A Greyhound, a Groundhog

Friendship comes in all shapes and sizes. Emily Jenkins’ new picture book, A Greyhound, a Groundhog, is a tongue twister about two unlikely friends: a greyhound and a groundhog.

As you read it aloud, the speed of the words (and the illustrations) increases until the two friends (and your tongue) are all topsy-turvy.

“A groundhog, a greyhound,

a round little

greyhound.

A greyhound, a groundhog,

a brown little

groundhog.”

And so it continues, around and around, the greyhound chases his tail, then he chases the groundhog, until they collapse on a heap on the ground, happy as can be.

Chris Appelhans (illustrator of Sparky) drew the beautiful illustrations in this book. His illustrations have a lot of energy and movement, and they complement the text perfectly. It is almost as if the movement of the greyhound and groundhog occurs as the story is being read aloud.

This book will become a staple in your child’s library, and you will be asked to read it again and again (probably at faster and faster speeds) until you can no longer say the words in the correct order. But that is part of the fun! Start 2017 with an exciting read-aloud that will have you and your child learning a new tongue twister about new friends.

Getting at the Truth

The heroine of David Arnold's Mosquitoland, 16-year-old Mary Iris Malone, gives readers a limited amount of information. She is an unreliable narrator. Yet she is smart and charming, and we want to believe her as she sets out to save her mother.

We learn that Mim's father married on the rebound, that Mim has not spoken with her mother in months, where she once spoke with her daily, that Mim has been prescribed a drug used to treat psychosis, and that there's a history of it in her family. Readers must piece together the truth between Mim's narrative of her journey, and flashbacks to the past.

Another recent and unforgettable unreliable narrator is Cadence in We Were Liars by E. Lockhart, and a classic is Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. Usually it's because there are things the narrator doesn't want to see, other times it's because the narrator needs to construct his or her reality in order to survive.

We as readers must rely upon the author's skill to toggle between the objective truth and the narrator's truth to make the constructed world of the novel hang together. We need to believe that both could be plausible, so that when they come together at the book's end (the narrator's version and the objective truth), we are satisfied. Mosquitoland does that. Quite a feat for a first novel.