Give the people what they want

Dear Aunt Debbie,

In my continuing quest to find books with longer narratives that Isabel will tolerate having read to her, I have two more success stories -- or rather, one semi-success story on my terms, and what appears to be one slam-dunk on her terms.

The semi-success (which is also a HUGE success for Eleanor):
Eleanor has been reading another series by my friend and prolific YA and middle grade author Tui Sutherland, whose book The Menagerie was a hit in our house last summer. The series is called Pet Trouble, and each of the eight books follows a different kid in the same town. Each kid owns a dog who causes some kind of trouble: a golden retriever runs away, a beagle howls incredibly loudly, a poodle can't stop getting dirty.

Each book can stand alone as a story, but there are sightings of the dogs and characters from one book in other books, which makes for fun connection-spotting. Eleanor loves the dialogue, and finds the situations hysterically funny. There's a little bit of suspense, but the trouble of the title doesn't get too serious -- they're fun reads.

Isabel has always loved dogs, so I thought that Pet Trouble might work for her as an early chapter book read-aloud. We've been reading Mud-Puddle Poodle together this week (that's the book Eleanor is reading on her own in the picture above), and it's worked pretty well as a mutual read-aloud. The narrator, Rosie Sanchez, is a girly-girl who wants her new poodle to be clean and ladylike, but Buttons turns out to be obsessed with rolling in the mud, and doesn't want to be dressed up in doll clothes.  Rosie's four older brothers are at first dismayed by the cute little dog, but Buttons wins them over by being smart, energetic, cute, and a magnet for the girls who one of the brothers wants to attract. (Side note: as with The Menagerie, I appreciate here that Tui's main characters are a variety of races. Rosie and her family are Latino, which is both clear throughout and not made into a big deal at all.) Isabel loves the descriptions of Buttons's dog-play behavior:

She ran in big circles on the grass in front of us as we walked. The wind blew a leaf past her nose. With a ferocious yip, she pounced on it, then blinked in surprise when it didn't try to run away. She poked it with her little black nose, then looked up at me like, Did I win? Did I win?

Isabel said to me last night, "When you read it, it's like I can see the pictures in my head!" And I thought, yes! This is the revelation I've been hoping for!

But truth be told, even Buttons's antics don't make Isabel clamor to read a book without pictures.  So now we come to...

The slam-dunk (and one of your recommendations to me over Thanksgiving): 

Jeff Smith's Bone: Out From Boneville. This is an odd, wonderful series focused on the adventures of three small white bone-people: Fone Bone (the sweet hero), and his cousins Phoney Bone (the schemer who's always getting them into trouble) and Smiley Bone (the dim-witted, cheerful one). In Volume 1, the Bones are kicked out of their hometown of Boneville because of Phoney Bone's antics. They become separated in a desert, and Fone Bone finds himself in a valley populated by huge toothy rat-monsters (visually scary with hairy faces and red eyes, but made somewhat comic through their bickering over how they plan to cook Fone Bone for dinner). There are also kind possums, bugs shaped like leaves, a beautiful, kind human girl named Thorn, and her incredibly tough grandmother, Gran'ma Ben, who raises racing cows. And of course a big red dragon with furry ears who is protecting Fone Bone (no one knows why). I've only read the first book (there are nine, plus a couple of prequels and a connected series), but so far it is weird and wonderful. Rereading your description of Jeff Smith's appearance at the National Book Festival a few years ago, I like him even more.

Why on earth haven't I gotten graphic novels for Isabel earlier? I picked up Out From Boneville earlier today at the library, and gave it to Isabel to look at in the car as we drove up to my parents' place. She was immediately excited: "It has pictures on every page! Oh, thank you, Mommy!" By the time we got to the Upper West Side, she had looked through every page, and was already making up names for the characters. She was thrilled to have Jeff read it to her tonight, and warned him ahead of time that she knew there were going to be a few scary parts. She loves monsters. She loves pictures. She loves humor. We have a winner here.

I hope that business at the store is humming, with Christmas right around the corner, and look forward to hearing from you when you get a chance to breathe!

Love, Annie

Griffins and unicorns and kraken, oh my!

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Your haiku summarization of the beginning of The Secret Garden is perfect, and gives me a new level of appreciation for the extreme condensing that some of these early readers provide.  (On a more adult level, have you seen these "ultra-condensed classics"? Some are pretty funny.)

Back in the world of unabridged chapter books, Eleanor and I have finished the Little House series.  We left Laura and Almanzo married and settling down on their own small farm, after a sweet, low-key courtship.  Our Little House sojourn has led to a number of chapter books piling up, and Eleanor's next pick was something totally different: middle-grade fantasy filled with mythological creatures and cliffhanger chapter endings.

I'm speaking of The Menagerie, the latest book by my friend-from-college Tui T.Sutherland, co-written with her sister Kari Sutherland.  Tui and Kari were in New York recently to promote The Menagerie at the great independent bookstore Books of Wonder, along with a number of other middle-grade authors, and we bought ourselves a signed copy there.  It turned out to be a terrific purchase -- Eleanor loves this book, and we swept through it in less than a week.

The plot: There's a secret menagerie filled with mythological creatures (unicorns, dragons, griffins, etc.) in the small town of Xanadu, Wyoming.  Before the story begins, six griffin cubs have just escaped, and their possible discovery in the town threatens the existence of the Menagerie.  There are two protagonists: Logan Wilde, a boy who's just moved to Xanadu from Chicago after his mother left him and his father, and Zoe Kahn, the youngest child of the family that has run the Menagerie for generations.  Logan stumbles into the mystery of the missing cubs, and finds an immediate connection with the animals, but struggles with the question of why his mother has abandoned him.  Zoe spends the book worried about saving the Menagerie: agents from a governmental agency tasked with overseeing mythological animals are due to inspect the premises, and the missing cubs are a huge problem.  There are a host of other characters, human and animal, and sometimes a combination of the two.

What I like most about this book, and about Tui's series Avatars, is the level of research that underlies the characters: each animal in the Menagerie comes from the mythology or folktales of a different culture, and the result is a kind of mythological mash-up.  There are windows into a wide variety of stories that a reader might pursue, from the phoenix to the kelpie (a Celtic water-horse spirit) and the kitsune (a Japanese fox spirit -- who knew?).  Several of the characters here suffer from enlarged egos, and the clashes between the phoenix and the goose who lays golden eggs are particularly funny.

The narration alternates between close-third-person chapters from Logan's and Zoe's point of view.  Both are appealing characters, of the observant quirky loner type I've always been fond of.  Logan is African-American, and there are sprinkled references to racial and ethnic diversity among the other characters: the school librarian, who may be hiding a secret herself, is Indian, and a variety of skin tones are mentioned.  There are a few too many mean-girls in the book for my taste: Zoe's older sister Ruby and adopted sister Keiko, her former best friend Jasmin, a host of mermaids.  That being said, both Zoe and her mom are down-to-earth, and Logan's mom, in absentia, becomes a really interesting character by the end of the first book.

Because yes, The Menagerie is the first book in a trilogy.  This came as a shock to Eleanor this morning when we reached the end, and only one of the many outstanding plot questions was answered, followed immediately by a dramatic twist and the words "To be continued...."  She was thrilled and frustrated in equal measure.  We're both sorry we have to wait until next March for book two.

The multiple cliffhangers throughout this book captured Eleanor's imagination all week.  Waking up, it was the first thing she asked for, and in the afternoons after day camp, she'd turn to me out of the blue and say, "But we still don't know who opened the gate to let the griffins out," or "What's going to happen to Logan?  He's right there, and the SNAPA agents are coming!"  A couple of times, when I had to pause in our reading to change a diaper or otherwise take care of Will, Eleanor read a full chapter on her own (putting the bookmark back where she and I had stopped, so that I would reread what she'd read and we could talk through the words and pop culture references she didn't know).  I love the way in which her independent reading is starting to dovetail with our reading together.

From her excitement over this book to the early readers and flashlight I found stashed under her pillow tonight, I have a feeling this is going to be an excellent reading summer.

Love, Annie

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