Grandpa Green

by Lane Smith  
Roaring Brook Press  2011  

A boy fondly remembers his great-grandfather through the topiary garden he has built over the years.  

There's something missing here, something I can't quite put my finger on. Or maybe something off.

We have a boy, ostensibly the main character, going through the garden and explaining the meaning behind all the various animals and objects his great-grandpa has created. We see something unusual in picture books these days, a life-to-death story of a character... but not the boy. No, instead we are told the life story of Grandpa Green who doesn't appear until the very end, when history has caught up with him, and then... he is gone? As the boy models for an elaborate tableau of a knight fighting a dragon there is a sense that we have finally come to the present day, but then there is a final page turn where the boy has taken over and is sculpting an image of his grandpa. I think this is open-ended enough that readers (and their parents who read to them) can decide whether the boy is taking up the family trade or, indeed, is happily clipping a memorial to his late progenitor.

That's not even the missing part for me. What is missing is an arc, I realize. Grandpa Green's life may have a beginning, middle, and end, but are the linear events of a life enough of a story to satisfy as a "story?" Is it enough to say "He lived a full life, and now his great-grandson is taking over?" And even if it is a story about remembrance, about generational bonds, does the story really require a traditional narrative arc, or are the memories enough of a starting point to engender conversation? There's a telling statement toward the end – "He used to remember everything" – suggesting that much of what grandpa created no longer reminds him of the events they portray. It's almost be touching to imagine that grandpa creates the topiary as a replacement for his slowly vanishing memory, but that requires some effort even for an adult to read into it, much less a child.








Lane Smith, whose books I tend to love without reservation, has created a richly-textured study in green. The topiary on the page are just as marvelous as if they had been clipped and shaped from hedges, simply shaped and yet full of dynamic visual tension. There is a whole story in that chicken with a hatchling beneath its tail, and a certain muted sexiness in the scene where grandpa met his future wife at a cafe in Paris. To that end the book begins to take shape in my mind as a picture book for adults. Placed somewhere in mid-life, an adult reader can be taken by the hand as the boy ushers them through a certain nostalgia of their own childhood, their own grandparents' stories of war time and family building. Our narrator refers to himself as a great- grandchild but the book calls him grandpa, squaring up that this is a portrait of an adult parent's own grandfather as seen through the eyes of their own children.

Grandpa Green is a quiet, lovely book, the kind one gives to adults the way one gives Dr. Seuss' Oh The Places You'll Go! to high school and college grads and You're Only Old Once! to adults as a cautionary tale about life post-retirement.

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.

Big Plans

by Bob Shea
illustrated by Lane Smith
Hyperion 2008

He's got big plans! Big plans (he says)! Over and over and over...

Last year author Shea gave us some New Socks to play with, and they were good. Just the one image of that a chicken, with glasses, using a sock as a phone was enough for me. That's how kids are, that's how they play, I'm good. I think that for a certain age level picture books ought to try and capture that sense of childlike whimsy (claiming they're the biggest thing in the ocean, for example) and New Socks did it.

Shea's back, tugging illustrator Lane Smith for the ride, and things don't roll so smoothly. We start with a boy facing the corner of his classroom, obviously on punishment, the chalkboard full of all the "I will not's" he's most likely committed. From this single opening spread we learn that this boy rolls his eyes, schemes, laughs when others speak, isn't nice, proves the teacher wrong, considers himself the boss of the class, and announces that what he says goes.

I hate this kid.

I hate this kid so much that everything that follows better show me in some way that he is charming or in some other ways undeserving of this punishment in the corner, otherwise this book is really going to piss me off.

This book pissed me off.

He's got big plans, he announces, and he screams these words in 240 point type across most of the book. He's going to shout at the yes-men in the boardroom, take on the mayor, verbally assault the president. He's going to wear a skunk as a hat (because the only thing that stinks worse is this kid's attitude) and march all over the world shouting down everyone and everything else with his big plans. He's going to take over a losing football team (with his yes-man mynah bird) because losing is not part of his big plans. He'll order people to do this and that, and when he goes to the moon he'll order the rocks be moved so they can be read from Earth announcing his big plans.

And in the last spread we see that all his planning and scheming were a direct result of all the things surrounding him in the time out corner. There's a map of the moon and a book of presidents, and his snide little smirk that says "Yeah, they can put me in the corner, but I'll show them one day."

I never want that kid to leave the corner.

You know how it is when you get an email from someone who doesn't realize that writing in all caps reads like shouting? This book feels just like that, only worse. It's a bossy kid with a microphone hooked up to the Who's loudspeaker system shouting about his big plans at 160 decibels ten feet from your face. Did it have to be so loud, Lane? Couldn't the kid be less of a schmuck and more of a dreamer? Couldn't there be something in this kid that would make us want to root for him to take over the country and fly to the moon and be the star football player?

Not cute, not endearing, and please, let no one read this to boys at story hour unless they want an army of bossy boys shouting down adults and thinking they own the world, or a dozen time-out corners in need of occupants.