Princess Cora and the Crocodile by Laura Amy Schlitz, illustrated by Brian Floca

From the moment she was born, Princess Cora’s parents have been training her how to be a Queen. The nanny makes sure that she takes baths so regularly that there is no dirt in sight. Cora’s mother, the Queen, makes sure that Cora studies so that she will be wise. But the books are so boring, Cora finds herself yawning. Her father, the King, makes sure that Cora grows into a strong queen, so he trains her to skip rope. Between the nanny, the Queen, and the King, Cora life is scheduled to the minute and no fun at all. So when Cora thinks that a family dog will help liven things up, she writes to her fairy godmother.

Dear Godmother,

Nobody listens to me. My mother and father won’t let me have a pet and Nanny says I don’t even want one. But I do. And I’m sick and tired of everything.

Please help me.

Love,

Princess Cora

What her Fairy Godmother sends isn't any old golden retriever...Cora gets a crocodile. And since Cora has had enough with the bathing, boring lessons, and rigorous exercise, the Crocodile so kindly offers to dress as Princess Cora for a day...so that the real Cora can have the day off from “Queen training” that she’s always wanted.

Hilarious, fun and charming, Princess Cora and the Crocodile is an early chapter book that makes a wonderful read aloud for the whole family. This is a book that might be read a chapter a night over the course of a week.

Author Laura Amy Schlitz and illustrator Brian Floca are a heavyweight team. Schlitz won a Newbery Award in 2008 for her book, Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village, as well as a Newbery Honor in 2013 for her book Splendors and Glooms. Brian Floca won the Caldecott Medal in 2014 for his picture book about trains entitled Locomotive. With Schlitz’s words and Floca’s illustrations, Princess Cora and the Crocodile will become a classic.

Obsession

Charles Dickens

Splendors and Glooms by Laura Amy Schlitz felt like such a departure for the Newbery Medalist. When I got to interview her recently, I asked her how she arrived at this Gothic tale of puppetry, magic, mystery and obsession.

“Whenever I finish a book, I’m sure I’ll never write another,” Schlitz said. “So, I thought, ‘I should write from my obsessions. What do I love?’ The answer was Charles Dickens, and marionettes.” The author followed her obsessions, and she also created characters with obsessions of their own. Cassandra the witch can’t live with her fire opal, and can’t seem to live without it. Magician and puppeteer Grisini’s relationship with money and magic is much the same.

Schlitz’s obsession with Dickens comes through in more overt ways—the orphans Lizzie Rose and Parsefall (under Grisini’s guardianship), the London setting and the establishment of several characters’ plot lines that lead to a climactic intersection. But there are also more subtle connections to the Victorian writer. Schlitz visited Dickens’s house. She could picture him in his red waistcoat dashing up and down the stairs. “It’s an old staircase, so they have a decline in the middle of the tread,” she recalled. “People thought him vulgar because he wore a red waistcoat.”

Stairs factor into Splendors and Glooms when Grisini falls down the staircase of his boarding house, when Clara Wintermute’s father ascends the stairs of Grisini’s boarding house in search of his kidnapped daughter and meets Lizzie Rose, and the stairs in Cassandra’s house also play a key role for conversations overheard and narrow escapes. The scenes on the stairs often serve as transitions in the novel, resulting in a change of heart or luck (both good and bad, depending on which character you are) or a moment of insight.

The sense of obsession permeates the novel: Cassandra at her mirror, surrounded by images of former owners of the fire opal engulfed in flames, Mrs. Wintermute so consumed by grief at her other children’s death from cholera that she neglects Clara, and Grisini’s obsession with power gained through magic and money. And of course, the puppets. Cassandra, a puppet to her fire opal, Clara a puppet to her parents in a home filled with death masks and devoid of laughter, and Parsefall’s obsession with the marionettes, practicing and practicing in his desire to be as facile with the puppets as Grisini is.

Most importantly, Laura Amy Schlitz’s obsessions led to this compulsively readable novel. Which only goes to prove that following one’s obsession, or--perhaps more accurately--passion can lead to positive ends.

A Dose of Reality in a World of Magic

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.