More new baby and sibling books

Dear Aunt Debbie,

On brand-new babies:

We adore Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse (such a great book to address guilt over doing something mean and then regretting it), and read Julius, the Baby of the World soon after Isabel was born. However, we ran into the Bedtime for Frances problem: Eleanor started saying more negative things about Isabel as a consequence of reading the book than she had been on her own. We returned it to the library.

Another book you gave us in the same vein, with wonderful, realistic illustrations by Michael Emberly is Robie H. Harris's Hi New Baby!


Hi New Baby!

An older sister is less than thrilled by the appearance of her younger brother (the line Eleanor quoted from this one is "That baby is yucky!"), but quickly has some fond moments with him. One of the things I like about this one is that it's narrated by Dad, talking to the older sister in retrospect: remember when this happened?

Eleanor also really likes the book Rachel recommended in her comment, How to Be a Baby...By Me, the Big Sister. It contains some very funny lists.

On older sibling/younger sibling relationships:

As I've mentioned before, I love the treatment of sibling jealousy in A Birthday for Frances.

Rosemary Wells does siblings incredibly well. Two of our favorites (there are so many great ones) are Noisy Nora and Stanley and Rhoda (sadly, out of print).


Noisy Nora

Nora is the middle sibling, and spends the book watching her parents pay attention to her older sister and baby brother, then acting out in huge operatic ways ("First she banged the window/Then she felled some chairs/Then she took her brother's kite and flew it down the stairs!"). When all of the attention she gets is negative, she decides to run away, and everyone immediately misses her. Perhaps my favorite illustration here is Nora holding up a muffin pan in her little mouse hands, clearly about to drop it and make as much noise as she can.


Stanley and Rhoda

Stanley is a studious looking, responsible mouse, and Rhoda is his louder and far less responsible little sister. There are three stories in the book; our favorite is "Don't Touch it, Don't Look at It," in which Rhoda gets a bee sting and freaks out, while Stanley quietly calms her down.

I'll save the Max and Ruby books (NOT the ones connected with the TV show, blech) for another post. They deserve their own.

Finally, on a positive sibling note, I want to mention another gift from you:


Sisters

David McPhail's drawings of the older sister and younger sister playing together and separately have a nice pencil-sketch feel to them, and his spare text describes two girls who you feel would be fun to hang out with. It's a good Here's how we're different/ Here's how we're alike book.

Love, Annie

Book as window, book as mirror

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Sounds like a fabulous convention. From checking out your links, I'm particularly interested in reading some of Cory Doctorow's work. For the Win sounds in some ways like an updated version of Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game: applying kids' video game skill to real-world situations. I first heard about "gold farming" (sweatshop workers playing video games endlessly to get characters to higher levels, which are then sold to first-world players for real money) a couple of years ago, and find the concept both horrifying and fascinating. I'm intrigued.

I was struck by Mitali Perkins's formulation of books as "window books" or "mirror books," and started thinking this morning about which kids' books I've been reading lately would fall into each category. Then, of course, my English teacher brain kicked in, and I thought, So many of the best books, kids' lit or otherwise, are those which are both mirrors and windows. There's something in a book which allows you to identify with it deeply, and yet the book also has something to teach you outside of your own experience.

One of the first books I thought of which functions as both mirror and window for Eleanor is another of your gifts:


Babies Can't Eat Kimchee

Babies Can't Eat Kimchee, by Nancy Patz, with great energetic collage illustrations by Susan L. Roth, is perhaps my favorite How to Deal With a New Sibling book. The mirror: An older sister is faced with a new baby sister. She lists the things babies can't do (eat kimchee, spaghetti, and strawberry ice cream; dance like a ballerina; know what an elephant is), then turns it around and projects how she will help teach her little sister some of these things ("I'll teach her to lick up the drips"). When we started reading the book, just before Isabel was born, Eleanor immediately picked up on the positive formulation: I'm going to help teach my baby to walk, etc. The window: the girls in the book are Korean, and there are references to kimchee and the special dress the baby will wear on her first birthday. Both of these have prompted questions from Eleanor. The best part of the book: at the end, the older sister gets so carried away by the idea of singing songs with her little sister that she offers, "Baby, do you want me to teach you a song?" Then there's a two-page spread of a red-faced, screaming baby ("WAAAAAH! WAAAAAH!"), followed by the rueful older girl: "Well, maybe someday." We have probably acted out those last pages 150 times this year.

I remember, in my own childhood reading, identifying incredibly closely with lots of characters, to the point where their moods would influence mine as I read. What kids' books do you think functioned most as mirrors, or windows, or both, for Lizzie and Mona?

Love, Annie

Bravo for Frances

Dear Aunt Debbie,

I can't let your mention of the Frances books go by without taking a moment to wax rhapsodic about them: they are some of our absolute favorites, beloved by adults and kids alike. Russell and Lillian Hoban, the married couple who wrote and illustrated them, respectively, have a knack for depicting life for this family of badgers as both charming and realistic.

The book I remembered best from my own childhood, and the first one we bought to read to Eleanor, is A Baby Sister for Frances.


A Baby Sister for Frances

Perhaps the thing I love most about Frances is that she makes up little songs all the time, so each book is punctuated by these short rhymes that we provide tunes for while we're reading. A Baby Sister for Frances begins:

It was a quiet evening.
Father was reading his newspaper.
Mother was feeding Gloria, the new baby.
Frances was sitting under the kitchen sink.
She was singing a little song:

Plinketty, plinketty, plinketty, plink,
Here is the dishrag that's under the sink.
Here are the buckets and brushes and me,
Plinketty, plinketty, plinketty, plee.

She stopped the song and listened.
Nobody said anything.

Frances feels like her parents aren't paying enough attention to her because of Gloria. After a couple of disappointments (no raisins for the oatmeal!), she decides to run away. To under the dining-room table. Mother and Father play along, talking about how much they miss Frances as she sits listening and singing a lonely song and eating cookies, and eventually she decides to come back. (Though we got it before Isabel was in the picture, this is also a great book to give to a family expecting or just having welcomed a second child.)


A Birthday for Frances

A Birthday for Frances is also about sibling jealousy: it's Gloria's birthday, and Frances has a hard time ceding the spotlight to her sister. There's some wonderful dialogue in this one between Frances and her friend Albert about the uselessness of little sisters.


A Bargain for Frances

A Bargain for Frances is perhaps our current favorite, as it involves Frances's manipulative friend Thelma, who plays a mean trick on Frances over the purchase of a tea set. Frances thinks hard, and comes up with a really satisfying way to turn the tables on her. While the book ends happily, with friends playing together, the Hobans don't whitewash the ways kids can be mean to each other. My favorite moment in the matter-of-fact dialogue comes when Frances brings home the red plastic tea set Thelma has conned her into buying, and shows it to her sister Gloria: "'That is a very ugly tea set,' said Gloria. 'What's the matter with it?' said Frances. 'It's ugly,' said Gloria."

You mentioned Bread and Jam for Frances, which is another of our favorites, but needs a bit of a warning label if you have an impressionable child, as I do. In it, Frances only wants to eat bread and jam, and complains about all other food. Mother and Father deal with this by giving her bread and jam for every meal for a day and a half, at which point she gets tired of it and appreciates other kinds of food again (with the support of Albert, who is extremely satisfied with his own multi-part lunches). So the moral is a good one: try new food! In our house, however, what this translated to was Eleanor wanting to eat bread and jam all the time.

That leads me to the problem with Bedtime for Frances (the first Frances book, and the only one illustrated by Garth Williams). Like the others, this book has lovely moments in it: Frances has a hard time falling asleep, and one of the things she does is to make up a little alphabet song. However, she also gets out of bed multiple times, asks for and receives cake from her parents, imagines there's a tiger in her room, and is threatened with a spanking (the only time either Father or Mother comes off as punishing). We received this book recently in an awesome Easter package, and after reading it to Eleanor once (once!), she talked about there being a tiger in her room for probably two weeks. We've pulled it from the rotation.

There's one more Frances book, Best Friends for Frances. I've glanced at it in a bookstore, but never bought it, as the friend problem in it seems to involve Albert telling Frances he won't play with her anymore because she's a girl. Again, a concept I don't want to have to introduce Eleanor to just yet. Sadly, the time will come.

Love, Annie