Guest blogger: Brooklyn baby books

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Despite your protestations, your Newbery picks this time around did very well! Brown Girl Dreaming didn't take the top prize, but it was named a Newbery Honor Book, along with the marvelous El Deafo. You've got skills!

Our house has been a whirlwind of birthday celebrations and fevers for the last couple of weeks, and I've been feeling a little overwhelmed. Happily, our regular guest blogger and new mom Emily has some thoughts about several Brooklyn-themed baby books that have entered her life since the arrival of her daughter Alice. Here she is:

A realtor gave us a copy of Brooklyn Baby, by Lisa McKeon, which has quickly become one of my eight month old daughter Alice’s favorite board books. Both of us love illustrator Violet Lemay’s busy, happy streetscapes featuring familiar food carts and subway signs. I also love the silly local touches. “Brooklyn baby, now it’s time to go to sleep,” instructs the last page. High up in an apartment window, a little Brooklyn baby responds with a big “Fuhgeddaboudit!!” 


Alice is still too young for books she can’t eat, but when she can handle paper pages she has a lot of local options ahead of her. In Homer the Little Stray Cat by Pam Laskin, a scruffy street cat finds a home in the arms of a Brooklyn boy named Adam. Reluctant about having such a yowly new addition, Adam’s parents are won over by the ways Homer draws their shy son out. One of the more endearing aspects of this story is that Kirsi Tuomenan Hill’s illustrations present Adam’s interracial family without making them the center of the story. 


We discovered Mermaids on Parade at a public library sing-a-long when the author Melanie Hope Greenberg stopped in [Note: Mermaids is also a huge hit at our house, introduced to us by our guest blogger Denise] . With bright, pastel illustrations featuring all sorts of costumed characters, Greenberg tells the story of a young girl’s trip to the Mermaid parade amid lavish descriptions of Coney Island’s steamy summer electricity. 


It almost goes without saying that Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale, by the inimitable Mo Willems, is a total gem. Against photographed backdrops of brownstone stoops, a bespectacled cartoon dad makes an alarming discovery during a trip to the laundromat with his daughter. This one is wonderful to read out loud, filled as it is with onomatopoeic kid language – “’Aggle flaggle klabble!’ said Trixie again” – and the flustered, outer-borough dad is completely recognizable. 

I suspect it will be fun for Alice to see her world of brownstone stoops and corner laundromats - a world that would have been unrecognizable to me as a suburban kid - reflected in the books she reads as she grows up.

Emily

I'm sure it will. More from our crazy house soon.

Love, Annie

Wheezles and sneezles

Dear Annie,

A dad asked the other day for a picture book to read to a sick child about being sick.  Specifically, she had a stomach flu and he wanted a book about tummy aches.  As you know, I love odd requests that force me to rummage through infrequently visited corners of my brain, but the tummy ache brought me up short on this one.

The subject of illness in books seems appropriate this weekend, though, because (as regular readers may have guessed) you've been both sick and hosting Eleanor's birthday festivities.  I hope you're feeling better.  I have no stomach ailment books to offer, but given the season, here's a sampling of colds.  The main take-away in cold books is that they're eased by friendship -- and they're contagious.

Bear was sick, very very sick.

His eyes were red.  His snout was red.

His throat was sore and gruffly.

In fact, Bear was quite sure no one

had ever been as sick as he.

So starts  
The Sniffles for Bear by Bonnie Becker -- the latest in her quite good Mouse and Bear books.  Mouse is aggressively cheerful and friendly; Bear is glum and stand-offish.  In this one, Bear dramatizes his cold into being reason to write up a will, and Mouse's glee at being in line to inherit roller skates hastens the process of Bear's recovery.  Mouse then ends up with the cold.

In 
Pigs Make Me Sneeze! our pal Gerald of the Elephant and Piggie series lets loose a series of sneezes that send pig flying in various directions (she eventually appears on-page with a helmet).  He surmises that he must be allergic to pigs and bids her a sneezy sad farewell.  A feline doctor eventually sets him straight, and he galumphs back to his pal: "Piggie! Piggie! Great news! I HAVE A COLD!"  Which, of course, Piggie has already caught.

We've talked about
A Sick Day for Amos McGee by Philip Stead when it won the Caldecott Medal last year.  It's the lovely and gentle story of a zookeeper's animals taking the bus to come see him when he's home sick with a cold. They all understand they have to let him take naps, and they play gently with him.

"I'm too tired to run races today," said Amos to the tortoise.  "Let's play hide-and-seek instead."  

The tortoise hid inside his shell.

Amos hid beneath the covers.

The animals all spend the night, and there's a plan for all to head back to the zoo in the morning.

No list of friendship through adversity could be complete without good old Frog and Toad by Arnold Lobel.  An excerpt from
Frog and Toad are Friends:

One day in summer Frog was not feeling well.

Toad said, "Frog, you are looking quite green."

"But I always look green," said Frog.  "I am a frog."

"Today you look very green even for a frog," said Toad.

"Get into my bed and rest."

So I hope you've been resting up, dear Annie, and are getting better soon.

Love,

Deborah

Beyond bread and jam

Dear Annie,

Well, the Newbery, Caldecott and a lot of other awards were announced by the American Library Association on Monday, and as usual, I was miles off predicting any of them. 
Dead End in Norvelt by Jack Gantos won the Newbery for best children's literature.  I read half of it back when it was a mere sample copy -- am re-reading now.  Gantos is a really good writer.  I would have been happier if Jefferson's Sons or Okay for Now had won, but this one is an understandable choice.  I was quick on the trigger on ordering, though, and now have two shelves at the store full of almost all the winners and honor books.  Whew.

The categories of ALA awards have proliferated in recent years, one of the more interesting being the Theodor Seuss Geisel Award for books for beginning readers.  In the seven years they've been awarding it, Mo Willems has won two awards and two honors for Elephant and Piggie books.  They're definitely deserving, but happily this year the award went to a book that's definitely a change of pace:
Tales for Very Picky Eaters by Josh Schneider.

THE TALE OF THE DISGUSTING BROCCOLI

"I can't eat broccoli," said James.  "It's disgusting."

  "Maybe there's something else you can eat," suggested James's father.

  "What else is there?" asked James.

  "Well, we have dirt.  We have the finest dirt available at this time of the year, imported from the best dirt ranches in the country.

  "This dirt has been walked on by the most skilled chefs wearing the finest French boots.  

  "It has been mixed by specially trained earthworms, and it is served on your very own floor."

  "Ugh," said James.

Dad goes on to offer pre-chewed chewing gum and a sweaty sock worn by a runner "who was fed nothing but apples and cinnamon for three months before running a marathon in this very sock."  The broccoli wins. 

When James rejects mushroom lasagna, his father tells him about the hard-working troll in the basement hired especially to make mushroom lasagna.  The troll is green with fangs and wears an apron saying "Kiss the Cook." James' ubiquitous basset hound quietly sniffs the heat vent coming up from the basement.

The book has five short chapters -- my favorite is The Tale of the Lumpy Oatmeal, rejected for its lumpiness.  The oatmeal, Dad explains, regenerates every day, so that if one doesn't eat it, it gets bigger and bigger and starts eating the desserts around the house.  And because Growing Oatmeal, which now looks like The Blob, isn't a picky eater, he could spell trouble for James's dog.  The dog looks pathetically at James.  He asks for -- and gets -- another bowl of oatmeal "with fewer lumps."

The Tales are (mostly) wacky and charming with good illustrations.  The one on Repulsive Milk is a bit too preachy (builds strong bones).  The last chapter, on Slimy Eggs, turns the tables a bit and has a satisfying ending.  I know, I know: you're thinking, "Slimy eggs!  We've been there before!"  A year and a half ago you wrote about Eleanor's take-away message from Bread and Jam for Frances (the Ur-picky eater book) being to demand bread and jam all the time.  And Frances' b&j habit started with her facing down a plate of slimy eggs.  So I don't know if you want to introduce this one to your home, but its flights of fancy are definitely a hoot.

Love,

Deborah

Shaking it up

Dear Annie,

Continuing here with the permeable fourth wall, I'm having a hard time deciding how I feel about
Press Here by Herve Tullet.  It's a large-format, sturdy-paged book with lots of dots in it.  It starts with one yellow dot and the words, "Press here and turn the page."  Two dots appear on the next page, and the reader is encouraged to press a dot again.  A third dot appears.  One page instructs the reader to tilt the book to the left, and all the dots (there are more by now) end up on the far left side of the page.  Then the book holder straightens it out:

Perfect! ... Now press hard on all the dots. Really hard.

Not bad. Shake them up a little.

Pretty, isn't it?  Try blowing on them ... to get rid of the black.

Hmmmm.  Maybe a bit harder?

And on it goes: clapping makes the dots bigger, and at the end of course, the only thing to do is to go back to the beginning.

One of my colleagues has a three year-old who loves this book.  Like Eleanor and Isabel with the cats, he knows it's not real, and he gets that it's a joke.  I think there's also something satisfyingly tactile about being instructed to put your hands all over a book.  So sometimes I think, this is cool three year-old humor.  Yet at other times it feels a little too cute, a little too much like a kids' book that's angling for a museum shop to sell it.  Too self-conscious, maybe.  What do your girls think of this one?

I have no problems with the hilariously self-conscious 
We Are in a Book! by the prolific Mo Willems.  This one's my favorite Elephant & Piggie book.  The two characters start out sitting back-to-back.

"Piggie!"

"Yes, Gerald?"

"I think someone is looking at us."

So Piggie gets up and takes a look:

After some consideration, they agree that "A reader is reading us," leading them to the joyous realization: "We are in a book!"

Piggie gets a crafty look in her eye and says, "I can make the reader say a word," and demonstrates:

The fact that the reader has said Banana leads them to gales of falling-down laughter and a few repeats of the word.  Then the existential realization hits that the book is going to end: Piggie lifts a corner of a page to check how long it is (57 pages).

Gerald, as is his wont,  gets more and more upset:

This book is going too fast!

I have more to give!

More words!

More jokes!

More 'bananas"!

The solution, of course, is to send the reader back to the beginning, to "read us again."

I'm so fond of E&P, and to have them speaking directly to me -- knowing I'm there -- it's a treat.

Love,

Deborah

Piggie is a girl!

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Your last post gave me a great little epiphany moment -- all this time, all these many readings of Bow-Wow, I had just assumed the dog was male.  But you're right -- there are no gender cues at all.  What does it take for an animal to read as female?  Long eyelashes, I guess.  Eleanor has already consciously picked up on the eyelash cue when assigning gender to animal characters.  If it looks neutral, it's probably male.

Which is why your post reminded me of the moment that I figured out that Piggie, of Mo Willems's most excellent Elephant and Piggie series, is female.

The Elephant and Piggie books are cartoony stories about the adventures of Gerald (the elephant, a worrywart) and Piggie (the pig, mostly a happy-go-lucky sort, but prone to fits of anger).  They're longer than Willems's Pigeon books, and all the text is dialogue, in speech bubbles.  (They lend themselves to staged readings.)

The first Elephant and Piggie book we came across was Are You Ready to Play Outside?, in which Piggie's great enthusiasm for playing outside is dampened (ahem) by a torrential downpour.  She is crushed.  She is furious.  She hates the rain.  But with Gerald's help and after seeing two really happy worms playing in the rain, Piggie decides that rain is actually wonderful!  Just in time for it to stop raining.

I'm using the female pronoun here, but on first reading (and second, and fifteenth), I read both characters as male.  They have a kind of odd-couple feel that makes me think of buddy movies, Laurel and Hardy, Frog and Toad.  Piggie has no secondary sex characteristics -- no curly eyelashes here -- and neither character wears clothes.  Gerald is gendered by his name; Piggie isn't. Because the whole book is a dialogue between two characters, it's pretty easy to avoid pronouns.

We read other Elephant and Piggie books: There is a Bird on Your Head! is my other great favorite, although there are many.  I love the declarative titles.  It wasn't until we found I Am Invited to a Party! at the library that I saw it: when Piggie is invited to a party, and she and Gerald dress up in a wide variety of outfits to prepare, she wears women's clothing.  I think there may also be a female pronoun in this one; I don't have it at home to check.  The jacket copy confirms Piggie's gender as well, where others don't.

So, interesting choices by Mo Willems.  Why create a pair of male-female best friends and leave the gender of one, but not the other, ambiguous for several books?  Or did Piggie read as female to Willems from the beginning, and would Eleanor's and my gender assumptions about her surprise him? 

In any case, they're a nice boy-girl non-romantic pair.

Love, Annie

Reading aloud with accents

Dear Aunt Debbie,

I love the Allan Ahlberg video.  His reading of the word "Peepo," though, is so restrained -- in our house, the Americanized refrain of "Peek-a-boo!" is joyful and very loud.

As I've mentioned before, we're big fans in this house of reading things aloud with funny accents -- I've even put up a list on this blog of "Books it's fun to read aloud with funny accents."

One of our current favorite read-alouds fits this category to a T: Mo Willems's fabulous The Pigeon Has Feelings, Too!  There are several Pigeon books in the series that started with Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!, some board book-length, some larger picture-book length (no surprise that Isabel is a big fan of  The Pigeon Wants a Puppy).  In each, the pigeon tries to wheedle his way into or out of something, using a variety of toddler-inspired techniques: whining, exclaiming, pouting, begging, hopping around in joy.  The pigeon's supporting characters include a bus driver (clearly the adult in the situation) and a small yellow chick with big innocent eyes.

It's the bus driver who starts off the action in The Pigeon Has Feelings, Too! by exhorting the pigeon: 

"Hey pigeon!  Why don't you show everybody your happy face?"  

The pigeon responds:

"Never!  

Why should I?  Do I get on your bus and tell you how to drive?  

Boy, you sure know how to make a bird angry.

And sad.

Everyone always tells me what to do."

Each line is accompanied by a picture of the pigeon expressively demonstrating his emotion. I'd scan a couple now,  but I seem to have left the book in the girls' room.  Fortunately, I've inadvertently memorized every word of it.

A while ago, we somehow started reading both the bus driver and the pigeon with super-broad New York accents -- think Guys and Dolls, and you'll get the idea: "Boy, you shua know how to make a boid angry."  Now Eleanor can recite the whole book too, complete with accent (Isabel chimes in on "And sad" and "Yippee!" at the end).  So if my kids grow up pronouncing "time" "toim," you'll know how it started....

Love, Annie

Libraries and bookstores

Dear Aunt Debbie,

I've been thinking, this week, about the books we own versus the books we take out of the library. We've become big library-goers, often requesting books online to be delivered to our local branch, and visiting at least once a week for toddler storytime and to check out more books. For a while, I tried to limit the number we were taking home, but that has fallen by the wayside, and we now usually have between 10 and 15 out at a time.

Every Tuesday morning, before we go to the library, I take down all the books we have checked out and go through them with Eleanor, deciding which we'll give back that week and which she'd like to renew. If she wants to renew something over and over, and we're reading it all the time, I'll put it on my list of books to buy. Of course, there are many wonderful books that we don't buy. Sometimes she'll remember these and ask for them again; sometimes seeing them in the library or having a conversation with her will prompt me to check them out again, and I'm always a little surprised when Eleanor has no memory of having read them before. (Though of course she forgets things. She's 3.)

This weeks' rediscovery is a marvelous Ezra Jack Keats classic: Whistle for Willie.

The story of Peter trying to learn to whistle to call his dog Willie is simple and lovely. There's something very pure about Peter's play: hiding in a carton on the street as he tries to whistle for Willie, drawing a long line with colored chalk on the sidewalk, putting on his father's old hat and pretending to be his father while talking with his mother. He's just hanging out on the street in a pleasant, solo, meandering sort of way, the way thoughtful kids playing alone will. Keats's illustrations are brightly-colored collages of the city streets, and seem to come directly from Peter's perceptions: when he spins around to get dizzy because he's tired of trying to whistle, the red, green, and yellow lights on the streetlight get dizzy too, hopping out of their places and dancing about. We have read this book at least twelve times since Tuesday, often twice in a row.

Many of the books we own have come to us as gifts (a great number, of course, from you!); others are books I've bought for Eleanor, often online, so that her experience is that books you keep arrive in a box. They are also, of course, books you can return to over and over, books you can rediscover in your own home after fallow periods.

Last week, we got to go to a children's bookstore: the excellent Books of Wonder. I told Eleanor that she could pick out one book to buy, and we browsed together through the shelves. After picking out and discarding several choices (so odd to be limited to one book!), she settled on a book we're both happy to own: Mo Willems's Knuffle Bunny Too: A Case of Mistaken Identity.

This is, of course, the sequel to Willems's Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale, which we've taken out of the library a few times itself. In both books, Willems combines colored cartoon-like drawings with black and white photos of Park Slope, Brooklyn, as he tells the tale of his daughter, Trixie, and her adored stuffed rabbit, Knuffle Bunny. In the first book, she loses Knuffle Bunny at the laundromat and can't yet talk to let her father know what's happened; in the second, she and another girl bring their Knuffle Bunnies to school on the same day and accidentally go home with the wrong bunny. The kid details are pitch-perfect, and both books are very funny to read if you're the parent of a young child.

I say that I'm happy to own this book, and I am, but it's probably not the single book I would have chosen to buy that day. So my question, for you and any readers out there, is this: what do you buy and what do you borrow? How do you make those decisions? Aunt Debbie, has working in a bookstore changed your opinion on this question at all?

Love, Annie