Ambition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.