Interactive Reading

Apple Print from Alphamom.com

When we read with toddlers, it’s always an interactive experience. Trucks by Debbie Powell offers all sorts of possibilities for playful reading activities.

With its onomatopoeic sounds (“Brrm Brrm… Puff Puff… Crash Bang”), the text invites children to join in to make the juicy noises of the large vehicles as you read it aloud together. Take the book along as a guide on a visit to a construction site to see the trucks in person, and your child can identify each one by the sounds it makes.

And for a fun art project, your child can make apple prints that emulate the look of Debbie Powell’s artwork, which has the appearance of woodblock prints. Just cut an apple in half, set it in nontoxic paint, and press the apple half on paper or fabric to make a fun design. Lemon halves also work well.

Accumulating Wisdom

David Levithan

The narrator of Every Day by David Levithan, neither male nor female, simply called “A,” has literally lived the idea of “walking two moons in someone else’s moccasins.” Well, maybe not two moons, but 24 hours. And in those 24-hour snippets of someone else’s life—5,994 of them, by the time we meet A—the narrator has accumulated a great deal of knowledge about what makes us human.

A is also in the unique position of altering the host’s life. A essentially tries to live the Hippocratic Oath, “First do no harm.” A tries, for that day, to live the host’s life as the host himself or herself would. A keeps an e-mail account that serves as a journal, and seems to have acceptance around this experience of 24-hour immersions in someone else’s life—until Rhiannon comes along. For the first time, A wants to make the effort—and it requires a great deal of effort, since A changes bodies every midnight—to form a lasting relationship with someone.

A’s musings range from wondering about the nature of dreams—as when A dreams of Rhiannon: “I wonder: If I started dreaming when I was in Justin’s body, did he continue the dream?”—to thoughts of what would happen if A’s host died while A occupied it (would A have died, too?). But the narrator also thinks about what the experiences of thousands of days have taught A about the human condition.

On day 6000, when A goes to church as Roger Wilson, A shares a powerful insight that begins with religion but extends to the experience of what it means to be mortal: “Religions have much, much more in common than they like to admit…. Everybody wants to belong to something bigger than themselves, and everybody wants company in doing that…. They want to touch the enormity….” A suggests that no matter what religion or gender or race or geographic background, “we all have about 98 percent in common with each other” and we humans like to focus on “the 2 percent that’s different, and most of the conflict in the world comes from that.” For A, “The only way I can navigate through my life is because of the 98 percent that every life has in common.”

A makes us, as readers, the beneficiaries of the wisdom A has accumulated, day by day. We get to walk in other people’s moccasins together. We come away from Levithan's extraordinary novel asking ourselves what makes life meaningful, and how to be more active participants in our own lives. A reminds us that love "isn't the question... but it's not the answer either.... Love can't conquer anything. It can't do anything on its own. It relies on us to do the conquering on its behalf."

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.

Abundance

Extra Yarn by Mac Barnett, illustrated by Jon Klassen, is a story about abundance. It’s about one person, Annabelle, a child living in a dreary city, who tries to cheer up a jeering peer by making him a sweater. That leads to another sweater and another sweater, all rainbow-colored, each brightening the gray, wintry city and lightening the mood of her neighbors.

It is a story of believing that one bright sweater given to someone else brings warmth, cheer and connection. In Jon Klassen’s illustrations, yarn connects one sweater wearer to the next—to people and dogs and even trees, whose trunks are now hugged by the heroine’s knitted yarn. Annabelle, in essence, knits together her community. An archduke tries to buy Annabelle’s limitless spool of yarn, but she won’t sell it. So he steals it. But her yarn comes back to her.

Marianne Challis

Last week, my voice teacher, Marianne Challis, died. It was sudden. She was 58. I worked with her for more than a decade. A truly great teacher, she taught us so much more than how to sing; she taught her students how to live, by her example. She was a gifted singer and performer, and she wanted that for her students, too. She believed in abundance. She shared not only her knowledge of the voice and the body and how they worked together to create sound, she also shared her wisdom around her life experiences. At her service, her dear friend and director, Scott Barnes, said something that we could take with us: “Right now, we are raw and in shock, but as the days go by, we’ll remember the joy she brought us.”

Extra Yarn came to mind. It’s about creating and giving something to someone else with no expectation of a reward, and how the world gets a little brighter because of it. It’s about taking an action when it seems like no action will make a difference. It’s about believing that we won’t run out of yarn if we make one more sweater. As we go into fall and the days grow a little shorter and a little colder, we can warm our world with that belief in abundance and a small act of kindness.

Endurance

Sandra Boynton did what seems to be the impossible: She moved fluidly from greeting cards to board books for youngest children. The Going to Bed Book turns 30 this month, and it’s just as fresh and pleasingly surprising to toddlers today as it was when she first published it in 1982. Another of my favorites of hers, Moo, Baa, La La La! is like a song. Children come in on the title refrain and lose themselves to the music of the animal (and human) sounds.

This week I’ve been rereading Awakened by the Moon, Leonard Marcus’s biography of Margaret Wise Brown, well known for her book Goodnight Moon, illustrated by Clement Hurd. But she is perhaps little known for her innovative work with Lucy Sprague Mitchell at Bank Street, the progressive school that came to be known by its street address, at that time, in Greenwich Village. (The Bank Street College of Education is now located uptown on West 112th Street in New York City.) Together they founded the Writers' Lab where Mitchell, Brown and other writers began to share their observations of youngest children. They watched how youngsters began to play with and acquire language, more attracted to sound and rhythm than to actual words, which didn’t yet hold meaning for many of them.

We take their trailblazing efforts for granted now. Goodnight Moon is a nursery necessity. But at that time, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Mitchell and Brown, along with Edith “Posey” Thacher, Esphyr Slobodkina (Caps for Sale) and Ruth Krauss (A Hole Is to Dig, Maurice Sendak’s first picture book), were all influenced by the research they did with the nursery school students at Bank Street and the observations they shared in the Writers' Lab there. According to Marcus, it was Brown who realized that small children “did not place books in a special category of culturally exalted objects,” and therefore needed a more rugged format. William Scott, a parent at Bank Street who published many of the projects that resulted from its Writers' Lab, began printing books on durable cardboard stock “strong enough to withstand the onslaught of toddlers’ bites and tugs,” Marcus reports.

Because Boynton illustrates her own work, she smoothly moves between making a statement, such as “they hang their towels on the wall and find pajamas, big and small,” and creating images of a tall elephant hanging his towel high, and a lion placing his on a low hook, while dog busts out of bunny’s too-tight nightclothes and bunny gets lost in dog’s, to make the contrast and the joke. Margaret Wise Brown observed this is one of the contrasts toddlers enjoyed most—the playful juxtaposition of large and little, in a world where toddlers may be small in stature but stand at the center of their universe. Boynton gets all that and makes it look effortless, as the best authors of board books do. Her books are, in content and form, built to last.

Regeneration

Beth Kephart

Regeneration can mean the process of renewal, rebirth. In biology it can also mean the regrowth of lost parts. Often, it has a moral or spiritual connotation. Small Damages by Beth Kephart takes place in Spain, where 18-year-old Kenzie lives amongst the survivors of the Spanish Civil War. The “lost generation.” Kenzie is pregnant, about to give birth to a new generation. She literally embodies all of these permutations of the word “regeneration.”

Estela, the cook whom Kenzie is assisting, was roughly the same age as Kenzie when the war took hold in Spain and her family lost everything. Worse, Estela lost both her parents. But we don’t learn the extent of her loss right away.

Kenzie has lost her father. The parent to whom she was closest. The one from whom she inherited her creativity. Her father was a photographer; Kenzie is a filmmaker. Through Kenzie’s first-person narrative we learn how observant she is, how closely she inspects her world. Kenzie has lost her compatriot, her father, her confidant. Lonely and alone in the wake of her father’s death, she responded to the kindnesses of her dear friend Kevin, and their intimacy grew into a physical one. Now she charts the life growing inside her by the milestones outlined in her eighth grade health class: a necklace of bones, the presence of fingernails.

When Kenzie’s father died, the pain of his loss was almost physical to her. The pain was so acute because of the joy he brought to Kenzie while he lived. She cannot take any more loss. When she learns of her pregnancy, Kenzie wants her child to live, even if it means going to Spain and giving up her child to friends of her mother’s. Kenzie wants to give her child a chance. 

Beth Kephart exposes what it means for Kenzie to live through this process of regeneration--incubating this life within her--but also what her presence does to bring about Estela’s regeneration. In one scene, after months of building a trust between them, Estela takes Kenzie out to a field. They knock away dust “soft as a baby’s head” from a grindstone. Estela explains it’s where they once crushed the olives for their olive oil. Now they ship the olives away, and the oil comes back in bottles. “Something’s missing,” Estela says. Kenzie connects Estela’s grindstone with her father’s headstone, newly laid, her wound still fresh. Something is missing for her, too.

For both Estela and Kenzie, the life they once knew has vanished. But together, through their friendship and shared pain across a generation, they’ve made something new.

Around the Campfire

A great audiobook makes a car ride go from “Are we there yet?” to “I hope we drive long enough to finish this.” If you have a long drive planned before Labor Day, you will want On the Day I Died by Candace Fleming, read by a full cast, with you to make the hours sail by.

The 10 stories, threaded together by the main character, Mike Kowalski, a high school junior who’s drawn to a cemetery by a mysterious passenger he picks up late one night, will keep the whole family enthralled. The voices create the feeling of sitting around the campfire telling ghost stories (which, actually, they are—though without the campfire).

The mix of boy and girl narrators will hold the attention of both brothers and sisters, and the stories roots in folklore and history make them interesting for Mom and Dad, aunts, uncles and grandparents, too. There’s plenty of humor mixed in with the haunting, too. It’s a nice change from everyone watching his or her individual DVDs, to have a common listening and literature experience.

Listening is an underrated skill. We’re all accustomed to so many distractions—iTunes, cell phone rings, text messages—that it’s nice to sit back and let the words of a spellbinding story wash over you. If you like that one, try Jack Gantos reading his Newbery-winning Dead End in Norvelt. That’s another great one for the entire family, set in the actual town of Norvelt, Penn., created as a model community during the Roosevelt years (and named for Eleanor Roosevelt – Nor-velt) when the coal mines closed during the Great Depression. Young Jack’s caught between a mother who loves the it-takes-a-village motto of the town, and a father who sees it as a dead end.

And of course, perhaps the greatest listening experience in recent history is the Harry Potter audiobooks, read by Jim Dale. You can start at the beginning and go through all seven titles and have enough for a cross-country road trip. So here’s to traveling in style over the miles.