Book Reviewed:  The Doll Shop Downstairs – Yona Zeldis McDonough and Heather Maione, Viking, 2009

A visit to the doll hospital in New Jersey last week with my young adult daughter’s “Beth” doll from the Alexander Doll Company’s Little Women series sent me back to an underappreciated example of modern doll books.  The Doll Shop Downstairs, as well as its sequel, The Cats in the Doll Shop, follow a familiar path in chronicling the attachment of children for their dolls.  However, it also offers a charming and detailed introduction for elementary age readers to life in New York City during World War I, as well as the way that immigration changed the city.  A blurb taken from Kirkus Reviews compares The Doll Shop Downstairs to Rumer Godden’s The Story of Holly and Ivy and to Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family. Certainly, the happily resolved doll adoption theme of Rumer Godden’s book is in an influence, and the immersion in Lower East Side Jewish immigrant life immortalized in Taylor’s books is made available to a new audience.  Zeldis McDonough even includes a helpful author’s note, glossary, and timeline to guide readers who are probably less informed than Taylor’s original fans.

By far the most interesting element of this novel is that it is based on the childhood of “Madame” Beatrice Alexander Behrman, a daughter of Jewish immigrants who became one of the first and most successful female entrepreneurs in the American doll industry, long before Ruth Handler created Barbie.

Continue reading “A Visit to the Doll Hospital” →

Book reviewed:  When Green Becomes Tomatoes: Poems for All Seasons – Julie Fogliano and Julie Morstad, Roaring Brook Press, 2016

It’s poetry month. There are innumerable books to help you introduce children to poetry.  These range from the classics by A.A. Milne and Robert Louis Stevenson to the modern classics by Jack Prelutsky, Bobbi Katz, Jacqueline Woodson, and so many others.  There are great anthologies, some with inviting illustrations that do as much to attract readers as the poems themselves. Even very young children will at first enjoy listening to brief selections for the rhythm and sound.  Even if you have read many of these, you may not be familiar with When Green Becomes Tomatoes by Julie Fogliano, and one of my favorite illustrators, Julie Morstad (see here and here and here and here).

These are poems for the seasons, but they are not about Christmas, Hanukkah, or the Fourth of July.  They are, instead, quirky meditations in lower case, a mix of Haiku-like imagery, e.e. cummings, and William Carlos Williams (“So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow…”). The book is organized by season, with each short poem having a specific date.  Nature is personified, sharing feelings with the child narrator: “today/the sky was too busy sulking to rain/and the sun was exhausted from trying.” Some are meditations on the universe and its inconsistencies from the perspective of a child: “if you ever stopped/to taste a blueberry/you would know/that it’s not really about the blue, at all.” Note the distinction here. The speaker does not deny that the berry is blue, but rather that its blueness is not its essence, which you have to taste to experience.  If you don’t get it, your child might.

Julie Morstad’s pictures are, as always, exquisite.

Continue reading “A Child’s Garden of (Quirky) Verses” →

 Book Reviewed:  I Will Come Back For You: A Family in Hiding During World War II – Marisabina Russo, Schwartz and Wade Books, 2011

Yom HaShoah, the day on which Jews commemorate the victims of the Holocaust by remembering history, falls this year on April 12.  It is difficult, but also extremely important, to select age-appropriate books for children and young adults on this subject.  There are no perfect guidelines; some children may be ready to process information that others of the same age simply cannot assimilate.  (link to Jewish Book Council review and their lists).  Is it best to focus on tales of survival and resilience, or, in doing so, are we misrepresenting a cataclysmic series of events?  It is dishonest and disrespectful to the memories of those lost to invent a false narrative in the guise of protecting children.  We can only do our best to gradually introduce the highest quality books on this subject and to understand when children are simply not ready.  Marisabina Russo’s picture book, based on the experiences of her own family during World War II, is straightforward in narrating tragic events, but subtle and artful at the same time.

Continue reading “A Tale of Survival and Loss” →

Book Reviewed:  The Year of Goodbyes – Debbie Levy, Disney Hyperion Books, 2010

The assumption that children and young adults will want to read poetry is reflected in the many recent books that present history and personal experience through verse to young readers. Some of these, such as Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming and Marilyn Nelson’s American Ace, successfully experiment with the boundaries between lyric and narrative, offering the reader a new way to enter the past. Debbie Levy’s The Year of Goodbyes is also an experiment, a profoundly moving one, in combining documents, conversations, and original poems to make the sorrows of the Holocaust individual and real.

In the book’s introduction, Levy (also the author of a children’s biography of Ruth Bader Ginsburg) explains the structure of the book through the custom of the poesiealbum, a volume something like autograph books, “but…much more serious enterprises,” which students collected, inscribed, and exchanged with their friends in the Germany of the 1930s, from which her mother became a refugee.  Reproducing translations of actual entries from these books, images, and interweaving her own poems, Levy has attempted to capture the fear and confusion of a young girl about to be uprooted from the only world that she knew.  Levy creates a complete world, bookended between her introduction and a detailed afterward, along with a time line, photos, and bibliography.  The Year of Goodbyes needs to be experienced in this context in order to appreciate the depth of what Levy has accomplished.

“It is January 1938.
I am Jutta Salzberg,
a Jewish girl
in the city of Hamburg,
between the Elbe and Auster rivers,
in the north of Germany.”

Continue reading “Poesiealbum/Poetry Album” →

Book Reviewed:  Islandborn – Junot Díaz and Leo Espinosa, Dial Books for Young Readers, 2018

April is National Poetry Month, with lots of opportunities for engagement with young readers.   Therefore, I’m going to to take a different approach to a new book that is getting a lot of publicity, but not in this vein.

For,  Islandborn is not a poetry book…but it is a book filled with poetry.  Junot Díaz and Leo Espinosa have created an exquisite tribute to the power of the past, even when that past is narrated to a child too young to remember. Lola, a little girl of Dominican heritage living in a close-knit community in Washington Heights, New York City, is assigned a project by her teacher, Ms. Obi.  When the kids in her ethnically diverse class area asked to draw a picture of the country from which they emigrated, Lola is anxious.  “Miss,” she asks, anticipating a problem, “what if you don’t remember where you are from?  What if you left before you could start remembering?”  Ms. Obi inquires if Lola knows people who do remember.  Lola’s response, “Like my whole neighborhood!” produces a child’s journey through her heritage, and makes her into an artist and a poet.

Continue reading “Islandborn, Brilliantly Made” →

As Good as Anybody – Richard Michelson and Raúl Colón, Alfred A. Knopf, 2008

On Wednesday, April 4, we remember the 50^th anniversary of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King’s brutal assassination in Memphis.  There are many excellent picture books about his life and legacy, as well as about other activists in the movement for civil rights. As Good as Anybody stands out for its specific focus on King’s relationship with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched alongside King and chose to use his religious authority to encourage support racial equality and condemnation of white supremacy.  The book introduces the biographies of these two men separately, emphasizing parallels between the two religious leaders from boyhood on, but without glossing over important differences in their experiences.

Continue reading “Remembering Dr. King” →

My very first entry in this blog, posted almost six months ago, was a critique of Philip Nel’s recent book, Was the Cat in the Hat Black? (Oxford University Press, 2017).  Although the book included important historical material, if quite selectively, it ultimately seemed to be dogmatic and marred by internal contradictions.  Now Nel has posted on his blog an assault on the use of the Cat as a mascot for the NEA’s “Read Across America Day.”

Once again, Nel manages to choose only specific examples of Seuss’s racism, which no thinking person will deny or minimize, without contextualizing these within his long career.

Nel has an easy and patronizing answer to my discomfort with his need to send Dr. Seuss to a re-education camp.  I am no doubt “wrapping (my) self in an unreflective nostalgia,” and failing to realizing that “then you bear responsibility for the pain that this art inflicts” (Nel’s italics to emphasize the moral idiocy of anyone who questions him.  He cleverly anticipates anger with his dictatorial attitude…

Continue reading “The Cat in the Hat Is Not Perfect” →

The Secret Seder – Doreen Rappaport and Emily Arnold McCully, Hyperion Books for Children, 2005

It is difficult to balance presenting the truth and maintaining a sense of hope in Holocaust books for younger children.  Books that inspire a sense of terror outside of the ability of children to cope undercut their own purpose; they may fail to make the connection necessary to teaching about a tragic era in Jewish history. Books that only present benevolent rescuers or the ultimate victory of liberation are misleading.  In The Secret Seder, Doreen Rappaport and Emily Arnold McCully create the story of a loving and supportive family maintaining their Jewish beliefs within an ominous time.  The author and illustrator neither minimize the child’s fears nor depict an unalloyed sense of security.  Within the story, they emphasize the essential nature of Passover as a celebration of freedom and a defiance of slavery (unlike an unfortunate book that I reviewed earlier).  Though published over 10 years ago, this is a book worth having at Passover time.

Jacques is a Jewish boy living with his parents in Paris, all desperately pretending to pass as Christians under the Nazi occupation.

Continue reading “A Secret to Share” →

The Yankee at the Seder – Elka Weber and Adam Gustavson, Tricycle Press, 2009

Don’t invite this “Yankee” to your Seder if, like me, you are celebrating Passover this year. If you do, you should be prepared for a serious discussion about race, history, and freedom. Maybe that is not a bad thing, but this book really strains the implications of a “teachable moment.”

If you’re not sure what Passover (Pesach) is, it is the Jewish holiday commemorating and reenacting the Exodus from slavery in Egypt.  If you are not sure what the American Civil War was, it was a bloody conflict in which more than 600,000 soldiers lost to lives, in addition to the many who were handicapped, traumatized, and sickened.  The War was fought because a group of southern states seceded from the Union in order to preserve their “right” to own slaves, as well as the possibility of expanding slavery throughout the United States.  After Reconstruction ended, a long and successful movement developed to systematically deprive liberated black people of their rights by “rebranding” the Civil War as “The War Between the States,” in which two societies with equally legitimate cultures and economic systems fought for their freedom. Slavery was essentially removed from the equation.  The Yankee at the Seder is part of this corruption of history, even if, as is likely, the author did not view her picture book in this light.

Continue reading “Do NOT Invite This “Yankee” to Your Seder” →

Books referenced:
Bunny’s Book Club – Annie Silvestro and Tatjana Mai-Wyss, Doubleday Books for Young Readers, 2017
Red Knit Cap Girl and the Reading Tree – Naoko Stoop, Little, Brown and Company, 2014

It is a well-known fact that animals love to read, especially eager and bookish animals who befriend both people and fellow nerds of their own species. The obvious appeal to children of recognizing fellow book lovers who happen to have four legs is inventively exploited in two stories about the need to read.

In Bunny’s Book Club, a persistent young rabbit who knew of his affinity for books “….ever since he first heard the lady with the red glasses reading aloud outside the library.”  Being on the outskirts and looking in are not enough for Bunny, who devises a plan to “break in” to his favorite place, using a flashlight and a convenient book drop.  Soon his friends, including a porcupine, a mole, and bear, want in on the action, and they eventually spend hours enjoying their illegally borrowed books both in the library and in Bunny’s cozy home.  The fun ends, almost, when they are caught by an understanding librarian, possibly one of the most appealing created in children’s literature. She issues them cards, and the fun never stops.

Continue reading “Book Nooks, Non-Digital Version” →