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.

The Moon Jumpers

by Janice May Udry  
pictures by Maurice Sendak  
Harper & Row   1959  

Four children frolic beneath the light of the full moon.  Yup, it's as simple as that.  

On the title page we get a small verse of poetry that sets the tone for the book. 

Summer night is the cool dark grass  
And big tired trees  
With the moon sailing  
On a wind.   

Once the sun has set, the moon is in the sky and Mother and Father are otherwise occupied, the children go outside and do what kids do on a summer night.  They climb trees and dance around and tell ghost stories. And once the Moon Jumpers have had their fun and its time for bed they return sleepily and go to bed with dreams of the morning sun on their minds.  

There is a poetic dreaminess to the text, and so little actual plot, that I am tempted to take the text and submit it to agents just to see if anyone today thought this was commercial enough.  Now, this was a Caldecott Honor Book and I'm going to assume that everyone I would submit the text to would recognize it immediately (right?), but I would still be curious to see how this would be viewed today.  

As for Sendak's art, these are the early years and where he already has his color palate and shading in place for Where the Wild Things Are five years down the road, though the style of his human characters is still very much in progress developmentally.  Their poses and gestures are full and free-spirited (for the kids at least) and there's a glimmer of Max in the facial expressions. 

It's a quiet little book without being cute or cloying.

Lion

by William Pene Du Bois  
Viking Press  1956  

In an animal factory in the sky winged artists invent new animals, including one very unusual looking lion.  

Artist Foreman, looking suspiciously like an angel, was one of the first animal designers in the Animal Factory in the sky.  Now in semi-retirement as, well, a foreman to the other artists, he has come up with a new name for an animal -- LION -- and sets about to design an animal to fit the name.  Artist Foreman being a bit rusty designs a multi-colored quadruped with whiskers and a mane of feathers, the tale of a fish, and a variegated striped pattern that defies nature.  Doubting that he has made an animal to match the great name he has given it he goes around to the other animal designers and asks them, in one word, what they think is wrong with the creature.  Size, feathers, color, legs, haircut... each of these responses sends Artist Foreman back to the drawing board to make the necessary adjustments.  

Finally he takes his creation to the Chief Designer and asks what is wrong with this marvelous creature and is told "Nothing!"  Ah, but the Chief Designer hasn't heard the proposed noise for the Lion -- PEEP PEEP! -- but his suggestion that a creature like that would make a mighty ROAR leaves Artist Foreman little choice but to accept that a peeping lion would be as wrong as everything else he originally thought about his creature.  So Artist Foreman returned to his drawing board and roared with happiness over his latest creation.  


This is one of those time capsule books, something I had totally forgotten I'd read as a small boy.  When I stumbled upon the title on a Caldecott book list (it's an Honor title), and with fond memories of his other books besides The 21 Balloons, I had to hunt it down. My first reaction was What an odd take on the creation stories.  Clearly we are shown a heaven in the clouds, with angels of creation in the service of a god, but what we know of the Biblical creation was that the animals were created by God and not his underlings working in a factory.  Then there's the notion that God merely signs off on these creatures not of his design, and that no one dares contradict him... it all reads like an odd bureaucracy, complete with yes-men and semi-competent foremen whose employees laugh at him behind his back. Though fifty years ahead of its time, the book seems to argue both for and against the idea of Intelligent Design.

Of the mid-century children's book authors and illustrators William Pene Du Bois fits an odd space in my nostalgic heart.  There is a childlike whimsy and logic to his stories and illustrations that, as an adult, don't quite hold up.  At the same time that innocence is oddly in keeping with the way kids think.  The odd fraternity of The Three Policemen, the looney inventions of Lazy Tommy Pumpkinhead, even his original illustrations for Roald Dahl's The Magic Finger all speak to this sense of Du Bois channeling some other world that looks like ours but simply isn't.

In Lion he gives a glimpse of a heaven no one has ever claimed, before or since, with angels working an animal factory, working their way through trial and error.  The story allows the reader (or listener) a chance to recognize everything that is wrong with the Lion and decide for themselves what exactly is wrong with Artist Foreman's creation. Were it not for the wings and the clouds the story could be set anywhere, setting becomes almost incidental from the start. The Animal Factory in the Sky is simply a door through which we are given entry into Du Bois imagination.

I was surprised that a single library in my local system had a copy of this book on hand.  Out of print since 1986, I wonder how often it gets checked out by young readers, and how long before this lone copy ends up discarded and lost to the memory of grown children from another era.

Aliens on Vacation

by Clete Barrett Smith
Disney / Hyperion  2011 

When Scrub is shunted off to his Grandmother's for the summer he discovers that her Intergalactic Bed and Breakfast is more than a name... 

Scrub just knows his summer is going to suck. Having to spend his summer helping his grandmother run her Star Wars hippie-decor B&B in the middle-of-nowhere Washington was bad enough, but knowing that his best friend Tyler was going to be doing basketball camp and tournaments across the country was killing him.  There is no way Scrub would ever make the seventh grade all-star team next year, not with Tyler gaining the coach's favor three times a week in practice and in games on the weekend. But with his parents called off on last-minute business trips, and no way to convince them he could take care of himself at home alone, there is little Scrub can do but suck it up and stick it out the best he can.

Initially he assumes Grandma's business caters to the sci-fi nerds after meeting with one of the guests, a tall man with loose, ash colored skin.  With a better understanding of the House Rules ("Two arms, two legs, one head" and "No harming the natives" in particular) Scrub begins to realize that "Intergalactic" is more than just a name for Grandma's establishment; she truly is catering to visitors from other planets!  But the resort only works as long as the "guests" can remain unnoticed while on vacation, and it falls to Scrub to help Grandma keep her hostel/travel portal a secret. 

Naturally, there are suspicious locals, including Sheriff Tate who is certain that Grandma is up to no good, and Amy who suspects there's a connection between the B&B and life on other planets. And then there's the little issue of the intergalactic transporter shutting down leaving vacationers trapped on Earth. It's only a matter of time before the carefully hidden truth is about be be exposed, right there on the lawn in front of the B&B with world media attention.  But if Scrub saves the day and can protect Grandma and her guests his actions will not only get the Sheriff fired but cause him enough ridicule to force him out of town... taking his daughter (and Scrub's only real friend) Amy with him.  Is there any way Scrub can make the right decision for everyone?

Among all the book's characters I do have a favorite and that's Mr. Harnox, the aforementioned tall guest with ashen skin who happens to be stuck on Earth. Throughout, Mr. Harnox is constantly making discoveries about his new home (a description of cacti sounds delicious) while at the same time applying the lessons Grandma has tried to instill in all her guests, ("Everything deserves a second chance"). Alternately comic relief and an alternate viewpoint on the world, his loopy wide-eyed innocence coupled with his unusual diet creates a character that wouldn't be out of place in a Charles Addams cartoon.

Smith gives readers a solid everykid in Scrub; neither nerdy nor geeky nor uber-hip.  He's just a kid, an easygoing vehicle for dealing with whatever gets thrown his way, which ends up being quite a bit, actually.  There isn't any mystery what Grandma is up to, or that Scrub will figure it out, so much as a question of what is the right thing to do in any given situation, and can Scrub handle it.  What's interesting is how adept Scrub is at his various care-taking duties – helping the aliens prepare to look human before leaving the B&B, shopping for excessive amounts of ammonia and aluminum to keep one long-term guest fed, and even mitigating conversations between the guests and locals to quell suspicions. Scrub finds, as many kids do, that fluid middle space where they are maleable to any given situation and it becomes an empowering thing for a kid to find they are both needed and capable when it comes to being responsible. There's a strong thread of compassion woven throughout though Smith doesn't draw any undue attention toward it. 

Which is not to suggest Aliens of Vacation is a dry "message" story.  It's a solid, plot-driven middle grade book with heart that will have readers longing for distant relatives with intergalactic transporters in their homes.



Full disclosure: Clete Barrett Smith and I were students together at the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program and I received my copy of the book from his publicist.

Cousins of Clouds

Elephant Poems 
by Tracie Vaughn Zimmer 
illustrated by Megan Halsey and Sean Addy 
Clarion House / Houghton Mifflin  2011 

A collection of poetic ruminations on pachyderms coupled with informational bits that might work on multiple levels for older and younger audiences.   

The second largest mammals on the planet get the poetic treatment from a variety of perspectives that describe and explain as much as they meditate and drift.  Each poem includes a bit of non-fiction that informs the reader separate from the poem's language and intent, with illustrations that underscores the many facets of elephants. 

One particular spread covers the bases here.  One one page we get "Ivory:"

Excuse me?
You want what?
Two of my teeth? I think not!
Find another souvenir.
My enemy is drawing near~
my calf and I must disappear.

This is accompanied on the same page a line drawing of an elephant drawn on top of collaged brown paper that gives the animal shades of character as it stares the reader down.  Beneath is an explanation of how elephants were once hunted for their ivory and how a boycott on ivory sales was instituted in 1989.  On the facing page we get another poem, "Mud Spa:"  

slurp!
thwonk!
splat!

Completely divine,
muddy chocolate sublime
splattered onto my skin–
better yet, I'll dive in.

The playful poem, and equally playful illustration, gives us an image we have seen before, but the accompanying sidebar text explains how elephant skins are sensitive to sunburn and insect bites, making the mud bath more of an essential element of survival more than playtime.  In these two pages we get a range of information and imagery that paints a concise picture of elephants in a way dry text could not.  

This is what made me think about how this book -- reformatted, and slightly modified -- would work equally well with an audience older than what we would normally consider for picture books.  I know there are older readers, including teens, who don't have problems reading picture books, but there are as many if not more who would find the poems and information appealing if presented differently.   

Not to suggest there's anything wrong with the collection as it is, no, no.  In fact, I'd like to see more like this, books with a melding of fiction (and poetry) among the non-fiction.  The reader with a preference for one will end up reading the other and reaping the benefits. 

Underwear

What We Wear Under There  
by Ruth Freeman Swain 
illustrated by John O'Brien 
Holiday House  2008 

A picture book history of undergarments over the ages that provides some basic coverage but nonetheless has a few holes.

This was a book on my radar some time ago that dropped off and resurfaced mysteriously.  All I could remember going in was how I thought this was the perfect subject for a picture book, something that might pair nicely with Fartiste, or perhaps even Captain Underpants. 

For the most part what we get is serviceable.  The book moves historically from breechclouts  and loincloths through the middle ages, hop skit fads, corsets and nylons, and diapers ancient and modern.  The problem for me occurs early on when we start getting some unfamiliar vocabulary and nothing to help us understand it. "During the Middle Ages in Europe, women wore coarse shifts over their loincloths for warmth."  Having only previously been told about loincloths as the single bandage-wrap ancient Egyptians wore, and with no idea what the shape and covering a shift looks like, all we are given as an illustration is a single panel showing a pair of knights jousting.  We sort of get a glimpse of a shapeless garment that might be a shift a couple pages later hanging from a clothes line, but not enough to really understand its coverage or purpose.  

Other unexplained and unseen garments include doublets, petticoats, bloomers and the actual Chinese pants that are constructed in a way that allowed for easy access when using the bathroom.  Pants that open when you squat and close when you stand up?  I have seen these pants and they are an interesting point in fashion engineering and would be the sort of thing a reader would also want to see. 

It's difficult to pin down the source of the problem here.  The book is clearly researched, with an easy-to-read text, but fails to really give us a sense of what the evolution of underwear looked like.  This is a picture book, so that point is unforgivable.  At the same time, working only from the text, an illustrator might have felt limited without doing the author's research all over.  I would like to think that an editor would make sure the illustrator had everything they needed in the way of source materials, or that the pictures illuminated what was hinted at in the text, but that isn't the case here.

So in the end Underwear: What We Wear Under There gives us a peek at at unmentionables but fails to provide enough coverage to satisfy.

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?

Jazz Country

by Nat Hentoff  
Harper and Row  1965  

A teen boy wants nothing more than to be a jazz musician and that being white puts him on the outside, but time an exposure to one of his jazz idols teaches him that character, not color, defines who you are. Well, sort of.  

I love how every once in a while a library sale will unearth relics from another layer of the children's literature archaeological strata.  Books that have finally reached their expiration date due to lack of circulation are given one last chance on a library cart where, for a mere quarter of a dollar, you can get a glimpse into what was published for a teen audience over 10, 20, 30, sometimes (as in this case) over 45 years ago.  

Tom Curtis is a high school senior who, for the last five years or so, has wanted nothing more than to become a jazz musician. On weekends, and some weeknights, he heads down to the Savoy club and stands outside (because he's under age) listening to his idol, Moses Godfrey, take the stage and direct the most idiosyncratic jazz Tom has ever heard.  Godfrey is an innovator, a band leader along the lines of a Charles Mingus (to whom the book is partially dedicated), an important figure in jazz who may nonetheless be part of a dying breed.  Listening to him, Tom is full of doubts about whether he's good enough, or ever will be good enough, and whether or not he should go to college or instead try to make a go of it as a jazz musician.  

Oh, and Tom is white.  Moses and most of the other jazz cats are black.  And it's no small thing that one of Tom's biggest hang-ups is how he's ever going to "cross over" and make it as a jazz musician because he's certain that, being born white, he just doesn't have what it takes to ever really make it.  Seems kind of quaint, doesn't it?  

Early on Hentoff presents Moses as a sort of zen master, questioning all assumptions and doling out his own version of zen koans to all around.  In his first meeting Moses asks if Tom is a musician and his fumbled response reads almost like Luke Skywalker's first encounter with Yoda. Having been so quickly shut out Tom becomes determined to prove that he is a musician, and worthy, grafting a sort of zen apprenticeship onto the monomyth of the hero's journey.

This being the mid 1960s Hentoff is eager to make sure the story resonates with its intended audience who would be hip to current events.  There are the beginnings of black militantism, and the Southern freedom marchers.  There's passing reference to hippies and an acknowledgment of failed attempts at integration. The divide between poor and rich is presented mostly as a black vs white issue, and the police are never where you need them and always where you don't want them.  From the perspective of the 21st century it's difficult to know if this is an accurate perception of the times, or simply the beginnings of what we know recognize as a collection of stereotypes.  My sense is that Hentoff was trying to include as many views as he could and in doing so created an amalgam of types to give the 1960s reader a general, but all too convenient, sense of the political landscape.  

As interesting as the question of whether or not race matters in a musical form created and popularized predominantly by African Americans, Hentoff stumbles on the main story question regarding what Tom should do with his life. He has plenty of examples about what a rough life it is to make a living as a musician – not just a jazz musician, or a black musician, but just as a musician – and he can see that the jazz world still has a lot of external hostility in the form of business and press criticism, so when Tom finally lands an paid offer to join a band we really feel he should know what to do. 

But he doesn't.  Hentoff has dragged his main character across town, through fights and police brutality, in decrepit tenement buildings, to social gatherings, in and around hipster areas... but we have no sense of Tom's other life, the one he's trying to choose between.  He has a few school friends who get mentioned, and a set of parents who are mentioned only briefly and are "cool" with their son exploring his options, but for the most part his white world is a mystery. He's teen without a girlfriend or a desire for one, a teen with no interests outside his jazz life?  He's got good enough grades to get into colleges, Amherst eventually becomes his school of choice due to its proximity to NYC, but it's all treated as a casual aside, a white default. Its the beginning of the escalation of the Vietnam War and boys are starting to realize that a college deferment is the way to avoid the draft, but that never occurs to Tom when deciding whether he should defer the college or the jazz life.  His fears about falling out of the scene and not making it in jazz if he goes to college ignores the reality that by refusing college he risks his life, not just his jazz, by getting drafted.  This feels like a huge blind spot in the story.  

But in the end what is most frustrating is that, once given the option to join a band Tom goes around to every major character in the story and asks them for their opinion about what he should do.  At this point the reader will have made up their own mind, but Tom should know, he should have an opinion of his own, and it should reflect some sort of growth in his character. The mere fact that he still has to ask, is still looking for acceptance and permission, suggests that he has a long way to go and probably should pack it up and go to college. 

"I can't tell you when I decided to try college for a while," Tom explains, then justifies his turning down the offer to join a band because he didn't like the band leader.  That might have been clearer before and when he got the offer but it wasn't for the simple fact that for the entire story we have never seen a shred of emotion from Tom. Given how so much of the story is filled with jazz musicians talking about getting the feeling into the music it might have been nice to see Tom get a little feeling into his own life. And given that Hentoff was and is a premier jazz historian and critic, you'd think he'd have been able to show us what Tom's "song" looked like before and after he found the music within him.

Writing about a white teen looking to enter the predominantly African American world of jazz in the mid 1960s, we're going to have to forgive a lot of Hentoff's pedantic narrative as a record of its time, an historical document of another era. His use of the word Negro gives the book a slightly off taste to the modern palate. And Hentoff quickly dismisses a large number of influential white jazz musicians of the day as possible role models for Tom simply so he can make his case about race, jazz ideology, and class differences in 1960s New York City.  I had hoped that Hentoff would be able to deliver a sound story of a teen musician trying to navigate the waters of the race and class in the 1960s, something we could hold on to as an historical novel of the time.  Sadly, I understand now why it might have gone neglected on the library shelves.

Dave the Potter

Artist, Poet, Slave 
by Laban Carrick Hill 
illustrated by Bryan Collier 
Little Brown  2010

A picture book biography of a 19th century African American pot maker who was also a poet, and apparently a slave. 

I don't think anyone's going to let that summary slide without my saying something about it first.  When I look at a picture book biography I have to step back and read it through the eyes of the intended audience, or try to at least.  When the subtitle promises to tell me three things about the subject, and text only conveys two of those three effectively, it leaves me feeling something is missing. That Dave is depicted as an artist making pots comes across in both the detailed verse describing the process and the well-researched images. But all we see of Dave is him at work in his shop and maybe a few details the convey the general era of the story and nothing, text or image, that necessarily informs us of Dave's slavery. 

Does it have to?  Can we simply put the word 'slave' on the cover and assume the reader will understand what is necessary for the context of the story?  Here's my problem then with the text – we learn in the back matter that Dave's profession was unusual for a slave, which I think is safe to assume because what we tend to hear about slaves in the American South leans toward house and field. The fact that he's an artisan is an important distinction, but I instantly want to know: who does a slave potter make his pots for?  Were they commissioned by his owners to be sold locally?  Did his make them for his master's house?  In the back matter we are told one of the earliest records is of 17 year old Dave looking to get a loan for a house – was this for his business?  Was he freed?  So many questions around his identity as a slave which are important only in so far as they help us understand who he was creating his pots for. He doesn't begin to write poems on his pots until he's in his 30s as far as we know – another clue, he's been educated and has a facility with rhyme – which might suggest that his stature had been secured as a local artist that he didn't fear his pots would be rejected for having been inscribed by a slave.  So many things I wish I understood about this aspect of Dave's life.  

Is it right to want so much from a picture book?  Perhaps not, but again, if it's important enough to put on the cover of the book I think it isn't unreasonable to have it addressed within the main text.  This becomes part of my problem with back matter in nonfiction picture books. So much information is jumped to the back after the main text that it begins to feel like everything that proceeds it is like the carrot before the stick, and the reader is going to get both. Yes, sometimes the details aren't going to fit the narrative flow of a story, which is perhaps why we should question this method of delivering nonfiction to younger readers because if we are presenting fact in the guise of fiction we risk readers walking away with only half the story. Out of context of the narrative – literally, separated from the text – the back matter is easily ignored by a reader who wants the gist of the story and only reads the main portion.  And in Dave the Potter there is little in that main text to explain enough of Dave's story to justify the word 'slave' on the cover or in the subtitle.

Having said all that, Hill does a nice job of giving us the process involved in 19th century pottery.  It's a very close narrative, told in verse, an extremely tactile and physical study of what it meant to be literally a man of the earth. Hill captures that sense of what it means to be an artist, working along, knowing only what the artist can about how such things look like during their creation.  The dedication, the shaping, the pride of craftsmanship, much of what is written can be applied to any art or craft. On the poetic front I might have liked to see more of Dave's little couplets incorporated into the story as opposed to the back matter, but it can equally be argued that there is poetry in his craft.  I can't think of a more appropriate approach to a poet's life than to write in verse, as Hill does here, so bonus points for that.

Ignore my misgivings; I think the book deserves its Caldecott Honor and Coretta Scott King awards.  Dave the Potter is a well-told examination of a craftsman's life in the early 19th century, beautifully illustrated and carefully researched, and a fine portrait of an African American plying a trade few did during that particular time in history. I simply wish I had a better sense of the subject in that time. 

Surfer of the Century

The Life of Duke Kahanamoku   
by Ellie Crowe
illustrations by Richard Waldrep
Lee and Low  2007
 
A bit of bait-and-switch on this picture book biography of the father of modern surfing as it focuses more on his accomplishments as a swimmer.  

As a kid, "Duke" wasn't much for school, but he loved the water.  He loved swimming and surfing, riding the waves at Waikiki Beach on 100-plus pound long board made of koa wood that was twice as long as he was tall.  He was a strong and powerful swimmer and he even developed his own way of kicking through the water in a way that has been adapted by swimmers since.  He caught the eye of a local lawyer who offered to train Duke for competition and he eventually made his way to the Olympics where he took gold and silver medals in 1912, 1920, and 1924.  He did some time as a bit player in Hollywood, was sheriff of Honolulu for 13 consecutive terms.  Oh, and did all he could to promote surfing as a sport.

No doubt Kahanamoku lived a rich and full life, diverse and interesting and a good topic for a biography, but I felt a little cheated when I turned the last page.  Duke's title as Surfer of the Century was thirty years posthumous, and while he was active in the sport its inclusion in this biography felt almost more obligatory than key to the subject.  For a generation of post-war surfers, particularly those who competed in the 1960s, Duke was revered as the father of surfing and he saw himself as more of a world-wide ambassador.  A search of videos on YouTube will turn up a brief interview where he's asked which was better, winning five Olympic medals over a twenty year period or swimming the great waves off Castle Surf, and while he initially plays diplomatic and says they were equally great he does finally admit that surfing was a greater thrill.

I realize I've once again compared a book as written against the book I wanted to read, but can I make a case for being led on?  With a title like Surfer of the Century is it wrong to expect a story to be more about surfing that swimming?  By highlighting his swimming achievements – which are nothing to scoff, he did break Olympic records that stood nearly two decades until broken by Johnny Weissmuller – I almost feel like they are treated as more legitimate as a result of their international stature.  I wanted to know more about the status of surfing, its history, and how it began and changed over time.  None of that is here.  I wanted to know why Duke was held in such high esteem by the surfing crowd -- there is mention of his legendary two-mile ride of one long wave, but no context for understanding how remarkable that accomplishment was and remains.  I don't think it's wrong to imagine that few younger readers wouldn't be interested to know more about surfing, and about a legend among surfers, who would be equally disappointed to find a biography full of so much non-surfing detail.

Or maybe what's missing are the sort of stories that really make a character stand out.  We get the story of Duke's rescuing fisherman whose boat had capsized and how it would lead to beach lifeguards keeping rescue boards on the beaches.  That's good.  What is perhaps not fitting a "gentle" biography is the fact that on another occasion, while training for the Olympics in the Pacific Ocean off Long Beach, Duke battled a ten-foot eel, losing his finger in the battle and calling into question his ability to swim again (he did). We read that Duke was sheriff for over 25 years and no mention of whether or not he surfed during that time, no mention that this was before, during, and after WWII, he just sort of drops away from the story then.  I'll grant that when creating a limited biography, as the picture book biography is by necessity, one must pick and choose details, but again I keep wondering where the father of surfing is during these gaps.  If it turns out that his surfing legends were from his boyhood days, and his title and admiration are mostly honorary and ceremonial, then perhaps a different title is in order.  Or at the very least a better explanation as to why the focus of his life tends to veer toward the non-surfing side of things.  

On the one hand, I feel horrible; there aren't enough picture book biographies on minorities and I cannot think of another about a Hawaiian, much less any other Pacific Islander that isn't fiction.  But when there is an opportunity to cross a child's interest in a sport like surfing in addition to a biography about a previously unknown biographical subject who also happens to be a lesser-seen minority, it seems a shame to not deliver on that promise. 

The Fourth Stall

by Chris Rylander 
Walden Pond Press / Harper Collins  2011 

Mac's the guy you go to when you need a problem solved, but when a gambling ring muscles in on his territory has Mac finally come to a problem too big to solve?  

Mac is the go-to guy when you got a problem that needs fixing.  Need tickets to an R rated film when you're only in sixth grade?  Mac's your guy. And through a combination of traded favors and cold hard cash there is very little Mac can't fix.  He's a sixth grade wiseguy with integrity, and honest, and he and his friend Vince have built quite a nice little business for themselves in the fourth stall of the East Wing boy's room.  But that all goes south when a third grader comes in for protection from a gambling racket run by a legendary kid named Staples who is looking to muscle in on Mac's territory.  Piece by piece, Mac's quiet little empire falls apart as Staples puts the financial squeeze on kids and sends in his high school thugs to do the dirty work.  

On top of all this is Mac's best friend and business manager, Vince. Together they've built the business and have been saving up so that when (not if) the Cubs go to the World Series they'll have enough to buy the tickets.  But there are some problems with the books and all fingers point to Vince.  It's beginning to look like Mac has a mole in his operation, confirmed when he spots Vince taking money from... Staples?  Worse, someone has broken into Mac's room and taken all his business's assets, thousands of dollars worth.  Just when it looks like he's going to have to fold up shop and join Staples, Mac makes a discovery that gives him just enough leverage that might allow him to regain his business and send Staples packing for good.  

I think somewhere along the way every middle grade boy has had a fantasy of running some great moneymaking business, and probably out of school if not a vacant stall in a bathroom. They are grandiose schemes built on the fine American notion that if you build it, they will come, never realizing they needed it before. Mac's services provide easy answers to generally easy questions but with some complicated twists. Mac has hired muscle – a loose conglomeration of the school's bullies who can be bought for a price – and the school has a genuine problem with gambling on school sports, athletes who are willing to throw games, and bookies putting the screws on kids who are too young to understand what they're really getting themselves into.  It is the playground made hyper-real, the natural extension of the acceleration of childhood. Like a New Yorker cartoon with kids speaking and behaving as adults, only with a lot more malice involved.  

Rylander gets that childhood is a violent mirror of the adult world, and that kids choosing to emulate that world will make the same, and worse, decisions when confronted with trouble. Suspicions will be built on the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence, trusts will be misplaced, character motives will not always seem as clear-cut as they are presented. Mac and Vince grew up together in a poor trailer park, but while Mac's family made it out to relative security things aren't so easy for Vince, and the unspoken tension grows throughout. Vince, it turns out, may have more in common with the super bully Staples which causes Mac to do some serious soul searching (and old fashioned gumshoe work) to better understand their common motivations. The emotional landscape of boys is rich in The Fourth Stall, with plenty of moral ambiguity to cause a careful reader to double-back on their assumptions the same way Mac is forced to throughout the investigations. There is a final confrontation that is inevitable but interesting an open resolution regarding Staples that suggests not all crimes stories are so neatly tied up as they are on TV or in movies.

I keep thinking there has to be a name for this appropriation of adult genres into children's books; taking hard boiled detective, or in this case the gangster-crime boss drama, and layering the stories over a school setting. Odder still, they seem to be winking to an adult audience in doing so, giving a knowing nod to those who would get the book's cultural references. The Forth Stall has a cover that clearly references the book jackets and movie posters for The Godfather. Is a middle school kid going to get the reference?

I only mention it because of the trend within family-centered movies to include references to keep adult chaperones engaged. You have a greater chance of parents spreading the word to other parents, or their willingness to take kids to the movie (and later buying DVDs) if they felt the movie truly had deeper layers for all audiences. This is a smart marketing strategy, and with animation there is a long tradition of making stories accessible, but I wonder if this is really the best approach for books aimed primarily at middle school readers.  Is the idea that the stories will feel more sophisticated and thus "trick" kids into thinking they're reading a more mature book? I think kids are smarter than that, and maybe this is over-thinking. Maybe it's just as savvy a marketing choice to design a book cover with an adult buyer in mind, it makes it easier to sell to a parent of a boy to send a visual cue that says "this book is like a middle grade gangster story, your boy will love it." It may also be savvy of an author to write a book that will entertain an adult agent and editor as a step toward getting published. I've often wondered what would get published if kids were the gatekeepers.  

Despite my general misgivings about longer middle grade books, The Fourth Stall justifies its length with action and a quick-paced story.  I don't know if the book is series-worthy, but I'd be very interested to see what Rylander does next.