February 11, 2013
Love Stories for Little Readers
When February comes around, even the littlest readers start thinking about love and cinnamon hearts. But of course, love itself is not all cupids and doilies, nor is it even store-bought Valentine cards distributed to every student in the class. Here is a great list of literary love stories that are ideally suited to a child’s perspective, demonstrating the amazing possibilities and benefits of love, friendship and family connections.
Oscar’s Half-Birthday by Bob Graham: I adore this story of family life in the city, of two parents and a big sister who are so in love with their Baby Oscar that they can’t possibly wait all the way until his birthday to celebrate his baby goodness. And so on the occasion of Oscar’s half-birthday, they pack a picnic and trek up to the park. The celebration starts small, but by the time they’ve finished singing “Happy Birthday”, the chorus has been picked up by people all around them, and the world is alive with song, community and connection.
Without You by Geneviève Côté: Winner of the 2012 Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award, Côté’s book is her second about two friends, Pig and Bunny, whose differences can sometimes come between them. In Without You, the friends have a falling out and decide that they don’t really need one another anyway. But everything from reading books to baking cookies turns out to be quite lonely without the other, and Pig and Bunny realize how much richer the world is when they are together. Love isn’t easy, but it’s worth it.
Frog and Toad by Arnold Lobel: For easy-read texts, Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad books have remarkably depth. I continue to maintain that “The Letter” (from the Frog and Toad are Friends collection) is one of the best short stories I have ever read. The two friends face their fears and foibles together, and even their most mundane adventures result in humour, poignance, and surprises. I might declare that Frog and Toad are literature’s greatest companions (and it’s no surprise, really, that they were James Marshall’s inspiration for the als0-excellent George and Martha books).
Should I Share My Ice-Cream? by Mo Willems: And speaking of literature’s great companions, you really can’t go wrong with any of Mo Willems’ Elephant and Piggie books. They’re simple, silly and definitely funny. In this one, Elephant Gerald is faced with a quandary: just how much is a friend required to give of himself (and his treats?). In the end, however, he realizes that the mathematics of friendship are really quite simple, and he is just lucky to be their beneficiary.
Night Sky Wheel Ride by Sheree Fitch, illustrated by Yayo: All of Sheree Fitch’s books are love stories, odes to language and to life itself. From this one, I love the line, “Can you hear the mermaids murmur/beluga whales sing/ feel the whirling stir/ of every little humming phosphorescent thing?” But this is also the story of a brother and a sister, about how much braver they can be when they’re together. And Night Sky Wheel Ride takes on a particular poignance when you learn about the real life story that inspired it.
Who Will Comfort Toffle? by Tove Janssen: We are crazy about the Moomins at our house, and are so pleased that two of Janssen’s picture books are newly in print and translated into English thanks to the good people at Drawn & Quarterly. In this one, Toffle the loner ventures out into the world, skirting its shadows and avoiding company as well as danger. It turns out that no Toffle is an island though–he finds a message in a bottle from a Miffle in need of his help. Being needed provides Toffle with the purpose he’s been seeking all along, as well as necessary companionship. I love the ending: “‘Forget the past and all your fears. Think of all the super fun/ That we can have. I’d love to see the beach, a shell, the sun…’/And Miffle knows and Toffle knows, that both have seen the end/ Of fear and fright and long, dark night, now each has found a friend.”
Lumpito and the Painter from Spain by Monica Kulling, illustrated by Dean Griffiths: I don’t know any kid who doesn’t love a story about a dog. This particular one is about a dachshund who goes to visit Pablo Picasso, and steals the painter’s heart. Lump has canine adventures with paper rabbits, a goat, and becomes immortalized in his new Master’s artworks.
The Owl and the Pussycat By Edward Lear, illustrated by Stéphane Jorisch: Lear’s curious and beautiful poem is reborn with Jorisch’s illustrations, which give readers a vivid picture of things like bong trees and runcible spoons. The unlikely pair is a cat from the wrong side of the tracks and the owl who loves her, both of them fleeing society’s disapproval via a pea-green boat (equipped with some honey and plenty of money). Read this book a few times and you’ll know the whole thing by heart: “And hand in hand by the edge of the sand, they danced by the light of the moon, the moon, the moon. They danced by the light of the moon.”
February 10, 2013
Flip Turn by Paula Eisenstein
Flip Turn, the debut novel by Paula Eisenstein, is a wonderful companion to Leanne Shapton’s memoir Swimming Studies, using fiction to address many of the questions Shapton posed in her book. What does it it mean to be defined in one’s youth by a competitive sport? How can you be yourself without the sport? Does having natural talent hinder one from trying anything that doesn’t come easy? And where does the discipline of competitive athletics come from? Where does it go when the sport is gone? Eisenstein too delves into the peculiar culture of competitive swimming, the smell of chlorine, greeny blond hair, how you should not in fact stow your wet suit in a plastic bag after morning practice but rather roll it in your towel, otherwise it will still be wet for practice later in the later and therefore impossible to put on.
For Eisenstein’s unnamed narrator, competitive swimming offers welcome escape from a horrifying incident in her family’s past. Her older brother had been convicted of murdering a young girl at the local YMCA in their hometown of London ON, and the family cannot help being defined by that event both among themselves and in the wider community. The protagonist of Flip Turn views her swimming successes as a chance to tell a different story about their family life, to change the narrative. If she is good, then her family is good, she figures, which is a heavy burden for a young girl to carry on her shoulders no matter how muscular those shoulders are.
In the pool is the one place where she belongs, where both her mind and her body know exactly what she needs to do in order to be successful. Whereas, at school and even among her teammates, she’s not comfortable in her skin, always feeling like an outsider, partly due to her brother’s infamy or at least her consciousness of it, and also due to the fact that to be teenaged is always to feel like something of a misfit. Home is no better–she is all too aware of the fractures in her family, tip-toeing around her parents in order to be everything her brother wasn’t. Though she has to be careful not to be too successful in her sport–every time her name appears in the local newspaper, she knows that with her surname she only serves as a reminder of the terrible thing her brother had done years before.
Eisenstein’s narrative is told in fragments, which is disconcerting at first but the reader becomes accustomed to the style. This fragmented approach makes sense as well because this character’s world is one that is very much broken, and also because any young person is only figuring out how to understand a world in pieces anyway. Flip Turn has no obvious narrative arc–the trajectory is less of an arc than lengths back and forth across a pool–except that as the story progresses, the narrator’s voice and focus changes, deepens, demonstrating that this character is indeed maturing and that her awareness of the world around her is broadening.
This broadened awareness, however, fails to lead our character to any tidy resolution and, if anything, actually makes her experiences more complicated. Which is pretty much how life works, but it also means that this novel’s abrupt ending isn’t going to satisfy everyone. Though I imagine that anyone who gets into Flip Turn isn’t going to approach its ending expecting anything vaguely book-shaped anyway. What we get here is a portrayal of consciousness instead, a singular voice infused with such tenacity that the reader is left suspecting (or perhaps just hoping?) that this is a character who someday really is going to be okay.
February 9, 2013
Ultimately, the way to read…
“Ultimately, the way to read Artful, and maybe every book after it, is to suspend belief as a reliable system, or else to begin to believe in only this: story. Believe in story’s uncanny ability to infiltrate. Believe in human interaction, and the plunge of vulnerability it requires. Believe in nothing (ghosts!), and by that act, believe in the possibility of everything, and everything as a possibility.” —Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
February 7, 2013
A Big Week
It has been a very big week in the life of Harriet, who successfully underwent her first trip to the dentist (without a cavity to show for it!) on Tuesday and who this afternoon was registered for kindergarten in September. Initially, she was nervous about all the big kids and stuck close to me, until she was whisked away by a group of grade 6 “school ambassadors” who played with her while I filled out the paperwork. And then Harriet was presented with a brand new book, her own copy of Miss Bindergarten Gets Ready for Kindergarten, which we’ve had out of the library many, many times. It was a wonderful introduction to the kindergarten life, and Harriet is looking forward to it. I only cried a little bit.
February 6, 2013
Pennies Saved
I hate change of all sorts, except the monetary kind, and so I naturally am very unhappy about the demise of the penny. And so, in my efforts to render the penny eternal, I’ve decided to keep a glass jar full of them until the end of time (or at least until we decide to move, and I wonder if it’s really necessary to preserve a jar of pennies). I’ll display the jar high on a shelf, and one day I’ll show it to my grandchildren who will barely be able to fathom that there was ever such a thing as a one cent coin.
But while all that is still in the future, my little daughter and I sat down this afternoon to sort through the coins in our family’s change jar and take the pennies out. And really, there is no better companion than a three-year-old for such a project. We had a very good time picking out the pennies and guessing if they were old or new based upon their shininess or tarnish. 2009 pennies we decided were Harriet pennies, “from the year you were born!” and pennies from the years after amazing because Harriet was older than they were. We were quite excited to find 1979 pennies too, as old as Dad and Mom. Lots of 1984, and 1992, commemorating Canada’s 125th. And then we found a 1969, which was exciting, and a 1967, which was the most exciting year of all. The oldest penny we found was from 1958, when the Queen looked remarkably young.
Our little jar isn’t filled yet, which means we’ll have to be keeping an eye out for pennies even as they become increasingly rare. In their rarity too, I think, they’re only going to become a little more magic, and really, haven’t they ever been?
February 6, 2013
Blogging Like No One is Reading
Blogging stats are important*, and I pay attention to mine, so I was a bit dismayed last summer when my traffic levels plummeted. Part of the problem of course was that it was summertime, when traffic always falls down a bit, but that didn’t fully explain what had happened. But then these things (particularly online things) are always about ebb and flow, popularity is fleeting, and I’ve found that whenever I get too confident about anything I’m up to, life itself has an amazing ability of administering a kick in the ass–which is always useful, I think, in healthy doses.
So what does a blogger do when her traffic falls off? I, of course, turned to my number one piece of blogging advice, which is Blog like no one is reading. It’s advice that is always useful, and never more so than during those times when no one is, in fact, reading. Blogging like no one is reading runs counter to traditional advice, which is to write for your audience, which is to jump through hoops and perform virtual naked tapdances in order to garner online attention, but I find such advice is always delivered by folks without a clue of what blogging is all about, with no real sense of the tradition it was born from.
To do the opposite of blogging like no one is reading is terrible advice for a variety of reasons. First, because most of the time, no one is going to be reading, and so there has to be something more than feedback from the outside world to push a novice blogger on. Second, because you’re never going to be able to predict what readers will respond to and what they won’t. It’s the strangest serendipity, and attempts to orchestrate this will absolutely drive you crazy. It will also result in the naked tap-dancing that just looks ridiculous, and never more so than when it doesn’t work and still, no one is reading. And there you are in your feather boa and your silly top hat, when dancing wasn’t even what you planned to be doing in the first place.
People to come for blogging for a variety of reasons. For many writers, a blog offers a way to keep a website up-to-date and active. An effective blog can be as simple as a news and events page updated monthly or so. Others come to blogging because they were advised to, because it would help their online cachet, though they don’t fully believe in the spirit of the thing. They believe that the blog is to bring forth results (ie traffic, ie book sales, ie fame and fortune) when the fact of the matter is that a blog, at its most bloggish, is its own final product. So many of us blog for the sake of the blog itself, a work of art, a creation, as eternal as a thing can be in ephemeral world of the internet. The blog is the point, the one thing you have control over anyway, rather than what anyone else happens to do with it.
The thing about blogging like no one is reading is that you really can’t go wrong. And you’ll find that this is precisely what the most amazing and popular bloggers out there have been doing all along anyway–creating something original and personal with their own interests in mind. That reams of followers were interested too was really just happenstance. (There are exceptions to this, but these are so often marketing tools rather than blogs proper. And if you don’t see the distinction between the two, then you and I were never really on the same page in the first place. And you don’t know what a blog is. But I digress…)
The thing about blogging like no one is looking is that it gives you some perspective, allows you to take a real good look at what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, and change and develop accordingly. It is easy to get caught up in a run for readers, but when winning traffic becomes your sole preoccupation, then you’re doing blogging wrong. You’re probably not having fun either.
Anyway, of course, these are all the things you tell yourself during the summer that your blog’s traffic plummets. These are the things that offer consolation. And then when you discover that the reason behind the plummet was that your blog has been hacked and is now (unknown to you) packed full of invisible ads for Viagra and therefore search engines have seen fit to abandon you and so too has all your organic search traffic, well, you get your hack fixed of course. And the numbers come back. But you just keep on doing what you’ve been doing, blogging like they haven’t, which is what you should have always been doing in the first place.
*Note: Blogging like no one is reading and paying attention to blogging stats are not necessarily contradictory. Each has its uses.
February 4, 2013
A Question of Identity by Susan Hill
I can’t believe that A Question of Identity is only my third Simon Serrailler mystery. It feels like my connection to these books goes deeper, like these are characters I’ve known for a long long time. Which is a testament to the depth of the books in this series, though I wonder if Susan Hill has finally crossed a line, if the Simon Serrailler novels are now incapable of standing alone. I can imagine that a reader who picks up this one looking for a good whodunnit might be confused by all the attention on Simon Serrailler’s sister, Dr. Cat Deerbon, her work in a hospice, trouble amongst her adolescent children. Would they know what to make of Simon’s stepmother who is hiding some kind of terrible secret about her marriage? And what of Simon’s relationship with Rachel, whose husband is in the final stages of Parkinson’s Disease? Who dun what anyway, that isn’t contained in some rich and wonderful back-story?
For those of us well-versed in the back-story, A Question of Identity is a kind of homecoming. Susan Hill is a wonderful writer whose crime novels are as rich as any literary novel in terms of character, writing, and depth. And what I most appreciate about them are how much they are of this world. In A Question of Identity, a group of readers get together to form a book club to support their local independent bookshop, which is struggling in these tough economic times…
And yes, I admire Hill’s novels’ unabashed bookishness too. Right before a character is killed off, Hill has her compiling a list of books for a lending library she’s thinking of starting at the seniors’ complex she’s just moved to. “She was well into her stride, remembering books she’d loved, wondering if this or that novel was out of print, adding ‘Miss Read’ hastiliy, then ‘Nancy Mitford’ and “Denis Lehane’–one of her own favourites, but possibly a bit too raw for some…. She was enjoying herself, and had just jotted down Daphne du Maurier when she heard a sound…”
So yes, onto the murders. At a (poorly constructed–typical) newly-built seniors’ housing complex in Lafferton, two women have been killed in the dead of night in a bizarre ritual, with no signs of forced entry. Simon Serrailler and his team find a break when they link the crimes to a few committed in Yorkshire years before, except the accused in those cases was shockingly acquitted and fixed with a new identity for his own protection afterwards. Which means that he is now untraceable, and authorities are refusing to disclose any information to police in Lafferton. Simon is faced with having to track down a suspect whose existence has been wiped off the face of the earth.
Somewhat disappointingly, I guessed the murderer quite early on in the book, which says something because I’m normally quite a rubbish sleuth. There just weren’t enough other suspects, and Hill has the suspect finally caught in a sting that felt somewhat artificial. So perhaps as a crime novel this one comes up short, but then I still read it with utter pleasure, and I’m not sure that a good crime plot was ever what I came to these novels looking for anyway.
February 3, 2013
How (at least I am hoping…) having a baby is just like getting a tattoo.
Last summer, there was this two week period during which I was completely occupied by the question of whether or not have have another child. Mostly because we were coming down the wire of “now or never”. It was something we’d been meaning to get around to, but had had good reasons to put off for over a year by that point. We had been having a very good time with our one child, with a life arranged very much the way we liked it. It was easy, most of the time. We were comfortable. I suddenly understood those people who decided not to have children because of how their lifestyle would be affected. I had never thought about it first time around, because I wanted a baby, no question, but now I understood the stakes of having a baby, how much upheaval it would really mean. I also knew that my mothering self had limits I hadn’t known about when a baby was just something I dreamed about.
Anyway, because I am me, I spent that two week period of complete occupation talking about my quandary with everyone I came into contact with. Friends with newborns, pregnant friends, new friends, old friends, my book club, total strangers–I cringe now to think about it, but I kept putting the word out into the world hoping to get back some kind of answer, a confirmation.
“The problem,” I remember telling one friend, “is that another baby would push our limits. I mean, financially, and in terms of space, and how much I am willing or able to give of myself.” In practical terms, having one child only would make the most sense for us.
“So, why don’t you do that?” she said.
But I knew that I couldn’t. It wasn’t that simple for me. And not because of anything that society says, or pressure from outside camps, or even because of how much Harriet wanted to have a sibling. Just as I’d always known that I wanted to have a child, I also knew that I would want another. It’s not a logical thing; it’s more compulsive, actually. It doesn’t make any sense. A smart woman would know her limits, and heed them, but I know I would not be satisfied. It wasn’t a question of “choice” (and really, not much is, reproductive-wise). If I made the choice not to have another baby, I’d spent the rest of my fertile years longing for one. Happy in my “lifestyle”, well-rested, but it wouldn’t be enough. Perhaps if the decision had been made for me, it would have been different, but it could not be a decision I’d be content to make for myself. (And don’t think I don’t know how fortunate I am to be in this situation at all, how much more choice I have than so many other women.)
A problem that many women have, I think, is too much empathy. We meet one another and assume that here is a like-creature.We feel secure enough in that to make judgements. We assume that what we feel is usually the norm, in what is general. (Or maybe that’s just me…) I have always wanted children, and I really cannot imagine what it would be to feel otherwise. And so when I hear about a woman who feels this way, I assume that there has been some kind of misunderstanding, hers or mine. Or I’ll equate her feelings with my own fears or uneasiness before getting pregnant myself, feelings that were so easily brushed aside, completely dismissing the specificity of her experience. Also, that same woman will hear me talking my non-choice/compulsion to have another baby, and write me off as a complete idiot.
Or I’ll see a headline like “Opting Out of Parenthood, With Finances in Mind” and it will raise my hackles–kids don’t have to be expensive. But then when I read the article carefully, I encounter the line, “Some people have a profound emotional desire to have children. But I don’t. Young as we are, it would take a pretty big financial, practical and emotional shift for that to change.” And clearly, this writer and I are operating from beginning points that are so far apart. What makes sense of the matter for me isn’t applicable for her, and vice versa. As with most human communication, much of the time none of us really have any idea what others are talking about ever.
Here’s what I’m hoping for though: I am hoping for is that for me having another baby turns out to be a lot like getting a tattoo. I got my first tattoo when I was 20, and immediately started planning another. And it concerned me, that I might never want to stop and would eventually turn into Lydia the tattooed lady. But when I got my second tattoo, when I was 24, right away, I knew I was done. It was enough.
I just hope in terms of babies that I’ll continue to know my self so well, and most of all that my “self” will continue to make demands on my body and my life that are fairly unridiculous, relatively speaking.
January 30, 2013
The House on Sugarbush Road by Méira Cook
There is no expressway into the Johannesburg of Méira Cook’s novel The House on Sugarbush Road. Instead, the roads are twisting and clogged with traffic, detritus, pedestrians on the roadside calling out in a language you don’t understand. This is a novel that is disorienting to encounter, hard to get one’s bearings in; the reader travels blindly along these foreign streets, trusting in the story and its teller. And as the story progresses, the trust builds. While The House on Sugarbush Road is Méira Cook’s first novel, she is widely published (and lauded) as a poet, she worked as a journalist in her native South Africa, and her prose gorgeously reflects the former while her novel’s approach shows the latter. The effect is brutal, surprising, and provokes an incredibly visceral reaction.
This novel was not what I was expecting. Perhaps it’s the sweetness of “sugarbush” but I was all set for the Africa of Alexander McCall Smith. And a wildly unpopular opinion, which I continue to hold, is that his Precious Ramotswe books are terrible. This was also set to be another book about the complicated relationship between a Black maid and the family she’s been loyal to for years and years, but my goodness, you don’t know from complicated. Beauty Mapule, like every other character in this book, is as imperfect as she is true. This is Johannesburg in 1994, just post-Apartheid, but this also means the flip-side of revolution–that the whole world has gone to pieces.
This brokenness and devastation is reflected in the house on Sugarbush Road where Beauty has lived and worked for 40 years in the deaths by car accident of Ilse and Meneer du Plessis, her employers, which occur not long before the story begins. Left behind is the elderly grandmother Ouma who is as much as a relic of another time as the house itself is, and Benjamin du Plessis, the son, who has returned from abroad because he doesn’t know what else to do with what his parents have left behind.
And Beauty Mapule, she hates him. She makes a point of of serving him the most paltry or gristly food portions, steals his pocket change, does whatever she can to make his existence as uncomfortable as possible. She glories in her power here, though she cannot articulate exactly her motivations. She thinks Benjamin is oblivious, but he isn’t. He just doesn’t know what to do about it, this woman who had loved him as a child alongside her own child, and who now makes clear her distaste and scorn.
It is easy to assume that the loss of Beauty’s own child, however, has everything to do with her behaviour. Her daughter Givvie, christened Given, who was taken in an episode of violence that was shockingly common at the time. Her son Lucky certainly fared better in his life, but the life that he has made for himself has little room for a mother who is a domestic servant. He wants nothing to do with his eldest son either, the product of an earlier relationship, and so Beauty has been left responsible for her grandson as well, who has turned out to be a complete disappointment.
Beauty’s stepdaughter, who has found being five months pregnant does nothing to deter the advances of the men who continually become besotted with her at first sight, finds work with Ouma’s daughter, Magda, whose previous maid had disappeared along with most of Magda’s worldly goods not long before. The father of her child is a shady but charming businessman with shades of the devil himself who becomes embroiled in the lives of every character in the novel eventually, the one element that connects in a place where so much has fallen apart.
The House on Sugarbush Road is scattered with phrases in a cacophony of languages, and there is not a glossary to be found. And I love that, that we’re expected to find our own way through this wild book, that Cook doesn’t provide us a guided tour, an opportunity for gawking, for spectacle. We have no choice but to be utterly absorbed in the novel, an experience which becomes devastating toward the novel’s conclusion, which is brutal, inexplicable, the opposite of everything we’re trained to expect from a story.
Except the very best stories, of course, which defy expectations. And so it goes with this one.
