From My Scanner...

Dear Annie,

Ah, Hippos Go Berserk. A big favorite in our house -- one of the first books we gave Eleanor, I think. One of the many wonderful things about that book is the center spread, which I can't resist posting here:



It took me many readings before I realized that all is a bit of an exaggeration.

Hippos got a second life when Lizzie picked it up as she was learning to read. This was the first book she ever read on her own. Mona also went back to the board books when she wanted to learn. For her, it was a now out-of-print series of tiny books by Helen Oxenbury called Baby Beginner Books, with one word per page. There were four of them, but the one I remember best was
I Touch. It makes sense that many board books can become early readers: very few words per page, simple, big type, cozily familiar.

I'm going to do a bit of a leap here, to something I discovered on the store shelves today. I was straightening up the new sibling shelf, and found myself sorting through several copies of
Best-Ever Big Brother. It's a nice little lift-the-flap, nothing outstandingly imaginative, but utilitarian: "I'm a big brother. My baby brother has to wear a diaper/But I can wear big-kid underpants," etc. It's more-or-less the usual mix of multi-cultural: one spread with black siblings, two with Asians, three with whites. The exception, of course, is the cover: one is much less likely to find a book containing a variety of races with an African-American cover.

Best-Ever Big Sister has a child on the cover who could be interpreted as non-white. I've always liked these books, and they sell at about the same rate as other sibling books for the same age.

So imagine my surprise when I discovered myself holding two copies of the Big Brother pictured above, and two copies of this:


The bar code number is the same. It's just that this is what turned up when I re-ordered. No one at the publisher, Penguin Books, told me this was happening -- it just happened. My cynical self suspects that the publisher thinks it will sell more with the blue-eyed blond. Sometimes -- not often, but on occasion -- white customers will say that they're rejecting a book for a young child because the children pictured aren't white. They phrase it as "I want to give the child images that look like him/her." I find this a disturbing thing, and different from buyers who are looking for books with characters who resemble non-white children they are buying the books for. There's a much wider variety of races in books than in previous decades, but there are still a lot more books with white kids in them, or with white kids as the majority of kids. It seems reasonable to want to get more non-white images in the hands of non-white kids because there are already so many white images around. And it seems like a good idea to give everyone pictures of the world that reflect the variety of people in it.

So am I sounding like someone from a previous generation? Do you think about race when looking for books for your kids? Or is there enough variety around that you don't feel a need to be conscious of looking for it? This is a question for you, Annie, but also for any of those other parents of little ones out there.

Love,

Deborah

The great silliness of Sandra Boynton

Dear Aunt Debbie,

I don't think you're taking the window/mirror thing too far -- and I love your assessments of Lizzie and Mona's reading habits. I'm looking forward to seeing what Eleanor and Isabel gravitate towards as they get older.

This morning, everyone woke up too early and we ran out of milk and there was some general grumpiness (mostly from me), and then Eleanor completely lifted the mood by putting on a CD she's been listening to a lot these days: Sandra Boynton's Philadelphia Chickens (a collaboration with composer Michael Ford).


Philadelphia Chickens

It comes with an accompanying book, with fabulous Boynton drawings and the lyrics and music to all the songs, and I've had it stuck in my head all day. Patti LuPone singing "I Like to Fuss"; Laura Linney singing "Please Can I Keep It," about a big animal that follows a kid home; Kevin Kline singing a patter song about being really busy -- it goes on and on in great goofy, catchy style, with an all-star cast. (If you're a fan of The Belly Button Book or Snuggle Puppy, this album gives you handy tunes for the songs in each. And "Snuggle Puppy" is sung by Eric Stoltz. Sigh.)

Boynton is so unabashedly silly, and so prolific, that I figure most parents have at least some of her books, but I thought I'd mention a couple of our favorites, both of which involve counting:


Doggies: A Counting and Barking Book

Doggies is one of the first books we read to Eleanor regularly. On each page, a new dog is counted, and barks an appropriate number of times (1=Woof! 2=Yap yap! 3=nnn...nnn...nnn, etc.). On the page for number 9, all the dogs howl -- this used to send Eleanor into paroxysms of laughter. We're now all reading it together to Isabel, who seems intrigued.


Hippos Go Berserk!

Boynton's hippos have this manic look in their eyes when they're running to a party -- a party that grows and grows as the book goes on, first adding hippos, then subtracting them, and in the middle having a giant dance party (we always make the book dance at this point, and sing a little tune). This one also begins to get at the concept of addition: we recently had a conversation with Eleanor about how many hippos there are at the party, sparked by the last line of the book ("One hippo, alone once more/Misses the other forty-four.").

There are so many other great Boynton books. And, I'm sure, other great counting/numbers books. What would you recommend on either front?

Love, Annie

Mirrors & windows 2

Dear Annie,

I think I may have oversimplified Mitali Perkins’ mirror/window analysis in my last post. You talked about a book being able to be both: a reflection of the reader with which s/he can identify, and a way to see new places and have new experiences. Which of course Perkins was intending with the concept too. I really want to read her Bamboo People. Here’s her May 27 post on that BEA breakfast. I love her description of how Cory Doctorow entertained himself while others were speaking.

I’m so glad Eleanor took to Babies Can't Eat Kimchee. It acknowledges the ways in which a newborn can be disappointing (can’t play yet, cries inexplicably, etc) while still celebrating the relationship between siblings – and reminding the older one of her many accomplishments. The window element of the book -- introducing three year-old Eleanor to little bits of Korean culture – is such a great thing to be able to do within the context of everyday reading.

You ask about Lizzie and Mona and the window/mirror stuff. At some point in their chapter book lives, they each gravitated to different kinds of books. Their reading wasn’t exclusively one kind. But Lizzie definitely got very involved in adventure and fantasy books. Treasure Island, The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, and The Hobbit were books that she revisited frequently. I think she loved worlds which were very different, yet at the same time she could imagine herself an adventurer in those worlds. Window?

Mona, a year and a half younger, grounded herself in what we referred to as “domestic fiction,” Beverly Cleary’s Ramona books being the best example. Real life for kids. As you know, they’re among my favorites for taking the trials and tribulations of growing up so seriously, while presenting them with such a gentle sense of humor. Mona has always been interested in the interpersonal dynamics around her, and many of the books she chose gave her more reflections of her world. It’s funny, the last books we read aloud with Mona, when she was a high school freshman, were The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. She was already a strong feminist, and I think the biggest attraction of those books was Mma Ramotswe’s perception of human relations, and Mma's own strong sense of self. So does that make it a mirror? Am I pushing this concept too far?
Love,

Deborah

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

BEA & energizing authors

Dear Annie,

I’m just back from New York where I spent a day at BEA (Book Expo America: the booksellers’ convention). The day started with a really wonderful breakfast where three children’s book authors spoke. I realized after it was over that if I’m going to be blogging, I have to dust off my old journalist’s instincts and start taking notes. I didn’t, alas, but wanted to give you a few impressions.

Cory Doctorow is the author of Little Brother, a novel about Homeland Security gone wild, and the current For the Win. He was incredibly moving. He talked about the intensity of adolescence and how it’s a great age to write for. Tries to stay very connected to his audience, is deep into the world of high technology, cares deeply about injustice, and was a pleasure to listen to. I’m not doing him justice here, but in the spirit of this blog will quote one line from the bio on his website on a completely different topic:
“On February 3, 2008, he became a father. The little girl is called Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow, and is a marvel that puts all the works of technology and artifice to shame.”

Mitali Perkins is a Bangladeshi-born, New York-raised author I wasn’t familiar with. Her current book, Bamboo People is about a friendship between two boys on the Thai-Burmese border. Her books all tend to be about cultures in conflict. She talked about kids’ books falling into two categories: mirror books or window books. Basically, a mirror book has elements with which the reader can strongly identify (she talked about Little Women being a mirror book for her because she was in a family of sisters), and a window book introduces you to experience foreign to your own.

And Richard Peck (I can’t find a website for him, which makes sense), the third speaker, was an angry and impassioned 76 year-old guy. I know him best for A Long Way from Chicago and sequels – middle-grade stories of the Midwest during the Depression for which he won a Newbery Honor, and for the first sequel, the Newbery Medal. He’s currently flacking Three Quarters Dead which harks back to his roots as a horror writer. Three girls are killed in a car accident while the driver is on her cell phone. The fourth, surviving member of their group starts receiving text messages from the dead ones… Peck made it clear that he hates cell phones, a lot of other technology, and what he sees as anti-authoritarian, anti-intellectual culture inspired by the upheavals of the 60s. He said he quit teaching (in the NYC school system) in 1971 (the year of Doctorow’s birth) because that’s when they took teachers’ authority away. I disagreed with a lot of what he was saying – and liked some of it too – but it was a pleasure to listen to someone who cared so deeply about communicating with kids through his writing.

Walking out of the breakfast, on my way to a day of visiting publishers’ exhibits at the Javits Center, I felt renewed. Here were three wildly different authors, all of whom had very strong world views, writing very different kinds of books, and caring deeply. It’s part of what makes my job so satisfying.

Love,

Deborah

Quirky and out of print

Dear Aunt Debbie,

While I'm always excited to find new books, some of the ones I've most enjoyed reading to Eleanor are books I remembered faintly from childhood, and then got to rediscover. I'm not talking about the well-known classics here, the Margaret Wise Browns and Maurice Sendaks. No, these are strange, quirky books that no one I know outside my family has ever heard of, which came to mind suddenly and then had to be searched for, because of course they're out of print.

After waiting several weeks, one such gem arrived on the hold shelf of my local library yesterday: Tell Me A Mitzi. Lore Segal's book, memorably illustrated by Harriet Pincus , contains three stories: "Mitzi Takes a Taxi," "Mitzi Sneezes," and "Mitzi and the President." Each is introduced by a brief conversation between a girl named Martha and her mother or father, in which Martha asks them to "Tell me a Mitzi." In each story, Mitzi and her little brother Jacob have a low-level adventure, based in reality and involving a lot of step-by-step detail:

So Mitzi got Jacob's bottle, carried it into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator and took out a carton of milk and opened it and took the top off Jacob's bottle and poured in the milk and put the top back on and closed the carton and put it back in the refrigerator and closed the door and carried the bottle into the children's room and gave it to Jacob and said, "Let's go."

Why do I find this kind of writing so pleasing? Part of it, I think, is because this is the way toddlers think; going through an action in such detail makes total sense to them. As a parent who has been asked to make up a lot of stories lately, I also recognize a narrative trick I've employed to make the story a little longer while you're figuring out what's going to happen next.

This is such a New York book, with its street scenes and taxis; such a 1970's book, with its patterned clothes, and Pincus's drawings are solid and joyful and a little strange. (The IndieBound site has no image of the cover, but the wonderful blog Vintage Kids' Books My Kid Loves has a few images to give you a sense.) It taps into something deep in my childhood experience (in New York, in the 1970's -- and get this: Mitzi's grandparents live one door down from Grandma and Grandpa's house), but, as you wrote about Countdown yesterday, you don't need to have had that experience to love it. At Eleanor's request, we've read it aloud four times already since yesterday afternoon.

Love, Annie

A Good Book

Dear Annie,

As the person who decides what books our stores will carry, I read a lot of kids’ novels. Sometimes I can tell right away if a book will be right or wrong for us, but there’s a vast middle-ground through which I slog regularly. There are times when I feel I’ve lost all critical faculties (hmm, maybe this is a good book, it seems okay, why am I not excited about it…). Then there’s fantasy fatigue, when I just can’t face another book about an 11/12/13 year-old with mysterious magical powers who has just discovered that s/he is crucial to the survival of civilization/life in another dimension/ancient gods and goddesses. But every now and then, just as I feel I’m sinking beneath the flood, the waters part and there stands a really good book.



So here’s the latest in that category:
Countdown, by Deborah Wiles, which came out this month.



It’s the story of an 11 year-old girl during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Her father is a career military officer stationed in suburban Washington DC. Franny tries to make sense of the escalating crisis at the same time that she’s dealing with a realignment of her group of friends (is she being pushed into the out crowd?), a shell-shocked uncle who’s getting worse, and a rebellious older sister who has discovered the civil rights movement. The list may sound a bit heavy-handed, but the characters have dimension and the execution is very well crafted. Into these plot lines, Deborah Wiles weaves collages of history: mini-bios of important figures of the time, lots of photographs, rock’n’roll lyrics, newspaper clips.



My overwhelming feeling after reading it was, yes, she got it right: she really presented the feelings and atmosphere that I lived through that fall of 1962. This was followed by, but what will 21st-century kids think of it? I got one positive review back from a fifth grader whose father reported she stayed up late reading and asked him lots of questions about the era the next morning. Another kid reader has come back for a second copy to give a friend – always a good sign.



I’ve been a big fan of Wiles’ Love, Ruby Lavender (the opening chapter, when a girl helps her animal-activist grandmother liberate some chickens from a chicken farm, is a stitch). It has two companion books, Each Little Bird That Sings and The Aurora County All-Stars. They’re not as ambitious as Countdown, but all have great characters, all in the same small southern town. I went to a luncheon with Wiles last week, and she talked about Countdown as the first in a trilogy about the Sixties. But like the earlier trilogy, the main characters will be different in each book although some of the settings will be the same. I look forward to them.

Love,

Deborah