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

Playing in the Park

Dear Annie,

Eleanor's progress through the early readers is a delight to watch.  She's picking some of the classic authors of the genre: Cynthia Rylant and  Syd Hoff in your previous post, and now James Howe.  Howe is probably best-known for Bunnicula, a chapter book series about a vampire bunny who sucks the juice out of vegetables.  And he's done a more recent series about kids in middle school who are ostracized for different reasons.  He's impressive in a number of different genres.

Not unlike our pal Emily Jenkins, author of the wonderful early chapter book Toys Go Out, a handful of picture books including the mathematically-inclined Five Creatures, and, writing as E. Lockhart, YA novels including the excellent The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks.  She's got a lovely new picture book:
Water in the Park, illustrated by Stephanie Graegin.  Sooner or later, a non-New York-based bookseller can sometimes feel, all roads lead to Brooklyn.  This book was based on a summer's observation of Prospect Park, but the experience is definitely universal.  Going from dawn to dark, Jenkins lists various activities in the park -- most of them having to do with water.

Turtles leave their rocks when early morning dog-walkers arrive -- panting in the heat, the dogs say, "Heh. Heh. Heh."

Mr. Fluffynut is scared to go deeper than his doggy ankles.
He holds a tennis ball tight in his mouth and will not give it up.
"Drop it!" says his human.
But Mr. Fluffynut will not drop it.

By 7 a.m. babies arrive, sprinklers are turned on (one baby cries, the other laughs),and soon a panoramic illustration of the playground shows dozens of children in motion.   In late morning, park workers water plants.  Then it's lunchtime:

Coming up on noon, it's time for lunch.  Maybe a nap.
Some children cry.
Claudie K. clings to the leg of a bench.
"Not going home," she says.  She likes it here.

We'll see more of Claudie in the afternoon.

The grown-ups show up to eat lunches on benches.

On very hot days, the ice cream truck comes early.
By two, its tune is already jingling.
Children coming back to the park get soft-serve cones and bright Popsicles.
Grown-ups buy bottles of water.
Sticky fingers and faces are rinsed in the sprinkler.

Kids dump water on each other and run through sprinklers, someone scrapes a knee, a naked baby runs away from clothing.  When the sprinkler is turned off, the baby who cried when it was turned on now laughs, and the water-loving baby cries.  Dog-walkers and other grownups return, and as it turns to dusk a downpour soaks those who linger.

It's a lovely recitation of the details of life, with many many details to pore over.  I love it for its quiet way of taking everything seriously.  Jenkins' theme of uniting it all with water (pond, sprinklers, bottles, rain) didn't quite work for me.  The human rhythms seem to be the theme of the book.  The detail that's missing here is the drumbeat of cell phones: I can't find even one in the entire day.  Idyllic.

Love,

Deborah