Library Mama

Charlotte Jane Battles Bedtime by Myra Wolfe. Illustrated by Maria Monescillo.

Charlotte Jane is the daughter of two pirates, who have built a beautiful ship-shaped house in the suburbs. They use endearments like “doubloon” and “pomegranate”, managing to seem both devoted parents and still-fierce pirates. Charlotte Jane grows up wanting the very best of life, and at one point decides that “Bedtime [is] not juicy.” She stays up later and later, until one night, she manages to stay awake until sunrise. Victory turns out to be less sweet than she’d expected as she says, “Arr. My oomph’s weighed anchor!” Then follows a hunt, aided by her parents, for Charlotte Jane’s missing oomph. The illustrations are charmingly bright and stripy watercolor and ink drawings. It’s a bedtime book with a fun pirate twist that’s great for older toddlers and preschoolers. My own toddler did not, alas, decide to learn a lesson from the book, but she did enjoy reading it multiple times.

I just counted. Right now, I have seven library books at home waiting to be read, six reviews waiting to be written, and six books on hold. I hope they won’t all come in at once, though the pile at home says that they’ve been coming in faster than I can read them. Swamped in books I’m excited about is a good kind of swamped, right?

The Microscope by Maxine Kumin. Illustrated by Arnold Lobel. I read this book to my son’s class in April, for Poetry Month. I like a funny poem for kids, especially, and this one is funny enough that I memorized for a high school poetry assignment, too. That time, I found it in a Cricket magazine, and though I have about half a bookcase devoted to my lifetime collection of Crickets, I couldn’t find the poem when I went looking for it a couple years ago. This year, I tried Google again, with better results. Now I have the perspective for the name Maxine Kumin to sound familiar. Right – former poet laureate and Pulitzer prize winner for poetry. Not only was the poem published as a picture book in 1984, but my library had it on the shelf, shelved with the biographies. It’s a tiny little thing, maybe 5 by 6 inches, so Teacher A. was kind enough to set up the document projector for me so the class could see the pictures. I’m not sure if this is irony or appropriate for the topic. In any case, we had fun.

The poem itself is a bouncy little thing, gleefully relating the contrast between Anton Leeuwenhoek, Our Hero, absorbed in making his microscopes and the slightly gruesome things he sees in them, and the townsfolk, who would just like him to keep his dry goods store open. The complete text is up on the Web, but here are the closing verses:

Impossible! Most Dutchmen said.
This Anton’s crazy in the head!
We ought to ship him off to Spain!
He says he’s seen a housefly’s brain!
He says the water that we drink
Is full of bugs! He’s mad, we think!
They called him dumkop, which means dope.
That’s how we got the microscope.

The closing notes that Leeuwenhoek didn’t invent the microscope, but built over 200 of them, refining the design and sharing his findings with many other scientists. Lobel’s drawings, while still distinctively his own work, call to mind seventeenth century-style copper engravings and illustrate the poem brilliantly. Read it for the poetry, the science history, or just the humor.

Thanks to my colleague S. for pointing out this one! Also, I'm trying a bigger picture size to see if Pinterest will see it. Let me know if it makes things too slow to load for you.

The Astonishing Secret of Awesome Man by Michael Chabon. Illustrated by Jake Parker. Awesome Man himself takes through a day in the life of… Awesome Man. He describes his costumes, his powers (the “Awesome Power Grip,” aka hugging), and his sidekick dog, Moscowitz. We see Awesome Man beating villains like Radioactive Jell-o from Outer Space and Dr. Von Evil. And then, alas, Awesome Man is beaten by his arch nemesis. He must flee to his secret fortress, a small patch of suburbia in an undersea bubble. After some deep reflection huddled on his bed, Awesome Man realizes that the problem is that he’s out of positrons. He needs to eat to regain his strength! But once on the job again, will he ever stop long enough to reveal his secret identity to the reader? The ending is undeniably sweet. The bright, smooth pictures have occasional retro-feeling dot fills, giving a hint of old-school comics. There are just enough details to let you discover new details in subsequent readings. This is ideal for superhero-obsessed preschoolers and early elementary kids, with just the right blend of action and innocence.

Fair warning: I have not yet read this book to either of my children. No, my good friend and colleague S. pointed it out to me on the shelf waiting for the head children's librarian’s attention. It has not yet been stickered and is not yet available to the public in my library. Since that librarian isn’t in today, I snuck it off the shelf to read and put it back before she noticed its absence.

Extra Yarn by Mac Barnett. Illustrated by Jon Klassen. “On a cold afternoon in a cold little town, where everywhere you looked was either the white of snow or the black of soot from chimneys, Annabelle found a box filled with yarn of every color.” She starts to knit. She knits a bright sweater for herself and for her dog. People start finding her brightness distracting, so she knits sweaters for them, too. When she’s knit sweaters for every person and animal in town, she starts knitting cozies for the buildings. The illustrations show the change in the town as it gradually fills with color and warmth. All the while, the box stays full of its beautiful yarn, which seems to be magic both in never running out of yarn and in allowing Annabelle to knit with amazing speed (that last isn’t commented on in the book, but really… she knits a cathedral cozy.) Then, an evil Archduke comes from across the sea to take the box for himself. Annabelle says no. The Archduke is powerful and used to getting his way. What will happen to the box?

The story is told in simple, direct language, with little enough text to the page that my two-year-old would likely be able to sit for it. But there’s enough meat to the feeling of it that it holds up for older readers, too. The art fits and expands on the text perfectly, showing a kind of 1960s minimalism. It starts on white pages with buildings and figures in shades of brown and grey. The constantly falling snow shows brown in the sky and white against the brown buildings. They look to me like watercolor with especially crisp edges, as if they were first painted, then cut out, then had details like the snow added. Aside from a tiny bit of pink on the noses and cheeks of the people, the yarn is the only color throughout, with bulky variegated watercolor stitches covering first Annabelle and then of course nearly everything in the town. I’m fascinated by the technique. It looks like Klassen (who also illustrates The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Placefirst painted sheets of mixed colors with watercolor, then – maybe digitally – overlaid that with the knit stitch pattern. Those pieces are then, by my guess, cut out to make the required. This is a book about the joy and peace that hand-knitted love can bring, and it’s a forceful peace. Annabelle may not do anything but knit, but that knitting transforms her community and is powerful enough to withstand the evil plots of the outwardly more powerful Archduke. May it always be so.

My favorite Hanukkah book for years has been Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins. I’ll happily pull it out and read it to whoever wants to listen every year. As I noted in my review, though, it’s really too wordy for very young children.

This year, I also fell in love (not surprisingly) with Chanukah Lights by Michael J. Rosen and Robert Sabuda. Those who know the name Robert Sabuda, though, will know that this is an elaborate pop-up book. The text is simple and moving, and would probably be fine for little ones, except for the fragility of the art work. Last week, though, I was challenged to find a Hanukkah book that would appeal to two-year-olds, and so ignored the three other books I have notes for reviews on to hunt some down. Here are a few I found:

Hanukkah, Oh Hanukkah. Illustrated by Olga and Aleksey Ivanov. The lyrics to the classic Hanukkah song are paired here with appealingly bright acrylic paintings featuring a modern family – grandparents, parents, two children, and a dog. The tune is written out on the first page, so those unfamiliar with (or rusty on) the song can still learn it. It’s bright, bouncy and short while covering the basics of Hanukkah – perfect for young children.

Hooray for Hanukkah by Fran Manushkin. Illustrated by Carolyn Croll.
Here, a menorah tells about growing brighter and brighter on each of the eight nights of Hanukkah, and what its family does to celebrate each night. While still fairly brief, this one has a sentence or two on each page, and so has room to get a little more into the holiday. The pictures show a large and happy early twentieth-century family, done in what looks to my untrained eye like watercolor with colored pencil.

Hanukkah, Oh Hanukkah by Susan L. Roth. It’s the same classic Hanukkah song, and the music is still included. This smaller format book is illustrated with paper and fabric collage featuring a family of mice. This version has a sweet and clearly handmade look.

Hanukkah: A Counting Book by Emily Sper. This is a counting book - from one to eight, obviously - with the names of the numbers written out in English, Hebrew masculine, Hebrew feminine, and Yiddish. All of the non-English words have American phonetic pronunciation written out as well as the words being written in Hebrew letters. After the shames candle is introduced, the counting proceeds with an appropriate number of Hanukkah-related objects, from one menorah to four dreidels, six heroes, and eight nights, on one page. The facing page is all black, with the numbers in the different language and cutouts of that number of candles, so that they show up brightly against the blackness . The combination of all these elements makes for a sleek, attractive book.

Do you have any favorite Hanukkah books?

Cross-posted to http://library-mama.dreamwidth.org and http://sapphireone.livejournal.com .

So far, my series on The Twelve Dancing Princesses has focused on novel-length retellings. I love novel retellings, but I also love picture-book versions of fairy tales. Picture books have a few important differences from novel-length retellings. There is the opportunity for lots of beautiful artwork, for one. A novel has to flesh out the characters to work while fairy tales in their short and historical form are meant to have fairly blank characters onto whom listeners can more easily project themselves or their neighbors. A picture book can choose whether to leave the characters blank or draw them more fully. Finally, an issue that I noticed especially with this particular story: A novel has to address just why it is that twelve royal girls of adult age are dancing their kingdom into poverty. Are they dance-mad or under some sort of spell? The shorter versions go by so quickly that it’s enough to solve the mystery of where the princesses go without needing to know why. Those interested can read the original Grimm’s version from Project Gutenberg.

The Twelve Dancing Princesses retold and illustrated by Jane Ray. Jane Ray is one of my absolutely favorite illustrators. I have yet to see a book of hers that I didn’t love the illustrations for, and this is no exception. Her two-dimensional folk art style is filled with rich colors, arching branches, and bright spots of gold. Based on the variety of hair and skin colors and body shapes, her princesses had a variety of mothers, though she doesn’t get into that. All the princesses are drawn as beautiful, including the two with glasses and the one with a double chin and non-traditional-princess figure. Where most books just don’t show the hero when he’s in the invisibility cloak, Ray’s is there, cleverly shown in shadowy folds that are a puzzle to find. The retelling is fairly straightforward, leaving characterization to the illustrations. It leaves out the bloody bits of the original, and visually explains the youngest, who guesses that they are being followed, not being the one to marry the old soldier by her looking too young to be married. The only addition to the original story is, at the very end, having the new queen hire a royal cobbler and increasing the opportunities for dance throughout the kingdom (yay, dancing!) This is a perfect version for those who like their art beautiful and their retellings traditional.

The Twelve Dancing Princesses retold by John Cech. Illustrated by Lucy Corvino. Cech’s retelling adds some nice characterization and a more animated tone to the storytelling. Here, rather than being beheaded, earlier princes are eventually found in the mystical kingdom, from which they eventually escape to marry the other princesses. As in Jane Ray’s version, if any reason for the dancing is to be found, it is that the princesses love dancing, and so the eldest princess makes continued dancing a condition of her marrying the soldier. Lucy Corvino’s illustrations are beautiful, lively swirls of color, very different from either of the other two picture book versions here. While I like the style in general, the historical purist in me could not get over her combining fifteenth-century hairstyles with nineteenth-century dresses. I know it’s fantasy, and it shouldn’t matter… but somehow it does. It is still really beautiful.


The Twelve Dancing Princesses Retold and illustrated by Ruth Sanderson. This version is the one that I bought for myself with my own money when I was in high school. It’s still in print, and, while not the first version in the list of picture book adaptations on Amazon, is the first one with a creator name that suggests itself in the search box – not at all bad for a retelling over 20 years old. Sanderson, like Ray, both retells and illustrates the story. The pictures are the lush, detailed oils that you expect of a quality fairy-tale retelling. It’s clearly set in the 15th century – a note even says that she research 15th century dance to try to get the dance pictures right, though not all the poses look right to me. I can tell by the hairstyles that this was done in the late 1980s, alas, though I am sure that this would not even be noticed by a child reading this, or even necessarily by a person less familiar than with the Middle Ages than my fellow medieval buffs and I. Her princesses are a little older and her hero is just a youth looking for a job rather than a retired solider. That makes the youngest and the hero the right age to be interested in each other. She names them Lina and Michael and lets them develop a romance over the course of the story. The princes who tried previously are given a potion to freeze their hearts and leave nothing but the love of dancing. She makes a few other twists to the story, like the princesses giving Michael an official invitation to the secret ball to try to trap him. A beautiful version, with the storytelling updated to slightly more modern ideas of relationships. In the end, I think, the princesses let Michael share their secret because of the relationship they’ve developed with him rather than just being busted.

Cross-posted to http://library-mama.dreamwidth.org and http://sapphireone.livejournal.com .

I brought this home for my six-year-old – ninjas are big in his set right now. But the two-year-old loves it, so I get the incredible joy of her toddling over to me with the book saying, “Ninzha! Ninzha!”

Ninja Cowboy Bear Presents: the Way of the Ninja by David Bruins. Pictures by Hilary Leung. The ninja, the cowboy, and the bear are all friends. Usually they have a great time together, but “One day, the ninja’s ways came between him and his friends. This is what happened.” There is a moral, of course – the ninja wants to play with his friends, but only his way. When they don’t want to play his extremely active, often injury-inducing way, he goes off to play by himself. You can guess the message, of course, but the telling is delightful. The language is the perfect combination of concise yet formal, giving the simple story an epic feel. The art is brightly rounded and looks digitally created, each character with a distinctive style. When the text describes the characters talking, they’ll be shown with thought or speech bubbles filled with descriptive pictures rather than text. The ninja’s has kanji alongside the beautiful Japanese-style pictures in his thought bubbles. (Transliteration and translation are both supplied on the copyright page, for those who don’t read kanji.) In this book, the ninja’s detailed half-page picture descriptions of what he’d like to do with his friends contrast vividly with his friends’ tiny black and white ideas. Small bluebirds around the edges of the page give occasional one-picture commentary on the action. In the end – hooray! – the ninja finds a way to work the action and adventure he craves into the activities his friends want to do. The only caveat that I have to give for this book is that it is not for bedtime reading. I was alone with the kiddos the evening I brought this home from the library, and kept hearing loud thunks from downstairs while I was trying to put the toddler to sleep. It transpired that my son had been inspired by the book to try great ninja leaps across the living room. Otherwise, this book is perfection.

Read more about the triumvirate of Ninja, Cowboy and Bear in these books:

The Legend of Ninja Cowboy Bear
Ninja Cowboy Bear Presents: The Call of the Cowboy

St. George and the Dragon by Margaret Hodges. Illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman. I am writing up this old favorite because, after several attempts at finding the perfect book, this is the one that Lightening Bolt settled on for doing his big Book Project on at school. Trina Schart Hyman is one of my favorite illustrators of all time, and this book is a fine example of her work. These are glorious full-page pictures (watercolor and ink if I am not mistaken), with borders and marginalia around the facing page of text. It’s a long picture book for older readers (LB was disappointed not to be able to read it to his class) and the text is beautifully written. Every time that LB asks for it at bedtime on an already late night, I look for a way to abridge the text to make it a more manageable length. Every time I end up just reading the whole thing, because the words are just right, with strong metaphors and alliterations adding to the medieval feel of the book. And for kids too old for little-kid picture books and not quite ready for all chapter books, this is a book detailed and exciting enough to capture.

Crossposted to http://sapphireone.livejournal.com and http://library-mama.dreamwidth.org .

Everyone Knows What a Dragon Looks Like by Jay Williams. Illustrated by Mercer Mayer. Here is an old-but-good one, fortuantely still available from Amazon as well as at my library. Young orphan Han is a cheerful street sweeper who tends to the gate of the city of Wu, between China and the land of the Wild Horsemen. One day, a messenger brings word that attack by the Wild Horsemen is imminent. The Mandarin calls together his advisors - the Captain of the Army, the Leader of the Merchants, the Chief of the Workmen, and the Wisest of Wise Men – to discuss what to do. They decide to pray to the Great Cloud Dragon to save them. Shortly thereafter, Han meets an ragged and fat old man at the city gate, who says he is the dragon and asks to be taken to the Mandarin. Naturally, the Mandarin and his advisors refuse to believe the man – they all know what a dragon looks like. Only Han is polite and hospitable to the old man, and his courtesy of course saves the day. This is a beautiful, slightly twisted fairy tale from Williams, whose “The Practical Princess” I remember vividly reading in Cricket as a child. This is both absorbing on the surface and provides plenty for more conversation. The beautiful pictures are recognizably the prolific and versatile Mercer Mayer’s fairy tale style, but also clearly Asian in palette and layout. Lightning Bolt loved it so much that we read it regularly for six weeks before I brought it back to the library.

Lightening Bolt asked for books to help with being sad about his uncle. Here are two that I picked off the helpful bibliography one of our fabulous children’s librarians put together, and which LB asked to be read more than once. I was looking specifically for books that weren’t about a grandparent, as that’s a quite different situation than what we had. Also, my favorite book which a friend recommended to me.

And What Comes After a Thousand? by Annette Bley This book opens by setting up young Lisa’s friendship with the elderly Otto. They have special ways of counting together, deep conversations, a victory dance to do if Lisa manages to hit the copper buffalo in the garden with her slingshot. Then, Otto gets sick and dies. Lisa is confused by the strangers at his funeral who don’t understand the victory dance and who all talk quietly, which Otto hated. Where has Otto gone? She finds the answer in their discussion on numbers – where do they live and how high do they go? This is translated from German, which I mention because the art looked German to me the first time I picked it up. It is a gentle and moving approach to a thorny subject.

Always and Forever by Alan Durant. Illustrated by Debi Gliori A family of woodland animals lives happily together, until Fox gets sick and dies. Then for a long time, no one in the family can laugh or enjoy life anymore. It takes help from a friend and considerable effort on their part to go on with life and find happy ways to remember Fox. Here, the gentle animal pictures help to remove the story enough to make the raw and real pain bearable. The story feels honest both about the pain and the possibility of recovery.

The Other Side of Sadness by George A. Bonanno So it turns out that both Freud and Kuebler-Ross were wrong about grief. People don’t need to sever their emotional connection to the deceased as Freud thought, nor do they need to express and work through grief in defined stages as Kuebler-Ross thought. Really studying bereavement is quite recent - within the past 20 years – and Bonanno shares what he’s learned in a career focused on it. He talks about the evolutionary uses for sadness (making you slow down enough to figure out how your life is going to worked without your loved one); when grief counseling hurts more than it helps (if you were already recovering on your own); the ranges of normal recovery, experiences with talking to or feeling the presence of the deceased after death (common for some, but nearly always kept secret in our science-loving society); how to tell and what to do if grieving is going to far (if you’re still not able to function after six months). He talks about the experience of grieving in other cultures, particularly those which are more community than individual focused. This means that the society pays more attention to whether people follow the proscribed rituals than to what they are feeling – which turns out, as often as it’s been studied, to make recovery much easier for people. I especially liked the story of the African tribe which traditionally tells lascivious tales about the deceased at the funeral, saying that applying the morals of the living to the dead is extremely inappropriate. Most of all, he says that bereavement is part of the natural order of things. Humans are made to be resilient and recover. I found this very helpful, and recommend it highly to anyone dealing with grief or helping the bereaved.