Return of the Dapper Men

written by Jim McCann
illustrated by Janet Lee
Archaia  2010

In a world, where time has stopped, populated by eleven year old children and their robot minders, comes a story of the day the men from space came to repair the damage that had been done long ago...

It would be fun if I could say that this book struck a balance between Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland and the British TV show The Prisoner, because that was my initial sense. Instead, I found myself early on feeling like a rubbernecker craning to make sense from an accident that took place at the corner of Trying Too Hard Avenue and Style Over Substance Lane.

Snark aside, Return of the Dapper Men suffers from an unusual form of a malady I've found in a number of graphic novels with a juvenile theme or aimed at a younger audience; namely, it lacks a coherent, well-plotted storyline with compelling characters who show real growth within the framework of the narrative. This is especially crucial in fantasy or historical stories as the modern reader needs to "buy in" to not only the character's story but the background to the world being built before our eyes. Sadly, what I think happens is that people confuse illustration with world building, and that by setting a futuristic or other-worldly story in a richly rendered place will explain a lot of the missing narrative.

What we are told (and told such a leaden narrative at the beginning) is that Verona, er, Anorev is a land that somehow, at some time, has been plunged into a sort of a temporal hold pattern. Populated by eleven year old children who hide underground and live in a perpetual state of recess, they are a little like Peter Pan's Lost Boys in that they have been away from adults or the influence of society that they all they know is their petty playground ways. Above ground live the robots, seeming caretakers who know little or less about the world they inhabit than the children. Yet among them is a young boy, Ayden, and his robot girl sidekick Zoe who have apparently awakened from some great slumber and begun to ask questions.

Seeming, apparently, somehow at some time... I don't use these vague terms because I am lazy but because these points aren't clearly explained in the story. In fact, Ayden and Zoe have a number of telepathic conversations where we only hear Ayden's side (Zoe is the one robot who never talks out loud) and while we can infer some of what Zoe is saying it is difficult to believe that she or Ayden have made a great leap in their emotional development. It's especially clunky when Ayden says straight out "We're both different now. We have to be. If I can change so can you." Too bad we don't actually get to hear what Zoe says that would convince us of any of this. And to have a character say out loud that they have changed, well, you better have delivered on that to the reader so they aren't left scratching their head going "Really? How?"  Better still, if the characters truly have changed they aren't likely to announce it, and you don't need to tell the reader either.

So much to do, so much yet to come! And yet... what?!

Add to this the Dapper Men, Deco era dandies in their double-breasteds, spats, bowlers and brollies. Out of the sky they fall, deus ex machina, to help kick-start the age of questioning and learning to set the time rolling again. 314 come to the land, one specifically to sacrifice his life and serve as guide for Ayden, the other Dapper Men to roam like silent robots to, I don't know, do a bit of gardening and polish some brass? They have come to fix things, but why so many, and what do the others do, and why, why, why? Why did they leave, only to return? Return from where? Why robots? Why can't Ayden achieve inner growth without their arrival (especially since they don't appear to do much at all to begin with)? What does time have to do with anything? Is this some parable about the loss of innocence, and if so, what besides petty squabbling is lost? What, indeed, is a reader supposed to make of such abstract joylessness as exists in the land of fair Anorev, where we lay our scene?

Lest anyone be confused let me make this clear: deliberately leaving out information, or deciding not to explain the hows and whys of a fictional landscape does not create mystery. It does not provide a window for a reader to fill in their own personalized detail, nor does it make the story profound. It isn't necessary to spoon-feed readers every little detail but they must be guided, grounded in the world of the fictive dream. The only thing being deliberately enigmatic does is announce to the world that your little fiction is, like the emperor's new clothes, naked of some crucial coverage.

Visually, stylistically, the book is lovely to look at.  For a bit at least. There is a layered effect, with the artwork cut out and laid upon painted background that provides chroma and texture, but after a while their effect fails to stand out. Its almost as if all the backgrounds are of the same color value -- as if they'd all register the same color gray if viewed in black and white. If this seems unusually close scrutiny for the illustrations perhaps its because at least when I'm looking at colors I can make some sense of the intended mood. The skies being a blue painted over words presents a thin veiling of what has been lost to the citizens of Anorev, though if that text could have been legible and reference similar stories of children lost in space – Wonderland and Oz and Skull Island – it might have made the images feel more connected to something larger than itself.

I don't know if there's a better, more satisfying story in Return of the Dapper Men that just didn't make itself out, but I do know that when you strip away the illustrations and try to read the story straight it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Simply adding pictures didn't add anything to what wasn't there.

Resistance: Book 1

written by Carla Jablonski
art by Leland Purvis
First Second 2010

This graphic novel set during the Occupation of France by the Nazis in World War II shows the work of the Resistance movement through the eyes of children who find themselves in the thick of things.

Teen Paul finds himself the man of the house when his father is taken away by the German Occupying forces. When they Germans come and take away his Jewish friend Henri's parents Paul and his younger sister concoct a plan first to hide Henri for his own safety, then find themselves recruited to help the Resistance get information into the hands of those behind the lines in Occupied Paris.


The overall treatment of the story is fairly workmanlike. A reader with any knowledge of the Nazi occupation of France won't be surprised to read about characters who defied the Germans and worked hard to defeat them underground. That teens and young children were involved doesn't feel revelatory as children have played important roles in the history (and fictions) of all revolts. The pluck of nerve of these kids is a given; anything less wouldn't provide us with the story. But it's a story that drags, a story that is either overly simplistic or overly illustrated, depending on the spread of the moment. Scenes either don't have much impact despite their importance – like the taking of Henri's parents which takes place off stage – or their impact is drawn out over several panels where they could have been better handed with a single image.

I think there's room for a graphic novel about the Resistance movement in France, and that it would make a valuable alternative for readers interested in going deeper into World War II abroad, deeper than they can in most history classes. I only wish this book, and perhaps this series (a trilogy) could be condensed into a single volume of manageable length. We'll see when its finished whether the series drags or if its merely my impatience with this first book's mise en scene for the subsequent stories.

Lost States

Lost States:
True Stories of Texlahoma, Transylvania, and Other States That Never Made It
by Michael J. Trinklein
Quirk Books 2010


What if the United States had accepted every proposal to form a new state? One really messed up flag, that's for sure!  

Growing up in Southern California it is hard not to notice that there is a simmering animosity with neighbors to the north. It isn't so much that Sacramento, the state's northern nowheresville capitol, is out of touch with the urban hipness of Los Angeles, Hollywood, and the wealthy enclaves of Santa Barbara and San Diego counties. Nor was it the hippie-centric enclaves of Santa Cruz and San Francisco who felt that the south was nothing more than water-stealing conservatives. It was the fact that California was, and is, a "destination state" that draws immigrants from all over the country, so much so that fewer than one in seven Californians is a native. Basically, the state is full of people up and down the coast who'll never agree with one another; dividing the state into factions seems like a good idea only until it comes time to discuss how to do it, at which point things fall apart.

Every state in the United States, apparently, has some version of this story. Reading Lost States: True Stories of Texlahoma, Transylvania, and Other States That Never Made It is a fun little romp through the growing pains of a young nation and the people who would mold it to their personal agendas. Some of these lost states were merely boundary squabbles latter settled by politicians, others were publicity stunts designed to attract tourists or business, and still more have been proposed as a matter of political or economic practicality like the annexation of various islands for some strategic advantage. Each of the Lost States receives a brief history of its proposal and why it failed as well as a map outlining (or in most cases approximating) it's location in relation to what state is currently in its place. Many of these proposed states are clearly the results of the early land grabs and settlements of the 19th century. The really odd and interesting stories are the ones that reveal hidden, sometimes dark, histories. American Imperialism is alive and well in the proposal for adding the island nation of Saipan to the nation (or incorporating it into Guam and making an honest state of them both). The only problem is that Saipan – a slave-trading sweatshop nation that produces a huge amount of name-brand clothing with "Made in the USA" legally attached to it – would never be allowed to told what to do by a strong democracy like Guam, much less agree to US labor laws under which it would be bound.

Odder still is the former Soviet republic of Albania actively seeking to become the fifty-first state. So eager in fact that English is an official language and when the US seeks allies for foreign intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, Albania is first to step up. While there might be some political advantage gained by having a state wedged into the Adriatic coast between Greece and Montenegro, chances are better that Russia and the European Union might see the move as an opening salvo toward world domination. As Lost States suggests, Albania courting statehood is akin to "talking about marriage on the first date. Run, America, run!"

There's a lot to be learned in this book beyond the trivial. Apparently when Texas was admitted to the Union it was allowed the provision to divide itself up into as many as four states without having to seek Congressional approval. As the book points out, this means that the area of Texas could have as many as eight senators in Washington instead of two. It seems like Governor Rick Perry should have focused his attentions on dividing his state rather than promoting succession a while back. It amazes me that provision is still on the books.


Trinklein's maps are individual and well-created for the most part. Sometimes modifying older maps, creating new maps as necessary, for anyone who loves looking at or studying maps its fun to imagine how different things would be if, say, we talked vacationing in New Sweden instead of Maryland, or went to the Grand Canyon in New Mexico, or if, somehow, No Man's Land simply remained the unclaimed panhandle of Oklahoma.

(This review is cross-posted at Guys Lit Wire today, a great resource for books of interest to teen boys and their minders.)

Where's Walrus

by Steven Savage
Scholastic 2011

After escaping from the zoo a Walrus find "ingenious" ways to remain hidden in plain sight from the zookeeper. Complete with "twist" ending!

I have to call this one the way I see it: It's Where's Waldo meets Goodnight Gorilla. Also: this is a board book disguised as a picture book.

One afternoon while the zookeeper naps nearby a Walrus, in what looks like an above ground swimming pool, simply waddles out the gates of the zoo and into the big city. In scene by wordless scene the Walrus hides in plain sight by blending in. Here he is a statue in the fountain. There he is a fireman working a hose. It often takes little more than a hat and a few props to elude the zookeeper, who besides working at one of the poorest designed zoos in the world is clearly a dolt himself. Finally the Walrus hides at a diving competition (performing a "twist," if you will, off the high dive) where he is not only spotted by the zookeeper but wins a gold medal. This gives the zookeeper an idea and in the end Walrus has a new and more humane pool with a diving board to perform for the public.


Obviously, younger pre-readers are going to enjoy pointing out where the Walrus is on every page while laughing at the buffoon of a zookeeper for missing him. The simplified graphics on a picture book-size page seem like a waste; their flat tones and bold shapes would not only reduce well to a smaller sized board book they might actually look better for not taking up so much space.

As for the "twist" at the end, where Walrus's diving feats impress the zookeeper and provide him with a new home, well, that sort of speaks to why Walrus ran away in the first place. The story isn't just about a mischevious Walrus, it's about an animal in a pool so small that it has no way to entertain itself and must go in search of fun elsewhere. It not only answers the unasked question "Why did the Walrus escape from the zoo?" but underscores one of the larger issues surrounding the idea of capturing wild animals in the first place; is a zoo really the most humane way to appreciate wild animals? In the end Walrus isn't just a captured animal, he's an exploited one, putting on shows to draw people to the zoo.

Overthinking the book, am I? With a cute concept and easy-to-scan illustrations it can be easy to miss the imagery presented to young readers matter-of-factly. The treatment of animals in zoos and aquariums varies, and even where animals are well treated there is still the idea of our presenting animals in faux environments under the guise of their being educational. Many a time I've been to a zoo and seen a depressed animal in an enclosure – if you can read emotions in humans you can do it in animals equally well – and overheard parents tells young ones "Oh, they're just tired from running around all morning" or something equally dismissive. Go to the big cat house during feeding time and hear those lions and tigers roar with such ferocity that the sound penetrates your body and you appreciate the bars that separate you while at the same time realize that, perhaps, this is not the way things should be.

So despite my misgivings about the casual representation of zoos to small children, I think the book is fine for what it is. I don't know why this didn't go straight-to-board-book because I have a hard time understanding the justification for its size. If it were a truly Where's Waldo situation where you had to pour over the details of a page for hours to find the hidden elements I would understand it. As it is, Walrus is large, impossible to miss, and the humor of the zookeeper not finding him wears thin even for the few pages that it takes place in the story.

Happy Belated Blogiversary to Me!

Oh, Holy Undies, how could I have missed my own 5th Anniversary? 

So a quick scan of the records showed that five years and nine days ago I embarked on this journey to read, write, and review books for children and young adults. What began as an exploration to better educate myself eventually led to an MFA at Vermont College and what is clearly becoming my great second act in life. I would hardly have guessed as much, but it appears that this blog and all that has come from it was the spark that ignited the tinder of my quasi midlife crisis. 


Since I didn't know it was on the horizon I haven't exactly planned anything for this celebration. Sorry, if I'd known I'd have sent our invitations and baked us all a grand and glorious gooey cake. Instead I think I'll republish my first-ever online book review of a book intended for children, something from my own childhood that made me keenly aware of a book as something other than a mere entertainment. And while you're all enjoying that I'll go look in the mirror for telltale lines of age. 


What do you think, should the blog get a face lift? Can anyone recommend any good digital plastic surgeons?

_____

Originally published October 3, 2006

The Magic Finger

by Roald Dahl 
illustrated by William Pene du Bois
41 pages Harper & Row 1966
 
This is a story of a girl with anger management issues, a story with a high sense of justice and a low tolerance for senseless violence, and the delightfully quirky world that Roald Dahl excelled at creating. The Magic Finger is a pushing, prodding, poke-in-the-eye, accusatory allegory to war via a pointed attack on the tradition of English sport hunting. In the right light, it could also be a call to vegetarianism, though I don't know that was Dahl's intent back in the mid-60's.
 
Our unnamed antagonist -- who'll I call Zak for reasons to be explained -- is the type of child who is a tempest beneath a barely calm surface. When humiliated by her teacher for spelling cat with a 'k' (and Twain had something to say about this) her boiling point is reached as fast as it takes to point her finger and turn the font of derision into a house pet. In the fantasy world of children's literature this casual power and transformation is presented as a natural occurrence, one in every classroom. Zak's abilities and her unwillingness to be trifled with are the point at which we jump to the real story.
 
Zak's neighbors, the Greggs, are a typical English hunting family proud to return from the fields with their kill, one duck a piece. The injustice of this needless killing sends Zak to seeing colors, and in her rainbow fury she turns her neighbors into duck-sized, bird-winged humanoids for the night. And because this universe needs balance (and the Gregg's need a lesson) their house is taken over with people-sized, human-armed ducks. As the humans are chased out and fired at with their own guns they quickly take to the trees and learn the obvious but valuable lesson of seeing the world from the eyes of the hunted. Come morning the world is set to rights and the Greggs set about atoning for their hunting sins while Zak goes of in search of another family that needs a lesson.
 
The joy I had discovering this shortly after it was first published left a lingering mark. In some ways I prefer this to Dahl's better-acknowledged classics James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in that it distills the lesson and entertains without unnecessary baggage.
 
Sadly, modern editions of this book no longer contain the original illustrations by du Bois, favoring instead more cartoon-y illustrations by Quintin Blake who has illustrated (or re-illustrated in this case) all of Dahl's books currently in print. This apparently was Dahl's illustrator of choice beginning with The B.F.G and presumably the earlier books were re-illustrated with his approval. One of my favorite parts of the original is the doubled page that allows you to watch the school teacher turn into a cat. There is also a multi-page spread where Zak's fury changes color but are presented in black and white ink wash that may be the result of economics (color being more expensive to print) but force readers to translate colors to emotions in a way that is more internal (and less obvious) than a similar expression in Leo Lionni's Frederick.
 
As for Zak, unless you read the original edition you won't see a little girl wearing a sailor's hat with that name on it, pointing at the reader in an homage to James Montgomery Flagg's Uncle Sam posters of the early 20th century. This closing image appropriates the iconic military recruiting image and transforms it into an accusation addressed to the reader. Is Zak attempting to teach you a lesson for your unknown sins, or is she merely warning you to beware your actions. Written and illustrated early in the Vietnam conflict the message isn't overt in Dahl's text but du Bois illustration appears to draw a connection between the senselessness of sport hunting and mindlessness of war.

Perhaps it is time to re-release the original edition.

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.

Fast Sam, Cool Clyde, and Stuff

by Walter Dean Myers  
Viking Penguin  1975

A collection of vignettes of teen life in Harlem, though occasionally dated in language and setting, still as bold and authentic sounding as probably was back in the day.  

Francis, aka Stuff, moves to 115th street he finds the local kids wary of the newcomer until he proves his stuff (or lack thereof) on the basketball court. The good-natured humility test passes as a sort of ritual and Stuff is accepted as one of the gang.  

In the collected stories of Stuff recounts tales of broken homes, parental death, drug abuse, and several trips to the jail that echo the prejudices of the day. They also concoct crazy schemes – like dressing up a boy as a girl to enter a dance contest thinking they won't get caught – that rings with the sort of head-shaking humor that truly is kids being kids. The kids also experience the honesty and brutal truth of parents just trying to get by, and to that end they come together as a club that calls itself the Good People who vow to be there for one another. There aren't unrealistic heroics here, and no heavy moralizing either, simply stories of inner-city life told matter-of-fact and dialog heavy that show kids trying to sort out the world for themselves.   

*

I had the opportunity to hear Walter Dean Myers speak this past summer and it was fascinating to hear him talk about how he progressed from a short story writer to a novelist and how he didn't really concern himself with plot structure while writing Fast Sam, Cool Clyde, and Stuff. This may explain part of its appeal and freshness on this current reread, because each of the "chapters" stands as a sort of freestanding story that builds on information from previous stories. Characters come and go and eventually a few threads pull together to reinforce a hard message about community support can only help those who are willing and open to the offer of help. What's refreshing is that the kids already know and articulate the messages the book delivers, long before the book delivers them, so instead of feeling hammered by what happens there's a sadness to the events that weighs on the reader just as it weighs on the kids.

It was also nice to see a novel-length collection of stories that meandered at a comfortable pace through their own time. The self-contained nature of the chapters allows for readers to take a break and reflect if they want or to plunge ahead and see 'what happens next" to Stuff and his crew. The over effect becomes a series of shorter pieces that might, these days, might be extended into larger novels and strung together as a series. So often what I hear people say about series is that they love the characters and want to know more about what they do next, but far too often I find myself impatient with series titles because they seem to have been plotted to draw out the narrative in order to justify their continuing adventures in subsequent volumes.

What Myers does, inadvertently by his account, is give us sketches of characters who grow with each story and expand our knowledge as we go. It is probably possible to take these sketches and better integrate them into a single, more unified narrative which would give the story an overall master effect that would do more to draw attention to the author than the story. This is actually a fairly large problem I have with first-person point-of-view middle grade novels where the author's mannered style or carefully knotted plot gives the story more of a deliberate literary feel and less a sense character verisimilitude. 

So huzzah for Walter Dean Myers and his innocence in crafting a novel with more heart and soul than structure and self-consciousness.

*


Tiny note about the current cover I see circulating these days, not the one above: It has the silhouette of a boy blowing a trumpet with the city in the background. That's all well and good but Stuff plays a saxophone, people, and after previous covers were clear to include a sax if baffles me as to why they would change it. One of the stories begins with the boys headed into town to get a new reed for Stuff's sax but then they end up in jail. There's no reason I could see why these later editions would change the text (so he could go buy a new trumpet mouthpiece?) so I can't understand why they would do this and I sincerely hope that the next chance they get the publishers return to the sax. Or, as the original paperback cover had, the kids hanging out on the stoop.

Pearl

by Jo Knowles   
Henry Holt  2011  


When fifteen year old Pearl (aka Bean) loses her grandfather, the one person she felt knew and loved her best, a whole world of secrets open up that forces her to question everything she's ever believed about her world.  

Pearl, who goes by the nickname Bean, and her best friend Henry are self-separated outcasts. Henry's mom Sally spends her days watching soap operas on TV, refuses to leave the house, and has spent the last fifteen years expecting her husband to come home while poor Henry is self-conscious of his profuse sweating. Bean lives with her grandfather Gus who seems to love her more than his own daughter Lexie, Bean's mother, who likewise cannot stand Gus. The rift between Gus and Lexie is strong and loud and it leaves Bean siding with her grandfather simply because her mother shows no interest in her. In their private misery Henry and Bean find comfort in each others company.  

When Gus dies Bean is crushed and then angered at the way Lexie and her mother's friend Claire seem to be celebrating the fact. Bean manages to convince Sally to leave her house for the first time by inviting her to Gus's funeral which allows Lexie and Claire to help Sally address the reality of her situation, that her husband isn't coming home. While Bean and Henry attempt to understand their world as it turns upside down they discover first that Bean was conceived out of spite against Gus, and that the cause of that spite was Gus's intolerance over Lexie's sexual orientation. 

Further complications arise when Henry and Bean's friendship veers toward the rocks of becoming something more serious while Bean begins piecing together clues about her biological father that happen to line up with Henry's father's disappearance. Fortunately for all involved that particular story thread doesn't happen to tie together and the story ends with all five characters out of the shadows of their long-kept secrets, stronger and supportive of one another.  

*

There's something very Southern about the feel of this story, something rural, or at the least very country about it that I can't quite put my finger on. It could be the closeness of the characters, the focus on food for comfort, or my own stilted perspective that comes from stories that are more rooted in character than in place. Or perhaps it comes from a deeper desire on my part to want to assign the story's central theme of intolerance to a time long past, something sad and bucolic like a country song or an old movie in sepia tones. 

There also something interesting going on with the framing of the story, between Gus's last words and Bean's reflection on them at the end. Having seen Gus yell at Lexie and accuse her of dressing "loose" and essentially bringing on the rape that caused Lexie (the rape being a fabrication the teenage Lexie uses to further justify her actions) we know that Gus has given up on his own daughter and instead begun to use Bean as a substitute for the daughter he wished he had. His last words to Bean as she's leaving for the day are simply "Be good." And while there was never and indication that she had or would behave otherwise, it becomes the defining statement against Lexie, the unspoken suffix to his admonition being "...unlike your mother."

Of course, there's nothing actually bad about Lexie other than the fact that she had an unsupportive parent and thus never really learned how to raise Bean, and the reader begins to wonder if Bean was little more than an emotional pawn between Gus and Lexie's battles. But in the end, after the dust settles and all truths have been explored and exhausted, Bean reflects back on Gus's last words. She thinks Don't worry, Gus, I'll be fine.  I don't want to over-read this, but since we have learned that Bean and Henry have genuine affection for each other, and there's is a "traditional" heterosexual attraction, I can't help but wonder if Bean's silent assurance to Gus is that he needn't worry that she'll turn out "bad" like her mother. After fifteen years of tension it will take years to sort out the damage and here, standing in the fresh echoes of her dead grandfather's voice, it isn't one hundred percent clear that Bean fully accepts her mother's choice of partner or even lifestyle. Gus clearly was wrong, and Bean comes to understand that, but she cannot shake the thought that had he been more accepting she wouldn't have been conceived at all. 

Sadly, there are probably many teens out there who will benefit from Pearl story. It's a safe window into the world where even adult children struggle with their parents and poor decision-making has long and lasting effects, especially when they involve sex and behavior based on anger and spite.

Bake Sale

by Sara Varon  
First Second 2011  


The long-awaited (by me at least) new graphic novel by the author of Robot Dreams, proprietor of unusual parallel worlds. Recipes included.   

Cupcake is a cupcake who is the owner of a bakery that makes, among other things, cupcakes. It may take a moment of adjustment, but if you can get past that – and vegetables that eat carrot cake, and eggs that drink coffee, etc. – you'll be fine.  

Cupcake has his routine down. He gets up, bakes some fresh pastries, makes fresh coffee, sells his goods to his regulars, then in the evenings plays drums with his band. It's a god life, but it is a routine, and Cupcake actively tries to learn new things to prevent the routine from becoming mundane. When it comes out that his friend Eggplant has an aunt is friends with Turkish Delight, the greatest pastry chef in the world, Cupcake's dormant crush takes over his thoughts. Determined to meet Turkish Delight where he knows they will instantly become close friends, Cupcake quits the band and spends his extra time selling baked goods outside of his store in order to earn enough extra money for the trip to Turkey with Eggplant.

But just as Cupcake has earned enough money Eggplant loses his job and Cupcake is not willing to take the trip without his friend. In a gesture of friendship Cupcake gives his travel money to Eggplant so that he can visit his aunt, but this puts Cupcake in a funk. Without a band, without his best friend, and with no chance of meeting Turkish Delight, Cupcake loses interest in baking and attempts to sell day-old coffee and stale pastries. Eggplant returns and inspires Cupcake to enter a baking contest using fresh spices he brought back from Turkey with talk about what they will do with the prize: a pair of round-trip tickets to anyplace in the world. While Eggplant suggest they can return to Turkey and meet Turkish Delight, but Cupcake notes that it doesn't have to be Turkey, suggesting he has gotten over the folly of his crush and recognizes the value of the friendships he has at hand.  In the back of the book there are eight recipes from "Cupcake's Repertoire," items featured in the story. 

While I freely admit that it's stupid to have any expectation about any author's work, I was not expecting this story at all. Defying expectations, that's a good thing, but I think what I first had to get over was the imposition of logic my brain kept trying to force onto the story. Why I was so easily willing to accept a robot-building dog without issue but had to struggle with a cupcake-baking cupcake might say something about how easily we accept anthropomorphism with things traditionally given brains as opposed to inanimate objects like produce and bake goods. But then, what to make of the Gingerbread Man?

It wasn't an insurmountable obstacle, and soon enough I was firmly in Varonland and wondering, truly, where the story was headed. Would Cupcake find the love of his dreams in Turkish Delight, or would he find her personality at odds with his imagined version of his idol? Would the band take him back after he sends his friend to Turkey alone, or would they keep that Potato as his permanent replacement? Will Cupcake happily return to his routines and make fresh coffee ever again? There's a lot of visual and sight gags (I want to know who Mr. Peanut was buying a valentine for!) in addition to the occasional dissonance of wondering about an enormous turkey leg walking a dog and wonder where the rest of the turkey was. The New York of Varonland is indeed an unusual place but perfectly fine if you're willing to roll with it.

And while I was happily going along with where Varon was taking me, in the end I was a little surprised that the story didn't have a more pronounced conclusion. It stopped more than it ended, totally underselling the idea that Cupcake is happier to have a friend like Eggplant than to harbor hopes of a new friendship with a stranger. I'm not saying the conclusion needs to be more obvious or spelled out, but with a younger audience (the book is geared for ages 8+) the point could be easily lost. 

Comparing Bake Sale to Robot Dreams is like comparing dogs to eggplants, though there are similarities. Between the books I mean. Both stories deal with the idea of friendship with main characters that deal with the shifting emotions surrounding those friendships. While guilt is less of a factor in Bake Sale than in Robot Dreams there is still a dream sequence where Cupcake finally meets Turkish Delight only to see her literally sit on and crush Eggplant. This becomes the incident that causes Cupcake to give his friend his money, and while not exactly done out of guilt it does seem as if Cupcake recognizes the selfishness of wanting to go on a trip with his friend. So while Robot Dreams looked at moving beyond old friendships Bake Sale finds its strength in maintaining and valuing those friendships at hand.

Just Disgusting

by Andy Griffiths   with illustrations by Terry Denton  
Scholastic  

"From the Best-Selling Author of The Day My Butt Went Psycho..." 'nuff said.  

In researching about the types of books boys like to read I came up with a short list of elements that, when included, would increase a reader's interest. Most of the things writers are taught have to do with craft elements – subtext, metaphor, desire lines, character development, plotting and pacing, etc – which may make for fine literature but aren't the sort of things boys care about when they want to read.

Want to read.

See, for me the battle for the mind of boy readers is getting them to want to read and worrying about content and context much later. And if getting them to the point where they want to read means giving them a longer leash on junk reading, so be it. In fact, where curricula moves students from reading for fun toward reading for meaning at around the fourth grade I think the goal posts should be moved and those concepts introduced in the second half of sixth grade. Let them read for fun for a few more years and I think you'll have a larger group of stronger readers among the student body. Boys and girls could continue to read whatever interested them, none of the books currently taught would be abandoned, all I'm suggesting is a couple extra years to let boys get a better footing with reading and toward wanting to read.  

That said, here is a fine piece of junk reading that boys will enjoy, one of a series. It's got everything a boy could hope for in a book: short stories, outrageous humor, exportable imagery, plenty of action, a good dose of cartoon violence, and no pretensions about being art or literary. What the books in this series lack in subtlety they make up for in sheer gross-out entertainment value. There is no way any teacher or parent is going to recommend these books to the boys in their charge, and boys know it, which is also part of their appeal.

Of these, Just Disgusting is my favorite, mostly because it seems the most chaotic. It opens with a list of "101 Really Disgusting Things" many of which will be featured in the book, though some are just there for the extreme gross-out factor. You put two or more boys in a room and ask them to come up with a list of things they find disgusting and this would be pretty close. And this is the charm (?) and brilliance (!) of what Griffiths is about, because he seems to be able to access those moments when boys are totally unguarded and uncensored. Most adults would agree that many of the things on the list are, truly, disgusting, but the difference between adults and kids is that we no longer talk about such things, but not kids. For the middle school reader much of this is still fresh territory and a valuable currency during recess and on the playground.  

Sometimes the stories drag, but only because they follow the beating-a-dead-horse rule of schoolyard storytelling. The internal editor in my adult head was thinking of all sorts of ways to shorten the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure parody of "Cake of Doom" or the annoying sibling story "Shut Up!" but to do so would remove their authenticity. In precisely the same way that adults quickly tie of the way children will drag out something they find amusing, these stories seem almost designed to serve as adult repellent.  

Coupled with these stories are the spot illustrations that are all over the margins and threaten to crowd out the text, or at least overshadow it. In the same way that MAD magazine includes the "marginal" art of Sergio Aragones, the Just books include short comic strips, illustrations of key points in the text, flipbooks in the corners, and in the case of "Two Brown Blobs" a full comic representation of a story set in a bathtub (use your imagination about those blobs, and you'll be right). Even the page numbers have a bit of story running through them as they are surrounded by a duck who goes through some pretty unusual and, yes, disgusting tribulations of his own. All this visual anarchy might seem a distraction, but it's the sort of distraction that gives the weaker reader a chance to pause without putting the book down, which encourages them further to keep reading. 

Other books in the series speak for themselves: Just Annoying, Just Joking, Just Shocking, Just Crazy, Just Wacky, Just Stupid, all featuring tales of Andy, his sister Jen, their parents, and Andy's friend Danny who is nowhere near as smart as Andy. And Andy is pretty smart, Andy Griffith that is. He knows the territory and he knows how to mine it. Author of The Cat on the Mat Is Flat in addition to The Day My Butt Went Psycho and other series, Griffiths is the perfect go-to author for boys who have graduated from Captain Underpants and don't mind a little more story than picture in their diets...

If the adults are willing to let them read for pleasure.

The Witch Who Wasn't

by Jane Yolen  
Illustrated by Arnold Roth  
Macmillan 1964  

At a convention for witches, sweet young Isabel doesn't think she has what it takes to win the Spelling Bee...  

I'll be honest, I checked this out from my library because of Arnold Roth. That and the hope that by checking out the one sole remaining copy of this book in my library system that it might survive another year's weeding.

At 700 years old, Isabel is a young witch (apparently witches only age one year for every one hundred they are alive), and is finally old enough to attend the witch convention. Only she isn't a very good witch when it comes to spells, she simply couldn't create anything evil. Her cauldron smelled of sugar and spice, her attempts to create snakes turned to cakes, bats became cats, and bugs became things one could hug. In short, Isabel was too nice to be a bad witch.

At the Witches' Convention when it came time for the spelling bee while the older, more experienced witches drew spells that conjured up horrible beasties all Isabel could manage was a tiny mouse. This, of course, was the most horrible thing of all, sending all the other witches jumping onto chairs and hiding behind each other until the thing could be taken away. That Isabel was different, and that made her extraordinary.

This is one of those old fashioned picture storybooks, a wordy tale that today would be turned into a book for young readers and not a picture book at all.  Not that the story doesn't lend itself to illustration only that "They" who decide such things have declared that picture book readers no longer have the patience for a book over 500 words (if that). And I'll grant, the story might benefit from some tightening, the character development could use a little more focus, but so what. There is little to the story as it is that feels like it's pushing 50 years old and Roth's illustrations are as delightfully demented as usual.

I understand there was a sequel, Isabel's Noel, but sadly that title seems to have fallen under a bad spell and made to disappear.

Secret Circus

by Johanna Wright 
Neal Porter Books / Roaring Brook Press 
2009  

Only the mice know, and they aren't telling...

In Paris there is a circus, a very secret circus, a very tiny circus, that only the mice know about. They ride a hot air balloon to a merry-go-round long after the people have gone to bed and find their way to the circus where they snack on left-behind snacks and enjoy the show. When it's over the mice return home safe with their secret and a conspiratorial wink that begs the reader to keep the secret safe.  

Using the very simple repetition of "Only the mice know..." followed by the who, what, when, where, why, and how of the circus Wright opens up the story to the charming illustrations. For the mice this secret circus is to be the event of the season and much is made of getting there as the circus itself, which is how it is with most highly anticipated events.

The economy of text is well matched with playful paintings that have the loose feel of cartoons on canvas. Wright paints in a transparent style that gives the effect of watercolor on textured canvas, both child-like and tactile.

And...

I know this is a deceased horse to flog, but looking the illustrations I was reminded of the warmth and connection the eye makes with art made by human hands. I'm not in for bashing digital illustration but in looking through Secret Circus I couldn't stop thinking about how impossible it would be to capture the same mood in pixels. This leads me to thinking about books and the coming digital delivery devices and how much will be lost and retained in the transition. Would these illustrations maintain their charm on a digital screen? There's no reason to think they wouldn't, but with forced digital elements -- animation, pan and zoom, music and sound effect -- something would be lost. Looking at art in a museum isn't enhanced by music or shifts in lighting, and that, ultimately, s what leads me to think that books will always be with us. Artists will always take hand to medium, and despite being able to view the finished work as a digital upload we will still have that desire to see the thing in person, before us, to swim amid the subtleties in its presence.

So, yeah.

Bubble in the Bathtub

by Jo Nesbo 
Aladdin 2011 

Nilly and Lisa are back, this time to help rescue Doctor Proctor who seems to have gotten himself trapped somewhere in time while trying to reunite with an old flame from long ago... 

When Lisa and Nilly receive a postcard from their friend Doctor Proctor (inventor of the infamous Fart Powder that was the subject of the previous book) the discover a secret message indicating that the doctor is in trouble and needs help. With the sale of a collectible postage stamp to an odd woman named Raspa who has a wooden leg with a roller skate at the end of it, the kids tell their parents they're spending the weekend at a friend's house and take off for Paris. From Oslo. With tiny Milly crammed into a carry-on bag because they only have enough money for one ticket.

Once there they find the doctor's hotel room but he is missing. Through luck, Nilly discovers that a powder he was instructed to bring along from the doctor's lab is actually a bubble bath that is the active ingredient for a time machine built out of a bathtub. The doctor's old flame Juliette shows up and explains how she and the doctor were parted many years before, and that he's gone back in time to try and change history. Suddenly everyone is traveling around through time trying to find the doctor and make sure that history doesn't get changed entirely. Napoleon, Joan of Arc, the French Revolution, the Tour de France, the Eiffel Tower, all of it may or may not be irreparably altered as Nilly, Lisa, Raspa, Juliette, and the doctor himself go zipping around in the bathtub hoping to correct, undo, and generally mess with historical events so that there can be a happy ending.

Head-spinning plot twists and preposterous time travel paradoxes?  Oh, heck yeah, but its so much fun that you either twist yourself into a pretzel trying to sort it all out or, better, you taken them for the goofy fun they are and roll with them. Nilly and Lisa understand they cannot change the past without having profound effects on the future, but some histories were just meant to be no matter what the shift in events.  When Nilly impersonates Napoleon he knows what is supposed to happen that day at Waterloo, but is all that bloodshed necessary? No, Nilly decides instead to convince the French troops to go home, pretend they suffered heavy losses, and return to their families and breakfasts. On the other side of the battle, finding the French troops gone, Wellington and company decide to pretend they won a great battle, and return home to their families with a similar story. Nilly has changed history, but the outcome is still recorded the same and no one is the wiser. And as far as the paradoxes are concerned, when Lisa helps a despondent Gustav Eiffel by sketching out an idea for a tower it's hard not to get up in the snake eating its own tail. It's the ultimate answer to the chicken-egg question: they both came first.

Nesbo has written one big, slobbery shaggy dog of a book that is hard to resist. Middle grade books that push 200 pages really need to prove themselves to me, but at 425 pages I never felt like I was being dragged along. The humor is irreverent and droll, wacky and sophisticated at the same time, it honors the spirit of adventure and the desire for nonsense in dealing with the adult world, and is one of the few books (if any?) where the central story was about kids helping two adults reunite for love.

Nesbo, Norway's (perhaps Europe's) leading adult crime novelist has taken another step toward establishing a reputation on par with Roald Dahl – the better parts at least. While his adult fiction is dark his middle grade books (there is a third not yet in translation) are the most Dahl-esque stories I have read. Evil and ugliness lurk in the adult characters, as they do in real life, but Nilly and Lisa treat them with the same aplomb any kid would in dealing with schoolyard bullies. Nilly's pluck in getting his friends out of the guillotine is as absurd as it is natural in the world Nesbo creates. If anything, Nesbo does one better than Dahl by empowering his characters with an indestructible passion and innocence.

I know people like to get excited by authors and series, and that generally isn't me. But after reading dozens and dozens of middle grade books it's genuinely exciting when someone truly "gets" what it means to be a kid and can make it funny while delivering the serious stuff amid a truly absurd adventure. I sincerely wish Nesbo a long career in both his adult and children's books, and that his books get the attention they deserve. I'm doing my part.

Nothing Ever Happens On My Block

written and illustrated by  
Ellen Raskin  
Atheneum  1980 


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Punch in New York

 written and illustrated by
Alice Provensen
Viking  1991


When the star of a famed Italian puppet theatre is stolen fro his owner he goes on a mischievous romp through modern day New York City only to realize there's no place like home... unless you get to rip off someone in the process.

Landing in New York, Il Professore Tucci-Piccini (all Punch puppeteers are referred to as Professor) has one of his bags stolen from him, the one containing his star, Mr. Punch. Back at the thieves den when they discover the suitcase is not full of money they toss Punch out of the window where he lands on a baker in the street and sets of on his very Punch-like adventure across the city. After a couple of isolated incidents Punch falls in with a pack of muggers and quickly becomes their leader, convincing them to help him steal the car of a wealthy man and driving it – preposterously across the roofs of buildings – to his home. Lauded for his excellent driving Punch is hired on as the regular chauffeur but he becomes lonely for his old family, the puppet theatre, and in the end manages to combine his old and new jobs into one sweet deal.

Punch has always been a bad boy, and his antics have always been enjoyed for their outrageousness. In updating the Punch tale, Provensen has found ways to incorporate some of the standby characters – policeman and alligator – in a way very much in keeping with modern times. Other, trickier characters such as the beadle, the devil, the hangman, and even Judy and the baby are sidelined probably because of how quickly they would become hot-button problems if introduced. In the traditional play Punch is a serial murderer and clearly that wouldn't do for a picture book. Instead, Provensen gives us a Punch without his historical trappings but with plenty of bad behavior that walks the tightrope between playful and dangerous.

Provensen's illustrations sit like stacks of multiple planes, almost naive in perspective. The large city scenes are crowded with textual details, names of stores and signs and places that suggest that nothing in New York is real unless it has a name attached to it. Some of the businesses are real (the Waldorf) while the rich man named Helmstrump seems an amalgam of Helmsley and Trump and his name appears on buildings throughout. It's difficult to know if Provensen is going for commentary or providing adults with an inside joke and I'm not quite sure it works either way. But the color palate of oil paint on velum is bright and bold

The historical origins of a Punch and Judy puppet show go pack to the 16th century Italian commedia dell'arte where a set of stock characters would perform farces that openly mocked the morality of decent people. Punch, a hunchbacked hooked-nosed dwarf, was an obnoxious braggart, a violent drunkard, and a coward who settled every disagreement with a paddle that was larger than himself. He would beat police and church figures, outwit the devil, and got away with murder, literally. The no one in their right mind would cheer for such a person in real life. This puppet surrogate allowed audiences to laugh at the folly of the bad guy getting away with it.

And I feel the need to interject here that this desire to root for the bad guy exists to this day in modern entertainment. We like to imagine ourselves getting away with it, yet at the same time feel relief in seeing the lawbreakers get caught or killed. It feeds our fantasies and then calms our sense of morality, but this need of a moral coda is a modern desire; we have come to a place where we would feel guilty without an explicit ending that the bad guys didn't get away with it, unable to allow our sense of morality rest unspoken. In that way we have become rather weak (or at least lazy) as a society when it comes to using our intellect while enjoying entertainment.

I mention this because the reason I had to check this book out was that someone pointed out a couple of bad reviews on this book on Amazon. I am beginning to believe that comments and product reviews on websites are proof of our failures in education and that they represent 90% of the population.  That aside, I was astonished (I shouldn't have been) that someone thought this book taught bad values ("values" being a the operative word that told me all I needed to know about the commenter) and two of the three reviewers felt the book should be banned. The one who complained about the values even suggested people not buy this "book" (the word book in quotes) as if somehow disagreeing with its content made it less of a book than one they agreed with.

Yes, I can see how if you believed that puppets could come to life, talk to people, drive cars around town, and generally create mischief, that you might believe the book is a deliberate attempt to teach young readers how to lie, cheat and steal. If you cannot tell the difference between a drawing of a fictitious character in a picture book and real people in the world – and worse, if you do not know how to have a conversation with your children to help them understand the differences between what is real and what isn't – then you have a bigger problem than can be solved by banning books. I don't think you need to be cultured in a way that you understand the history of Italian commedia and English puppet theatre in order to understand this book, but if you have a problem with this book then you're also going to have a hard time with gangster movies, with the moral ambiguities of James Bond, even with cute little picture books with talking animals in it; I can think of no greater lie than teaching kids animals can think, behave, and reason just like them.  I realize some people take the bible literally, as is their right to do so, but to apply that same standard to all books is to suggest that all fiction is real or that there's no difference between made-up stories and those in the bible.

Come on, is this really the state of our educational system today?

Is Punch in New York a great book? No, but it is a fine introduction to a classic buffoon from another time and place, where the people weren't so smart that they were offended by a broad farce.

Fight the Night

written and illustrated by  
Tomie de Paola  
Lippencott  1968  

Ronald so refuses to go to sleep that he vows to fight the night, until the morning if necessary.  

Playing outside until bedtime, Ronald refuses to cooperate. Even as his mother coaxes him into pajamas and into bed with the vague promises that tomorrow is another day and perhaps there might be a surprise for him and that the night would catch him and make him sleepy, Ronald is having none of it. Donning a cape, a pot repurposed into a helmet, and a flashlight Ronald climbs under his bedclothes and creeps in the darkness toward the foot of the bed where the Night lives. 

Squeezing out the other end he emerges in his outside fantasy world prepared to take on the Night. But the Night is having none of it, calling out "Go too sleep before it's too late." Demanding a fight Ronald promises to catch him with his flashlight but the Night decrees "You will never catch me" and so the chase is on. Eventually the Night insists Ronald must be getting sleepy, and despite his protests his eyes show fatigue. But come the dawn Ronald has succeeded, and with the Night in retreat he climbs back into his bed from the bottom, removes his helmet and cape, and from the bottom of the bed hears the night laughing at him just as mother calls out that breakfast is ready. With that Ronald draws the covers over him and sleeps all day, the Night having finally caught him as his mother had promised.  

In this very early Tomie De Paola book we are treated to a classic Hero on a Night Journey, literally this time battling the night. It also happens to be a classic Epic in the battle between kids and their parents come bed time, especially in summertime when the sun is lout long past dinner and neighborhood games of hide-and-seek are a rite of childhood if ever there was one. Here our Epic Warrior Ronald seriously dons his fighting gear and actively goes in search of the Night, vowing to vanquish it once and for all. The Night, elemental and omnipresent, becomes his transformative night passage to self-mastery, proving once and for all that the night can be fought. The Warrior, having vanquished his foe, returns home the way he came having proved himself and grown up to the point he no longer need heed his parents. He has earned the sleep of the Hero returned triumphant.  

De Paola's lines are young and not quite as assured as they later became. Placed alongside the 60s work of Mercer Mayer and Maurice Sendak the three writer-illustrators could easily be assumed at having come from the same school; De Paola's thatched crosshatching aligns with earlier Sendak, while the poses, facial features, and attitudes of the main characters seem to come from Mayer's family tree. Which is not to suggest there was any conscious effort to copy one another or create a unified style. I don't mean to suggest there was a deliberate attempt to copy or mimic each other, only that they are very much of the time and before de Paola's lines softened and his color palate neutralized to its recognizable state that it is today.  

I was curious to check out some early de Paola after hearing him speak at a recent SCBWI conference. There was a sense, looking back, that he felt he didn't know what he was doing when he started in children's books, a trope of modesty I have heard from others, most notably and hysterically from Peter Sis. These illustrators who come to children's books seemingly by accident are coy in the way they hide their light under a bushel. While it may be true enough that these illustrators were not schooled in the sequential storytelling art of picture books the way contemporary illustrators can now establish themselves with completed books as portfolio pieces, it cannot be ignored that the sense of story and the essence of what is true about childhood had been completely absorbed. A solid understanding of the classic tales, of heroes and their journeys, and of children at play, these things de Paola understood and captured here.  

Fight the Night can be viewed as a less sophisticated Where the Wild Things are, but what a pity it isn't still around to give younger readers a chance to imagine a journey into the night with a Hero with an articulated goal and success in his charge against the oppressive nature of adults against childhood.  

Who, Said Sue, Said Whoo?

written and illustrated by Ellen Raskin  
Atheneum  1973  

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

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

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

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

Spectacles

 written and illustrated by Ellen Raskin 
Atheneum  1976   

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

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

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

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

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

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