Selective editing

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Seeing those images from Fireboat of the planes heading toward the towers, I'm not sure if I'M ready to read it with Eleanor yet. Both of the books you write about in depth, though, do seem like good possibilities in the near future.

A propos of this topic, I was talking to my friend Cyd a few days ago about the selective editing we are sometimes tempted to do as parents when reading to our children books which are mostly fabulous but contain one or two highly disturbing moments.  I've written about reading Betsy-Tacy to Eleanor for the first time and eliding the death of Tacy's baby sister (on second reading, we talked about it ahead of time and read it with the full text, and Eleanor seemed totally capable of handling it).

Cyd, mother of three girls, is currently reading the All-of-a-Kind Family series to her eldest, Rebekah.  I remember the series dimly from my own childhood -- it's about a family of five girls living on the Lower East Side at the turn of the century -- but I don't think it made as much of an impression on me as it did on Cyd's family.  (Here's her sister, writing about it on one of our favorite blogs, Even in Australia.)

When the mother of a boy in one of the later books gets sick and is in the hospital, Rebekah got terribly worried about her, and asked about her welfare every night when Cyd sat down again with the book: "Is she going to be okay?  Will she get well?"  In Sydney Taylor's text, the mother dies, and the family goes to live with their social worker.  Cyd felt that this would crush Rebekah, talked it over with her husband, and had the mom get well and go to live with the social worker with the rest of the family.

As we talked, Cyd and I both felt mixed about this -- when is it time to reveal the harsh truths  that are part of life, and when is it still time to protect your child from what she will inevitably learn later?

I feel like this is a question we keep coming back to, and that there's no one good answer.

Love, Annie

9/11 books for young children

Dear Annie,

It's lovely seeing you as a co-blogger in the New York Times today, writing about responding to 9/11 with your high school students.  I'm sorry I've never seen with their eyes performed, although one of the best meetings of Lizzie's and my mother-daughter book group was when you came to talk about it.

Last week, you brought up the issue of talking about 9/11 with Eleanor, who's four and a half, and asked about a Huffington Post list of kids' and YA books on the subject.  I'm familiar with most of them -- they cover a wide age range.  I was surprised the list didn't include Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers for teens, or Mordecai Gerstein's The Man Who Walked Between the Towers (I know, it's about the beginning of the towers, not their end, but it still belongs).  Two of the youngest books on that list are particularly interesting.

I really like Maira Kalman's
Fireboat: The Heroic Adventures of the John J. Harvey, but it would be a very hard one to read with most young children.  I wonder if it would work for you and Eleanor, given that she's aware of what happened.  The book tells the story of a Depression-era New York City fireboat which was decommissioned in 1995 and bought by a group of friends who lovingly restored it ("They repaired the 2 propellers ... They repaired the holes with steel plates... They scraped barnacles...").

Then there's one page that's all black, with white lettering:

But then on September 11, 2011 something so huge and horrible happened that the whole world shook....

[detail of a two-page spread]

 Two airplanes crashed into the Twin Towers.

CRASHED, CRASHED, CRASHED into these two strong buildings.

The sky filled with fire and smoke.
The buildings exploded and fell down to the ground.
Many people were hurt.  Many lives were lost.

After these stunning two-page spreads, the story goes back to the friends who own the John J. Harvey, who rushed to the boat  and volunteered to help.  The lower Manhattan water pipes were badly damaged, and the fireboat ended up pumping river water to the firefighters on land to pour onto the wreckage for four days.  It ends feeling a bit like the plucky little boat that could still help out.

On a completely different note is another book which comes at the events from an oblique angle: 14 Cows for America, by Carmen Agra Deedy.  It's a moving reminder of the powerful feelings generated by the attacks.  The book tells the true story of a young Maasai man who was studying medicine in the U.S. on September 11.  When he returns home to his village in Kenya, he talks about the attacks.  The villagers decide to give the U.S. a gift to express their deep sympathy: 14 cows, highly prized by the Maasai.  The U.S. ambassador eventually comes to the village to accept the gift, and the village says it will keep the herd for the Americans.  It's lovely and moving, a good way to talk about loss and caring.  The final line of the story:

Because there is no nation so powerful it cannot be wounded, nor a people so small that they cannot offer mighty comfort.

Love,

Deborah

Talking to kids about difficult issues

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Your discussion of Jefferson's Sons raises a question we and our guest bloggers have touched on before (here, here, here, and here, among other places): when and how do we talk to our kids about complex, painful issues, and how do books play a part in those discussions?

This question has come up for me again most recently in relation to September 11th.  HarperCollins is putting out a new edition of with their eyes: September 11th: the view from a high school at ground zero, the play I created with my students after the World Trade Center was attacked four blocks from our school.  (I've written about it in more detail here.)

with their eyes is a YA book, aimed at an audience of high school students and above -- not the kind of thing you'd generally want to share with your 4 year old.  But with the new edition and my revised introduction have come interviews, and opportunities for me to write about the play, and the book has been out on the coffee table,  so at some point I had to explain to Eleanor what it was about.

I told her the story of September 11th very simply: that some very angry, very evil people had flown planes into two tall buildings, and the buildings had fallen down, and lots of people died.  She asked why people had done that, and I said I didn't fully know; that some people believe it's okay to hurt and kill others, but that we know it is never okay.  I told her that my students and I saw some of it, and that we had to leave our school and walk uptown when it happened, and that the play told the stories of lots of different people's experiences.  I reminded her of the tower we've seen going up at the World Trade Center site when we drive up the West Side Highway to visit my parents, and explained that that was where it happened.

Eleanor took the story in stride.  It's funny what upsets her and what doesn't -- she can process stories of great tragedy well, and then something very small will upset her deeply.  I wasn't sure how much of it she'd taken in, but about a week after our conversation, she brought it up matter-of-factly in the bath when I was talking obliquely to my mom about the play: Oh, that's about the people who flew the planes into the buildings and killed all those people.  Her tone was serious -- she knows this is heavy, real stuff even if she doesn't fully comprehend it yet.

with their eyes appeared recently on a Huffington Post list of children's books about September 11th.  I'm not familiar with any of the other titles on the list, though some of them look powerful.  Have you read any of them?  I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

Love, Annie