Tag Archives | children's literature

Arte Público Press

Piñata Books Are Full of Surprises!

Arte Público Press uses the delightful metaphor of piñata to describe its imprint of bi-lingual Spanish-English books for children — full of delights and full of surprises.

Surprise #1 — Arte Público Press is the original publisher of Sandra Cisneros’ seminal The House on Mango Street. To further bring Hispanic literature to mainstream audiences, “Arte Público Press launched the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Program in 1992. This program represents the first nationally coördinated attempt to recover, index, and publish lost Latino writings that date from the American colonial period through 1960.”

Surprise #2 — Piñata Books include bilingual picture books for children, bilingual “flip” books for middle-grade readers, informative biographies, and nonfiction books that take a closer look at US Hispanic history through a different set of eyes, plus a variety of novels for young adults. Piñata Books help fill the need for quality, bilingual books that reflect “themes, characters, and customs unique to US Hispanic culture.”

This month I was honored and delighted to interview Marina Tristán, Assistant Director of Arte Público Press at the University of Houston. I thought about what challenges this publisher faced — initially to break into publishing bi-lingual Spanish/English books for children and now, currently, with the pandemic. I asked Marina:

What is most rewarding — and challenging — about being an editor or publisher?

As an independent non-profit, mission-driven press, Arte Público Press’ goal is to provide publishing opportunities to Latino authors and to ensure Latinos, particularly children, see themselves and their culture in books. And, of course, it’s important for others to recognize Latinos are part of US history and culture. When we first started publishing books in the late 1970s, there were very few — if any — Hispanic authors who were household names, and Latinos were mostly represented as thieves and gangbangers in books (and movies). That has changed tremendously over the years. Now, most high school and college students are familiar with Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street, which Arte Público first published in the 1980s.

Marina Tristán

We seek to ensure Latino authors are appreciated as part of the US literary canon and kids see themselves as valued contributors to our national culture. There are many rewards in our work, such as when a teacher tells me that a confirmed non-reader — a kid who has never read a book — was caught reading one of our books on the school steps before school … or a kid enthusiastically notes that an author’s name on one of our books is the same as hers. Hispanic kids can relate to our books and that might help them to become readers and see themselves as writers. The books published under our imprint for children, Piñata Books, serve as a gateway between school and home. Our kids’ picture books are bilingual, which allows parents who are not literate in English to share in their children’s education and what writer Pat Mora calls “bookjoy.” Our publishing program absolutely makes a difference in people’s lives, starting with our children.

Obviously, there are many challenges as an independent publisher, but mainly we cannot compete with major presses that are part of global conglomerates with huge budgets at their disposal and newspapers and magazines as part of their holdings that can promote the books they publish.

Tell us about a few of your recent publications and why they are unique.

Trust Me — Richard Santos’ thrilling debut novel follows a mismatched group of people desperately searching for money, happiness, and love. And aren’t we all doing that?? The upcoming elections make this riveting read about a political campaign operative particularly relevant as it barrels through the New Mexican landscape in an exploration of innocence and guilt, power, and wealth. Kirkus Reviews called it “a compulsively readable debut.”
Manhattan Tropics / Trópico en Manhattan — originally published in Spanish in 1951, this was the first novel to focus on the postwar influx of Puerto Ricans to New York. This new edition contains a first-ever English translation, and its exploration of class, race, and gender — while demonstrating the community’s resilience and cultural pride — ensures its relevance today.
Wishbone — this engaging novel for teens juxtaposes a young girl’s experiences being bullied at school in Houston because she’s “too ugly, too fat, too Mexican,” with her grandmother’s many years before while married to a male chauvinist in Laredo, Texas. Horn Book Magazine said, “Spare writing and the revelation of long-held secrets make for a compelling tale, with an ultimately empowering and satisfying conclusion.”
Holly Hernandez and the Death of Disco — this captivating whodunit for young adults is set during the disco-dance craze of the 1970s and follows two students trying to solve a murder at their high school. Kirkus Reviews said, “This fast-paced, skillfully developed murder mystery offers equal billing to both characters, their separate lives, and their individual problems while also examining gender inequality and social injustice and providing an interesting look at the history of disco as a safe place for queer people and people of color. A fun murder mystery with a side of disco fever.”

What books of yours would you especially recommend to young readers, teachers, and librarians?

My Shoes and I / Mis zapatos y yo — René Colato Laínez draws on his own experience traveling from El Salvador to the United States in this poignant bilingual picture book about young migrant children making the arduous journey to be reunited with family. School Library Journal called it a “moving, heartfelt tale of courage and perseverance.”
The Boy Who Touched the Stars / El niño que alcanzó las estrellas — This inspiring bilingual picture book recounts José M. Hernández’s rise from a migrant farm-working family to an astronaut. The book mentions José’s second-grade teacher who was instrumental both in convincing his father to settle in Stockton, California, so the children could prosper and encouraging his educational and space career. In its starred review, Kirkus Reviews said, “This outstanding bilingual autobiography encapsulates the life-changing power of having a goal and the will to achieve it.”
The Case of the Pen Gone Missing / El caso de la pluma perdida — The first short, bilingual novel in the Mickey Rangel Mystery series introduces readers ages 8 – 12 to this fifth-grade, web-certified sleuth (with a certificate to prove it!) who lives in South Texas. School Library Journal said, “Lively and entertaining narrative coupled with attractive [black and white] illustrations will make this book a favorite among young mystery readers.”
The Missing Chancleta and Other Top-Secret Cases / La chancleta perdida y otros casos secretos — this first short, bilingual novel in the Flaca Files / Los expedientes de Flaca series features a plucky second-grade girl named Flaca who envisions herself a detective. Reminiscent of Harriet the Spy, this skinny Puerto Rican girl imagines mysteries all around! Kirkus Reviews said, “Short and sweet, this book is a good choice. Chuckle-inducing fun.”

Sharing Piñata Books with young listeners, it has been my delight to have my grandchildren snuggle close and ask me to “read this book again, please.” Sometimes we read in English, sometimes in Spanish. What an extra treat to hear the same story in two different languages. Thank you, Arte Público Press, and thank you, Marina, for your wonderful introduction to your books.

Enchanted Lion

Small Press Medley 2

I am enchanted … with the fresh, delightful, and imaginative books published by this independent publisher. Their doors opened in 2003 and even during these tumultuous times, their doors have stayed open and their vision has stayed strong. Enchanted Lion Books come from a diversity of sources and voices that have been under-represented, translated books from other countries and cultures, and international illustrations that are unusual and captivating. Enchanted Lion has stayed true to their vision and mission statement: “We love books, well-told stories, and illustrations that open up the visual world and deepen a child’s sense of story. … We believe in the books we publish because they are beautiful and lively, thoughtful and full of feeling. They evince a fierce belief in the imagination.”

As an author, educator, parent, and grandparent, I am pleased to share my excitement about these books because they offer new ways of seeing and caring about our world, imagining a better world as well as understanding one’s place in this world.

I had the pleasure of asking Claudia Zoe Bedrick, publisher, editor, and art director, about Enchanted Lion Books, to share her responses with you. First, she shared this quote from Pablo Neruda from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, words that are especially relevant to our challenging times:

There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song — but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny.

Claudia Zoe Bedrick, publisher,
Enchanted Lion Books

First, I asked why is it important to publish books for children in translation?

Claudia replied: “Publishing books in translation is important because of the narrative, aesthetic, conceptual, philosophic, and cultural richness they present. Books created in different languages and cultures often pose more open-ended questions than US books, which tend to offer answers and resolution. Books created by people formed within the crucible of other languages offer different understandings of family, community, economy, life, death, happiness, sorrow, and so on. In Spanish-language cultures and Scandinavian cultures, for example, there is a tendency to publish “darker” picture books, meaning ones that are more honest and open about the relationship between sadness and happiness, life and death, and how all of that connects to a sense of meaning and purpose. So, books in translation give children a global literature and a bigger frame for thinking about the world and our place in it. We don’t think adults deserve only a national literature. Why should we think that children aren’t also nourished by a global literature?”

Will your publishing focus change due to Covid-19?

Claudia: “As a small, indie publisher we have had to make many adaptations as a result of COVID. We are making more e‑books of our books, but we are not taking up another publishing philosophy.”

What is most rewarding and challenging about being a publisher?

Claudia: “I would begin to answer this by saying that we are an indie publisher, which means that the risks, challenges, and rewards are different than for a corporate publisher. Our only income comes from the sale of our books. So if books can’t sell through normal channels, as during COVID, the risks for us are high. Daily challenges are enormous: staying afloat, getting our books noticed, working to achieve a level of sales that means our books are really taking on life in the world.

“But the rewards of our work are great. Our existence outside the mainstream and our role in coming from the margins with unusual books and voices gives us our sense of purpose. We believe in the margins and love the honesty, beauty, imagination, and preciousness that reside there.*

I shared with Claudia that I had spent the early morning cozy on the couch listening as my eight-year-old grandson read from Where the Sidewalk Ends. I thought about Enchanted Lion and the importance placed on children’s imaginations … and I continued thinking about Shel Silverstein’s poem:

“There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind … ”

Claudia responded: “We are in that borderland — the place where the sidewalk ends before the street begins. It is there, in that liminal space, that all manner of forgotten, yet necessary things thrive. Discovering new voices, bringing stories to life, working with artists, choosing materials for our books: these are all great and lasting pleasures.”

Which of your recent books do you hope educators will use as they encourage creativity and imagination throughout their curriculum?

Claudia: “I think educators will be using many of our recent books, a few specific titles:

Layla’s Happiness
Drawing on Walls: A Story of Keith Haring
The World’s Poorest President Speaks Out
The Shadow Elephant
The Strange Birds of Flannery O’Connor
Every Color of Light
Telephone Tales, a short-story collection written by the great Italian children’s author, Gianni Rodari

Claudia continued: “It’s everything. There is no future, no better world, no utopia, no progress, no hope, no true community without imagination and the spirit of creation. I believe that our fundamental nature is love and love is creative. That we presently are on so many paths of violence is a terrible perversion, a sickness.

“Our humanity is in the dancing, however clumsily, and in the singing, however sorrowfully. We whittle ourselves down when we fail to keep creativity and imagination alive. The stories we tell, the visions we have, all make this world just as surely as anything else.”

Request a copy of Enchanted Lions’ books from your library or an independent online bookstore.

Dance where “the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind … ”

Become enchanted.

Pterodactyls and Dragons

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“The Boy chiefly dabbled in natural history and fairy-tales, and he just took them as they came, in a sandwichy sort of way, without making any distinctions; and really his course of reading strikes one as rather sensible.” The Reluctant Dragon

Kenneth Grahame wrote “The Reluctant Dragon” as a chapter in his book Dream Days, in 1898, ten years before publishing The Wind in the Willows. The Boy in the story is the son of a shepherd, during the time when dragons still needed slaying. Unlike most children of his station, Boy is a reader, spending “much of his time buried in big volumes.”

the 1938 title page of The Reluctant Dragon

I was the Boy, lost in that wonderful stage where I read “to escape, to uncover … to find companionship … [to] set loose dreams,” as Pamela Paul and Maria Russo state in How to Raise a Reader. I plowed through novels and “factual” books. Visiting our tiny elementary school library was the high point of my week. We had no book lists. No one told us what we should be reading relative to study units. We were only required to check out a book, two at the most.

Classmates leafed through magazines or whispered to friends. For me, library period was serious business. Some kids couldn’t find a single book and Miss Sharp, the librarian, would pull one off the shelves. I knew those kids would return their books unread the next week. Why couldn’t I have their check-out allotments instead of agonizing between three books, one of which I’d have to slide behind the stacks so no one else would check it out. I habitually chose a novel and a science book and read them in a sandwichy sort of way.

In his introduction to A Hundred Fables of Aesop, published in 1899, Grahame wrote:

Vitality — that is the test; and, whatever its components, mere truth is not necessarily one of them. A dragon, for instance, is a more enduring animal than a pterodactyl. I have never yet met anyone who really believed in a pterodactyl, but every honest person believes in dragons — down in the back-kitchens of his consciousness.

I didn’t know yet about pterodactyls, but I did learn about the world’s first bird, Archaeopteryx, in All About Birds. At nine, I wasn’t sure about dragons since there weren’t any in Virginia, but this Jurassic Age creature, discovered in Germany in 1861, seemed very real. The illustration of its fossil remains rendered vitality in every line. I loved reading how the flying reptile developed, bone by bone, muscle by muscle, into today’s modern birds. I repeated softly the word Archaeopteryx to myself, loving the sound of it.

the original German archaeopteryx fossil in the Natural History Museum in London

The borrower’s card in the pocket of All About Birds bore my signature every other line, I checked it out so many times. The only bird book I owned was a small Golden Nature Guide. Birds made no mention of archaeopteryx or pterodactyls, but it set loose dreams of my becoming an ornithologist.

Across the Atlantic, in Scotland, seven-year-old Michael J. Benton received a Golden Nature Guide called Fossils. Four years younger than me, Michael pored over the pictures (“481 Illustrations in Color”). Fossils covered ancient life from cockroaches to corals, including Archaeopteryx and the astonishing Pteranodon, with its 25-foot wingspan. Michael was hooked:

“What excited me [about Fossils] was that the illustrations were all in colour — unusual still in the 1960s — and there were not only pictures of fossils, but reconstructions too. The text reflected the knowledge of the time — this is what Tyrannosaurs looked like, based on the classic studies by Professor Henry Osborn of the American Museum of Natural History, and this is how the dinosaurs died out, rather slowly, and perhaps as a result of long-term cooling climates (or maybe because they were too stupid to adapt to a changing world) … Nonetheless, as a seven-year-old, that was all I needed. It never entered my head to question the authority of something written in a book …”

Benton’s early interest in dinosaurs led him to study paleobiology. Now a professor at Bristol University, Benton is a world-renowned paleontologist and author, with a dinosaur named in his honor. Despite growing up in a country stuffed with stories of dragons, fairies, water horses, and other mythical creatures, his dream was let loose by a 1.00 (in American currency) children’s field guide.

I didn’t become a scientist, after all. My sensible, sandwichy method of reading — novels and nonfiction — sent me down a different road. I became a writer of fiction and nonfiction, though much of my fiction depends on research. In the back-kitchen of my mind, there are griffins and grackles. Both are vital, and both get along just fine.

Charles Knight’s mural at
the American Museum of Natural History in New York

Welcome to Lizard Motel

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There is a special period of … childhood, approximately from five or six to eleven or twelve — between the strivings of animal infancy and the storms of adolescence — when the natural world is experienced in some highly evocative way … It is principally to this middle age range … that writers say they return in memory in order to renew the power and impulse to create. —Edith Cobb

Welcome to Lizard Motel: Children, Stories,
and the Mystery of Making Things Up, A Memoir
Barbara Feinberg
Beacon Press, 2004

At first glance, Welcome to Lizard Motel, with its cover illustration of a bureau and a lizard’s tail (presumably) sticking out of one drawer, seems an unlikely book about children’s literature. That’s what I thought when I saw it on the education shelf in Borders. The subtitle, though, Children, Stories, and the Mystery of Making Things Up, reeled me in.

Feinberg begins her memoir on a day in which her twelve-year-old son must read a Newbery-winning novel as his summer assignment. He hates the book, hated the book he had to read the summer before (another Newbery medalist). She takes her son to the pool and learns from his friends that they all despise those books. Feinberg decides to read them herself.

The first third of Lizard Motel is devoted to Feinberg’s thoughts about “problem novels,” popular in the 70s and still going strong in more literary iterations through the 80s to the mid-90s. Lyrical writing pulls her through many narratives, but she feels depressed by the bleak endings. “Don’t you think there’s an excessive amount of angst [in modern children’s books]?” she asked a librarian. “Weren’t our books cozier?” She remembers reading Anne of Green Gables and Eleanor Estes’ The Hundred Dresses, books that didn’t shy away from harsher realities, but didn’t cheat the reader. She takes to task books such as The Pigman, Don’t Hurt Laurie, Steffie Can’t Come Out to Play, Dicey’s Song, Bridge to Terabithia, and others that feature trauma.

Feinberg’s views spark controversies. She rails against children’s books as teaching tools. “As a tool to further the notions of, say, multiculturalism, an approach that could be deliciously rich, but which seemed never able to move freely, since the strict humorless watchdog of Political Correctness was always nipping at its heels.”

When her seven-year-old daughter invites Feinberg to her school for a presentation of class writing, Feinberg examines the Writing Project then headed by Lucy Calkins at Columbia University’s Teachers College. Her daughter’s class had been instructed by a graduate from that program, who had the students write memoirs. Each child’s first-person story was in the vein of, “My mother always cooked vanilla pudding for me” or “My father put me to bed every night.” The past tense made the stories sound like eulogies, as if “this moment we are sharing together has vanished.” Young children don’t naturally reflect on their pasts. One boy said he’d rather write about haunted houses than his terminally ill sister.

Comments on Lizard Motel range from “poor execution” to “delightful.” Some argue the merits of a parent writing about children’s literature, apparently forgetting the book is a memoir and why shouldn’t parents discuss what their children are reading? Sandwiched between problem novels and the Writing Project is Feinberg’s own childhood, the books that “pulled her out from some shadow I hadn’t known I’d been hiding in,” and, best of all, a program she began called Story Shop. I longed to be one of those lucky kids who came weekly to the rented church basement to write and create.

Should this book be in children’s literature collections? Maybe, if you enjoy prose like this: “I was charmed that the tiny chairs [from her Story Shop room] cast their own shadows, and each time I left and came back, I felt that someone had just been, a moment before, sitting in the chairs. Once or twice I wondered if it might be the chairs themselves that were alive …” Maybe, if you believe an “outsider” can express the view that not all children want to read sad, realistic fiction.

This book reminded me that when I was a kid, we had no assigned books, only the freedom to choose whatever we wanted. I browsed the library shelves, avoiding any book with an N sticker, indicating a Newbery winner. To my nine-year-old self, those books were like medicine.

As a children’s writer, Feinberg’s book made me want to write a Valentine to all the books I’d loved as a child. So, I wrote my own memoir for my master’s thesis in children’s literature. Yet my Valentine, begun in joy, turned dark as my traumatic childhood crept in. I didn’t write the book I wanted to. After re-reading Welcome to Lizard Motel, I hope one day to pay proper tribute to the books that changed my life, minus the doom and gloom.

No Wraiths or Fetches Necessary

Big Green Pocketbook 2

To celebrate our fortieth anniversary this year, we decided to take a Big Trip. My husband suggested Paris. “Cornwall,” I said. “Someplace old.” Not that Paris isn’t old. Instead of a crowded city, I wanted winkles and pasties, lost gardens and standing stones, piskies and Tintagel castle. He agreed and I began putting together a trip that would send us back in time.

My motives weren’t entirely pure. True, I’ve been an Anglophile ever since I read the British children’s fantasy Hubble’s Bubble at the age of eleven and started saving pennies to go to Wales and Scotland. Currently I’m writing my first magical realism middle-grade novel. Building the world of my story has taken nearly three years, yet the book’s foundation feels as stable as shivering sands. By tramping over ancient lands, I hoped Cornwall’s mythology would seep through the soles of my Sketchers and I’d bring some back with me.

As much as I love America’s history and varied landscapes, I fret that the U.S. isn’t — well, Britain. America has, as New England fantasy writer Jane Langton once wrote, “less history to draw on … It is bald of mythology, bare of folk tale. Its open fields are not marked by standing stones.” We do have Native American folklore and the tall tale adventures of larger-than-life characters such as Paul Bunyan and John Henry. But those stories are not part of my background.

Langton’s essay is more than thirty years old and much has changed. Many fantasies today give readers passports to worlds beyond medieval Europe, inspired by African, Asian, and indigenous American cultures. My book is set in Virginia, deeply linked to my English roots, a place and voice I know. But Virginia has no dead kings buried with broken swords, no sleeping dragons under the hill, no fairies. How will I saturate the landscape with magic?

When I think back, I didn’t always notice the settings of childhood books. The opening line of Edward Eager’s Seven-Day Magic hooked me right away. “‘The best kind of book,’” said Barnaby, “‘is a magic book.’” I agreed and ripped through the Half-Magic series, not caring that the books are placed vaguely in America (Ohio and Connecticut, Eager’s stomping grounds).

Midwesterner Eager grew up with the Oz books, the first true American fantasies for children. When he had his own children, he discovered E. Nesbit’s books, which he praised for the “dailiness of the magic. Here is no land of dragons and ogres or Mock Turtles and Tin Woodmen … The world of E. Nesbit is the ordinary or garden world we know, with just the right pinch of magic added.” Everyday magic, set wherever, suited me fine.

Yet when I found Jane Langton’s A Diamond in the Window, I met an opening that left no question about its setting: “Edward Hall sat under the front porch of the big house on Walden Street in Concord, Massachusetts, and thought about his two ambitions in life.” By page 4, I’d learned Concord was the site of the first battle of the Revolutionary War, Walden Pond was nearby, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, and Henry David Thoreau, whoever they were, had lived there. This Virginia kid, clueless about New England, was intrigued. Not far into the story — a delightful combination of fantasy and mystery — the children’s naïve Uncle Freddy quotes Emerson to the trash collector:

“Oh, call not Nature dumb!
The trees and stones are audible to me …”

It’s a funny scene, but the quote set me to wondering. I’d often thought trees talked (it turns out they do!) and sometimes worried when I walked on rocks — did they hurt? The Diamond in the Window has magic, but it also has nature, which was more accessible to me. As a child, there was so much I wanted to know about the ground beneath my feet, the trees stretching toward the sky, the clouds and weather.

In Langton’s essay, she admits British fantasy writers can tap into “the thick intertwining of field and forest with myth and history.” She mentions that Scottish writer Mollie Hunter once told her that fantasy “could only be composed by someone standing upon a countryside drenched in myth and folklore.” Really? I went flying to an essay by Mollie Hunter in which she credits legends, “a succession of folk memories filtered through the storyteller’s imagination,” as the basis for true fantasies.

Virginia, I’m afraid, sadly lacks supernatural beings such as Celtic fetches and wraiths. But it has an abundance of nature, the kind E.B. White tapped into by watching ordinary spiders and pigs and rats at his Maine farm. Langton argues that “nature taken pure, nature in its simplicity and silent grandeur” carries its own brand of magic. Instead of longing for standing stones, I’ll be happy to extract “marveling wonderment” from the seashell-capped Blue Ridge Mountains, horse-pastured Piedmont, and osprey-nested Chesapeake Bay.

As for Cornwall, we discovered that the five-hour car trip after an overnight flight to Heathrow, in which the only age-qualified driver (who can barely park her small pickup) would never manage driving stick-shift from the left seat on the left-hand side of the road. It’s okay. We will gladly take a bus from London to Stonehenge. My Sketchers will never know the difference.

Enchanted Points of Entry

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My first glimpse of Margaret Wise Brown’s house on Vinalhaven Island, Maine, was from a boat. It topped a granite slope, clapboard siding painted the same gray-blue as the sparkling Hurricane Sound. I was so excited I nearly fell overboard. We’d just passed the Little Island that Margaret had made famous in her Caldecott-winning book and I’d spotted a seal dozing on the rocks.

Margaret’s Only House was not the only house on that end of the island, but it was to me. I’d been working on a biography of Brown and was looking for the real Margaret. My pilgrimage to Only House was professional, primary research. I came to Margaret’s work as an adult and placed her in her house, not myself as a child in the fictional site of one of her books.

I was not a Potter fan clamoring to find Platform 9 ¾ at King’s Cross station, or someone with fond memories of Eloise scoping out the lobby of the Plaza. As a kid, I longed to see Sleepyside-on-the-Hudson, the fictional setting of my beloved Trixie Belden mysteries, because I believed it was real. Recently I learned the village was real, based on Ossining, New York, where the author had lived.

Each year, thousands tour literary houses such as the Bronte Parsonage in Yorkshire or Hemingway’s home in Key West. When I went to Concord, Massachusetts, I waded in Walden Pond in honor of Thoreau, an author I admire as an adult. I think it requires a different mind-set to visit the fictional sites of favorite children’s books and come away satisfied.

If you loved the Anne of Green Gables books, a trip to Prince Edward Island may disappoint with its busloads of tourists and modern interpretive exhibits. However, children still reading those books might eagerly embrace fiction and reality in that liminal space, thrilled to see Anne’s tiny bedroom with her stockings draped over the bedstead. Scholars maintain that when children visit literary sites, the experience enhances re-readings of those books.

But how do adults fare on these journeys? I loved Wendy McClure’s The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie. The Little House books McClure devoured as a child carried her to new places, new sights, new adventures. She found in those landscapes “enchanted points of entry into a fantasy world,” as Nicola Watson writes in The Literary Tourist.

McClure craved to churn butter and play with a corncob doll. She imagined helping Laura — magically transported to the 1970s — on the escalators of North Riverside Mall. Then, like so many of us, she grew up and left her childhood book friend behind. After the death of her mother, McClure re-read the books and decided to trace Laura’s path, homestead by homestead.

The Wilder Life concludes with McClure remembering the different houses her mother, who grew up in a move-every-few-years-military family, tracked down on summer vacations. “I … thought of Laura, too, of one little house after another forming the story of a life.” At last she declared to her patient husband that they were done Laura-jaunting. Home was with him, she realized. Time to re-enter the story of their life together.

Sarah Maslin Nir recounts a different experience in her New York Times article, “All the Pretty Ponies.” Growing up “mostly horseless” in New York City, she traveled to Chincoteague Island, Virginia, on the trail of Marguerite Henry’s Misty of Chincoteague. Misty had “stoked [her] equestrian fantasies as a girl. Maslin Nir arrived during Pony-Penning Days, when the wild horses swim from Assateague Island to Chincoteague to be auctioned, a tradition dating from 1925 to thin the herd and raise funds for the fire department.

She sat on her hands during the auction to keep from bidding on adorable, shaggy ponies. Then she visited the Museum of Chincoteague Island and saw taxidermied Misty on display. The experience was “crushing.” When she learned that Misty had never been a wild pony, she knew “the creature Henry had conjured on the page had never really lived.” She bought a copy of Misty of Chincoteague as a souvenir of her trip, preferring her childhood version to reality.

When we as adults try to repossess a fictional landscape that meant everything to us as children, we risk trampling the enchanted point of entry. On my trip to Concord, I was sorely tempted. Not only is Concord the home of Emerson, Thoreau, and the Alcotts, it was also the setting of my favorite childhood book, The Diamond in the Window, by Jane Langton. The neo-Gothic house depicted on the cover was on 148 Walden Street. I could go there. I could take a picture!

The lure was powerful. But I know that wonderful old houses were often parceled into apartments, added on to, changed. I didn’t couldn’t bear to see Eric Blegvad’s 1961 illustration marred by the 21st century.

In his 1935 travel memoir, In Search of England, H.V. Morton climbed the rock steps to Tintagel, the rumored birthplace of King Arthur, even though he felt the castle “was one of those places which no man should see.” Tintagel wasn’t the gaunt rocky ruins, but “a country of dreams more real than reality.” Exactly so.

Not everything has to be seen, not every speck of curiosity must be satisfied, especially in a world where Google provides the answer to anything. I remembered my first reading of Diamond, that singular moment when my imagination sprouted wings and I soared into the clouds. I didn’t go to 148 Walden Street. I would not ruin the memory.

The Quiltmaker’s Journey

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Earlier this week I pulled out our small stash of Thanksgiving picture books. The kids are older now, but they seem to like it when the old favorites come out. I got lost, as I always do, in The Quiltmaker’s Gift by Jeff Brumbeau, illustrated by Gail de Marcken. I’ve written about that book for Red Reading Boots — you can find that here.

I went in search of its companion, The Quiltmakers Journey, which wasn’t with the Thanksgiving books for some reason. Found it — and lost myself in it, as well. It’s a prequel, really. Explains how the Quiltmaker came by her values of generosity, beauty, and love of people, not things.

When the Quiltmaker was a young girl, she lived a materially advantaged and privileged life. Because everyone in her town was rich, the girl assumed everyone in the world was. This was by design, we learn. A wall had been built — a stone wall, thick and high — around the town. The children in the town never saw what was outside, but they were warned by their elders that horrible, terrible things were on the other side of the wall….

When I read this in storytime to kids, you can see them imagining what’s on the other side of the wall. Their sweet faces morph into troubled ones — brows furrow, eyes worry, thumbs and fingers travel to their mouths…. Which is exactly what happened to the children in the town. And so they understandably stay inside the wall where everything and more was provided and where an obscene abundance reigned; but not, we learn, the assumed happiness that would come from such luxury.… Our young heroine grows restless!

The girl who becomes the quiltmaker goes out, of course — beyond the wall — that’s the main story. And she learns that the terrors on the other side of the wall are nothing like what she’d imagined. No monsters or ghouls, witches or dragons. Rather, extreme poverty. And though she sees the ravages of hunger and unhappiness, she also witnesses extraordinary generosity and kindness. She learns that it’s not the people who are frightful, but the circumstances in which they live.

When she returns to her life inside the wall and makes a plea before the town elders for their town to help those who are outside the wall…she faces resistance. Ignore the poor, she’s told. “If they wanted to be rich, they shouldn’t have been born poor.”

This does not sit well with the girl who has now had her eyes, ears, and heart opened. She’s been outside the wall — she knows things the elders do not. She leaves her life of comfort and makes a new life outside the wall as she struggles to figure out what her gift to the world will be. Eventually, she sells the ring her mother gave her to buy bright cloth and thread…and she uses the skills bequeathed to her by the kind old seamstress who sewed her gowns when she was a child…and she makes quilts. Thick and warm quilts. Beautiful quilts. Beautiful, warm quilts she gives, not sells, to those who need them most.

The Quiltmaker’s Journey takes longer to read than many picture books, but her journey is an important one. Try reading the book during your Thanksgiving festivities this weekend. It will not disappoint. It’s an inspiring way to begin this season of holidays.

The Princess and Her Panther

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Last week, I was working on my WIP, a sprawling mess of a novel. I’d hit a rough patch and I set myself the assignment to just type away for ten minutes — ten minutes of nonstop typing just to Get Words Down — I wouldn’t let my fingers stop. I simply needed some words to work with, I told myself.

I do not usually resort to this, but it was not a particularly good writing day. And so I typed and typed — and I knew it was dreck, but at least it was maybe (hopefully) a starting point for this pivotal scene between two cousins…. Typetypetypetypetype…. And then, my fingers typed this line:

Signe was brave, and Riya tried to be.

I stopped typing.

I’d written 873 words. 865 were lookin’ pretty useless. But these eight…maybe these eight had something I could work with? There was a rhythm to them, a quiet spark of some sort. Something familiar.… Comforting. They made me smile. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I highlighted the line so I wouldn’t lose it, then I continued. The words that came after these were better, easier. The conflict unknotted itself just a bit and I could begin the work within it.

This afternoon, I figured out what was so familiar about the line. It’s basically a plagiarized line from a favorite picture book of mine: The Princess and Her Panther by Wendy Orr, Illustrated by Lauren Stringer.

I love everything about this book. I love the red “O” on the very first page, which begin “One afternoon…”. I love the story told in the pictures. I love the imaginations of the Princess and her Panther — sisters, the older one in charge, the younger following the narrative that is set.

In the backyard, the princess and her panther cross the desert sand (sandbox), drink from the waters of wide blue lake (wading pool), and pitch a red silk tent (red blanket over a tree branch.) Darling Daughter loved the tent when she was the panther’s age.

Throughout there is this wonderful perfect refrain: The princess was brave, and the panther tried to be. Wa-la! The source of my line!

This book is a wonderful read-a-loud — every word is pitch-perfect. And the illustrations…well. The illustrations make us feel the confidence of the princess, the nervousness of the panther. And we see when the princess loses a little of her confidence — it’s the too-whit-too-whooing and screechy hoo-hooing that does it.

Then comes the variation on the perfect line, itself perfect: The princess tried to be brave, and the panther tried to try.

And then they both regain their bravery—the princess was brave, and the panther was too—and together they shout “Enough is enough!” vanquishing the imagined wolf, monster, witch, and slithery snakes. The sisters go back to their red silk tent, “and the full moon smiled as it shone its soft light on two sisters sleeping…”

It’s an immensely satisfying book — a picture book extraordinaire as both the pictures and the words are necessary for the full effect. The story arc is perfect and that line — my favorite line! — put things right somehow for this frustrated writer. Just the sound of the words strung together. It’s exactly what my book needed this week.

I haven’t read The Princess and the Panther in storytime for quite some time — it used to be in regular rotation and received rave reviews, by which I mean my young story time friends sat rapt. I don’t know how it got parked on the bookshelves for so long. But I’ve pulled it off the shelf now and it’ll be headlining the very next storytime I do.

I’m grateful I still read to kids regularly — it helps this writer’s writing. Good picture books are like poetry — the language seeps in.

The BIG Umbrella

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I am extraordinarily lucky in that I have a group of wee ones who join me for storytime most weeks. They’re little — age three and under, with several babies in the mix — so we don’t tell long stories or read great doorstopper books. But with picture books, some of the best ones are pretty spare in terms of words.

I have a new favorite — new to the world, even — that I want to share widely. The BIG Umbrella written and illustrated by Amy June Bates, co-written with Juniper Bates. (A mother-daughter pair, the daughter being quite young, which is its own loveliness.) This book is an antidote for our ugly, contentious times. It is a story of inclusion and gladness — an “All are welcome, please come!” invitation leaps off its pages.

By the front door…

there is an umbrella.

It is BIG.

It is a big friendly umbrella.

There’s a page turn with each of those lines — the better to show off the wonderful art. The bright red umbrella catches even the youngest’s eyes.

The umbrella features a smiling face. The eyes are smiling, too. I think it’s the first anthropomorphic umbrella I’ve seen, now that I think about it. The umbrella is being taken out and about by a child in a yellow rain slicker. We are told — and see — that this big friendly umbrella likes to help, likes to spread its arms wide, “lives” to shelter those who need shelter.

In the next several page turns, the big umbrella takes in one friend after another — a blue jacketed child first…then a tutu-clad dancer…and a red sneakered sports star.

And that is only the beginning of who the big red umbrella shelters. We learn it can take in the tallest among us (giant bird feet appear and are cut-off at the top of the page before we’re to the knee) as well as the hairiest (a benevolent hairy beast.) It takes in those clad in plaid and those with four legs. The umbrella just keeps getting bigger as they all crowd under it together.

Towards the end of the book there is a gentle reminder that although some worry there won’t be enough room, there always is.

I almost cried when I read it. But I was saved by the smiles around the circle — those wee ones got it! They can’t pronounce umbrella, many of them, but sitting in a crowded space on their parents’ laps, with their young friends…they got it. There’s always room.

The Penderwicks

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I have a mixed history with The Penderwicks books by Jeanne Birdsall. The first book, The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale Of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy came out in 2005 when #1 Son was eight and Darling Daughter was three. It won the National Book Award that year and there was much flurry over it.

It’s the sort of book I love — a family story, gentle adventures, quotidian details — and with a modern setting, as opposed to the more dated books that had inspired it like The Melendy Quartet, The Moffats, and the E. Nesbit books.

People pressed The Penderwicks upon me. “Look at the cover!” they said.

It was an adorable cover. So we read it.

I must’ve been in a mood or something…. I just didn’t love it. The kids liked it just fine. I was…very critical. I wonder now if I was jealous, actually. It’s the kind of book I might like to write.

Fast forward six years or so…. I was working toward an MFA in writing for children and young adults. I had to do a critical thesis — a scholarly work of in-depth analysis and criticism. I decided to write my critical thesis on The Twenty-First Century Happy Family Story. I looked at the history of the genre (the “Happy Family Story” was a recognized genre at one time) and many of the twentieth century examples, which were all on my shelves as they are beloved works I’d read as a child and to my children.

After analyzing these older books I loved so much, I proposed certain changes — tweaks, really — that might be needed to make the genre appeal to twenty-first century kid readers. In that process, I looked at The Penderwicks again. Was it a good model of the twenty-first century happy family story I was proposing? Two more books had come out in the series in the meantime. I read those, too, stubbornly holding to my mostly crabby stance. Of course these books had their charms, but I picked apart places where I thought they’d fallen short. I learned a lot doing this. I’d be grateful to Ms. Birdsall if this was all I got from her books.

Meanwhile, people continued to press the Penderwicks books upon me. My writing teachers…librarians and booksellers who know me well…my agent…my agent’s adorable daughter…. “Why don’t you love the Penderwicks?” they’d say. I started to feel like a heel. And I had to admit it didn’t make sense. (This is when I formed the jealousy hypothesis.)

Still, I didn’t pick them up again until just recently. I opened the first book to look at how Birdsall uses point of view since I was stuck on a POV problem in my own novel…and this time, for whatever reason, I fell into the book. I asked my nieces who live just around the corner to read it with me. Their mother had just ordered the book for them — it being exactly the sort of book they would love. (It’s genetic, this love of happy family stories.) And they did love that first Penderwicks book — we read the first chapters together this summer and they finished on their own, unable to wait for me.

Last week, while my sister and brother-in-law were out, I had a chance to do one of my favorite things: sit on the floor in the hallway between my nieces’ bedrooms and read them to sleep. Only they couldn’t go to sleep. We are now on the second book in the series, The Penderwicks on Gardam Street, and it was entirely too absorbing to put anyone to sleep. I eventually had to say, “It’s late. We really need to be done for now….”

Today after school they came over for another couple of chapters. Who knows how these things happen, but I’m in love with the Penderwicks at last! The fifth book came out this fall. We’re planning on reading the whole series together.

The Stuff of Stars

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I’ve been anxiously awaiting the book birth of The Stuff of Stars by Marion Dane Bauer, illustrated by Ekua Holmes. I heard the text a year ago and forgot to breathe while the author read it out loud. And then I heard who the illustrator was. Let’s just say, what a pairing!

When I opened my much anticipated copy — after oohing and aaahing over the cover — and read the first page, I heard cello. A deep deep cello note, under the words.

In the dark,

in the dark,

in the deep, deep dark….

As I continued to read, I continued to hear cello music — almost a synesthesia kind of experience, though thoroughly explained, I suppose, by my intense love of cello.

And so, when it came time to read it to an audience — storytime in worship at church — I contacted a wonderful cellist in our midst and asked if she was the sort of person who liked to improvise, drawing pictures with her cello, etc. She is that sort of person, luckily enough. I emailed her the text and she emailed back her excitement. I said, “Wait ‘til you see the art….” (She gasped when she saw the art.)

I gave her complete artistic freedom. We agreed to meet before church to run through it a couple of times. I sat so she could see the pictures as I read. We ran through it twice — different both times. Wonderful both times. We did it another two times in each of our church’s services — different those times, too, and wonderful in all new ways because the kids were listening.

She’s an extremely talented musician working on a degree in composition — obviously not everyone could do this. But it was just glorious, my friends.

She played how “the cloud of gas unfolded, unfurled, zigged, zagged, stretched, collided, expanded…expanded…expanded….” My heart nearly burst when she played that expansion. The children sat rapt, their eyes wide at the collaged marbled papers illustrating the first moments of our cosmos.

The cello illustrated for our ears how the starry stuff turned into “mitochondria, jellyfish, spiders…” It helped us hear the ferns and sharks, daisies and galloping horses. The galloping horses were fantastic.

When the dark refrain returned…

…one day…

in the dark,

in the deep, deep dark…

…so did that low low note on the cello. The children noticed. Their heads turned to look at the cello…and then back at the marbled darkness in the book.

It was powerful.

The Stuff of Stars is powerful without cello music, I assure you. I’ve since read it to young and old alike without accompaniment, and it’s a delightful — I will even say holy—experience every time. If you’ve not seen this book, you must! Pick up a few copies — it makes a wonderful new baby or birthday gift; for the story of the birth of the cosmos moves to the birth of our planet…and then to the birth of the individual child “special as Love.”

We need more books like this one — books that hold together wonder, science, awe, love, and our place in nature alongside the inevitable tensions of life. We need gorgeous books for children. Too much of the world is ugly right now. Children need beauty, stories, and art. They need to hear:

You

and me

loving you.

All of us

The stuff of stars.

For further reading, I highly recommend the following:

Marion Dane Bauer interviews her illustrator, Ekua Holmes.

The writing process for The Stuff of Stars.

Story Time for All

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A couple of weeks ago, Darling Daughter and I made our way to the Farmers Market. I’ve been recovering from a bit of surgery, and truth be told, I wasn’t feeling great that morning, but needed to get out and about. We wandered the stalls, got our veggies, our goat cheese, our sunflowers…then some coffee and lemonade and cardamom donuts so as to sit down and rest a bit. And then…

“Storytime! STORY-time!” A voice sang out to the crowd.

As any reader of this column knows, I’m a huge fan of story time. Give me a kid or two and a stack of books and I will read and sing and play happily for as long as they will. Truly, story time gives me Great Joy. I’m usually the storyteller or storyreader, though. Too seldom do I attend story times now that my children are fairly grown.

I recognized the voice immediately. It belonged to a local actor here in the Twin Cities — he’s part of the Guthrie company as well as being a regular at several other theaters. Most recently he played the Lorax at the Children’s Theater Company in Minneapolis and the Old Globe in San Diego. His name: H. Adam Harris. And does he ever have a voice!

When I saw this talented man do story time at the farmer’s market last summer I was also thrilled and carried away by the experience — I wrote about it for Red Reading Boots, in fact. This year, he was every bit as wonderful — and he read some new-to-me books I loved and have since added to my story time stack. But it was my personal experience of the story time this year that was so meaningful.

I, a middle-aged mother with teen daughter in tow, was not the target audience for this story time. But I enjoyed it every bit as much as the littlest ones there. Yes, I loved all the kids gathering…the families setting down their baskets and bags and situating their kids on the blue mat and themselves on the steps…I loved the kids’ laughter, and Mr. Harris’ wonderful voices and expressions and enthusiasm. It was a beautiful day, the stories he’d selected were terrific….

But on that particular Saturday, what my tired and recovering body loved most was simply being read to. I loved the story time itself. I just melted into the steps and gave myself over to the experience. What a gift it is to be read a story! Why do we not do this for each other more often? While I think it the most fabulous thing in the world that we read to children, the only thing more fabulous would be also reading to each other as adults.

Darling Daughter suggested I bite the bullet and just get Libro.fm already. I do adore audiobooks. But I think it’s not quite the same as someone reading to you live and in person. The relationship between reader and listener is lost without a little eye contact, without a well-placed question or chuckle. No, I think the thing has something to do with being read to, not the listening itself.

So I commend it to you — find someone to read to. Find someone to read to you. Sit back and enjoy it.

“Storytime! STORY-time!”

Little Women

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Darling Daughter and I watched the recent PBS version of Little Women last weekend.I was out of town when the first episode aired, but she waited for me and we streamed it Friday night so we’d be caught up to watch the final two episodes Sunday night.

I liked Little Women just fine as a kid. I read it tucked between the banisters and “the old book cabinet” at the top of my grandparents’ stairs when I was probably nine or ten. I liked Jo very much, and Beth, too. I found Meg too grown-up to identify with, and Amy…well, she seemed like a bit of a brat to me. I thought her sisters were…generous with her. I started the novel again when I was in college after an American Lit class taught me about the friendship of Emerson, Thoreau, and the Alcotts, but I didn’t make it very far. There was a lot of transcendental preachiness to it, I thought. I didn’t remember those parts from my perch at the top of my grandparents’ stairs.

Darling Daughter listened to an audiobook of Little Women during a pneumonia recovery when she was nine-ish. She loved it. Kept listening to it over and over again, even after she was well. I think of that time as The Little Women Era. I could hear the transcendental sermons from her bedroom all the way down in the kitchen — right away in the morning as I made breakfast. Again at night as she got ready for bed. Sometimes I wonder if her mighty work ethic, diligence, and focus comes right out of that book. She listened to those twenty-three CD’s over and over and over again. And when I got her the thick novel to read, she pored over that, too.

Last summer, we took a trip to Concord, Massachusetts, a place I’d wanted to visit since I was in high school. I’m a Thoreau fan, you see, and it was a thrill to walk around beautiful Walden Pond accessed via the very trail (or close to it) Ralph Waldo Emerson used to visit his friend out in the little cabin in the woods. It was also great fun to tour the Alcott house and hear about the family. Darling Daughter was as elated with that part as I was with tramping around Walden Pond. As we moved room to room, she whispered supplementation to the (very good) tour guide’s words. Her cheeks were pink, her eyes aglow. She was in her element.

Somewhere along the line, I’m sure we’ve watched a couple of movie versions of the famous March family’s adventures and trials. The PBS series was not that — a movie, that is. It was more like a collage we decided — episodes, snapshots, very short acts—gorgeously presented. It deserves a cinematography award, I think. Stunning light and images. We quibbled happily over whether the characterization was just right…or not. We gloried in our recognition of certain places in the Concord area. We fully appreciated the self-reliance footage of the Alcott gardens, henhouse, and orchards. And we teared up with Beth’s death, even knowing it was coming, rejoiced at the birth of Meg’s twins, felt all the conflicted emotions surrounding Amy’s journey to Europe with Aunt March, rooted for Jo throughout, and found Laurie very handsome, indeed…. Though we missed the subtlety of Jo and Laurie’s relationship in the book. They rather upped the romantic element in this production.

At times I looked over at my girl, her face aglow by the light of the television screen. Sometimes her eyes were dancing, sometimes her lips were pursed. She tends to be a purist…and as she said several times, “the movie is never as good….” But this was a special…“presentation,” we decided. We wondered if it would introduce a new generation to a classic, sort of doubting that a pre-tween would find it very interesting.

As for me…I loved watching with my Little Women-obsessed kiddo. I might’ve missed it without her, but I wasn’t about to knowing that this book has so been her book. (Mine is Anne of Green Gables—and I watch all movie adaptations with my heart in my throat, waiting to see if they get it right.) As I brushed my teeth Sunday night I wondered about reading Little Women together this summer…we haven’t done that. Maybe this summer is the time to do so.

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The Giant Jam Sandwich

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Recently, I was invited to a baby shower. I love shopping for baby showers, because I almost always give books and knit a wee little hat — two of my most favorite things. I had the hat all done except for the top little curly-cues, but I was fresh out of board books and so went on a happy little jaunt to one of my local bookstores.

And there — BE STILL MY HEART — was a book I’d not thought of in over forty years, but which had so captivated my imagination when I was early-elementary age that I’ve never forgotten it. The Giant Jam Sandwich, story and pictures by John Vernon Lord, with verses by Janet Burroway. I bought it immediately for the baby. And I bought myself a copy, too.

I never had this book as a child. My memory of it is entirely a television experience. We didn’t watch much television, so I was very curious as to where I might’ve seen it. I’m too old to have watched Reading Rainbow as a child, so I did a little digging, and found that it was read on Captain Kangaroo in 1977 (we did watch Captain Kangaroo). The book was read, perhaps by the Captain himself, and the camera zoomed in on the pages — very low-tech.

I didn’t read this book to my own kids — it wasn’t republished until 2012 — but you can bet I’ll be reading this story of the four million wasps that come into Itching Down one hot summer day to any kid who crosses the threshold from now on. Because, I am still utterly enthralled with this book! The detailed pictures, the effortless rhyme, Mayor Muddlenut and Bap the Baker…. So great!

I think it was the very idea of creating an enormous jam sandwich to trap those four million wasps that got me. The logistics are astounding. My mother made bread — I knew all about the kneading and the rising and the baking and I was floored by the efforts of the citizens of Itching Down. The bread dough filled an entire warehouse-like structure — the townspeople had to crawl all over it to knead it. They had to build an oven on a hill….

For hours and hours they let it cook.

It swelled inside till the windows shook.

It was piping hot when they took it out,

And the villagers raised a mighty shout.

“Isn’t it crusty! Aren’t we clever!”

But the wasps were just as bad as ever….

A giant saw is used to slice the loaf, eight fine horses pull the slice to the gigantic picnic cloth set out in a field. A truck dumps the butter and the people use spades and tractors to spread it out! Same with the jam!

Six flying machines ‘whirled and wheeled” in the sky waiting for the wasps, who came at last lured by the smell of the jam. They dived and struck…and they ate so much that they all got stuck!

Kersplat! The other slice came down and only three wasps got away. The rest were stuck in that giant jam sandwich….

I thought a lot about this book as a kid. (Rich Interior Life, they call this.) The improbable problem solving, the baking logistics, the sheer amounts of butter and jam….. An amazing effort.

[The wasps] never came back to Itching Down,

Which is not a waspish sort of town,

But a very nice place to dance and play,

And that’s what the villagers did that day.

What became of the sandwich, you ask? Well, you’ll just have to pick up a copy yourself. It’s a pretty perfect picture book, in my opinion. And interestingly enough, I count only a couple of kids in the illustrations…. Fascinating all the way around!

Waiting

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I had the pleasure this past weekend of accompanying an energetic eight-year-old boy down Washington Avenue on the University of Minnesota campus. We were on foot — his feet faster than the rest in our party, but we easily caught up at each of the pedestrian intersections because he stopped at the light at each and every one.

Before Sunday, I’d never realized there were so many crosswalks on this stretch. The stoplights “talk” in this busy urban area — there are buses, bikes, and light rail trains — and when you push the button to cross the street, whether once or seventy-two times, a disembodied voice with great authority says “WAIT.”

There’s no exclamation point to the word as vocalized by the stoplight, but it does sound like it’s in all caps and has a definitive period — its own declaration. “WAIT.” Our young charge repeated the word perfectly matching the pitch, volume, and authority of the mechanized voice.

“WAIT.” said the light.

“WAIT.” he repeated. Then he hit the button again.

“WAIT.” it said.

“WAIT.” he told us as he hit the button again.

“WAIT.” the light responded.

“WAIT.” he said. And then…well, you can probably guess how it continued.

When we finally actually needed to cross Washington Avenue, he pushed the button a bazillion times while we stood awaiting the instruction to cross safely. (I’m not sure I’ve ever waited so long to cross a street, actually.) As we stood there I thought: this is what so much of childhood is. WAITING. You’re forever waiting — on others, for everything to be ready, for some great thing, for your next birthday, for whatever will happen next, for “just a minute”.… Life, at some level, is a long series of WAITS. Maybe especially when you’re a kid, because when you’re a kid you are also waiting to grow up.

On Tuesday I was back at the U of M to hear Kevin Henkes, one of my picture book writing heros. The title of his talk was 3 Kinds of Waiting: A Picture Book Trilogy. I thought of my young friend as I listened to Mr. Henkes talk about this theme of waiting present in so many of his books. He has thought deeply about waiting — from a child’s point of view, but any age’s point of view, really. We wait for good things and hard things, he said. We do both wistful and serious waiting. He talked about windows and waiting, treating us to illustrations from his books and others that included someone looking out a window, waiting for the next thing.

I was in picture book heaven — Kevin Henkes is a master.

I thought of my new friend who so loved pushing the walk buttons on Washington Avenue. He waited a long time to be adopted, to come to his new home with his little sister, to have a Mama and a Papa, to be part of a family. He’s a sponge for language and music and his new culture — he’s learned so much in the last couple of months. He loves books and stories, and I think it might be time to introduce him to Lilly and her Purple Plastic Purse…to Wilson and Chester…to Chrysanthemum and Penny.…and Owen and Wendell and Julius and Wemberly and Sheila Ray, too.

Henkes’ books are spare in their text, but you read them slowly, because so much of the story is told in the illustrations. They’re good books for language learners, which is every kid, of course. And I like this theme that’s going on in all of his mice books (and his other books, too), this theme of waiting. Waiting to show-and-tell, waiting for the new baby, waiting for new friends, waiting to learn how, waiting for an appropriate time, waiting to grow up.… It’s pretty universal, this WAIT.

I never thought of Henkes “mouse books” as falling under this theme of waiting until he pointed it out. But when I got home, I looked at my (substantial) collection of his books and realize that they all have something to do with waiting. And I can’t wait to introduce them to my new friend who so solidly says and understands the word WAIT. I think he’s going to love them.

Pablo and Birdy

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There are books I read with my eyes leaking beginning to end. Counting by Sevens…Swallows and Amazons…The View From Saturday…Because of Winn Dixie…Orbiting Jupiter…. I don’t mean to say these books make me cry — that’s another category, the ones that make you ugly cry so you can’t read it outloud. Rather, these leaky-eye books are stories read through a watery prism from the first page on. I never sob or sniffle, I just wipe at my eyes with my sleeve for the entire length of the book. If I read them aloud to my kids when they were little, they commented. “Mommy, are you crying?” And I quite cheerfully could say, “Not exactly. This one just makes my eyes leak.”

It’s like the book fills my heart to such an extent — With what? Wonder? Beauty? Gratitude? Bittersweetness? Truth? — that something has to overflow. And that something is my eyes, I guess. I love many many books, but the eye leakers are in a special category unto themselves.

Alison McGhee’s Pablo and Birdy joined the list most recently. I knew from the first line.

“Ready Birdy?” Pablo said, and he held out his finger for her. “Up you go.”

This is the story of a boy named Pablo who washed up on the beach in an inflatable swimming pool as a baby. Birdy is the parrot who was found clinging to the ropes that held Pablo safe. The book opens as Pablo is turning ten. He is surrounded by the love of an eccentric group of islanders who try to protect him from the story of his past for which they have no answers. But that doesn’t mean Pablo doesn’t have questions.

Birdy is a flightless and voiceless parrot. She is lavender-feathered and mango-scented and the bond she has with her Pablo is a fierce one. Their relationship is largely responsible for my leaking eyes.

There are slapsticky funny moments as well as sad and worrisome moments in Pablo and Birdy. There’s an eclectic cast, human and not, including the Committee, a group of rag-tag island birds who comment on all of the goings-on. Also a pastry-stealing dog thread that can break your heart. And through it all, there is the mysterious myth of the seafaring parrot who knows and can reproduce all of the sounds of the world that have ever been made.

A strange wind blows in during the events of this novel. Island wisdom holds that “the winds of change mean fortune lost or fortune gained.” As Pablo says at the end, it’s not always easy to tell what has been lost and/or gained. That’s fundamentally what the story is about, I think — that elusive and/or — and as such, it is a beautiful one to press into the hands of kids you love.

Two of my nieces turn eleven this spring. They each bear a slight resemblance to Pablo in different ways — and they are loved just as fiercely by we, their “islanders.” There is still space in their heads, hearts, and lives for wonder and imagination, which is the only thing this book requires. I’ll even go as far as to say this book can restore wonder and imagination if it’s on the way out. They’re both getting a signed copy for their birthdays—shhhh don’t tell! I don’t know if their eyes will leak or not. But I’ve dreamt of reading it with each of them — leaky eyes and all — and I think they’ll love it.

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The Hate You Give

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This past weekend, Darling Daughter and I participated in a parent-teen book discussion about The Hate You Give by Angie Thomas. This book has won many awards, received fantastic reviews, and is a hot topic of discussion in both the book and teen world — especially where those worlds overlap. It’s about the aftermath of a police shooting of an unarmed black teen. It covers various racial issues, grief, friendship, economic disparity, and political activism, just to name a few of the challenging thematic elements.

The conversation over pizza and salad was excellent. I came with a list of questions, but we really didn’t need it. We wondered together about all we don’t know and can’t know about another person’s situation. We wondered if differences make it harder to understand one another…and/or if there’s a way to use those differences somehow to strengthen what we have in common. We reflected on how complicated life can be — how so many traps can catch a kid, an adult, too. We talked about the difference one caring adult, or one good friend, can make in a kid’s life. And we talked about when that isn’t enough. We discussed institutional and systemic racism. And they provided real life illustrations from school that week.

It was pretty eye opening. These teens are white students at very diverse urban high schools (three different ones.) We parents had gone to high schools, back in the day, without nearly as much diversity in terms of culture, language, skin color, religion, and socio-economic status. It was clear they thought we’d missed out. Speaking for myself, I think we did, too.

Our kids are pretty fluent in things we never thought about as high school students because of the rich make-up of their student bodies. Their lunchrooms accommodate an array of dietary restrictions and economic necessities. The scheduling of tests has to take into account various religious observances. There are sometimes heated discussions and even fights happening in languages the bystanders and staff don’t understand. There are cultural values they find mysterious, but want to respect, even as they wonder about the source of their own values. There are racial issues that play out in both ugly and interesting ways. It’s quite a mix of people and issues they navigate each day in their classes, hallways, and lunchroom.

Our kids loved The Hate You Give—for the “realness” of it, the contemporary feel, for what it helped explain, and for the questions it made them ask of themselves, their schools, and their communities. When we talked about “mirrors and windows” — whether a book mirrors a reader’s life situation or provides a window to see into another’s life situation — they all said they thought this was a window book. It was written for white people, they said, to help them flesh out stories in the news, help them build empathy. I asked if they had black friends reading the book. They did. They did not speculate as to whether their black friends read The Hate You Give as a mirror or window book, but they said everyone who reads it is talking about it.

We parents loved The Hate You Give, too — for the peek inside our kids’ days and thoughts, for explanations of things we’re not familiar with (like rap lyrics), and for its complexity. The situations and the characters in this book are enormously complicated. Our days are filled with tweets and posts and headlines that grossly simplify things, thereby causing further harm. This books blows open issues of race and family and community by showing their complexity. It makes for a rich, heart-breaking story that somehow manages to give a glimmer of hope at the end.

The Hate You Give is a heck of a cross-over book. Some of us read YA and kidlit books regularly, but many adults do not. This one works for adults. And if you have a teen you can read it with — well, sit back and listen to them. They also give you a sense of hope.

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A Porcupine Named Fluffy

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It’s Read Across America Week this week and I had the privilege of hauling a bag of books to a local elementary school and reading to five different classes — K‑2^nd grade — last Tuesday. A truly wonderful way to spend the afternoon, I must say.

#1 Son’s 21^st birthday was Tuesday, which made me all nostalgic for the days of picture books, and so I’d packed a bag full of his long-ago favorites (and a couple newer ones, too). In each class we’d chat for a few minutes and I’d kinda suss out what they might like most. Small Walt was a hit with a kindergarten class, The Odious Ogre with the second graders. One Dog Canoe works for just about any age, of course. As does A Porcupine Named Fluffy. I think I read A Porcupine Named Fluffy by Helen Lester, illustrated by Lynn Munsinger, in three of the five classrooms. It never fails.

When #1 Son was small, we used that book to get things done. “When you’re all done with bath and have brushed your teeth…we can read Fluffy.” “Just as soon as you finish your lunch, we can read Fluffy out in the hammock….” He loved Fluffy.

The book opens with Mr. and Mrs. Porcupine taking a stroll with their first child in a stroller. They’re trying to find exactly the right name for him. They consider Spike. Too common. Lance? Too fierce for their sweet little guy. Needleroozer?

It’s Needleroozer that gets the kids laughing — it’s almost like a magic word that unlocks something.

“Needleroozer?!” they say.

“That’s a terrible name!”

“It’s hard to spell!”

Prickles? I say. They shake their heads. Pokey? More head shakes. How about Quillian?

“What kind of name is that?” said one little boy.

Then together Mr. and Mrs. Porcupine have an idea. “Let’s call him Fluffy. It’s such a pretty name. Fluffy!”

Lots of giggles at this. Porcupines aren’t fluffy! They all know this and so the name is hilarious! It’s a pretty wonderful introduction to irony, if you ask me.

So Fluffy grows up, beloved and somewhat protected, with his ironic name. At some point he begins to suspect he’s not fluffy — things happen. The illustrations carry the humor in these instances and kids love love love it. And so he embarks on the challenge of making his sharp quills fluffier — more hilarity ensues.

And then one day, Fluffy meets a very large rhinoceros. And the rhinoceros tells him right out that he’s going to give Fluffy a “rough time.”

“What’s your name, small prickly thing?” the rhinoceros asks.

“Fluffy,” says Fluffy.

And this just slays the rhino — he can hardly breathe he laughs so hard. By then, everyone is laughing — a proper reading depends on the laughter in fact.

“And what is your name?” Fluffy asks, despite his embarrassment.

And then we find out the rhino’s name, which I shall not divulge here. Suffice to say, it gives the irony of Fluffy’s name a run for its money.

The books ends with the two as fast friends, of course. And the book ends with readers — young and older — smiling and laughing. There’s just something about this book! If you haven’t read it, or don’t remember it (it was published before I graduated from high school!) look for it in your library. I saw it there just a few weeks ago — it is still very much in circulation.

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The Human Alphabet

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At my local library, a couple of weeks ago, I flipped through the books that were for sale by the Friends of the Library. These are mostly books that have been removed from the shelves for one reason or another. The kids’ books cost $.50—fifty cents, people! I’ve found some great ones in these bins.

The find this time: Pilobolus Dance Company’s The Human Alphabet. I snapped it up. As in I dropped the other books I was holding, I grabbed it so fast. It’s in pretty good condition. You can tell it’s been read hard, but frankly it might be the very copy that was read hard in our house, so I don’t mind the evidence of previous reads.

This book regularly found its way into our library bag when #1 Son was young. He hated alphabet books with an almost pathological hatred, being a child who could ferret out an adult’s agenda (learning letters, for instance) quicker than you could open a book. He disdained any books that were designed to help a young person learn letters or numbers. Except for Pilobolus’s alphabet book. For this reason, I consider this book magical.

It opens with this simple invitation: Here are 26 letters of the alphabet and 26 pictures — all made of people! Can you guess what each picture shows? And what follows are the most amazing pictures. Each letter is made of people, and so is a picture that goes with each letter — a line of ants for A, butterfly for B etc. They are astounding, each and every one.

Something about these letters made of people spoke to our boy who was “not so very fond of letters and numbers.” (A direct quote, age four — we read a lot of Winnie-the-Pooh, hence the British syntax.) Occasionally he would humor me and we would make letters with our bodies. But only occasionally. Mostly he just flipped through the book, studying each letter, each picture. Sometimes I’d position myself so I could see his eyes as he looked at the book. He’d take in the whole page, lean in a bit…and then the recognition! His eyes would widen almost imperceptibly, and a little smile would come — he’d discovered something. The letter N! Or an ice cream cone! (MADE OF HUMANS!)

I tried so hard not to ruin it by having him trace the letters, or say them out loud, or wonder together what other words might start with that letter. I bit my tongue, and we just enjoyed. Regularly.

The copyright on this book says 2005. In my memory, he was much younger when we were looking at this book. But he was a later reader (you can read more on that adventure here), so perhaps it fell in that time when he already “should’ve” known his letters, but gave no indication he did on any of the usual tests and performances.

When I showed him my find, #1 Son, who will be 21 years old in a couple of weeks, smiled with recognition. Maybe I’ll send it to him for his birthday….

The Pushcart War

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I first heard of Jean Merrill’s The Pushcart War in grad school. I read it because a fellow student spoke with absolute glee about it. I’ve not heard a book recommended with such laughter and vigor before or since. And I fell into the book just as she insisted I would. Fell, I tell you. Lost my head, really.

My kids did, too. I handed it to them with a casual, “It’s really good and I think you’ll like it…” sort of recommendation. I wanted to see if they would, as I did, google “pushcart war” to see when this had happened and why we didn’t know more about it. They did. Well, the little one said, “Wait…did this really happen?!”

Apparently, we each read over the dates of the forward and the author’s introduction. Both are dated in the year 2036, which would’ve been a clue, of course…but so absorbed were we in the “reporting” of the Pushcart War — in the struggle, the unfair tactics and politics of the truckers, and the plight of the pushcart vendors — that we missed the clues, I guess.

When The Pushcart War was published in 1964, it was set in New York City in 1976. When it was republished in 1974, it was set in 1986. The 1985 edition is set in 1996 — always the not-so-distant future, in other words. When the New York Review Children’s Collection published the 50^th anniversary edition a couple of years ago, the date changed to 2026 (this is the edition I have). This book has had political resonance in each of the eras in which it has published and republished, and the plight of the pushcart vendors certainly still rings True, hilariously and poignantly, today.

The story could be categorized as “narrative journalism,” published ten years after the events of the war. The forward, written by one Professor Lyman Cumberly of New York University says “…it is very important to the peace of the world that we understand how wars begin….” The Pushcart War shows us. Kids understand the issue at hand — the big trucking companies want the roads cleared for trucks and only trucks. The trucking industry cites the importance of deliveries being on time, the general agreement that traffic is awful etc. The pushcarts — the little guys — are the first target.

But they fight back! And the fight is glorious and one that anyone who has ever been bullied or witnessed bullying or has bullied will understand. There’s The Daffodil Massacre, which starts it all off, and then we’re quickly introduced to Morris the Florist, and Frank the Flower, and Maxie Hammerman, the Pushcart King. Movie star, Wanda Gambling, sees the danger signs — don’t we all? I mean, the taxi drivers grew cautious in their driving! — and pretty soon there are famous speeches and secret meetings, triggering words and secret weapons. Then there’s an all out War. It’s basically David and Goliath all over again.

But there’s something about the way it’s written — I guess it’s the “narrative journalism” tone — before you know it, you’re searching Wikipedia to get the details nailed down.

If I were a teacher of fourth graders, I’d read a chapter of this timeless classic every day. And I’d notice, and ponder, as I did and do, that this book, a story for children, has only the briefest mention of any kids. The main characters are entirely adults.

Fascinating, don’t you think?

Skinny Dip with Brenda Sederberg

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Brenda Sederberg is the current facilitator of the Chapter & Verse Book Club in Duluth, Minnesota. She’s an enthusiastic reader and wonderfully avid about sharing the books she reads. A retired teacher, she continues to inspire learning wherever she goes.

How many bookcases do you have in your home?

Oh ... soooo many! When I retired from 34 years of teaching I brought very little home from my classroom, but I did bring 24 boxes of children's books! I'm just not ready to part with them. They take up bookshelves on an entire wall in my house. From time to time I will be chatting with someone about something, and end up saying, "oh ... you should see this book by ....", and I find the book and loan it out. When guests with children visit they often end up reading books from my shelves.

I also have shelves of books in another room in our house, organized:

nature and outdoors books
books by Hispanic authors (I taught middle and high school Spanish for a number of years … before teaching elementary school)
travel books
an assortment of Nobel Prize winning literature
children’s books from places I’ve visited (Maine, Texas, Rhode Island, France, Germany)
favorite fiction and nonfiction books I’ve read or want to read

Have you traveled outside the United States?

I love to travel, and when I do I look for children's books from the area I'm visiting, or read a book while I'm there that was written by an author from that region. I read Heidi in Switzerland last fall, and Pinocchio in Italy the year before. I enjoy hiking and biking in the wide open spaces in these countries, the small towns ... and I stay away from the big cities.

Mt. Royal Public Library, Duluth, MN

Which library springs to mind when someone says that word?

It's hard to choose one! We lived in a small town in North Dakota when I was young, and I biked to the Public Library there and checked out as many books as the book clamp on my bike would hold. It was a beautiful building, of course, as libraries are! There were large steps leading up to the door, and columns alongside the steps. The old public library near Lincoln Park School was a favorite when I went to school there, and now I LOVE the Mt. Royal Library in Duluth. When I was in college in Duluth, I worked 10 hours a week in the Children's Library at UMD, run by Lorraine Bissonette. She arranged books beautifully, with stuffed animal book characters next to books, colorful mobiles hanging above the shelves, green and flowering plants throughout, and comfortable chairs in which to sit and read. It was a library like no other, to be sure ... more like some of the wonderful children's bookstores ... the Wild Rumpus, for example.

Do you read the end of a book first?

NEVER. I do not usually read any information on the flap or the back, either. I like to start with the dedication, and then the first line of the book, and continue from there. I want to read it and let it speak for itself, I don't like to know much at all about a book before I read it! First lines are important to me ... I sort of "collect" first lines!

“In the Carpenter Shop,” Carl Larsson

Who is your favorite artist?

It is hard to choose one … I like the art of Carl Larsson, Swedish painter, and visited his home in Sweden where one can see the painting he did IN his home, above doorways, around walls. I copied a “saying” he painted in his house, above a doorway in our home: “Whef Du Vad, Var God Och Glad,” in Swedish (forgive any errors!), in English: “I’ll tell you what, be good and glad.” I love Betsy Bowen’s woodcuts, and the prints of Rick Allen, who has a studio in Canal Park in Duluth and each spring releases a new print of “The Trapper’s Daughter”! He has practically written a book in printing her many adventures! The lettering and text he sometimes incorporates in his work is wonderful, and often humorous.

A Wrinkle in Time

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It was a dark and stormy night.

When I read this aloud one chilly fall evening on the porch to my kids, I laughed out loud. It was Banned Books week and we were “celebrating” by reading Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, one of the perennial repeaters on banned books lists. #1 Son was in fourth grade, which is when I’d been introduced to A Wrinkle in Time. Darling Daughter was a little young, but she was accustomed to coloring while we read books that were supposedly “over her head” — books that she often quoted later.

I can’t imagine I laughed the first time I heard the opening line of this important book. But as an adult, it struck me as terribly clever — taking the most clichéd opening line ever and starting an astounding, break-all-the-rules book with it.

My fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Henderson read us A Wrinkle in Time. I remember the hair on my arms standing up as she read a chapter each afternoon after lunch and recess. I could hardly breath I loved that book so much. Meg was a Smart Girl, a Strong Girl — a smart and strong girl in ways not always recognized, but frequently squelched, in my experience. There were not nearly enough Smart/Strong Girl protagonists when I was in fourth grade. I adored her. I wanted to be her. Plus, I had a mad crush on Calvin.

The book was smart, too — filled with languages Mrs. Henderson could not pronounce, peppered with sayings from people I did not know (like Seneca), and there was math and science and space adventure! Oh my! (I wanted desperately to be a scientist when I was in fourth grade.) Reading time after lunch and recess was always my favorite part of the school day, but during those few weeks that we read A Wrinkle in Time, I was in the highest reading heaven.

When we reached the chapter called “The Tesseract,” Mrs. Henderson declared it “too difficult conceptually” and she skipped it. I can’t decide whether to never forgive her for this, or be terribly grateful. Because I went to the library and found the book so I could read the skipped part. I was determined to understand it, and I did. (The drawing of the ant on the line helped.) I understood it sitting on the floor in the library at age nine better than I did when I read it to my kids on the porch during Banned Books Week thirty years later, I think. Darling Daughter copied the picture of the ant in her artwork. #1 Son studied it after we’d finished reading.

I don’t remember reading ahead once I’d found the book in the library — I probably didn’t, since I enjoyed hearing the chapter installments each day. In fact, I don’t remember reading A Wrinkle in Time on my own at all — and there were plenty of books I read in a compulsive manner again and again.

But it was like I’d never left it when I read it to my kids. I remembered it all — the excitement…the terror of IT…the fast-paced dialog between all the smart smart people…the identical children bouncing balls in front of identical houses, which I think of every time I’m in a suburban development with only beige/grey houses and townhouses… Most of all: Meg’s frustration and fear, fierce strength and smarts.

The hair on my arms stood up again when I saw the preview to the movie of A Wrinkle in Time that’s coming out this March. It’s going to be wonderful, I can just tell. This groundbreaking, unusual novel that couldn’t be categorized when it was published and continues to resist categorization nearly sixty years later … this book that has been banned again and again and again … this book is about to take the world by a storm again, I predict, even as it’s never lost favor (except with those who would ban it, I guess). I open its pages and the hair on my arms stands up still — it remains incredibly relevant, I believe. Perhaps more so now than when it was published. I can’t wait to see it on the big screen.

Skinny Dip with DeDe Small

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DeDe Small shares her enthusiasm about books, reading, and literacy with her students at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. We invited DeDe to Skinny Dip with us, our first interview in the New Year.

When did you first start reading books?

I don’t actually remember learning to read but I do always remember having books. I even came up with my own cataloging system in the later elementary grades.

Dinner party at your favorite restaurant with people living or dead: where is it and who’s on the guest list?

I don’t know where it is but I know I am eating a really good steak and we need a big table because I am inviting Barak Obama, JK Rowling, Buck O’Neill, St. Ignatius of Loyola, Jane Goodall, my parents, and my aunts.

All-time favorite book?

This is really hard because there are too many to name! I loved it when my mother read The Secret Garden to me. As a young child, I loved reading Andrew Henry’s Meadow by Doris Burn. In upper elementary, Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell was my favorite. All-time favorite might have to be the entire Harry Potter series because it speaks to choosing kindness, love, and integrity over power and fame.

Favorite breakfast or lunch as a kid?

I was cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

What’s your least favorite chore?

Doing the laundry.

What’s your favorite part of starting a new project?

I love the feeling when everything starts clicking and you can sense where the project might go. That sense of potential is energizing.

Barefoot? Socks? Shoes? How would we most often find you at home?

Barefoot in warm weather and socks when it is cold. You will most often find me curled up on my couch with a book, doing school work or watching a movie. The activity changes but my location does not.

When are you your most creative?

I am most creative when I step back and take the time to let an idea percolate a bit.

Your best memory of your school library?

My strongest memory is actually of my public library. We would go once a week. It became a great bonding experience with my mother and I came to think of the library as a special place. I now have four library cards.

Favorite flavor of ice cream?

Mint Chip.

Book(s) on your bedside table right now?

Wishtree by Katherine Applegate, Wolf Hollow by Lauren Wolk, and La Rose by Louise Erdrich. I recently read The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, Refugee by Alan Gratz and Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds.

Best invention in the last 200 years?

Vaccines

Which is worse: spiders or snakes?

Spiders. Way too many legs and eyes.

What’s your best contribution to taking care of the environment?

Recycling

Why do you feel hopeful for humankind?

I find hope in the characters of good books and real-life stories. Lloyd Alexander was specifically referencing fantasy but I think it is true of all good stories: “Sometimes heartbreaking, but never hopeless, the fantasy world as it 'should be' is one in which good is ultimately stronger than evil, where courage, justice, love, and mercy actually function.” Books allow us to recognize our own humanity in others and that makes me hopeful. If we read more, connect more, and understood more, the world would be a better place.

The Grinch

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I’m just going to say it. Go on the record.

I do not like The Grinch. I do not like the book. I do not like the character. I do not like the story of How The Grinch Stole Christmas. I do not like the brilliant theater productions of the story (though I acknowledge the brilliance.) I do not like the TV special, which I grew up watching, and which I did not let my kids watch. I do not like the movie or the song. I do not like any of it, Sam-I-Am.

Lest you think I’m simply grinchy about all things Grinch, I will tip my hand here at the beginning and say that I love the name “Grinch.” It’s perfect. As perfect as Ebeneezer Scrooge’s name, and let’s be honest, How The Grinch Stole Christmas is really just a knock-off of Dicken’s A Christmas Carol. It’s just not as well done. It lacks…subtlety, among other things.

Scrooge is afflicted with his own personal bah humbugness, but you suspect even before all of the Christmas Ghosts visit that he could be a different man with a little therapy and some homemade Christmas cookies. But the Grinch is just mean. He’s not all “Bah humbug!” when Christmas frivolities get on his nerves — he’s all “I MUST stop this Christmas from coming.”

Dude. Take your two-sizes-too-small heart and get back to your cave.

I’m tired of making excuses for the grinches of the world. He takes the stockings and presents, the treats and the feast of the wee Whos! He takes the last can of Who-hash, for heaven’s sake! And then The Tree — he shoves the Whos’ Christmas tree up the chimney! Who does that?!

It’s CindyLou Who and her sweet trusting nature that just undoes me.

“Santy Claus, why…Why are you taking our Christmas tree? WHY?”

The Grinch poses as Santa Claus — can we agree this is an abomination?

He tells her there’s a light that won’t light, and so he’s taking it back to his workshop to fix. Sweet CindyLou believes him — she trots back to bed with her cold cup of water. My heart! And the Grinch takes the very log for the fire; then goes up the chimney, himself, the old liar.

We did not have this book growing up. We watched the TV special but I’d never read it until I babysat a family who had it. They had three boys, ages nine, six, and three. They were wild. Difficult. Not kind to each other. And they were exhausting to put to bed. I think this is why their parents went out.

I suggested a few books to wind down one summer night, and the six-year-old demanded that I read How The Grinch Stole Christmas.

“YEAH!” said the nine-year-old. “It makes babies cry!” And as if on cue, the three-year-old started to whimper. I said we weren’t going to read a book that made anyone cry. And besides, it wasn’t even Christmas.

But two hours later, after the older two had passed out, the three-year-old brought How The Grinch Stole Christmas down to me and asked me to read it. His eyes were huge. His thumb was in his mouth. He said he had to go potty first. Then he needed a cold cup of water — just like CindyLou Who.

When we finally sat down to read the book, we did not get past the first page before huge tears welled in his eyes. I told him I could not in good conscience read him a book that made him so sad. He suggested we just look at the pictures. And so we did. We talked through the pictures, and he trembled as we did. He obviously knew the story.

And it did not matter one bit that The Grinch could not finally take away Christmas — that Christmas came in fine style even without all the trappings he’d stolen. It did not matter that The Grinch’s heart grew three sizes in the end and that he himself carved the roast beef. This, I suppose, is meant to be the “lesson,” the take-away that makes the rest of it all okay. Too little too late, I say.

I had a three-year-old on my lap trying so hard to brave, trying not to be The Baby his brothers told him he was. His little heart hammered as we turned those pages and by the time we were done, I was done with The Grinch.

So there.

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Thanksgiving Tea

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The week before Thanksgiving I was part of a wonderful Thanksgiving-themed Storytime. Excellent books were read: Otis Gives Thanks by Loren Long and Thankful by Eileen Spinelli. We sang through There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Turkey by Lucille Colandro, and Simple Gifts by Chris Raschka. All was going swimmingly — beautiful children, rapt and smiling. They were very young, but you could tell they were read to regularly. They knew how to sit on cushions, raise their hands, use their inside voices, etc.

And then I decided to “tell” an original story about setting the table for a Thanksgiving Tea. I pulled out #1 Son’s tea set from when he was three and very into tea parties. I gave it a good wash — quite dusty as he has used larger tea cups for years now — and packed it into a “story box” with a few other props.

We will set a beautiful table together, I thought. I will invite them to pour the tea for one another…to imagine what they’d like to eat…we will give thanks for all the goodness in life…. Warm cozy feelings flooded my storytelling heart.

I placed a small end table in front of them. They all stood up and gathered around. This was unexpected — the standing — but it made sense, of course. They would be right there and able to see the story unfold. I smiled, opened my story box, and began.

This is our Thanksgiving table for tea… They stood still stock still, staring at the table in front of them. I love the innate drama of telling stories!

This is the tablecloth, ironed so smooth, that covers our Thanksgiving table for tea…. I spread a colorful sunflower napkin. Immediately they all were touching the napkin, rubbing the table with the napkin, pulling the napkin to one side and then the other, wiping their noses on the napkin. I suggested we put our hands at our sides.

Nope.

I suggested we put our hands behind our backs.

Ha!

So I continued. I’m semi-unflappable.

This is the light, that shines in the middle…. A quick glance at my fellow storytime leader confirmed that we might not want to light the candle as planned in my ridiculously cozy vision of this story telling. This was an excellent choice as instantly there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of little hands all over the unlit candle. They passed it around, grabbed it from one another, blew on it. I insisted we put the light in the middle as the story said.

When it was reluctantly placed there and we imagined the cozy flame, I continued through the story. They continued touching the candle and adjusting the cloth.

But things didn’t really fall apart until I brought out the small plates of “all different colors” with their “matching cups for our Thanksgiving tea.”

These were rearranged, stacked and unstacked, clattered together, passed around, dropped on the floor, sipped from, and licked. My fellow storyteller flinched with every clatter, but I knew what those dishes had been through and although they are pottery, they are the magical sort that somehow does not break.

When I placed the teapot and cream and sugar “that match the cups and plates, all different colors” on the table, frenetic pouring and common cup swigging ensued. Clearly they understood the concept of teatime. A small skirmish broke out over the cream pitcher and its imaginary cream. Heaps more sugar than the wee sugar bowl could possibly hold was sprinkled around all over the cloth and on each other. A thousand or more children managed to gather around that tiny table and “manipulate” the props.

WHAT A FEAST! I cried. WHAT A TREAT! WHAT SHALL WE EAT FOR OUR TEA?!

“Cereal!” was the first answer. Then ‘taters and pie and popcorn and candy and turkey and more candy and toast and goldfish and jelly and macaroni-and-cheese and cupcakes and milk and apples and buttered noodles and bananas and hotdogs and meat and corn-on-the-cob and hot chocolate and watermelon and more candy. Marshmallows, too. For the hot chocolate. But also just to eat.

All of these things we pretended to place and plop and sprinkle and slop on the wee little plates and in the wee little cups as they were moving, no less. It was chaos — everything constantly being passed and clattered and exchanged and grabbed.

WE GIVE THANKS FOR THIS FOOD AND DRINK, THIS TABLE, AND OUR FRIENDS! I yelled above the mayhem. AND NOW WE CLEAN UP!

Half of the group immediately went and sat on their cushions. The other half did indeed “help” put everything back in the storybox. My storyteller partner and I heaved a sigh of relief as I put the lid on. Nothing broke. No one was crying. There was no blood.

“Now we have a craft!” we said. Which was, curiously, a much calmer activity. Except for the glue sticks — small battles erupted over those. More than one child used them as chapstick. Perhaps this made for a quiet ride home.

Mouse Books

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We have mice. Hopefully just one, but it’s a brash one, scuttling around the kitchen during breakfast this morning.

This happens in the fall at our house. We’ve certainly tried to find where they might be getting in, but they say a mouse only needs a dime-sized hole, and we obviously haven’t found it. Caught two a couple of weeks ago.

They’re small. Cute, even. Which is good, because otherwise I’d have the heebie-jeebies. And I (mostly) don’t. It’s just a To-Do on the list — and I’m not the one who To-Do’s it even.

But it has me thinking…. We might not want them in our houses, but mice are beloved characters in kids’ books. Certainly at our house they have been. Ralph S. Mouse…The Mouse and the Motorcycle…all of Kevin Henke’s wonderful mice picture books…The Brambly Hedge Collection…Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH…A Mouse Called Wolf…Stuart Little…The Tale of Despereaux…Brian Jacques’ Redwall Series…Avi’s Poppy and Ragweed books…Bless This Mouse…. And these are just some of the books in which mice play the starring role. Plenty more have mousy “minor characters.” (Think Templeton in Charlotte’s Web, or Mouse in the Bear books by Bonnie Becker.)

I’ve written many Red Reading Boots columns about our favorite mice books. (I just looked back—many!) I look at the shelves in my office, which have been stocked with all of the family favorites I’m allowed to take from the #1 Son’s and Darling Daughter’s shelves, and goodness! It would appear we’ve raised them on mice! #1 Son had imaginary mice friends who accompanied through the trials and tribulations of early childhood — and no wonder! Did we read anything else?!

What is it about mice that are so appealing for storytelling? Is it that they’re the presumed underdog because of their size? Yet in story after story, they prove themselves to be intelligent, resourceful, and courageous — their size even advantageous. Certainly this is a theme worthy of putting before children.

Is it because they are so wee and dear (fictionally!) and lend themselves to illustrations? Some of my most favorite illustrations have mice in them (see the above list for starters!) Their little clothes!

Or is it because we like to imagine parallel universes in which the smallest animals create homes and villages and worlds from our bits and bobs? Hidden away in the hedgerows, the rafters, beneath the floorboards…all these stories running along beside use.

It might be this last thing for me. When I’m on walks I often see tiny hollows, small pockets, and inviting dime sized (and larger) holes in the walls and hedges and trees. When I see these, I’m immediately furnishing a home for tiny ones inside — scraps artfully repurposed, cozy built-ins, winding passages….

I’m fully aware that other rodents could star in such scenes, but it’s always a bitty mouse with large ears and eyes and flickering whiskers that comes to mind. Perhaps it’s because of what I’ve read over the years? Certainly could be. There’s something about mice that fire our imaginations, I think.

I’m on the hunt for new mouse books. What do you have to recommend?

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Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH

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I have had the pleasure of entertaining a few young writers in my office in the last couple of months. They come with a Mom, usually. (My office doesn’t really hold more than three people at a time.) These Moms are so thankful that I would do this “generous thing” of having them over that I feel almost guilty. Because I do it for me. These writers, most of whom have not hit the double digits in age yet, are such an inspiration for me.

We often share our WIPs (works-in-progress). Theirs is beautiful, because they are almost always illustrators as well as writers. Some write picture books only, but some cross over into illustrated chapter books, filling notebook upon notebook. I usually show them some mess I’m working on, and although they’re polite, I can tell they’re startled (or amused) that I don’t have my act more together.

We discuss process. I ask them if they write most every day and they say things like, “Of course.” And “I use my free time in class efficiently.” These kids leave and I have the urge to clean my office, start a new notebook and calendar, and get my act together. They are good for my soul.

They usually try my Wesk (Walking Desk) and they spend a lot of time looking at my bookshelves. This is how I know they’re serious writers — they’re serious readers. I tell them this. And they nod smartly or look at me with the “Duh!” look on their face. Mostly we talk about newer books — those published within their lifetime — that we love. But I had one young writer recently who kept remarking on the books of my childhood.

“Ramona the Brave! I love Ramona…. The Borrowers! Remember when we read that when we were visiting your friend, Mom? Wind in the Willows! I like Mr. Toad….”

And then she spied Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. She pulled it off the shelf and scrutinized the cover. “Is this the same Mrs. Frisby we have?” she asked her mother, doubt and suspicion in her young voice. Her mother answered that it was, this one just had a different cover. “Was this yours when you were a girl like me?” she asked, her eyes darting my way but then immediately back to Mrs. Frisby in her modest red cloak on the cover.

“No,” I said. “This was my son’s copy.” The cover says: Celebrating the 35^th anniversary of NIMH. It’s not nearly as well done as the art on the original, which I had — the book is nearly as old as me.

“This does not look like Mrs. Frisby,” she said, her nose scrunched up in disapproval.

“I don’t think so either,” I said. For the life of me, I do not know why they redid the cover. Zena Bernstein’s gorgeous (pen and ink?) drawings are still inside the book. Why did they change the cover to something that looks so…blah for the 35^th anniversary?

“She looks…pretend.”

Right. I remember so clearly being this young writer’s age, and my second grade teacher, Mrs. Perkins, reading us the story after recess each day. This was my favorite part of the day. I just fell into the world of Mrs. Frisby and her wee family in such danger in their cozy cinderblock home. There was nothing pretend about it. Young Timothy had pneumonia — I’d had pneumonia and I knew exactly what that felt like. I wheezed along with Timothy in solidarity. I remember visiting the Rats of NIMH with Mrs. Frisby, and my heart pounding with hers as she delivered the sleeping powder into the cat’s dish.

“I mean, I know it is pretend,” said my young visiting writer. “Technically. But it doesn’t feel pretend when you’re reading it.” She pushed the book back into my overcrammed bookshelf. “That’s the kind of book I want to write.”

Me, too, sweetheart. Me, too.

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E.B. White

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A couple of weeks ago I was in the basement of the Science and Engineering Library at the University of Minnesota getting a little writing in before work. It’s a good spot — there’s a nice coffee shop, nothing in the stacks is intelligible to me on that floor so I’m not distracted, and it’s quiet and out of the hordes of university traffic. Only those looking for serious quiet go all the way down in the basement.

When I was done with my jolt of creativity caffeine, I packed up to head out. As I walked through the library’s security gate, I set off the alarm. I turned around and looked at the sleepy scruffly young man at the check-out desk. He looked as surprised as I did.

“I didn’t even go into the stacks this morning….” I said.

“Huh,” he said.

“Can I just go through then?” I asked.

“Well…I’m supposed to look in your bag.” He grimaced.

“Okay,” I said, heaving my giant bag up on the counter in front of him. He peeked in. Didn’t even touch it. Clearly, this was not something he did often.

“Would you like me to pull stuff out?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure.” So I pulled out the detritus that is my commuting bag — a couple of folders and notebooks, my knitting, sunglasses, The Horn Book magazine and two small books, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a bag of markers and colored pencils, the pouch of meds/lipstick/emergency supplies, some hand lotion, my wallet and phone, a pair of socks, the granola bar I couldn’t find the day before, my water bottle, lots of Kleenex and ticket stubs, and the program from my daughter’s band concert the night before. I threw out a couple of receipts while I was at it, and tidied the collection of post-it notes and recipe cards etc. while he stared at the pile. He looked to be completely overwhelmed.

“I can live on the streets for three weeks out of this bag,” I said.

“Wow,” he said.

“I’m kidding,” I said.

He looked at me nervously and then ran his hand half-heartedly over the paper items and picked up one of the books. The Wild Flag by E.B. White. (I wrote about it in Red Reading Boots a few weeks ago.) It’s the perfect size to slip into a purse and I’ve been carrying it around since I purchased it this summer. It’s also a pleasure to hold — worn, but solid linen-esque cover, comfortable size and shape etc.

“What’s this?” he asked, turning it over in his hands. He even sounded suspicious.

“It’s called The Wild Flag,” I said. “I purchased it in an antique store in Stonington, Maine this summer. The receipt is serving as a bookmark, I believe.” He pulled out the receipt, glanced at it, and then stuck it in somewhere else. Not that it matters. You can open this book up to most any page and start reading. It’s a collection of editorials.

“Who’s it by?” he asked.

“E.B. White.”

“Is that the dude that wrote Charlotte’s Web?” he asked, looking suddenly awake.

“The very dude,” I said.

“My Mom read that to me a bunch of times when I was little.” He smiled. “I loved the rat.”

“Templeton,” I said.

“Yeah, Templeton!” He handed me the book back.

“So, may I repack my bag?”

“Sure!” he said. “You have a lot of stuff. But I know you didn’t find that book down here.”

Indeed.

Wherever this man-child’s mother is — she should be proud. He woke up early one morning and remembered Templeton all these years later. That’s the power of reading to a child.

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Pinkerton & Friends

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I had a “Why in the world….?” moment the other day. It was unexpected and a little strange and it was this: When I imagine picture books that I am writing and/or thinking about writing, I imagine very specific illustrations. From a very specific illustrator. Even though I admire the work of many illustrators. (I admire this one, too, of course.) But always, always, in my first imagining, I “picture” the illustrations by Steven Kellogg.

I love Mr. Kellogg’s work. But I love the work of a lot of illustrators and would aspire and hope for many (very different) illustrators to make art to help tell my stories. I can switch my imagination to other illustrators if I think about it, but without thinking about it…it’s Steven Kellogg’s art. When this realization came to me I pulled some of his books off the shelves in my office with the question: Why is Kellogg my default, the first one whose work I imagine?

All I can think is that the years 1999 – 2002 were what I think of as The Pinkerton Years. You might think it strange that I can pinpoint the years, but I know we were less involved with Pinkerton (and by that I mean not reading Pinkerton stories on a daily basis) by the time Darling Daughter came along late in 2002. Prior to that, we could hardly leave the house without a Pinkerton story with us.

These were also the first of the allergy/asthma years — #1 Son was critically ill too much of the time, and with his doctors we were struggling to figure out what was causing such severe reactions. The only clear allergens were pets, and he came to understand first that he could not be around puppies or kitties, or anything else furry and cuddly and fun. A terrible sentence, of course, when you are three and wheezy.

So we read a lot of books about pets, and before we read Ribsy and Because of Winn-Dixie we read Pinkerton stories. A lot of Pinkerton stories. #1 Son adored Pinkerton. Pinkerton, a Great Dane, is possibly the most hilarious dog to ever be featured in a book — he is huge and ungainly and always getting himself in a fix. His expressions, his “knees and elbows,” his giant floppiness, and his curiosity and giant heart make him quite a character.

Very quickly we learned to spot Kellogg illustrations from across the library/bookstore, and pretty much wherever there are Kellogg pictures, there are animals. Not just great danes, but boa constrictors, mice, cats, pigs, ducks in a row, horses, spaniels….. And wherever there are animals, there’s a fair amount of chaos — at least in a Kellogg book. (Articles and interviews suggest he has lived the fun and chaos in a home we could not have entered and lived to breathe — lots of pets!)

The detail in Kellogg’s illustrations is tremendous, the hilarity aptly conveyed, and the sweetness and rollercoaster high emotions of kids and Great Danes alike comes alive on the page. I could read stacks of the books in one sitting to my wheezing boy. We used them to get through nebulizer treatments, and to “push fluids,” and to encourage rest for a kid all amped up on steroids. They were magical and we poured over the illustrations long after the reading of the story was done. The medicine could go down without much fuss as long as Pinkerton was along.

Those were exhausting, worried years, and all I can think is that I somehow absorbed Steven Kellogg’s art in my sleep-deprived anxious state…and it’s now in my bones. Thank you, Mr. Kellogg, for your stories, your art, and your presence in our family’s life. You are the default in my imagination and I’m grateful.

Bookstorm™: No Monkeys, No Chocolate

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We are pleased to feature No Monkeys, No Chocolate as our August book selection, in which author and science writer Melissa Stewart, along with Allen Young and illustrator Nicole Wong share the interdependent ecosystem that creates the right conditions for cacao beans to be grown and harvested so we can produce chocolate. This ecosystem is set in the rainforest of the Amazon, but there are interdependent ecosystems all over the world, vital animals, reptiles, birds, insects, humans, and plants that are necessary for our lives to continue on this earth.… more

Bookstorm™: Jazz Day

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This month we’re featuring Jazz Day, a book that’s all about jazz and a photograph that recorded a moment in time, people at the top of their musical careers and people who were just getting started. Author Roxane Orgill is familiar with the jazz culture; she’s written several books about the music and the people. Illustrator Francis Vallejo took elements of photography, graphic design, acrylic, and pastels to illustrate his first book.… more

Bookstorm™: Miss Colfax’s Light

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We are pleased to feature Miss Colfax’s Light as our June book selection, in which author Aimée Bissonette and illustrator Eileen Ryan Ewen tell the fascinating story of a woman who served as the Michigan City Lighthouse keeper from 1861 to 1904. Captains and navigators on Lake Michigan relied on her lighthouse to keep them from foundering on the rocks or crashing onto the shore in rough weather.… more

Gardening and Farming Delights

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Jackie: At last — we made it to spring and all the usual accoutrements have shown up — lilacs, violets, the smell of apple blossoms, and thoughts of sprouting seeds and growing vegetables. How could we not look at picture books about gardens and farming this month?

I have to confess, Phyllis, I did not know of Miss Jaster’s Garden, written and illustrated by N. M. Bodecker and published in 1972. I’m so glad to meet Miss Jaster and Hedgie the hedgehog whom she treats with a bowl of milk each night. “But hedgehogs being the shape they are, and Miss Jaster being a little nearsighted, as often as not she put the saucer where the hedgehog’s head wasn’t. And Hedgie — so as not to cause distress — “politely dipped his tail in the milk and pretended to drink.”

That’s not the only problem caused by Miss Jaster’s poor vision. When she is scattering flower seeds in her garden she does not see Hedgie and plants seeds on him too. “…after a while he began feeling restless.” Hedgie is sprouting. Hedgie blooms! And feels like dancing. “Tomorrow I’ll be as quiet as an earthworm,” thought Hedgie, “but not today. Today is the greatest day of my life. There’ll never be another like it!” When Miss Jaster sees flowers dancing in the yard, she yells, “STOP THIEF!” and poor Hedgie, frightened and chagrined, runs off. Eventually the Chief Constable, with a capable bit of sleuthing, finds Hedgie and brings him back — “a weary, worried, bedraggled little animal, down on his luck.” Miss Jaster feels bad at having given the hedgehog (“flowerhog”) such a scare. And they take breakfast together every morning — “And there was nothing but peace and sunshine and a touch of Sweet William.”

I love the tone of this book — Hedgie is up for the adventure of being a walking flower garden. The constable is thoughtful, “Did you by chance, happen to notice how many legs these flowers had when they made their getaway? In round numbers?” In round numbers! And I love the characters — the hedgehog who’s so thoughtful he pretends to drink with his tail so as not to upset Miss Jaster. And kind Miss Jaster who doesn’t mind sharing her garden with a hedgehog and is actually pleased when she realized that she also shared flower seeds with him.

This story has a lot of text. But the humor is so wonderful and the characters just the right degree of eccentric, I think it would be enjoyed by the five to ninety crowd. What do you think?

Phyllis: I didn’t know this book, either, but I also love it. The double-page spread map at the beginning of the book is a little story all in itself, as good maps often are. From Hedgie’s corner to the birdbath (“For ancient inscription, see page 17”) to Miss J’s wicker chair and Sunrise Hill (“Elevation 9’”) Bodecker has created a whole world in art as well as text.

As someone who has become nearer and nearer sighted my whole life, I completely understand how Miss Jaster might make such a mistake. And who wouldn’t want a walking flower garden? Who wouldn’t want to be a flower garden? I love how the ending brings mutual satisfaction to Miss Jaster and to Hedgie, who have always been solicitous of each other — each morning they share “a leisurely breakfast … and a walk along the beach, followed by a small but persistent butterfly.”

Certainly the text is much longer than many more recent picture books, but what wonderful details! When Miss Jaster goes out to plant she does so in “a purple morning-dress and sturdy shoes” with a “large straw hat, trimmed with cornflowers on her head,” pulling “a small four-wheeled wagon full of garden tools and flower seeds.” Like a garden in full bloom, the story is lush with language.

I love, too, how Hedgie, as he discovers he’s sprouting, wonders which he will be: “’Flower bed or vegetable garden? Vegetable garden or flower bed?’” until one day, “’I’m in bloom!’ cried Hedgie.”

Jackie: I call James Stevenson the writer with the humor cure. He makes me laugh. And Grandpa’s Too Good Garden is one of his curing-est. Mary Ann and Louie are disappointed with their gardening. Louis says, “We dig and rake and plant and water and weed — and nothing ever comes up. Our garden is no good.” Grandpa remains calm and tells them he once had a garden that was “a little too good.” There are some wonderful cartoon‑y frames of Grandpa and Wainey in the garden (both as kids with little mustaches) but the story really begins when Father throws his Miracle Grow hair tonic out the window. It spills into the garden and gets rained in. Before Wainey even wakes up a vine snatches him up and almost out the window. The garden was taller than the house. Giant caterpillars came to eat the giant plants. The plants continued to grow and Grandpa got “snagged on a weather vane above our roof.” Grandpa is in trouble…only to be rescued by Wainey on a giant butterfly. This happy ending is accompanied by Wainey showing up to offer Grandpa and the kids some ice cream. I love the exaggeration, the total silliness of it.

Phyllis: Gardeners need patience, but not all of us wait quietly. When the seeds don’t grow quickly enough, Wainey and Grandpa encourage them. “’Hello, beans? Tomatoes? Are you down there? Give us a sign!’ ‘Hello, carrumps?” The fortuitous hair tonic reminds me of old radio science fiction shows. “You threw the growth formula out back?” the scientist asks his assistant just before the now-giant earthworms come banging on the door. There’s a satisfying circularity to Grandpa’s garden story when one of the giant butterflies that metamorphed from the giant caterpillars rescues both brothers. Wonderful wackiness!

Jackie: Farmer Duck by Martin Waddell (illustrated by Helen Oxenbury) is set on a farm and Farmer Duck does farm work so we are including it. It’s all about friends. And friends are important to gardeners. Who else would take our extra zucchini? or help us pull weeds? or share plants with us?

This is such an exuberant telling. Was there ever a lazier farmer than the human farmer who stays in bed all day, yelling to the duck, “How goes the work?” Farmer Duck always responds the same way, “Quack.” This goes on day after day. While the lazy farmer eats bon bons, the duck saws wood, spades the garden, washes dishes, irons clothes. The other animals can’t stand to see their friend work so hard. One night they meet in the barn and make a plan. “’Moo!’ said the cow./’Baa!’ said the sheep./ ‘Cluck!’ said the hens. And that was the plan.”

When they carry out their plan the lazy farmer runs away and never returns. “…mooing and baaing and clucking and quacking, they all set to work on their farm.” We just can’t help but think hay will be sweeter, corn will be taller, and there may be dancing in the barn.

Phyllis: I adore this book, text and art. The duck looks wearier and wearier, and who wouldn’t want to be comforted by such caring hens and the other animals as well? And I love how the animals that the duck tended to at the beginning of the story, including carrying a sheep from the hill, all pitch in to help at the end as “mooing and baaing and clucking and quacking, they all set to work on their farm.” Animals, unite! The fruits of the labor belong to the laborers!

Jackie: I would be remiss not to mention your namesake book, Phyllis—When The Root Children Wake Up, retold by Audrey Wood and illustrated by Ned Bittinger. It’s a story of seasons. A robin comes to the window of Mother’s Earth’s underground “home” and calls, “Root Children! Root Children …Wake up! It’s time for the masquerade.” The children awaken the bugs and paint them and head out for the masquerade. But it’s not too long before “Cousin Summer slips his knapsack on his back and quickly strides over the hills and far away.” Time for Uncle Fall. And soon it will be time for another winter’s nap.

There’s a lot about this story that I like — the circle of seasons, painting the bugs. I’m a little put off by the very realistic drawings of children as the “Root Children.” I’m not sure why. Maybe because they seem too real to be sleeping underground all winter. Makes me feel claustrophobic. Maybe I’m just grumpy. I’d love to know what others think.

Phyllis: It’s true that what caught my eye about When the Root Children Wake Up was my name in the title, but I also love the story and art in the version I have, a reprint of the 1906 Sybelle Olffers book first published in Germany and republished in English in 1988 by Green Tiger Press. The charmingly old-fashioned original illustrations remind me of books I loved as a child and include a joyous spread of the root children emerging above ground carrying flowers and grasses “into the lovely world.” Interesting how art can change the perception of a story!

A garden book for the very young is Lola Plants a Garden by Anna McQuinn, illustrated by Rosaline Beardshaw. The straightforward story tells how Lola loves the poem “Mary Mary Quite Contrary” and wants to plant a garden of her own. She and Mommy read books about gardens, make a list of Lola’s favorite flowers, buy seeds, and plant them. While she waits for them to grow, Lola makes their own book about flowers, strings beads and shells and bells, and makes a little Mary Mary doll. Lola’s patience and work are rewarded as the flowers grow big and “Open toward the sun.” Daddy helps her hang her bells, her friends come to her garden to eat Mommy’s peas and strawberries, and Lola makes up a story for them about Mary Mary. The book concludes, “What kind of garden will Lola plant next?” Simply told and satisfying, the book makes me want to run out and buy more packets of flower seeds, then invite friends to come visit in the garden and encourage them to grow.

Jackie: Friends and gardens and the cycle of seasons. We are all rooted on this earth. And that’s good to remember. Let’s go plant some beans.

Bookstorm™: Turn Left at the Cow

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Who doesn’t love a mystery? Whether your find them intriguing puzzles or can’t-wait-to-know-the-solution page-turners, a good mystery is engrossing and a little tense. Throw in a little humor, a detailed setting, and well-drawn characters and you have a book you can confidently hand to young readers who are already hooked on the genre and those who have yet to become fans. We are pleased to feature Turn Left at the Cow as our May book selection, written by the expert plotter Lisa Bullard, replete with her characteristic humor.… more

Spring, Where Are You?

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Phyllis: Each year, as soon as the snow melts, I’m eager to go search for native wildflowers. Two of the earliest flowers bloom in two different protected places a car ride away. And every year, I go too early — either the ephemeral snow trilliums aren’t even up yet or the pasque flowers are still such tiny, tight, furry brown buds that they’re hard to spot in the dried grass on the hillside where they grow. When I do finally find snow trilliums and pasque flowers in bloom, I know spring really has arrived.

A little boy named King Shabazz also goes looking for spring in Lucille Clifton’s The Boy Who Didn’t Believe in Spring, illustrated by Brinton Turkle. His search takes him down city streets rather than up windy hillsides, but the impetus is the same.

When King Shabazz’s teacher talks about spring, he whispers, “No such thing.” When his mother talks about spring, he demands, “Where is it at?”

One day after his teacher has talked about blue birds and his Mama had talked about crops coming up, King Shabazz has had enough.

“Look here, man,” he tells his friend Tony Polito, “I’m going to get me some of this spring.” They set off through their urban neighborhood, searching for spring. They look around the corner, by the school and playground, by the Church of the Solid Rock, past a restaurant and apartment buildings until they come to a vacant lot walled in by tall buildings with an abandoned car sitting in the middle.

When the boys go to investigate a sound coming from the car, Tony Polito trips on a patch of little yellow pointy flowers. “Man, the crops are coming up!” King Shabazz shouts. The sound turns out to be birds who fly out of the car, where the boys discover a nest with four light blue eggs.

“Man, it’s spring!” says King Shabazz.

As do picture books by Vera B. Williams, Ezra Jack Keats, and Matt de la Peña, Clifton’s book celebrates the city where so many of us live and where spring arrives, as well, even if you don’t yet believe in it.

Jackie: I loved this book so much that I had to do a little research on Lucille Clifton, who wrote more than twenty books for children. You mentioned celebration, Phyllis. Here’s what New Yorker magazine writer Elizabeth Alexander said of Clifton after her death in 2010:

Clifton invites the reader to celebrate survival: a poet’s survival against the struggles and sorrows of disease, poverty, and attempts at erasure of those who are poor, who are women, who are vulnerable, who challenge conquistador narratives. There is luminous joy in these poems, as they speak against silence and hatred.

There is luminous joy in this book — joy in the characters who are best friends and wait at the stoplight, which they have never gone past before, to see what the other will do; joy in the discovery of a bird’s nest on the front seat of a beat-up car. This is a story of survival, too. The boys do cross the street, even though Junior Williams has said he will beat them up if he sees them. They will survive. They have courage, each other, and appreciation for spring.

Phyllis: Julie Fogliano’s book and then it’s spring is another story of waiting, this time in a more rural setting, told in second person in one long extended sentence whose syntax captures the feeling of waiting and waiting and waiting.

“First you have brown,
all around you have brown,

the book begins, and proceeds to seeds, a wish for rain, rain, a “hopeful, very possible sort of brown” but still brown. As time passes (and the single sentence continues) the child gardener worries that the birds might have eaten the seeds or bears tromped on them, until finally the brown

“still brown,
has a greenish hum
that you can only hear
if you put your ear to the ground
and close your eyes…”
until finally, on a sunny day,
“…now you have green,
all around you have green.”

Jackie: I love Julie Fogliano’s language: “…a hopeful, very possible sort of brown.” And the brown with the greenish hum just makes me smile. I know this is a blog about writing but I have to mention Erin Stead’s illustrations. Her possible-birds-eating-seeds painting is full of jokes — there’s a bird wearing a bib, a bird flat on its back, birds billing (as in billing and cooing) a bird trilling. It would be worth giving up a few seeds to see these lively birds in one’s yard.

Phyllis: And the sign to keep bears away (which the bear is using to scratch under his arm) made me laugh out loud: “Please do not stomp here. There are seeds and they are trying.”

The Iridescence of Birds, A Book about Henri Matisse by Patricia MacLachlan also uses the syntax of an elongated sentence to heighten a sense of yearning and show how Matisse’s love of color and light might have bloomed from his childhood “in a dreary town in northern France where the skies were gray and the days were cold” and his mother brightened their home with painted plates and flowers and red rugs on the dirt floor, and his father raised pigeons “with colors that changed with the light as they moved.” The single long interrogative sentence is answered by another, shorter question:

“Would it be a surprise that you became
A fine painter who painted
Light
And
Movement
And the iridescence of birds?”

Jackie: This book does for me what all good picture books do, it makes me want to know more about Henri Matisse — and his remarkable mother. She knew that a red rug trumps a dirt floor any day — and she must have had a lode of artistic ability herself. And this book makes me want to try to write a story in one sentence.

Phyllis: Waiting-for-Spring Stories by Bethany Robert was a baby gift to my first daughter, and it continues to enchant. Papa Rabbit, “like Grandpa Rabbit before him and Great-Grandpa Rabbit before that,” helps to pass the time with his little rabbits until Spring arrives by telling stories, seven in all. And true to a child’s sensibility of the world, wind talks, a star yearns to sing, the little rabbit’s too big feet complain about the ways he tries to shrink them, a worm reassures a rabbit, and, in my favorite, “The Garden,” vegetables rebel against a farmer who plans to eat them for supper.

“’Get him, boys,’ called the onion.” And they do. The onion makes him cry, potato trips him, the carrot whacks him on the head, and they escape by rolling out the door.

“After that, the farmer rabbit always ate pancakes for his dinner.”

Jackie: Those vegetables could be in a horror picture book, for sure. But maybe they are too funny for a horror picture book.

Phyllis: The book and the storytelling end with sunlight pouring in the window and the snow beginning to melt from the windowpanes.

“Spring is here at last!”

Jackie: These stories remind me of Arnold Lobel’s work in their sure portrayal of characters I care about in just a few words. And I so love the talking grass and the talking feet and the feisty onion, carrot, and potato. I don’t know why but I found myself wanting to hear something from the little rabbits between the stories, something about the waiting or the upcoming spring. But that’s another book. These stories are cozy and charming and just right to read while we wait.

Phyllis: Last week I saw pasque flowers and snow trilliums. This week I found green leaves growing in my garden. This year’s time of yearning is over. It’s time to go outside and glory in springtime, here at last.

Celebrating Ezra Jack Keats

Two for the Show 3

Jackie: This is the time of year when I read the Travel Section of the Sunday paper. I just want to go away from gritty snow, brown yards and come back to Spring. Well, there are no tickets on the shelf this year so Phyllis and I are taking a trip to the city created by Ezra Jack Keats. And why not? This month, this year marks his one-hundredth birthday.

As our travel guide we’re taking The Snowy Day and the Art of Ezra Jack Keats (Yale University Press, 2011), written by Claudia Nahsen to coincide with The Snowy Day’s 50^th anniversary and the showing of many of his works at the Jewish Museum, New York

I’ve been thinking of Keats since I read Last Stop on Market Street, this year’s Newbery Award winner, written by Matt de la Peña and illustrated by Christian Robinson. Robinson’s wonderful depictions of the urban landscape and the text’s suggestion that beauty is all around us, reminded me of Keats’s city scenes. Often they are set in his childhood home in Depression Era Brooklyn but enhanced with Keats’s brilliant collages, sketches, and jazzy palette.

A bit about his life, which I learned from Nahsen’s beautiful book: Jacob Ezra Katz was born in New York, on March 11, 1916. He was the youngest of three children born to immigrant parents in a “loveless marriage.” He grew up in a family marked by strife and unhappiness. He felt invisible as a child and believed “’life was measured by anguish.’” (Nahsen,p. 5). Art saved him. And in his art he gave life and validity to the streets he remembered from his childhood and to the kids, often invisible to society, who live on those streets.

Phyllis: And up until publication of A Snowy Day, the first full-color picture book to feature an African American protagonist, those kids were virtually invisible in picture books as well. I especially love how Keats makes us see the city and the children and grown-ups who live in it with fresh eyes — his art includes graffiti, trashcans, and the struggles and celebrations of childhood. Nahsen quotes Keats: “Everything in life is waiting to be seen!” While some people criticized Keats, a white writer, for writing about black characters in The Snowy Day, the poet Langston Hughes wished he had “grandchildren to give it [the book] to.” Keats felt the criticisms deeply but continued to tell and illustrate the stories in his world “waiting to be seen.”

Jackie: Keats wrote and illustrated twenty-two books in his career. The ones I know are just as fresh, just as in tune with the lives of children as they were when he wrote them. We all know Peter of A Snowy Day, Peter’s Chair, A Letter to Amy. But Keats’s Louie is not quite as familiar. Louie is a quiet, kid who hardly ever speaks. But when he sees the puppet Gussie (Keats’s mother’s name) at Susie and Roberto’s puppet show, he stands up and yells “Hello!, Hello! Hello!” Susie and Roberto decide to have Gussie ask Louie to sit down so they can get on with the show. After the show they bring Gussie out so Louie can hold the puppet. Then the boy goes home, eventually sleeps and dreams he is falling and kids are laughing at him. When he wakes up, his mother tells him someone slipped a note under the door — “Go outside and follow the long green string.” At the end of the green string is — Gussie! There is so much to love about this story — a sensitive portrayal of a child who is somehow different, gets laughed at, yelled at by some kids; two kids, Susie and Roberto, who treat Louie with great kindness; and a hopeful ending.

Nahsen says: “…neglected characters, who had hitherto been living in the margins of picture books or had simply been absent from children’s literature take pride of place in Keats’s oeuvre.” She quotes from his unpublished autobiography: “When I did my first book about a black kid I wanted black kids and white kids to know that he’s there.” So it is with Louie. Keats reminds readers that the quiet kids, the kids who march to a different drum, the kids who live behind the broken doors, or on broken-down buses and can only have a cricket for a pet (Maggie and the Pirate) are there.

Phyllis: Just as Keats portrays the real lives of kids who live in buses or city apartments without “even any steps in front of the door to sit on,” he doesn’t shy away from the small and large griefs and troubles of childhood. In Maggie and the Pirate, Maggie’s pet cricket, taken by a boy who admires the cricket’s cage, accidentally drowns in a river. Maggie and her friends hold a cricket funeral, and when the “pirate,” a boy who didn’t mean for the cricket to die but wanted the cage “real bad,” brings Maggie the cage with a new cricket, the children

                “all sat down together.
                Nobody said anything.
                They listened to the new cricket singing.
                Crickets all around joined in.”

Tragedies and consolation in the death of a cricket — a world seen through children’s eyes.

Jackie: Keats came back to Louie with three other books and used this character to help him present some of the other problems of childhood—The Trip (1978), Louie’s Search (1980), and Regards to the Man in the Moon (1981).

The Trip tells us that Louie and his Mom move to a new neighborhood. Louie’s Search takes place after Louie has moved to a new neighborhood. “’What kind of neighborhood is this?’ thought Louie. “Nobody notices a kid around here.” He puts on a paper sack hat and paints his nose red and goes out for a walk. Eventually he picks up an object which has fallen off a junk wagon and so encounters the scary junkman Barney. Barney is huge and thinks Louie has stolen this object. “’Come back, you little crook,’ Barney bellowed.” They go to Louie’s house where Barney tells his Mom, “Your son’s a crook!’”

What Louie had found was a music box. When he holds it the box makes music. When he drops it, it stops. Barney decides to give the music box to Louie and stays for tea with Louie and his mom. It’s the beginning of a wonderful relationship that ends with a wedding and Louie finding the Dad he hoped for.

Phyllis: Another thread throughout Keats’ work is the power of imagination. Louie in The Trip imagines a plane flying him to his old neighborhood. Jennie in Jennie’s Hat imagines a beautiful hat instead of the plain one her aunt has sent, and the birds, who she feeds daily, swoop down and decorate her hat with leaves, pictures, flowers (paper and real), colored eggs, a paper fan, and a pink valentine. In Dreams, Roberto imagines (or does it really happen?) that when a paper mouse he has made tumbles from his windowsill, its shadow “grew bigger — and bigger — and BIGGER” until it scared off the dog terrorizing his friend’s kitten on the sidewalk below.

We haven’t really even talked about his art and his brilliant use of collage and color. Just as Keats’s books celebrate the power of the imagination, Anita Silvey says that Keats took “absolute joy in the creative process.” We can share that joy in his books in stories and art that recognize that everyone needs to be seen, everyone has a place, and everyone, joyously, matters.

Jackie: Brian Alderson in Ezra Jack Keats: Artist and Picture-Book Maker writes that in The Snowy Day Keats “came home to his proper place: a colorist celebrating the hidden lives of the city kids.” I would add that that can be said for most of his works. And we are the richer for it.

Heather Vogel Frederick: Borrowed Fire

Knock Knock

In Absolutely Truly, my new middle grade mystery set in a bookshop in the fictional town of Pumpkin Falls, New Hampshire, a first edition of Charlotte’s Web goes missing. There’s a reason this particular book features so prominently in the story — it’s a nod to my literary hero, E. B. White. E.B. White and I go way back. He’s one of the reasons I became a writer, thanks to Charlotte’s Web, which was one of my all-time favorites as a young reader (it still is).… more

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