Shoring Up Confidence

The mice in Boo to You! by Lois Ehlert build their confidence for fending off a threatening black cat by constructing a creature out of the harvest vegetables and other items at hand. They take action. They don't sit idly by, quaking in fear of the feline lying in wait.

Lois Ehlert shows us exactly how they do it. With gourds, seeds, cranberries and strawflowers, she models how children can create their own camouflage with found objects from their yards, nearby parks or kitchens. Even the enemy cat's outline looks like black fabric cut with pinking shears. He's not scary so much as prickly and goosepimply. We believe that the villain would be scared off by the cleverly inventive creature the mice have assembled.

As we head into the Halloween festivities, this board book is an ideal selection to focus on the creativity of fashioning a costume and also to show toddlers that no matter how small they are, they need not be frightened.

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.

Facing Challenges

In his autobiography for children, Chuck Close: Face Book, Chuck Close does two things extremely well. First, he allows readers to take a deeper look at his paintings—thanks to the ingenious flip book at its center, which allows us to look at overlays of dozens of his self-portraits. Second, he also invites us inside his way of thinking and seeing, so we come to understand how Close looks out at the world. It’s a philosophical book, presented in a Q&A format that children can easily pick up and put down, think about and return to again and again.

Recently I got to attend the Horn Book at Simmons Colloquium (at Simmons College in Boston), where the theme was “Look Out!” – these two threads to Chuck Close’s book (winner of the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award in the Nonfiction category) felt even more pronounced as we viewed footage from interviews of Close conducted by 12 fifth-graders from P.S. 8 in Brooklyn. He answers the questions that children wonder about and underscores the idea that we never stop being curious, we never stop looking out and wondering about the things for which we have a passion.

In his book, Chuck Close explains that even as a child, he was aware of how others saw him. His family did not have much money. He struggled in school. There was no term for dyslexia yet, but he had trouble learning to read and solving math problems. He could not recognize faces (a phenomenon called prosopagnosia, or face blindness). His love of drawing and artwork, which his parents encouraged, helped him demonstrate to his teachers that he cared about what he was learning. He made a 10-foot-long illustrated map of Lewis and Clark's expedition for history class; he found memorizing dates and names challenging, and the map proved he was paying attention.

His book shows how his approach to learning led directly to the portraiture for which he is now famous. His artwork helped him recognize the people he loved. “If I can flatten someone's face, I have a much better sense of what he or she looks like," he explains. He takes dozens of photographs and places the face of his subject on a grid of tiny squares. Each square is a tiny painting which, combined with the others, adds up to the representation of a unique human face. A means of coping with his world became an expression of creativity. Chuck Close figured out a way to navigate his world, and in his book, he shares those strategies with his readers. Ultimately, it’s about breaking down the large tasks into manageable steps. His life models the idea that if Chuck Close can overcome all the challenges he faced, then what’s stopping you?

Thought #156

Bear Has a Story to Tell by Philip C. Stead, illustrated by Erin E. Stead, is a story of patience. It is also a story of paying it forward. And it is a story of creativity and friendship. All of this is true of the picture book itself. But it is also true of the creative process behind the picture book. Here’s why.

“The more I tried to write, the less I wrote,” Julie Fogliano confessed during her acceptance speech at the 2012 Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards last Friday night, September 28, 2012. It was the kickoff to a two-day celebration of speeches and a colloquium, held at Simmons College in Boston. Fogliano and Erin E. Stead received an honor citation in the Picture Book category for their book And Then It’s Spring.

From And Then It's Spring

Fogliano had been trying to write since 1988. The breakthrough came with a request from her friend George O’Connor, fellow bookseller alum from New York City’s Books of Wonder, and an accomplished writer and artist in his own right (The Olympians series). O’Connor asked Fogliano if, for his birthday, she would email him one thought per day. Most thoughts had to do with legos on the kitchen floor and pancakes for breakfast, according to Fogliano. But Thought #156, she says, “about waiting and the color brown,” was different. She liked it enough to also send it to her friend Erin Stead, another Books of Wonder alum.

Erin Stead, whose husband, Philip Stead, had secretly shown one of Erin’s drawings to his editor, Neal Porter (which resulted in their first collaboration, A Sick Day for Amos McGee), now paid the favor forward. Erin sent Thought #156 to Porter and said she would like to illustrate it. And the seeds of And Then It’s Spring (Neal Porter/Roaring Brook/Macmillan), illustrated by Erin E. Stead, were planted.

But what does that have to do with Bear Has a Story to Tell, you might ask. I shall tell you. Philip and Erin share a studio. “Philip did much of the designing” of And Then It’s Spring, Erin Stead says. When Philip saw this drawing of the bears for Fogliano’s book (above), he scurried off to write Erin a bear book. Bear Has a Story to Tell.

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.