More

by I. C. Springman
illustrated by Brian Lies
Houghton Mifflin, 2012

It's Hoarders for the picture book set! A thieving magpie collects and collects until... well, as they say, less is more.

One of the oddest thing about reviewing  picture books is that it often takes more words to describe them than it does to read them. Quite simply we have the story of a bird with a propensity for stealing colorful, shiny things and bringing them back to his tree where they accumulate until, finally, the weight of everything sends it all tumbling to the ground. At last the blackbird is forced to accept that only a small number of things is the right amount.

For a book to illustrate the concepts of more, less, too much, and enough, More is a beautiful vehicle. The paintings have the studied care of detail painted into them yet the layout is simple enough to stay focused on the action. But from the perspective of narrative I am bothered by the mouse (or mice, as there are more than one) that acts as the blackbird's external voice or reason. I've thought about this for a while now and what I think bothers me is the dissonance between the illustrations and the cartoon-like behavior of the mice. If the illustrations were more comic the dynamic might have made more sense, but as it is the realism of the blackbird against the imploring nature of his tree-bound rodent friend reads a little like a National Geographic documentary with Disney characters animated into the proceedings.  

But I do like the message of learning to do with less, and imagine many a parent will appreciate having some ammunition against young lap-sitters who might be tempted by commercial culture to want more and more and more.

Now if it didn't have Jiminy Field Mouse and his moral tacked onto it...  

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. 

The Secret of the Yellow Death

A True Story of Medical Sleuthing
by Suzanne Jurmain
Houghton Mifflin 2010

A compelling account of how early medical researchers discovered and isolated the causes of yellow fever in the early part of the 20th century.

Don't start this book if you have just eaten, and I might make the same recommendation for the following description of the symptoms that open The Secret of the Yellow Death: at onset, an icy chill, followed by a crushing headache, yellowing skin and the whites of eyes the color of lemons, delirium and blood-clotted vomit come next and violent spasms.  Within three days a victim could be dead.

You would think that something this virulent would have had its heyday during the plague years, hundreds of years ago, but the outbreak that consumed Cuba and eventually lead to the discovery of the yellow fever virus happened barely 100 years ago. That a combined team of scientists from the United States and Cuba solved the mystery through dogged determination despite a general disbelief among other scientists that mosquitoes were the carrier gives the story its tension. After all, if it wasn't mosquitoes, then what was the cause?  

Heading up the team was Walter Reed, a doctor who was sure that the source of the outbreak that was sweeping across Cuba could be discovered.  Even from a distance, when he was called back to the States, Reed kept contact with the team of four other doctors who attempted to actively manufacture ill patients in order to prove their theories.  Even as they had successes, managing to grow carrier mosquitoes and getting them to bite willing recruits, some managed to avoid illness.  At each turn it is as if the solution is within reach and then comes another setback. But with each trial and set of circumstances they learn a little more until, finally, they isolate the virus and understand the gestation period and the crucial timing necessary to replicate the illness in a controlled setting.  But many of the doctors involved died before the final results were discovered and understood by those who carried their efforts forward.  

It's a compelling mystery because of the variables that must be discovered both through trial and error and because little was known or understood about the simple organisms known as viruses.  Jurmain has chosen to get close to the story, to use primary source material to reconstruct the narrative of how the scientists worked to come to a conclusion.  She admits early on that she is unable to include source material for the Cuban doctors involved because that material is unavailable.  It would be nice to think that some day normalized relations between Cuba and the US might give us the full picture of the story, but as it is written there are few missing gaps of consequence and the story doesn't suffer for the lack.

While not profusely illustrated it does contain plenty of photos from the era that remind the reader just how crude the practice of medicine was just 100 years ago. The crude hospital and research facilities, the crude metal syringes, and the handwritten medical charts all add to the overall mood of the story, yellowed with age and looking for all the world like they might still carry the sickness with them.  There is an appropriate creepiness to The Secret of the Yellow Death and that will be a huge part of its appeal to readers.  Gross when it needs to be, creepy and disgusting in a scientific setting, and the constant question – are they ever going to figure this out? – combine for a compelling read.

Guyku

A Year of Haiku for Boys
written by Bob Raczka
drawings by Peter H. Reynolds
Houghton Mifflin  2010

Haiku for and about boys, organized by seasons, full of the sort of things boys do. But not for haiku purists or people who want boys to really understand what haiku are really about.

Full of observations of what it means to be a boy, full of mischief and the occasional moment of tenderness, Guyku is a collection of poems that promises more than it delivers.  And, yes, what ruins it for me is the haiku itself.  

As Raczka notes at the end of the book, haiku "is a wonderful form of poetry for guys like us" because it's an observation of nature, the poems are short, and they don't take long to read.  All well and true, even the note that "a good haiku can pack a punch," but here's the thing: these aren't good haiku, not many of them at least.

Man, that sounds harsh, but the thing that makes a haiku is exactly that punch, the observation that takes everything else in the poem and sharpens the observation.  And punch is the word, because the summary observation in a haiku should come as a sort of a punchline at the end.  Or at the beginning, as a statement followed by a sort of sideways definition.  A good haiku isn't simply just ramming a scene into a 5-7-5 format and calling it profound because it fits, there has to be that break, that breath, that moment where the observation is observed.  Here is a guyku taken from the "Fall" section:

Pounding fat cattails
on a park bench near the pond,
we make a snowstorm.

It's a nice image, and one that is total "boy" in that it takes nature, finds a way to make it an amusement and creates another nature image, turning fall into an artificial winter.  It even has a comma that breaks the action from the observation at the end, but it's missing the true punch of that image, almost as if it were an afterthought and not the poets intentional focus.  As always, I have to resist the temptation to tell the author (and you, the potential reader) how it "should" have been written, but I can think of three or four different ways the emphasis could be shifted to give that snowstorm image more weight, make it stronger.  Flabby writing is what it is to my ear, and it kills my ability to enjoy what the book has set out to accomplish.

If this puddle could
talk, I think it would tell me
to splash my sister.

Again, a great boy moment – that temptation to do something naughty and the interaction with nature – and yet so much more could be done with it in haiku.  The puddle could talk, the boy could hear the puddle and debate the appropriate behavior, and all with the same outcome but with more punch. 

I've also been seeing the same problem recently with people writing in the "limerick style" while at the same time ignoring the conventions of the form, thinking a A-A-B-B-A rhyme scheme is all that's necessary.  As with some haiku, the limerick contains a "twist" ending that serves as a punchline to everything that comes before.  I think it's perfectly fine if you want to write five lines, or three lines, or if you want to follow certain poetic formats, but one should be careful calling a poem a limerick or a haiku when, in fact, they are approximations of form.

So as much as I wanted to really like the concept of Guyku I have a hard time with telling young readers that all it takes is seventeen syllables in three lines of observation about nature.  I think as a basis for teaching the form it is fine to let kids play with the basic format, but in writing for young readers we owe it to them to showcase not only the form but what is possible when done correctly. 

Fast & Slow

Poems for Advanced Children and Beginning Parents 
by John Ciardi 
illustrated by Becky Gaver 
Houghton Mifflin  1975 

A somewhat lackluster collection of poems for children by an otherwise great American poet who might have been caught in the trade winds of children's poetry... 

I have read various collections of Ciardi's poems over the years and find him to be rather sturdy when it comes to quality, though I have to confess I have yet to come across a poem of his I wanted to quote or memorize.  Whether or not this should be a measure of a good or great poet can be debated, but I would argue that with poetry, with so much focused on the language and the phrasing, the idea of being moved by a particular passage or insight is crucial. 

In reading this collection I had a strange feeling of displacement.  Not of myself but of the poems and the poet.  This collection came out a full year after Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends, a book whose poems still resonate today, and between these two titles I get the feeling there was a seismic shift in poetry for children.

Ciardi was of the old school, a more pastoral observer.  He writes poems about the differences between youth and age (the title poem),  meditations on nature ("Why the Sky is Blue"), and the nature of friendship ("What Johnny Told Me").  Some of the poems are short but many are lengthy narratives that seem more keen on telling a quirky story in rhyme as if somehow the beat and the meter will transcend the absurdities of the narrative ("A Fog Full of Apes").  On the other hand you have Silverstien's odd paeans to selling one's sibling ("For Sale"), advice on avoiding those who would stiffle your dreams ("Listen to the Mustn'ts") and the cautionary tales of children who refuse to do chores ("Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout...").  Silverstien's poems often read like short jokes and one-liners, but as subject matter they celebrate the world of the child from the child's perspective; Ciardi's poems come from a top-down world view. 

Perhaps it's unfair to compare these two, but while reading Fast & Slow I couldn't help feel that sense that I was witnessing the historical shift in children's poetry between the old and the new.  Scholars can probably define it better, for me reading Ciardi felt for the first time like I was listening to a kindergarten teacher on the edge of retirement treating her charges the same way she did forty years earlier.  There's a stodgy innocence in these poems; they aren't bad, necessarily, but neither are they bold, adventurous, or relevant.  There is a reason Where the Sidewalk Ends keeps getting anniversary editions and Ciardi's books keep turning up in the withdrawn and discard bis at the library.  It's sad to think of poetry falling out of favor, and to have it replaced with works that are newer and flashier and perhaps weaker in their poetic rigor, but I totally understand.

I Like You

by Sandol Stoddard Warbug
illustrated by Jacqueline Chwast
Houghton Mifflin 1965

My wife likes to say I have a sticky brain. This is a fairly accurate description of my proclivity to spout lots of useless bits of cultural flotsam that I can recall at a moment's notice. I can, for example, sing jingles from television commercials that haven't aired in over 35 years without the crutch of revisiting them on YouTube. I can, with the briefest of information, recall the actors or titles of movies as people try to describe them. I am horrible at the stuff I was supposed to learn in school, but I often get the obscure questions correct in Trivial Pursuit.

Years ago I came across a single panel cartoon -- reprinted in an issue of Utne magazine, if I'm not mistaken -- that made me laugh with a sort of recognition that could have sunk my spirits if it caught me on the wrong day. In it, a portly gentleman is among a handful of people in a movie theatre, staring at the screen in horror. The caption (approximately): "Roger suddenly realizes that one of his treasured childhood memories is actually a scene from a movie." I took this to be Roger Ebert, Pulitzer Prize winning movie critic, and I knew all too well how that felt. So many times as an adult, revisiting old movies I might only have caught a glimpse of on television growing up, I have scenes come rushing back like a sudden gale force wind. It is, indeed, an odd thing when a memory from childhood presents itself and demands recognition.

So for years I have been using the phrase "goofus on the roofus" as a term of endearment for those who have behaved silly. Certainly with my girls, though I have done it to friends as well. In my mind the full phrase was always "goofus on the roofus, hollering your head off" and, when the situation called for it, I would use the whole line. I cannot recall specifics, but I have no doubt I have referred to at least one individual in Berkeley (known by many as The Hate Man) precisely this way. Something to do with his daily ritual of standing on the roof of his apartment building, in full view of my dorm room, naked, shouting at the sun in some ritualistic fashion.

Recently, I dropped by my local children's book store and saw I Like You sitting on the counter. I'm not generally convinced that impulse items placed by the check-out counter are really deserving of the space, but there was something about this book that caused me to pick it up. It had that look about it that said "Remember me?" and so I had to find out whether it was, indeed, another treasured childhood memory coming back to claim it's rightful place. I used the time-honored tradition of the Random Page Test, and this is what I landed on:



"I am a goofus on the roofus
Hollering my head off
You are one too"
(sorry for the bad scan)

Another gap in my past bridged.

The 1960s seemed like a time when children's books were not only finding their legs, but really testing the boundaries of their freedom. Nonsense and imagination took the place of linear narrative in a way that seemed to reflect the restless nature of a post-war, baby boomer childhood. There are glimmers of this in Ruth Krauss's Open House for Butterflies and Remy Charlip's Arm in Arm, collections of prose-poems and story-etts and snippets of the kind of nonsense that resonates with a playground sensibility.

Warburg opens with the declarative "I like you / And I know why" and proceeds to explain all the reasons why. Many of the reasons are as intimate as being able to share secrets, or share feelings, and they aren't always positive. "I like you because if I am mad at you / Then you are mad at me too // It's awful when the other person isn't // Phooey." And the book continues with this examination of friendship until finally concluding, with the only true response to such a query, "I guess I just like you // Because I like you."

Chwast's illustrations have that loose, spontaneous quality of having quickly captured a moment, almost as if they were taken from a sketchbook. With each page the subjects change so that there is no particular individual serving as the "I" throughout; boys and girls, men and women, young and old, and all the various combinations, each used to help illustrate the quasi universal elements that build a friendship. I say quasi because, unfortunately, the book suffers that lack of diversity that would come a few years down the line in children's books. Everyone depicted is clearly of European descent (or an animal). I wish Chwast had been more forward thinking and given us just a bit of the old UN casting here. It would have gone a long way toward promoting not just the ideas of friendship, but that these things are universal across the spectrum and the sort of things that bring us together.

Still, it fills in yet another gap in my endless quest to rebuild the library of my youth and explain one of my more curious expression. I'll continue to call people goofuses on the roofuses when warranted, only now I'll know where it came from.

(For those reading comments, I don't normally go back and revise posts once "published" - I prefer to stand here warts and all - but this time the gaff Mr. Florian pointed out didn't sit well with me. I only mention it so the comment makes sense.)

The Willoughbys

by Lois Lowry
Houghton Mifflin / Walter Lorraine Books 2008

I resisted this initially because I was deep in other reading and couldn't get to it. Then when I had the time to get to it I resisted because, oh, I don't know. Because I was afraid it would suck, and I'd hate to have to say that about a Lois Lowry book?

Fear not, I will not say that The Willoughbys sucks. Neither does it shine.

It does what it sets out to do: it tells of a family of unpleasant children who wish nothing more than to rid themselves of their parents and live as orphans in the world. While fully cognisant of classic books concerning orphans in this world -- Horatio Alger and Dickens tales and the like -- the story is set in another world altogether. It appears to have been hewn from the same fabric as children's books from the mid-20th century. In it's sparse settings, it's descriptions of people, in it's overall vibe it all but shares the same literary lineage as books by Roald Dahl and William Pene Du Bois.

These are no slouch authors, and this is not feint praise, yet there is this lingering feeling that the book resides in a place that isn't so much a shadowy netherworld that parallels our own but a sort of Disneyland facsimile, where the details are perfect but the grit and soul are missing.

The Willoughby children, headfed up by the obnoxious older brother, decide that they would be oh-so-much better of in the world if they were orphans. Realizing that their reprehensible parents don't care much for them, they concoct a plan to send them abroad on a dangerous vacation in the hopes of an untimely demise. Unknown to them, the Willoughby adults have decided it best to vacate their house and, once away, sell off their possessions and leave the children to fend for themselves. Naturally there subplots, chiefly concerning a baby left on the doorstep, a rich-but-heartbroken candy inventor, an immature nanny, and some shenanigans concerning a mother and her son abandoned in Switzerland.

All of this Victoriana plays well into the hands of children who may be yearning for something akin to Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events. The only problem is... who's reading those books anymore? They appear untouched every time I check the shelves in my local library, and they certainly aren't selling in the stores. It begs the question of a phenomenon rather than a predilection toward this type of story, though Harry Potter did sort of redraw the map for dark adventure. Still, there isn't much call for a book that parodies those classics, so what has to sell here isn't the atmosphere but the humor.

And it's a dry humor, droll, one for only the sharpest crayons in the box. I know of at least one fourth grade class whose teacher read this book aloud to them toward the end of the year. The comments I heard were "It was pretty good," and "A little weird." They didn't know the source material for these ragamuffin tales and heard them strictly as face value modern stories. Was the audience too young? Perhaps, but an older audience would ask for more of this sort of story. A little more gore, a few more perils.

I am reminded suddenly, and for no reason whatsoever as my mind wanders, of Edward Gorey books. There comes a point where a reader suddenly gets what Gorey is doing -- internally, they grok the Edwardian-cum-Poe drawing room farce -- and from that point on the reader has become jaded. Anything similar to, but not, Gorey becomes instantly derivative and weak. So what happened here?

Lowry has given us a paper doll theatre with beautiful decor, costumed characters, even a script, but no motivation or soul. Everything is driven toward the happy ending from the very start, right down to the naming of the abandoned baby, the entirety a mechanical exercise in changing scenery but not in the joy of the story. One could (and someone has) attempt to make a story with the character cards from a game of Clue and do no worse.

I am happy to see Lowry write something not-so-serious for the middle grade set. I only wish, well, that it didn't feel so orphaned as a result.

Tupelo Rides the Rails

by Melissa Sweet
Houghton Mifflin 2008

Covers are funny things. You're not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but a lot of time goes into making those covers appealing so that you'll pick them up. Also, after the umpteen-millionth time you decide to ignore your gut feeling and give a book a chance despite its cover, and get burned, you decide that maybe you should trust the gut a little more.

So I passed this book by several times, is what I'm getting at. The cover didn't speak to me. The title didn't speak to me. Nothing about this went "woof! woof!" And generally, I'm not a dog person, and I've been seeing a lot of dog books recently that left a sour taste in my mouth.

Obviously I put the gut in check and picked it up. And then I almost gave it up again. Tupelo is deliberately left by the side of the road with his sock toy, Mr. Bones. What?! Who starts a book off by having a dog dumped by the side of the road... unless its a middle grade novel where the dog will save the family but only at the risk of his on life? That's a heavy message to dump on kids without warning. So many questions; why was Tupelo dumped? Was he a bad dog? Did he live with mean people? Won't kids wonder (and worry) about being left by the side of the road themselves?

Very quickly Tupelo sniffs out hot dogs, and a hobo camp, and a band of dogs who are themselves lost or abandoned. They take Tupelo to a hill where they each bury a bone in honor of Sirius, the dog star, their impromptu god. Then along comes Garbage Pail Tex, a hobo with a bucket of cooked hot dogs for the dogs. Once fed they hop a train to another town where Tex finds the dogs either their old masters or new homes. All find homes but Tupelo who, lacking a bone before, could not make a proper wish for a new home. He decides it is time for him and Mr. Bones to part company, to bury him and make a wish to Sirius. Garbage Pail Tex finds him and together they find Tupelo and new home.

It says something about this book that I was compelled beyond the cover and the introduction to read through. You couldn't have asked me to imagine abandoned dogs, hobos, train-hopping, star gazing, and religious ceremonies for dogs all in one place. Certainly not in a picture book, which I suppose is why this one surprises.

And here we get to that area I harp about with picture books, where editors fear that kids cannot handle sophisticated, demanding stories. I'm thinking "Wow, dog dumped by the side of the road - no one's done that before" and then it hits me in the shower: Hansel and Gretel, taken into the forest and left for dead not once but twice by their parents. These days it's a wonder you don't see libraries being pressured to purge all their Grimm stories that aren't rewritten to have more favorable (in some eyes) endings.

It was worth pushing through my misgivings about this. While it might not be one of my favorite books of the season it's certainly a title worth checking out.

Sisters & Brothers

Sibling Relationships in the Animal World
by Steve Jenkins and Robin Page
Houghton Mifflin 2008

I learn more from picture books than I probably did back in high school. Of course, I have a different perspective on what interests me than when I was younger, and kid books are pretty much all I read these days so I'm probably not learning as much as I could.

Still.

Did you know that armadillos give birth to four young, either all male or all female, each an exact clone of the other? I can't say I did, and that would make for an interesting relationship if you were raised along side three exact copies of yourself. More weirder than being identical twins.

Turkeys, on the other hand, hang around with mom for a year and then the ladies go off to mate while the brothers stay together in a band. Dudes, it's like some guys I went to school with! I guess they were turkeys of a sort.

Then there are the naked mole rats. Okay, they are practically blind and live in these huge burrows underground, that I knew. What I didn't know was that each colony has a single mom -- sort of like a queen bee -- and that when they meet each other in a narrow passage way they have to sniff one another to determine who has seniority, because the eldest gets to climb over the youngest.

And then finally, a puzzle piece I didn't realize was missing in a story I conceived long ago. New Mexico Whiptail Lizards are all female. There are no males. That just blows my mind.

I think this is the first time I can remember where the text upstaged Jenkins cut paper illustrations. Or perhaps I've just gotten so used to his work that it no longer surprises and delights the way it used to. That doesn't make it bad, it's just become as familiar as Eric Carle's style in it's sameness.

By using sibling relationships to explore these unique animal families, Page and Jenkins supply a lot of great information in a clean, easy to understand style that is obviously engaging enough for an adult but readily accessible to young readers.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some Whiptail Lizards to research.

The Adventures of Sir Lancelot the Great

by Gerald Morris
illustrations by Aaron Renier
Houghton Mifflin 2008

It's been way too long since I read me some Arthurian legend. And while I should probably go back and remind myself of everything I've forgotten from T.H. White's The Once and Future King, or perhaps Roger Lance Green's King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table (with it's spiffy new Puffin Classics edition), it was more fun to get Gerald Morris's take on the French knight aimed at the young reader crowd.

Fun is key here. Morris has neatly selected a series of tales from Lancelot's part in the legends and presented them as a series of adventures that begin with his inadvertently spectacular arrival at Arthur's court to his days where he has grown weary of the burden of being Sir Lancelot. Along the way he meets challengers to his title as unbeaten, ladies who hold him hostage until he chooses one for a wife, and in the end, defender of the innocence of the queen.

Ah, yes, Guinevere. There's no mention of Lancelot's secret affair here, and nothing else unsavory that might scare off young boys (and girls, to be fair) who might be getting their first introduction to the Arthurian legends. Guine isn't even mentioned by name, she's simply the queen. All in all there is a very sanitized, safe feeling about these adventures, but that doesn't make them any less enjoyable.

The humorous illustrations, both inside and on the cover, are an appropriate indication of what the reader can expect. In some ways, the book's lineage feels closer to Monty Python than any of the traditional prose or poetry of legend. It's hard not to see the rampaging John Cleese at times as Lancelot goes through his paces, until you come across one of Renier's illustrations and are confronted with an entirely different, but equally humorous, character.

This is the first is what is promised as a series, the next up this fall being The Adventures of Sir Givret the Short. If I were a boy I'd be looking forward to these.

Wait a tick! I am a boy!

Trainstop

by Barbara Lehman
Houghton Mifflin 2008

On a train trip between cityscapes young girls watches as her view in a black tunnel is replaced by a vibrant countryside. When the train is flagged down mysteriously the girl notices she is the only one on the train who isn't asleep. Stepping off the train she finds a group of people gathered around a tree where a person and their plane have become lodged. What isn't apparent until she reaches the tree is that the people are all tiny, as if the remained frozen the height they were from her train window perspective. While the people are as real as the girl, the plane in the tree is one of those balsa wood planes with a rubber band powering the propeller. Once she has rescued the tiny pilot she returns to the train and resumes her ride home, out the of the fantasy and out of the tunnel, back to the city where she lives.

Out in front of her townhouse, standing in her stone yard, she looks up and sees the rescued pilot and a co-pilot flying toward her. They come with a gift of thanks, a small seedling for an apple tree that is planted in the crack in her stone yard. As a parting shot the girl sits on her stoop admiring her now-grown tree while all over the city other trees have begun sprouting up, no doubt from kindred daydreaming souls looking to return nature to the cities.

Lehman set herself an impossible bar with The Red Book a few years back and, unfairly perhaps, everything since has been measured against that amazing snake-eating-its-tale fantasy. If the impression -- mine at least -- was that her subsequent books (Museum Trip, Rainstorm) were increasingly weaker attempts to capture lighting in a bottle, Trainstop manages to stand apart from the others, on its own and with very sturdy legs. As with her previous books Lehman mines the theme of a child's daydream world, but here the idea of an fantasy taking place while the rest of the world sleeps, coupled with the message of bringing nature back to the cities, is perhaps the strongest, most direct message delivered yet. Where in previous books the children imagine or discover worlds for their own purposes and keeping, Trainstop gives us a child looking to share her fantasy with the world. It's almost a subtle environmental message, a quiet Lorax making a last call on those with eyes and ears enough to still listen.

For those unfamiliar with Lehman's work, the book is as wordless as her previous books, filled with the same thick-outlined ligne claire illustrations that are her trademark. Probably the simplest of her picture books to date, but no less engaging. I think what I'd really like to see is what Lehman can do with the long-form: graphic novels. Her sense of pacing, her imagination, I think make her an ideal candidate for an extended fantasy romp a la Sara Varon's Robot Dreams or, on a more picture book level, Regis Faller's The Adventures of Polo.

I can hope, can't I?

Hogwash

by Arthur Geisert
Walter Lorraine / Houghton Mifflin 2008

The children in Pig Village trek up the hill to wallow in the official mud hole. After their frolic they move on to the paint yard where colored liquid is dispensed onto the ground for a more vibrant wallow. As their playtime comes to an end the parents of Pig Village meet them to help supervise their collective bathing in a large agitation tub, followed by being hung out to dry on long clothes lines, and then it's all back to Pig Village, one and all.

Yes, it's wash day in hog land, or Hogwash, as the play-on-words title suggests. And as a synonym for nonsense there's probably no better title for the goings on here. Geisert's wordless picture books (not a graphic novel, mind you) traffic in these silent movies concerning the goings on of anthropomorphic pigs. He produces color etchings for illustrations, a process that renders lines a little rougher than most drawings, here giving the artwork a fussy sort of distance from being too clean.

I have to admit, there's a certain quality to Geisert's books that leave me cold, and it might be the lack of warmth in his art that counteracts the whimsy. I wasn't as impressed with his previous book Oops! because it attempted to slow down a situation -- a house falling apart -- into a book-length set of stills that made a dynamic situation stagnant. At least with Hogwash there is more of a linear narrative, and on the whole I enjoyed it.

This time around I did find one illustration that caused me to wonder about the scale of the pigs in this land. At the point where the piglets are being sent to line dry there is a wind-driven motor made with two magnets that looks like a child's science project. It's the most basic motor that can be made, and it's hooked to a power coil that appears to be copper wire wound around a wooden thread spool. Backing up, looking at the communal bath, their water is heated in what looks like a giant tea pot -- or is it a normal sized teapot?

Are these miniature pigs? Toys? If they are to this scale, these pigs would be about a quarter of an inch tall. I thought that could be an interesting reveal to first give you a world of unusual pigs and then to show you that they're smaller than insects, a world within a world as it were.

It's fun, I liked it, I just wasn't as wowed as some people get over Geisert's books.

Dodsworth in New York

by Tim Egan
Houghton Mifflin 2007

I don't remember the last time I reviewed a beginning reader, if at all. I know I passed on Mo Williams' recent Pig and Elephant series because (prepare to throw rocks and tomatoes) I just wasn't bowled over by them. They weren't bad, they just didn't go anywhere for me.

But the other day I noticed this title and, I don't know, something about it caught me. Perhaps there's something vaguely New Yorker-ish about the design, or the fact that it's a beginning reader that features New York in the title. It had a handsome, sophisticated look about it. Say what you will about judging books by their covers, if they weren't meant to be judged that way they wouldn't spend so much time and energy designing them.

Dodsworth appears to be a mole-like creature. It doesn't say, it doesn't really matter. He's off on an adventure to see the world. First stop, though, is his friend Hodges the Elephant's cafe for the best pancakes ever. Unfortunately Dodsworth is met by "that crazy duck" which seems to be Hodges' pet. (A moment to consider all the animals who have other animals as pets and ask "What's up with that?") Duck appears to be somewhat of a loon, a bit of a trickster character. He's chased off and after a hearty breakfast Dodsworth is off, next stop New York.

Do I have point out that, unseen until he gets there, that crazy duck has stowed himself away in Dodsworth's luggage?

Dodsworth is hounded by the duck all over New York. He tries to send the duck back to Hodges but the duck appears everywhere Dodsworth goes. "There's that crazy duck again!" kids might well be saying every time they see a duck in the pictures. But is it the same duck, or does Dodsworth simply have duck on the brain? At last Dodsworth catches the duck but in securing him for a voyage home they inadvertently find themselves on a steamer to Paris. Dodsworth calls Hodges to let him know that it might be a while before his duck is returned, to which his elephant friend apologizes for the duck ruining his adventure. Au contraire! "He was the adventure!" Dodsworth admits.

Yes, all of that from a beginning reader in simple language, begging to become a series on par with Frog and Toad and Little Bear et al. Perhaps not quite for a Level 1 or 2 reader, but certainly not far behind.

The Crow

(A Not-So-Scary Story)
written and illustrated by
Alison Paul
Houghton Mifflin 2007

I am of two distinct minds about this picture book.

1. Interesting idea, flawed execution.
2. Not every recent illustration graduate from art school deserves to have their final project published.

No, I don't have evidence of this last statement being true in this case, or in the many others I have seen lately. I have noticed a greater deal of picture books by first time authors who have recently graduated and am wondering if this is a trend of laziness on the part of publishers and editors. Thirty years ago, I'm sad to say, illustration for picture books was not seen as the highest aspiration for illustration majors in art school; advertising and editorial art was the brass ring. But as computers have radically changed the thinking and approach of illustration -- in addition to advancing the ability to publish rich, full-color illustration -- so has the idea that a picture book is somehow lower or more rarefied a place for the illustrator.

I also can't help but think that illustrators might be falling into the same trap many amateur writers fall into, believing that writing a picture book requires little to no study of the form. After all, it's only for children, right? Get the illustrations down, tack on a story, done.

This is a heavy rap to be laying down on this book, but the gut feels what it feels. And as I read The Crow I couldn't help but wonder if this was Paul's senior thesis project snatched up by a young editor looking to build a stable, hoping this would pan out.

It's a take on E.A. Poe's "The Raven" wherein a child wakes up to find a crow sitting on a branch outside their window. As the narrative unfolds the child imagines the crow as a king on his throne, a thief in the night, a powerful wizard, each with its own wordless spread that re-pictures the scene with the imagined one. In the right hands this would be clever but here it exists only as a clever idea.

There are places where the illustrated collage work appears sloppy, the layered effect not achieving a suggested depth, the whole looking like a hastily produced dummy of a book promising greater execution in the future. Children might not be able to see the differences between the good and the mediocre but that doesn't give adults the permission to ignore quality.

The Dream Stealer

by Gregory Maguire
Clarion 1983, Reissued by Houghton Mifflin 2002

A demon called the Blood Wolf will kill all in a small Russian town in order to gain access to a magic doll with powers to defeat the animal. Two small children see a vision of the Firebird and hunt down the Baba Yaga in order to learn the meaning of the omen. An old tale of a beautiul woman, a motherless girl and the collective dreams of a town that build toward a showdown in the Russian countryside.

That's what I thought a few years ago when I wrote it but today I think something totally different:

What a crappy plot summary!

Yes, continuing my "week of coasting on old material" I've dredged up another from an old reading log I kept. This book, however, is much better than my initial summary and in a lot of ways my favorite Maguire book.

Long before he made a name as the king of fairy tale retellings Maguire took on three different classic Russian folktales -- Vasillisa the Beautiful, the Firebird and miscellaneous tales of the noted witch Baba Yaga -- and wove them into a very compact (140 pages) and well-told tale. (If I'm wrong call me out, but I don't know of anyplace else where these tales are all interwoven like this.) I remember the shock of starting this book, expecting it to be light and fluffy, suddenly compelled by the power of the book's voice to sit right where I was standing and read the book without stopping. I can get sucked into a book like most people but I have never before been so instantaneously and summarily been zombified by a book.

The night is dark, and the wind is high and strong and smells of snow: so gather close around the fire, my little friends, and I will tell you a tale of Baba Yaga the witch.

So it begins, and like a yarn told in the quiet of the night by a fire and entire world opens up, a world that exists in folktales that may never have existed anyplace on Earth at any time. It's a tale that taps directly into the vein of historical storytelling, echoing backwards and forwards in time in ways are rooted deep in the sub-conscious. These places, these people, this interconnection between humans and animals, between what is real and what is magical, all dredged from some part of our reptile brains like an inherited collective memory. I'd like to make the claim right now that the oldest profession is, in fact, storytelling and we have the cave paintings to prove it. The need to procreate is a survival mechanism as a species, but it's the need to create stories that feeds our souls and keeps us going.

Yesterday I referred to Daniel Pinkwater as a Zen master; today I'm calling Gregory Maguire a shaman. I am sincere on both counts, without an ounce of hyperbole, and I hope that doesn't discredit me in the process.

There are two things I do not understand concerning The Dream Stealer and they have nothing to do with the story itself. First, I do not understand why this book has never been issued in paperback. Hardcover retellings of classic Russian folktales, they don't fly off the shelves because they ask a lot of a reader (or a reader's money source); mainly they make experimenting with the book a costly proposition. Release this book in paperback, cut the price in half, and you're giving your potential market an opportunity to make a better fiscal risk. I hate to put it in those terms but if publishers are afraid to reissue titles for fear of making back their costs then I don't see why the thinking can't go the other way. Why does the hardcover need to be the proving ground? Go the other way, take the chance on the paperback, I say.

Second, why can I find no one else whose heard of this book? Everyone knows Wicked and Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister and even Maguire's other books for middle graders, The Hamlet Chronicles but no one seems to know about this book. Am I the only cracked person on the planet that thinks it's any good, and is everyone else just too polite to tell me? Is there some conspiracy involved, or some curse surrounding the Baba Yaga that rings bad luck upon you like saying Macbeth in a theatre?

What is it?

Poetry Friday "Derelict"

I'm taking the plunge and joining the Poetry Friday melee. And when I say melee I'm using the more archaic meaning of "a group of diamonds, each weighing less than 0.25 carat" both in reference to fellow poetry bloggers and with a particularly oblique reference to the subject of my inaugural post.

The poem is from a collection called Song of Men which, when I first came across it, brought a smirk to my face that never fails to return every time I see it. The pub date on my copy (obtained at an estate sale) is 1918 from Houghton Mifflin , though Amazon shows it's still available with a pub date of 2006. Who knew there was still a market for a book of poetry with so rugged and manly a title?

There is a bit of explanation, a bit of history, that precedes the poem in the book but I'm going to dive straight in and give some particulars afterward.

Derelict
by Young Ewing Allison

Fifteen men on the Dead Man's Chest—
Drink and the devil had done for the rest—
The mate was fixed by the bos'n's pike,
The bos'n brained with a marlin spike,
And Cookey's throat was marked belike
It had been gripped
By fingers ten;
And there they lay,
All good dead men
Like break-o'-day in a boozing-ken—
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!

Fifteen men of the whole ship's list—
Dead and be damned and the rest gone whist!—
The skipper lay with his nob in gore
Where the scullion's axe his cheek had shore—
And the scullion he was stabbed times four.
And there they lay,
And the soggy skies
Dripped all day long
In upstaring eyes—
In murk sunset and at foul sunrise—
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!

Fifteen men of 'em stiff and stark—
Ten of the crew had the Murder mark—
'Twas a cutlass swipe or an ounce of lead,
Or a yawing hole in a battered head—
And the scuppers glut with a rotting red
And there they lay—
Aye, damn my eyes—
All lookouts clapped
On paradise—
All souls bound just contrariwise—
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.

Fifteen men of 'em good and true—
Every man jack could ha' sailed with Old Pew—
There was chest on chest full of Spanish gold,
With a ton of plate in the middle hold,
And the cabins riot of stuff untold,
And they lay there,
That had took the plum,
With sightless glare
And their lips struck dumb,
While we shared all by the rule of thumb—
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!

More was seen through the stern light screen—
Chartings no doubt where a woman had been!—
A flimsy shift on a bunker cot,
With a thin dirk slot through the bosom spot
And the lace stiff dry in a purplish blot.
Oh was she wench…
Or some shuddering maid…?
That dared the knife—
And took the blade!
By God! she was stuff for a plucky jade—
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!

Fifteen men on the Dead Man's Chest—
Drink and the devil had done for the rest—
We wrapped 'em all in a mains'l tight
With twice ten turns of a hawser's bight
And we heaved 'em over and out of sight—
With a Yo-Heave-Ho!
And a fare-you-well!
And a sullen plunge
In the sullen swell,
Ten fathoms deep on the road to hell!
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!

Crikey!

You've got gore and pirating and treasure and all sorts of poetic manliness going on. Brained by marlin's spike? Yawing holes in heads? Purplish blots of clotting blood? If this doesn't have Hollywood Summer Movie written all over it... oh, wait.

Young Ewing Alison? I thought Robert Louis Stevenson wrote that Yo-ho-ho! bit in Treasure Island. Yes and no. Stevenson is responsible for setting the tone with following lines:

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest-- Yo-ho-ho, and
a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil had done for the rest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

But it was Allison who in 1891 fleshed out the story of the Dead Man's Chest, a treacherous bit of reef located near the island of Tortola in the Caribbean with a history of wrecking ships. You can jump here for a complete rundown on Allison, the background to the legend behind the poem, and annotations for the poem itself. Apparently there was even a Broadway musical version of Treasure Island that used Allison's verse in 1901 and saw a revival in the 1970's.

Given the amount of pirate information floating out there culturally this might not be such a bad addition to an educational framework. Since we all pick up a little Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! along the way, might as well feed it to the kids from the source. Give or take a little Stevenson.

The Periodic Table: Elements With Style

"Created by Basher"
Written by Adrian Dingle
Kingfisher/ Houghton Mifflin 2007
Toucan Books U.K.

Can the periodic table of elements be fun? And hip?

I found this book strangely compelling. I don't get to say that enough about books these days. Inside this compact little book are over 50 of the elements from the periodic table, that nifty little chart you probably haven't thought much about since high school unless you work in the sciences. Each of the elements gets it's own page and a little first-person bio about its characteristics.

That's right, the elements get their own say and they're quite an interesting collection of characters. And it comes with it's own poster of the elements attached to the inside cover!

The book opens with a brief explanation on the history and organization of the periodic table then jumps in and introduces the reader to the elements by their groupings (carbon elements, noble gasses, &c.). Then each element gets their say in little social networking style "about me" statements accompanied by stats like their symbol, color, atomic number, weight, density, melting and boiling points, and date of discovery. Here's the opening for a fellow you might think you know well:

Some think of me as the devil in disguise because I'm often mistaken for copper. My name is taken from the German word kupfernickel, meaning 'devil's copper'.

Did you recognize Nickel from his introduction?

What could easily fall apart under the weight of being either too cute or too clever the characteristics for each of the elements is well handled by Adrian Dingle, a chemistry teacher who came to the project after the art was created. I think that's part of what makes this book feel quirky; It began as a project by Simon Basher, a British designer who re-imagined the periodic table as a chart of monsters and creatures and ghoulies with individual characteristics that feel like a mashup of grafitti culture, hip-hop, manga, and digital pets. Then Dingle was brought in to make the link between art and science with an eye toward a young readership.

This isn't the kind of book one purchases to just have around the house, it really is more of a reference book best used in schools, but the fun of it almost justifies shelf space in the home. If this had been available to me when I was in middle school I might have done better in the sciences. In fact, I think all of our science and math texts in this country could do with this kind of an overhaul. We've been hearing for almost ten years that the US trails in Math and Science but we aren't likely to change that until kids get more interested.

I'm hoping more books like this help.

Rainstorm

by Barbara Lehman
Houghton Mifflin 2007

What a disappointment.

A bored, lonely boy attempts to amuse himself one rainy day when he discovers a key under the furniture. Trying all the locked places he can think of he eventually finds its mate is a trunk that contains a ladder that leads underground. Following the underground tunnel he emerges on an island containing a lighthouse and a group of children and sunshine. They play together, eat together, and let the boy take a turn lighting the beacon. At the end of the day he takes his leave and returns to his dull home life.

At night he can't shake the image of the day's events and the next morning he ventures back into the tunnel only to be met by the children from the island who dared to venture to visit him. They return to his home and in the end happily play in his room.

There is a very weird class thing going on here that makes me uncomfortable. The boy is shown eating alone at one point in front of a formally set table, servants at the ready, dressed in a tie and a little boy suit. He may be the classic boy trapped in the tower of luxury but in the end he doesn't escape, he merely invites he new (and always shoeless) playmates into his home. That the boy is white and the playmates are represented by minorities doesn't help.

The question is, if the tunnel has always been there, if these children have always had a way to escape the island, why didn't they find the boy first? Could these be the children of the servants? When you get a wordless picture book you get to make the story up yourself, but you must use the clues available to you. So what is it Lehman wants us to read into all this?

Where Lehman previously gave us the parallel universe of The Red Book it all it's wordless glory, and the Museum Trip gave is a magical daydream, Rainstorm gives us a rather dull tale of privileged boredom and no mystery or fantasy whatsoever.

I'm not just hard on the book in comparison to Lehman's other books; it's difficult to not set this up alongside recent wordless picture books that are more clever (Adventures of Polo) or more detailed in their fantasy (most David Weisner books, especially Flotsom). Fantasy and escape don't need concrete explanations, but the questions they raise should invite equally fanciful interpretation. There isn't a lot to hang onto here, much less interpret, beyond the little dot of a moon in the night sky that actually belongs to the beacon and is as easily missed as it can be ignored.

It also isn't a question of the fantasy, the pacing of the book feels labored and pointless. Easily a third of the pictures could be removed and the story would retain its integrity. But a book with one third fewer illustrations would be very thin, and the story's shortcomings would be readily apparent.

The exercise feels as distant, closed off and cold, sheltered and empty