twentybyjenny

Letting Go

2012-01-27T07:06:00.000-08:00

With Why We Broke Up, Daniel Handler ties a relationship to the objects that have been meaningful to (at least) one of the parties involved. Maira Kalman animates those objects in her artwork so that they almost seem to take on the emotional life of the two people involved in this ill-fated romance. When Daniel Handler discussed the seeds for this project (with a gathering of teachers, librarians and reviewers), he said it began with Maira Kalman.

Handler and Kalman had collaborated on a picture book, 13 Words, and Handler asked Kalman what she’d like to work on next. She showed him paintings of ordinary objects that she’d done. If you look at her picture-book biography, Looking at Lincoln, that’s what she does there, too. She enters President Lincoln’s story through the stovepipe hat she spies in the park, the $5 bill on the table at the diner, then delves more deeply into the details of his life. Handler said that he tried to think of what makes ordinary objects seem a bit magical, and felt that “endowing them with significance because of a romance” would do it.

Min and Ed form a pie-in-the-sky connection—two people from opposite ends of the high school popularity scale who meet because the co-captain of the basketball team is hiding out after his team’s loss at a party hosted by the “arty” crowd. (Ed never uses that term to describe Min, she does; he simply calls her “different.”) But the tangible objects that give their connection meaning keep their interactions credible. The couple operates most smoothly outside the daily rhythms of high school life. When they try to pull each other into their individual orbits, trouble brews.

Ultimately, Min cannot change Ed. She brings out his best but she cannot keep his best. He would have to wish to change, and he either cannot or will not (we know not, because we only see Min’s side). Through Min’s eyes, we see that Ed tries, and perhaps even wants to sustain it, but he does not. And that is why they broke up.

With her “Dear John” letter, the basis of the entire text of the novel, Min describes the objects in the box that she is returning to Ed and replays the key moments of their relationship. Her letter and her returning of the objects allow Min to begin the process of letting go. She expects nothing back in return. She allows herself to reflect on the meaning Ed had for her, and the best parts of him that she brought to light, and why she couldn’t see then what she sees now. She’s very human and very healthy about it. By doing this physical and emotional housecleaning, she will be able to move on. Don’t we all wish we’d had a Min to guide us through high school?

Clues from the Past

2012-01-19T16:29:00.000-08:00

In The Cabinet of Earths by Anne Nesbet, history holds the clues to an unsolved mystery. And what could be better for two modern teens with a sense of adventure than a puzzle that began generations ago? The author threads together elements of the French Resistance, two competing scientists, and children who disappeared--which no one in Paris wants to discuss.

In fact, it seems that 13-year-old Maya Davidson and her new friend Valko are the only ones who care about the unsolved mystery of the missing children. As Maya tries to help her “invisible” Cousin Louise locate the relative who “rescued” Louise as a child, Maya and Valko discover clues that point to a disturbing underlying cause for both Louise’s “invisibility” and the missing children.

Nesbet maps out plenty of paths for readers to follow if their curiosities get the better of them. What was the French Resistance? Who were these scientists (whom the author bases on actual men)? And along more abstract lines, is there a difference between people who appear to be invisible and people we ignore? How far would you go to be physically beautiful or handsome? What would you be willing to give up? What would it be like to live forever? To outlive your parents, your siblings, even your own children?

Nesbet raises all these questions and more. Very early in the book, Henri’s grandmother decides that the emotional pain of one of her sons betraying the other son is too great, so she embraces her mortality. She removes her bottle of earth from the cabinet and allows her natural aging process to run its course. She lives out her life (mostly to be there for young Henri), but she chooses not to live forever. This book is a terrific conversation starter with your children. What gives life meaning? If you could live forever, what do you think would begin to be less valuable to you? More valuable?

Pieces of a Picture

2012-01-12T21:21:00.000-08:00

At the start of the New Year, I suppose it’s tradition to set goals one hopes to work on or reach by year’s end. One of my ongoing quests is to break down the Big Goal into smaller parts. Few do it better than Maira Kalman, and perhaps the best example is her book Looking at Lincoln.

As I mentioned in the review, the seeds of the book began with a blog that Kalman did for the New York Times. She started with her love of Abraham Lincoln, which led her to the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia. On her blog, she shares pages from her notebooks, which brim with drawings and phrases and doodles in the margins culled from her research about the 16th president, as well as photo reproductions that she shares with readers.

It’s such a great example of how our interests can lead us down deep and winding paths. And as we wind our way down these paths, unexpected connections can occur. Kalman also shows us—if we compare the notebook doodles on her blog to the images in her picture book—how she selected the facts and images that made the greatest impact and refined them for her book. We see the amount of thought and discipline that went into her choices of what to include and what to leave out, and how those pieces of the picture add up to a three-dimensional portrait of a great leader and extraordinary human being. She captures Lincoln’s humor and sorrow, his joy and his pain.

And most of all, Kalman models the way she starts small, with details that interest her, and builds to the larger integrated whole. What a great way to approach any goal, whether it’s writing a book or building a house or running a marathon. We have to begin a little at a time, word by word, brick by brick, step by step.

Bedtime Buddies

2012-01-06T05:27:00.000-08:00

How often have we walked in on a toddler who’s acting out a familiar scene? She might be showing a friend how to throw a ball using the same pointers you showed her, or explaining to her doll how to share with her friends (after receiving the same advice herself). Sleepyhead by Karma Wilson, illustrated by John Segal, encourages that same kind of role-playing—a tool that helps a child process his day and, in this case, to drift off to sleep.

We see the kitten hero instructing her teddy, Sleepyhead, to brush his teeth just as we presume her own parents instructed her to do. Then we watch her anticipate Sleepyhead’s stall tactics: “We’ve hugged our hugs…. You’ve drunk your drink.” Still, Sleepyhead asks for “one more.” It’s a gentle humor that arises from recognizing one’s own behavior and being able to laugh at oneself.

At the same time, the rhyme and the nursery-hued art (in the imagined scenes of the kitten carrying a drink in a boat to Sleepyhead as he rides on the back of a swordfish, or brings a book to the teddy high atop a giraffe) are soothing enough to have a lulling effect. And because the book, first published in 2006, is now in a board book edition, you may send it off with your toddler to naptime or bedtime. It’s durable enough to sleep on, drool on or be tossed across a crib.

Don’t be surprised if, when you check in on your toddler, you hear a quiet “Sleepyhead, Sleepyhead. Now close your eyes, my Sleepyhead” wafting from the nursery.

A Fresh Start

2011-12-23T05:57:00.000-08:00

In Bluefish by Pat Schmatz, Travis has a complicated relationship with his grandfather, his sole guardian. He’s not excited about the fact that they had to move away from the creek where Travis found some peace of mind, and he misses his hound, Rosco. But it is a chance to start fresh. And to leave behind the nickname his peers had given him: “bluefish.”

The book opens with a good Samaritan act. Travis sees a stray shoe come flying past him while he’s at his locker. Shortly thereafter, a kid ambles by who’s missing one. Travis returns the shoe to the kid without a word and continues on his way. This earns him the respect of Bradley (the one-shoed kid) and also Velveeta, a silent witness. A friendship tenuously takes hold among the three. It’s sealed by a teacher, Mr. McQueen, with a knack for matching the right kid with the right book, and for offering the right comment at the right time. Travis has never known an adult like that, and Velveeta is sorely missing the one adult who had served that role in her life.

With the aid of this friendship and adult guide, both Travis and Velveeta find the courage to confide in one another. There’s a hint of attraction between them, but Schmatz keeps their connection platonic, exploring the full extent of what it means to be a true friend and confidante. Through their friendship, each transforms his and her self-image, and they begin to see in themselves the sense of possibility that they bring out in one another. Schmatz packs an emotional wallop in this brief novel.

A Need to Understand

2011-12-16T08:30:00.001-08:00

The Greek gods have fascinated me for as long as I can remember. I loved their power and beauty, but also their weaknesses and petty jealousies, which made them seem more like us. Donna Jo Napoli, in her introduction to her Treasury of Greek Mythology: Classic Stories of Gods, Goddesses, Heroes and Monsters, illustrated by Christina Balit, puts it beautifully: “In reading the myths, we begin to understand that the ancient Greeks must have wanted more than just the big answers from their gods,” she writes. “They must have also wanted their gods to be a reflection that could help them understand themselves.”

Napoli went back to the oldest Greek sources for her myths, Hesiod and Homer. I got to interview her about her research recently, and she set me thinking about just how ancient these myths are. In fact, they’re so much a part of Western civilization that we make certain assumptions—Napoli was not exempt! She and artist Christina Balit had a point of disagreement about the half-bull, half-man Minotaur. Napoli believed that the Minotaur had a human torso on a bull’s body, but when Balit’s illustration of him arrived, she’d portrayed the Minotaur with a human body and a bull’s head. After Napoli went back to substantiate her view, she discovered that the oldest representations in art and sculpture convey the Minotaur as Balit had (you can see Balit's image of the Minotaur here).

It’s such a great example of how important that component is for us as readers, to be able to envision something in our own minds and “make it ours.” It’s why I’m so often disappointed in the movie version of events and characters from books, for which I’d already created my own images. Napoli could find no written reference about which way the Minotaur’s anatomy leans (only descriptions of a “half man, half bull”). The artists who made their ancient paintings and sculptures were the more readily available, with their bull’s head, man’s body depictions. With words alone, we can picture what makes sense to each of us individually as readers, but the job of painters and sculptors is to construct a physical representation of their vision.

For all of us, the seeds of that impulse come from a desire to understand the things we read about or experience in our everyday dealings. Very much like those ancient Greeks, trying to make sense of the events in their lives.

Finding the Fireworks

2011-12-09T07:25:00.000-08:00

One of things I love most about Marla Frazee’s projects is the way she chooses them. “When I read a book to consider illustrating I don't want to fully understand it. I want to puzzle it out,” says Frazee. “I almost want to be afraid of it.” You can see just what she means when you look at her artwork for Stars by Mary Lyn Ray. The text is poetic and lyrical and closely observed, yet it does not include a set group of characters. Frazee found ways to connect the images and build relationships among characters so that you feel an emotional connection to them.

Frazee spoke at the Society of Illustrators in the same presentation as Stephen Savage (which I mentioned last week). She said the text of Stars reminded her of Ruth Krauss’s A Hole Is to Dig, illustrated by Maurice Sendak. Krauss, a former teacher, once said something along the lines of she hoped her students didn’t sue her for lifting their conversations verbatim and recording them in the book. Stars has that same loose, free-associative quality as Krauss’s book.

If you look at Frazee’s illustrations for All the World by Liz Garton Scanlon, and Everywhere Babies by Susan Meyers, the same is true there, too. Frazee creates the narrative through line with her images. We recognize her characters from certain details—pigtails, a slouchy posture, striped onesies, overalls. Although they go unnamed, we feel as if we know them.

Marla Frazee’s Web site, in addition to showing a picture of her studio under an avocado tree (she's sitting on the porch of her studio with Rocket, above), gives all sorts of insights into her work. At the Society of Illustrators, she talked about how she starts with a series of single images. “Sometimes the way into a book is just that--just a way to get started. Like you tend to have polite conversation and then you click,” she said, adding that you have to give yourself permission to make mistakes.

She talked about painting with a tiny brush. It made me look anew at the spread of the yellow sky with its hundreds of dandelion seeds, and the winter scene veiled by snowflakes (“Of course each one had to be unique,” Frazee said with a laugh). Cecilia Yung, art director at Penguin Books for Young Readers, who helped organize the presentation, made this wonderful observation: “The starring character is the sky.” Going back through Stars after that, I thought about the sky’s many moods, and how it envelops the stars in all its incarnations—as celestial body, as the blossom shape that precedes the pumpkin, and as the shiny kind a child keeps in his pocket or gives to a friend to lift her spirits. And that fireworks finale merges the human- and nature-made creative forces into one. Brava!

The AHA Moment

2011-12-02T07:16:00.000-08:00

When you are looking at a book with a child who is just starting to grasp the cover of a book in his or her tiny fingers, there is nothing like that “AHA” moment on his or her face. The moment when he or she recognizes the character, or how to turn the page, or skips ahead to see if things will turn out the way he or she thinks it will. That is what happens with Where’s Walrus? by Stephen Savage. There are no words in his book, and babies and toddlers use only their eyes to identify Walrus.

Stephen Savage recently gave a presentation at the Society of Illustrators in New York City, and he talked about how babies pick out Walrus instantly on the cover. After that connection, it makes sense that they would go through each image, searching for Walrus just as the zookeeper searches for his runaway charge. But the author-artist also gives them a hint in the first scene after Walrus’s escape: Walrus is hiding in a fountain across from a mermaid. In this instance, their tails are the same, and also the leafy crowns they wear. Walrus’s tusks differentiate him from the mermaid. In the next scene, the fellow’s tail gives him away. With these first two puzzles, Savage “informs” children that these are the two characteristics that will help them discover Walrus in each image.

In his presentation, Savage talked about the importance of stripping down the images or “essentializing” them. He began with the cover. “Things that are well designed touch the heart and emotion,” he said, “like the Wonder Bread logo. That makes me hungry.” But he also packs in plenty for adult observers, too. The cover is a reference to Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks.” The zookeeper is a nod to Buster Keaton’s silent films. And can you find the Monopoly man in these pages?

This is a book where your baby or toddler may actually beat your older child (and you) to the punch—finding Walrus before anyone else. Their minds are so attuned to visual cues that this book is tailor-made for them, but the entire family will pore over it.

Crazy Love

2011-11-17T18:49:00.000-08:00

Remember what it was like to fall in love as a teen? The obsession? The inability to think about anything else? Interpreting every word, gesture and pause?

Well 14-year-old David Gershwin embodies those feelings. He just happens to be in love with Zelda, one of his psychiatrist father’s patients, in How I Stole Johnny Depp’s Alien Girlfriend by Gary Ghislain. “She’s pretty in a scary sort of way,” according to David. “Like something you’d really like to touch but that will probably bite.” Zelda insists she’s from the planet Vahalal, and she’s on a mission to find her “chosen one” and bring him back with her. When she points him out on the Internet it’s… Johnny Depp.

Haven’t we all felt that the object of our obsession is from another planet? Or is Zelda schizophrenic (though the hero’s father insists, “No one is ever crazy, David”)? But then how do you explain her superhuman strength to slip out of unbreakable handcuffs and her talent for Space Splashing (“the ability to be at two points in space at the same time”)? David’s in love, and he sees what he wants to see, so as readers, we do, too.

The strength of Ghislain’s story is that he defines David’s psyche well, and because we never leave David’s head, we’re as invested in his mission to win over Zelda as David is. Zelda’s superhero attributes and David’s funny and obsessive viewpoint will hold the attention of even teens who don't think of themselves as readers.

This original take on an all-consuming crush will appeal to guys for its comics-humor quotient, and to girls because of Zelda’s feminist stance (and superhuman strength). Will the nerdy boy win over the otherworldly beauty? Read on and find out.

An Unlikely Friendship

2011-11-10T22:46:00.000-08:00

To thoroughly enjoy The Cheshire Cheese Cat by Carmen Agra Deedy and Randall Wright, illustrated by Barry Moser, you must first accept that a cat (Skilley) could prefer cheese to a mouse

Once you accept that, you are in for a treat. There is in today’s London an inn called Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, and although it was rebuilt after a fire, it stands in the same spot where Charles Dickens often dined and wrote. Dickens is the first to notice strange doings in one of his favorite taverns, and that Skilley seems to be catching and releasing the same mouse (Pip) over and over again. But he is not the last.

Various tensions emanate from the situation, and much of the fun of the novel is the discovery of who’s rooting for the mice and who wants them gone. One of my favorite parts of the book is when Adele, the mouse-hating barmaid, brings Skilley’s nemesis, Pinch, to “help” with the mousecatching. Skilley, attempting to hide from Pinch his friendship with Pip, accidentally hurts Pip. Skilley confides in Maldwyn the raven, and their illuminating discussion about how to repair the friendship could serve as a model for children experiencing similar circumstances.

As Charles Dickens’s 200th birthday approaches (on February 7, 2012), this book makes a terrific introduction to the Victorian writer, his humor (his writer’s blocks) and one of his favorite haunts.

Kindred Spirits

2011-11-04T06:34:00.000-07:00

Melissa Sweet found a kindred spirit when she discovered the work of Tony Sarg. He stars in her picture-book biography, Balloons Over Broadway: The True Story of the Puppeteer of Macy’s Parade. They both design toys, for one thing. And they both need to play in order to do their work.

Melissa Sweet learned about Tony Sarg from her colleague at eeBoo Toys, where she works as a designer. She has often used collage in her artwork, as she did with her Caldecott Honor book A River of Words. But this is the first book in which she uses three-dimensional collage—actually incorporating the materials that Sarg himself would have used, such as dolls, yarn and spools of thread.

One of Melissa Sweet’s three-dimensional collages is currently at the Society of Illustrators (128 East 63rd Street, New York, NY 10065). It’s part of an exhibition of original children’s book artwork (150 pieces in all, from books published in 2011) and will be on display until December 29, 2011. The collages look terrific in the book, but they’re even more impressive in person, where you can see the level of detail, and the care Sweet took in assembling the components.

The other extraordinary coincidence is that the Society of Illustrators recently purchased an original illustration by Tony Sarg himself. It’s reprinted here courtesy of the Society of Illustrators, called “Busy intersection in small town,” c. 1928, created in India ink and watercolor. If you want to see just how much Melissa Sweet has in common with Tony Sarg, you can find out more in this interview (and also see some photos of her studio).

If you have a family tradition of watching the Macy’s Parade together, this book will make the experience all the more meaningful.

Long Winter’s Nap

2011-10-27T21:58:00.000-07:00

There are many reasons to read and reread Very Hairy Bear by Alice Schertle, illustrated by Matt Phelan.

True, it conveys the concept of hibernation for very youngest children, as the bear prepares for his long winter’s rest by eating well and then settling into a cozy spot. That also makes this an ideal nap or bedtime book, because the bear is winding down his activities.

But the best part is the wordplay. In the summer, “He eats the berries and the bushes, too. He’s a very full berryfull bear.” Matt Phelan shows a blueberry stuck to the end of each ursine toenail. As squirrels tuck acorns under oak trees, “a no-hair nose knows where to find them.” Long vowel sounds slow the pace, mirroring the bear’s transition to inactivity: soft white snowflakes “cling to bear hair (if there’s a bear there),” the text reads, as the bear becomes camouflaged by snow. The silver salmon the bear pursued in spring now “sleep deep” on the pond’s floor.

One last gasp of humor before the close as the furry fellow “scratches his big brown bear behind,” then settles down to sleep. This brief book accomplishes a lot in a short span, and your youngsters will want it close at hand.

Before the Monster

2011-10-21T07:20:00.000-07:00

This Dark Endeavor by Kenneth Oppel is scary, which makes it timely as Halloween nears. But it’s scary all year round. As a precursor to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the novel’s fear factor arises from the tensions between the characters.

Oppel’s twist on the classic story is the invention of a twin for Victor Frankenstein, Konrad, and they are both in love with Elizabeth Lavenza. That’s one source of tension. Victor wants to be better than Konrad, even though he loves Konrad. That’s another tension. When the twin brothers together with Elizabeth discover a secret passage that leads far beneath the Chateau Frankenstein, and a recipe for an Elixir of Life—that leads to further tensions with Victor and Konrad’s father, who forbids them from returning to the cellar and from reading the books stored there. And then there’s the tension between Victor, the siblings’ friend, Henry, and Elizabeth when they seek help from a troubled, reclusive alchemist.

More classic scary scenes emerge during their search for the Elixir’s ingredients: white-knuckle encounters with the vulture-like Lammergeier, which has a 10-foot wing span, and also a prehistoric coelacanth (their pursuit of the fish through tiny tunnels will make even hearty readers feel claustrophobic). But the true terror arises from Victor and his unpredictability. We watch his inner struggle as he wrestles between his jealousy of and loyalty to his brother, his desire to attract and even possess Elizabeth’s affections, and finally his hunger for power.

At the same time, the world is changing around the 15-year-old twins. The author probes the societal shifts in thinking in late 18th-century Switzerland. Konrad yearns to visit America, the French people have fomented a revolution, and scientific breakthroughs have begun to overshadow Roman Catholicism. When Victor, an atheist, worries that he could lose his brother to illness, he almost envies Elizabeth her devout beliefs. His thoughts as he observes her in the church expose the tug-of-war between fact and faith, in both religion and science: “Wine to blood. Lead to gold. Medicine dripped into my brother’s veins. The transmutation of matter. Was it magic or science? Fantasy or truth?”

Frankenstein still holds our attention, centuries later, for good reason. And Kenneth Oppel’s perfectly sets the stage for the man and the monster to come.

Fireside Stories

2011-10-14T06:37:00.001-07:00

As the nights grow longer, there’s nothing better than sitting by the fire or gathering by lamplight to read aloud a spellbinding story. You and your children will find it hard to break away from Icefall by Matthew J. Kirby.

As you know, I’m a big believer in reading aloud as a family, well past the time your children can read independently. In the same way that we gravitate to book clubs, to talk about books we’re interested in reading, a book read aloud together as a family allows everyone in the family to participate in a shared experience and discussion, no matter what their reading ability. On top of that, the power of a great story read aloud is hypnotic. You lose all sense of time in the present as you become fully swept up in the world of the story. That is what will happen to you and your listeners when you read Icefall.

Suddenly you find yourselves in an icelocked land where the children of a king must hide out under the protection of berserkers—barely civilized men who wear animal skins and literally go berserk when they begin to fight. The world of young Solveig, who narrates, her older sister, Asa, and her younger brother Harald, heir to the throne, has contracted dramatically. The waterways are freezing over and their food supplies are dwindling. All they have for entertainment are the fireside stories of Alric the skald—the king’s storyteller.

With his stories, Alric lifts their spirits and imparts wisdom—and sometimes warnings. After some of the berserkers are poisoned, and nearly everyone becomes suspect, only the stories give them a semblance of order. Solveig believes that, unlike her siblings, she has nothing to offer. Asa has her beauty, which can help her father to build an alliance with another kingdom by her marriage, and Harald will succeed their father as king. But Alric recognizes in Solveig the key gifts for a great storyteller: memory and sight. He helps her to see that she possesses an intuitive sense of people and a keen perception of situations. He plants a seed in her that she, too, could make a great skald, and is bent on helping her prove it to herself.

The book works on many levels: as an adventure and a window into another time and place, as a mystery, and in a subtler way, as a guide to what makes a good story. And finally, what are the attributes of a great storyteller? We discover these along with Solveig. Not every book makes a superior story to be read aloud; this one does. As Alric and Solveig weave their tales to entertain, teach, and cheer their audience, we see what power story has over others—ourselves included. Matthew Kirby lets us into the secrets of a storyteller’s bag of tricks, even as he uses them himself to enchant us.

Got it!

2011-10-07T06:40:00.001-07:00

I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen is truly a book for all ages.

The author-artist’s background as an animator informs his pacing and the subtle adjustments in the expressions of his animal characters. As the story progresses, Klassen demonstrates what the slightest shift of the shape of the eyes or a change in posture can do to convey his character's mood. When the bear realizes, “I HAVE SEEN MY HAT,” he literally sees red. He appears on a tomato-colored page that infuses his fur. His anger emanates from the pages.

Rereading the book helps youngest readers to pick out the early clues as to the culprit that took the bear’s hat. Older readers will appreciate the minimalist approach Klassen brings to the pictures—a tuft of grass here, a rock there—that keep the focus on the bear’s internal life. If youngest children are not ready to imagine a worst-case scenario, Klassen allows them room to think the thief simply got away.

Here the spare scenery serves Klassen’s story well—children can see what they’re ready to see and “get" what they’re ready to get. The important thing, in the end, is Bear gets his hat back. Right?

Welcome the Dark

2011-09-29T19:54:00.000-07:00

Many children go through a phase in which they’re afraid of the dark. The Game of Light by Hervé Tullet may be just the ticket to shed that fear.

Read it first all the way through with the lights on so your child can see the themes the author-artist explores, such as sunlight (“In the daytime, everything is bright”), flowers in bloom, and fish in the sea. Tullet also mentions, “Everything flies around,” and when you shine a light through that page, your child can make out a stick figure hidden among the rectangles (arms and legs) and circle (head), and on the next page, four faces “light up the room.”

So when your youngsters think they see a monster hiding in the shadows, the shining faces and the “everything” that flies around in Tullet’s book can replace those menacing images. If you hold the book up by its front and back covers, they combine to create a continuous panorama of moon and stars.

This book will help your child welcome the dark, replacing shadowy figures that may have frightened them with fish and stars lit by flashlight. With these uplifting images as the last ones they see before they drift off to sleep, they’re nearly guaranteed to have sweet dreams.

An Obsession with Antiquities

2011-09-23T07:11:00.000-07:00

Cleopatra’s Moon by Vicky Alvear Shecter plunged me right back into my childhood obsession with all things Egyptian. Where I grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan, part of the public library building also served as a museum. In it, there was an adult mummy and a baby mummy, and you had to go through a secret passageway to get to them. Every time I went to the library, I visited this exhibit. Nothing ever changed about it, but I had to see it every chance I got. It was like stepping back in time and imagining what the ancient Egyptians’ lives were like, what they saw and wore and did as part of their daily routine.

When I was a teenager, the contents of King Tutankhamun’s tomb went on tour, and our family traveled to Chicago to see it. That cemented my obsession with Egypt. I could get a sense of how King Tut lived from the things he was buried with in death. But Shecter’s research for Cleopatra’s Moon goes further; it brings alive the smells, tastes and textures of the time. She includes the spices they used in cooking and the perfumes and fabrics they wore, the games the royal children played, and Queen Cleopatra’s attitudes of acceptance and tolerance toward people of all classes and faiths. As a ruler, she earned the respect of her people, and Shecter gives us a strong sense of why she deserved it.

And then, with that full and lively setting, Shecter weaves her tale of intrigue anchored entirely in fact—the fight for Egypt among the Roman elite—Marc Antony, Cleopatra’s husband after Julius Caesar, and Octavianus, whom Caesar had named as his successor.

When most of us think of Queen Cleopatra, we likely picture a woman resembling Elizabeth Taylor in all her beauty and sensuality. We rarely (if ever) think of Queen Cleopatra as the mother of four children. But only one of her children survived to adulthood, and that was Cleopatra Selene, forced to leave her beloved Egypt after her mother’s death (by suicide) and go to the home of her enemy, Octavianus, in Rome. How will she keep her brothers safe? Should she pursue an alliance based on love or power? How will she reclaim her homeland? What would her mother have done? These universal questions of adolescence (well maybe not the reclaiming her homeland part) bring Cleopatra Selene’s experiences home to us as readers, even though her circumstances are extraordinary.

A Passion for Collecting

2011-09-16T06:27:00.001-07:00

So many wonderful themes come together in Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick, that it’s impossible to touch on them all. Perhaps the theme that speaks most to children, however, is the idea of collecting things. We all did it (and likely still do). Stamps, rocks, shells, dolls, Matchbox cars. Ben Wilson, whose story Selznick tells in words, has a box with a wolf on it, in which he keeps the things he collects. Rose Kincaid, whose story unfolds in images, looks out of the window of her house in Hoboken and creates and arranges miniature models of the buildings across the Hudson River. They are both collectors. Their paths lead them both to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, one of the greatest collections in the world.

I got to hear Brian Selznick talk about his work on Wonderstruck earlier this week, and he said that several books for children had influenced him. One is Pam Conrad’s My Daniel, about a brother and sister who discover dinosaur fossils near their farm in Nebraska, and their dinosaur makes it to the American Museum of Natural History. Another is Conrad’s book Call Me Ahnighito, told from the point of view of the meteorite that’s discovered on the North Pole in 1897 and now resides in that same museum—and Ahnighito figures prominently in Ben and Rose’s story in Wonderstruck.

And of course, Selznick said, you can’t write a book set in a museum without paying homage to From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by Elaine (E.L.) Konigsburg. He does that several times in his book, including the fact that he named Ben Wilson’s mother Elaine.

One of Selznick’s favorite books as a child was The Borrowers. The Clock family—Pod, Homily, and their daughter Arrietty—“collected” things from “human beans” and repurposed everyday household objects into clothes and furniture. As a child, Brian also loved to collect tiny things, he says. One of the best moments, early in Selznick's novel, is when Ben finds a book called “Wonderstruck” that gives him a name for what he loves to do: curator. “In a way, anyone who collects things in the privacy of his own home is a curator,” the book says.

There’s a picture book I adore that also captures this passion for collecting. In Ben’s story there’s a “cabinet of wonders.” In Sergio Ruzzier’s picture book, it’s The Room of Wonders. “Pius Pelosi was a pack rat, and he collected things,” the story begins. Pius finds a pebble he loves and his collection expands from there. He creates a compartment for each of the objects he selects, and visitors travel from everywhere to see his room of wonders and hear his stories.

Brian Selznick says that the impulse to collect and organize things is part of being human. To curate is to organize, and that helps us make sense of our world. He believes that is why we love museums, because they allow us to see where and how we fit into the world. And that feeling of knowing we are part of something much larger fills us with wonder.

A Difficult Anniversary

2011-09-08T18:22:00.000-07:00

As the 10th anniversary of September 11, 2001, approaches, our thoughts turn to how we may prepare children for the images they'll be seeing. Many children were either too young to process what was happening at the time or were not yet born. Pictures and accounts from that day may be confusing to them. America Is Under Attack: September 11, 2001: The Day the Towers Fell by Don Brown does a terrific job of reporting the day's larger events and also telling the stories of several individuals, to put human faces on the staggering number of people affected.

These four picture books allow children to enter the story where they can make sense of it, and leave behind the details they cannot or do not wish to process.

14 Cows for America by Carmen Agra Deedy, illustrated by Thomas Gonzalez (Peachtree). Accompanied by glorious images of the Kenyan landscape, Deedy tells the true story of a Maasai tribe member who was attending medical school in the U.S. when the planes hit on 9/11. He returns to his village to ask his tribal elders if he can dedicate his sacred cow to America, to heal them from their great sorrow. The tribe is so moved by his story that they dedicate 13 additional cows for America. The book is ideal for youngest children because the storyteller must help his fellow villagers understand the magnitude of the event ("Smoke and dust so thick they can block out the sun," he tells them), and also because of its healing message.

Ladder to the Moon by Maya Soetoro-Ng (sister of President Obama), illustrated by Yuyi Morales (Candlewick) also takes more of a symbolic approach to 9/11, as a girl and her grandmother reach down to children on earth who are in peril and invite them up to safety with them on the moon. Author and artist together create abstract images of a tsunami, 9/11 and war, and focus on themes of love and security.

The Man Who Walked Between the Towers (Roaring Brook Press) is Mordicai Gerstein's 2004 Caldecott Medal-winning picture book about Philippe Petit's amazing tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers in 1974. Gerstein pays tribute to the architectural feat of the towers as well as Petit's accomplishment.

Fireboat: The Heroic Adventures of the John J. Harvey (Penguin/Puffin) by Maira Kalman pays tribute to the John J. Harvey, a fireboat that came out of retirement to aid New Yorkers on September 11, 2001. The fireboat’s story begins at its launch in 1931, during Manhattan's glory days, when the Empire State Building and George Washington Bridge were going up and Babe Ruth hit his 611th home run. But as the piers start to close, the fireboat's days dwindle, until a group of friends rescue the boat, and the John J. Harvey in turn proves itself the little fireboat that could for New Yorkers in need on their darkest day.

This piece originally appeared in Shelf Awareness.

Eye of the Beholder

2011-08-25T19:31:00.000-07:00

Is it the apple that catches the bear’s eye in Orange Pear Apple Bear by Emily Gravett? I’m not telling. At least… not yet. What I really admire about the way that Emily Gravett presents the four elements of the book—the orange, the pear, the apple and the bear—is that she paints them almost like still life portraits. At least, with the fruit. The bear is true-to-life, too, except that he (or she) has so much personality.

But then Emily Gravett plays with all of the elements by bending the rules. She paints the bear orange, wearing a human expression, as if contemplating a decision. Later, she gives him an apple shape and a pear shape. But when the bear licks its lips, that’s our first clue that it may have other ideas in mind. That bear may have designs on those fruits.

Youngest children may or may not pick up on all of that right away, but they will immediately notice the way Emily Gravett plays with colors and shapes. The way she approaches perception here, with such simplicity yet such wit, reminded me of another of my very favorite books, It Looked Like Spilt Milk by Charles G. Shaw. He uses the shapes clouds make; Gravett uses fruits. But the way both of them make unusual images out of everyday objects encourage children to use their imaginations. “It looked like a rabbit. But it wasn’t a rabbit,” writes Shaw of a rabbit-shaped cloud. Gravett uses even fewer words. “Pear bear.” It looks like a pear, but it’s a bear.

Books like these change a morning walk or an afternoon stroll through the supermarket. Children begin to compare things that are new to them to other things that are familiar. And that not only encourages the imagination, but if we encourage them to make these connections, they begin to feel at home wherever they are.

A Time of Transition

2011-08-18T19:01:00.000-07:00

When you look back on your childhood, doesn’t it seem as if summer was always a time of momentous changes? Your first time away from home? Winning a tennis tournament? A first romance?

Drew Robin Sole is 13 years old during the pivotal summer when she begins to think of herself and her world differently. The Summer I Learned to Fly by Dana Reinhardt unfolds like a poem, from Drew’s no-nonsense point of view. Except that she begins to indulge in a bit of nonsense—like riding a bike without a helmet and sneaking out of the house when she’s grounded. She also finds herself arguing with her mother, and she can’t figure out quite how it happens. She loves her mother. Yet Drew also needs to test out her own ideas about how things work.

And then there's Emmett Crane, who eats the cheese she leaves on the dumpster behind her mother's Cheese Shop, and shows her things and people in her community she never knew existed. This is not a romance, though maybe there are feelings stirring there. Mostly it’s the story of a boy and girl building a tenuous trust that blossoms into friendship—with a few missteps along the way.

Almost everyone in the book is in transition in some way—Drew’s mother; Nick, a handsome employee in her mother’s cheese shop; Emmett and the friends to whom he introduces Drew. And each touches Drew in ways large and small that ripple through her. By summer’s end, she emerges as a bigger person with richer life experiences for having tested her wings.

The Rewards of Perseverance

2011-08-12T06:58:00.000-07:00

The hero of Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes by Jonathan Auxier has an indefatigable spirit. Practically from his birth, he has encountered obstacles at every turn. Still, he perseveres.

He does not know who his parents are. He has a dim recollection of birds pecking out his eyes; his blindness forced him to develop and pay attention to his other senses beyond the norm of sighted people. He survives on the streets through his keen awareness of what’s happening around him and by stealing food and other valuables for the exploitative Mr. Seamus. Yet Peter has not become hard-hearted. In fact he comes to the aid of another in distress, Sir Tode, a human-kitten-horse hybrid under a hag’s spell, and brings out the best in him. Sir Tode rises to bravery that he had hitherto run from in his human knight form.

This terrific book for boys and girls (a significant girl character comes along a bit later in the book) brims with action, magic, far-off lands, kings and queens. But it also deals with real-life challenges, such as blindness, hunger and poverty. The author treats those obstacles realistically but also shows readers that there’s a way out if, like Peter, you have an unflagging will to rise above your circumstances and seize the chance for a better life when it arrives.

Peter shares much in common with Harry Potter in that respect. Sometimes, when you persevere and the moment of opportunity presents itself, it can feel like magic.

Learning the Hard Way

2011-08-05T05:49:00.000-07:00

The title hero of Substitute Creacher by Chris Gall learned his lesson the hard way. But we don’t know that at first. Have you ever heard of someone learning the easy way? When it comes to life lessons, most of us learn as a result of going through a tough experience, and wanting to avoid going through that again.

We may try to spare others headed down that same slippery slope with a word of warning, but the listener only truly hears it if he or she wants to hear it. Or if he’s going through something similar himself and seeks advice from someone who’s been in their shoes. That’s the terrific twist at the end of Substitute Creacher. After all the examples Mr. Creacher gives of students gone wrong, it turns out that he is one of them. That gives him insight into the children’s characters and credibility with his young audience (both students and readers).

The teacher may have learned the hard way, but he has a gentle delivery with the children in his classroom. He dispenses his anecdotes with humor and rhyme (framed in green slime). By the time the students realize that their sub is more like them than they’d realized, he has won them over. That’s also when it dawns on them that he’s merely trying to spare them the experience he had to go through to learn his lesson.

Peek-a-Boo

2011-07-28T09:34:00.000-07:00

The game of peek-a-boo allows a baby to explore one of the most important concepts in his early experience of the world: object permanence. The book Peek-a-Who? by Nina Laden, builds on this idea by incorporating a guessing game into the peek-a-boo exchange.

According to psychologist Jean Piaget, the concept of object permanence is the beginning of a child’s understanding that objects continue to exist even if the child cannot see, hear or touch them. The game of peek-a-boo plays with this idea because a person hides his or her face from the baby, but the baby can still hear the person’s voice and see that they’re still there.

Peek-a-Who? uses die-cut pages so the baby can see the parent or caregiver through the opening in the page. As they get familiar with the riddles in the book, they see that the black-and-white background belongs to the cow (“Peek a… MOO!”) and the railroad tracks belong to the train (“Peek a… CHOO-CHOO!”). As they begin to sound out the words, they can chant along with the parent or reader. Until such time as they can chime in verbally, they can grasp the thick board book pages with their fingers; the die-cut pages help even the earliest-developing motor skills along.

This is not a new book (it was published in 2000), but it was new to me. A colleague at Chronicle Books pointed out that it was their top-selling board book, so I had to have a look. Now I see why it’s been a success with so many families. It taps into a baby’s every developmental stage—eye contact, motor skills, and, eventually, rhyming sounds and predictability.

Unlikely Heroes

2011-07-22T06:10:00.000-07:00

Very few things please me as a reader more than an unlikely hero who can win me over.

There’s nothing much to like about Saba, the narrator of Blood Red Road by Moira Young. Not at first. She’s possessive of her twin brother, Lugh. She’s mean to her nine-year-old sister, Emmi. She blames Emmi for the death of their mother and for the light that’s gone out in their father’s eyes. And she doesn’t hide that from Emmi either. You wouldn’t want to have to fight Saba for the last loaf of bread. She’d probably kill you for it.

Yet the fact that she’s so direct, scrappy and winner-take-all makes her a survivor. She can’t read or write, but she remains teachable, as we discover when she meets Mercy, her mother’s friend. Mercy shows her a different point of view, and Saba considers it. She’s not close-minded. And her reluctance to trust serves her well as she moves into the larger world of this post-apocalyptic novel where people are mostly takers.

Saba got me thinking about other characters who’ve won me over, or at least, won my sympathies over the course of their stories. Katherine Paterson’s Great Gilly Hopkins is the one that leaps to mind. But books for teens teem with them, too--the best friends and narrators of The Pigman by Paul Zindel; 16-year-old Steve Harmon, the Monster of Walter Dean Myers’s title; the misfit stars of Stoner & Spaz by Ron Koertge; Brent Bishop, protagonist of Paul Fleischman’s Whirligig; and, of course, Katniss from Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games. You wouldn’t want to fight her for the last loaf of bread either.

Most of these young people have to experience something dire in order to develop a feeling for others—and, sometimes, compassion for themselves. That foray into testing adulthood, trying out ideas that are contrary to the ones that have been handed down by parents, teachers, and other adult guides, is essential to growing up. Some enter that wider world by choice, others by necessity—like Saba and Katniss. These books allow teens to try on other personas without having to live through their experiences.

Who are some of your favorite unlikely heroes? Which unlikable protagonists wound up winning you over?

Growing Pains

2011-07-15T06:43:00.000-07:00

It’s hard to think of any author-artist who captures the pains of growing up at the various stages in a child’s life as well as Kevin Henkes does.

We meet Alice Rice in Henkes’s Junonia on her way to her family’s annual winter vacation to Sanibel Island. She is about to turn 10. That is a big deal. She wants it to be special. She wants to share it with the “family” she has formed in Florida, as she has each February through years of winter retreats. But things are not going according to plan.

Some of the “family” members can’t get there due to weather, others due to conflicts. And Alice’s favorite, Kate, her mother’s college classmate who usually stays with them in their house, is bringing her boyfriend and his 6-year-old child, and they’re staying in their own cottage. It’s as if she’s throwing a birthday party and half the people can’t come, and then her best friend asks if she can bring a friend she’s never met!

Henkes knows how to get inside the skin of a child as he or she experiences deep emotional pain and joy. Think of the anxious hero of Wemberly Worried or Lilly’s fit of jealousy when Julius, the Baby of the World moves into her house. And then there are the joys of acquiring a purple plastic purse and the horrors of the teacher kidnapping it for the schoolday in Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse.

The emotional journeys of Henkes’s characters get subtler as they grow older. Kids feel like they have to be mature about these changes as their birthdays add up, or they feel that their parents expect them to be more mature about worries and new babies and a teacher’s confiscation of your prize possession because you’ve flaunted it a bit too much and a bit too long. “You’re a big boy/girl now.” “Set an example.” “You should know better.” These are the phrases a child hears as he or she gains experience. The expectations others have for them have changed, but the children still feel like children. And they are. Henkes conveys all of those complexities over the course of one spring break as Alice Rice goes from nine to 10 years old.

For a child, sometimes the small shifts can feel like tectonic plates realigning their world. That’s certainly the case for Alice. And with Alice as a companion, children know that if she can survive all these changes, they can, too.

Keeping an Open Mind

2011-07-08T06:34:00.000-07:00

At its core, Say Hello to Zorro! by Carter Goodrich is a heartwarming and funny story about staying open-minded. It stars a dog, but that just makes it easier for a child to laugh (in recognition) from a safe distance. Mister Bud, the hero of Goodrich’s picture book, has been the master of his house. We can tell by the way he meets his owner at the door, and by the way she shapes her day around his needs and his rigid schedule that he rules the roost. So on the day his owner brings home Zorro to meet Mister Bud, he is not pleased—at least, not initially.

Carter Goodrich comes out of a film background. He designs characters (for Finding Nemo and Despicable Me, just to name two). When we had a chance to talk about his work on this book, he said it was important to stay true to a dog’s nature: “They can’t lie. It’s all out there. I think that’s why people like [dogs] so much. It’s not all rosy, but Mister Bud and Zorro accept each other and learn how to cohabitate.” They look different and seem different in every way, except that Mister Bud and Zorro both love schedules! As soon as they embrace this commonality, they make peace.

And isn’t that what siblings do? They unite over the shared experience of living in their family and abiding by or railing against the household rules. Kids at school are attracted to others with common views or interests. This book is very funny because it capitalizes on the quirks of a canine pair that lives to eat and sleep. But in truth, a child adjusting to a new baby in the house, a new kid horning in on his or her best friend, or a new school, is, at the root of it, simply trying to get used to a disruption to his or her routine--a new set of rules, a “new normal.” By showing us how Mister Bud and Zorro make the best of their situation (and even improve upon it), Carter Goodrich shows young people that they can, too. They just have to keep an open mind.

On Alert!

2011-07-01T07:15:00.000-07:00

Summer is a time of planned outings with friends, and family vacations. Young children get more out of your excursions if you can prepare them for what they may encounter on their hike in the woods, camping trip or a visit to the zoo. With gorgeous photos and simple fun facts, Baby Animals: In the Jungle by the editors of Kingfisher and the other books in the Baby Animals series can be a great resource. If you can expose children to what they will be seeing, it does two things: 1) It relieves their worries, at least in part, if they know what to expect and 2) they get more out of the experience—before and after.

Once you and your child have been through the book a few times, you can play a game: What’s this animal? What sound does it make? Where would you find them? These kinds of questions help them realize how much they already know, and to get more out of an encounter with the animals they’re about to see. When they get to the zoo, they know to look in the trees for the baby gorilla or orangutan. They know that the orange-hued monkey swinging from the branches is the orangutan, while the burly black primate with the “thick, woolly coat” is a gorilla. The black fur on and around the face of the baby gorilla in the photo will also help your child distinguish between a chimpanzee and a gorilla.

When you come home, read through the book again. This allows your child to review his or her visit to the zoo or hike in the woods (in the case of Baby Animals: In the Forest) and to retain the information he or she has gained through first-hand experience.

The Student Body

2011-06-23T20:29:00.000-07:00

Have you ever considered that it’s often the changes in a student’s body that determine his or her place within The Student Body? Stupid Fast by Geoff Herbach puts that reality at the center of Felton Reinstein’s story. For his entire 15 years, Felton has been the butt of the jocks’ jokes (they call him “squirrel nuts”). But during a spring gym class, he sprints the entire 600-yard dash, outrunning the best runners. That summer, as Felton continues to get taller and meatier, the jocks claim him as one of their own. Felton’s physique earns him a place with the popular crowd.

The same holds true for young women. The ones who get curvy first draw the attention of their male peers (whether they want it or not) and win the loyalty (or envy) of most girls. They become the popular girls. These changes arrive seemingly overnight, often during the summer, and change everything for those individuals.

Herbach probes the complex feelings of being thrust into a world that was previously off-limits and, in Felton’s case, completely unsought. There are advantages and disadvantages. As his mother falls apart, Felton has another place to go. On the other hand, immersing himself in this alternate refuge can feel like a betrayal to his family. His crush, Aleah, also has a calling and a discipline as a pianist. While he lifts weights, she practices scales. For those of us who were late bloomers, this can be a confounding time, just waiting for your body to “catch up.” You have no control over when the changes will take place or if they will happen in the way that you would like. The book describes the emotional purgatory of not quite belonging where you once did and not quite fitting into a new realm, but moving forward anyway. Sometimes Felton jumps to wrong conclusions, sometimes he’s right. But he has to keep going. And that’s not a bad message either. Felton grapples with the balance between friends and family and his newfound athleticism, and sometimes that kind of mindful grappling is the best we can do.

A Call to Action

2011-06-16T18:35:00.000-07:00

It’s difficult to hear messages so frequently about the bleak outlook for our planet. Young people can start to feel saddled with—and even guilty about—problems they did not create. Mark Kurlansky’s World Without Fish, illustrated by Frank Stockton, arms kids with facts, and then the author tells them what they can do to change things for the better.

He provides them with Web sites that list sustainable fisheries (and rates those sites for their effectiveness); they can eat fish responsibly, knowing that these fish populations will continue to thrive. He gives young people concrete steps they can take in their own communities to effect change. He teaches them respectful ways to begin a conversation with the person in charge of the fish department at the grocery store or a waiter in a local restaurant. In the same way that Kurlansky presents the points of view of most everyone involved in trying to address the environment, he also instills respect for all parties involved.

The book does not shy away from worst-case scenarios, but Kurlansky also offers plenty of reasons for hope. He wrote it, in part, for his 10-year-old daughter, Talia. (When you read the book, you’ll notice that the characters in the running comics-style story are Kram and Ailat, Mark and Talia [at right] spelled backwards.) In a recent interview, I got to ask him what he believes is the most important thing we can do to help the planet. He answered, “Participate. The thing I find encouraging about kids is that they keep offering solutions… The most important message in the book for children is… that over the next 40 years more change [will occur] than was witnessed during the 120 years of the Industrial Revolution. They'll get to participate in these changes; I hope they view this as a tremendous opportunity.” What a great way to head into summer, thinking about ways to create positive change.

Who’s in Charge?

2011-06-10T09:11:00.000-07:00

One of the things I love most about Mitchell’s License by Hallie Durand, illustrated by Tony Fucile, is that the boy hero believes he is truly in the driver’s seat. The car (Dad) lets him pretty much steer their course. He plays along, and improvises a little (Dad makes the “VROOM!” noise when they “go fast,” and “BONK!” when they literally hit the wall). But when Mitchell tries to get away with something he knows he shouldn’t, Dad puts on the brakes.

In an interview with Hallie Durand and Tony Fucile, they both said they played similar games in their own households. Durand expanded on the “Remote-Control Dad” activity in their home, and Fucile often makes sound effects while bumping into walls (for effect only, no worries). The book joins the ranks of the few other father-child interactive games such as Pete’s a Pizza by William Steig and Jules Feiffer’s The Daddy Mountain. Durand said she was inspired by the “pizza” breaking into laughter in Steig’s book (“Pizzas are not supposed to laugh!” says the pizza-maker father) to have the “car” speak in Mitchell’s License. Now this book can be a jumping off point for you and your child to riff on the game yourselves.

Fathers Know Best

2011-06-03T06:27:00.000-07:00

March of the Penguins (2005) is the first film I can think of that informed mass numbers of children about the important role fathers often play in the natural world. They learned that male emperor penguins care for their young while the mothers go out in search of food. Eric Carle’s Mister Seahorse came out before that film (2004), and now it’s newly available in a board book edition. The author-artist is a master of distilling information into its simplest form. Here he exposes an entire undersea community in which fathers care for their unborn offspring.

Mrs. Seahorse lays her eggs in Mr. Seahorse’s pouch, then disappears from the pages. Ever after, it’s Mr. Seahorse protecting his offspring in his pouch while communing with other caretaking fathers in his travels. Mr. Stickleback, a fish, guards the nest he built, where Mrs. Stickleback laid her eggs. Toddlers can see the eggs that Mr. Tilapia keeps in his mouth (therefore he cannot speak but Mr. Seahorse tells us what's happening). Eggs are clearly visible on the belly of the pipefish, Mr. Pipe, and (my favorite), on Mr. Kurtus’s forehead. Transparent “windows” in a few of the board book pages fill in the reeds, coral reefs and seaweed that offer camouflage to other sea creatures. (Eric Carle described how he creates his collage artwork in a recent interview.)

Mister Seahorse is a great way for toddlers to learn about another approach to “child-rearing” in nature, and curious older siblings will scamper off to read more about fascinating creatures such as the Kurtus nurseryfish. It’s a great conversation-starter about the important role both parents play in child-rearing.

Breaking Free

2011-05-27T06:40:00.000-07:00

“The inspiration for the novel and the factions were based on my views about human nature, and that virtue as an end in itself may not really be a good thing,” said Veronica Roth of her debut novel, Divergent, in a recent interview.

Virtue as an end in itself may not really be a good thing. The author suggests that by trying to be “good,” whatever “good” may mean to one group or another, we lose something of ourselves. Does “doing the right thing”--if it’s defined by someone else or society at large--mean that we deny who we are? Beatrice Prior, the narrator of Divergent, feels torn when she must choose between the five factions of her society. She knows that if she does not choose her family’s faction, the selfless Abnegation, she will have to leave them behind, possibly forever. But from the very first, Veronica Roth shows us how drawn her heroine is to Dauntless, the faction that houses the soldiers that guard the borders of their society. They are daring, gutsy, even reckless at times.

One of my favorite moments in the book is when Tris realizes that bravery and selflessness are “often… the same thing.” It’s a great way to get teens thinking about what constitutes selflessness and bravery, and how we decide which actions are true to us, and which ones betray our sense of who we are. But she also taps into the idea that there are shades of gray. In that same interview, Roth talked about how we often single out cliques in high school as being damaging to kids, but what about in adulthood? Do we ever really graduate from labeling people? Is there really such a thing as a “good girl” and a “bad girl”? A “stoner” or “jock” or “geek”? Doesn’t everyone have more to him or her than one overriding quality?

Roth also invites readers to look more deeply at their families, friends and classmates. To see that there’s more to them. None of us fits easily into boxes. Most of us are, in fact, divergent. Does that make us “dangerous”? Perhaps only to the people who prefer neat categories.

The Power of Suggestion

2011-05-20T06:46:00.000-07:00

As he emulates the artwork of John James Audubon, Doug Swieteck discovers that he cannot paint every feather on the Arctic Tern. Instead, he paints enough lines to suggest countless feathers. He learns that less is more. And his careful attention to detail keeps him firmly planted in the present. He is, as Gary Schmidt’s title suggests, Okay for Now.

Doug is up against some big challenges in the summer of 1968. He is new in town, about to start eighth grade at a new school, his oldest brother is fighting in Vietnam, his middle brother is being accused of burglary, and his father is verbally, often physically abusive. Yet a few key people believe in him. His mother, for one. And at least two teachers. But Mr. Powell may be the greatest influence on Doug. He notices Doug’s interest in the Audubon book at the Marysville Free Public Library, and he approaches Doug. They connect through their mutual admiration for Audubon. The librarian encourages Doug’s curiosity.

How does Audubon do it? How does he create the “terrified eye” of The Arctic Tern? The sense of impending doom in The Snowy Heron? Mr. Powell teaches Doug how to look carefully at these images and discover for himself the strategy for creating the mood in these plates as he sketches them. And as he sketches, Doug discovers a strategy for staying in the moment, finding a sense of calm, quieting the rumblings of what may be waiting for him at school or at home with his father. He begins to apply these tools to other areas of his life, and he begins to change.

In a moment of crisis, Doug figures out the right thing to do because of Audubon’s The Yellow Shank. He "step[s] into the middle of the picture, where he should be, with the light behind him and the dark ahead.” The changes Doug makes begin to ripple through his household. As he begins to expect more of himself, those around him subtly begin to expect more of themselves, too. The power of suggestion transforms Doug into a power of example.

¡Buen provecho!

2011-05-13T18:38:00.000-07:00

¡Enjoy your meal! That is the underlying message of The Cazuela that the Farm Maiden Stirred by Samantha R. Vamos, illustrated by Rafael López.

Children love a good story with a cumulative text. They love the repetition, and the idea that this is all building up to an exciting surprise. Samantha Vamos takes “The House that Jack Built” formula and adds a brilliant twist: she uses Spanish words in place of key characters and ingredients; each contributes to a delicious meal. Her story of just enough cooks in the kitchen gives children delectable morsels such as mantequilla (butter) and azúcar (sugar), and introduces the pato (duck) who visits the mercado (market) on the back of a burro (donkey).

When I had a chance to interview Samantha Vamos recently about Cazuela, she said that the phrase “the cazuela that the farm maiden stirred” came to her when she was short of ingredients one cold Chicago morning and fantasized that she lived on a farm where everything she needed would be handy. The phrase reminded her of “The House that Jack Built,” and she was on her way from there. But she also wanted to create a bilingual text, and the repetition of this framework allowed her to introduce Spanish words to children and invite them to practice the new vocabulary through the repeated phrases. She also liked the idea of featuring a meal in which everyone played a part and enjoyed the fruits of their joint efforts (unlike the animals in The Little Red Hen, who won’t help and therefore don’t get to eat the results).

The stunning artwork by Rafael López not only helps give visual clues to the Spanish words, but the artist also makes it seem perfectly normal that a cow would coach a goat, who’s stirring the cream into butter in the kitchen. He includes lots of details to be discovered upon return visits to the book, such as the sun’s moods changing from scene to scene, or the burro’s first appearance. A glossary that helps with pronunciation appears at the end, as well as a recipe for… well, I won’t give it away. But it allows children (with a little help) to prepare a classic Mexican dish just the way the farm maiden, farmer and animals do in the book. And Samantha Vamos also prepared an activity guide with word cards featuring Lopez’s divine illustrations.

Can’t you just see a group of friends putting this on as readers’ theater, and popping up with their word card each time the narrative reaches their part? Vamos said that when she visits schools, the kids like to say the repeated part of the text as quickly as possible, like a tongue twister. And that’s the best part of what books give us: new words to adopt as favorites, exotic words that we can exchange with others—like a great meal prepared and shared together. ¡Buen provecho!

Making Waves

2011-05-05T21:31:00.000-07:00

Words are power, especially for toddlers.

When they learn to speak, toddlers go from 0 to 60 in one minute flat. Suddenly, they can ask for things by name, make jokes, express their personalities. Liesbet Slegers knows how to connect with this age group, as she proves once again with Bathing. Her simple black outline and her focus on just a few things on a page—a washcloth mitt with a fish on it, a shampoo bottle with a smiley face—help smallest children to focus, too. There’s just enough on a page to keep them interested without feeling overwhelmed.

Also, she’s not afraid to incorporate slightly more challenging words like “faucet.” She uses it in context (“Look, water is rushing out of the faucet! The bathtub is filling up with water”), and she pictures it clearly, with the toddler hero pointing at the faucet. In 12 pages, Slegers moves the child from running the water in the tub to drying off in a towel. She takes everyday activities and makes them feel like adventures. And to youngest children, they ARE adventures. It’s a constant process of discovery, as if to say, “Look what I can do! I’m making little waves in the water.”

Happy and Safe?

2011-04-28T22:23:00.001-07:00

What would you do if you were told you could be “cured” of the emotional roller coaster of life, and that a timeproven “procedure” would keep you forever “happy and safe”? You’d say, “What’s the catch?”

Delirium by Lauren Oliver allows teens to examine the tradeoffs—without undergoing irrevocable surgery. The idea of forbidden love goes back to David and Bathsheba, Romeo and Juliet. Lena’s feelings for Alex are taboo. Even though he has the mark of the “cured,” Alex stirs in Lena symptoms of delirium. She finds herself doing things she’d never done before, forbidden things.

The larger theme of the book is the ability to question, so central to adolescence and becoming an independent adult. We have to create a distance from the rules to decide which of them makes sense for us as individuals. Lauren Oliver paints an extreme case in which no one, not even adults, is allowed outside the boundaries of certain behaviors nor permitted outside of certain physical territories bounded by a fence. Outside the fence are the Wilds. But Lena, haunted by the memory of her mother, wonders if her mother was telling Lena to go her own way. Lena’s best friend breaks the rules, which at first cause Lena to lash out at her, but then prompts her to question why the rules are so stringent. Why does the society want to control them?

Lena is not someone who rebels for rebellion’s sake. She resists the rules that seem to go against human nature, that try to curb curiosity, love, and freedom.

Words to Keep

2011-04-15T07:43:00.000-07:00

Perhaps, like me, you might at first resist the idea of the subtitle for Poem in Your Pocket for Young Poets: 100 Poems to Rip Out & Read, edited by Bruno Navasky. Rip the page from a book? I still grapple with whether it’s truly okay to underline favorite phrases in pencil or mark the margins. Of course, you don’t have to rip out the pages.

But that idea of owning the poem, ripping it out, sticking it in your pocket and committing it to memory—or taking it out to share it with someone else—is a valuable idea. It took me a long time to feel as if I “owned” a book, that it was truly mine, to mark up and dog-ear. It’s still easier for me to take a pencil to a set of galleys or a paperback than a hardcover. But part of the fun is revisiting where I’ve been. The notes I made in the margins of my books in college are fun to look back on now. Do the same passages move me today that moved me then?

In his acceptance speech for the Claudia Lewis Award for Poetry for Guyku: A Book of Haiku for Boys, poet Bob Raczka said that he often goes back to the words of Mary Oliver:

“Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”

At the risk of sounding a refrain, allow me to repeat: that’s what poetry does best. It teaches us to live in the moment, to see things anew. I’m taken with May Swenson’s “Analysis of Baseball” (in Poem in Your Pocket) because she drills down to the game’s essence, the relationship between bat, ball, and mitt. She invites us to review our own experience of the game and see if her observations match up with ours. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t, but during that time of reflection, we relive some great moments in baseball and sharpen our minds.

If you are not already a poetry lover, I’m betting that Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist Connie Schultz can convert you with this week’s piece, “The Familiarity of a Poem.” She admits, “I was in my 40s before I was willing to share my love of poetry.” Now she has a poem delivered to her inbox every Monday. If you’re already a poetry convert, you likely know about Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac, which offers a new poem every day. (Today’s poem is by William Wordsworth.)

Like Schultz, I, too, bristle at the idea of relegating Black History or Women’s History or Poetry to one month out of an entire year. But if that monthly theme grabs the attention of just one person and opens his or her eyes to a fact or a person or an event or a poem that he hadn’t known about before, then I’m all for it. Then let the newly anointed come along with the converted among us, who celebrate all year long.

A Nature Celebration

2011-04-08T06:01:00.000-07:00

Poetry is about savoring the moments. Haiku celebrates moments to be savored in nature. Bob Raczka’s Guyku: A Year of Haiku for Boys, illustrated by Peter H. Reynolds, captures small events worth celebrating: the discovery of a penny on the train tracks, the decision not to put worms on the fish hook but to use hot dogs instead, the realization that the temperature is warm enough so the snowman won’t hold his form—spring has arrived. Raczka and Reynolds conjure moments so specific that they become universal experiences of childhood. We can all relate to and connect with them. Raczka wrote a stirring acceptance speech when he won the Claudia Lewis Poetry Award at the Bank Street College of Education about preserving the sanctity of childhood play, outside in nature.

I love that Raczka says in the title that this is a book for boys. Love that Dog by Sharon Creech stars a boy who comes to love (and write) poetry. Often a boy’s instinctive response to poetry is “ewww.” But it doesn’t have to be that way. Raczka and Creech make a great case to boys that poetry is written for them, too. (Girls will also enjoy these, but they also tend not to be put off by poetry. By the way, Raczka assures us that he is working on a book of haiku for girls next: Herku? Galku?)

Poems are a way of rediscovering the familiar. What a cool idea—that you can be an explorer in your own backyard or the woods down the street or the pond by the school. Yes. That is the gift of poetry. The best poetry inspires you to see the world differently and to write about it, too. So here’s my advice, via one of my favorite poets, Karla Kuskin:

Write about a radish.
Too many people write about the moon.

The night is black
The stars are small and high
The clock unwinds its ever-ticking tune
Hills gleam dimly
Distant nighthawks cry.
A radish rises in the waiting sky.

(from Moon, Have You Met My Mother? by Karla Kuskin [HarperCollins])

A New Kind of Reader

2011-04-01T07:14:00.001-07:00

Reading Press Here by Hervé Tullet approximates the experience one would have with an app. Yet, it is not an app. It’s a book. One of the genius qualities of Press Here is that even though it’s clearly making a case for the great glory of books, it never adopts an attitude. It celebrates the pure joy of page flippings, book turnings, and the ability to grab the two covers in both hands and toss it up and down. I am not one of those people who frets about the future of the book. A great story--or, in this case, a great experience with words and pictures and ideas--will always be in demand, whether it’s a book, an e-book, an enhanced book or an app.

However, I believe that we need to think about how we use books with pages and pictures, and how we use electronic devices with young people. Just the way we would television or radio or any other means of conveying content for educational or entertainment use. One of my favorite anecdotes about the new kind of reader who's emerging today involves a 22-month-old and Freight Train by Donald Crews. A dear friend of mine who runs a library system in Connecticut visited her toddler grandson at Christmastime. She bought him a board book of Freight Train, wrapped it up and put it under the tree. In the days leading up to Christmas, his mother bought the Freight Train app for him to play with on her iPad. He happily pressed the screen for the different parts of the train, and saw and heard different things happening depending upon where he pressed. When he pressed the cattle car, for instance, the cows said, “Moo.” On Christmas morning, when he tore off the wrappings for Freight Train the board book, he instantly recognized it. He went to the page with the cattle car picture, and he pressed it. Nothing happened. He pressed it again and again. Nothing. Next he started pressing and saying, “Moo! Moo!” as if providing the soundtrack himself.

Did he feel like the experience of the board book was missing something? I don’t know. But when we talk about the generation of readers who will change their reading habits because of electronic devices, in my view, this is the generation who will drive the future of reading. The children who are growing up with the option of electronics to aid their fluid experience of content, from pre-reading experiences on to decoding words (learning to recognize letters and simple words by sight) and then to reading for information and entertainment will ultimately set the new standards for reading preferences.

The more kids read, the better, as far as I’m concerned, in whichever way they prefer. My great hope is that they can still have the experience of sustained reading, of getting lost in a book—by page or by screen—for long stretches. As they get older it becomes more challenging to read without interruption by phone calls and text messages, sports practice and play rehearsals. Children can build worlds out of words or blocks or forts in the woods or create plots for their Lego characters or the dolls in their dollhouses. Those long interrupted periods of reading and playtime develop imagination and concentration, and we need to help children honor and defend those opportunities until they can do that for themselves.

Ambition

2011-03-24T22:05:00.000-07:00

Amelia Earhart was a survivor—except when she didn’t survive. She was charming—except when she wasn’t charming. Amelia Lost: The Life and Disappearance of Amelia Earhart by Candace Fleming reveals the person behind the legend. The author essentially states that the pilot may not have fully prepared for her what turned out to be her final flight. Amelia Earhart was willing to wreck a friendship to get a lecture tour and a marriage to get the man she loved and who could ensure her fame.

These are not easy things to know about your hero.

Yet the author takes nothing away from Amelia Earhart’s intelligence, goal-setting and accomplishments. She worked hard and earned every success. As readers we can feel Amelia’s charm and courage coming through the pages. Each chapter makes a strong case for why she became an American hero. I had a chance to interview Candace Fleming recently, and one of the things I found most touching was the reason for the author’s fascination with Earhart. “My mother, who must have been 13 in 1937 [when Earhart disappeared], would tell a story about going outside and looking up, convinced that she'd see [Amelia] fly over her little town in Indiana,” Fleming says. “She couldn't believe her Amelia was lost—not the person she had seen in the newsreels and in the papers!”

The book leaves us with haunting questions: How far would you be willing to go to pursue a dream? Would you risk all that Amelia Earhart risked? Friends, family, safety? If presented with the right opportunity, if we were offered a fully funded chance to fly around the world as the first woman pilot—the Friendship flight that started her on her way—maybe we would have risked it all, too.

Teamwork

2011-03-18T06:17:00.000-07:00

One of the things I admire most about Kylie Jean is the way she goes to her friends and family for help. Together, she and her cousin and friends figure out how to cope with the mean new girl without stooping to mean-girl tactics, in Kylie Jean: Drama Queen by Marci Peschke, illus. by Tuesday Mourning. In Kylie Jean: Blueberry Queen, she asks her cousin (a different, older cousin) to help her register for the Blueberry Queen contest, then calls upon her grandparents for assistance—her photographer grandfather for a picture, and her other grandparents for sponsorship. Kylie Jean also asks a neighbor she admires to write a recommendation for her. The heroine models a strategy that can be very helpful to children of this age, who are making fledgling attempts toward independence. She asks for help from people she trusts. Clara Lee also does this in Clara Lee and the Apple Pie Dream when she seeks out her grandfather as her trusted advisor.

That awkward transition to doing things on their own is easier for both Kylie Jean and Clara Lee because of the roles their families play in helping them achieve their goals. Kylie Jean makes a list of tasks to complete in Blueberry Queen, and enlists her family or friends with specific skills to help with each. In the case of Clara Lee, it’s self-confidence she needs—to believe she, too, deserves to represent her town, not because her family helped to found the town (like her rival’s family did), but because she sees herself as an integral part of its community. And then she must summon the courage to give a speech. But once she overcomes the first crisis of confidence, the second feels easy.

It’s sometimes hard to find strong books for this age group because so few drill down to these essential issues of blossoming independence. But Kylie Jean, Clara Lee, Dessert Schneider from Dessert First, Clementine, and Ivy and Bean can be strong guides through rough waters.

Read-Aloud Adventures

2011-03-11T06:25:00.000-08:00

Please, little red chicken, interrupt! It means you’re paying attention!

Interrupting Chicken by David Ezra Stein captures the essence of the experience of a child reading aloud with a loving adult. In the opening wordless scene, we detect hints of the ceaseless energy of the young chicken before she ever appears. Once she’s in her pajamas, she asks for a story, and Papa says, “Of course, you are not going to interrupt the story tonight, are you?” We know that she will (though she promises, “I’ll be good”), and we can’t wait.

When she breaks into the story to warn Hansel and Gretel about the witch--and to take part in the other two stories--it’s clear that the little red chicken knows these stories by heart. My favorite aspect of the book is the way the little red chicken imagines herself as a character in each story. She believes she can save Little Red Riding Hood from the Wolf. In Stein’s artwork, the little red chicken literally appears as a character alongside the red-caped star and the villain who would, if left to carry out his mission, swallow the girl’s granny. In an interview, Stein discussed the process of creating this clash of the "real" and storybook worlds. (He received a 2011 Caldecott Honor citation for Interrupting Chicken.) The feathered heroine is a riot of color in a sepia-toned world. She is shaking things up.

The captivating little chicken at the center of this story is smart and spirited, she loves her Papa, and she cares about the characters in her books and wants to help them. We can imagine her becoming a passionate and involved member of her classroom and community. The best books enhance and help to develop those qualities in a child, by opening up a discussion between the child and someone who cares about him or her--someone who has a wider experience of the world and can help to process all that a young person is learning from hour to hour. So maybe it’s worth moving up bedtime just a bit, just enough to allow for those interruptions.

Active Imagination

2011-03-04T06:17:00.000-08:00

For Lucy, the little fox who stars in Red Wagon by Renata Liwska, the stress is on the “active” in “active imagination.” As she takes an action (going to the market on an errand for her mother), she uses her surroundings to feed her fantasy and transform a chore into a pleasurable experience. It starts to rain, and Lucy imagines the red wagon as a ship, and rescues a raccoon pirate. We see all of her friends joining in to play a part.

When we were kids, we often staged plays in which everyone took a part, helped figure out the scenery and props, created makeshift costumes from castoff clothes or old sheets. We’d go exploring in the woods and build lean-to forts from large branches and sizable pieces of fiberglass we’d find. We’d make igloos after a large snowfall. Our parents would say, “Go outside and get some fresh air and exercise.” That’s what Lucy and her friends are doing. They’re exercising their imaginations along with their bodies, and each of them takes a role in the imagined scenes.

As a huge fan of technology, I recognize how it has freed me up in myriad ways, given me access to quantities of information in a moment that in the past would have taken hours to compile, and it allows me to stay in touch with people on the other side of the country. But as a former teacher, I do wonder if children get away from the computer and TV and their electronic games often enough, to go outside and play--exercise their minds in a different way, spontaneously making connections and choices in concert with other children. Even Albert Einstein took his dog for long walks.

Lucy demonstrates that we need very little to create a big adventure. She turns what could have been a dreary errand into an exciting journey, and inspires all of us to do the same in our own lives.

The Legacy of the Bicycle

2011-02-25T06:46:00.000-08:00

The bicycle is making a comeback today largely because of its affordability, portability, and its ecological friendliness. In the late 19th century, when it was first introduced in America, the bicycle revolutionized the lives of ordinary citizens, especially women and African Americans. Sue Macy’s Wheels of Change: How Women Rode the Bicycle to Freedom (with a Few Flat Tires Along the Way) charts the dramatic changes that resulted from the bicycle.

When you think about it, when we were kids, as soon as we could ride a bike our lives changed dramatically. We could ride to a friend’s house who lived two miles away instead of just playing a pick-up game of kickball with the neighborhood kids. We could ride to the Dairy Queen and buy an ice cream cone, ride to a piano lesson or football practice. It gave us independence, too.

For women at the end of the 19th century, one change set off many others. Not only could they get around freely and efficiently, but women also invented things to help them hold their skirts in place or carry groceries home, designed bloomers so they wouldn’t have to ride sidesaddle, and they could exercise. There were political debates about whether women should be allowed to ride. Some of the opposition was even led by other women! Charlotte Smith, for instance, fought for the rights of female workers for 15 years, but focused much of her wrath on the bicycle, calling it “the devil’s advance agent morally and physically in thousands of instances.” On the other hand, Albert Augustus Pope, the man who through his manufacturing and marketing innovations single-handedly propelled the bicycle to the peak of its popularity, took a stand (through his advertisements) in favor of bloomers. The bicycle may have gone out of favor in 1897, but the changes it helped bring about remain.

Learn more about the bicycle’s influence in this interview with author Sue Macy.

Extended Family

2011-02-18T06:27:00.000-08:00

The relationship between the third-grade heroine and her grandfather forms the core of Clara Lee and the Apple Pie Dream by Jenny Han, illustrated by Julia Kuo. It’s relatively rare to find new books with portrayals of an intergenerational family living together under the same roof.

Tomie dePaola’s Nana Upstairs and Nana Downstairs and his 26 Fairmount Avenue books spring to mind. And for older readers, there’s Paul Fleischman’s The Borning Room, and two books by Sharon Creech—Heartbeat and Granny Torelli Makes Soup. And one of my favorite tributes to intergenerational families and relationships is a nonfiction title—Eloise Greenfield's book written with her mother, Lessie Jones Little, Childtimes: A Three-Generation Memoir, illustrated by Jerry Pinkney, which covers life from the late 19th-century through the mid-20th-century. This was (and is) a common experience for many families, especially when they were first arriving in the United States.

Clara Lee confides everything in Grandpa, including her wish to be Little Miss Apple Pie in their town’s Apple Blossom Festival. Grandpa’s unfamiliarity with some of the rituals of the Apple Blossom Festival gives Clara Lee reason to explain them (for his as well as readers’ benefit). And when her anxiety about preparing for the contest causes her to grow impatient with her six-year-old sister, Emmeline, Grandpa may be gentler with the third-grader than perhaps her parents would be, but his disappointment in her behavior makes a greater impact on Clara Lee.

In the book’s most poignant scene, Clara Lee tells her grandfather about Miss Little Apple Pie hopeful Dionne Gregory bragging to Clara Lee that her great-great-great-uncle was one of their town’s founding fathers, and that her family is “as American as apple pie.” His response—that her Korean American heritage makes her more of a person, not less of a person—provides the perfect reassurance for Clara Lee. He gives Clara Lee a way of perceiving herself that will far outlast a Little Miss Apple Pie crown.

A Child's-Eye View

2011-02-11T05:21:00.000-08:00

There’s Going to Be a Baby by John Burningham, illustrated by Helen Oxenbury, unfolds as an ongoing conversation between mother and child. It’s an exploration of how things will change when their new baby arrives. Each activity—a meal in a restaurant, a visit to the zoo, an errand at the bank—presents a way for the mother to gently reintroduce the topic of the forthcoming addition to their family (“Maybe when the baby grows up, it will be a chef and work in a restaurant,” his mother suggests). Yet Burningham and Oxenbury remain entirely within the child’s perspective.

The boy’s fantasies of his new baby brother or sister as a chef or a zookeeper or—best of all—a banker bring comic relief. The scenes between mother and child remain within a realistic context. The child’s fantasies unfold as pixelated comics-style panels, such as the images of the banker-baby in a button-down shirt and tie counting piles of coins. The fantasies gauge the boy’s emotional ups and downs: when his mother says the baby might grow up to be a zookeeper, he says, “Then the baby might get eaten by a tiger” (not to worry—the boy’s fantasy shows only the infant’s exhaustion from cleaning zebras and feeding seals in a series of windowpane illustrations). At one point, just when the young hero seems to be warming up to the idea of a new sister or brother, he stands up in the tub and pronounces, “Mrs. Anderson’s baby threw up all over their new carpet.” Surely Mommy won’t bring a baby home now! The impact of his pronouncement feels more forceful because it’s spoken by the child not in response to his mother’s imagined future for the baby-to-come, but instead arises from his own thoughts during one of his daily rituals--taking a bath.

This is a journey of a child’s resistance to and gradual acceptance of the notion of a new baby in his home. The ending feels pitch-perfect. The boy confides in his Grandad, and his words reveal how much consideration he has given to this forthcoming change. He reviews highlights of the conversations he’s had with his mother: “Maybe it will be Susan or Peter. Maybe it will be good at cooking.” Author and artist keep the focus completely on the boy hero: “Grandad, the baby will be our baby. We’re going to love the baby, aren’t we?” Young readers who have trepidation about impending changes to their own families can see that other children have also been through this experience, and they are not alone in these confusing feelings.

No Gimmicks

2011-02-03T20:33:00.000-08:00

Let us pause for a moment in praise of books that use design in service of their content.

So many books have flaps to lift or tabs to pull, or parts that pop up, and for no apparent reason, other than to give children something to do—a gimmick. One Blue Fish by Charles Reasoner, on the other hand, is a perfectly designed book. Each element of the book serves its sole purpose: to introduce youngest book lovers to colors, numbers, and creatures they are likely to encounter in their own surroundings.

Each number, spelled out, appears on the left in big, chubby, easy-to-read letters. The corresponding numeral is displayed--die-cut, or cut out in the shape of the numeral--on the right. With repeated readings, children start to see that the two belong together. They learn to identify the letters in the words, and the sounds they make. And when they look beneath the numeral, they see that the single “blue fish” goes with the “one” and the “1.” It’s a book they will want to come back to again and again because of the element of surprise. It becomes a peek-a-boo game, as they grow confident about what they will find under each number-shaped flap.

As with the best children’s books, the simplicity of One Blue Fish’s design is deceptive. Yet a book this clean, with all of its parts working together seamlessly, is very difficult to achieve.

Lifting the Veil

2011-01-28T07:47:00.000-08:00

As an Upper West Sider in Manhattan, I live among Orthodox Jewish families. Parents drop off their children at the school on my block. I see the men in hats and women with their heads covered and wearing long skirts as they walk to services on Friday nights and stroll along the Hudson River with their children during the High Holy Days. Hush, by Eishes Chayil, took me inside this insular world and offered me a deeper understanding of its culture and customs. The novel’s narrator, Gittel Klein, lives just two blocks outside of the heart of the Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn’s Borough Park, but that’s enough to give her a rare arm’s-length perspective of her community.

The goyishe (non-Jewish) family that rents an apartment from Gittel’s father may be off-limits, but Gittel and her best friend, Devory, form a friendship with Kathy, Gittel’s upstairs neighbor, and realize that she is not the devil she’s painted to be. This raises other questions for Gittel. That exposure to outside values factors into her contemplation of whether or not to confide what she comes to realize about Devory’s suicide at age 10. While Gittel spends the night at Devory’s house, she witnesses something she doesn’t quite understand but that fills Gittel with fear. Devory’s 15-year-old brother, who is home from yeshiva, comes to Devory’s room in the dark and goes under his sister’s blanket: “I saw the blanket, how it moved back and forth and back and forth so fast I thought they were playing tug-of-war.” Those are the only details the author gives, but they are the only details she needs to give. Gittel never discusses this with Devory, but she knows something is terribly wrong. Only as she prepares for her marriage does Gittel realize what happened to Devory, and she must either betray her community by telling the truth, or betray herself.

There has been some debate about whether Hush would have been better served if it had been published as an adult book rather than as a book for teens. But I believe it is solidly young adult. The author clearly traces Gittel’s coming of age, and the way that the gradual realization of what happened to Devory shapes the person Gittel becomes. The chapters in which the 12-year-old Gittel narrates perfectly capture that young, trusting mind attempting to make sense of her world and testing her theories. It’s a book filled with warmth, humor and respect for family and tradition. So when Gittel begins to question the dark side of tradition and absolute loyalty, we feel the devastating consequences as acutely as Gittel does.

A Rendezvous with History

2011-01-21T08:52:00.000-08:00

Rita Williams-Garcia has many gifts. One of them, which may be hardest to achieve for any writer, is her ability to fill in only the details the narrator (and thus, the reader) needs in order to make sense of her experience. That’s what the author accomplishes through Delphine's narrative in One Crazy Summer.

Big Ma, Delphine’s paternal grandmother, does not embrace change. The Brooklyn household she runs with her son, Delphine’s father, is a traditional home, and those are the values she instills in Delphine and her sisters. So when Delphine and her sisters arrive in Oakland, Calif., and they find themselves immersed in the Black Panthers Summer Camp, they must sift through Big Ma’s beliefs and the values that their mother, Cecile, lives by to figure out what makes sense to them—as readers, we get to go on that journey with them.

The girls’ mother puts on a lot of armor. To survive as an African-American woman on her own, she has to. But Delphine doesn’t understand why that armor shields Cecile from her daughters, too. That’s another journey to understanding that we take with Delphine. There are no easy fixes for Delphine. There were no easy fixes in 1968. What the author does is create an opening to understanding. Cecile gives Delphine as much knowledge and exposure as she can handle and leaves a door open for future revelations. And Rita Williams-Garcia does the same for young readers. Brava!

Gone Reading

2011-01-14T07:01:00.000-08:00

On Monday, January 10, Bink and Gollie by Kate DiCamillo and Alison McGhee, illustrated by Tony Fucile, won the 2011 Theodor Seuss Geisel Award for beginning readers. This was the sixth Geisel Medal awarded.

We’ve reflected on the Newbery and Caldecott criteria in the past, now let’s look at beginning readers and the goals of the Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) Award: “The Theodor Seuss Geisel Award recognizes the author(s) and illustrator(s) of a book for beginning readers who, through their literary and artistic achievements, demonstrate creativity and imagination to engage children in reading.”

In the case of Bink and Gollie, the heroines themselves demonstrate creativity and imagination to engage children in reading. Gollie hikes “high in the pure air of the Andes Mountains” without ever leaving her house in the treetops. Bink in some ways plays the role of the beginning reader, as when Gollie leaves a note on her door while on her adventure that states: “To whom it may concern: I am on a journey….” And Bink says, “I’m baffled. Am I ‘whom’?” When Bink goes away and comes back, she finds another note: “Bink, I implore you, do not knock.” Bink wonders, “What does implore mean?” as she knock knock knocks at Gollie’s door. Young readers can figure out the general meaning from the context, but the words may well prompt children to pause and puzzle out their meaning, and then adopt the words for themselves.

The three brief stories, told mostly through dialogue, keep readers captivated. Fucile’s illustrations (which garnered a New York Times Best Illustrated Book citation) ramp up the humor. Take Gollie’s trip to the Andes, for instance. Inside, Gollie’s house is transformed into snow-capped mountains, while outside, Bink stands on the same familiar landing and knocks at the door where she always comes to call. In another episode, Bink buys a goldfish, and Fucile depicts Bink holding up Fred’s fish bowl in the movie theater so he can see, too. In my other favorite moments: when Bink goes to buy her “outrageous” socks, only her eyes and spiky hair clear the store’s counter; Bink and Gollie “compromise” by meeting on the stairway halfway between their two homes for pancakes (the striped sock that Bink forfeits in the deal serves as Gollie's wind sock--a fun pun--and later winds up on the summit of Gollie’s Andes Mountains).

Bink and Gollie stretch the vocabulary beyond the limits of your usual beginning reader (think Cat in the Hat, Frog and Toad, George and Martha). But the challenging words, couched in humor, are ones children will want to collect and try on for size in similar contexts. We may raise a generation of readers who say, “With whom am I speaking?” or “Don’t take my bike, I implore you.” Just when you thought text messages were butchering the language, here come Bink and Gollie to make the case for eloquence and cleverness!

Books to Chew On

2011-01-07T00:52:00.000-08:00

Board books are the ideal format for toddlers, and certainly they are safe for newborns, too. But even better for babies are cloth books. Their soft pages can be balled up in tiny fists, and drooled over, then thrown in the washing machine. Add to that some sound effects, like the crackling sound of the pages in Crinkle Animals: Farm, and nearly all of your baby’s senses will be engaged.

Studies have shown that with newborns, one of the key elements to capture babies’ attention is contrasting images such as black and white. All of the animals in Farm feature black-and-white elements, with the bold black outline and white feathers or fur—except for the pig finale, in a blush of pink (and a kiss mark on its cheek). There are no words in the book, allowing you to improvise with your baby to see what he or she responds to—animal sounds, animal names, perhaps a game of hide-and-seek with the page turn (Where did the cow go? There it is!). It’s soft enough to go in the crib or stroller, and the crunchy sound will help baby find it if it winds up beneath a leg or belly.

Doubt and Faith

2010-12-17T07:55:00.000-08:00

There are so few Christmas-themed books aimed at teens, and I’m hard pressed to think of any with the staying power of Katherine Paterson’s Angels & Other Strangers. The nine short stories here focus on young people and adults experiencing the kinds of crises of faith that often creep up during adolescence—and a single event that brings about a change in perspective.

Over the years, many of the teens and adults I’ve spoken with have described going through their catechism, confirmation, bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah—a rite of passage at the center of their communities of faith designed to welcome them in—and finding themselves questioning that very community. It’s such a common experience of adolescence, yet we rarely talk about it amongst ourselves or with teens. We become complicit in a silent agreement that in “polite society” we don’t discuss religion or politics. But books like Katherine Paterson’s can help young people feel less isolated if they’re experiencing a sense of alienation from their religion, and to know that doubt is part of developing a lasting faith.

Many of our country’s citizens came to our shores to escape religious persecution. Not just the Puritan pilgrims, but throughout history—Jewish families seeking refuge during World War II, Muslim refugees from Kosovo, the subject of Paterson’s The Day of the Pelican. Growing up in a family that practices religion is not always easy. Communities are made up of individuals, and a teenager who questions his or her religion does not always feel there are places to go to talk about those questions. And the wide range of religions and cultures in America also make us feel that we’re in a largely secular society, making teens feel they must be believers in secret.

Books like Katherine Paterson’s let teens know they’re not alone, that there are many stages within a religious practice, and that it’s also normal to doubt. Some of the characters in these nine stories are in a crisis of faith, like Carol, the mother in “Tidings of Joy.” Others are in a period of doubt, like Carl, the father in “Star of Night.” Or they have only ever known doubt and fear, like Genevieve, the foster child in “Maggie’s Gift.” But in each story, one honest act of compassion or generosity—often from a child—leads the questioning adult or child to a place of hope, and perhaps on the road to a more lasting feeling of faith. For those times when we feel alone and faithless, these characters make good companions.

A Trusty Companion

2010-12-10T06:01:00.000-08:00

Despite all evidence to the contrary, Eva Nine in The Search for WondLa, written and illustrated by Tony DiTerlizzi, feels certain that there are other human beings like her. She is forced outside of the Sanctuary she shares with her robot guardian Muthr, and finds other creatures, but they too look nothing like her. The elegant two-tone double-page illustrations that open each chapter pull you into this futuristic world where things are out of balance, and Eva is trying to find out why.

It’s a quest story with a girl at the center, surrounded by her trusted creatures, most notably Rovender Kitt (the blue-hued rabbit-like Caerulean) but also Otto (the armored water bear). These creatures, both male, and the fast-paced adventure and advanced weapons will keep boys, too, glued to the pages. (Plus there’s an augmented reality feature: if you have a Web cam and go to Wondla.com to download the software, you can experience WondLa-Vision—by holding up several spreads from the book, you can see a 3-D map of Orbona. But that’s an added bonus to a completely satisfying straight reading experience.)

The Search for WondLa is an example of beautiful bookmaking—a thick volume with creamy pages into which you and your youngsters can happily escape over the winter break when the days are short and a great story makes the best companion through the long winter nights.

A Birthday Party for Jesus

2010-12-03T07:19:00.000-08:00

Who knew that the story of the birth of Jesus could be told so simply yet so completely? In The Child in the Manger, Liesbet Slegers distills the events related in the Gospel of Luke to their barest elements. Mary and Joseph are on a journey: “They knocked on many doors. But nobody would take them in.” They are grateful to find a stable “because Mary wanted to lie down. She felt that her child would be born soon.” Slegers’s version is an example of superb storytelling because she never loses sight of her audience.

In a recent interview, Liesbet Slegers talked about her approach to The Child in the Manger, and she said that she took her story into the schools as she was working on it (from the link to the interview, you may also read the book throughout the month of December online free). She said she read it over and over again to “test my ‘book to be,’ ” to make sure it was connecting with her audience. Margaret Wise Brown, author of Goodnight Moon, did the same thing. She went into New York City classrooms and tried out her stories with the students.

Slegers captures the sense of wonder at the birth of Jesus, with the angel, the shepherds, and the three kings all playing their parts in the story. And then she brings that sense of wonder into a context that’s familiar to children. The idea of Christmas as a birthday party for Jesus, at which we all get presents, is one that nearly every child can comprehend—and celebrate!

Fireside Stories

2010-11-26T07:02:00.000-08:00

Those of you who have been following along for awhile know how often I trumpet the virtues of reading aloud. That’s why I can’t resist recommending Tomie dePaola’s version of The Night Before Christmas, for youngest book lovers.

To me, the holidays are an opportunity for celebrating not only the pilgrims’ landing, Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa but also for gathering around the fire with a great book and reading aloud as a family. After all, at the heart of each holiday we celebrate there are great stories of courage and commitment, of people through the centuries who followed their hearts and maintained a sense of integrity. Reading aloud is a long held tradition in my family, and one I’ve carried with me into the classroom and continue to this day. I read passages aloud to friends and family, and welcome every chance I can to start off my nephews, nieces, and any young reader in my life, with a great book by reading aloud the first chapter.

If this is not already a tradition in your family, the holidays are a great time to start a new one!

Ahoy, Comics Fans!

2010-11-19T05:54:00.000-08:00

The best graphic format books entice young people—even those who would not describe themselves as readers—because they’re caught up in the scene before they're even conscious of becoming engaged. They want to understand what’s going on, so they begin reading the dialogue balloons. Before they know it, they’re hooked. The Unsinkable Walker Bean by Aaron Renier, colored by Alec Longstreth, adds to that winning formula a delectable pirate adventure, a kidnapping and an evil pair of gargantuan merwitches. Who could resist?

There’s also a budding friendship between Walker Bean and Shiv, a teen on the ship’s crew who looks out for him, and an unexpected ally (we won’t say who). Renier has a knack for creating cavernous interiors (such as the pirate ship’s hull) and claustrophobic street scenes, and his pacing is superb. Kids who are true comics aficionados will also appreciate the color by Aaron Reiner. I hadn’t realized how essential the colorist was to successful comics until I spoke with Gene Luen Yang and Derek Kirk Kim about their collaboration, The Eternal Smile. Like music in a film, color sets the mood; it also indicates a change in location and, in the case of Walker Bean, the decision to make him the sole blond means he can easily be spotted even in a crowded street or a pirates’ brawl.

If your teen enjoys making his or her own comics, be sure to recommend Adventures in Cartooning. Even though it’s in our ages 8-12 section, it’s funny and sophisticated enough to appeal to teens, too. And its tips for making comics are some of the easiest to follow and to immediately put to use.

(Nearly) Happily Ever After

2010-11-12T06:21:00.000-08:00

Do you remember telling scary stories around the campfire or at sleepover parties? The best scary stories were always funny, too. I know I’ve talked about that thin line between scary and funny in the past, but there’s something about that moment when you can release all the terrifying tension with laughter that creates a great sense of relief. I think that’s the secret to the success of A Tale Dark and Grimm by Adam Gidwitz.

He has a way of saying, “Here comes the best part,” but with a sense of irony. At the end of the “Brother and Sister” section, he says, “I will tell you, as I always tell myself, that things will get better. Much, much better. I promise. Just not quite yet.” He tantalizes and taunts in the best possible way. It’s as if he’s saying, “Cover your eyes for this part,” knowing you will peer through your fingertips.

The other aspect of his writing that’s surprising (aside from the here-comes-the-scary-part-close-your-eyes aspect, which makes you laugh instead of tremble), at least for me, was the way he threaded together the well-known tales to make something completely new. With a slight adjustment, he makes “Brother and Sister” into an environmental story: the punishment comes to Hansel because he’s taking more from Lebenwald, the Wood of Life, than he needs. In a retelling of “Robber Bridegroom” (called “A Smile as Red as Blood”), Gretel is not all innocence: she ventures where her kind guardian warns her not to go. But each of the siblings learns something from those experiences that they apply in a later chapter of the book.

Even if the young person (or people) in your life is the most dedicated of Brothers Grimm fans, he or she cannot help but be impressed by how Adam Gidwitz reinvents their stories here. This is the ideal book for these long winter nights… Meh heh heh heh (think Vincent Price laughter…).

The Power of Persuasion

2010-11-04T19:33:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, I had the privilege of leading a discussion of five humorous picture books at Book Fest at the Bank Street College of Education in New York. A Pig Parade Is a Terrible Idea by Michael Ian Black, illustrated by Kevin Hawkes, was one of them. The discussion group included teachers, public librarians, school librarians, college instructors of children’s literature, and reviewers. My favorite comment came from a school librarian.

At first, she did not love the book. But because it was on our discussion list, she read it and reread it. She began to change her mind about the book. Then she thought, “This would be a great example of persuasive writing for the fourth grade teachers to use with their students.” When she told this to the group, you could see the idea spread like a virus through the room, indicated by the “aha” expression that lit up everybody’s faces. A sixth-grade teacher had said as we introduced ourselves that she was using picture books to teach examples of good writing to her students. She looked particularly pleased.

I’ve thought a lot about that librarian’s insight. It reminded me of Avi’s observation at an NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) conference that humor books rarely win the awards, but humorous writing is very hard to do well. (Avi went on to win a Newbery Honor, but not for his humor books—it was for a historical novel The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle.) Why not cite A Pig Parade Is a Terrible Idea as an example of persuasive writing? After all, one of the greatest examples of using humor to make a persuasive argument is, as far as I know, still taught in higher institutions of learning, and it dates back to the 18th century: Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” (And even at the pigs’ most piggish they could never achieve the kind of repulsive reaction that Swift’s proposal might from its more literal-minded listeners.) With Pig Parade, we can get children started at a far younger age to think about creative ways to make their arguments, and the kind of comical examples they could employ in service to their causes.

A Pooch Parade

2010-10-29T06:19:00.000-07:00

When I walk my dog in New York’s Riverside Park, no matter what time of day it is, I see a procession of pooches. Children constantly ask their parents and caregivers—and occasionally the dog owners themselves—“What kind of dog is that?” (Mine is a rescue dog of mysterious origins, so the answer is: Dachshund, Chihuahua, with maybe some beagle thrown in.) Walk the Dog by Bob Barner makes a terrific travel companion for these young minds curious about canines. The dogs on display in the oversize board book pages range from the familiar (“Hound Dog” and “Pug”) to the more exotic (“Queensland Heeler”).

Once a child takes an interest, you can encourage him or her to widen the investigation--with photographic books of dogs, books devoted to one breed, and wackier offshoots such as William Wegman’s fairy tales and adventures starring his pristine Weimaraners. This alphabetical introduction to dogs of all shapes, sizes, and colors is a great way to get toddlers started and to help them name the furry creatures they encounter in their daily routines.

Future Society

2010-10-21T22:58:00.000-07:00

What would a society of the future look like? Nomansland by Lesley Hauge inspires us to ask ourselves this question.

Would societies of the future scoff at Barbie dolls, high heels, and nail polish? Would they yearn for separation of the sexes to omit distractions? Is that really so far off from some pockets of our culture in which citizens strive to stave off modern technology and attitudes?

How do we as human beings respond to these restrictions? Some of us embrace firm guidelines: someone else can determine the rules, I will simply follow them, we might say. On the other hand, especially in adolescence, we may wish to see how far we can stretch the rules. What happens then? What are the consequences? Nomansland makes a nice pairing with The Hunger Games because they both ask the question, how do we fight for our families, peer group, or way of life if it means putting others in peril? What are the consequences of my actions?

Futuristic novels often raise questions from a slight remove, asking us to evaluate what is important to us now, and what will be important to us going forward. Nomansland does just that.

Passing

2010-10-15T00:39:00.000-07:00

At the center of the mystery in Zora and Me, someone is not being honest about who she is, and the effects of her lie ripple through both the black community of Eatonville and the white community of Lake Maitland.

When Zora and Carrie go with Mrs. Hurston into Lake Maitland, they see Mrs. Hurston present the situation with a little white lie, in order to fly under the radar of the white shopkeeper. And the girls encounter a woman named Gold. “She was the sun,” Carrie thinks. Gold makes a beeline for Zora and Carrie, and Carrie thinks, “Whatever it was that made her so beautiful must have been inside of us, too.” But Mrs. Hurston knows who she is even if, for her own protection, she presents a slightly different picture to the shopkeeper. Gold, however, lives a deception, and when she walks away from the girls, Mrs. Hurston says, “She best be careful about being too friendly with people she gave up her place with.”

I had a chance to talk with Victoria Bond and T.R. (Tanya) Simon about their process in writing this book. I found myself telling them about when the public schools started busing in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I was in third grade, just a little younger than Carrie and Zora in their novel. My best friend was a new girl who was bussed into South Westnedge School, Theresa. During one of our weekly Sunday visits, my grandfather said something about how “no granddaughter of mine is going to go to school with colored people.” I was eight years old, and I can still remember what I was wearing. I thought about that word, “colored.” I thought, “What does that mean?” And then, “Is Theresa colored?” And then it dawned on me: I could never tell Poppy about Theresa. I would have to keep her a secret.

When I told that story to Vicky and Tanya, they pointed out that this was a “passing story.” Vicky said, “With the introduction of race, we now have the introduction of a secret.” Tanya added, “And then you become involved in your own passing story. You pass as someone who holds values that you don’t actually hold in your heart. This is why there’s been the emergence of race studies, where white people suffer under racism as well as blacks. You always have to think, what happens to you at the point that you dehumanize a person?”

With Zora and Me as an entry point, children can talk about what happens to us at the point that we dehumanize a person, and what it feels like to be deprived of humanity. Only by talking about the subtle and not-so-subtle ways people look past or ignore each other can we begin to see and appreciate one another fully. By discussing a fiction, we can get at the truth.

Topsy-Turvy

2010-10-08T06:18:00.000-07:00

Peter Brown’s sense of humor in his latest picture book is completely in sync with his audience. Children love to role-play, and the idea of a boy acting the part of a misbehaving kitten or puppy—the way “Squeaker” does in Children Make Terrible Pets—will have them laughing until their sides hurt.

Squeaker is housebroken, but other than that, he has everything in common with a new pet run amok—messing up furniture, being a poor tea party guest—and he even runs away. The advantage Squeaker has—at least in Brown’s images—is that he knows how to play to the camera: us. Even if your child has never had a pet, he or she will recognize these situations. The boy can conjure all sorts of associations. (Squeaker can also be a stand-in for the annoying younger sibling.) The fact that a bow- and tutu-wearing bear wants to “tame” or “train” the boy only adds to the comedy.

Peter Brown (no relation) is quickly developing a repertoire of outlandish situations with familiar underpinnings—or perhaps he can simply predict the future. His The Curious Garden pictured a seemingly impossible green space high above a bustling city. But just a few weeks ago, when my aunt, uncle,

and their friends were visiting from Michigan, we visited just such a place: The High line, winding through the upper echelons of New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood.

So the next time you see a bow- and tutu-clad cub, check to see if she has a Squeaker in tow…

Getting Word-Rich

2010-10-01T05:50:00.000-07:00

As babies begin to put sounds together and make sense of their world, we can see the delight on their faces. They are communicating with the people they love. We answer in kind, with supportive sounds and loving hugs, in the sort of call-and-response that encourages further exploration of sounds and words. These are all instinctive. The Baby Goes Beep by Rebecca O’Connell, illustrated by Ken Wilson-Max, encourages these kinds of exchanges in playful, meaningful ways.

Last week, I attended the ALSC (Association of Library Service to Children) Institute in Atlanta, Georgia. Susan B. Neuman, a professor at the University of Michigan in Educational Studies specializing in early literacy development, talked about how key this kind of wordplay is to the development of early literacy. She emphasized the importance of talking to your child (even when you’re not in the best mood), singing and playing in helping your child to develop language skills. But—no surprise to all of us who love books—“books are the single most important avenue for learning new words.”

One thing that did surprise me was when Neuman said we should always respond to babies with the correct name for the things in their world. For instance, to take a common example, if the baby says “baa baa” for “bottle,” to respond with, “Would you like your bottle?” She encouraged us to always supply the baby with accurate vocabulary, so he or she can continue to expand his or her language in vocabulary-rich ways. Neuman said it takes, on average, 28 repetitions of a word for a child to learn it.

So, the message I took from her was: Have fun with language, sing, play, shout from the rafters—and give children the proper names for the things they seek.

The Price of Belonging

2010-09-23T21:46:00.000-07:00

So much of adolescence involves discovering and defining who you are in opposition to everyone else. Do you honor the things that make you unique? Or bury them in order to be who you think others want you to be?

In The Space Between Trees by Katie Williams, someone whom 16-year-old Evie once counted as a friend has been murdered. In her loss and grief, she becomes drawn to someone she would not normally spend time with, bad girl Hadley, who makes hate lists and hangs out with people she doesn’t like but whom she can control. Evie finds herself becoming more deeply tied to Hadley and doesn’t see a way to extricate herself.

Your teen will be caught up in the mystery and wind up identifying with Evie’s feeling--if not the outer trappings of her situation. It’s a beautifully written book that explores how a series of small decisions and a wish for companionship lead Evie further from herself. And who among us has not had experience with that?

School Daze

2010-09-17T08:25:00.000-07:00

It doesn’t matter how great most of your teachers are or how much you like your subjects. Every student knows what a bad day feels like.

In School!: Adventures at the Harvey N. Trouble Elementary School by Kate McMullan, inspired and illustrated by George Booth, the author and artist make high comedy out of that cold hard fact. Certain things annoy us and happen every day exactly the same way, over and over again. Your child’s bus driver may not drive into a ditch every day, but he or she may say the exact same cloying thing every morning, or pull up in the wrong spot every day, or center the door directly above a giant mud puddle.

Certainly we can all remember the substitute teacher saga – everyone wants to get one over on the sub. It’s a free-for-all. Hence McMullan and Booth’s twist about having a non-boring sub carrying a briefcase makes more of an impact. The pun in every character’s name only makes the recognizable ticks and quirks more fun.

I recently got to hear Lizz Winstead speak at the BlogHer conference here in New York City this summer. Winstead is the co-creator and former head writer on The Daily Show, and an audience member asked her what she thought of a story on Jezebel.com that asserted The Daily Show had an underrepresented number of women writers. Winstead defended the show’s hiring practices saying, “It’s not a woman thing, it’s a nerd thing,” and that in order to write for The Daily Show you have to be a “media-consumer extraordinaire, historian and satirist.”

School makes me think of that combination. The confluence of the experiences of Kate McMullan as a former fourth-grade classroom teacher and longtime author of children’s books, and of George Booth as a seasoned New Yorker cartoonist and satirist, makes their combined take on life in the halls of a frenetic public school a wildly successful send-up. No matter how your child’s school year is going, he or she will be highly entertained by this ode to school days.

Marking a Difficult Milestone

2010-09-10T07:19:00.000-07:00

As a New Yorker, there’s a part of me that would like to be able to think of September 11 as another day in my favorite season in the city. But it’s not just any autumn day. And this year, with the controversy surrounding the building of the Muslim community center downtown, the event does not seem like it happened nine years ago. It feels very fresh and raw.

So how do we talk about the events of that day with our young people? Especially those who were either not yet born or too young to remember? Do we try to shield them from it? How can we when the images are so powerful and prevalent? 14 Cows for America by Carmen Deedy and Wilson Kimeli Naiyomah, makes an ideal choice to address these questions because of its language and simplicity.

In the book, Kimeli has been studying in America to become a doctor, and he returns to meet with the elders of his Maasai tribe. He describes the events of 9/11 to villagers in Kenya who were not there, in words that a child can comprehend:

Buildings so tall they can touch the sky?

Fires so hot they can melt iron?

Smoke and dust so thick they can block out the sun?

Kimeli requests from the elders that he be able to give his only cow, Enkarûs, to the Americans, to help them heal. And the elders respond by also giving a gift to the Americans. Fourteen cows in all. They do not ship the cows to America—it is a spiritual gift. They guard the cows for the Americans, and the herd grows in number. As Kimeli Naiyomah says in an endnote in the book, “These sacred, healing cows can never be slaughtered.”

If you and your child were to travel to Kenya, you could visit these cows--your cows--guarded by the Maasai, growing in number.

Never Too Many Chefs

2010-08-27T06:57:00.000-07:00

In It’s My Brithday by Helen Oxenbury, everyone contributes an ingredient, from the toddler birthday celebrant, to the assisting animals, and then they all help make the cake. I’ve mentioned before how my mother helped me get comfortable in the kitchen very early on: she’d tell me how much flour a recipe called for, then she'd measure it out and place it on the counter next to me. When the time came for the flour, she’d ask me to add it while she stirred – just as the birthday child does in Oxenbury’s book. Gradually, my mother gave me more responsibility, cracking an egg over the bowl (being careful not to get pieces of shell in the mix), and later holding the mixer myself.

A terrific pre-K teacher at the Manhattan New School in New York City encourages her students to make their own sandwiches—with peanut butter and jelly to start (and very safe spatula-style knives)—and teaches them to clean up afterwards. This is a life skill, learning to prepare a meal for themselves, and it’s never too soon to start learning their way around the kitchen. It’s a wonderful sense of accomplishment to sit down and share a meal that they’ve helped to prepare, just as Oxenbury’s characters do when they shout “Happy Birthday!” and pass the communal cake.

Learning Facts from Fiction

2010-08-17T13:29:00.000-07:00

I am a late convert to nonfiction – that conversion story, which occurred in college, is one I’ll save for another time. Up until that point, however, I had learned--and I continue to learn--many of the facts that I have retained in my life while reading fiction.

Heart of a Samurai by Margi Preus is an excellent example of the kind of fiction I love that has taught me a great deal about factual situations. This book lays bare the ideological chasm that existed between East and West during the 19th century, through the riveting adventures and subsequent transformation of a real person: Manjiro or, as he came to be known in America, John Mung.

Marcus Zusak’s The Book Thief helped me imagine what it might be like to live in a small town in Germany and to hide a Jewish friend from the Nazis—ordinary people living through an extraordinary time.

In Go and Come Back, Joan Abelove transported me to a small village on the Amazon where the villagers held a different perspective on life—and a vocabulary to reflect that experience. The novel inspired me to think differently about modern society’s attitudes and values.

Set in contemporary Iraq, Walter Dean Myers’ Sunrise Over Fallujah taught me more than news reports ever could about the approach to warfare and peace-keeping in the Iraq war. Coupled with his Fallen Angels, set in Vietnam where the author served as a soldier, these two books paint a full portrait of modern warfare and its toll on those who are party to it—whether they be soldiers or civilians.

The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly taught me about life in a small Texas town at the turn of the 20th century, when Darwin and the Church and the start of the industrial revolution were all influencing family life across the country.

For Heart of a Samurai, Preus culls from her extensive research the details of what the whaling ships were like, what the men ate, the conditions of the ship and the attitudes on land, which were often more provincial than those of the men at sea, naturally. The author even includes reproductions of John Mung’s drawings.

But in order to fill in his emotional life, she imagines his thoughts and conversations, which makes the book a work of fiction. What an amazing way to introduce to young people this era and the cultural history of East and West.

Literary Touchstones

2010-08-13T06:24:00.000-07:00

In Cynthia Lord's Touch Blue, Tess’s hope that Aaron, her new foster brother, will be more like Anne of Green Gables and less like the Great Gilly Hopkins got me thinking about other characters who make literary references.

This is one of those moments when I wish I were sitting at a table with three or four other book-lovers to come up with more. I know there are more. The example that leaped to mind, of course, was Mira in When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead, and her many references to Meg in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. And, though it’s slightly different because Jack becomes fascinated with Walter Dean Myers as an author rather than one particular character in his work, I do love how Miss Stretchberry starts Jack on his way in Love that Dog by Sharon Creech, with examples of various poets, and then he finds Myers’ work and mines the author’s books himself. In John Green’s Paper Towns, Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” from Leaves of Grass holds clues that are key to the mystery of Margo’s whereabouts, but that’s (obviously) not a children’s book.

I know there are more. Can you think of other books whose characters make literary references to sum up their situation? We’ll have a virtual round-table discussion.

Reading Buddies

2010-08-06T03:18:00.000-07:00

How I wish I’d had How Rocket Learned to Read by Tad Hills when I was teaching reading and writing!

Yes, it’s a book about learning to read, but it’s also a story of bonding over books. Have you ever thought, “Ooo, I like this person!” because you liked the same books, the same characters? Or admired someone with whom you disagreed about a book because he or she was so passionate in defense of that beloved story or poem or biography (or so eloquently against it)? Maybe once or twice they even persuaded you, or at least got you to think about something differently, or to return to a passage and reread it.

At the risk of alienating you, I’ll admit that I am one of the few people in America who does not love Eat, Pray, Love. I acknowledge there are some scenes described by Gilbert that are truly memorable, such as some of the cultural traditions of Bali in the “Love” section. But I found Gilbert’s voice disingenuous. I have, however, had some thought-provoking conversations about this book. One of my favorites was with a friend who, when I told her my reaction to the book said, “Oh, I heard the first section was annoying, so I skipped “Eat” and just read “Pray, Love.”

I have another friend who, at the time when Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities was all the rage, felt bogged down in the middle, so he just skipped to the end. I had always been a traditional “start at the beginning and go straight through” sort of reader, and even though I, too, had felt bogged down in the middle of Vanities, I kept plodding through the pages. But after that conversation, I started abandoning books that didn’t hold my attention. That was a big change for me, and I enjoyed reading more because I only read the books I liked (I stuck with Eat, Pray, Love because it was so important to several people who kept recommending the book until I read it; but that was an exception, not the rule). I share that strategy with young readers because I’d rather see them toss aside one book than to give up on reading for pleasure completely.

I admire the little yellow bird in How Rocket Learned to Read. She knows just which story will pique Rocket’s interest and just when to stop reading to keep him coming back. All of us who love books know that he has a wonder-filled journey ahead of him, especially with his reading buddy at his side.

Fostering a Kinship with Nature

2010-07-30T07:13:00.001-07:00

The Water Hole by Graeme Base is a great way to bring awareness to youngest children about other animals around the globe, their habitats and common needs. I believe that one of the great gifts we can give young people is an appreciation of nature. If we encourage them to explore the natural world with a sense of adventure and also with the sense of peace and tranquility to be found in nature, they will likely become willing to do what they can to take care of their planet.

I don’t believe it’s fair to fill their minds with tales of global warming or disappearing species when there’s so little they can do to help at this age. But if they begin to identify animals, put a name to them, and match them to their natural habitats, they will start to develop an awareness of the other creatures and plants with which they share this glorious planet.

When Jerry Pinkney gave his acceptance speech last month for the 2010 Caldecott Medal for his book The Lion and the Mouse, he said that as a child visiting the zoo in the 1940s, he was troubled by the “dark, musty structures” that held the big cats, pacing their cages with blank stares. His artwork reflects a lifelong love and close study of nature, a passion that he shares with the young readers who open his books and the adults who visit the museums where his fine art is on display.

As children count the animals or pick out the comical frogs on the pages of The Water Hole, and search for the animals hidden in the shadows and tree branches, they will continue to get familiar and comfortable with these creatures. They'll start to recognize the animals the next time they see them in photographs, films, or at the zoo, and may well begin to feel a sense of kinship with them.

A Killer with a Conscience

2010-07-23T07:28:00.000-07:00

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins is action-packed adventure from the first paragraph. Even though it is set in the future, this fictional world strongly resembles our own. Because both male and female protagonists play pivotal roles, the book appeals to all readers. And once you’ve read Catching Fire, the second book in the trilogy, you can’t help but go back to The Hunger Games, looking for clues that led to this or that plot twist. And you will find them.

That’s the other reason these books appeal to all ages and genders: There’s suspense and mystery for readers who love’em, and the writing is masterful for the prolific readers who admire intricate plotting and strong character development. The Hunger Games came out before I started Twenty by Jenny, but it’s one book I don’t want you or your teen to miss. And you still have time to read it and Catching Fire before the release of the trilogy’s conclusion, Mockingjay, on August 24, 2010.

Your teen can read these books for pure entertainment, but there’s also plenty here to leave readers thinking. Katniss must fight for her life, but she does it with a conscience. Her motives are pure and her loyalty unshakable.

Pink Wheelchairs Aren’t “Cute”

2010-07-16T08:13:00.000-07:00

Melody Brooks, who narrates Out of My Mind, brought me right back to fourth grade reading class at Parkwood Upjohn Elementary School in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and my classmate Joy. In the novel, Melody says, “By the way, there is nothing cute about a pink wheelchair,” with the brand of wit that I remember from Joy. In addition to having started busing to racially integrate the Kalamazoo Public Schools the prior year (in 1971), Parkwood Upjohn served a physically challenged population. The school had a small swimming pool for physical therapy, and ramps for students who required wheelchairs.

Joy was funny and smart and often added a pithy remark or two at just the right time. Unlike Melody in Out of My Mind, Joy could speak easily, but her torso and limbs had ceased to grow, and she relied on a wheelchair to get her from place to place—though she could also use canes to advance her immobile legs. An aid helped Joy get from place to place, but other than that she seemed very self-sufficient to my nine-year-old mind. The teachers went a long way to create a space in which we all treated Joy as one of us.

Not until many years later when I read an article called “Unspeakable Conversations” by Harriet McBryde Johnson in the New York Times Magazine did I consider how much work must have gone into Joy’s daily routine. In her article, Johnson, a lawyer and disability rights activist and advocate born with a muscle-wasting disease, talks about a debate she had with Professor Peter Singer in her home state of South Carolina. She begins her article this way, “He insists he doesn't want to kill me. He simply thinks it would have been better, all things considered, to have given my parents the option of killing the baby I once was, and to let other parents kill similar babies as they come along and thereby avoid the suffering that comes with lives like mine and satisfy the reasonable preferences of parents for a different kind of child. It has nothing to do with me. I should not feel threatened.” But in the course of the article, she talks about how her debates with Singer (he later invites her to speak at Princeton University, where he teaches) cause her to reflect on the complexities of humanity and society. She’s candid about the fact that her willingness to look at Singer not as “a monster” but as a person, beyond the views he holds, allowed them both to achieve a level of honesty rarely achieved in public discourse. It made me think about the missed opportunities buried inside political correctness and the ways in which honest dialogue can at least open up our thinking if not change our minds. When Harriet McBryde Johnson died at the age of 50 in 2008, Peter Singer’s tribute showed that her views had also caused him to reflect on the complexities of humanity and society.

Johnson also wrote a moving novel for teens called Accidents of Nature. What comes through in both Johnson and Draper’s writing is how much people with physical challenges just want to be treated with respect like anyone else.

The Power of Choice

2010-07-09T06:37:00.000-07:00

Children make choices every day, but they may not always be conscious of what they are doing. They choose chocolate over vanilla. They choose blue socks over green socks. Those choices are easy. But what about the decision to include a neighbor in a game or to leave that child out? Sometimes it feels much harder to invite a child to play than it does to simply not make that phone call or avoid walking by his or her house—or leave him or her standing on the sidelines.

Laura Vaccaro Seeger’s What If? is brilliantly understated. She makes no judgments. She simply shows a scene in which two seals are playing in the water with a beach ball, and the arrival of a third seal on the beach introduces a situation where a choice must be made. Because these are seals, Seeger keeps them relatively neutral—their only differences are in the markings on their coats. It’s not about one seal luring another away with flash or style. The gray seal comes to the beach to retrieve the ball. The gray seal can run off with the ball and with the newly arrived brown seal and abandon the beige seal in the water. Or it can return with the ball to the beige seal and leave out the newly arrived brown seal; or all three can play together (the final scene).

This book is a great conversation-starter for when these situations arise, whether your youngster is the one being left out, or party to leaving out another child. It’s also a nice way to open up a discussion before a situation like this ever arises. We all know that summer with its long stretches of unstructured time is ideal for pulling together a neighborhood game of hide-and-seek or gathering everyone at the baseball diamond, and situations like the one featured in What If? are likely to occur. Another title that touches on a related theme, if one neighborhood child is dominating the playing field, is Kathryn Otashi’s One. The idea of one person reaching out to or standing up for another is simple yet powerful. And both of these books demonstrate to young people that any child can make that choice.

Laying the Groundwork

2010-07-02T06:24:00.000-07:00

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “No way. I finally got my kids out of school, and she’s already talking about the first day back.” Yes, you’re right. Feel free to tuck this one away until August. Or, you might think about it another way.

Mouse’s First Day of School by Lauren Thompson, illustrated by Buket Erdogan, is really a story about Mouse hiding in a backpack and going to school accidentally. In the process, Mouse takes the mystery (and therefore the anxiety) out of that very first day. And if you begin reading this little Mouse adventure in, say, very late July or early August, by the time school comes around, this will all be old hat. Your preschooler or kindergartner will be far less intimidated than he or she might have been.

Recently, I got to witness the value of arming a toddler with information as my brother and sister-in-law prepared my two-year-old niece, Maggie, to undergo open heart surgery. She was born with a hole in her heart, just like her mother. For weeks, Suzie (her mother) talked to Maggie in simple terms about what the procedure would involve. They would give her something to help her sleep through the operation, the doctors would sew up the hole in her heart, and afterwards, she would wake up to see Mommy and Daddy there, and she would have a scar on her chest, just like Mommy’s. (I might be leaving out a step or two, but you get the idea.) Every once in a while, Maggie would check in with her mother to ask a question or to make sure that she understood how it would go. “We have matching scars, Mommy?” she would ask. By the time Maggie got in the car to head out for her surgery, she knew the steps by heart. The hardest thing for her was leaving her big brother, seven-year-old Tiger, behind.

If you’ve been with me for awhile, you know that I’m a big believer that children can understand a great deal, and that whatever they can’t take in, they will simply ignore. So even if it seems like your toddler is not taking in Mouse’s first exposure to a classroom setting, you may be surprised on that maiden trip when he or she walks into that preschool or kindergarten room and says, “Look! There are blocks, just like Mouse’s!”

Griefstricken

2010-06-25T06:19:00.000-07:00

Grief is such an all-consuming experience. When grief strikes, the ground shifts like an earthquake, and then the tremors continue for days, weeks, months, often when we least expect them. It’s hard to see or hear anyone or anything else. Jandy Nelson captures that experience so beautifully in The Sky Is Everywhere when Lennie says, “It’s as if someone vacuumed up the horizon while we were looking the other way.” When her sister, Bailey, dies, Lennie looks for ways to feel intense alternative emotions, like getting involved with her sister’s boyfriend, and then creating a love triangle with Joe Fontaine—and shutting out everyone else. And then there’s that feeling of, why do I deserve to make a life when my sister’s has ended?

All of us who have lost someone close to us know that the intensity of the feelings may lessen with time, but the feeling of loss never really goes away. We just learn how to carry that person with us. Lennie does it through her poems to her sister, set adrift in the river or aloft on a breeze. We find ways to honor their spirit, the music they loved, the dreams they dreamed. The tension in The Sky Is Everywhere resides in the question of whether or not Lennie will allow herself to pursue the music she herself loves and her own dreams.

When my mother died, a friend who had also lost her mother told me, “It’s like living underwater.” And it was. It felt like everything was happening at a remove. I could see that the world was still spinning and that life was going on around me, but I felt separated from all of it. Gradually, I surfaced again, but it took time, and everything was different when I did. In The Sky Is Everywhere, we watch Lennie during her underwater period—loving and laughing but at a remove, seemingly unaware of the consequences of her actions. And then we see her come to the surface. It’s how she gets there that makes Lennie’s story such a moving and healing experience.

Making (Fun) Choices

2010-06-18T05:40:00.000-07:00

Meanwhile by Jason Shiga is a graphic novel version of a choose-your-own-adventure. It's about making choices and discovering the consequences of those choices, presented in a fun, entertaining way. There’s also a memory element involved because you want to avoid taking a path that leads you back to the same destination (though that seems inevitable, at least until you get the hang of it). As you go through the book, you also gain an appreciation of imagination—mostly Shiga’s, but also of what the human imagination is capable of—between Professor K’s inventions and the offhand explanation of physics, and the idea that our choices lead us to unexpected places, both physically and mentally. And it's all couched in a kind of Three Stooges slapstick comedy framework. As Shiga connects various plot paths to the multi-colored tubes, he leads us through the tabbed pages in unorthodox ways, on a journey of possibilities—3,856 possibilities, to be exact.

This is the ideal book for a long car trip or a rainy summer afternoon, when a child can plunge into Meanwhile with complete abandon, and no sense of time passing. The pages require that you engage your brain fully, to pick up on visual cues, so that you remember which tube(s) you’ve already followed and which new tube(s) may yield a different outcome. Then follow it with Adventures in Cartooning to get some idea of the structural planning and visual pacing required to complete a project like Meanwhile. Your child will be lost in it for hours and will want to share it with friends. No Kindle or iPad can create this kind of experience.

Moved to Act

2010-06-11T06:26:00.000-07:00

In Moon Bear, readers follow the majestic creature through the seasons as it scrounges for food and finds shelter high in the Chinese Himalayas, and the book ends with the birth of cubs. When any of us is in the presence of animals, whether it be a tiny kitten or an 8-foot bear, we cease to think of anything else. Especially for children, such an encounter can be awe-inspiring. They immediately want to protect and preserve this life form—it’s one of the reasons I suspect that, despite the controversy surrounding even the best of zoo environments, we humans continue to build zoos. Once children are exposed to these animals, they want to preserve them.

When editor Laura Godwin learned about the moon bears and how they were being held in captivity (the bears are farmed for the healing properties of their bile), she wanted to do something about it besides just make a donation. She wanted others to know about the bears. She asked science and nature writer Brenda Guiberson (whose books Laura has edited for more than 20 years) if she knew about the bears and would be interested in writing about their situation. Once Brenda agreed, Laura approached Caldecott medalist Ed Young (whom Laura has also worked with for a number of years) and he, too, agreed.

Laura and Brenda felt it was important to let children know that there were adults working to rescue the moon bears, and that there were ways they, too, could help if they wished. The reference to the bears’ captivity is very subtle in the book (the text refers to “poachers”) but the end note shows rehabilitated bears and gives a link to find out more about Jill Robinson and her team at Animals Asia who are rescuing the bears. Your child will be reassured that efforts are well underway to rescue these magnificent creatures. And if they want to help, there are concrete ways to do so.

Pillowy Pages

2010-06-04T06:39:00.000-07:00

For us grown-up book lovers, nothing gladdens our hearts more than to see a baby cuddle up with a book—literally. We've all seen babies take to a book so strongly that they carry it around wherever they go, sit on it in their car seats, stow it on their high chair trays and fall asleep on it in their cribs. That’s one of the reasons I was delighted to discover the Fuzzy Bee and Squishy Turtle Pack by Roger Priddy. Not only can a baby snuggle up with Fuzzy Bee and Friends—and use its crackly pages as a pillow—but the bold stripes and contrasting colors captivate youngest eyes that can’t quite pick up details yet. Plenty of books for babies present the facts, but both Fuzzy Bee and Squishy Turtle deliver information with a touch of humor, too.

Here’s an idea: Maybe publishers could create cloth books for us grown-ups, too. One of my most moving memories of my grandmother, as she began to lose her short-term memory, was when she took me to her room because she wanted to show me something. She had carefully made her bed, and it was littered with hardcover books. She told me, “I want all my books with me.” There was just a narrow space in the center of the bed where her long, lean body could fit. I don’t know how she slept with all those books dominating her sleeping space. Now, if she could have created a makeshift bumper pad of cloth-covered books, think how well she might have slept!

Wouldn’t it be nice to be surrounded by our favorite books, softly bound in quilted covers? Imagine how sweet our dreams would be. Babies have that luxury, so let’s indulge them!

Going It Alone

2010-05-28T06:14:00.000-07:00

White Cat by Holly Black is all about the experience of adolescence as a solo journey. All of the members of Cassel Sharpe’s family were born with a gift; each is a curse worker who can alter memories or dreams or life itself. Cassel doesn’t understand why he doesn’t have the gift. He doesn’t fit in with his peers (because of his family’s heritage—curse-working was banned in 1929) nor does he feel that he belongs in his family. Adolescence is all about questioning. Why is my body changing? What do I believe? Where do I belong? It is during this period—when you feel entirely alone—that you discover who you are, what you enjoy, what is uniquely yours.

The best YA authors explore this central experience of adolescence in new and interesting ways, as Holly Black does here. She answers none of these questions, but raises them in a fictional context and from different perspectives to allow teens to examine these questions for themselves. Cassel’s family tells him that he killed Lila Zacharov, but this makes no sense to him. He loved Lila. Something also seems off about his memories of the night that he supposedly killed her. And he’s been having strange dreams about a white cat. Little by little his instinct to investigate these nagging questions leads him to discover that his family is not telling the truth. Are they protecting him? Or themselves? He feels betrayed by them.

What do you do when you feel alone? You search for the answers yourself, and you begin to take responsibility for your life. This is the transition to adulthood, and while Holly Black constructs a framework of magic, the feelings and the experiences are real.

Connecting Past and Present

2010-05-21T07:45:00.000-07:00

Rick Riordan has zeroed in on my two favorite topics when I was in school: Greek myths (with his Percy Jackson and the Olympians series) and ancient Egypt (with the launch of his Kane Chronicles series earlier this month, The Red Pyramid).

In Mrs. Hecker’s seventh-grade English class I remember really locking onto the Greek myths. I had always been fascinated by them, but there’s something about the Greek gods that speaks to that point of embarkation into puberty. Perhaps it’s the adolescent behavior of many of them. Anyway, I guess you could say I never really stopped focusing on Greek mythology because I did my senior thesis in college on James Joyce’s Ulysses (which also led me back to Homer’s The Odyssey).

Some of you are likely too young to remember when the contents of Tutankhamun's tomb first traveled around the country. Again, I believe I was in junior high when King Tut came through Chicago, a mere 3-hour drive from Kalamazoo, my hometown. For the first time, all the things I’d read about and the photos I’d seen in National Geographic were sitting there in front of me in three dimensions. That made an enormous impression on me. But what I hadn’t known before reading Rick Riordan’s Kane Chronicles was the depth of influence of what was called The House of Life--the ancient school of Egyptian magic.

The House of Life earned its name because the practicing magicians were healers (through the spells they cast), and they also staved off curses and thus protected Egypt's Pharaohs. For all of us who believe that words and books can create entire worlds and spark new philosophies, there’s a precedent for that in the House of Life as well. The ancient Egyptians believed that hieroglyphs themselves created magic. As Rick Riordan put it in a recent interview:

“The ancient Egyptians considered all writing magic. They had to be careful: if they created the word ‘cat,’ they had to deface it slightly, because they believed they could create a cat. The idea was that the ultimate form of magic was to speak and the world began. You see that influence in the Gospel of John: ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ All these ancient cultures dovetail, and they were all forming and evolving at the same time.”

It’s both awe-inspiring and humbling to think about how far-reaching our roots go. To think of America, almost two-and-a-half centuries old, with seeds planted half a world away and thousands of years old makes the planet seem a bit smaller, doesn’t it? Like Carter and Sadie, the sibling protagonists of Riordan’s new series, we begin to see portals to the past all over the place.

A Sense of Wonder

2010-05-14T06:16:00.000-07:00

Zig and Wikki in Something Ate My Homework by Nadja Spiegelman, illustrated by Trade Loeffler, perfectly captures the sense of wonder that a close encounter with the natural world can inspire in us—and especially in children. Every morning I take my dog, Molly, for a long walk (unless there’s a downpour or a blizzard). Part of the week we spend in the city, and part of the week in New Jersey, where my husband and I share a cabin in the foothills of the Appalachian Trail. One spring morning last year, Molly and I came upon a bear cub, not 10 yards away. My first thought was, “This creature is magnificent!” The bear was on all fours, and we were slightly behind it (thankfully) so I couldn’t see how large it was, tip to toe, but I thought, “Wow!” It was the first time I’d ever seen a bear in the wild, and there really are no words to describe being in the presence of such a powerful, beautiful beast.

My next thought was, “Where is its mother?” Because of course I’d read many times, in both fact and fiction (Jean Craighead George’s novels leap to mind), how protective mother bears are of their cubs. Molly had not yet spied the bear (whew!), and did not bark. There was a small stone wall on the left side of the street, where the bear was, and I began to steer us to that side, so we’d be obscured from the bear’s view. He (or she) continued across the street seemingly oblivious to our presence and went on through the trees and onto a neighbor’s property. I began singing—as a camper in my Girl Scout days, I was told to make noise in bear territory so the animals wouldn’t be startled. We made it home with no further bear spotting.

A few days later, I was in the post office, and bumped into a neighbor couple (not the ones whose property the bear had entered). The husband asked me if I’d seen a bear recently, and I told him about my encounter while walking Molly. “Oh, that’s not a cub,” said the wife. “He’s at least a year old and looking for territory to claim for his own.” That explained why there was no mother.

Clearly that experience has stayed with me, and I will likely never forget it. Bears are much larger than the fly, dragonfly, toad and raccoon that Zig and Wikki encounter, but every time we get an opportunity to observe another living thing up close, we get a chance to stop and reflect on what an amazing thing life is. To watch a dragonfly dip its lovely wings close to a pond’s surface or observe the concentration of a raccoon when it’s stalking its prey (or trying to get into a garbage can, as I witnessed many times growing up in Michigan) is to be reminded of the majesty in life’s small moments.

I can think of no better way to engender in children a sense of wonder and an appreciation of nature than through direct experience and careful observation. Children are quick to realize the commonalities between us and all living things, and to feel a sense of duty in preserving the world around them.

Singing Lifts the Soul

2010-05-07T06:36:00.000-07:00

Nothing takes the edge off a long car ride like a singalong. Last week, my two-year-old niece, Maggie, was petering out near the end of a three-hour–plus drive, and we started singing If You’re Happy and You Know It! How I wish we’d had Jane Cabrera’s board book with us! Suzie, Maggie’s mother, and I quickly ran out of verses. (You may remember Suzie from the Musical Literacy blog.) We could only remember the “clap your hands” and “stamp your feet” verses, and Maggie was strapped into her car seat, so we were trying to come up with verses she could do in her confined state.

As the saying goes, “Desperation is the mother of invention,” so we started making up verses (and of course, repeating them—thank goodness toddlers love to repeat things). Maggie’s favorite was “touch your nose.” We repeated that verse a lot. You know how you always think of the perfect line hours after a conversation takes place? Well, since then I’ve thought of “wiggle your ears” and “go snap, snap” (with your fingers). But the point is, there are myriad opportunities to add verses.

That’s what I enjoyed most about Jane Cabrera’s version of the song. She spices it up with humor, with the chimp clapping, the elephant stamping its very large feet, and the giraffe nodding its head at the end of a very looong neck. If we’d had Cabrera's book in our “backseat library,” we may still have run out of verses, but we would have had a much longer stretch without a repeat (more important to the adults than the toddler). It’s nearly impossible to come away from this song without feeling uplifted and energized. Altogether now, “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands!”

Finding Ourselves in Fiction

2010-04-29T20:57:00.000-07:00

Many of us turned to books when we couldn’t turn to our peers or our parents. If you’ve read through my list of Twenty Classics for teens, you already know that I learned about puberty from Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Some topics just seem too private to discuss with anyone else.

Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan tackles two of the toughest topics for young men to talk about with others: friendship with a gay male, and knowing that you’re gay but not ready to come out openly. Through the alternating first person narratives of Will Grayson and will grayson, Green and Levithan create fully formed characters who grapple with these issues sometimes clunkily and sometimes gracefully—just as teens themselves do.

The first Will Grayson (created by John Green) is a straight male whose defense of larger-than-life Tiny results in, as you might have guessed, Will also being called gay. Then there’s will grayson (created by David Levithan) who knows he’s gay but has told no one except for an online friend named Isaac, whom he arranges to meet and which occasions his chance introduction to the other Will Grayson.

Next there’s Jane, who Will thinks may or may not be gay, but who is a member of the gay alliance at school and a friend of Tiny’s. And then there’s Maura, who has an unrequited crush on will. Will and will, Tiny and Jane offend their friends, then win them back; at times one friend seems to have all the power, then it shifts back to the other friend, and sometimes they even shoulder the burden equally. This book is as much about how to communicate honestly with friends and—yes—parents, as it is about the first stirrings of attraction, and even love.

There is so much for your teen to mine here about common missteps in friendship and romance, not to mention the trademark humor of both authors (John Green you may know from Paper Towns, and David Levithan from his co-authorship with Rachel Cohn on Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, the inspiration for the feature film of the same name). What are books but emotional laboratories, where we can test our theories about other people, and safely explore our ideas about ourselves.

Nature: The Key to the Spark Within You

2010-04-22T20:55:00.000-07:00

I was 13 when I first visited Walden Pond. It was 1976, the Bicentennial, and my father had a professional conference to attend in Boston. He and my mother decided we would drive from Michigan, making stops in Lexington and Concord, Mass. We visited Louisa May Alcott’s home, where I remember thinking the rooms were so small, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s house where I seem to recall an etching on a downstairs window purportedly made with a diamond, and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s home. It was astounding to me that all of these writers I’d been reading could be so concentrated in one place. But I think stopping at Walden Pond made the biggest impact. To see the land that had inspired so many of Henry David Thoreau’s ideas--to walk where he had walked and planted and harvested--made his journal real.

Thoreau at Walden by John Porcellino impressed me greatly because his graphic novel format captured visually the feeling of setting foot on that land, and what it’s like to be alone beside the water and to smell the earth. His images of the landscape render words unnecessary in many of the sequences of panels, and he gives you room, as readers, to take in what it’s like to stand where Thoreau stood, to see what he saw.

Young people are so in touch with that sensory experience. Right now I’m staying with my seven-year-old nephew, Tiger, for a stretch here in Austin, Texas, and he and his classmates are so connected to the present. We’ve had a series of overcast and rainy days, and at the first sign of sunshine, they’re out the door, riding bikes, zipping on their scooters, playing hide-and-seek among the trees in the park. There’s something about being in nature that makes us more alive, more awake.

That’s what John Porcellino taps into in the quotes and episodes he’s chosen from Thoreau’s journals, and it’s the reason I’ve returned to his book again and again since its publication in 2008. In an interview, Porcellino said he discovered Thoreau in high school, at about the time that he began to experiment with comics. Porcellino said that his advice to young people is to “Find that spark that’s unique to you and express that.” He believes that that is a large part of what we can take from Thoreau’s philosophy, too, as a man who lived differently from his peers in 19th-century New England. Though Thoreau may not have been fully appreciated in his own time, his ideas continue to influence us today.

Decoding Language

2010-04-16T07:57:00.000-07:00

When children can't make sense of a word they hear, they will often substitute a different word that does make sense to them. But, let’s admit it, we all do it. Song lyrics leap to mind. We hear a catchy melody and want to sing along, but we’re unsure of the words, so we might mumble some consonants that faintly resemble the singer’s phrases, or we fill in a seemingly logical alternative.

One of my favorite examples in literature occurs in Bette Bao Lord’s novel, In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson, when 10-year-old Bandit Wong emigrates to the U.S. from China and has to recite the pledge of allegiance with her classmates. She says, “I pledge a lesson to the frog of the United States of America, and to the wee puppet for witches’ hands…” Even children born in this country are uncertain in elementary school about the words “allegiance” and “republic.” What exactly are we pledging and to whom?

According to an interview with author-artist Keith Baker, the idea for LMNO Peas came from hearing kids say “L-M-N-O-P” whenever they said the alphabet, as if these letters made a word. “I was sharing this with some teachers who taught pre-readers, and they said that kids don’t understand that L M N O P are actually five distinct letters,” he adds. In his book, the pea
characters work and play among the letters, emphasizing the individual letters’ shapes and sounds. Your youngsters build confidence as they master the alphabet, but all the while they feel as if they’re just being entertained. What an ideal way to learn.

A Curious Nature

2010-04-09T07:36:00.000-07:00

What is it about animals that captivate us? Maybe it’s their complete abandon. They pay close attention to whatever they are doing, especially when they’re eating, which is why we always want to be present at feeding time at the zoo or aquarium. First of all, they come from everywhere to get the food, but secondly they’re completely absorbed in what they’re doing. As we observe them, we feel like spies because—unless we interfere in some way, with a sound or a sudden movement—they seem completely unaware of us.

In Busy Birdies by John Schindel, the photographs place us in close proximity to the parrots, ducks, herons and peacocks Steven Holt captured on his camera. How often would we get near enough to a hummingbird to watch it extract nectar from a flower (“Birdy sipping”)? When young children have this opportunity to observe an animal up close, they seize it. And birds are the perfect place to start because they are so abundant—even in the city you can find sparrows, pigeons, even the occasional red-tailed hawk!

A book like this can be a way into encouraging a child’s naturally curious nature. Using that photo of a goose with its wings spread and its companion with wings retracting, you can start a conversation with a child about how geese fly, and then observe birds in flight to see what it looks like in action. Children begin to ask questions—what kind of bird is that? Why does the hummingbird sip from flowers? And that leads the way to searching out more books about birds, and maybe a hike with binoculars in tow.

I remember a friend who lives in Baltimore laughing as she told me that she’d taken her children to the zoo in Washington DC and all her kids wanted to do was follow the pigeons. Birds are so much a part of a child’s everyday experience that they naturally gravitate toward them (plus birds are smaller than they are). It’s a great place to start, and then let their curiosity lead as far as it will take them.

Finding Meaning

2010-04-02T06:06:00.000-07:00

The observance of Passover and Easter are difficult to explain to a child. They hear the stories each spring, but children aren’t really equipped to process the events recounted in those stories for years. It’s right around adolescence that young people begin to understand and take in the stories they’ve been hearing in Temple and church, about injustice, life and death, and starting over with a second chance at life.

Whatever your family’s traditions may be, nature reinforces these themes, with its renewal of life, crocuses bursting from the barren earth, blossoms forming on bare trees, and longer stretches of sunlight. A sense of hope emerges. That sense of hope is what Sam gains during the course of the seven days following her fatal injury in a car accident in the first chapter of Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver. It is not a book with religious themes, but it is a book about finding meaning in one’s life. Much of the rebellion associated with the teenage years involves finding one’s own way, not accepting as a package what we’ve always been told, questioning our parents, our teachers, our religious practices. We have to doubt in order to find a deeper sense of faith, whatever that faith may be.

When I was younger, I deeply resented the phrase (usually uttered by my grandparents or their friends) “Youth is wasted on the young.” I’ve come to think that what underlies that statement is that when we’re younger we have no sense of our mortality, so we take things for granted. As we get older, the moments matter more. Faced with the possibility of death, Sam begins to wonder, why did she abide her friend Lindsay’s cruelty? Why would Sam want the guy who makes her more in the eyes of her peers, rather than the guy who brings out the best in her? The fact that Sam is in the popular crowd makes her vulnerability all the more poignant. She begins to see things and people, including her own family, differently when she realizes they may be lost to her—forever. She begins to think about her “greatest hits,… the things I wanted to remember; the things I wanted to be remembered for.”

The Read-Aloud Streak

2010-03-25T21:53:00.000-07:00

For those of you who’ve been following along for awhile, you already know how passionately I believe in reading aloud together.

I’m privileged to serve on the Bank Street Children’s Book Committee, and one of the great pleasures I derive from the many hours we spend together discussing books is when one of the members says, “Just listen to the language here,” or “look how playful the rhythms are in this section,” and he or she proceeds to read aloud the author’s words. To sit back and let the words wash over me is sheer heaven. I have never outgrown it. And if you are truly honest with yourself, you haven’t outgrown it either. There is nothing like the sound of a true storyteller’s voice.

That brings me to the piece I discovered in last Sunday’s New York Times. A father and daughter had started what they deemed, “The Streak”—a read-aloud streak. Kristen and Jim Brozina began to read aloud together on November 11, 1997, when Kristen was in fourth grade, and read for 3,218 straight nights until her first day of college. At a time when their family’s composition was changing (Kristen’s mother left the family, and her older sister left for college), this father-daughter read-aloud ritual became a stabilizing force for them both.

And what did I think of? Another parent and child who share a love of books and, more specifically, poetry: Julie Andrews and her daughter, Emma Walton Hamilton. They share a love of writing poetry, too, and include some of their own works in Julie Andrews’ Collection of Poems, Songs, and Lullabies, illustrated by the wonderful James McMullan. Music is another powerful way into words and literacy, too, and the mother-daughter selectors include a wide range of song lyrics, not only diverse in their uplifting or melancholy tones, but also in their level of sophistication. There is plenty here for the entire family to enjoy.

Who knows, as you gather next week for Passover or Easter, you may be inspired to start a “Streak” of your own…

Rhyme Time

2010-03-18T20:45:00.000-07:00

Few things give me as much pleasure as words put together well and in surprising combinations.

Perhaps that’s why I’m continually attracted to poetry. Button Up!: Wrinkled Rhymes by Alice Schertle, illustrated by Petra Mathers, delighted me when I first read it because I’d never read a collection narrated by shoelaces, soccer jerseys and jammies, for one thing. Nor had I considered just how early we begin to think of clothes as an indication of who we are and what we do.

These poems can be enjoyed by youngest readers, all of whom can see at a glance just how cool Bertie is by his sunglasses, or how sleepy Joshua looks in his jammies, or what a call to action “Bill’s Blue Jacket” is, by its pounding beat and its invitation to step outside and see the world.

Poems—especially poems for children—can be deceiving in their simplicity. I know I’m jumping the gun a bit—Poetry Month officially begins in April—but good poetry must be read all year round. I subscribe to “The Writer’s Almanac” so that a poem arrives every morning in my e-mailbox. And luckily, the clothes that narrate the poems in Button Up! can be “worn” in all seasons.

It's spring!

2010-03-12T09:08:00.000-08:00

Dare we say it? Spring has arrived here in New York. Temperatures have been climbing to near 60 degrees, and the sun has been out (today being an exception…). And we children’s book fans know that can mean only one thing: Bunnies and flowers and birds!

Tao Nyeu celebrates not just spring, but also summer and fall in Bunny Days, her three tales about six white bunnies. With a disarmingly simple text and artwork, she introduces the cycle of nature to toddlers who are often the first to notice a bird, frog or butterfly in our midst.

Perhaps my favorite quality about the book, because it’s so difficult to do well, is the way Tao Nyeu plays with fact and fancy. Would someone vacuum the leaves outside, and thus accidentally vacuum up the bunnies from their warren? Would real bunnies hang on the clothes line to dry after a spin in the washing machine? Of course not! But the nature of the illogical scenarios allows toddlers and preschoolers in on the joke. They already know how bunnies behave. They already know that vacuum cleaners belong inside, not outside. Just as they know balls are outside toys—or at least, they know that balls don’t belong in the living room.

Yet, because of the way Mr. and Mrs. Goat come across in the artwork, it seems perfectly plausible that they would vacuum outside or accidentally clip a cottontail while trimming the hedges. They always seem just a bit absentminded or distracted. And this leads to the other fun, gentle commentary: the bunnies are always alert and aware. So the contrast between the bunnies and Mr. and Mrs. Goat lays the groundwork for the jokes. Luckily, Bear is as alert as the bunnies and always has a solution for both the Goats and the bunnies. And because Bear is neither male nor female, goat nor bunny, Bear can be whoever the toddler reader needs Bear to be—loving guardian, caregiver, teacher, aunt or uncle.

I’ll stop there, but let me just say that this book rewards multiple readings. Each time I do, I am ever more impressed with what Nyeu accomplishes with so few words, colors, and brushstrokes.

A Sense of Personal Responsibility

2010-03-04T21:33:00.000-08:00

Recently, we’ve been talking about young people who took action out of a sense of personal responsibility. People like Claudette Colvin who, at age 15, decided she could no longer abide the segregationist rules on public buses. As an African American, she would not give up her seat to a white passenger because she said, “It’s my constitutional right.” And the courts eventually proved her right—confirming what she believed all along. The four young African Americans who began the first Sit-In in Greensboro, N.C., also believed they belonged at a public lunch counter in a Woolworth drugstore. They, too, had the law on their side.

But what if, like most people, you did not speak and act from your conscience? And what if keeping that truth to yourself meant that an innocent man may have been convicted of a capital crime? Or what if, wishing to step into the spotlight, you fabricated details you knew nothing about? Those are the questions that plague at least one teen who was working in the pencil factory where 13-year-old Mary Phagan was murdered in An Unspeakable Crime: The Prosecution and Persecution of Leo Frank. Without passing judgment, author Elaine Marie Alphin presents a number of factors that may have contributed to the behavior of Mary Phagan’s teenage coworkers and friends.

It’s so much easier to blend into the background, or to say, “My actions don’t matter,” than it is to do the soul-searching necessary to go against your peers or the authorities or sometimes your own family to do what you believe is right. Leo Frank’s case raises searching questions about our responsibilities as citizens and as conscientious members of our neighborhoods and towns.

Here Elaine Marie Alphin talks about why she believes this case will be important to young people and why it continues to haunt her.

A Dose of Reality in a World of Magic

2010-02-26T07:54:00.000-08:00

I used to think I was not a fan of fantasy books. I now know that’s not true. I just hadn’t read the right ones yet. The fantasies that draw me in are stories in which tightly constructed worlds that seem on the surface to be completely unlike my own cause me to think about my own world differently.

What would it be like to wake up one day and realize you were truly gifted in some way you’d never imagined? That premise could apply to any number of fantasy books (Harry Potter, Graceling by Kristin Cashore, Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief ). The Night Fairy by Laura Amy Schlitz, illustrated by Angela Barrett, however, puts a slightly different twist on this idea: a magical being is rendered rather ordinary, because she cannot use her wings after a bat accidentally crumples them. Flory must figure out how to get from here to there, find shelter from her predators, gather food one cherry at a time because that’s all she can hold. And she must do all these things without her wings.

For Flory, now nearly everything in Nature poses a threat. She is, understandably, angry. Things are not going the way they were supposed to go. And yet she figures out how to take care of herself in this new predicament. She grows accustomed to her new routine. She begins to accept her situation as it is. And that turns things around for Flory. She opens up to the possibilities around her, for friendship and forgiveness and flights on hummingbird wings. This is the paradox: as Flory begins to accept her new reality and the world the way it is, she also sees a world of opportunities in front of her.

In Celebration of Black History Month

2010-02-19T06:24:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, we discussed Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, the story of the brave teenage girl who paved the way for the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycotts. This week, we focus on another story of young people who brought about sweeping change with one courageous act, Sit-In: How Four Friends Stood Up By Sitting Down by husband-and-wife team Andrea Davis Pinkney and Brian Pinkney.

Like the four people who began the sit-in movement, the Pinkneys take a big idea and break it down into its simplest principles. Andrea Davis Pinkney boils down a complex historical narrative into poetic phrases and a recurring refrain. Brian Pinkney’s swirling ink lines and watercolor illustrations convey a feeling of action among four people who are sitting still. The protest consisted of four young African-American men sitting at a counter where they were implicitly told they would not be served. They were not told this in words, but rather by an unspoken understanding that black people were not allowed at the same counter as white people.

It’s difficult for most children today to understand that kind of racism. Today we have a black president. How could segregation have happened so recently in our history! This picture book presents the situation in such a way that six-, seven- and eight-year-olds can have an informed discussion about what life was like for African-American citizens before the civil rights movement.

To put these events in context, Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on March 2, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama. Nine months later, Rosa Parks also refused to give up her seat to a white passenger, and the Montgomery Bus Boycotts began in December of that year. In 1957, the Little Rock Nine—nine black students in Little Rock, Ark.--enrolled in Central High School despite the governor barring their entry; President Eisenhower sent in the National Guard to escort the students into the school. And on February 1, 1960—just 50 years ago--David Leinail Richmond, Joseph Alfred McNeil, Franklin Eugene McCain, and Ezell A. Blair Jr. (now known as Jibreel Khazan), four students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, sat down at a Woolworth lunch counter and attracted more than 70,000 people to join them in sit-ins across the South. They were putting into practice the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A timeline at the back of the Pinkneys’ book charts these milestones. This is a book that the entire family can open as a way of reflecting on how far we have come as a nation, and as an instrument for sparking a discussion of where we continue to find injustice, and what we still need to do as citizens of the United States and the world.

Paying It Forward

2010-02-16T22:36:00.000-08:00

Thank you to Rebecca Fabian for including me in a septet of Prolific Blogger Award Winners!

I’m especially honored because I enjoy escaping into Rebecca’s blog, Afterthoughts--notably her “Porn for Booklovers”—G-rated photos of sumptuous bookshelves filled to the brim (for me, it’s a tie between the books on the beach and the cottage with the sloping roof and wall-to-wall shelves). The Children's Department Manager for the Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley, Mass., Rebecca is also a graduate of the esteemed Simmons College Master of Fine Arts for Writing Children's Literature program, and calls herself “Full-time reader. Part-time traveler.”

Here are the rules for the Prolific Blogger Award Winners:

I. Every winner of the Prolific Blogger Award has to pass on this award to at least seven other deserving prolific bloggers. Spread some love!

Although I do not feel prolific with my weekly pace, perhaps this accolade will be an incentive for me to write more frequently? In any case, because I was slow to assemble my thoughts, fellow award recipient Deborah Sloan at the Picnic Basket (another blog I greatly admire) already passed along her kudos to another favorite of mine, Mitali Perkins’ Fire Escape.

But I easily found seven terrific blogs to praise:

1. A Fuse #8 Production: Betsy Bird via School Library Journal. Betsy was at the forefront of the blogging movement--at least in the children’s book world. She has an infectious way of talking about books that makes you want to join the conversation. She is currently counting down the top 100 novels, as polled by her readers. And she hails from Kalamazoo!

2. Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast OR “if you’re in a hurry, ‘7-Imp,’” as co-founders Jules (aka Julia Danielson from Smyrna, Tenn.) and Eisha put it. They are two librarians who love books and ask of each of their interview subjects seven questions. Jules is flying solo now, but she shoulders the responsibility well--the entries are funny, insightful and original.

3. Pixie Stix Kids, written by Kristen McLean, executive director of the Association of Booksellers for Children, may not come as frequently as you’d wish (because she is out at regional bookselling conferences running panels and such), but Kristen’s entries often delve into the thorniest topics confronting the book industry. She will make you think.

4. The Written Nerd, co-proprietor of Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and formerly of McNally Jackson bookstore in Manhattan’s SoHo, this blogger (whose identity shall remain anonymous) had me riveted with updates of her store’s progress leading up to its opening, and blogs about books as well as store events. Her goings-on reflect the interests at the core of her community.

5. First Second Books. Okay, I don’t call attention to publishers’ blogs for the most part, but Mark Siegel, the editorial director of First Second, educated a great many of us when graphic novels were just breaking into the mainstream. His link for booksellers serves as the Comics 101 guide for setting up a graphic novels section in the bookstore, library or classroom, and he’s generous—he includes his favorite creators regardless of publisher.

6. Great Kid Books from Mary Ann Scheuer, a librarian in Oakland, Calif., reflects on books, students, and their reading habits. Her descriptions of her interactions with young people help me overcome my homesickness for the classroom and restores my faith that children ARE getting news about the latest children’s books!

7. Head Butler: Jesse Kornbluth’s thoughts on books, theater, music and all things cultural amuse me to no end. One of my recent favorites was his “Consumer Warning” about Elizabeth Gilbert’s Committed. He's a co-founder of BookReporter.com and former editorial director for America Online.

II. Each Prolific Blogger must link to the blog from which he/she has received the award.

Here is the original post from the Afterthoughts blog.

III. Every Prolific Blogger must link back to This Post, which explains the origins and motivation for the award.

IV. Every Prolific Blogger must visit this post and add his/her name in the Mr. Linky, so that we all can get to know the other winners.

Congratulations to everyone who received this award!

A Snuggle and a (Light) Lesson

2010-02-12T06:20:00.000-08:00

Just by observing babies and toddlers, we can see how much they absorb through their eyes, nose, and fingers. They want to taste and touch everything. (That’s why board books are perfect at this age – if they wind up in your baby’s mouth, the pages can handle it.)

Four board books by husband-and-wife team Anne Gutman and Georg Hallensleben—Daddy Cuddles; Mommy Loves; Daddy Kisses; and Mommy Hugs—encourage cuddling and tickling between you and your toddler listener as your child learns about other animals and their young. Many of the creatures will already be familiar to babies and toddlers, but some of the animals’ behavior may not be—the fact that male penguins keep their young warm by tucking them under their bellies and between their legs, or that elephants show affection by intertwining their trunks. These scenes reassure young children by showing them a range of different animals that love their babies, while also introducing them to new words--like the koala’s “joey”—and also new environments through illustrations of the Antarctic or the Serengeti plains.

The impressionistic brushstrokes in the artwork keep the mood playful; this is no science lesson. Still, your youngsters will delight in being able to name and point to young animals who, just like them, have someone older and wiser looking out for them and giving them an encouraging squeeze, tickle, or offering a trunk to intertwine with theirs…

The Band for All Generations

2010-02-05T06:43:00.000-08:00

A certain song can transport us back to a moment; an album brings back in a rush details from a certain period of our lives.

For Penny Lane Bloom in The Lonely Hearts Club, the Beatles play her life’s soundtrack. She’s a modern teen and, by all rights, she admits she should be rebelling against the Fab Four, since her parents are fanatics. The couple met at a makeshift vigil in Chicago after John Lennon’s death, all three of their girls are named for prominent Beatles characters—along with Penny Lane, Lucy (“in the sky with diamonds”) and (lovely) Rita; and the Blooms will not abide knockoff bands. But Penny sees the wisdom of the Beatles’ lyrics (each section of the novel begins with a quote from a song), and hears the genius in their music, and she proudly hangs their posters on her bedroom walls. So when she gets jilted, who can blame her for turning to the only men who’ve been true: John, Paul, George and Ringo.

Penny is a girl-next-door; she’s someone you know or grew up with (“...there beneath the blue suburban skies...”). She’s down to earth and no-nonsense. And that’s what makes her belief in the kind of true love that the Beatles sing about (“All you need is love…”) so compelling. When she realizes that her childhood flame is not the eternal one she’d hoped it would be, she decides it’s better to be true to herself than to abide by the “unwritten rules” of male-female dynamics. She will not compromise herself or her values for someone who does not value her. She swears off guys until she graduates and though she begins alone in the Lonely Hearts Club, she soon attracts many more young women through her example. When romance comes to Penny again, it’s in the form of a friendship that evolves into something more, with someone who respects the principles that led to the founding of her club.

It’s impossible to read this book and not hear the Beatles’ songs in your head. So why not give in to it? Get out an old Beatles album or two, and either play them while your teen is in earshot or leave them out where your teen can find them. There’s a reason the Beatles speak to generation after generation.

Reflections on the Newbery Medal

2010-01-29T07:27:00.000-08:00

A week ago Monday (January 18, 2010), at the American Library Association conference in Boston, Mass., the 2010 Newbery and Caldecott Awards were announced.

Last week, we explored a few of the guidelines for the Caldecott Medal. This week, I thought it would be interesting to reflect a bit on the guidelines given to the Newbery committee. Like the books that have received the Caldecott Medal and honors, the Newbery Medal and Honor books also reflect a wide range of topics and genres. Here is the charge of the Newbery committee: “The Medal shall be awarded annually to the author of the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children published by an American publisher in the United States in English during the preceding year. There are no limitations as to the character of the book considered except that it be original work. Honor books may be named. These shall be books that are also truly distinguished.”

“There are no limitations as to the character of the book considered...” gives the committee a great deal of leeway. In Leonard Marcus’s book Funny Business: Conversations with Writers of Comedy, three of the writers he interviewed have won the Newbery Medal, and his questions get to the heart of their approach to writing and their affinity for humor as a means of communication. Other books that were considered “distinguished” by past Newbery Committees have run the gamut from poetry to biography to fiction.

Looking at this year’s Newbery winner and honor books alone, we see a diversity of topics and approaches. Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me, which won the 2010 Newbery Medal last week, is set in 1970s Manhattan on the Upper West Side, with a time travel puzzle at its core, and a heroine named Miranda trying to make sense of a world whose parameters are expanding in so many ways. (Another fun fact: Miranda’s favorite well-worn book, A Wrinkle in Time, also won a Newbery Medal.) The Newbery Honor book The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly explores the changes going on in a small town in Texas in 1899, and 11-year-old Callie, who’s more interested in science than cooking and sewing; the book explores the impact of Darwin’s ideas on Callie and how scientific breakthroughs are affecting the society in which she lives. Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin, also an Honor book, is a timeless quest story set in China that seamlessly weaves Chinese folklore into the narrative with occasional glorious full-color, silkscreen-like illustrations. Then there’s The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg by Rodman Philbrick, in which 12-year-old narrator Homer adopts a tall-tale tone but also gets across the horrors of the Civil War, and the nonfiction title Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose, which draws from interviews with Ms. Colvin and archival photographs to tell the story of 15-year-old Claudette Colvin’s brave decision to defy segregation in 1955 Alabama. Whew! Can you imagine a greater range of tone and topic, from history to time travel to folklore and tall tale?

Many teachers and librarians conduct “mock Newbery” discussions, to contemplate what makes a book “distinguished” and to choose the best of the year’s offerings. From the diversity of titles in this year’s mix, you can see how much depends upon the makeup of the committee and the discussion around each individual book. Does your school or local library host a discussion? If not, and if your son or daughter is interested, why not approach a teacher or librarian about starting one?

Reflections on the Caldecott Medal

2010-01-22T07:04:00.000-08:00

On Monday (January 18, 2010), at the American Library Association conference in Boston, Mass., the 2010 Newbery and Caldecott Awards were announced. That ceremony has often been called the equivalent of “the Oscars” for all of us in the children’s book field.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Caldecott Medal, primarily because of the wildly diverse range of winners and honor books the category has included. Here is the charge of the Caldecott Committee: “The[ Caldecott Medal] shall be awarded to the artist of the most distinguished American Picture Book for Children published in the United States during the preceding year. The award shall go to the artist, who must be a citizen or resident of the United States, whether or not he be the author of the text.”

The guidelines for the committee appear in their entirety on the ALSC (the Association for Library Services to Children) Web site, but the line of greatest interest to me is this one: “A ‘picture book for children’ as distinguished from other books with illustrations, is one that essentially provides the child with a visual experience. A picture book has a collective unity of story--line, theme, or concept, developed through the series of pictures of which the book is comprised.”

Consider this year’s Caldecott Medal-winner, Jerry Pinkney’s The Lion and the Mouse. Aside from a few animal sounds, there is no text at all. The entire story unfolds through the “visual experience.” What greater “unity of story,... developed through the series of pictures” could a book have? Notice how he varies the pacing: full-bleed spreads of the lion staring at the mouse that’s disturbed him, for instance, and much later in the story, a series of small panel illustrations when the mouse works to free the lion from his trap made of rope. (Full-bleed refers to the illustrations “bleeding” off the edges of the paper, using the full expanse of the spread.)

Then look at this year’s Caldecott Honor book illustrated by Marla Frazee, All the World. Nowhere in Liz Garton Scanlon’s text does it say anything about a family. That whole story line is developed through the illustrations alone, and yet it provides the through line for all of the other activities in the community. Thus Frazee creates a “unity of story” within the lines suggested in Scanlon’s lilting poem. The poem's overriding theme explores the idea that all the small moments connect to a larger shared experience—and it plays out in Frazee’s intimate scenes, or vignettes, that lead up to majestic full-bleed spreads.

Contrast those with the 2008 Caldecott Medal–winning The Invention of Hugo Cabret, in which Brian Selznick creates stretches of wordless sequences that move the story forward, within a larger prose narrative. The story is about a filmmaker, so the idea that the book “essentially provides the child with a visual experience” contributes a great deal to the reader’s experience.

These are fun conversations to have with young people. Their observations are so keen, and when they feel passionately about a book (whether for OR against it), they come up with some very persuasive arguments. Give it a try!