Behavior modification through literature

Dear Aunt Debbie,

I'm glad to hear from you about the ways in which independent booksellers are resisting and working around Amazon.  It always cheers me to know that you are physically selling books to real people, and thinking actively about what your customers want and need.  Let's hope the resistance continues!

And speaking of resistance....

Eleanor has been very 5-year-old tantrumy lately, pitching fits when she doesn't get her way about small things.  This morning I found myself drawing on literature as a way to engage her with what she's doing, and convince her that she wants to stop.  This isn't a new tactic on my part: Violet Beauregard in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Lulu in Lulu and the Brontosaurus have long been characters we invoke in the face of spoiled behavior: Do you really want to be like Lulu?

This morning, I struck on Katherine Paterson's The King's Equal, which I wrote about here almost two years ago.  We've been reading it again lately, more deeply.  Prince Raphael and the goatherd's daughter, Rosamund, make excellent foils for each other.  Raphael is spoiled and ungrateful in outsized ways.  After his father, the king, dies, Raphael collects insane taxes from all of his subjects, has lots of pictures painted of himself, and closes all the schools, putting children to work, because he feels only he needs to be smart. (Eleanor finds this part especially shocking.)

On his deathbed, the good king decreed that Raphael could only officially inherit the crown when he found and married a woman as intelligent, beautiful, and wealthy as himself.  Raphael believes there is no such woman, and threatens his advisers with imprisonment and death if they can't find him a bride by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, Rosamund is hiding in a shack in the hills with three goats and a magical talking wolf.  She is smart, kind, and grateful for the little she has (including a magically refilling small jar of grain), but Paterson manages to make her seem interesting as well.  After a time, the wolf tells her to go down to the castle and present herself as Raphael's bride.

Raphael declares her to be the most beautiful creature he's ever seen.  She proves her wisdom by telling him something about himself that even he doesn't know: that he's lonely.  And she proves her wealth by asking him whether there is anything he wants that he doesn't have.  Of course, there is -- lots.  Well then, she says, "perhaps you are poorer than I, for there is nothing I desire that I do not already possess." Ultimately, she proves herself to be more than Raphael's equal, and takes over the running of the kingdom while he goes off to spend a year with the goats, learning humility and how to bake bread.  When he returns, they are truly equals, and get to rule together.

I invoked Raphael and Rosamund this morning at the breakfast table, when Eleanor began to whine about walking to school instead of driving.  Which one do you like better? "Rosamund, of course!" Eleanor said, laughing.  And which would you rather be like?  "Rosamund!"  And what's Rosamund like?  We talked about kindness, and generosity, and more deeply about being grateful for what you have.  Eleanor seemed able to work through, in a way she hadn't before with this book, why Rosamund not wanting more than she has makes her wealthy.

And then we talked about what we have: enough food, enough clothing, loving family and friends.  "I have these Barbies, and I don't really even need them," Eleanor said.  Exactly.  And then we practiced: what do you think Rosamund would say if she didn't get her way about something little?  "Oh, well."  We ran through a couple of scenarios.  And the tantrum that had started ten minutes before dissipated.

I'm not saying Katherine Paterson is a magic bullet -- five minutes after this, Eleanor ignored all requests to put on her sneakers so we could go to school -- but it felt like a real working through of real issues, better than threats or pleading any day.

Love, Annie

Death in picture books and chapter books

Dear Aunt Debbie,

In answer to KPK's comment of a few days ago, I've been trying to think of books which address the issue of death for younger readers.  The only picture book of this kind I remember from my own childhood is another by Tomie dePaola (who is starting to seem a little morbid): Nana Upstairs and Nana Downstairs.  Nana downstairs is 4-year-old Tommy's grandmother, and Nana Upstairs is her mother, and in the book, Nana Upstairs dies.  I haven't read it in a long while, but I remember it being sweet and sad.

Patricia Polacco would also be a good author to check out on this subject -- in many of her books, while death is not the main subject at hand, she takes her adult-role-model main characters all the way to death on the last page.  This is true in Chicken Sunday and  In Our Mothers' House, and The Keeping Quilt has death threaded through it, along with births and marriages.  I've written more about these particular books here.

KPK mentioned The Fall of Freddie the Leaf, which I've never read, but in a conversation on this topic today, my friend Emily cited it as one of the main books about death in her childhood.  She says it's a lovely, gentle story -- Freddie is a leaf, and he grows and then falls and dies, and becomes part of the earth and helps other things grow.

The books I read as a kid which made me think most deeply about death are all chapter books, only one of which would be appropriate to read to fairly young kids.

The first is actually referenced in your previous post as one of the books Doug reads to the kids he babysits (what a wonderful, reference-filled scene!): E.B. White's Charlotte's Web.  I still remember my father reading me the scene where Charlotte dies; I still remember sobbing.  Such a great book, and such a bittersweet ending -- all those baby spiders taking off and leaving Wilbur alone, but the promise of the one who stays, the generations to come.  That's one we should break out fairly soon, I think.

The other two both have protagonists who are about ten years old, and I think that's probably the right age to read them: Bridge to Terabithia, by Katherine Paterson, and Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt.  I know I read both of them on my own (and then re-read, and re-read them, sobbing every time).  Bridge to Terabithia is the story of the friendship between Jess Aaron, a fifth-grade boy, and a neighbor girl named Leslie.  They create an imaginative world together in the woods near their houses (Terabithia, of course), and it's intense and wonderful, and then one morning while Jess is away -- I think at an art museum with his teacher -- Leslie tries to go to Terabithia in bad weather, has an accident, and dies.  There is so much in the book about friendship and guilt and loss; it feels horrible and preventable but altogether real.  I get choked up just writing about it.  I heard Paterson once on NPR talking about how she wrote the book after her son's best friend, an eight-year-old girl, was killed by lightning.  The book has that feel of truth to it -- she's trying to make sense of absolute tragedy.

In Tuck Everlasting, a ten-year-old girl named Winnie Foster meets the Tuck family, including one very attractive son a little older than she is.  She learns fairly quickly that he's actually a lot older -- he and his family have drunk from a spring of immortality.  Winnie is offered the chance to drink from the spring herself, and has to decide whether or not she wants eternal life and eternal youth.  I suppose with all the vampire fiction around these days, there are other places kids are puzzling over the pluses and minuses of eternal life, but for me, this was the first time I'd really pondered it.  It's hard to understand at age ten that people might want to grow old and even to die, when the time comes.  I suppose it's hard to understand on some level at any age.

Love, Annie

Expanding the notion of Princess

Dear Aunt Debbie,

I'll admit, we've deep-sixed a few books in this house. I've felt a little guilty each time; it's nice to know that Grandma Helen did it too. Sometimes it's because they're boring or badly written, but sometimes it's the content that makes me squirm. This is particularly true now that we've entered the beginning of a heavy princess phase in our house. (With two daughters, I expect that we're in for a good seven years of tiaras and Disney and happily ever after.)

I've been on a hunt for books that expand the notion of princess, that aren't just "She's really nice and pretty and then she marries the prince and they live happily ever after." Here are a few of my favorites that break or at least enrich or complicate the mold, some from my own childhood, some from you:


Helga's Dowry: A Troll Love Story, by Tomie dePaola
First off, everyone in this book is a troll, so they're small and dumpy and fun to look at. Helga is supposed to marry the handsome troll Lars, but he turns out to be a jerk and wants a dowry, so she uses ingenuity and troll magic to earn her own dowry, and along the way accidentally impresses the troll king, who falls in love with her. Helga is spunky and smart, and the book is a lot of fun. (I'm also a fan of dePaola's Strega Nona series.)


Petronella, by Jay Williams
Petronella is born into a royal family that, before her, has only had sons. She was supposed to be the next Peter, find a princess to marry, and come back to rule the kingdom. Though she's a girl, she goes out adventuring anyway, looking for a prince to bring home. She finds one at the house of a great enchanter, completes impossible tasks, fights the enchanter, and ultimately realizes (once she's defeated him) that the enchanter himself is a lot more interesting than the prince, who is kind of a dip. (In a lot of ways, it's similar to Helga's Dowry.) The edition I grew up with had amazing loopy Monty Python-like illustrations by Friso Henstra. It's out of print now, but I found it for too much money here on Alibris (I hope this is the right one. The cover picture is wrong, though).. I can't vouch for the illustrations of the new version, but the story is good.


The Paper Bag Princess, by Robert Munsch
This seems to be the one most people know. Eleanor was not as into it as some of the others, probably because Princess Elizabeth is wearing a paper bag instead of something beautiful, but it's a fun twist on the normal ending, as she runs off happily by herself after outsmarting the dragon and rescuing the dippy ungrateful prince. The thing I like most about Munsch's books is that they have the kind of random kid logic that's accurate to little kids. As in: everything in the castle is burned by the dragon except for a paper bag.


The King's Equal, by Katherine Paterson
This is a slightly longer book, more serious in tone and in illustration style, but quite beautiful. Thanks for sending us this one. The only other thing I'd read by Paterson is Bridge to Terabithia, one of my old YA favorites which I can hardly even think about without choking up. The King's Equal isn't weepy at all, but is another story of the girl (Rosamund, poor, kind, and smart) proving herself to be as wise, beautiful, and rich as the selfish and unpleasant Prince Raphael. The nice thing about this one is that Raphael has to go off by himself for a year, along with a few goats and a magical talking wolf, to prove himself worthy of Rosamund. Eleanor really likes it. The only downside to Vladimir Vagin's intricate illustrations is that the page with the picture of three gorgeously dressed princesses has no text on it, and she's always trying to turn the page while I'm still reading so she can see the picture.


The Princess and the Pizza, by Mary Jane and Herm Auch
This is Eleanor's favorite of your princess book recommendations, hands down. It's silly, with some nice wordplay and alliteration, and has references she can pick up. She knew the story of Snow White already, so when Auch refers to the princess with the seven little men following her, Eleanor was excited to be able to identify her. On the other hand, we hadn't yet read Rapunzel, and when we explained the Rapunzel story so Eleanor could get that reference too, suddenly all she wanted to do was play Rapunzel, which is not so feminist a story. Ah, well. Like Paper Bag Princess, in this one Princess Paulina ends up happily not married to the prince, and founder of her own successful business.

Any I'm missing here?

Love, Annie