Nothing Ever Happens On My Block

written and illustrated by  
Ellen Raskin  
Atheneum  1980 


While a boy sits and mopes there's plenty of things going on that he casually seems to ignore.   

In some ways Chester Filbert is like many kids who complain of nothing to do in a world where adults are more than happy to point out all the possibilities.  There Chester sits, a figure clad in black against a line drawing of his street full of houses with more Victorian gingerbreading than any historical town you can name. Soon people appear, in bright primary colors, kids playing ding-dong-ditch and girls jumping rope, a window washer, a gardner, a thief, a fire and a fire truck. All the while Filbert complains, comparing his dull block to places that have marching bands and haunted houses and pirates, basically everything he'd like to see instead of acknowledging the excitement bustling around him. Accidents pile up around Chester, kids get hurt, cars crash, an armored car dumps money everywhere and Chester goes home having decided that when he grows up he's going to move away from this crummy place.  

In he picture book game there are books where the reader can see more than the character can – I know there are others but I'm at a loss to recall them right now – making the story interactive and a bit of a game. Here, Raskin takes a common childhood complaint as her source and it works, but...

But I wonder when books play this game of "see how foolish the main character is behaving," especially picture books and early readers, if the message backfires. What happens when the reader identifies with the main character and, as in this case, can point out how preposterous the scene is while complaining that these same things never happen on the reader's block as well. The reader ends up feeling even more justified; not only don't they have thieves and police giving chase and trucks dumping money at their feet they also don't have haunted houses or parades either. Instead of being able to say to a reader "There's plenty of things happening if you open your eyes!" this narrative provides young readers the ammunition to say "Yeah? Like what?" 

Maybe there's an alternate reading to this story, something I haven't considered. What if this was the sort of thing that happened on Chester's street every day and he had become so numbed to it that all he longs for are the things he's never seen before. Or what if, what if everything we the reader sees is spectral, the ghosts of things and people that once lived on that street and now, like that kid in The Sixth Sense, appear to him in his ennui begging for the closure he has no interest in giving them? Why else would they all appear in monochrome from head to toe if these were not these shade's shades?

Okay, perhaps too close a reading, too unfair to over generalize. But let me ask if this book could be written or published today. Would we accept a main character who is unchanged at the end, a story where only the reader has (perhaps) been moved forward in their thinking?  It reads a little like a concept story with no resolution, the first act of a three-act play.

It's funny, because I don't feel this way about If I Ran the Circus and it's otherwise resolution-free story. Perhaps because in the act of imagining there is a celebration of creativity at hand where Nothing Ever Happens... is the antithesis of creativity, it's simply a list of complaints from a child who wants the world handed to them and can't be bothered to think about anything other than what's wrong.

And after all that, I still sorta like this book. I like the size (again a smaller picture book, about 6"x7") and I like the unchanging background with the action layered on top, like the various layers in multiplane animation. Color highlights aside, the details of the line drawing beg for closer inspection, though it might have been nice if they hid some secrets among their curves. Is it too much to wish for a gargoyle or a nest of birds with a little hatchling action? Now see, there I go, acting like Chester and longing for things that aren't while ignoring the things that are.

Who, Said Sue, Said Whoo?

written and illustrated by Ellen Raskin  
Atheneum  1973  

As Sue drives her jalopy she encounters any number of creatures that say any number of things, but the chitter-chatter mystery sends them running for cover.  And then there's that moral...   

In this cumulative story a young woman drivers her car across the landscape encountering any number of sounds. Each page answers the mystery of the sound from before while adding a new one to the coda that asks "The who, said Sue / Said chitter-chitter-chatter..." Throughout it isn't always obvious for readers to guess the animal making the noises – a cow says moo, but a goose goes "quitter-quatter," sounds mostly chosen for their rhythm within the story. In the end it turns out the chitter-chitter-chatter was coming from the engine compartment of the car... and made by a skunk, which sends the collected animals and Sue running.  

Were the book to end there it would be serviceable, certainly no worse than any number of picture books put out today, but Raskin leaves the reader with an interesting parting thought in the form of a moral. As the skunk drives off in Sue's car accompanied by a chimp with a cold the words "Moral: Words aren't everything" hang above the illustration. If the book's central question was in understanding the sounds different creatures made, only to discover that sometimes there are much greater mysteries afoot, what are we to make of the chimp and skunk taking off together? It's clear the implication that the chimp cannot smell the skunk and thus has nothing to fear, but were we supposed to be afraid of these unusual noises before discovering their origin?  This isn't clear, and the disconnect between this last line, the rest of the text, and the imagery is confusing at best.  

Raskin again provides textured line drawings and bold colors surrounded by a lot of white space, in addition to the smaller 7 by 8 inch size. The book is intimate and cute but in its efforts to moralize comes up short and unsatisfying.

Spectacles

 written and illustrated by Ellen Raskin 
Atheneum  1976   

When a girl named Iris begins mistaking the fantastical for everyday items an eye exam is on order in a picture book by the author of The Westing Game...

Iris starts out by telling the reader that she didn't always wear glasses, but then one day a dragon showed up at her door.  Then came the pygmy nuthatch, the Indian, the chestnut mare. What Iris saw were the general shapes of different things that would come together to create something her brain could make sense of. The dragon, for example, turned out to be her Aunt Fanny standing against a tree, a house, and a trail that made the whole look more menacing by the sum of its parts. Finally, Iris goes to the eye doctor who gives her the bad news: she needs glasses. Iris fights all of her options when they are described by color and shape, but when her mother re-frames the question – "Would you like to look older or younger, sweeter or smarter, like a scholar or a movie star..." – Iris is instantly more interested in glasses. In the end Iris is happier wearing her spectacles but still takes them off once in a while for a glimpse at the spectacles she used to see.

Spreads feature Iris on the left side in a line drawing with what she sees done up in pointillist shading against a solid color, followed in the next spread by the same arrangement but this time with the scene clearly delineated and in full color. Ignoring that many of the things Iris sees would hardly remain stationary enough for her to hold these shapes, to say nothing of items like a TV which she couldn't have confused, there is still a bit of squinty-eyed whimsy at the way Iris approaches life. Too young perhaps to realize she's having eyesight problems (it happened to me in third grade so I can relate) she is fairly good-natured about the whole experience until she finds she has to wear glasses.

The concept has been done since, by Suzy Lee in particular, and perhaps before Raskin did it, but for a thirty-five year old it doesn't feel too dated or stodgy. Change "Native American" for "Indian" and I think it would be fine. 

There is something very 1960s mod in her style of illustration, and very approachable. In fact, what initially startled me was that it was small for a picture book. At just under 6 x 8 inches – one-fourth the size of many picture books today – the book's intimacy draws in a reader's attention. Almost as if the book had been designed with a nearsighted reader in mind. But it raises an interested question today as many publishers point out the high cost of producing picture books: why not simply make them smaller? Not every book needs to e lap-sized, and an argument can be made for picture books to be manageable for younger readers. Just a thought.

I only discovered this week that Raskin was also an illustrator and began her career (as many illustrators do) working on other's books before writing and illustrating her own. In fact, she is responsible for the iconic woodcut illustrations for the New Directions edition of A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas, a book I've owned and replaced without ever making the connection. A quick Google search for Ellen Raskin illustrations yields a number of surprises, including book covers I have seen before including adult titles like A Passage to India and a Nathaniel West collection.

Lulu and the Brontosaurus

by Judith Viorst  
illustrations by Lane Smith  
Atheneum 2010  

Lulu is the sort of girl who won't take no for an answer when she demands a dinosaur for her birthday so she goes out to find one on her her own. Hilarity Mild amusement ensues, with a whiff of forced nostalgia.  

Lulu, an only child, is spoiled to the point that she has never heard the word 'no' before. So when she announces for her birthday that she wants a brontosaurus and her parents put their foot down, Lulu screams and throws a fit.  That the parents refuse to give in is supposed to play like a matter of practicality – she can't have one because they're extinct, or never existed depending on your viewpoint – but it is never said outright.  So Lulu runs away from home to find herself a brontosaur.  

Into the forest she goes, where Lulu encounters a python, a tiger, and a bear, and dispatches them with physical cruelty. At last she finds a brontosaurus but there is a problem: the bronto does not want to be Lulu's pet.  Turns out that the bronto wants Lulu as a pet, and as we have already learned, children make terrible pets.  Unhappy with the situation, Lulu makes an escape and returns home (by way of the bear, tiger, and python, with whom she is now more polite and apologetic) but is surprised to find that the bronto knows a shortcut through the forest.  Once it is agreed that neither Lulu or the brontosaurus will be either pet they strike up a friendship and live happily ever after.  

looking strangely familiar

And so Lulu got a brontosaur as she wanted, just as a friend and not a pet.  


Within the last year Jon Sczieska was instructing children's book authors to cut their books in half.  That was the first and most lasting thought I had while reading Lulu and the Brontosaurus.  Not that there's anything wrong with the story, despite feeling incredibly familiar, other than the fact that it feels like a picture book that no one has ever said 'no' to as it bulked up on junk food.  I suspect that Judith Voirst is among that pantheon of children's authors whose name secures a book deal sight unseen. Again, it's not a bad story, it's simply twice as long as it needs to be for what it is. 

ah, yes, now i remember...

What it is... is one of those books destine for the young reader shelf alongside Judy Moody and Captain Underpants that won't satisfy because the story is too simplistic.  It is one of those books that might be mistaken for an old fashioned picture storybook except for the fact that it's the wrong size and format for the picture book shelves. It's a safe book, a grandmotherly book, a benign entertainment.

Lane Smith's black and white illustrations are nice, in a familiar sort of way. It took me a week before I pegged what they reminded me of: the illustrations for Ruth Stiles Gannet's Tales of My Father's Dragon.  If this was a deliberate homage to a quainter, older style of book (I'll research it later maybe, if I'm still interested) then I feel this is dangerous territory.  Not because of Smith's work, because I think he's pegged the style to a T, but because Viorst misses this mark by quite a bit.  In Lulu's character  there is no whimsy or innocence, just a spoiled brat in need of comeuppance. In Lulu's story there's a forced sort of understanding and very little magic between her and her "dragon." And inviting us, whether directly or inadvertently, to compare the old with the new the new will almost always loose because it comes with the force of deliberate nostalgia.  Presuming, of course, this was deliberate.

I know I caught somewhere that this was someone's favorite book, but fell flat for me.

Mercury

by Hope Larson 
Atheneum / Simon & Schuster  2010

A tale of gold prospecting and romance and karmic debts paid off over several generations with just a kiss of magical realism in this graphic novel. 

In the settled Canadian province of Nova Scotia the Fraser's of French Hill have settled into a life of barely sustainable farm life when the mysterious stranger Asa Curry comes calling.  He's discovered gold on the Fraser property and looks to help mine it with a share of the proceeds. In the Fraser household daughter Josey has become smitten with Asa and over time he becomes the forbidden fruit she pledges herself to.  But there's something dark about Asa that causes Josey's mother to worry that he is a harbinger of death. 

One hundred and fifty years later the Fraser house has remained in the family but has burned down, causing the current Frasers, Tara and her mother, to become displaced.  While her mother works to find a new job and get settled in a new town, Tara returns to attend high school and, with the aid of a mercury-filled pendant that's been in the family for generations, solve a mystery that connects Tara's story with Josey's.  The phoenix out of the ashes of the house fire, as it were, allows Tara and her mother the chance at a new life that was denied their ancestors.

Jumping back and forth between stories it becomes clear that Tara and Josey's stories will cross paths, but with Larson that doesn't mean it is easy to guess.  The tale of the stranger with seemingly magical (and dark) powers is not unusual for the 18th and 19th centuries, and here those elements are handled as matter-of-fact as we treat the "magic" that allows us to use cell phones today.  This is Larson territory, where the magic is real, and she leaves much for the reader to discover and define for themselves.  Crows with faces of people, "spells" that can see the future, gold-seeking pendants and yellow snake guides are blended with they typical stories of teens encountering first loves and exploring territories as mysterious to them as anything else in this world. 

Larson's pacing and scene-setting is measured and exacting – nothing moves too fast or too slow – poetically cinematic in flow.  Having the panels set in the past against black backgrounds, while the present day sections are set against traditional white space, almost seems superfluous because we can the different ages by costume, but in a black and white comic it has the effect of turning the past almost sepia.  The visual darkness takes advantage of our knowledge of the pasts limitations and shrouds them in the darkness of a time before we became "illuminated" and magic was replaced by science and logic.  Larson's magic is elemental – mercury, gold, fire – with powers we can barely contain.  How is that not like love?

Boom Boom Go Away

by Laura Geringer
illustrated by Bagram Ibatoulline
Atheneum 2010

"A most unusual bedtime story" the cover touts, and I have to agree: the book does everything in its power to keep kids awake and shouting at their parents to go away and leave them alone.

A little gnome sits banging away at his drum. His mother tells him it's time for bed. His response?

"Hush! / Don't spoil the rhythm / of my drum." / boom boom / "Go away" / boom boom / "Go away!"

This is followed by a succession of toys; an elf on a gong, a prince with a bassoon, a knight with bells, a robot with spoons, mermaids with harps, a bear with a horn, all adding their own particular piece to the cacophany, all telling their parents to hush and go away. At the end we see a small boy fading into his bed with the refrain, his toys scattered about on his bed, all quiet.

Inspired by a song the author's child learned at a Dalcroze music class, the song has been imagined here to be a bedtime story, but the original point of the song was teach rhythm and cadence and hardly includes actions and sounds conducive to quieting a child's mind for sleep. Indeed, I sincerely doubt the song was taught as a pre-nap exercise, and in the author's note Geringer confesses her own child repeated the opening verse over and over – mostly likely the outcome for any impressionable child. The fact that the refrain includes a bit of defiance, a hush and go away, would seem to be exactly the sort of thing adults would want to discourage not reinforce through the repetition of this text.

Ibatoulline's illustrations disappoint as well here. Where in Jane Yolan's The Scarecrow's Dance there was life and nuance here this are static, dead toys against neutral backgrounds that echo the emptiness.

Eddie, Incorporated

by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
Atheneum 1980

Everybody in Eddie's family is in business or on their way. His father runs a produce market and his mother bakes goods sold in the store. His older brother Roger worked in a shoe store with eyes on a management position. His other brother Joseph is a whiz with numbers with plans to become a banker, always with a calculator in hand, figuring out the interest on any sum being discussed.

Eddie didn't have a job, or prospects, or even the slightest idea about what to do to earn money. But he wanted a job, and not just any old job: Eddie wanted to be the boss and own his own business. After a visit with his tinkerer neighbor Mr. Clemmons, Eddie learns that if you can find a problem or a need you can build a business around it. Looking at his littered neighborhood Eddie decides to start an aluminum can collection business, and he brings his friends Dink and Elizabeth in as partners.

The can business seems to be going along well, but once they factor in their costs and divide the money Eddie and his friends realize they're making pennies a day and decide to fold their business. Eddie tries to invent a shoe deodorizer with disastrous results, a lawn service no one wants, starts up a local newsletter which requires more effort than it's worth, and eventually devises a benign protection racket at his middle school to prevent sixth graders from being hazed by eighth graders. Along the way Eddie and his friends learn about advertising, profits and losses, writing up business plans and contracts - everything a budding entrepreneur would need to know in order to set up shop. In the end Eddie creates a babysitter agency that acts as an intermediary between sitters and families in need, collecting fees from both sides for their efforts. In true entrepreneurial fashion Eddie discovers the joys of being his own boss, and that there are ways to earn money from the efforts of others.

I have to say, I love stories that show kids how the business world works and I wish there were more of them. Stories about kids setting up a business to make money are fine, but what I'd like to see are more of the nitty-gritty, the nuts and bolts of what it means beyond "let's set up a lemonade stand and make a few dollars we can spend down at the candy store." Eddie doesn't just want a job, or a few quick bucks, he wants to be a boss and own his own business. Eddie doesn't have dreams about what he'll do with all the money he'll make, he's more concerned with making his businesses be both practical and profitable. He doesn't want to work for someone else but he's not lazy, Eddie works harder at making his businesses work than he would running deliveries for his father.

As usual, Naylor nails the middle grade world with its own sense of logic and independence. It's an older book, looks like it was last printed in 1985, which makes it a library find. My copy actually was a library find, a library discard sale book, which would indicate that it's lost favor with contemporary readers. Probably because it's the original printing and the illustrations by Blanche Sims give it a dated feel. I like the drawings, but I'm not a kid. With minor adjustments in dollar amounts (adjusted for inflation, of course) and fresh illustrations I think this is still a relevant title for budding executives.

Chiggers

by Hope Larson
Atheneum 2008

Abby has arrived at camp first (as usual, due to her mother) and as the other girls arrive everyone slips back into their camp personalities and cliques. Abby's closest friend Rose has returned as a counselor this year and her additional duties preclude her and Abby from hanging out as much.

As the bunks fill in her cabin Abby ends up with new girl Deni beneath her who spends her day complaining about what a dump the camp is and her nights scratching herself into oblivion. The girls come back to their cabin and find Deni mysteriously gone, and quickly the rumor is she contracted chiggers and was sent home.

The next girl to fill the bunk is Shasta, a hippie-esque weirdo who refrains from many camp activities due to her own mysterious illness, a illness that requires a daily medication she refuses to take. While Abby has always been a sort of fifth wheel around her cabin mates, Shasta is the out-and-out weirdo, and when Abby is stuck showing the new camper around she finds herself battling between distancing her self from Shasta and making friends with her.

Shasta, it turns out, was struck by lightning and occasionally finds her hair raised on end and little balls of lightning drift into her cabin looking for her. There's tension between Abby and Shasta when they find themselves attracted to the same boy until Shasta is sent home for failure to take her medicine. Camp ends with a kiss and a bandanna and memories that make camp that place where strangers are friends for life until it's time to go home.

Larson's graphic novel pulls off the trick of being episodic without feeling episodic, telling the story of a summer without a plot. Abby, and all the girls for that matter, are mean and nice, conflicted and assured, friends and enemies. They are kids at that age where everything is possible which means they run hot and cold with the wind. Everything is possible at camp, and Larson picks out those moments that highlight those possibilities; the friendship bracelets, the games of capture the flag, the overnight hike with the ghost stories and a flashlight. None of it cliched or bathed in the patina of nostalgia or underscored with "deeper meaning" than the moment it exists in.


More like this, please.

Little Boy

by Alison McGhee
illustrated by Peter Reynolds
Atheneum / Simon 2008

This Father's Day, when a Hallmark just won't cut it but $20 seems like too much to spend, why not give this little gem?

Generously borrowing from William Carlos William's poem "The Red Wheelbarrow," each of the rhymed sections in this picture book begins with the phrase "Little Boy, so much depends on..." to inventory the innocent mischief, imaginative play, and rituals of what it means to be a boy. All that and a big cardboard box. Reynolds illustrations are as precious as McGhee's cadences are measured, which is to say they are calculated with great care.

This is the father-and-son companion to Someday, the book about the mother-daughter bond that reads like a snake eating its own tail. With both books I can't imagine what sort of child they are intended for. Grown children? Adults with children who want an American Greeting Card memory of a time that never really existed except in a post-martini haze? Seriously, with Little Boy I can see maybe half a reading of this before the little boy being read to wants to go find a cardboard box of his own to play with rather than finish this non-story.

Beyond that, the book is a keepsake, a contemporary Norman Rockwell portrait of boyhood. Grandparents will love it, so might some parents, but it's not for children.

Altogether, One at a Time

by E. L. Konigsburg
illustrations by Gail E. Haley, Mercer Mayer, Gary Parker and Laurel Schindelman
Atheneum 1971

I would have hated this book as a kid. I would never have picked it up. I would have started the first story and felt alienated by the language of it, an almost disjointed voice. I would have jumped around and looked at the illustrations for the stories and would have walked away, never to give the book a second chance.

In this collection of four stories we see kids being kids, and not always nice ones. A boy invites an odd (read: dyslexic) kid to his sleepover party at his mother's urging and comes to hate that boy more because his best friend actually likes the kid; Another boy who spends his time with his grandmother when his parents are away shows his insensitivity when a cloud-covered meteor shower triggers sorrowful regret in his elder that he doesn't immediately comprehend; A girl in fat camp is shown how to achieve her inner beauty with the aide of a counselor who is in fact a ghost; A mother tells her daughter of what it was like being bused to school and how in dealing with the prejudice she encountered began to see herself as an artist.

I find Kongsburg voice to be very stilted in these stories even as an adult but like where they go and that I'm not always sure where she's headed. The clues were all there in the fat camp story and yet I missed that it was a ghost story until the very end. Actually I began to think there was something supernatural when she kept talking about this treasure trapped inside a blob of plastic -- I thought it might have been her heart -- but by the time things started to reveal themselves it was over. The thing is, as an adult I think these stories are great for opening up young reader's minds to question behavior and the morality of what is right and wrong. I an also see an adult trying to convince a skeptical kid to read these stories and watching them squirm just as I would have when I was in my middle school years.

This question of audience is coming up more and more for me lately. In a recent workshop we referred to there being a problem with gatekeepers, the adults in publishing who make the decisions and have to be appeased before the writing can even reach it's target audience. It came up because we were reviewing a story that contained what some felt were inappropriate images and ideas that others felt would have been happily accepted by kids. If the adult gatekeepers are pre-censoring stories because they are afraid of the possible backlash or wish to impose their own moral thinking onto a story, that's a bad thing for writers. In some ways what I liked about these Konigsburg stories was the exact moral ambiguity that I saw others actively attempt to shut down. We have come dangerously close to the edge totalitarianism when one side takes the moral high ground and the other side shrugs it off.

I may come back to these stories in a few days and see if my feelings still hold. At least I can say they make me want to reread them.

Interesting note on the cover shown here: This is the most recent edition available from Aladdin back in 1998. What's curious is that on my first edition copy the illustrations on the cover are the same except for that one on the bottom of the girl in the golden braids. On the original cover they use the mirror of that illustration that shows the story's protagonist, a black girl. Did the folks at the Aladdin imprint think it would smack of tokenism to keep the black protagonist on the cover, or were they trying not to scare off too many potential white customers? The collection is due to be reissued sometime this year as I understand it, here's hoping they're going back to the original cover.

If

A Fathers Advice to His Son
by Rudyard Kipling
photographs by Charles R. Smith, Jr.
Atheneum/Simon and Schuster 2007

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you...

It's hard to read these opening lines of the familiar Kipling poem without hearing the voice of a manic Dennis Hopper as a wigged out photographer in the movie Apocalypse Now.

Moving beyond that what struck me is just how accessible the original poem is in terms of laying down an almost Buddhist philosophy about how one should move through the world with humility, grace and compassion while still remaining strong.

To that end I find what photographer Smith sets out to do admirable but I find the final result a letdown.

Every passage in the book is illustrated with a saturated boiled-grain photograph of boys at play in various sports. The overall effect, as suggested in the tacked-on subtitle (to underscore Kiplin's intent, for those who cannot be bothered to read to the end of the poem), is to offer a strong, guiding father's advice to a son in relation to his becoming a better athlete, as opposed to being a better person. That's my take-away.

And that's where I take issue. It may be that we could use more poetry-spouting fathers on the sidelines giving their sons a larger picture of the world vis-a-vis lessons they can learn through sports, but why do we need to perpetrate the issue of the father-son bond as being sports related?

Page after page, sport after sport, the images connect only in the mind of the individual because the text doesn't support the concepts presented specifically as sports-based. The weakest example may be of a shot taken from behind (we do not see the faces of the boys at sport) of a boy taking aim at a target at an archery range, accompanied by the text

If you can think-- and not make thoughts your aim

Well, you have to take the "aim" part literally to connect with the image, but that's not what Kipling is saying, is it? He's talking about active thinking, about rational thought-based behavior, that one should not use thinking for thought's sake. This is good advice, but how does it relate to a boy taking aim with an arrow? How is a boy supposed to interpret that concept when the illustration suggests such a literal idea?

There are more like that, more literal illustrations, and they raise my hackles. Can we not teach these concepts to boys, father to sons, with examples that include the arts and sciences? When we "meet with Triumph and Disaster/And treat those two imposters just the same" can we not suggest that Community Service in the face of, say, a Hurricane-devastated area would serve as a better example of how to live in the world rather than show a soccer team huddled together?

I suppose I should be grateful anyone is considering father-to-son poetry at all these days, or that someone finds Kipling worth introducing to kids. I just wish we could get over the whole idea that the only way to captivate boys' attentions is through sports.