are forced to kill each other.  Yes, those are the plots.  But the authors use those plots to explore the complexities of human nature in very teenage-friendly ways.  Patrick Ness has an incredible ear for language.  He creates different voices for each of his main characters that submerge the reader in their experience.  Todd, the male protagonist, in battle for the first time:

Is this what war is?
Is this what men want so much?
Is this supposed to make them men?
Death coming at you with a roar and a scream so fast you can't do nothing about it --

and later in the same day, when reinforcements arrive:

"Come!" [the mayor] says to me. "See what it's like to be on the winning side."
And he rides off after the new soldiers.
I ride after him, gun up, but not shooting, just watching and feeling --
Feeling the thrill of it --
Cuz that's it --
That's the nasty, nasty secret of war --
When yer winning --
When yer winning, it's effing thrilling --

I don't feel like I'm doing this excellent series justice.  Suffice it to say that I had to stop reading anything for a few days after I'd finished it because anything I picked up was too much of a disappointing contrast with what I'd just read. So much to talk about in this one..

Love,

Deborah