Squish #4: Captain Disaster

by Jennifer L. Holm and Matthew Holm 
Random House 2012 

Squish, an amoeba, and his single-cell friends learn life lessons in a primordial soup that looks a lot like an upper elementary school. 

As a kid, one of the things I used to love about going out to a restaurant was that the family-friendly places would have comic books for us to read at the table. They were cheesy, with easy-to-solve puzzles and comic adventures that would loosely incorporate the restaurant's mascot and some lesson in good citizenship into eight or twelve pages, the perfect length between ordering and getting food. It was also the perfect length for delivering a didactic message about sharing or bullying or bike safety or recycling or whatever the topic du jour was at the time.

So when I say that Captain Disaster makes me feel like I'm sitting back in a Bob's Big Boy circa 1971 it isn't with a warm and fuzzy glow of nostalgia but with a certain level of puzzlement. Are kids no longer getting these messages in TV cartoons and in other formats that we need them to be produced as graphic novels for a younger readers? Or, conversely, can we not perhaps ask that graphic novels for younger readers elevate themselves above the level of the Archie comics found at the dentist office?

Why does this book make me feel like a snob all of a sudden?

Squish and his friends Pod, also an amoeba, and Peggy, a paramecium, all try out for the soccer team and very quickly learn they don't have any skills. Squish is made team captain and with very little guidance is expected to "steer the ship" of his team forward. While the Coach (a cycloptic crustacean) keeps hammering home the idea of having fun no one on the team is enjoying the fact that they lose every game. Squish's dad suggests that as captain he should try to help take advantage of his teams skills and so he works out a set of winning plays that turns his team around. The problem is that Squish somehow manages to miss the fact that he is always the one to score and Pod and Peggy want to quit the team over it. Realizing that he's focused on winning over inclusion Squish turns things around and returns to the team having fun despite losing.  There's a handful of biology terms thrown in occasionally, not enough to build a curriculum around, with a simple physics experiments at the end and a draw-the character page... all of which brings me right back to those restaurant comics.

Maybe it was the times, and the times they are always a-changin', but it seemed like we got comics like this everywhere we went. At the dentist office, sure, in comics and magazines like Highlights and Boy's Life; No trip to a national park was complete without some comic lesson about forest fires or steering clear of bears; Police and firemen would come to classes to teach us bike safety or the dangers of chemicals or electricity, all with cartoon pamphlets; And there were always fairs with kid-friendly material about recycling or public safety or any number of other civic lessons. I guess what I'm trying to say is, this stuff was everywhere, and it was free, and I'm wondering if we really need more of this stuff, stuff like Squish.

Regular reader know I am a very big advocate of graphic novels for kids, and like anything that includes art there is always a question hanging in the air about how one can discuss something like illustrated stories which many seem to think comes down to a question of personal taste. But as I've said before, the rules for graphic novels and comics for kids are the same as narrative text: are the characters multi-dimensional, is the story emotionally complex, are the secondary characters and plots clearly drawn and equally compelling? Time and again when I come across a graphic novel I find weak, and people question my assessment (usually because they disagree with it), I simply say "If this story had its pictures removed and were told as a traditional story, would you find it of a quality you'd be comfortable calling "good storytelling" for kids?

Quite often the answer is "no," and suddenly the question surrounding the value of graphic novels rears its head again.

Squish is not by far the worst offender in this sense, but when I see glowing testimonials from The New York Times, Kirkus, Publisher's Weekly, and The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Studies I can't help wondering when someone's going to realize the emperor is naked. The problem isn't that these comics shouldn't be made, they simply don't hold up as books that don't deserve the heaps of praise they've received.

You tell me, am I being too hard, or are these graphic "novels" for the younger set filling a need that's no longer being met?

Neville

by Norton Juster
illustrated by G. Brian Karas
Schwartz & Wade / Random House 2011  

Moving to a new neighborhood is tough. How do you find and make new friends? One boy has an interesting solution...

It's move-in day, and there's little for a boy to do while his parents begin unloading boxes and setting up the house. Mom can see that he's upset, she knows that it's hard to be the new kid in town, and suggests that maybe he should take a walk around the neighborhood. Maybe he'll make some new friends. "Yeah, sure," he says.

At the end of the block he shouts out "NEVILLE!" and is surprised when he's joined by another boy who tells him he's not loud enough. Soon the two boys are joined by a girl who tells them they aren't doing it correctly. Soon, a whole neighborhood of kids is shouting out for Neville and asking who this mystery boy is. As the sun sets and the kids return home they are convinced that this Neville must be a  pretty cool kid, and his friend isn't so bad either. As the boy returns home Neville himself has to admit to admit that his walk around the neighborhood wasn't so bad.

The astute young reader will figure out pretty quickly that the unnamed boy is Neville and that he's accidentally stumbled into a pretty clever way to make new friends. Whether this will ring as true to kids today as it did for me I would be curious to know. Growing up it wasn't uncommon for us kids to wander in the general area of where we knew certain kids lived and just shouted out their names. Goofuses on the roofuses, hollering our heads off so to speak. Phones were for adults, and it always seemed we only ever sort of knew where our friends lived. It also wasn't unusual for parents to roam the streets calling for their kids to come home either. That cacophony of neighborhood life, another victim of better manners and the age of cell phones.

Karas's illustrations are inviting and softly rendered with a very child-like quality to them. At times there are images where the children are drawn small on the page, almost too small; I think at this point in publishing every picture book needs to take best advantage of the page's canvas. I'm not saying a page can't include white space or needs to be crowded and busy but that traditionally printed picture books can hardly make their case against a digital world if they aren't making the most of their real estate.

Simply written and cleanly told, Neville is a pleasant take on the new-kid-in-town story.

Babar and Zephir

by Jean de Brunhoff
translated from the French by Merle S. Haas
Random House  1937

Babar's little monkey friend goes home for summer vacation. All hell breaks loose.

It is the end of the school year and time for Babar the elephant to bid his monkey friend Zephir farewell for the summer. His friends wave goodbye to him as his train passes them by the river, and it is impossible to wonder if Zephir isn't partially relived to be leaving his colonial oppressors behind him.

Arriving at Monkeyville, Zephir throws himself into his mother's arms though he cannot help but marvel at how capitalist his old home town has become. Though he puts on a happy face for his family Zephir secretly wonders if he wasn't better off back in Celesteville.

Arriving at his home Zephir climbs the rope ladder to his home and instantly realizes that Monkeyville is inaccessible and discriminatory toward the obese, like his friend Babar. While entertaining his younger sibling, Zephir catches the smells of his mother cooking bananas and chocolate, her French cuisine another colonial influence in their lives.

Zephir wakes in the middle of the night to the realization that he has made a mistake, that he should never have come home. Unable to sleep he sits and stares blankly into the darkness until dawn when he receives word from an early bird that a package has arrived for him at the train station. His hope that it is a piano, but this conceals the fact that he secretly wishes for a piano crate in which he can ship himself someplace else. Anyplace by Monkeyville.

The next morning he discovers the package from his friend Babar contains a small boat. This only confirms that he is not the only one who believes he should escape from the suffocating jungle of his youth. Nearby, Princess Isabelle takes note of Zephir's ambition and realizes that this might be time for escape as well.

Taking the boat out for its maiden voyage Zephir goes fishing in the hopes of catching a decent meal when his line ensnares a sea harpy named Eleanore. Believing briefly that he is in an fairy tale Zephir insists the sea harpy will grant him any wish for setting her free. Eleanore promises to return the favor any way she can though, honestly, how could she? If she had any power at all she would have avoided getting caught in the first place.

When Zephir arrives back on shore Monkeyville is jumping with news that Princess Isabelle has gone missing. The little monkey is not surprised. At this moment he conceives of a scheme by which he, too, can escape. He spreads a rumor among the younger monkeys that a green cloud has taken Isabelle and hidden her somewhere in Monkeyville. This sends the adult monkey's frantically searching all over the land while Zephir returns to his boat to check on a hunch.

On the water, Zephir calls out to Eleanore the sea harpy who confirms that Isabelle has indeed made her escape. She agrees to lead Zephir to the cage of an old water witch who is known for harboring runaways.

The water witch explains that Isabelle showed up to trade some of her royal jewels for passage to another land but was lured away by Polomoche, a monster who collects orphans and strays for his own amusements. Many who go with Polomoche are never heard from again. Despite being sympathetic for her need to escape Zephir is a monkey of the world and knows Iasbelle is in over her head and must be rescued.

Arriving at Polomoche's private island he is alarmed at the number of stone piles surrounding the land. They resemble nothing short of burial cairns, sending a chill up Zephir's spine as he thinks of all the missing children beneath them. Zephir knows that if he is to succeed he must keep his wits about him.

Sneaking into Polomoche's stone home at the top of the island, Zephir's fears are confirmed when he sees Polomoche entertaining a number of his friends with his latest find, Isabelle. The Princess cries, for now she knows that the amusement he promised was for her to "entertain" his guests in a most vile and humiliating manner. Polomoche whispers that if she doesn't come to her senses she'll soon find herself literally between some rocks and a hard place.

Zephir enters and startles Polomoche and his company with an offer to entertain them in Isabelle's place. As one runaway is as good as the next, they agree, and Zephir sets about distracting them by telling tales of things he has seen during his days in Clelesteville. Of course, Zephir embellishes his tales, adding layers of debauchery and immorality enough to whet their appetites. During this time Isabelle hides herself away, unsure of what to do next.

Clever monkey that he is, Zephir next gets up and plays the clown. Singing and dancing he seems so innocent and pure, arousing dark thoughts among Polomoche and his friends. Then, unseen to them all, Zephir delivers a potent drug to their beverages which cause them to act giddy and gay until they pass out. This, of course, is neither shown or mentioned in the text, but clearly this is what happened.

Once back to Zephir's boat he offers the Princess the choice to either return home or escape with him. He is disappointed when she says she wants to return home, but is encouraged by her promise to see that he is rewarded handsomely. With enough money Zephir could legitimately travel without it looking like he was running away himself. They are greeted at the shores of Monkeyville like returning heroes. Zephir smiles through it all, though deep down he despises cheap idolatry in all its forms.

At a ceremony in his honor Zephir is given his reward: Princess Isabelle is his to marry when they are of age and ready. Zephir visibly sags in disappointment and Isabelle is too smitten and simpleminded to even notice. Even back at home Zephir cannot bring himself to admit his disappointment to his family and goes along with the charade of happiness that he is home safe and sound, a hero of Monkeyville.

The rest of his summer drags on, an endless cascade of days full of mind-numbing boredom. He vows that when he returns to school in Celesteville he will find a job or some other excuse to prevent him from ever returning home during school breaks. Princess Isabelle will just have to find some other monkey to marry. Colonial oppression never looked so good.

===

This, of course, is not the actual summary of Babar and Zephir. This lesser-known and often out-of-print book in the Babar series is, I found, truly bizarre. Perhaps all the Babar books were a little it strange, but Zephir's tale seems exceptionally so. In choosing to "read the pictures" the way a child might, I found it interesting that I could access such a dark undercurrent. I wasn't trying to find darkness, I was simply looking for ways to build on what was there, scene by scene.

In the text, Zephir does return home for the summer, gets a boat as a gift, and rescues the Princess from an evil monster who has abducted her for his own amusement. The fact that it's monkeys and monsters (and mermaids) might add a layer of separation from the anxiety of child abduction, but that story thread is clearly there. It seems so innocent at first, and so simply child-like, that you can almost forget what is really going on. It's just a cute story about a commoner rescuing a princess in the end, right? Just like any fairy tale.

But the story is also lacking in quality. Something I noticed was that de Brunhoff often would describe or explain the pictures, including details that added nothing to the story. On a page where Zephir is thanking his mermaid friend for helping him find Polomoche's island we get this paragraph:

After a good crossing, Eleonore and Zephir land without being seen by the Gogottes. The country looks bleak. They are now silently taking leave of each other. Zephir holds his friend's little hand in his own.

Do we need to know it was a good sea crossing? Would we have expected something else without being told? They land without being seen tells, again, rather than shows but the place looks deserted to begin with. The landscape itself may be considered bleak because of a lack of vegetation, but unexplained is the connection a reader must make (if they can) that the rocks of the surrounding hillside are the actual victims of Polomoche who, we've been told, turned them into stone. Finally, Zephir and Eleanore's farewell sounds like someone describing a silent movie to a blind person.

Written in 1937 it would be easy to forgive Babar and Zephir for its transgressions. Last reprinted in 2002, I found the book still readily available in my local library. For fans of Babar himself the title is misleading – he is merely a speck in the book's first illustration and never returns again – and for that alone the book is probably least enjoyed in the series. As a stand-alone title I find this one sags a bit.

Unless you make up your own story for the pictures, you know, the way some kids do.

Bigger Than A Bread Box

by Laurel Snyder
Random House   2011

As her parents are going through a separation, a girl finds a magical bread box that can grant her almost any wish she can imagine. But what if what she wants can't fit inside the bread box?

There is no arguing, divorce is rough on families. It's usually rough both before and after for all parties, but especially so during, and no more so than on kids who get caught in the middle. And Rebecca is right there in the thick of it, listening to her parents argue when the power goes out, her mother reaching the breaking point as she berates her father for not paying the electric bill, again. But it's just a fight, right? Or rather, just another fight? But the next day Rebecca comes home from school to find the car packed and her mother waiting to take them from Baltimore to Atlanta where Rebecca's grandmother lives. "For a visit" she's told but Rebecca is furious at being taken away from her father, her friends, her home; more so when she wakes up the next morning and learns she's going to be signed up for school in Atlanta.

Refusing to speak with her mother Rebecca goes exploring and finds her way into the attic. Among all musty old things she finds a bread box, one of three but different that the others. A casual wish for a book to read is answered when she opens a red bread box and there, waiting for her as if by magic, a book to read. Soon, Rebecca discovers that the bread box can grant any practical wish, provided it fits inside the confines of the box. An iPod pre-loaded with her favorite tunes. An endless supply of her favorite snack cakes. A thousand dollars. A thousand dollars! About the only thing the bread box cannot deliver his Rebecca's life back the way it used to be.

But Rebecca has other problems when she is enrolled in school and battles with being the new girl. Buying off friends (courtesy of gifts from the bread box) she finds herself bumping up against the school's queen bee who, it turns out, has family troubles of her own she's hiding. And when she uses the bread box to find a birthday gift for her mother – a collectible spoon – and then later tries to return the spoon out of guilt once she realizes where it came from, Rebecca's story spins in a whole different direction altogether. Just as strangely, it all comes together in the end, although not with the happy ending Rebecca had hoped for.

There is, within the various structures of fiction, the "rule of three" that suggests things happening in groups of three are more satisfying to the reader. In Bigger Than a Bread Box the three main story elements are the divorce and relocation, Rebecca at the new school, and the magical bread box. All three work well together... and yet there's a part of me that wonders if this story could have managed with only two, any two, of them. Because the bread box is key to helping Rebecca learn some "lessons" it should stay, so then the question for me is did this have to be a story about both a divorce and fitting in at school? Looking at it from that perspective I like the divorce story more because there's some real gut-level, kids-on-the-front-lines emotions to be dealt with, while the school story is just, eh, a bit of a distraction from the other two story arcs. This doesn't mean I find the overall story flawed, only that I think I would have preferred there to be two books, The Bread Box Divorce and The Bread Box Goes to School. I know, I know, I need to review it as written.

It used to be that divorce was not a topic of middle grade. Divorce – along with runaways, drug use, and other social misfittery – was once the providence of YA. Oh, sure, you'd get a bounced-around Gilly Hopkins now and then, or the occasional inner city family landscapes of Walter Dean Myers, but for the most part middle grade was the stomping ground of golden tickets and Swedish tomboys and the occasional girl who speaks to wolves. That "issues" stories have shifted toward middle grade is neither  new nor news, and a divorce story like Bigger Than a Bread Box is welcome in a world where readers actively seeking both answers and escape in their own lives. What is new, and refreshing, is the use of a fantastical or science-fictional element within realistic fiction to tell these stories, and in that Bigger Than a Bread Box has much in common with Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me. For lack of a better description I would put both of these books in the category of middle grade magical realism, something I would like to see more of.

It is said (I've never read a first-hand account) that Jules Verne was upset with H.G. Wells for writing sci-fi that didn't explain the science of the fiction. When you're planet is being invaded by aliens from space and destroying life as we know it, who cares about the science! Some might suggest that this becomes the dividing line between science fiction and fantasy because, after all, if you can't explain it as either the cause or the result of science then clearly it is fantastical. But ultimately I find the arguments over genre slightly tedious and only barely helpful from a marketing perspective. So why bother mentioning it at all?

How the bread box does what it does is never fully explained, and I'm fine with that. Really, it's fine. The bread box is a middle grade McGuffin designed to present a mystery that isn't actually the point of the story. True, it presents complications that have consequences within the narrative arc but it's not a story about a bread box. It's a story about divorce, and a girl named Rebecca trying to navigate that emotional territory, and these are subjects firmly based in a real world that real middle grade kids have to deal with in their lives. To a child afraid of the dark an imaginary friend my become a comfort, to a teen it might be experiencing elaborate fantasies about defeating seven evil exes, and these are coping mechanisms for both the character and the reader to process the emotional terrain of the stories.

All of this to say that I think we might want to consider moving away from classifying middle grade books by genre. I know, I've drifted afield here, but what Bigger Than a Bread Box underscored for me is that I think sometimes we adults look too closely at the wrong things. We're like Rebecca's mother who despite having the weight of her world on her shoulders has simply forgotten to look closer at what her middle grade daughter might need, assuming that our adult decisions and responsibilities are enough. We can't, and shouldn't, presume that any one book will reach out and help a child cope, but sometimes, like a girl in the attic wishing things could be just a little better, a book can provide a moment of grounding and hope. In those moments the hair-splitting of genres and the science of magic hardly matters.
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Full disclosure: While I don't happen to think these things matter here, I received this book from the author via her publisher, and I consider her a friend (though we have yet to meet). Take from that what you will.

The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories

by Dr. Seuss
introduction by Charles D. Cohen
Random House  2011

Seven previously published magazine stories by the late Bard of Beginner Books, collected in book form for the first time.

The story of this collection has been in the news a lot lately, and certainly been on a lot of folks' radar since its publication announcement in the spring. The idea that there was enough Seuss that hadn't been seen widely since the 1950s is certainly newsworthy, although the nostalgia market being what it is it's impossible to not fear that the collection would consist of inferior material deliberately abandoned by Theodore Geisel for good reason. That said, with a market that consists of a half century full of people who learned to read on Seuss titles there was no way you could risk the reputation of the master by putting out an inferior product. No, it would be impossible to toss of a collection of rejects and risk the ire of Boomers who would pillory those attempting to profit from junk.

The Bippolo Seed is, like others, a collection of tales featuring familiar Seuss characters, animals, morals, and above all, that cadence, that anapestic tetrameter that is as distinctly Seuss as iambic pentameter is to Shakespeare. To read the book, to start a Seuss story new to the eye, it is almost impossible to not begin by reading aloud. It's as if something deep is tapped in the root memory of our reading brain that triggers this connection between when we first learned to read and how one is "supposed" to read Seuss. There is probably a paper on cognitive science about this (or if there isn't there should be) and to do so, to read this Seuss collection aloud, reveals some interesting information about these early stories and the development of that cadence we know by heart and memory.

Gustav's original magazine appearance

Writing for magazines, space was necessarily limited. Seuss was either asked or pitched his stories to fill two or four or five pages (best to fill a layout) and his illustrations would need to fit around the text, and vice versa. In some cases the magazine pages would contain multiple layouts on a single page. The effect this has is that there are large chunks of text to accompany a single illustration, and with the stories in The Bippolo Seed already we can feel, intrinsically, that something isn't quite right. The lines are long, longer than they would be for a beginning reader, occasionally spilling into the next line in a way that reads far more complicated than their later Beginner Book components. They also explain more than they show, no doubt another necessary component of their magazine straitjacket. But then, of course, these were stories meant to be read to a child, no by a child. Their presentation in an adult magazine was clearly aimed at parents (mothers) to use at storytime. Lap-sitters weren't expected to follow along with the text, or make connections between pictures and language the way they would with The Cat in the Hat or even Horton Hears a Who.

To be sure, these aren't second-rate Seuss stories, nor are they the way the good Doctor would have chosen to present them in book form had he the chance to come back to this world and guide us. "Gustav, the Goldfish" already got the book treatment when his wife at the time Helen Palmer converted it to Fish Our of Water, though seeing the story told in rhyme gives it a greater feeling of urgency. "The Bippolo Seed" with it's tale of endless wishing and greed follows the typical Seussian mold of a cumulative story that would sit nicely between If I Ran the Zoo, though a more direct connection can be found in "The Great Henry McBride" and his daydreaming of multiple occupations – from a time when holding down more than one job wasn't out of economic necessity!  "The Rabbit, the Bear, and the Zinniga-Zanniga," beyond being a mouthful that can get tricky to catch the rhythms, offers a story of quick-thinking that would be suitable filler as a shorter story in any Seuss collection. "Steak for Supper" and it's Mulberry Street location suggests a possible sequel to the book that started it all back in 1937, and "The Strange Shirt Spot" has seen print before... as the stain-in-the-tub sequence from The Cat in the Hat Comes Back. Of the seven stories presented the weakest and most derivative is "Tadd and Todd" which suggests Seuss' attempt to give his spin to another pair of twin T's, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, though with a more post-Freudian case of identity crisis.

text in search of an illustration (or two). double click for a larger view

If these stories can be said to be lacking anything it is more illustrations. Naturally, if they had more illustrations they wouldn't have fit the magazines, nor would they be collectible in a single book. I remember when The Lorax originally appeared as a magazine feature (yes, I am that old) it didn't matter than I'd already read the story, I wanted the book version for its additional illustrations and that "real book" feel. As much as any master in the field, Seuss knew how to pace a story and set-up those page turns, and it's that touch that is missing here. The words sit in their little blocks, and the illustrations have been expertly reproduced and colored, but that sense of flow, those layouts that force the eye across the page, back and forth between word and image, that's missing here in The Bippolo Seed.

That said, there are few who can do what Dr. Seuss did, and even with their minor flaws and limitations, its nice that there is a new Seuss for a new generation to have as their own. And for those older Seuss fans its an even better reminder of what can and should be expected in terms of books for young readers.

Do You Know What I'm Going To Do Next Saturday?

by Helen Palmer
with photographs by Lynn Fayman
Beginner Books / Random House  1963


One tow-headed boy's laundry list of what he intends to do includes a good deal of eating and pretty large amount of time hanging out with the Marines.  Includes gun play. 

This is perhaps Palmer and Fayman's finest collaboration and also it's most incendiary by modern standards.  A boy – let's call him Timmy in honor the owner of TVs Lassie, a generic type of the era – is standing around telling a younger boy of his plans for his next day of leisure. The younger boy is attentive on this first page and we won't see him again until the last page.

Timmy has big plans.  He's going to eat a breakfast that includes both donuts and pancakes, more pancakes than you'd probably eat at home in a year. Then he's going to work off those carbs by swimming, playing five games of tennis simultaneously, then beat an entire team at beach volleyball. A few ice cream sodas as a snack and then it's back to two-fisted bowling, water skiing, scuba diving, and a little wire walking.

Then things get interesting.

Timmy's going to fly around in a military jet, then in a military helicopter.  Okay, so maybe this Timmy has a friend or relative in the military.  No biggie.  A massive lunch later and Timmy's off to get a haircut but... wait a minute.  This barber is giving military buzz cuts. Four pages of the razor horror sends Timmy running down the railroad tracks vowing to keep his hair at all costs!

But then he hitches up with the Marines.  "Did you ever play with the United States Marines?" he asks the reader.  Why, no, Timmy.  It never occurred to me that that was an option for a seven year old boy.

"Shooting!  I'll got shooting with the United States Marines."  And sure enough, Timmy's there, gun in hand.  He's also at the firing range with a semi-automatic rifle.  Niiice.

After yet another meal (because we all know how boys love to eat) Timmy goes through all the basic training, beating every Marine in sight, but finally making his escape to do other things on his list.  No one holds Timmy down, not even the Marines!  But that escape left him hungry, so Timmy eats a hundred miles of spaghetti which earns him a spot leading the Marine band, a fine finish to a bust Saturday.

Oh, and that other boy he was bragging to in the beginning?  He's fast asleep on the last page.  Yes, sir!

In some ways this book needs to be seen to be believed, but someone else has already uploaded it as a Flickr set which you can check out right here.  You'll see, I didn't exaggerate the summary one bit.

It's interesting that no one considered it unusual to depict a boy talking about and joining up with a branch of the military, or handling real guns.  It's entirely consistent with my memories growing up of reenacting the war movies we saw on TV and owning blank guns and water pistols.  We cannot imagine putting a weapon in the hand of a child today, much less in the hands of a child in a beginning reader, yet boys today still do play at war and own water cannons and imitate the imaginary battles they see in video games.  In that sense it almost feels hypocritical that books don't accurately reflect the world of the boy today, that we have gotten so politically correct that we feel the problems of the influence of violence somehow rested in books and not in a culture that continues to supply children with the tools and images of violence.

The same with food. I cannot imagine a book today "promoting" this sense of unbalanced and unbridled eating that takes place here, but what's beyond the images?  This is a story of a boy bragging, and so naturally he isn't going to be bragging about getting his three-to-five servings of fruit and vegetables and making sure he doesn't exceed his 2000 calorie daily limit. And despite all the sugars and fats, this was 1963 and there wasn't a drop of high fructose corn syrup to trigger onset diabetes.  The boy is active and there's no room for sitting around with video games eating empty snack calories, no fat-saturated fast foods to bring on childhood obesity.  To our modern eyes we see the horrors of caloric excess but we fail to acknowledge that removing these images from books didn't make kids healthier.  As with guns, the problems exist outside the book and rest with a culture of denial.

Something I didn't know until I did some digging was that in the pre- and early internet days the rumor was that this book had been banned by the good Dr. Seuss himself, primarily because it advocates suicide.  WHAT?!  Apparently, between all the guns and the phrase "Next Saturday I'm going to blow my head off!" (in reference to playing a tuba), along with the fact that Palmer committed suicide herself a few years later after developing cancer, the assumption was the book was... well, yo now how rumors go. Unfortunate wording aside, it's a pretty big stretch to read into that tuba playing as a coded message to kids. 

So what have we learned this week from the mostly out-of-print oeuvre of Helen Palmer?  If we strip away the photos – as much for their dated qualities as their racial bias – we have books that celebrate the childhood imagination at its most uninhibited. We saw boys using tools unsupervised and with the freedom to learn about and solve design problems through physical experience.  We saw children fearlessly interacting with animals in a (mostly) respectful manner.  We heard the natural exaggerations of childhood told in a realistic and authentic manner without judgment or moralizing. In short, the Palmer-Fayman books validated and mirrored the experiential world of beginning readers who, like most of us, want to see something we can relate to in our reading.

From an historical perspective these books seem bizarre, and at times it is hard to deny the amazement that catches us off guard when we see things like a child handling a gun.  But at their core they are brave and bold, and more importantly honest, portrayals of a time when children's books trusted the reader's intelligence enough not to insult it was false safeties.  These books did not assume or remove the role of the parent in teaching their children right from wrong.  If anything these titles and their imagery remind us that reading, beginning reading, is not a passive activity meant to serve as a passive minder, reading is an activity meant to engender thought and meaning.

By making books "responsible" and "safe" for children we have abdicated our adult duties in knowing what our children are reading.  We no longer need to worry if a book contains materials we object to, and if they do we threaten to sue the publisher or have them banned from a library or threaten a politician's next election by forcing them to take action.  The irresponsibility we see in these books is really just the reflection of our own guilty conscious asking why we have chosen false battles in the name of protecting the children.

Finally, I should mention that Helen Palmer does still have one book in print called A Fish Out of Water (1961).  Based on a story Dr. Seuss published in 1950 called "Gustav the Goldfish" (which will be part of a collection of new Seuss stories to be printed this fall), it is the story of a boy in charge of a pet shop who is warned not to overfeed the fish.  When he does the fish grows to troubling proportions, causing the pet shop owner to come and (mysteriously) save the day.  Unlike Palmer's other books it was illustrated by P.D. Eastman which manages to prevent it from looking aged.  Also unlike other Palmer books the boys misbehavior results in catastrophies that require the help of adults (police officer, pet shop owner) to help him solve.  The book ends with a moral message, the boy promising never to disobey and overfeed the fish. 

This is the type of thing that is still safe. Obey authority figures, let adults solve your problems, and trust that fantasy illustrations aren't as dangerous as photographs.  Perhaps the reason Seuss let his wife adapt the original in the first place was because even he knew it was lacking the subversive qualities that made his own work resonate with readers.

I Was Kissed By a Seal at the Zoo

by Helen Palmer 
with photographs by Lynn Fayman 
Beginner Books / Random House 1962


A group of kids go to the zoo and do things no kid would ever be allowed to do, setting up some false expectations and perhaps forever ruining the notion of zoos to children forever. 

"What would you do if you went to the zoo?" is the question posed to a number of children.  One would want to play with a baby lion, another would make friends with a walrus, one would escort his brother around the petting zoo, another would help out with the baby elephant, the chimps, the penguins, and finally the titular seal.  "Those are the things we would do at the zoo. And do you know something? We went there! And we did them." 

Cruel, cruel world, giving children books featuring photos of real kids really doing these things.  Playing with a lion cub like it was a kitten, spending time with the trainers while they care for and train walruses and elephants, waddling around with penguins and petting gazelles.  It's no mystery why this book is no longer in print: think of the poor parents! Think of the poor zoos having to tell kids that, no, they don't just let kids wander around the exhibits just because they want to. Not these days, and I sincerely doubt they ever did.  

No, what Palmer does is begin with this premise of asking kids what they would do – simple wishing, not harmful and not unusual – then presents these fantasies with photos that suggest these wishes are possible.  Now, no one wants to bring up a kid's expectations only to let them down, but Palmer goes one step too far in the end by showing us a line-up of the kids featured throughout the book with the closing note that they really did these things. Perhaps a follow-up title would have been I Played Keep-Away From a Shark at the Aquarium! 

If reading Why I Built the Boogle House planted the seed of catching my own wild pets, I Was Kissed by a Seal... no doubt made me excited the next time my parents told me we were going to the zoo.  It wouldn't have been the same zoo in the book but why would I believe that all zoos were alike?  Why not expect an all-access pass to any animal that captured my fancy?

Growing up in the 60s and 70s my generation experienced first-hand the repercussions of the lies of post-war America. The optimism of the 1950s that crumbled during the Vietnam era were largely the result of kids realizing that the world was nothing like the promises delivered to them on a regular basis.  It isn't simply a question of being denied jet packs and space-age living, but the collection of promises we watched erode over time. It begins simply with a denial to play with lion cubs at the zoo but eventually includes the myths of family life as presented on TV, the casual lies of advertising, the college education as a guarantee of employment, the job for life and the retirement plan that takes care of all your needs.  The sting of reality was impossible to ignore while our parents tried to explain to us the deaths of Bobby Kennedy and Dr. King, or why they would turn off the news when they heard any mention of the "conflict" in Southeast Asia.  They couldn't even call it a war.

No, they could no longer offer beginning readers a world that never existed.  The fantasy of I Wish That I Had Duck Feet is fine, escapism and childhood fancy could still be found in the reportage of a book like A Hole is to Dig, but none of this photo-realism to serve as false documentary.  

Perhaps I'm being unfair to a cherished childhood memory.  Perhaps the real reason the book went out of print, and rightly so. was because there wasn't a single non-white child in the bunch.  That arrogance of the white default is still around in publishing, despite Ezra Jack Keats' The Snowy Day arriving a year after I Was Kissed by a Seal... proved that kids don't see color as a difference, they have to be taught it.

No matter what, I cannot shake the deep rivers of nostalgia this book opens up.  Sadly, I can no longer see it with the same innocent eyes.

Why I Built the Boogle House

by Helen Palmer
with photographs by Lynn Fayman
Random House / Beginner Books  1964

A boy trades up from a turtle to increasing larger pets, building and modifying homes for them, until finally he has a house big enough for a Boogle. (What's a Boogle?)

It starts with a turtle, a pet this boy has always wanted.  He builds a house for it to live in out of wood.  The next day the turtle has run away.  He wants a new pet.  He goes down to the pond and snatches a duck.  The duck doesn't fit in the turtle house so he modifies the house until the duck fits.  But the duck is noisy so he trades it for a kitten.  Now the house is too small for a kitten, so he builds it up until it's large enough. This goes on.  Kitten for a rabbit, rabbit for a dog, dog for a goat, goat for a horse. When the house for a horse draws the attention of the police who inform him that he can't keep a horse in his backyard the boy decides to dedicate the house to the imaginary Boogle he hopes to catch one day.  In the meantime he has outfitted his Boogle house into a rather nice private clubhouse with plants and a beaded curtain.

I love the innocence of children's books from the early days.  So free of concerns about children emulating behavior and notions of property and fears of litigation.  There's a reason this book is out of print, and it has nothing to do with the dated photos from the early 1960s.

Putting aside the problems of appropriating ones pets from local ponds (and the lack of concern for feeding any of the pets, which is perhaps why they tend to run away or become a nuisence) what Why I Built the Boogle House has going for it is the unbridled enthusiasm this boy has in building homes for these animals.  That and a seemingly endless supply of lumber and access to hand tools.  I'm not even going to pretend that this book didn't somehow inspire me to want to do the same thing (and longtime readers may remember I once tried to convince my parents to let me have a pet squirrel in our apartment when I was around 6 years old).

What this dated title by Dr. Seuss's first wife gets right is the mindset of a boy, albeit short-sighted in some ways, who recognizes that caring for a pet means providing for it as best he can.  In the pre-feminist way that dolls and doll play helped girls prepare for their lives as housewives and mothers, boys with their ownership of pets helped condition them to the notion of having and providing for families.  Trading up, the great American Dream of building bigger and better, the idea of not only making something with your hands but doing so with a purpose, these are the messages that truly explain why the boy, anyone really, sets out to build a Boogle house.  The Boogle, though the boy thinks he's hedging his bets by building for something that cannot be outgrown, is actually the future, his future.  The Boogle house his is retirement plan, his real estate venture, his safety net.  We build toward the eventuality of what we one day might need. It is a lesson about saving and planning, and one we have drifted far from in the past 50 years.

As best as I can tell, Helen Palmer published four children's books under her name, the only one still in print being A Fish Out of Water which was originally a story by Dr. Seuss called "Gustav the Goldfish" which appeared in Redbook magazine in 1950.  The other three books – Why I Built the Boogle House, Do You Know What I'm Going To Do Next Saturday, and I Was Kissed By a Seal at the Zoo – are decidedly different in that they use black and white photos (which conventional wisdom claims don't age well with readers) and feature situations and ideas which are no longer in favor with modern reader.  Or rather, they are no longer in favor with adults, because as Maurice Sendak reminds us, “Books don’t go out of fashion with children. They just go out of fashion with adults and publishers.”

I hunted these books down because they became dislodged from the deep storage of my memory banks and I wanted to understand why they had disappeared both in print and from memory.  For the most part I think the memory question is answered with "out of sight, out of mind." Many of not most of the books from my childhood never survived my childhood. Either from neglect on my part or destruction at the hands of my younger sibling, or perhaps in one of my mother's general purges (which might also explain my book hoarding... hmm), few of the books I owned made it into my teen years. Decades later, as memories of childhood books began to resurface I became driven to locate as many as possible, if for no other reason that reassure myself that I wasn't crazy – those books did exist!  Yes, it turns out, there was a children's book where a boy fires guns at a rifle range with the Marines, and another where kids play with lion cubs, and even a picture book by Aldous Huxley. There are some pretty interesting nuggets when you go digging around the past in children's literature.

With that in mind, later this week I'll be looking at the two other books by Palmer and casually examining how things have changed for both children and books since the early 1960s.  I would love to hear what your memories were of children's books from the past, not just the Helen Palmer books but about any. What books have gone out of print in your time, what lost treasures have you gone looking for?

Brain Jack

by Brian Falkner
Random House  2010


In a post-post-9/11 America, the most deadly threat comes from the Internet, and Sam and a small cadre of young hackers are the sole line of defense...  

Sam is a hacker, a freak, a natural.  He can code on the fly and read viruses and cut them off before they can do any damage. And like any teen boy he uses these powers for good, which is to say he and his buddy Fargas dip into a large multinational company so they can dip into their bank accounts and order up some sweet new laptops and neural headsets that allow you to jack into the Internet world through thought waves.

Seeing as this is the near dystopic future, life isn't all roses.  Terrorists have taken out Las Vegas with a nuclear weapon and Homeland Security is now on par with the CIA in terms of proactively making sure the US remains protected.  The problem is that this includes attacks via the Internet, and Sam's little cyber crime has alerted the big boys.  He thinks he's free and clear until he attends a super secret hacker's convention that in turn becomes an online meet-up on the White House servers which, in fact, is really a sting operation to catch Sam.  Once caught, it takes him only a few short weeks to figure out how to get out of the minimum security facility... and right into the arms of Homeland Security, who set the entire thing up as a sort of protracted pre-employment test.  It was the only way to find the best of the best, and Sam passed with flying colors.  It also means he either works for the government, or he returns to jail.

Once he's working for Homeland Security Sam's job is to serve as wingman for Dodge, a punk he'd encountered back at the hacker convention.  Their job is to monitor Internet traffic and sniff out potential threats.  One attack appears to destroy them one moment, and then in the next be their savior. This phantom of the Internet also removes spammers and online gaming, things many are happy to see gone.  But as they try to understand what is going on Sam senses something darker is in the works, something dangerous that involves the neuro headsets that get people addicted to being so jacked into the Internet that, like his fried Fargas, they cease to do anything but stay plugged in until they die.

And once Sam figures that out, all hell breaks loose.  Like internal civil war and mass hypnosis hell.  Families torn apart, one branch of the military against the other type of hell.  Can Sam and his friends save the country before it destroys itself?  And if he can, will Sam be destroyed in the process?

This story has fingerprints of The Matrix all over it, what with an entire world full of people jacked into a world where they can just "know" things due to the collective hive mind.  But the battle scenes with virus attacks read like air-to-air fighter jet combat, written with assured technical jargon and a very real sense that this sort of thing could be happening in our future.  Faulkner's plotting and pacing is perfect, the jogs between real world action and battle online taut, and there isn't a single page of fat or filler to be found.  Books that push beyond 200 pages have to prove themselves to me, but half way through these 350 pages I knew I was in good hands and eagerly wanted to know how Falkner was going to make this work.

It has been a long time since I picked up a book that I wanted to race to the end of, and if this isn't already optioned for a major motion picture then someone is asleep at the wheel.  That said, I hope someone in Hollywood is asleep at the wheel, because this book could so easily be ruined in the wrong hands.

As for that phantom that takes over the Internet and sets the country against itself, I believe Pogo said it best: We have met the enemy and he is us.

How to Survive Middle School...

(without getting your head flushed) and Deal with an Ex-Best Friend, ... um, Girls, and a Heartbreaking Hamster
by Donna Gephart
Peachtree Press / Random House 2010 

I think the only thing the title doesn't include is the main character's love of Jon Stewart, and perhaps the fact that he isn't legally old enough to have a YouTube account... 

David Greenberg is a bit of a nebbish who wants so much to be like Jon Stewart when he grows up that he spends his free time creating a one-man TV show called Talk Time.  The show comes off like n amalgamation of different late night elements – a top six-and-a-half list, a quasi monologue, and a regular feature called "The Moment of Hammy" featuring David's pet hamster.  But just before the first day of school David and his best friend Elliot have a falling out and – because you can't have a middle grade story without a bad guy – Elliot teams up with the school bully to make Elliot's transition to middle school a nightmare.  The girl of the title is Sophie, a whipsmart, previously homeschooled girl who not only loves his videos but manages to get them a wider audience that spreads all the way to the top.  And by that I mean they get the attention of the producers of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.  In the end scores are settled, amends are made, and David might just survive middle school after all.

I've been knee deep in a fair amount of middle grade books with boy main characters lately, and I've had a difficult time reconciling these characters with real middle grade boys. It isn't that they're way off base in characterization so much as they all seem so narrowly focused.  And I don't necessarily mean self-centered (though there is a bit of that) but that their desires and behaviors are confined to a personal goal, a school-based conflict, a home-based conflict, and a resolution that comes with external aid or understanding and not entirely from within the character themselves.  I guess I'm sensing a formula, and by the looks of it I'm going to have to conclude it's a successful one in terms of getting published.

Something else that always comes to mind is that readers of this age tend to be younger than the main character by a few years.  In this case the ideal reader is going to be nine or ten years old.  So what is an older elementary school reader going to get from this reading experience?  The idea that middle school is something to fear?  That you should be career minded by the age of eleven?  That all it takes is a YouTube account and a girlfriend with a homeschool network to become famous enough to take newspaper interviews and land on national television?

I suppose the other thing that eats at me is this idea of a bully as a stock character to be overcome without addressing the actual problems or solutions of bullying in the first place.  The bully as an obstacle, entrenched as a brick wall, with no attempt to understand the reasons beyond the superficial "he has no father" or "she's just insecure."  As we've seen in the news lately, though it's hardly new, the reasons for bullying and the way students and adults deal with it is far more nuanced than some kid offering up knuckle sandwiches or adults saying "There oughta be a law."

In How to Survive Middle School... Tommy Murphy is a kid whose name screams stock character from the rafters.  If it had been written that he was born in the back of an Irish bar, I wouldn't have been surprised.  "That kid's crazy mean" David's cousin Jack warns him, and apparently that's all you need to know.  Like Checkov's maxim that a gun in the first act will be fired by the third, an off-screen bully introduced at the beginning of the story is going to be nothing but a menace throughout.

At this level the bully ceases to exist as a character and simply becomes a device.  An antagonist without a narrative arc of their own who stands out like a two-dimensional cut-out in a crowded room reduces the other characters to little more than plot devices themselves.  Yes, a main character needs obstacles to overcome, but they need to be organic to the story, they need to rise from the characters desires and not simply a road block plonked into the middle of the road.

So I guess in this roundabout way I've decided that for David Greenberg the only thing that stands between him and fame is... nothing.  Because despite his mom having run off to be a hippie beet farmer, his best friend taking sides with the cardboard bully, and being liked by a new girl to the school, all of poor David's conflicts have nothing to do with whether or not he can achieve notoriety for his videos.

abandoned: Any Which Wall

by Laurel Snyder
Random House 2009

Scared away by a condescending narrative voice.

It's been a while since I abandoned a book outright, but I just couldn't keep plowing through. There have been books I wanted to ditch, and others I probably should have dumped, but I've always held out to the end with that hope that maybe something toward the end would redeem the effort. But Any Which Wall just didn't give me a reason to continue beyond the first chapter.

I might have made it through the second chapter had it not been for the prologue. Over the last couple of years I have come to regard the prologue as something akin to party appetizers made from leftovers and canned cheese, heated to a greasy sheen. In almost every case they did not need to be there, and I had sudden memory pangs of skipping over the "boring" matter at the front of books I read as a kid because I was eager to get to the story.

Worse, when the prologue took on that storyteller voice, that condescending tone of a disembodied narrator speaking directly to me from the great beyond, those books were always a sign of pending boredom. Do you have a story to tell me, or are you more interested in catching me in your thrall of your magnificent storytelling cadence? From the moment I could read independently I always had that feeling that the author or storyteller didn't trust me, the reader, to get the story on my own without their hand-holding. I didn't find it quaint, or comforting, or reassuring. I always heard it like the voice of the old lady who never had kids of her own and kept trying to feed me stale, dusty ribbon candy.

And that's what Any Which Wall felt like to me. I could see what Snyder was going for, but it's just not for me. There's probably a great story in there somewhere, and some kids are really going to love this (I'm guessing they're all girls - I'd be curious to interview the boy who voluntarily read and liked this book), but for the swell of positive reviews I gleaned all I can say is that this must have hit a soft, nostalgic spot for some adults and they responded accordingly.

The Great and Only Barnum

The Tremendous, Stupendous Life of Showman P.T. Barnum
by Candace Fleming
Random House 2009

Assuming you've read nothing about his life, what do you know of P.T. Barnum? That he was a huckster and a flim-flam man? That his name was the first name in three-ring circuses for a good portion of the 20th century? That he said "There's a sucker born every minute?

That's about as much as I knew – or thought I knew – going into this biography, coupled with a skepticism that was little more than a glorified snake oil salesman. Nothing like a well-written biography intended for middle grade readers (and up) to clear the air.

First, the quote: Barnum never said it, one of his competitors did, apparently cheesed that Barnum was able to corner the market on drawing a crowd. The circuses came later in his career, built from a combination of his showmanship and the desire to mix the curiosities from his "museum" with a traveling show full of animal acts and clowns. In between there was his American Museum of alleged artifacts from history (many of them fake) and the type of human curiosities generally associated with traveling freak shows.

If Barnum's life seems like the natural extension of Professor Harold Hill's fast-talking salesmanship it's clear Barnum was born for the life he led. As a boy he was successful in drawing a crowd and making money from them. And what's most surprising is how genial he seems, how he never regarded the public as the "suckers" despite the importance of making money from their gullibility. He had a genuine regard for what we would probably call low entertainment and discovered that the general public didn't mind "harmless" hoaxes.

Fleming makes this a breezy read, well-documented with a strong narrative thread, and actually fun. Makes me wish there were more biographies like this when I was a kid.

When You Reach Me

Rebecca Stead
Wendy Lamb / Random House 2009


I'm going to punt on the review here. People have been talking, and mostly raving, about this book for the better part of this year so I don't know that I have much to add. Because I agree, it's good, and because I think others have said pretty much what I would have said. So in the interest of not clogging the blogosphere with more arterial review plaque I'll merely add those things that are personal, that wouldn't be duplicated elsewhere (I hope).

This was the first book I've read in some time that made me want to go back and re-read it instantly. I'm not a big re-reader, mostly because there's so much out there to read and I am, generally, a slow reader. But this was not only a breezy read but a fun one, and the feeling of wanting to steep more in its mood left me running to get back on the ride.

The book feels "classic." I don't know if it's because it taps into the river of nostalgia that I believe I share with the author – growing up when books like Harriet the Spy were new – of the strong memories I import into the books 70s settings, but this book reads to me like an older title that is still fresh today. Which, obviously, is peculiar when it's a new book.

Then there's the speculative fiction element. The book has a light touch and the multiple levels of time travel – a traveler from our contemporary future goes back to the past, as viewed from that past – is really satisfying. I'm sure there are some who could pick apart some of the time travel elements, but I don't care. If there are flaws they didn't bother me.

And we need more speculative fiction for middle grade readers. Not science fiction, not fantasy, not alien invasions (cute or menacing), but solid stories that deal with real middle grade issues and at the same time play with big ideas. Trend-watching aside, I personally think this is the greatest gap in middle grade fiction: stories about Big Ideas that do not have a "trouble story" or a dystopia at their core. I don't know if Ms. Stead sees the book this way, or if she'd rather think of it as simply what it is – a great middle grade book – but I'm telling you it falls right into a giant gap in the types of books kids enjoy.

Not much of a review, I admit, but I'd been putting this off for a couple months now because I didn't know if there was anything new to add to the din of what is already out there. I have a couple books that have fallen off the shelf, so to speak, and languished unreviewed because I was unable to get a grip on how to articulate my joy or excitement with them (I think Gennifer Choldenko's If a Tree Falls at Lunch Period might be the one that haunts me most for lack of review). So for other takes on When You Reach Me you might want to check out fuse #8's review, or the 100 Scope Notes review, or maybe the teenreads.com review. This book is showing up on a lot of Best Books and awards shortlists, and well-deserved I should think. But as far as I'm concerned if it won no awards or accolades it still sits in the rare pantheon in my experience - those books that bear rereading.

Punch and the Magic Fish (with video bonus)

A Grimm Brothers' Tale Retold
by Emanuele Luzzati
Pantheon / Random House 1973

Luzzati's retelling of the Grimm's "The Fisherman and His Wife" get overlaid with the Punch and Judy comedy of the hapless hunchback and his shrew of a wife. Not as opulent as some of Luzatti's other illustrations, the story melds the two stories fairly well until the end when it veers a little and the magic fish from the original ends up in the frying pan.

I've done coverage on the original Grimm story long ago when I was doing that sort of thing more often with my Grimmoire series. Basically, Punch the fisherman finds a fish who, in exchange for his freedom, grants the fisherman a wish. His wife Judy sends him back repeatedly to upgrade the wishes even though Punch is perfectly happy with his life at every stage of the story. Finally the wife goes one wish too far and the fish returns them back to their poor life with a family of hungry kids.

Luzatti is usually very bold with his colors, but here everything is set against open fields of white and it doesn't work for me the way his other books do. Still, the mix of torn paper collage and sketchy marker give it that whimsy that I like about his work.

As an added bonus, I was able to find a video Luzzati made around the same time that features Punch and the music of Rossini. It isn't "The Fisherman and his Wife" but it shows another side of this illustrator's work. The darker elements of a traditional Punch and Judy story are here - the beatings, Punch's journey to hell - but I think this could still work for kids today. Some kids. Anyway, enjoy.

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves

retold and illustrated
by Emanuele Luzzati
Random House 1969

I don't remember when I first heard the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, but I'm guessing it was originally from a Fleischer Brothers cartoon. Maybe it was a retelling with Popeye the Sailor. I know it wasn't the only place I heard it, because it was one of those stories that was sort of assumed with popular culture. Everyone knew the story of Ali Baba tricking the thieves out of all their loot, stored in a secret cave opened by the words "Open Sesame!"

But kids today don't know the story, not as far as I can tell. They know Aladdin but certainly not Alāʼ ad-Dīn of the "original" Arabian Nights tales. They might not even know The original Arabian Nights stories, or think Scheherazade (or more properly Shahryar) is a rapper, and there's some question as to whether or not Ali Baba even belongs with the other stories from ancient Persia. Still, some knowledge of these old tales no matter how bowdlerized or maimed would be better than nothing, yes?

Here we have an ancient example, circa the late 1960s, of a loose retelling of the tale. In it we have a lazy Ali Baba cut from the same cloth as Tom Sawyer in that he possesses smarts but would rather lay about. One day, from a secret vantage point, he spies the thieves entering their secret lair and once they've left, Ali avails himself to all their loot. Once home, he proceeds to practically give away the spoils of his adventure until the day the thieves come calling to Ali's town. They figure out he has their trinkets and gold and devise a couple of plans to get their money back.

They are armed cutthroats, why are they even messing around?

Anyway, Ali Baba tricks them and steals away to the life he once had, living carefree and poor.

From a modern day adult vantage point, after surviving the PC wars and all the other cultural baggage of the last 40 years, it is hard not to look at this depiction of Ali as a layabout and wonder if this isn't some form of racism, or cultural insensitivity at the very least. I suppose this happy-go-lucky demeanor offsets the generic evil of the thieves but it seems an unnecessary detail. Perhaps it also softens up the dubious morality of a story where stealing is viewed as okay, so long as you steal from thieves and then give it all away.

Should I cut Luzzati some slack because he was better known as an illustrator? I'm going to have to say no here because the choice to make Ali a sort of lazy trickster character was all in his retelling. He could have made Ali Baba more of a simpleton, but the core of the story is that he outwits the thieves and gets away with it. There are other details, fantastic details, that would have been just as interesting to expand on, if they didn't make the book longer than it is. Like the fact that Ali shows his brother Kassim the cave, where he later returns without Ali only to be hacked to bits. Now, I know that's not exactly picture book friendly but it's no less grim than some Grimm tales, especially when Ali has his brother sewn back together by a town tailor so they can give him a proper burial without making the town suspicious.

That would make for some fun explaining on a parent's part! There's also a slave girl in Kassim's house who helps Ali and who he later marries... this story has it all!

I did pick up the book for reasons other than story – more for the art by Luzzati, which has the thick, dark outlines and bold colors of a stained glass window – but unfortunately even they cannot blind me to the problems of the telling. Luzatti was also part of an animation team and a few years later made a short animated cartoon of this story. There are a number of Luzatti cartoons on YouTube, but unfortunately not Ali Baba. I'd be curious to see how it translated.

In the event that anyone from Random House is out there, if you still own this property you might want to consider having someone use these illustrations as the basis for another author's shot at retelling. Disney has recently been having contemporary writers retell their versions of classic fairy tales using concept art from the movie adaptations, this would be no different. A little more cultural sensitivity, some nicely rephotographed layouts, and I think you have a great little reissue.

I might even know a certain MFA candidate who would be willing to give the story a go. Just let me know.

As a final footnote, what is interesting here is how the term Ali Baba is being used today. According to the keeper of all knowledge, Wikipedia, US military forces in Iraq currently the term Ali Baba as derogatory slang to describe looters. Ironically, Iraqis also use the term for thieves as well. It is perhaps the one thing both sides can agree upon. It would be interesting to know just how much of the original story both sides really knew, or whether they received all their knowledge of Ali Baba from a cartoon or a badly retold picture book.

(I realize the cover shown above is slightly different than the US version. I couldn't get the copy I borrowed to fit on the scanner, and there weren't any other versions available in the Internet.)

Abe Lincoln Crosses a Creek

A Tall, Thin Tale
(Introducing His Forgotten Frontier Friend)
by Deborah Hopkinson
picture by John Hendrix
Schwartz & Wade / Random House 2008


If in 2007 a book appeared by a 90 year old author claiming to have been a boyhood friend of JFK, relating an experience where the two as boys nearly drowned in the Charles River of Boston one summer day, where the author saved the young JFK's life and thus played an important role in our nation's history (who would have defeated Nixon in 1960 if JFK weren't even alive?), and there was no one alive who could refute it...

Did it really happen? And would we tell the story as a picture book?

Abe Lincoln Crosses a Creek tells a similar story concerning Abraham Lincoln's Kentucky neighbor Austin Gollaher, about how the the two as young boys attempted to cross a creek, and how Austin rescued Lincoln which allowed him to live and, eventually, become our 16th president. The book attempts to tie up this story with the moral that "what we do matters, even if we don't end up in history books."

That's all well and good, but who's to say it happened? Hopkinson sites at the beginning of the book two titles that quote Gollagher from 1898 and 1921 and a third from 1922 that confirms the story, probably taken from the same sources. Given all the biographical scholarship on Lincoln done in the past 90 years it seems odd that more recent references couldn't be cited.

Unless the story couldn't be proven to modern standards.

Here, again, we see another recent example of the "storyography," the biographical recounting that place story before biography and, in this case, the anecdotal above the known. Hopkinson covers her bases by saying "The events described in this story, so far as this author can determine... did, in fact, take place..." Yes, well, short of Lincoln's personal account, or a third party's account, what we have is, as the subtitle indicates, a tall tale concerning a real individual from history. And since it is a tall tale is there really any reason to lend the story a level of legitimacy by pointing out sources? Does the fact that Lincoln is a character require this level of explanation?

And, as always, shouldn't this information be spelled out to the reader in the text and not placed in tiny type on the Library of Congress page intended for adults who won't be as nearly confused about the legitimacy of the story as the intended reader?

Actually, Hopkinson does attempt to alert the reader in the text that the story contains some questionable details. At the point when Lincoln falls into the creek a giant, incongruous caution warning splashes across the illustration announcing "I want to make sure we get this right. Because maybe it didn't happen like that." The narrative then proceeds with an alternative version of the event in question because, as Hopkinson later suggests, "For that's the thing about history – if you weren't there, you can't know for sure."

Ah, I see. Because we were not there, because the source of the story is perhaps an interested party who could profit from the attention of having been the late president's boyhood friend, because no one can say for sure it didn't happen we can proceed to tell this story as if it did.

A book is a powerful thing. It represents the labors of a lot of people – writers and illustrators, editors and publishers and printers – and when presented by adults like parents, librarians, and teachers takes on the weight of authority in a young reader's eyes. They would not have gone through all this trouble if the story weren't true, would they? When a child is handed Abe Lincoln Crosses a Creek and reads the text only, do they have any reason to doubt the story happened as described, or at all? Do we teach young readers how and when to question historical events and to vet them for accuracy? No, of course not. They accept what they are given because they trust adults to be honest with them.

That said I do not suggest that Abe Lincoln Crosses a Creek should not have been written, and that other books that attempt to tell historical anecdotes from the childhood of historical figures cannot be retold, only that it be clearly and directly related to the reader that such stories might not be factually accurate. There should no question in a reader's mind about the story they have just been told, nor should they confuse that story for history if there is any question.

I have an unusual perspective in this area, having been researching Lincoln's life from the period just after the events in this book. Earlier biographies contain second and third hand accounts of events that do not hold water in biographies written after the 1920s. In fact, I could write a few similar picture books concerning the pre-teen life of Lincoln that, while entertaining, would not be considered accurate by modern Lincoln scholars.

For the past decade we've seen a number of biographical picture books that seem to escape the rigor and expectations we would apply to books intended for older readers. This is a mistake, because (and I think I've said this many times before) that this young age is when we do the most damage in terms of misinformation. Children today STILL have heard the story of Washington chopping down a cherry tree when we now know that the story was a fabrication of Washington's childhood neighbors, told to their children as a morality story, recounted to biographer Parson Weems as gospel truth. It is not true and yet the power of this misinformation still courses through our national psyche.

Accuracy should not suffer at the hands of entertainment, not in the books we present to picture book readers. "What we do matters."

Exactly.

Mudshark

by Gary Paulsen
Wendy Lamb Books / Random House
2009

Is it me, or does Gary Paulsen seem to be ripping through a very fertile period? These past few years he's released, it seems, two or three books a year and they always slip in under the radar where I find out about them by accident.

I was actually trying to remember the title of a book of his I read and liked and came across this as I was scanning the shelves. Being in the mood for a light read, and with a promising flap summary, I took the bait.

Lyle Williams is Mudshark, a kid we are told is cool. Cool not so much because he is hip but because his demeanor is calm and detached. When things go missing or problems need to be solved everyone – including adults at school – know to go to Mudshark. So notorious that the day someone tags his locker with a sign proclaiming the Mudshark Detective Agency he simply smiles in acknowledgment.

Small problems plaque Mudshark's fellow students - misplaced gym shoes and lost homework folders - but with his keen eye and memory he is able to resolve cases quickly. Larger problems loom as chalkboard erasers go missing, foul odors come from the faculty lounge, and a gerbil has escaped is cage and at large. Complicating matters is a new school pet, a parrot, who appears to possess a psychic ability that threatens Mudshark's place as the school mystery solver. In the end, Mudshark must debunk the parrot, find the missing erasers, and tie up every other mystery in order to retain his title, and his cool factor.

Paulsen's pacing is odd. The book seems to meander for the first 38 pages (out of 83) as he sets up all the bits and pieces that will eventually come together in the end. They almost read like vignettes, and yet when the story finally kicks in there isn't a sense that everything actually is tied together, or that it ever will. It isn't that Paulsen is being crafty, its this feeling that none of it matters. The only clear conflict is that Mudshark is going to be replaced by a parrot, and solving that mystery almost gets lost in the shuffle.

The mystery to me is why people aren't more upset with Mudshark for his abilities. He is able to find lost items and answer mysteries only because he witnesses them. Which begs the question: if you see a kid drop his homework folder, why not tell him he dropped it? Why wait until he realizes its missing and then play at being a detective when really all you're doing is withholding information until it makes you look good? To that end Mudshark isn't cool, he's manipulative and his powers rely entirely on luck, not skill.

Withholding information is key, because Paulsen does that as well. The mysteries presented cannot be solved by the reader (or at least by a smart reader) they can only be solved when Paulsen/Mudshark explain them. Setting up all these careful mysteries at the beginning leaves the reader hoping there's a great puzzle to be solved, but then before clues can be revealed the mystery is solved. Highly unsatisfying.

Paulsen does write with a breezy clarity that makes him a first choice for reluctant boy readers, but this wouldn't be one of my first choices.