Books with a good beat

Dear Aunt Debbie,

What a wedding! It's taking us more than a day to recuperate.  As we return to normal life here, images from the past week of family celebration keep floating through my mind.  One of my favorites has got to be Eleanor dancing behind the New Orleans-style second line band leading the guests to the ceremony (a brilliant idea for a wedding, by the way).  From infancy, Eleanor has loved a good beat -- we used to calm her colicky crying with Jimi Hendrix -- and Isabel is now the same way.

I've been thinking about books that mimic the rhythm and feel of a good song.  Two of our favorites are board books about music, one with some historical content, and one that's just good and silly.

Chris Raschka's Charlie Parker Played Be Bop reads like a jazz riff.  It provides the absolute basic facts about the jazz great Charlie Parker: "Charlie Parker played be bop.  Charlie Parker played saxophone."  and then goes into what the music sounds like, with rhyming rhythmic words: "Be bop.  Fisk, fisk. Lollipop.  Boomba, boomba.  Bus stop.  Zznnzznn.  Boppity, bibbity, bop...."  Raschka's illustrations include dancing boots and chickadees, and a sour-looking black cat ("Never leave your cat alone.").  It's impossible to read this book without bopping and tapping your foot yourself.

Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb is nonsense rhyme about monkeys drumming on drums.  It, too, asks for a reading with steady rhythm: "Hand, hand, fingers, thumb.  One thumb, one thumb, drumming on a drum.  One hand, two hands, drumming on a drum.  Dum ditty dum ditty dum dum dum."  I think I have the whole thing memorized.  The monkeys in Eric Gurney's drawings are so pleased with themselves and their drumming, and the book is so joyful and silly, that it's been one of our favorites for ages.

I'm sure there are more music-related books out there that mimic the feel of the songs they write about -- do you have some favorites in this category?

Love, Annie

Book as window, book as mirror

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Sounds like a fabulous convention. From checking out your links, I'm particularly interested in reading some of Cory Doctorow's work. For the Win sounds in some ways like an updated version of Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game: applying kids' video game skill to real-world situations. I first heard about "gold farming" (sweatshop workers playing video games endlessly to get characters to higher levels, which are then sold to first-world players for real money) a couple of years ago, and find the concept both horrifying and fascinating. I'm intrigued.

I was struck by Mitali Perkins's formulation of books as "window books" or "mirror books," and started thinking this morning about which kids' books I've been reading lately would fall into each category. Then, of course, my English teacher brain kicked in, and I thought, So many of the best books, kids' lit or otherwise, are those which are both mirrors and windows. There's something in a book which allows you to identify with it deeply, and yet the book also has something to teach you outside of your own experience.

One of the first books I thought of which functions as both mirror and window for Eleanor is another of your gifts:


Babies Can't Eat Kimchee

Babies Can't Eat Kimchee, by Nancy Patz, with great energetic collage illustrations by Susan L. Roth, is perhaps my favorite How to Deal With a New Sibling book. The mirror: An older sister is faced with a new baby sister. She lists the things babies can't do (eat kimchee, spaghetti, and strawberry ice cream; dance like a ballerina; know what an elephant is), then turns it around and projects how she will help teach her little sister some of these things ("I'll teach her to lick up the drips"). When we started reading the book, just before Isabel was born, Eleanor immediately picked up on the positive formulation: I'm going to help teach my baby to walk, etc. The window: the girls in the book are Korean, and there are references to kimchee and the special dress the baby will wear on her first birthday. Both of these have prompted questions from Eleanor. The best part of the book: at the end, the older sister gets so carried away by the idea of singing songs with her little sister that she offers, "Baby, do you want me to teach you a song?" Then there's a two-page spread of a red-faced, screaming baby ("WAAAAAH! WAAAAAH!"), followed by the rueful older girl: "Well, maybe someday." We have probably acted out those last pages 150 times this year.

I remember, in my own childhood reading, identifying incredibly closely with lots of characters, to the point where their moods would influence mine as I read. What kids' books do you think functioned most as mirrors, or windows, or both, for Lizzie and Mona?

Love, Annie

BEA & energizing authors

Dear Annie,

I’m just back from New York where I spent a day at BEA (Book Expo America: the booksellers’ convention). The day started with a really wonderful breakfast where three children’s book authors spoke. I realized after it was over that if I’m going to be blogging, I have to dust off my old journalist’s instincts and start taking notes. I didn’t, alas, but wanted to give you a few impressions.

Cory Doctorow is the author of Little Brother, a novel about Homeland Security gone wild, and the current For the Win. He was incredibly moving. He talked about the intensity of adolescence and how it’s a great age to write for. Tries to stay very connected to his audience, is deep into the world of high technology, cares deeply about injustice, and was a pleasure to listen to. I’m not doing him justice here, but in the spirit of this blog will quote one line from the bio on his website on a completely different topic:
“On February 3, 2008, he became a father. The little girl is called Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow, and is a marvel that puts all the works of technology and artifice to shame.”

Mitali Perkins is a Bangladeshi-born, New York-raised author I wasn’t familiar with. Her current book, Bamboo People is about a friendship between two boys on the Thai-Burmese border. Her books all tend to be about cultures in conflict. She talked about kids’ books falling into two categories: mirror books or window books. Basically, a mirror book has elements with which the reader can strongly identify (she talked about Little Women being a mirror book for her because she was in a family of sisters), and a window book introduces you to experience foreign to your own.

And Richard Peck (I can’t find a website for him, which makes sense), the third speaker, was an angry and impassioned 76 year-old guy. I know him best for A Long Way from Chicago and sequels – middle-grade stories of the Midwest during the Depression for which he won a Newbery Honor, and for the first sequel, the Newbery Medal. He’s currently flacking Three Quarters Dead which harks back to his roots as a horror writer. Three girls are killed in a car accident while the driver is on her cell phone. The fourth, surviving member of their group starts receiving text messages from the dead ones… Peck made it clear that he hates cell phones, a lot of other technology, and what he sees as anti-authoritarian, anti-intellectual culture inspired by the upheavals of the 60s. He said he quit teaching (in the NYC school system) in 1971 (the year of Doctorow’s birth) because that’s when they took teachers’ authority away. I disagreed with a lot of what he was saying – and liked some of it too – but it was a pleasure to listen to someone who cared so deeply about communicating with kids through his writing.

Walking out of the breakfast, on my way to a day of visiting publishers’ exhibits at the Javits Center, I felt renewed. Here were three wildly different authors, all of whom had very strong world views, writing very different kinds of books, and caring deeply. It’s part of what makes my job so satisfying.

Love,

Deborah