Love Is My Favorite Thing by Emma Chichester Clark

Pick up a copy of Love Is My Favorite Thing. Read it in your most adorable dog voice. Take the book home. Read it to your dog. Then let your dog read it to you. This Valentine’s Day, let Plummie do the talking. Plum (Emma Chichester Clark’s dog) is a “whoosell” or a whippet, poodle, and Jack Russell cross. And Plummie just LOVES love! In fact, she is the one telling the story in this book. She especially loves it when Emma and Rupert, her family, tell her “You are a very good girl, Plummie.” But will Plummie always be loved, even when she chases other dogs, jumps in water, and grabbing toddlers’ melting ice creams in the park?  This is a story of one slightly naughty dog who is loved unconditionally. A perfect read for your children to laugh and giggle as Plum REALLY tries to be a good dog, and inevitably, creates a lot of mayhem (and love) along the way. 

Check out Emma Chichester's Plumdog Blog to see more adventures with Plummie!

Plum wonders "Will they still love me?"  in Love Is My Favorite Thing.

Unconditional Love

When it comes to unconditional love, there is no better teacher than a pet--both for giving and for receiving love. In Charley's First Night, when Charley the pup wants Henry the boy to take him home, a lifelong lesson begins.

"This is home, Charley," the boy tells his new pup after a tour. Helen Oxenbury's image of Henry staring into his pup's face, and Charley's vulnerable four-legged body language make clear that each is the only one for the other. In a pitch-perfect scene that blends humor and poignancy, Henry prepares Charley's bed for the night. His parents have been "pretty clear" that Charley must sleep in the kitchen. So Henry places a big comfy pillow under the table, along with his Teddy bear Bobo next to Charley--stuffed bear and dog's bellies bared irresistibly--and a clock between them: "tick-tock-tick-tock--like another little heartbeat in the night."

Even youngest readers will predict that neither boy nor dog can make it through the night alone. "The crying started in the middle of the night and you knew right away it was Charley," Henry says. His feet do not even touch the ground as he runs to his dog, just the way a parent would with a crying newborn. Youngsters will feel that palpable pull. 

Henry breaks the "pretty clear" rule, but who can deny his sense of responsibility? His indisputable, irrefutable love for this dog?  A closing image shows the reflection of an understanding mom in the mirror on Henry's bureau.

A Fable's Finale

When I got to talk to Lois Lowry recently about her book Son, the conclusion to the Giver Quartet, we discussed the fact that we both had read 1984 and Brave New World in college, and we both believed that The Giver was the first novel for young people set in a dystopia. "I think I created a monster," she said. "I hope some new fad will emerge."

What sets Lowry's Giver Quartet apart is the books' lack of violence in a current crop of dystopic literature mired in graphic images of death and destruction. The world of The Giver was already ravaged by war. The dystopia we discover there is a reaction to war and a preventative measure against what the Elders perceived to be the causes of war. Colors. Music. Love. Emotion of any kind. We enter a world devoid of passion. The violence has been done, but its vestiges remain. This gives the book a fable-like quality we don't see in the bumper crop of dystopian fiction.

Lowry retains that fable-like quality for all four books. The stories of Jonas, Kira, Matty and Gabe are not tied to any particular city or technology. Each community Lowry explores has its own rules and rituals. The young people coming of age question the construct of their society; they begin to wonder if there is another way, begin to chip at the foundation of the Elders' ideas to discover something else truer beneath. They must uncover the morals of their own stories.

Happy and Safe?

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.

Griefstricken

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.