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.

No Gimmicks

Every flap, pull tab or yellow cube that pops up serves a purpose in explaining the pair of opposites on each spread of The Happy Little Yellow Box: A Pop-Up Book of Opposites by David A. Carter. It is a model of simplicity.

“Near and far” stands out in particular, illustrating how the same size object farther down the road appears to be smaller. It’s an abstract concept, but Carter makes it understandable through his use of objects—homes, where the Happy Little Yellow Box appears in the windows—with which children are familiar. They can look up the street at the windows of their neighbors’ houses and test the concept for themselves.

Carter explores the capabilities of the pages— with sturdy cardboard, a limited palette, and double-sided pages with room for die-cuts and shifting panels both inside (such as the “near and far” example) and attached to them (as with the elevator that moves “up and down” with a red ribbon loop). He confines the colors he uses to yellow (most frequently, of course), red and blue—the primary colors—plus black and white.

It’s a book that may be used far beyond the teaching of opposites. In art classes, it’s instructive for teaching the use of color, composition and sculpture. For bookmaking projects, it’s an example of how one can use the page, the shifting parts, flaps that reveal the concept Carter’s teaching (“in and out”; “large and small”). The pages are made for investigation, for peering through the openings, for observing how the helicopter lifts off (“high and low”), for collapsing the final yellow cube and opening that spread over and over to see how Carter constructed the cube to lie flat when the page is closed and take form when the spread is open.

Teachers often speak of “mentor texts,” books that model clear exposition or surprising use of language. The Happy Little Yellow Box is a model of invention—what can be done within the construct of a book to break it wide open, to investigate the possibilities of the page. Children will do this intuitively, asking themselves, “How does he do that?” and likely finding an answer as they solve the mystery for themselves. There are no gimmicks. If they look hard enough, they’ll see just how Carter does it—and he does it with such simplicity that they may well have a go themselves.

Rollicking Refrains

Children glom onto the refrain of Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed because it states the obvious—“The doctor said, ‘No more monkeys jumping on the bed!’”—yet the monkeys do it anyway. Eileen Christelow’s approach is lighthearted despite the pretty bad head bumps that occur.

The monkeys see the injuries of their siblings and still take a chance—against the doctor’s orders. The mother also seems to have trouble learning the lesson because she keeps calling the doctor even though she consistently receives the same response. At this stage, toddlers appreciate the repetition; they have time to digest and feel in on the joke. The doctor is the only one who seems to get increasingly frustrated. In Eileen Christelow’s illustrations, he looks patient enough during the mother’s first few calls, but by call numbers four and five, he’s clearly reached his limit. His advice, as repeated by the mother, appears in all capital letters the fifth time.

The design of the book makes it easy for children who are just starting to identify letters and sight words. The key refrain always appears in the same way: Mama holds her injured child on the left, the doctor appears on the right for the phone call, shown as two large vignettes, then the mother sharing the doctor’s advice with her children appears on the next page. Children also learn to count down from five to one through the course of the book and through repeated readings. This is a terrific addition to the backseat library—a great one to have on hand so everyone can join in the recitation and laughter.

The Burden of Power

Kristin Cashore

If Graceling was about owning one’s own power, and Fire was about deciding when the use of power is appropriate and when it is not, then Bitterblue is about exploring what it’s like to have power over the fates of others. In this election year, Kristin Cashore (author of all three books in the Graceling series) raises searching questions about leadership—how much autonomy to grant others and when to determine certain decisions on their behalf.

In the case of 18-year-old Queen Bitterblue, her father, King Leck, twisted the truth. He wiped out the memories and experiences of his citizenry after inflicting unspeakable crimes against them as individuals and as a citizenry. Bitterblue feels compelled to confront those truths herself but then must decide how much of that information to release and to whom. Would it be healing or do greater damage to make public some of these facts? And how can she remedy the hurt her father caused to so many of his subjects? It’s a daunting task, and she has few people she can trust, surrounded as she is by her father’s men, who must come to terms with their own guilt, sorrow and grief.

Her only reliable means of gathering the truth is to disguise herself as a male and take to the streets. But that comes with its own perils. As the daughter of a king that wronged a nation, she has few friends and many enemies, but she feels it’s worth the risk to get to the truth. One of the great injustices she discovers is that her father made it a crime to teach others to read. As someone who thrives on education and loves to learn, Bitterblue finds this one of the greatest travesties of her father’s reign.  As she strives to bring about justice, Bitterblue also finds laughter and love, enjoys the friendships of Katsa and Po (from Graceling), and discovers friendly neighbors and possible allies.

Kristin Cashore once again explores the questions at the center of the human experience: the pursuit of truth and justice, and the need for a society that allows people to thrive as individuals.

The Cover-Up

When you’re a kid, there comes that time when you’ve covered up something that you thought could have dire consequences, only to discover that it would have saved so much time and energy if you’d just told the truth. Nearly 12-year-old Stella makes this discovery the hard way (is there any other way?) in Summer of the Gypsy Moths by Sara Pennypacker.

By the end of chapter two, Stella’s great-aunt Louise has died. Stella comes home from school to find Louise dead in front of the television set. Stella and Angel, the other girl Louise has taken in, decide they’d better hide the fact or risk becoming wards of the state. Their plan to dig a hole in the backyard for Louise’s body, and to say that the woman broke her ankle works even better and for longer than they want it to. Much of the book’s humor stems from their nearly 12-year-old thinking and how they pull off assuming Louise’s duties managing the summer rental cottages next door. Self-reliance and resourcefulness are their greatest assets and also their Achilles’ heel.

Both girls have had to grow up more quickly than most their age—Stella because of her mother’s frequent disappearances, and Angel because her parents both passed away. So their matter-of-fact handling of Louise’s death comes across credibly, and the comic moments increase as they get more deeply invested in their cover-up. They also come to appreciate each other’s strengths: Angel’s a better liar (which helps them carry off their masquerade), and Stella is a better cleaner (which helps convince owner George Nickerson that Louise is still following through on her duties).

All the while, Sara Pennypacker envelops us in the warmth of the Cape Cod sun, the smell of the sea, and the rhythms of the renters coming and going. The humor and authentic dialogue contribute to a great read-aloud experience, but Pennypacker also gently raises questions of when is it okay to tackle things on your own, and when is it time to ask for help? Is it ever okay to lie? What is a true friend? Pennypacker never makes the children seem at risk—what the children fear could happen is far worse than what does happen. At the same time, the author creates living, breathing girls whom we care about and whose fates matter to us. Each lives with sadness, but the girls don’t dwell on that. They forge ahead, often with humor and a determination to solve whatever challenge lies ahead.

Transcendent Storytelling

William Joyce

When I first heard the term “transmedia storytelling” at Digital Book World last year, I thought, “what?” It scared me. Writers were talking about stories that began as games and grew into films and books. I worried that books would be sidelined. Since then, I’ve come to believe that there are many ways to experience story, and a great story transcends its medium. William Joyce’s Morris Lessmore is the ideal character to travel through these porous boundaries.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore by William Joyce won an Academy Award, but it began as a book. It makes perfect sense that a book about a lifelong love affair with books would begin as a book. And Morris Lessmore is based on a real man, William Morris, a lover of books if ever there was one. (Bill Morris hired me right out of college, so I got to witness this firsthand.)

But Bill Joyce told me in an interview that after he’d written the book, and before he’d completed the artwork, his retina detached, and he couldn’t see well enough to finish painting the book. At around that same time, he founded Moonbot studios, and they decided to make a short film based on Morris’s story.

Miniatures from the Movie

So Morris Lessmore’s story is a book and a film and an app. Each medium has its strengths and offers a different experience of the story. In the film, one of my favorite scenes occurs after Humpty Dumpty plays the piano, and Morris does a Gene Kelly–style dance with the many-hued books. In the app, a deep-voiced narrator reads the book beneath the animated pages, and you get to play the piano with Humpty by pressing keys that correspond to the notes. (There’s also a separate $.99 Imag-n-o-tron! app that “augments” the book. A video shows you how to lay your iPad or phone over the book to animate the pages; books fly, Morris dives into a book. It takes a bit of practice, but if you hold the device very still, the pages spring to life. My favorite is the feeling of “entering” the library. The walls seem to extend to the sky.)

But in the book, there’s a beautiful scene in which the books that Morris has cared for surround him, when he's "stooped and crinkly," and read themselves to him. It’s a scene that only appears in the book, and of all the means of experiencing his story, it’s the scene that most moves me.

Thanks to Bill Joyce, I am awakened to the possibilities of transmedia storytelling. Perhaps it should be called “transcendent storytelling.” A story that transcends its medium allows us as readers to transcend the here and now and to experience the story from a number of entry points. However we meet Morris and in whatever way we accompany him on his journey to his calling and his passion for books, each experience of his story deepens our connection to Morris Lessmore and his Fantastic Flying Books.