The Extraordinary Mark Twain (According to Susy)

by Barbara Kerley  
illustrated by Edwin Fotheringham  

In an everything-old-is-new-again twist we get a biographical picture book portrait of Samuel Langhorne Clemens from a fresh pair of eyes... his daughter's.  

"According to Susy, people were... well, just plain wrong about her papa."  And so begins both the story of and about Mark Twain's oldest daughter's attempt to capture the man she knew in her own journal when she was thirteen years old. 

What we are treated to is a sort of dual biography of Twain told by dual narrators.  Susy begins her biography of her father in secret but continues on once her parents discover the journal, at which point Twain becomes, and acknowledges, an unreliable subject.  Knowing his daughter is taking notes he deliberately makes scenes to be recorded, but Susy is quick to note they are manufactured.  She also succeeds in recording his routines and unguarded moments.  These don't necessarily contradict our general impression of who Twain was but rounds out more of his life as a working family man, a humorist who his young daughter saw more as a philosopher when not in public.  

Both Kerley and Susy manage to keep the focus on Twain, giving is a more balanced view of the subject.  We see so little of Susy beyond the part of her journal that include her in family outings, but she gives us a glimpse now and then. We sense that daughter who longed to set the record straight about her Papa, and who felt the need to preserve a certain unvarnished truth about a man the public saw only in one or two dimensions. In the backmatter, Kerely includes a single page of instructions for how the reader can write a biography about a member of the family, using Suzy's approach to gathering and presenting material.  I found it instantly fascinating how well both Kerley and Susy could draw a rounded picture of their subject by following these guidelines... and how much they underscore what we don't know about Susy Clemens herself. It's only natural that we see Twain and his family during the brief year Susy is taking note, and limited to those passages that illuminate the portrait provided, but I did finish the book wanting to know more about Susy.  

The text itself co-mingles actual quotes with original narrative and highlights the quoted material in a way that makes it stand out on the page.  This is something I have actually advocated for in picture book biographies as a quick, visual way to clue the reader in on which words can be documented and which are authorial summary.  What I hadn't expected, and hat shows up occasionally here, are fragments of sentences and phrases that end up strung together in a Zagat restaurant review sort of format.  Here, Kerley is describing where Twain found his daughter's journal with his biography inside: 

He examined the book with "deep pleasure," delighting in Suzy's "frequently desperate" spelling. He approved of how she didn't "cover up one's deficiencies but gave them equal showing with one's handsomer qualities."   

While these sentences read cleanly aloud, they take on an awkward quality on the page that I hadn't previously considered. I was first drawn to this problem of highlighted attribution with Jeanette Winter's My Name is Georgia where quoted material was not only italicized but mixed with narrative written in the first person. By avoiding the first person -- and by including whole chunks of Susy's journal in tact as inserts throughout the book -- Kerley instead juggles three voices in the text: Susy's journal, Twain's observations after the fact, and her own. It's a fairly sophisticated approach and what it might lack in visual cleanliness it more than makes up for in its sturdy, well told narrative. 


This is the second time Kerley has been paired up with Fotheringham and I think it makes for a winning combination.  In What To Do About Alice I made note that I thought Fotheringham's  illustrations weren't up to his usual standard, but that isn't the case here.  Using a rich set of tones that at once nostalgic yet modern, Fotheringham juxtaposes sturdy caricature illustrations of Twain and his family alongside more impressionistic details of buildings and animals for a layering effect that makes the focus of each spread pop.  And throughout words, either spoken or written, fly about the pages like filigree curlicues from a fountain pen.  It's a nice abstract touch that adds a sense of animation to illustrations.   

Kereley once again sets a standard for picture book biographies with a fresh approach and solid research.

(Whoa, that ended up sounding a little too blurb-y.) 

The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins

An Illuminating History of Mr. Waterhouse Hawkins,
Artist and Lecturer
by Barbara Kerley
illustrations by Brian Selznick
Scholastic 2001

The story of Waterhouse Hawkins is one of those odd ducks that are at once as fascinating as they are forgetable. Waterhouse (as he apparently preferred to be known) was a (self-taught?) naturalist artist who (somehow) managed to find himself commissioned to make life-sized models from the fractured, (incorrectly) recreated fossils of dinosaur bones that had been discovered at the end of the 19th century. Working with the scientist Richard Owen, renowned for his ability to reconstruct animal physiology with only the slightest of fragments, Waterhouse was able to present to the public their first glimpse at the creatures who once populated the planet.

Kerely does an interesting (not necessarily positive) thing here and separates Waterhouse's saga into three parts: London of the 1850s, America in the 1870s, then back to London. It's an unusual story arc because Kerley isn't telling a life story or a biography so much as she's highlighting the years of Waterhouse's fame. His proverbial fifteen minutes of fame, you might say. While this isn't necessarily a problem it does leave us with a story whose narrative arc is based entirely on this nebulous rising and falling of Waterhouse's fame.

Additionally, the "climax" of the narrative arc culminates in Waterhouse upsetting Boss Tweed in New York where he is at work building a palace to house a new collection of dinosaurs. Pissing off Tweed in a public forum, Waterhouse returns to his workshop to find his works in progress smashed to ruins and carted away where they were buried in Central Park. Waterhouse then returns to London for his final act which, at least here, consists of reflecting on new knowledge that renders his creations inaccurate, pondering what great new discoveries might be on the horizon.

While this isn't quite a "history" of an individual, as promised in the subtitle, we do have a drawn out vignette of a Mr. Waterhouse Hawkins. The "illuminating" aspect might be defined simply as presenting the reader with a rough sketch of a minor player in the history of anthropology. Going back over this, I'm surprised by how little I actually learn about the subject. I also don't find myself caring whether or not he gets funding to make his sculptures, or find I'm involved enough with his American undertaking to feel horrified at the destruction carried out in his workshop.

The information provided does, however, suggest answers to these problems.

I think I would have preferred the book not be about Waterhouse as an individual, but about the process that led to the creation of these sculptures. I would rather have seen a story about how Waterhouse and Owen came together, worked together, with a little comparison between the scientist and the artist and how their fields inform each other. Seeing their struggle to recreate what had never been seen or recorded would make for a nice triumph that would naturally lead Waterhouse to America, as it did.

From there, some background on Boss Tweed and political corruption in New York, along with some public sentiment either way about the dinosaurs, so we can get a feel for the showdown to come. Then, big showdown, work crushed, Waterhouse returns to England, complete with coda about how his statues are there to this day.

I know, I know, a review isn't supposed to rewrite or tell the author how they should have written their book. But in trying to understand why this didn't work for me I had to try and envision a way in which the story could have worked. Sometimes I don't think it's enough to say "this didn't work, and here's why" without offering an alternate possibility. Clearly my suggestion isn't the book Kerley set out to write, but the book, as written, is only a mildly entertaining and easily forgettable tale.