Time to Play

Interior from Giggle!

Board books often seem to be directed at the adult playing with the child, rather than to the child directly. Giggle! by Caroline Jayne Church speaks directly to toddlers, and encourages adults to engage with them in the activities suggested in these pages. 

Giggle!--like Pete's a Pizza by William Steig, The Baby Goes Beep! by Rebecca O'Connell, illustrated by Ken Wilson-Max, and Mitchell's License by Hallie Durand, illustrated by Tony Fucile--features toddlers that model fun things to do with your child that require nothing but imagination and interaction.

If your baby or toddler is having a fussy day, just press the Giggle! button that pops through the upper right-hand corner of every page, and the sound of laughter emanating from the book is sure to pass on its infectious joy and improve everyone's spirits.

The Price of Power

Holly Black

What could be a more frightening thought than teens who aspire to be vampires? Not for love, as with Bella and Edward, but for the desire to stay beautiful and young forever. That is the picture Holly Black paints in The Coldest Girl in Coldtown.

Black taps into that teen mindset of invincibility and carries it to its logical extreme in thought-provoking and haunting ways. She lays out the "scientific" parameters of infection versus "turning," after a vampire bites a human (there's an 88-day "cold" period during which, if an infected human does not feed on the blood of another human, he or she can theoretically return to a "normal" human state), and the elaborate Coldtowns that the government has built to contain the infected. Black gives a back story that explains how vampires are "made" and the complicated way that Lucien--a power-grabbing vampire whose nightly broadcasts within the oldest and most famous Coldtown--has achieved his status.

Once there were strict rules designed to "control," or at least track, the vampires' lineage--and the mysterious vampire Gavriel (aka, the Thorn of Isra) played a part in it. But Lucien has changed all that. The human heroine, Tana, makes a decision to rescue Gavriel, and gradually uncovers his complex past, and reveals a complicated history of her own. It's an epic book, with a size to support it, yet it reads in a flash. Black melds her characters' addiction for power, glamour and blood with sly commentary on today's youth-obsessed culture. The humor comes as easily as the book's gothic elements.

If you've not yet read her Doll Bones (aimed at middle graders, but which will appeal to her YA fans, too), it makes a fascinating contrast to this book. With a very different tone and equally serious (though less gory) themes, it too explores friendship, family, loyalty and independence. In many ways, Coldtown, with its exploration of hierarchy, the breaking of rules and fierce love, shares more of the aura of her Curse Workers series. This reader can't wait to see what she does next.

Time Matters

The father in Fortunately, the Milk by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Skottie Young, disrupts the space-time continuum when he escapes through an emergency exit, against the wishes of his alien captors. All the man wants to do is take some milk back to his children for their breakfast.

Neil Gaiman
Photo: Brady Hall

His children believe that their father is taking a very long time to buy milk for their Toastios. The people and creatures their father meets on his journey live in an era different from his. Professor Steg, for instance, believes they are in the future, but the father knows the Stegasaurus is from the past. The aliens are outside of time, and who knows what era the pirates belong to.

Gaiman plays with the elasticity of time. Time passes quickly from the father's perspective, as he moves swiftly through time periods and challenging situations, milk safely in hand. To the children, time plods along at a snail's pace. As we wait for a loved one, time moves slowly; when we are swept up in events, time moves quickly.  In an ever more programmed world--programmed by events as well as technology--time moves at a breakneck pace. 

As an early adopter, Gaiman was one of the first to join Twitter. He tweets throughout the day and often crafts a blog entry from them at night. He uses Twitter to reflect in the moment, and his blog to reflect on the day. So it was especially interesting to hear Gaiman say, when I got a chance to interview him recently, that he plans to take a break from social media. Why? Gaiman says, "I would like to be bored more. I don't think I get bored enough these days, and I think boredom is a brilliant, brilliant way of coming up with ideas."

Time to be "bored" feeds the imagination. Time to do nothing, matters.

Wordless Books & Visual Literacy

For a child who cannot yet read--who cannot decode letters as symbols that represent sounds--wordless books such as Journey by Aaron Becker give them a way to tell the story they see. 

From Journey by Aaron Becker

Children will notice the only colors that pop in the opening pages of Journey: a boy's purple crayon, and a girl's red one. Like Crockett Johnson's Harold and his purple crayon, the girl uses her red one to create a world. In her case, it leads her out of her alienating sepia-toned cityscape and into a lush world of forests, interconnected waterways and steampunk airships. Eventually, a purple bird leads her back to the boy and his purple crayon. She is no longer alone. 

Stephen Savage's Where's Walrus? is a terrific introduction to wordless books for children. Its direct, implicit puzzle--finding Walrus, who's escaped from New York's Central Park Zoo--allows them to pick the hero from a line-up based on his unique characteristics (flippers, tail, tusks, etc.). The book gets them thinking about patterns, likenesses and differences. Generous white space and bold colors repeated for maximum effect make this an ideal book for giving children the idea of how to "read" a purely visual narrative. 

Green by Laura Vaccaro Seeger includes a few words, to describe the bountiful shades of green that she showcases in the book, but the larger narrative goes unstated. A parent-child relationship that centers around a tree, which begins as a sapling and grows to be the anchor of their home, suggests the cycle of life. Her greens go from the concrete and literal ("lime green" / "pea green") to the more abstract ("all green" / "never green"). She uses die-cuts in the pages to train children's eyes on the details she wants to reveal to them. It's an ingenious way to demonstrate ways to inspect artwork carefully and unlock its secrets.

Jerry Pinkney's Caldecott Medal–winning The Lion and the Mouse, with its breathtaking landscapes of the Serengeti teeming with hidden treasures, invites children to pore over the pictures for flowers and creatures, large and small. Pinkney's gorgeous spreads of grandeur composed from the tiniest details echo Aesop's overriding theme of the interconnectedness and interdependence of nature's plants and species. 

Open any one of these books (and hopefully all four) to unlock how much your youngster has to say about what he or she sees.

The Power of Words

Richard Scarry

Perhaps no one knows the power of words more than a toddler just starting to name the people, places and things in his or her world. Richard Scarry's Best Little Board Book Ever taps into that instinctive wish and helps youngest children take control of their needs. 

Richard Scarry understood that by naming the things around them, children begin to gain power. They can ask for what they need. They may not always get what they want (how many times have we heard them say, "I need it" when referring to a coveted toy or sugary cereal), but they can in fact get what they need, and they can be understood. 

The author-artist takes that very basic desire to communicate and gives children a way to take control of their world. As Frannie the bunny goes through a day very much like readers' own, she describes waking up, getting dressed, playing with friends--all the way through to bedtime. Scarry gives Frannie a constant companion in a little green bug (the bug, too, has a doll to cuddle with). Later, in the story Daddy reads Frannie at bedtime, the little green bug makes a number of appearances and ties the entire book together. Scarry provides enough of the familiar to make the new vocabulary easy to digest.

Readers and Writers

The truth is, it's only by writing that we become better readers. We begin to appreciate what it takes to write well. In Thrice Told Tales: Three Mice Full of Writing Advice, Catherine Lewis gives concrete examples of what effect different approaches to writing may have on the reader. She does this by putting teens--as the potential writers--in the reader's shoes. 

My Bible in high school

Perhaps you, like me, used Kate Turabian's A Manual for Writers as your Bible while writing in high school and college. The trouble is, it's a great reference for research papers, but as a guide to drawing in readers (or listeners, when we had to give oral reports in front of the class), not so much. If we were lucky, a good teacher pointed us to Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. But Lewis wrote Thrice Told Tales especially for teens, and lets them in on the tricks of the trade for great writers, and also gives them the tools to analyze--as readers--why a piece of writing moved them in a particular way.

A godsend in college

(It also warmed the cockles of my heart to see a sentence diagram [illustrated by Joost Swarte] in Lewis's pages--it reminded me of Mrs. Hecker, my seventh-grade English teacher at South Junior High, who taught us how to do sentence diagrams. No dangling prepositional phrases for her students!)

Lewis gives writers the nuts and bolts (such as sentence parts, as with those fab diagrams) with Three Blind Mice as her framework--a tale they know well--to get them walking. Once writers have mastered that, she let's them run--with secrets to the craft. Through the use of metaphors, similes, point of view and more, she offers up not just definitions, but their actual use in context. Because Lewis provides a loose narrative of a trio of mice with different personalities, she often offers contrasting ways of expressing the same set of facts, depending on the perspective of the three observers. She also lays out a smorgasbord of styles from a wide range of writers, such as Dickens, Homer, and Hemingway. She models critical thinking for readers, and also demonstrates for aspiring writers how the choices they make elicit different responses from readers.

Catherine Lewis reveals the tools for good writing, and encourages young people who wish to write well to practice with these tools. Thrice Told Tales is for writers, readers and teachers; it's made for dipping in and out, for mini-lessons or for first-aid "how do I get out of this mess" writing crises. Put this in teens' hands, and see how they run.

Myths to Explain Our World

Have you noticed how the days are getting shorter? How it's sometimes dark when you wake up now, and the sun sets earlier? In The Time Fetch, Amy Herrick creates a captivating mythology to explain why this is so.

Eighth-grader Edward has disturbed a Fetch in the middle of December, "a dangerous time." The Fetch collects the stray minutes, the moments you won't miss -- and disperses them where they're needed. But Edward's interference puts the Fetch's job in jeopardy. The boy needs a rock for Mr. Ross's science class, and grabs the nearest one from his kooky Aunt Kit's backyard. Aunt Kit has raised Edward and, with a sense of foreboding, tells him to come straight home and offers him some cryptic words of advice, "It's the short end of the year," when "the curtain between here and there grows thin." As odd as her phrases seem, they begin to make sense to Edward--and to readers--as bizarre occurrences whirl around the Fetch. 

Amy Herrick
Photo credit: Breukellen Riesgo

The Fetch may be Herrick's invention, but she uses the idea of time's perceived elasticity to explore age-old ideas. Edward's Aunt Kit is the first to broach the subject ("Without time everything would happen at once," says she), then Mr. Ross introduces the topic of time as the fourth dimension (along with length, width and height). This may lead neatly into a discussion with young readers of how man has always sought explanations for things he cannot understand, from the oral tradition of the Aztecs to the controversial heliocentric ideas of Copernicus. Over the centuries, poets and scientists have always worked toward and continue to strive for a deeper understanding of how the universe works and where human beings fit within it.

The Time Fetch makes a natural complement to books such as A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle and Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me, to further explore the nature of time and humankind's fascination with it over the centuries. And for adults and older children with a desire to explore these ideas, Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman (an MIT professor of physics and writing) is a beautiful piece of bookmaking--a series of meditations on the nature of time, to be enjoyed in short bursts, to allow time for Lightman's ideas to sink in before reading the next chapter. (This was one of the early paperbacks to use French flaps--maybe even the first.) 

Amy Herrick, whose inspiration for The Time Fetch began with a conversation with a friend about how time seemed in shorter supply now than when they were small, provides a wonderful gateway into a larger examination of how the world works.