Scientific women

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Welcome back from summer! It's lovely to hear from you, and to get a glimpse of the goings-on at the National Book Festival.

You asked whether Harry Potter has made an appearance in Eleanor's life. It's interesting: several of her friends and 3rd-grade classmates have gotten very into the books, but Eleanor is holding off. Twice, she's tried starting to read the first book on her own, and each time she has stopped because she feels like it's "too scary." This from a girl who within the last year devoured all of Percy Jackson, and is two-thirds of the way through the Books of Beginning, both series which include great violence, battles, magic, and end-of-the-universe stakes. And yet there's something about Harry that she doesn't feel ready for. As we've discussed in person and you've mentioned on the blog, there's a lot of material in the later Harry Potter books that isn't really appropriate for elementary-age kids, so I'm fine with Eleanor waiting until the books click for her. I've thought about beginning it as a read-aloud, but right now most of our read-aloud time also includes Isabel, and I don't really want to start Harry Potter with an almost-6-year-old.... Ah, well. Thankfully, there's plenty of time for reading and rereading.

Isabel has started out her first-grade year by declaring that she wants to become a rock star, and that her favorite subject is science. As if by magic, two of your recent gifts chronicle female scientists who became rock stars in their fields. Both books have become huge hits over here.

The Tree Lady, by H. Joseph Hopkins, is a picture book chronicling the life and times of Kate Sessions, the scientist and tree hunter who brought trees to the desert climate of San Diego in the early 1900s.

On each page, Hopkins positions Kate as an exception to the rules of her world:

Katherine Olivia Sessions grew up in the woods of Northern California. She gathered leaves from oaks and elms. She collected needles from pines and redwoods. And she braided them together with flowers to make necklaces and bracelets.

It was the 1860s, and girls from Kate's side of town weren't supposed to get their hands dirty. 

But Kate did.

...

When Kate grew up, she left home to study science in college. She looked at soil and insects through a microscope. She learned how plants made food and how they drank water. And she studied trees from around the world.

No woman had ever graduated from the University of California with a degree in science.

But in 1881, Kate did.

A nice proud feminist vibe throughout!

The illustrations, by Jill McElmurry, are beautifully specific: pictures of plant cells, specific (labeled!) types of leaves and desert trees, a real sense of the desert climate in the San Diego scenes.

There's enough of a story here to make it interesting, and enough scientific detail to encourage questions and further investigation.



The graphic novel Primates: The Fearless Science of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas, by Jim Ottaviani and Maris Wicks, gets far deeper into the complexities and triumphs of scientific research. This is a book you can get lost in.

Primates provides a clear and well-dramatized introduction to the work and lives of these three primatologists, the first to live with and study primates for years in their natural habitats: Goodall with chimpanzees, Fossey with mountain gorillas, and Galdikas with orangutans. Each woman tells her own story in first-person, and in her own font and color, which helps keep the voices distinct. There are similarities in the stories, but the very different personalities of the researchers come through well.

The fourth voice in the book is that of Louis Leakey, the anthropologist and archeologist who gave all three women their start. He believed that women were better-suited to this kind of work: more patient, more observant. Through Leakey, the three women meet each other, so there are some nice moments of crossover.

Ottaviani and Wicks don't romanticize the details of living in the bush. You get a real sense throughout of the difficulties and privations of each woman's chosen career: leeches, trekking through forest, sitting for hours, days, weeks in observation. All three come across as passionate and unconventionally brilliant, deeply dedicated to the animals and their land.

While non-kid-friendly details are alluded to in the book -- Louis Leakey's womanizing, Dian Fossey's murder -- the stories are kept age-appropriate. It feels to me like a book that will deepen with rereading as you learn more about each woman's life from other sources.

I think that Isabel responds to the fierce determination of the women depicted here: their focus and refusal to be put off. I have a feeling there are more animals in her future.

Love, Annie

Cynical politics and awesome first ladies

Dear Aunt Debbie,

And Happy Presidents' Day to you!  Bad Kitty sounds like a funny way to get into the topic of politics, though perhaps, as you say, a tad cynical for a first time through.  Then again, it's hard not to feel cynical these days when trying to explain the democratic process to one's children.  We've had a few conversations about the presidential election with Eleanor -- nothing about the Electoral College, so I'm afraid I'm no help on that front, but a few of those Major Conversations that pop up when you're not expecting them as a parent, often just before bedtime: What color is God's skin?  What happens when we die?  What's the difference between Democrats and Republicans?

We read Duck for President a while back, and while I adore Doreen Cronin and Betsy Lewin's Dooby Dooby Moo, I remember not loving this one as much.  It's wacky, as their books about the animals on Farmer Brown's farm tend to be, but at least when we last picked it up, also struck me as aimed at slightly older, more savvy readers.  Maybe worth picking up again.

The most presidential book we own at the moment is Eleanor's new book of  Obama paper dolls, which my father bought for her birthday.  They're Tom Tierney dolls -- the best paper doll artist ever, and worthy of a complete post someday soon.  It's laudatory, and the text inside is mostly about the clothes.  I love Tom Tierney.  (If you're feeling quite cynical and a little more adult, but still want an activity book, I'd recommend the Idiots' Books mix and match book Build Your Own President, created by my former college classmates, Matthew Swanson and Robbi Behr.)

Rachel at Even in Australia posted recently about historical president books.  Her post made me realize that I've never written here about the first book you gave Eleanor, sent to us mere weeks after she was born: Amelia and Eleanor Go for a Ride, by Pam Munoz Ryan, illustrated by Brian Selznick.

The Eleanor of the title is, of course, Eleanor Roosevelt; Amelia is Amelia Earhart, and apparently the two women were friends in real life.  Ryan draws inspiration from an actual historical episode: an evening when Amelia joined Eleanor for dinner at the White House, and later in the evening the two went flying in an airplane together.  In the fictionalized version, the flight is a spur of the moment decision, and Amelia and Eleanor are the only ones in the plane, swooping over Washington DC at night.  They return to the White House only to go out again, so that Eleanor can take Amelia for a spin in her new car.  The back of the book provides accurate historical information: there were other pilots on the plane, it was arranged ahead of time, Earhart didn't fly it the whole way, etc.  I like having the facts laid out at the end, but allowing for a little bit of fantasy in the plot.

Our Eleanor is a big Eleanor Roosevelt fan, and the depiction of Roosevelt and Earhart is compelling.  They're both presented as strong-willed, charismatic women who aren't shy about pursuing their interests.  And of course, Selznick's drawings are fantastic -- I didn't make the connection until picking the book up again last week that of course these portraits and DC landscapes were penned by the artist and writer who created Hugo Cabret and Wonderstruck.  What an awesome man.  And what awesome women.

Love, Annie

Animal characters as an entre to history

Dear Aunt Debbie,


My memory of Watership Down is vague -- I read it in college, on the recommendation of a friend who was captivated by it in 7th grade.  I think I was too old at that point for it to change my life.  One of the things I remember liking about it, however, was how animal it is.  Yes, it's on one level a commentary on human society, but it's in such a clear rabbit-perspective -- my memory is of rabbits who think and observe in a way rabbits really might, if they had a certain level of consciousness.  Which got me to thinking.


There are so many books about animals in which the animals act essentially like humans: The Wind in the Willows comes to mind, and of course there are lots of others, especially in the picture book world.  The animals chat with each other, have tea, wear clothes.  In what other books do animals appear straight-up as animals, interacting only with other animals as part of an animal society rather than in concert with humans?  I am drawing a blank here, but wondered if anything springs to mind for you.


I'm at my parents' place tonight, and was scanning their shelves for inspiration when I came across a couple of my childhood books which don't try to depict animal society at all, but anthropomorphize animals as a way to write about famous historical figures.


These two books, both by Robert Lawson, are tales of great men as "written" by their animal companions.  The subtitles say it all: Ben and Me: An Astonishing Life of Benjamin Franklin By His Good Mouse Amos, and Mr. Revere and I: Being an Account of certain Episodes in the career of Paul Revere, Esq. as recently revealed by his Horse, Scheherazade.


I read and reread Ben and Me in elementary school.  Amos the mouse is a fine narrator, funny and somewhat self-important (a bit like Franklin himself).  By his account, Amos helps Ben Franklin figure out all kinds of inventions, from the Franklin Stove to the discovery of electricity.  In a climactic scene, Amos goes up in a basket tied to the proverbial kite and is hit by lightning (Franklin tricks him into going up when there's a storm, and won't pull him down out of danger because he's so obsessed with the concept of electricity).  Amos is burned and furious, but otherwise okay.  The book is a terrific entry into Franklin lore, good, kid-friendly historical fiction, packed with drama.


Mr. Revere and I never grabbed me quite as much.  Perhaps it's because a mouse can go more interesting places than a horse; perhaps because Franklin is a more interesting man, on the whole.  Still, it's another accessible and interesting entry into American history.  


On the slightly pulpier side, Ally Sheedy (yup, that Ally Sheedy) wrote, at age 12, She Was Nice to Mice: The Other Side of Elizabeth I's Character Never Before Revealed by Previous Historians.  In it, a mouse living in Queen Elizabeth's court makes friends with the queen, and because of her small size is able to overhear conversations (and more) between Elizabeth and Essex, among other people.  I loved this book.  I have no idea how good it would be on a reread, but Elizabeth's court is juicy material, and Sheedy has fun with it.  I look forward to finding my old copy someday.


Love, Annie

Introducing the Thanksgiving story

Dear Aunt Debbie,

And happy Thanksgiving to you!  We missed you and your sweet potato biscuits, but my mom did a masterful job with the Johnson family pumpkin pie, and apple pie to boot.  It was a good day.

This is the first year that Eleanor has begun to be exposed to, and to take in, the Thanksgiving story.  It's interesting -- I remember getting all dolled up in elementary school in construction paper Pilgrim and Indian hats and headdresses, way back before I'd read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and started realizing how much had been revised and left out, and I found myself wondering recently how the story would come down to Eleanor and Isabel.  At preschool, they've done a nice job: they talked about the Pilgrims, and Eleanor came home to inform me solemnly that the Pilgrims came on a ship, "but they weren't the first people here."  Then they had homework: for Friday, each kid was given a plastic grocery bag and asked to fill it with the possessions they'd want to take with them on the Mayflower.  Evidently Eleanor really thinks the New World needs a Snow White Barbie doll and a plastic fireman's hat, among other things.  Her friend Ella (who I am sure will be massively into Ella Enchanted when she gets old enough) was a little more practical, and brought a lot of snacks.

Our first exposure to the Thanksgiving story actually came earlier this year, when we took the book Pilgrim Cat, by Carol Antoinette Peacock, out of the library.  I didn't realize at first that it was a Thanksgiving-related book.  It's decent picture-book historical fiction, about a young girl, Faith Barrett, who is among the passengers on the Mayflower, and makes friends with a cat who jumps on board just before the ship sails.  Faith and Pounce, the cat, become close friends, and he sticks by her through a difficult and dangerous time.  There's a nice surprise toward the end when Pounce disappears in the New World and is found again having given birth to kittens -- he is a she!  Just after this, there is the first Thanksgiving feast, complete with an accurate description of what they probably ate.  Lots of fish, it turns out.

Pilgrim Cat feels like a nice initial level of introduction to Colonial history.  Some of the story is prettied up a bit: there's no indication, for example, that the arrival of settlers threatens the Wampanoag people they interact with, and all the Pilgrim and Indian encounters are very positive.  But there's some good realism here too: conditions on the ship are described in bleak detail, and while waiting with many other passengers on the ship while some of the men land and build houses, Faith gets very sick with a fever that kills a great number of the people on board.  Eleanor and I had a bit of a discussion about that.  Squanto appears, and there are lovely drawings by Doris Ettinger depicting the daily activities the Pilgrims engaged in.  You get the feeling that Peacock did her research.  Now if only there were a dog involved, perhaps Isabel would be interested too....

Love, Annie

Social issues embedded in picture books

Dear Aunt Debbie,

These books sound fabulous -- I'll clearly be reading some of them myself before Eleanor is ready to go there. It strikes me, though, how dark their themes are. This is a comment (a complaint?) I've heard a lot about recent YA books, though I'm not sure how different they are in tone from previous generations. Do you think books for teens have gotten darker or weightier? Is this necessarily a bad thing if it's true?

I think about this as we've been reading a lot of Patricia Polacco in our house. Her picture books often touch on weighty or at least societally complex issues, but the touch is light and the illustrations filled with swiftness and joy.

I first came across Polacco's wonderful book Chicken Sunday long before I had kids, when I was right out of college and teaching at a boarding school. That year, I was part of a group of teachers who met once a month to talk about "issues of educational equity and diversity." For one meeting, our assignment was to find a children's book with themes of diversity. I think we were supposed to do a swap with the books after the session, but everyone wanted to keep the books they'd picked, so we all took our own home again.


Chicken Sunday

What I like about Chicken Sunday is that it isn't preachy. It's the 1950's, I think, and the narrator is white, and her best friends and adopted grandmother are black, and the hat-maker is Jewish, and the complexities are there underneath the narrative, but they're not made too explicit. The grandmother talks about how the hat-maker had "a hard life," and in one illustration you can see a number tattooed on his arm, but that's all that's mentioned. So there's this other level that, at some point, Eleanor can notice and ask questions about, but for right now, it's a story about the kids wanting to save up to buy an Easter hat, and being unfairly accused of throwing eggs, and doing something creative to get the hat for their grandmother.

When I was looking recently for good books involving same-sex couples, you mentioned Polacco's In Our Mothers' House, with the caveat that the story isn't as good as some of her others.


In Our Mothers' House

Like Chicken Sunday, In Our Mothers' House is told in retrospect. The narrator is one of three children adopted by a warm, loving lesbian couple (the kids call their mothers Marmee and Meema). They live in Berkeley, and all of their neighbors are totally accepting of them except for one family, where the parents keep their kids away. The most explicit this family's homophobia gets is when the mother tells Meema and Marmee: "I don't appreciate what you two are!" Then she walks away, and everybody else in the neighborhood hugs them. It's enough to spark a question in a child reader: why doesn't this mother like their family? Polacco leaves the complexities of the conversation to the parent reader. Mostly, I appreciate this approach.

I'd like the book to be a little less episodic -- here's another warm, loving thing that happened in our house or neighborhood as I was growing up -- and to have more of a single narrative. That said, it does part of what I want it to do: provides pictures and text that normalize the idea of a household with two moms, and with adopted kids of different races. Eleanor's first reaction to the book was not positive: she sighed as we got to the end and said, "This book is long." But then when we went to pick which books to return to the library that week, she wanted to keep it. We've renewed it twice now, and she's asked me to read it to her multiple times. What's her favorite part? When Meema and Marmee, who always wear pants, don huge flowing dresses to host a mother-daughter tea at their house. So, she's 3.

The other two Polacco books we're reading regularly were your recommendations as well. And because you put it so well in the email you sent to me recommending them, I'm going to quote you here:

Go out and get Thunder Cake.
A girl and her babushka'd grandma, on grandma's farm, see that a thunderstorm is brewing. Girl is scared. Grandma says they have to make a thunder cake before it hits, so they race. To the cows for milk, the chickens for eggs, etc. It has those lovely energetic Polacco people and animals with hands and feet going in many directions. And the last page, after the two sit down to their cake as the (slow-moving) storm crashes, is the recipe, complete with a secret ingredient.

I also really like The Keeping Quilt, which follows a quilt through many generations of Polacco's family. Don't know if this one will read to Eleanor a little too slowly, like Our Mothers. I've given it as a wedding gift, because it's so full of family. She of course has a pretty serious quilter for a grandma, so it might resonate.

Eleanor loves them both. The Keeping Quilt doesn't feel slow at all, but again touches on so many periods of history, here especially Russian Jewish immigrant history, that there is a rich layer waiting for her to get a little older. And, of course, there are a lot of wedding dresses for her to look at.

Love, Annie

Gripping historical fiction for older kids

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Oddly enough, the book I'm reading with my book club fits into this conversation, albeit on the older YA end of things. The library has labeled it "YA" on the spine (though they've also labeled it "Assignment," a surefire way to get more kids to pick it up).

The book is Kindred, by Octavia Butler.

Kindred

It's a time-travel novel: Dana, a contemporary (1976) African-American woman, is transported back in time to the antebellum South in order to save the life of a white boy who turns out to be one of her ancestors. He's accident-prone, and she is called back several times, with some of her visits lasting months, though very little time elapses in her real life. On one trip, her husband (a white man) is pulled back with her, and has to pose as her master for the safety of both of them. It's a gripping read, giving you a real sense of the historical situation of and relationships between slaves and plantation owners. Dana is an articulate and conflicted observer, trying to make sure that her family line will be started, repulsed by the situation she finds herself in, and slowly starting to accept it as normal at the same time.

Earlier this year, I came across another YA series which completely obsessed me: the Sally Lockhart Mysteries, by Philip Pullman. I'd read Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass) several years ago, and loved them; I think I like Sally Lockhart even better.


The Ruby in the Smoke: A Sally Lockhart Mystery

In The Ruby in the Smoke, Sally is 16 years old; in the later books (The Shadow in the North, The Tiger in the Well, The Tin Princess), she's in her early and then late 20's.

All four books are set in Victorian London, and are beautifully written, nail-biting mysteries packed with historical detail that enriches the plot without getting in its way. You find yourself learning about the opium trade, the plight of European Jewish immigrants, and Victorian property law, among other things. Above all, I adore Pullman's characters, especially his women; Sally is smart and tenacious and feels very real all the way through. I gulped these books down, reading them the way I remember reading as a kid, carrying them from room to room with me and reading in every spare second.

Of course, I found all of these books as an adult, and don't have a good sense of exactly when they'd start to be appropriate for kids: what's your thought on this? And what are some of the great new YA books you've discovered recently?

Love, Annie

Historical Girl Power

Dear Aunt Debbie,

I look forward to sharing the baseball books with Eleanor when she gets a little older. Right now, of course, we have Cubs-related board books, and sing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" as our last lullaby every night ("And it's root, root root for the Cubbies") -- but you understand marrying into a family with a love for a team that seems destined to lose forever. At least your Red Sox fan daughters eventually got lucky....

We've found and checked out a few random baseball-related books in the library. The one she liked best was Girl Wonder, by Deborah Hopkinson.


Girl Wonder: A Baseball Story in Nine Innings

It's based on the true story of Alta Weiss, who pitched on a minor league team starting in 1906, then quit baseball to become one of the first women doctors. It's a punchy book, and Eleanor enjoyed reading it. Like a number of historical girl-power books, however, it raises a funny issue for me: it introduces my daughter to historical prejudice and stereotyping even as it tries to debunk the stereotype. When I read dialogue in which men and boys tell Alta, "You can't play baseball! You're a girl!" I cringe. Nobody has ever told Eleanor that she can't play baseball. I kind of hate for her to have to find out.

When I opened Girl Wonder, I realized that Hopkinson was also the author of another good library find: Apples to Oregon: Being the (Slightly) True Narrative of How a Brave Pioneer Father Brought Apples, Peaches, Pears, Plums, Grapes, and Cherries (and Children) Across the Plains.



Apples to Oregon

This is a joyful, weird, tall tale of a book, also based on a historical narrative. It's told by Delicious, the oldest daughter of a tree farmer who transports a nursery full of trees from Iowa to Oregon in a covered wagon. The full-length title gives you a good sense of the tone. And while it's the father's idea to go this whole long way, Delicious and the other kids are the ones who do a lot of the tree-saving work. Empowering in another way?

Love, Annie