Books discussed:
26 Fairmount Avenue – Tomie dePaola,  G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers, 1999
Here We All Are – Tomie dePaola, G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers, 2000

 

If you know Tomie dePaola’s work exclusively from his picture books, (I don’t want to write “only know,” as if the incredible quality of those works of art and narrative were not enough to support his reputation), you need to read his series of chapter book autobiographies, beginning with Newbery Honor winner 26 Fairmount Avenue. There are eight books so far, each one chronicling around one year in the life of the young Tomie as he experiences the joys and sorrows, mainly joys, of a close-knit family and a supportive community in Meriden, Connecticut. The series begins when Tomie in 1938, shortly before Tomie begins kindergarten, and right as he confronts the excitement of the hurricane that hit the east coast that year.  Tomie narrates his story from the perspective of a young child without a hint of condescension or sentimentality.

The remarkable nature of these books, aside from the signature dePaola pictures of family and friends, this time in black and white, is that they are both sophisticated and innocent at the same time.

Continue reading “Tomie (Tommy) dePaola” →

Book discussed:  Glass Town: The Secret World of the Brontë Children – Michael Bedard and Laura Fernandez and Rick Jacobson, Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 1997

Today, July 30, 2018, is the bicentennial of Emily Brontë’s birth. There have been surprisingly few articles in the American press commemorating the birth of one of the greatest Romantic poets and novelists, as well as an icon of mysterious and stubborn independence to women authors.

There have been more recent books for children about Emily and her siblings, including Mick Manning and Brita Granström’s The Brontës: Children of the Moors, from 2016.  Today, in the spirit of recognizing the half-hidden, I would like to bring attention to an older book about the secret literary creations, as well as the psychological defiance, of the three children of Haworth parsonage.  Narrated by Charlotte, the sometimes gloomy text and deeply expressive oil paintings of Glass Town chronicle how the wildly imaginative Brontë siblings devised their own parallel world of freedom in the midst of their repressive home. Children who live in glass houses “…seek delight in secrecy.”

Emily is portrayed, as she often is, as a brooding, exotic, spirit of nature:

 “Emily, too, is a solitary thing. She looks long, says little.  Now she is looking at the sky. She reads  the clouds as others read a book. She says a storm is on the way.”

Indeed, a storm is on the way, as Emily will grow up to become the (secretly) female author, Ellis Bell, of Wuthering Heights, as well as of outstanding examples of Romantic poetry.  As a child, she and her sisters and brother wrote about Glass Town, its utopian structures places where “…the vast remains of a vanished world…stood in silent grandeur, rising above the clouds, seeking the acquaintance of the skies.” The real world of their father’s home was structured and prosaic, although a certain level of neglect at least left the children on their own to experience both nature and their inner lives:

“Emily ran on ahead, hair flying in the wind…She dwells within these walls with us, and yet her home lies there. She is a child of the moors, a friend of all things wild and free. She feeds on clouds and drinks the wind.”

Fernandez and Jacobson’s images capture both the enclosed domestic world of the children, and the unlimited natural environment, as well as the world of Glass Town.  Their father ominously sets the hands of a grandfather clock, as the dark shadow of his arm looms against the staircase leading up to the children’s rooms. Emily and Charlotte lie in bed together in from of a large window looking out on the night.

If the image of Emily Brontë in this beautiful book seems stereotypical and lacking in critical distance, that is surely deliberate. Here are Emily’s own words, from her poem, “Come hither, child:”

 “When I was hardly six years old
I stole away from crowds and light
And sought a chamber dark and cold
I had no one to love me there”

Irrepressibly brilliant and maybe unknowable Emily Brontë will fascinate children in this poet and richly illustrated book.  There could be no better time to revisit it, and Emily’s poetry and fiction.

The excitement, in both the positive and negative senses, over the change in name of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, to the Children’s Literature Legacy Award, has not died down completely.  I have already written about my ambivalence about the Little House books, which I feel have a great deal of value in spite of their undeniable racism.  I believe they should ideally be read in conjunction with other novels, poems, and primary sources which give a more accurate and complete account of the experience of Native Americans (as I have discussed here and here and here and here and here).

However, I want to make one further point, specifically about the frequently repeated qualifier that changing the name of the award is not censorship or book banning, actions which the ALA and the ALSC are on the record as opposing.

In fact, many of the most vocal and committed proponents of the name change have clearly stated their preference that Wilder’s work be essentially eliminated.  Debbie Reese, whose blog is dedicated to the mission of supporting a more truthful portrayal of Native Americans in children’s literature, has explicitly stated that she hopes that Wilder’s books are no longer read, at least by young children, their target audience. She has stated this to a reporter for The New York Times, in School Library Journal (Volume 54, Issue 11, Pages 53-60; apparently no longer available on line), and on her own blog.

Note that in the blog entry, in which Reese compares Wilder’s books unfavorably with the work of the brilliant contemporary novelist Louise Erdrich, Reese declares that “the world might be a better place if we replaced every copy of Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie with Erdrich’s series.”  This alarming suggestion fails to take note of the fact that Erdrich, in an interview in The Horn Book, recommended that her work be read along with that of Wilder.

Reese is not the only advocate of the award change to promote the idea that Wilder’s work is irredeemably toxic.  In James LaRue’s thoughtful consideration of the issue on his ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom Blog, he considers some of the change’s implications. In a lengthy comment to that post, Megan Schliesman argues in favor of the award name change from the perspective of local control, which is a tactic generally used by the right to eliminate works they deem offensive from schools and public libraries.  We don’t actually legally ban books through government action in our country, at least not yet.  When people pressure libraries and school boards to suppress or include specific books, they argue in favor of community standards. So the next time some library in a red state decides that the Harry Potter books advocate witchcraft, that science and health materials are threatening, or books about gay or transgender teens are immoral, we may all have a more difficult time fighting against their outrageous threats to everyone’s intellectual freedom.

 

Book reviewed:  Ship of Dolls – Shirley Parenteau, Candlewick Press, 2014

It’s tough to be a young child caught in a web of moral decisions. You’re lucky if you have a silent but persuasive doll to help you.  In Kirby Larson’s The Friendship Doll, that message was explicit. In Ship of Dolls, the first in Shirly Parenteau’s trilogy about the same Japanese-American doll exchange which was the setting for Larson’s novel, eleven-year old Lexie Lewis is confronted with the consequences of lying or even withholding the truth from her grandparent guardians.  She is also involved in the 1920s doll exchange, an eager, even desperate, participant in a contest to accompany an American doll, Emily Grace, to San Francisco, to be part of the send-off of these silent ambassadors to Japan.  Like most of the characters in Larson’s book, Lexie is a powerless child caught in a bad situation; her actions can either improve things or make them much worse.

The two authors’ moral and narrative style are somewhat similar, at least in the fact that their young heroines are treated really badly by adults.  Lexie’s father has been killed in a car accident. As the book begins she is living in Portland Oregon with her paternal grandparents. Her mother is a flapper, making this book rather different from Larson’s.  There is a focus on Lexie’s incompetent mom as a hedonistic if well-intentioned “new woman,” who dresses stylishly, sings in nightclubs, and seems to be inconsistent in her feelings about different men in her life.  She remarries a musician after he husband’s untimely death, but, by the end of the book, a ship’s captain has offered her “free” passage to Japan in exchange for entertaining the passengers.

Continue reading “Small Dolls, Big Decisions” →

Book discussed: The Friendship Doll – Kirby Larson, Delacorte Press, 2011 (Yearling Paperback Reprint edition, 2012)

Japan dedicates a holiday each year to the role of dolls in the lives of Japanese girls, not as play objects, but as centers of elaborate ritual.  Hinamatsuri, observed on March 3, combines religious focus on dolls symbolizing the Emperor and Empress and other important figures, and prayer and wishes for the futures of girls (an official summary from the Japanese embassy is here; more detail can be found on the website of the the Kyoto National Museum).

There are currently at least two authors who have written middle grade fiction about an historical event related to this practice.  Kirby Larson’s The Friendship Doll was followed by a three book series by Shirley Parenteau, beginning with Ship of Dolls in 2014 (more on those in a later post).  Both authors use the Friendship Dolls program of the 1920s, developed by Christian missionary Sydney Gulick and Japanese business leader Eiichi Shibusawa, as a way of promoting cultural understanding between the two nations through the exchange of traditional dolls. Larson weaves the stories of four different American girls suffering from different challenges, both economic and emotional, and one very haughty and yet vulnerable Japanese doll. The background of their stories is rich in historical detail; Larson’s attempt to present the hardships and inequality of the Great Depression is reason alone to share this book.

The Friendship Doll is a work of historical fiction, but it employs fantasy as well.  Miss Kanagawa, the doll who wanders America through a series of circumstances beyond her control, has a mysterious power of influencing the choices of people who encounter her.  There is a strongly didactic, even harsh, element to the way this happens.  Children, and sometimes adults, facing clear moral dilemmas look into Miss Kanagawa’s dark eyes and experience epiphanies.

Continue reading “Dolls, East, and West” →

Books referenced:

Baby Monkey, Private Eye – Brian Selznick and David Serlin, Scholastic Press, 2018
Curious George Gets a Medal – Margret and H.A. Rey, Houghton Mifflin, 1957

On July 4, I visited the Cloisters here in New York City, to see part of the wonderful new exhibit, Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination. (The rest of the exhibit is at the Metropolitan Museum’s main location on Fifth Avenue.) Along with other visitors, I was struck by the overwhelming beauty and simplicity of a Dior wedding dress designed by Marc Bohan.  The bride mannequin had her back to the visitors, as she stood behind a rope in a medieval chapel.  A lovely little girl, visiting the museum with her parents and grandfather, managed to sneak away, crawl under the rope, and approach the bride.  She wanted to touch the dress and she did.  Who could blame her?  My husband associated the dress’s style with the BBC series Call the Midwife, but it was more austere. Perhaps if Madeline’s Miss Clavel had chosen to get married she might have worn it. Well, once the little girl was noticed her parents removed her before the security guard had to intervene. She went in an instant from looking fascinated by the beautiful dress to realizing that she had done something embarrassing and she started to cry.  Everyone there empathized with her, since we all had experienced similar terrors as children.

This reminded me of Curious George, without the gorgeous fashion.  If you remember, in Curious George Gets a Medal, the fourth book in the series (I wrote on the second here), the intrepid little monkey has a series of disasters that one wouldn’t think would lead to winning a medal. He floods the floor with soap powder, accidentally lets a lot of pigs out of their pen, and, finally, ends up in the dinosaur diorama at the Museum.  It looks so appealing, and George enjoys the attention, posing casually against a stegosaurus as onlookers admire him and take pictures. Apparently, they don’t know that monkeys and dinosaurs did not coexist.  But when George reaches up to pick some phony grapes from a palm tree, everything crashes down. You guessed it, he’s in trouble.

But, wait! Professor Wiseman (!), while initially angry with George, quickly realizes that he is the very monkey whom he has contacted by letter requesting that he join an important space exhibition. Professor Wiseman has beautiful handwriting as well as an official seal as director of the Museum:

“I have never met you but I hear that you are a bright little monkey who can do all sorts of things, and that is just what we need.

We want you to do something nobody has ever done before: bail out of a space ship in flight.”

What monkey, or child, could resist this mission, especially in the very year when the Soviets launched Sputnik?  To the satisfaction of every child, or adult, who has identified with the Reys’ creation, rather than facing humiliating, George gets a medal.

Brian Selznick and David Serlin’s new hero, Baby Monkey, faces similar challenges as he teeters on the bridge between being a small and  helpless being who has trouble putting his pants on, and a successful detective solving crimes.  Like Selznick’s other marvels (I have written on this genius’ work here and here and here), the book is a complete production.  Exciting and young child-friendly plot points appear in large and dramatic font.  Each page features Baby Monkey engaged in hyperkinetic and purposeful actions, some against a blank background and others embedded in film noir scenery. There are plenty of references in the pictures to intrigue adults, from painting, movies, and opera to allusions to Selznick’s other work.

The end of the book has a helpful “Key to Baby Monkey’s Office,” identifying every image, as well as a fantastic Borgesian bibliography of unreal sources. When I first glanced at it, I was momentarily fooled! Famous Babies I Have Known: Bubbe Books, 1988: Is that an imprint of Kar-Ben Publishing?

When Baby Monkey solves his last case by finding his own mother, as loving and warm as the Mary Cassatt portrait in the little detective’s office, readers will feel as relieved as he does.  Or that little girl in the Cloisters when she went back to her family and realized, I hope,  that no one was mad at her.  I don’t know if Baby Monkey will be making further appearances in a library or bookstore near year: I hope he will.  Selznick and Serlin’s curious creation is worth a sequel.

Jasmine Toguchi: Mochi Queen – Debbi Michiko Florence and Elizabet Vuković, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2017

Eight-year-old Jasmine Toguchi has a “thinking spot” where she goes when she needs to contemplate what to do. Fortunately, girls in middle-grade series fiction now do quite a lot of thinking and quite a lot of acting on their own behalf, and on behalf of others, too.  Debbi Michiko Florence’s Jasmine, like Andrea Cheng’s Anna Wong, Annie Barrows’ Ivy and Bean, and Derrick Barnes’ Ruby (a very incomplete list!), has to negotiate competing demands on goals in her young life; she doesn’t get discouraged easily.  When her Japanese-American family prepares for their New Year’s Day custom of preparing and eating mochi, a traditional delicacy made of rice flour, Jasmine decides that sometimes traditions need to change.

Jasmine is endearing in many ways.  She is honest; her bossy older sister Sophie, old enough to participate in cooking mochi with the women of the family, drives her crazy. Jasmine bitterly describes her sister “barking commands…while she picked at the chipped polish on her fingernails.” Florence captures a younger sibling’s resentment without mincing words.  Yet revenge against Sophie, or event against her insecure and obnoxious cousin Eddie, a young spokesman for male privilege, is not Jasmine’s goal.  She decides that, rather than insist on being allowed to cook mochi two years before the minimal age of ten, she calculates that working with the men and older boys to pound the rice into flour with a heavy kine (mallet) is a more ambitious goal. She develops a physical fitness plan involving strengthening her arm muscles through a variety of activities, from climbing trees to stacking dishes after a spaghetti dinner.

One of the most touching aspects of the book is Florence’s description of Jasmine’s relationships with adults, particularly with her neighbor, Mrs. Reese, and her beloved grandmother, “Obaachan.”  Mrs. Reese is not Japanese American, but she is eager to learn about Jasmine’s family’s customs.  She is kind and tolerant, offering her home and yard as a neutral haven for her young friend.  Jasmine’s grandmother, whom she identifies beautifully as smelling “like a pine forest,” is not a mere symbol of allegiance to older ways. Yes, she initially responds to Jasmine’s desire to pound rice flour with the men by asserting that “Girls no pound mochi. It kisoku, the rule.”

Continue reading “Jasmine Toguchi Stands Up for Girls” →

Book reviewed:  Hannah’s Way – Linda Glaser and Adam Gustavson, Kar-Ben Publishers, 2012

This week will mark the two hundred and forty second year of independence for the United States. No matter how many times we remind ourselves that we are a nation of immigrants, it can never be enough.  With the important exception of Natives Americans and Africans brought here against their will as enslaved people, the rest of us either are immigrants or the descendants of immigrants.  In the current climate of xenophobia, countered, we hope, by the majority of Americans who respect and defend newcomers and refugees struggling to get here, this Fourth of July would be the perfect time to read Hannah’s Way with your children. (I frequently blog about books about immigrants in kidlit; see here and here and here and here and here.)

Linda Glaser tells the story of Hannah, a child who left Minneapolis with her Jewish family to live in a small Minnesota town in the early twentieth century.  A helpful “Author’s Note” explains that many Jews followed the same route, opening small stores in regions with very small Jewish populations.  When Hannah’s public school teacher announces a class picnic trip on a Saturday, she feels lonely and alienated, as she will not drive to the event on the Jewish Sabbath.  Glaser describes Hannah’s feelings realistically.

Continue reading “Hannah’s Way Is Our Way” →

Book reviewed:  This Is Sadie – Sara O’Leary and Julie Morstad, Tundra Press, 2015

This is the week when we celebrate independence in both Canada and the U.S.  In writing for this blog, I have dedicated a number of entries to works by Canadian authors and illustrators, some published by the Canadian Presses Tundra, Simply Read, and Kids Can (e.g., A Pattern for Pepper; The Pink Umbrella; Julia, Child; How To; Singing Away the Dark; Suki’s Komono). Although these books are all different, I find a common thread of artistic individuality and respect for children’s imagination.  As an American, I enjoy learning about new authors and illustrators, both Anglophone and Francophone, and noticing both commonalities and different emphases from U.S. children’s books.

As you know if you read my blog regularly, Julie Morstad is one of my favorite illustrators, and her collaborations with author Sara O’Leary are wonderful odes to the childhood fantasy.  In This Is Sadie, we meet a little girl who lives in literature, literally in the case of one picture, which is a two-page spread of a swimming pool filled with characters.  Wearing goggles, flippers, and the same red and green dress she prefers on land (“And then she chooses a dress./’Don’t tell the others,’ she whispers,/but you are my favorite.’”), Sadie dives into a world of mermaids, swans, bears, and other literary creatures.  Her companions, from Mowgli to Alice, are as real to her as the ordinary bedroom where she wakes and plays actively but quietly, “because old people need a lot of sleep.” Cardboard boxes, an old fashioned record player, and, of course, piles of books, are part of the elaborate scenery.

Continue reading “Happy Canada Day” →

Books referenced:
Little Plum – Rumer Godden and Gary Blythe, Pan Macmillan, 2016 (reprint of Viking Press, 1962 edition, illustrated by Jean Primrose)
Home Is the Sailor – Rumer Godden and Jean Primrose, Viking Press, 1964

Rumer Godden might well be the goddess of doll fiction, or at least one of its most original and sophisticated practitioners.  Her best-known and loved works in this genre are probably The Story of Holly and Ivy, and The Doll’s House, but she also created other settings for dolls and the children who love them.  Home is the Sailor is a sequel to Miss Happiness and Miss Flower, in which a lonely English girl brought up in India is sent back to live with her cousins in a small British town and finds security and comfort by designing an authentic Japanese house for two dolls.  Godden herself grew up in India, and her works for both children and adults use complex cultural references; Miss Happiness and Miss Flower even includes illustrated building plans for constructing an authentic house for the Japanese dolls.

In Little Plum, cousins Nona and Belinda Fell confront a different kind of alienation, this time of one social class, as an improbably wealthy family with a daughter their age moves in next door, but seems distant in every way.  While the quiet and artistic Nona is the heroine of Miss Happiness and Miss Flower, her cousin Belinda is at the center of Little Plum.  Belinda is uninhibited, immature, and even a bit aggressive.  She has previously shown little interest in playing with her Japanese doll, Little Peach, but she becomes frustrated at her new neighbor’s apparent snobbery and the way that this privileged child, Gem Tiffany Jones, neglects her own doll, Little Plum.  There is quite a bit of “mean girl” behavior in the story, as The Tiffany family secludes Gem and refuses to allow her to interact with other children, who naturally come to resent her.  Godden describes physical fights between the girls with gory detail, presenting Belinda as a child who cannot really understand her own impulses and often expresses her feelings in risky behaviors and angry attacks.  Belinda’s mother is really wonderful. Rather than attacking her daughter for failing to conform to feminine stereotypes, she communicates acceptance and love, even as she assigns consequences for Belinda’s actions.

The villain of the story is Gem’s nasty aunt, who comes to help her benevolent but weak father while Gem’s mother is in a hospital for polio patients.  There are echoes of A Secret Garden and Heidi, as some characters seem to benefit by promoting illness and helplessness.  At the end of the book, Gem’s mother returns as the girls and their school friends are celebrating an elaborate dollhouse version of the traditional Japanese doll festival. Mrs. Fell, assisted by the kindly and odd bookseller, Mr. Twilfit, along with Gem’s father, has planned and executed an elaborate catered affair for her daughter, niece, and friends, as well as their dolls. In the Fell household, children’s obsessions are not cute trivialities to be indulged but patronized, but rather serious and significant events.

Continue reading “Rumer Godden’s World, Where Dolls Are Real” →