See and Say

a picture book in four languages
woodcuts by antonio frasconi
harcourt, brace & world, inc 1955

Until just this moment when I looked up the publication date I would have sworn this book was 15 to 20 years younger than it is. This multi-lingual abecedarian groups words and images at random throughout with each object named in English, Spanish, French and Italian, including a pronunciation guide as well. The words and images are common items independent readers would know, allowing for this book to be a beginner's guide to learning common words in four languages. On the last page there is a list of common phrases, a sort of beginner's phrase book for world travelers of the picture book set.

Another book checked out more for the pictures than the content, Frasconi's woodcuts are bold and simple graphics that use layering and the texture of the wood grain to good effect. The use of four colors (and black) is done in a very modern way, and the lower case font I think is what initially threw me in terms of guessing the book's year. Despite its age, the book is still serviceable (though I believe it is no longer in print).

Out of curiosity, I was curious to see when Mattel first produced the See n' Say, a toy where children would line up a pointer to an illustration of an object on a clock-like face, pull a string, and hear a stirring voice say something like "The cow goes.. moooooooo!" These simple analog learning toys were quite the rage in the 60s (and still in production under the Fisher-Price name) work well enough for the pre-reading set, but are limited to a dozen objects and quickly are abandoned. The book See and Say, which predates the toy by a decade, contains at least 60 words and their variants in three other languages.

My point? That even today, there is more value to be had in a book than an expensive toy, that simplicity doesn't mean limitation. Once a child has learned to match an image with a name and a sound, what more is there? What prompts the child to want to explore more? With See and Say there is the opportunity to not only learn the name of things, but the similarities and differences in names across cultures. There is an open door to sound out new words, and the possibility to excite the love of languages in young minds when they are most elastic and available to learn second, third, and fourth languages.

In the 1950s, when See and Say was published, the post-War world embraced travel abroad and the idea of learning more than one language was a bit of cultural capital that was also a high point of education. Today, with English having established itself as the international language of commerce, it is no longer necessary to learn another language in order to travel and breeds a sort of arrogance that other nations and cultures resent. It is not unusual to find Europeans who know three or four languages, including English, but in the US a polyglot is seen either as a learned scholar or a show-off. I hear kids marvel at how well foreign students speak English and know several languages while they struggle to master their own native tongue.

So while I was drawn to this book for its art I realize that things have changed in the past half century in picture books, because I don't know how popular a book like this would be today. We live in a country where English-only ballot initiatives underscore just how intolerant we've become, where instead of learning other languages we now suspect those who speak foreign tongues might be terrorists out to get us. We might do well to consider the generations coming up and looking at the books we give them as a way of fostering tolerance and understanding.

Or we can let publishing get taken over by electronic devices and continue to insist that our cultural arrogance is everyone else's problem.

Wow, how'd I get way up here on this soapbox?

My Name is Georgia

a portrait
by Jeanette Winter
Harcourt 1998

Out of the darkness I emerge, and the next few weeks are going to be heavy with picture book biographies and graphic novels. Not that any of you are keeping tabs, just what I've been soaking in for the past couple of weeks while visiting the island of Incommunicado.

For this intimate look at the painter Georgia O'Keeffe, Winter has chosen to tell not so much a life story as a sort of emotional growth of an artist. We do get the requisite facts of her life as a person -- birth, death, early childhood -- but most of what Winter has built this book on are the words that O'Keeffe uses to express her feelings. What emerges isn't so much a description of how art spoke to her, but how she seemed to be answering a calling that was difficult to articulate outside of her art. The distance was always calling me, O'Keeffe says, and Winter uses these moments to build an emotional arc to a story that shows us the inner life of an artist.

Aside from the opening and closing images that plainly state O'Keeffe's dates of birth and death, the book is told in a first-person viewpoint. To achieve this, Winter has taken select phrases quoted from various biographies about O'Keeffe and built narrative bridges to fill in the gaps that otherwise would have been described by traditional biographers. Winter sets the stage and situations and then allows O'Keeffe's words to fill in the feelings surrounding them.

I went to the Texas plains,
the Wild West of my childhood books.
...you have never seen SKY--
It is wonderful.

Rather than break the flow of the narrative with quotes or attributions, Winter simply offsets O'Keeffe's quotes in italics. For the younger reader these statements probably read more as emphasis, but for older readers (and adults) this serves as an elegant solution to the dilemma that arises when a picture book author writes about someone else in the first person.

It's an interesting point (and one I have been exploring a lot lately, so it's likely to show up again) that nowhere else but in children's books do we find biographies written in first-person narration. Any adult author that dared to write about an historical personage in the first person, their book would be labeled as fiction, but here and in many others like this the Library of Congress has categorized this book in the traditional non-fiction category of Biography.

In carefully choosing O'Keeffe's words Winter is able to present the reader with a sense of how the artist thought and felt. Whether or not this is an accurate portrait it would take an art historian to sort out, and taken by themselves I'm not so sure I would draw the same conclusions on character that is implied here in this book. But Winter is smart in calling this a portrait and not a biography, understanding the artist's use of the word to mean "a likeness" with all the leeway it provides. An artist, painting a portrait, has the delicate task of finding the best way to represent their subject while at the same time inserting their own style to the process. I have no doubt that Winter has "painted" a portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe, but is it an accurate one?

As Winter portrays O'Keeffe, she is a woman driven by the landscape, compelled to paint it, to find her peace within it, to commune with this space in an almost religious sense. It isn't hard to believe this was what O'Keeffe was like, what she felt, and it's a fairly sophisticated idea to communicate to a picture book audience. Where the biography is lacking in he type of information one might look for in a report -- why she made the decisions to move to New York, her relationship with the photographer Alfred Steiglitz, how old she was at any of these ventures -- Winter does manage to convey a sense of time passing and the emotional growth of the artist.

As for the illustrations Winter has said she wanted to give her impression of O'Keeffe's work and in this area I feel she falls flat. Winter's style is unique in and of itself and I am sure I could recognize any illustration from any book of hers on sight. O'Keeffe painted small things very large to make people notice them (as is pointed out in the text itself) but Winter paints the large things very small, surrounding her images on each page with a lot of white space. O'Keeffe was drawn to the large openness, the faraway she calls it, but here it looks so contained, so tiny.

Still, for a biography that looks at first blush to be very slight, this book is contains a great deal that is felt more than it tells.

NYC dystopia x2

Today, I am cross-posting with Guys Lit Wire, the blog for books aimed at teen boys.

dys·to·pi·a –noun. a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding.

Well, there's plenty of that going around in a pair of books I'm featuring today, both of them set in New York City but written 40 years apart from one another.

First up is the dead and the gone, Susan Beth Pfeffer's sequel to Life As We Knew It. As with the previous book, the events that follow occur after an asteroid has hit the moon, knocking it out of its former orbit. Where Life As We Knew It was set in rural Pennsylvania and followed closely the struggle for survival as seen from a teen girl's perspective, the dead and the gone shows us how events unraveled through the eyes of Alex Morales, a seventeen year old boy living in Manhattan.

Alex is the second-eldest of the Morales children, his older brother Carlos is a Marine stationed on the West Coast. Alex's mom is a nurse on night duty when the book begins, possibly on her way home. His father is in Puerto Rico attending the funeral of Alex's grandmother. At home, Alex's two younger sisters wait for him to return from his night job working at a pizza parlor. The news of the asteroid's collision course is peripheral at best; most people are listening to the baseball game.

Unraveled is the best way to describe events that follow. As the shifting of the moon has profound effects on the planet's delicate ecosystem, tides have flooded the subways and knocked out all satellite transmissions. Quickly Alex moves into survival mode in order to protect his sisters and keep the family together. When his sisters ask about the safety of their missing parents Alex reassures them without hesitation that everything will be okay. Alex is as pragmatic as he is protective, shunting his emotions in order to assure their survival.

Where events felt more ominous in Pfeffer's previous exploration of this disaster scenario, here in New York City the events that unfold seem merely to hasten the inevitable. As the food shortages and flu epidemic spread, as the rich get out of town and the poor are trapped on an island left for dead, New York comes to represent the ultimate failure of the urban model of living, an unsustainable wasteland. Alex casually learns to lie and steal and, in the end, manage to get himself and one of his sisters successfully out of New York and toward a promise of a new life further inland.

Recently released for its 40th anniversary, Harry Harrison's Make Room! Make Room! gives us another version of the Big Apple in decay. The events are no less ecological, though the cause is man-made this time.

It's the future, the end of the millennium. You'll have to forgive a book written in the 1960's for getting the future of 1999 wrong, though in many ways the book does correctly understand some of the probelms we're facing today. Harrison's premise was that the US was unconcerned with population control and that short-sidedness led to a planet where the population outstripped its resources. Greenhouse gases have ruined rich agricultural farmland, food and water is scarce, New York city is under a constant heat wave. As Harrison paints it, only the date of this scenario might be wrong as we may still be headed in this direction under global warming.

I have to break the review here to interject that this book was nothing like I had remembered it to be. I had this strange sense of double deja vu because there are familiar elements in the story that echoed both a movie adaptation of this book and the sudden realization that my disappointment was the same I felt when I first read this book as a teen. The movie was Soylent Green, and the disappointment I felt then as now was that there is no such thing as Soylent Green in the book. That is to say, if you've seen the movie and you think you know what the book is about, you don't.

Harrison tells the story of a police detective named Andy Rusch who happens to land on a case of murder that was a crime of opportunity. The problem is that the corrupt politicos believe there's something deeper going on and Andy's forced to continue to follow through on the investigation beyond when it should have been dropped. There's a girl involved, a gangster's moll, who takes up with Andy once she's out of her meal ticket. And darting through the story is the thug on the lam who shows us the seamier underside of a New York Harbor clogged with decommissioned Liberty Ships used as emergency housing for the world's refugees.

What Harrison has done is graft a noirish crime story onto a New York City that has collapsed under the weight of its population. It's a dirty, ugly world with rationed water, no electricity, a black market for produce and meat, and corruption at every level of government. Where the dead and the gone gives us the quick death of NYC Make Room! Make Room! gives us the tail end of the long, slow demise. Both versions, as written, are equally plausible portraits of a city in decay.

But in a head-to-head grudge match it's Pfeffer's book hands down as the better read. Pfeffer's book continues to draw out the disaster in diary format, one day at a time, inviting the reader to put themselves in Alex's shoes in deciding whether or not he's made the right decisions. the dead and the gone deals somewhat flatly with Alex as a protector of his sisters and there is little for him emotionally. Harrison's book has a more balanced emotional story at it's heart with Andy questioning love and what it means to live in this rotten world, but in imagining the worst aspects of his world into our future he retained some ugly racial and sexist stereotypes that, while "authentic" for a reader back in 1966, detract from the story.

the dead and the gone
by Susan Beth Pfeffer
Harcourt Children's Books 2008

Life As We Knew It
by Susan Beth Pfeffer
Harcourt Children's Books 2006

Make Room! Make Room!
by Harry Harrison
Tor Books 2008

A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever

written and illustrated by Marla Frazee
Harcourt 2008

James and his friend Eamon are going to Nature Camp for a week. It's a day camp near Eamon's grandparent's beach front house where the boys spend their week. If you want to see what they did at camp all you need to read are the endpapers which are snapshots of their time at camp. Their best week ever happened at Bill and Pam's (Eamon's grandparent's) house.

Bill's a nice old guy who has traveled the world, loves penguins, and wants to talk about Antarctica all the time. The boys couldn't care less. Pam's cooking is better than anything the boys get at home, but probably because all she serves them is banana waffles. The boys stay in the basement, sleep on an inflatable mattress that serves as a fort, a trampoline, and a couch for their video game playing. They wear the same shorts all week long.

James and Eamon are boys, true boys, marginally overseen by adults, living the summer that boys dream of. Their week over, the boys look out over the ocean at night, feeling something they can't articulate. But they know what to do: they collect driftwood, small rocks and mussel shells and assemble a miniature Antarctica complete with penguins on the deck. They hug Pam and Bill and hope they can go to Nature Camp again soon.

Frazee knows boys. At the very least she knows these boys, and she knows that with boys everything is indirect. Bill asks them if they want to go see the penguin exhibit at the zoo, they boys say they'll think about it, and then they run away. They aren't trying to be rude, they're just boys doing what boys do, which is run away from conflict. I don't have a problem with this, because Frazee presents this with the same carefree attitude that boys bring with them. At the very end of their week when the boys don't know how to address their feelings of sorrow they do what boys do best: they build things, the express their feeling physically.

I'm on the fence between calling this a good picture book and a great picture book. It's heart is in the right place, the humor is dry and authentic, but I'm left feeling like their best week ever needed a little more of an anchor, maybe one or two more activities to solidify their week. Their days are taken up with Nature Camp -- which is never shown, and I'm fine with that -- but I wish they'd had more time at Pam and Bill's to build or create or invent some week-long project that could mirror the building of their summer friendship.

Will boys like it? Probably. Will they get it? Maybe. Does it matter? Nope.

A Crooked Kind of Perfect

Linda Urban
Harcourt 2007

Zoe wants a piano. In her mind she considers herself a piano prodigy waiting to be discovered. She's just a baby grand away from Carnegie Hall. But when her easily-distracted dad is charged with procuring the instrument he returns home with a cheesy Perfectone D-60 organ, complete with electronic rhythm sections and lessons that feature television theme songs in its practice book. When her teacher discovers that Zoe has some talent she convinces her to enter the annual Perform-O-Rama competition. And much middle grade hilarity ensues.

No, actually, it doesn't. What happens is much anxiety ensues, as Zoe is forced to attend the competition with her agoraphobic father who leaves poor Zoe in the care of her music teacher who, in turn, passes her off to another family she knows while he cowers in a hotel room. In that respect the book takes an unsettling turn because it really does feel the girl is at sea in the end. I'd like to say I thought this was a case of good writing but I can't imagine the author intended for the reader to feel anxiousness over her well being instead of the suspense of the competition.

It's funny, because until I sat down to write this I hadn't thought about how unnerving the end of the book was. In fact, I'd read recently that some consider this to be the best middle grade book released this year, and I might have given it that if I hadn't started thinking about it. Finishing the book my only qualm had been that there is an inconsistency between Zoe being told there was no classical music available for her organ, and no music beyond the 1980s, when in fact both appear throughout the competition with little mention. I thought it too minor to point out.

But what of the subplot at the beginning, where her best friend from the school year previous has dumped her ceremoniously for not being, well, Bratz enough? In the end it seems the only reason for her inclusion is for the sudden appearance of a certain baby grand at the end of the story and a good graphic for the cover. And what of that other strange subplot, the one with the boy who might be her boyfriend who hangs out with her dad all the time in the kitchen baking? Wait a minute, doesn't Zoe's mother use a mirror to read scores over the judges shoulders so she can calculate scores in the competition?

Now that I think about it, I haven't encountered this much head-scratching since... The Higher Power of Lucky! This book is exactly what a librarian might consider to be the perfect middle grade reader after all! There aren't enough "serious issues" to really make this award-worthy, but if the Newbery committee proves me wrong you read it here first.

So here's the thing. I read this because my youngest was hungry for something light and fluffy, something to read quickly between larger books, something to cleanse her palate. After I read it and felt I could recommend it to her she devoured it pretty much in a single sitting. It was perfect for the moment and easily forgotten when the moment was over, which was exactly what she wanted. I think that's good enough.

I Love My Pirate Papa

by Laura Leuck
illustrated Kyle M. Stone
Harcourt 2007

This cracks me up. Not the book but my original notes taken a few weeks back.

This rhyming picture book explores The joy of raising boys Without a mother's love aboard A pirate ship of noise A father's tenderness is buried In text beneath the gruff Exterior of belching lads And other other pirate stuff

First, I don't remember penning those lines, but the handwriting if definitely mine. Second, why I felt the need to take notes in rhyme is beyond me. It happens sometimes, what can I say. Third, if I wasn't going to finish the review-in-verse why the hell didn't I take down some other notes to help flesh out my initial impressions?

It's hard to believe that the current piratemania hasn't played itself out but I suppose as long as the Johnny Depp franchise continues to come out at regular intervals we won't see the last of it for a while. Which isn't to suggest this is a bad book, because it isn't. In fact, it's a nice little tale of a pirate papa indoctrinating his boy into the life of a pirate as matter-of-factly as any parent raises their child with their own beliefs and customs. Certainly there are elements specific to pirate culture but change those out and give them spirited illustrations, as included here, and you could be reading I Love My Amish Papa or I Love My Homeschool Papa. Because the pirate theme is there to deliver a father and son bonding story.

Now, let's see if we can't get more period-based father and son (and father and daughter) picture books out there. We could have I Love My Secret Agent Dad (done in a mid-century retro style to match the Cold War era), and I Love My Cowboy Pa, and perhaps I Reckon Ain't No One Better Than My Pappy Farmer.

Pssst!

by Adam Rex
Harcourt 2007

I get it now. I wasn't sure before when I first came across Adam Rex's Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich last year but after seeing this there's no doubt in my mind:

Adam Rex is making picture books for adults.

Sure, they can be enjoyed on certain levels by kids but the reality is that there's just too much packed into his illustrations for these to be for children. I wonder if his publishers and editors have figured it out. I bet the art department has and they're just keeping it to themselves.

A girl goes the the zoo and one by one different animals call her over for a little private chat. "Psst! Can you get me some tires?" the gorilla asks. "Why?" Isolated panel of a tire swing, the tire ripped from the rope. The girl promises to try. Next exhibit the bats want flashlights, not for them but for the hippo that they share a cave with. The peccary wants trash cans for all their trash. The penguins want paint because they can't stand all the white of their exhibit space. The sloths need helmets because they're falling out of trees and landing on their heads. Reasonable requests all.

Finally the animals give her money to make the various purchases ("The peacock collected the coins from the fountains.") and she's off to the hardware and supply store across the street from the zoo where everything beginning with the letter T is on sale for half off. Too bad she doesn't need a tiki or timber.

Each of the pages where the girl converses with the animals is presented like a one-page panel comic, buffered with spread where the girl is making her way around the zoo. It's in the spreads -- done in a pencil-draft style compared to the full color of the conversations -- where Rex includes lots of strange little details that might not register with younger readers. First a fawn and later a rhino are shown free-wheeling around the zoo in clear plastic balls. Trash cans topped with animal heads suggest a place to put trash in their mouth but later a panda-headed can is labeled "bamboo" and a tiger-head can is labeled "steak". Near the bat cave an elderly gentleman in a Batman suit is sitting, most likely the original 1930's Batman retired to the edges of the zoo.

It's the punchline of the book that sold me on the idea that there was a different audience for this book than the one I assumed. Once the animals have what they need the girl hopes their all happy and goes about her way. Turn the page and you see what they've done with their new toys: they've built an Ed "Big Daddy" Roth hot rod circa 1966 to ride around the zoo at night.
















(For the kids out there who don't know who Ed "Big Daddy" Roth is and what grew out of the mid-1960's hot rod culture)

Do I believe there are books out there that children and adults can enjoy together, conceived as a piece of mutual entertainment much the same way that Pixar includes jokes and sight gags for the captive adult audience? Yes. Do I think that Pssst! is equally enjoyable to young and old with each getting different things from it? Naturally.

But I still maintain that I think Adam Rex is putting one over on the publishers.

Alligator Boy

by Cynthia Rylant
illustrated by Diane Goode
Harcourt 2007

After a visit to a museum a boy decides he'd rather be an alligator. A gift of a costume alligator tail and head provide an instant transformation. Now he can deal with bullies fearlessly, enjoys school more, thrives.

Rylant's breezy rhyme and Goode's light drawings make an absurd-but-real situation and make it fun. Perfect for reading to the little boy who insists on wearing his superhero pajamas all the time, equally for any child who feels they are somehow different, trapped within conformity.

My only complaint is that as good as it is, it feels thin. I'm not so sure this deserves its own book as it does a place in a collection of shorter story-poems, the way Edward Lear's works were collected.

Life As We Knew It

by Susan Beth Pfeffer
Harcourt 2006

What could be more benign than the moon, cycling through the night sky, orbiting Earth and inspiring song and romance.

Bringing with it the end of life as we know it.

Miranda's journal entries quickly bring us up to speed. Her parents are separated, her father's remarried and his new young wife is newly pregnant. Her older brother is finishing up his first year at college and her younger brother thinks of nothing but baseball. Among Miranda's close friends she counts a girl enamored with her Born Again minister. Another friend died in an accident last year. Due to an injury Miranda has had to give up ice skating for swimming but she still follows the rise of a local boy on his way toward the Olympics.

Then there's all this talk -- excited talk -- about an asteroid on a collision course with the moon. The scientists have made their calculations and deemed the event historic but safe. The face of the moon has shown a history of asteroid damage and this current event promises to be spectacular, viewable with binoculars if not with the naked eye.

Miscalculation. The density of the asteroid was greater than anticipated. The moon is knocked from its orbit, closer to the Earth. Tides erupt into tsunamis all over the world. Earthquakes. Volcanoes awaken. The shoreline of every continent is swallowed. News vanishes from coastal radio and television networks. The moon sits uncomfortably close to the horizon.

Panic sets in. Miranda's mom has preservation instincts enough to grab as much cash as she can and go shopping for perishables. Miranda, her younger brother Jonny and their close family friend Mrs. Nesbit all help stockpile goods for the pantry. Miranda feels it's all a bit much, but then everyone is doing it so maybe her mom knows what she's doing. Families start to leave town, kids stop going to school. News comes in spurts from landlocked cities: rolls of the dead are read. The electricity begins to falter. The sky is covered in volcanic ash, the temperature rises, then falls sharply. How long with the heating oil and gas last? What kind of a winter is coming?

How long will Miranda and her family last?

As a member of Gen X (or the tail end of the Boomers, depending on where you set your marker) I'm one of those who have never had to learn first hand what bad times could be like. We've suffered depressions, but not like in the 20's and 30's. We've seen wars, and war protests, but it never really challenged our daily lives the way World War II brought on rationing and home front sacrifice. The Holocaust is something in history books, not living memory. I've seen my fair share of earthquakes (1971 and 1989), watched the hurricanes and tornadoes on the news, read about famine and disaster the world over. But the members of The Greatest Generation have done their job a little too well by cocooning the rest of us from the realities they vowed never to suffer again. We have not, as sheltered Americans, as world citizens en masse, had the personal experience of knowing what we would do when pressed to our limits.

Which is why some of us like reading about Earth shattering events that provoke those corners of our brains to ask "What would I do in that situation?" I couldn't make a steady diet of books and movies like that, like Life As We Knew It, but I could consume my fair share. I think many teens do, and for similar reasons -- because we want to compare our own emotions and reactions with those of the characters. We want to be right, and where we're wrong we want to know how and why. The book, movie or play become personal, we judge the characters and evaluate the situations and run a parallel narrative in our heads. Yes, hoard as much as you can, share with no one, and think about what you do when people get desperate. Can you second guess the medical concerns, the biological variables, the emotional trauma? When the food runs scarce who eats less, who eats more and who gives up all together?

I think Pfeffer has put together a great little story here, one that opens itself naturally to questions of morals and values. That alone probably prohibits it from use in the classroom (because morals and values aren't measured on standardized tests) but it shouldn't prevent whole-hearted recommendations to teens. I have a few questions and items I wish were addressed in the book -- political information, how the governments survived and some of the social mechanics of community, particularly after the first winter -- but perhaps that means I can look forward to a sequel. Honestly, there probably isn't any way to include the political in a journal reporting on a closed system like a single family's survival, still one can always hope.

Hope. Yeah, that's in there as well. The hope that Miranda can one day go to the prom, that the worst is over and that, with some adjustment, life as she once knew it will one day return.