January 16, 2012
New kids books to start the year right
This Christmas was exceptional for the calibre of picture books that we were given as gifts– so many new discoveries, books exactly in line with the kind of stuff we like, books we’d long been waiting for, though we hadn’t even known it. It was quite a novelty, because as bookish people, we’re used to making our own literary discoveries, used to friends buying us something other than books because they assume we’ve read them all already. But not so! What follows is an absolute trove of delights.
When I Was Small by Sara O’Leary/Julie Morstad: I’ve been buying Sara O’Leary’s Henry books for little people since long before I had a little person of my own. This latest installment is as lovely as the rest, as Henry asks his mother to tell him stories of that long-ago never-never time before he was born, back when she was small. In the pattern of the previous books, she tells him about the small girl she once was, back when she wore the same shoes as her doll, when she had a ladybug for a pet, slept in a mitten, and bathed in a bird bath. And then she shares with Henry a dream she had that connects her past to his present.
There Were Monkeys in My Kitchen by Sheree Fitch/Sidney Smith: We love Sheree Fitch, and 
Nimbus Press’ re-issue of her books by (with new illustrations by Sidney Smith) is cause for celebration. In this rollicking rhyme, Willa Wellougby discovers that her house has been overtaken by a variety of simian creatures, including go-go apes and square dancing monkeys. The monkeys are agents of chaos, and poor Willa has to contend with them alone, because she’s been calling the police and the RCMP and getting no response. And when the Mounties finally arrive, it might just be too late.
I Want to Go to the Moon by Tom Saunders: A picture book biography of Neil Armstrong, in verse! Tom Saunders’ story began as a song, and it’s recorded on the CD included with the book. The illustrations are vivid and engaging, the bouncing verse outlining Young’s story and underlining a message that impossible dreams can be realized. Only problem is that the verse stays in your head, and in our family we’ve taken to hurling, “You’ll never go to the moon, Neil,” as a cryptic insult.
The High Street by Alice Melvin: The Tate publishes books– who knew? And it’s no surprise that 
they’re gorgeously designed and illustrated. This was one of two books that Harriet received for Christmas intended to nurture her inner consumer. In this story, a small girl goes shopping with a rhyming list of things to get, and knocks items off one-by-one. But the best part is wall of the shops cut away so that we get to see inside, and also what’s going on in the space above the shop. A must-have for the English fetishists among us.
The Cow Who Fell in the Canal by Phyllis Krasilovsky: Harriet’s grandmother picked this one up on a recent trip to Holland, and we adored it, as we like vintage picture books in general, and the illustrations are reminiscent of Marjorie Flack’s. This story of a cow who (surprise!) falls into a canal is simple and funny, and its illustrations offer marvelous glimpses of Dutch landscapes.
The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes by Dubose Heyward/Marjorie Flack: 
Speaking of Marjorie Flack, here she is, illustrating this ahead-of-its-time feminist tale. Basically, this is Dee Dee Myers’ Why Women Should Rule the World compressed into storybook bunny form. A single mother bunny is chosen to become the new Easter bunny because the skills she has acquired managing her brood and her household are applicable to the competitive world of egg distribution. Apparently, we can do it all!
Who Will Comfort Toffle? by Tove Jansson: Our first Tove Jansson picture book was The Book of Moomin, Mimble and Little My, much beloved. And we like this one even better, the story of lonely Toffle who’s content to haul his suitcase about and remain the fringes of society. Then he discovers a Miffle who’s in need of comfort as much as he is, so he makes it his mission to track the Miffle down and discover the pleasures (and comforts) of friendship with her. The last page is unbelievably lovely, and I only wish I’d known of it during that period about five years ago when everyone kept asking me to do readings at their weddings.
On Market Street by Arnold Lobel and Anita Lobel. Our second shopping book, written by Arnold 
Lobel (!) and illlustrated by his wife Anita. And it’s an ABC book, and B is for books, so basically this book is perfect, and when T is for toys, we discover a Frog and Toad allusion in the picture. I can’t believe I’d never heard of this one, which won the Caldecott Medal in 1982.
Press Here by Herve Tullet: A book like none I’ve ever seen, but maybe a bit like the iPad. But better. Because it requires imagination to make it go, not to mention fingers for pressing, arms for shaking, breath for blowing the dots away. A truly engaging book with great design, and a lot of fun to “read”.
January 12, 2012
Nursery Rhyme Comics: 50 Timeless Rhymes from 50 Great Cartoonists by Chris Duffy (ed)
For me, motherhood has been a portal to the wonderful world of comics, and I’ve been making more frequent visits ever since Little Island Comics opened up around the corner from my house. As a child, I never got past Archie, which is not to say I was not a devoted fan, but Archie is hardly the cream of the comics crop. In the company of Harriet, however, I’ve been working my way through Tintin’s adventure The Red Sea Sharks, which is wonderful, and Harriet loves it too, though I’m pretty sure she understands about none of it. She also has a Silly Lilly book that I quite enjoy, and we enjoy the Moomin storybooks so much that we’re going to have get started on reading the comic strip collections.
I also think that it’s rude to hang out in bookstores and not buy anything, so when we were all there a couple of weekends back, we picked out Nursery Rhyme Comics, which was edited by Chris Duffy. Now, you mightn’t have thought that our household needed a fifth Mother Goose Collection, but we did! We did. If you scroll down to the photo of Harriet reading in bed, you’ll see that this book is what she’s been lost to, and her parents like it just as much. It includes some rhymes we didn’t know before, all the favourites we knew already, and each one reborn in the style of a notable contemporary cartoonist. (I am not very cool. The only one I’ve heard of is Kate Beaton, but I know that she is very cool.)
The old woman who lives in the shoe has a rock and roll band, Jack Be Nimble is petulant and ashamed with a hole in his pants, the King of Hearts is a terrible, terrible tyrant who gets what’s coming to him, Little Boy Blue’s sleeping is cause for a party, the hickory dickory dock mouse is actually a bell ringer. The cartoonists’ styles are remarkably contrasting, each one interesting and vivid in its own way, rendering simple nursery rhymes into stories, and this book a remarkably rich collection.
January 5, 2012
We are pretty impressed with ourselves
Stuart is excited because he built the walls, I am excited because I was the visionary of the floor, and Harriet (who hasn’t seen and/or broken the finished product yet, because it was completed after her bedtime) was pretty enthuasiastic about the opportunity to eat some white glue.
Thanks to Ruth Ohi for the inspiration.
December 23, 2011
Our Best Book of the library haul: Don't Slam the Door by Dori Chaconas and Will Hillenbrand
Of course, this was our favourite book from the library haul this week. Don’t Slam The Door has rhyming couplets, fabulous vivid drawings, and is one of those causality lesson books (like Tumble Bumble, one of our favourites). The little girl implores the dog not to slam the door, but then he does and all hell breaks loose, just as she’d predicted– knotty wool, stinging bees, cows in the bed, and whatnot. Delightful. But I especiall admire the bossy little girl at its centre, demanding everything of everyone around her, and doesn’t she seem just a little bit familiar.
December 15, 2011
Our Best Book of the library haul: Singing Away the Dark by Caroline Woodward and Julie Morstad
Okay, here’s the perfect picture book for the darkest time of year. Caroline Woodward’s rhyming verse matched with Julie Morstad’s illustrations (and oooh, that cardinal!) make Singing Away the Dark an absolutely delightful book. “When I was six, and went to school, I walked a long, long way…” this book begins, and its narrator recounts her bravery as she walks a mile to the school bus before the sun’s even risen, facing the dark, the shadows in the trees, and other obstacles (errant cows!) by trudging forthwith and singing loud. “I see a line of big old trees, marching up the hill. ‘I salute you, Silent Soldiers! Help me if you will.'”
My love of Simply Read Books knows no bounds lately, and I’m so happy to have discovered them, for their books are always wonderful, but also beautiful (and oh, the endpapers on this one, a pattern of leafless trees). And once again, I’m cheating, because I didn’t find this book on my own, but rather it comes recommended by Theresa Kishkan, Sara O’Leary, AND the Canadian Children’s Book Centre. And really, the quality of the book warrants all the hype.
December 8, 2011
Virginia Lee Burton and the Graphic Novel
I’ve enjoyed Virginia Lee Burton’s books for as long as I can remember, though never more than I have in the past year as I’ve come to understand her approach to book design (and how far-reaching was her influence). Anyway, last weekend our friend Aaron picked our copy of Katy and the Big Snow, which has no dust cover because Harriet has declared it her mission to rid books the world over of their dust jackets (plus the jacket was already battered– this was a discarded library book we bought for a quarter. Jacket has been put away to avoid further battering).
And Aaron said, “Don’t you think this looks like something by Seth?” And we thought, 
“Hey, he’s right,” of course. And because I know very little about Seth or about cartooning, I did a bit of googling, and found this blog post from Drawn & Quarterly entitled “Virgina Lee Burton: Godmother of the Graphic Novel.” So goes the post:
I always find it curious when people draw distinctions between kids comics and kids picture books, basically you’re telling stories with pictures in both instances, and the art can’t be separated from the words. Why is Sara Varon’s Robot Dreams a comic, while Chicken and Cat is not? And really, aren’t graphic novels just pictures books for adults. Semantics, I know.
The post is referring to a slide show with the “Godmother of the Graphic Novel” title presented by cartoonist James Sturm. The site it was published on seems no longer current, and the slideshow itself isn’t functional, which is driving me crazy, because I want to see it so badly! I’ve scoured the internet for Sturm’s contact info, but no dice. So I’m disappointed, but also excited that the importance of Virginia Lee Burton might be greater than I’ve imagined yet.
December 4, 2011
On urban picture books, and concepts of home
I was holding Harriet’s hand the other day as we walked up the flight of stairs to our door when I heard her say under her little-girl breath, “four flights of stairs to family’s apartment.” I recognized it as a line from Corduroy, and asked her, “Whose apartment?” She said, “Lisa’s.” I said, “Did you know that we also live in an apartment?” She said, “No. We live at home.”
I appreciate Don Freeman’s illustrations in Corduroy, probably for similar reasons black parents would have appreciated them when the book was published in the 1960s: here is a picture book that reflects the reality of my child’s life. Lisa’s is an urban world, with stairwells, department stores, laundromats and sidewalks. And it’s a world far removed from the one that I grew up in, at the end of a cul de sac, with a big backyard. I grew up in neighbourhoods where they didn’t even have sidewalks, and the only store nearby was a Beckers. The families we looked down upon were those with single-car garages, and the families who looked down on us had driveways made from interlocking brick.
Such a childhood served me well– who needs sidewalks when you can play in the street? And manicured lawns are fine and well when there are ravines to explore, and creeks to wade in, and games of Nicky Nicky Nine Doors to be won. But the choices we made for our family would be different– we want to be able to walk to our places of work, and not have to work so much, and not working so much means we don’t own a house, and not owning a house means we get to live in the apartment of our dreams in a neighbourhood close to the places where we work, and so it goes, a most unvicious cycle.
Ours not such an unusual choice, of course, and this is underlined by the so many wonderful children’s books these days depicting urban life. In fact, some of these books commodify urban life to such hipsterish effect– I’m thinking about Urban Babies Wear Black, or the various board books we own about sushi. We’re big fans of Mo Willems’ Knuffle Bunny Books, and for a long time, I would read these and wonder if Harriet’s urban life wasn’t urban enough, and were we denying her a proper childhood in a Brooklyn brownstone? And then I read an article about the time Willems has to spend photoshopping the unsavoury elements of his neighbourhood out of the books’ photographic illustrations, and came to terms with our urban life as it is.
Urban life presented how it is is why we love Bob Graham’s Oscar’s Half Birthday, with the graffiti in its streets and the wonderful rumble of the train overhead. It’s why we love Subway by Anastasia Suen and Karen Katz (“We go down to go uptown. Down down down in the subway”). Joanne Schwartz and Matt Beam’s City Alphabet and City Numbers present city grit in all its glory. And Don Freeman’s contemporary too, Ezra Jack Keats, whose sidewalks and alleys are ways of delight. Even Shirley Hughes’ books with their domestic focus have the city as their backdrop– buses, stoops, parks and traffic.
We are fortunate that some of our very favourite urban stories are set in the city where we live: Allan Moak’s A Big City ABC, poems from Alligator Pie, Who Goes to the Park by Warabe Aska, Jonathan Cleaned Up and Then He Heard a Sound by Robert Munsch, and when Harriet’s bigger, I hope she’ll enjoy Bernice Thurman Hunter’s Booky books as much as I did. One of our favourite books of all time is Teddy Jam’s Night Cars, set against a Toronto streetscape, and we love the familiar TTC as presented in Barbara Reid’s The Subway Mouse. (Find more Toronto kids books as recommended by Imagining Toronto‘s Amy Lavender Harris.)
The urban setting in children’s literature has become one we can almost take for granted over the past 50 years, thanks to pioneering author/illustrators like Freeman and Keats. These days, children’s books are working to further broaden notions of home in stories like Maxine Trottier’s Migrant, about a young girl belonging to a family of itinerant workers. In Laurel Croza’s award-winning I Know Here, a girl whose home is a trailer in Northern Saskatchewan contemplates a move across the country to Toronto, and takes stock of all she knows and loves about the place where she lives. Martha Stewart Conrad‘s books (we like Getting There) show children from communities all over the world enacting various versions of every day life, portraying the fascinating ways in which we’re all alike and different at once.
How wonderful that my child’s storybook worlds can be as diverse as the one we see outside our window. And once she understands that home is a concept that is broader than just this place where we live, she’ll know how hers fits in with all the rest of them.
December 2, 2011
Our Best Book of the Library Haul: 9 Magic Wishes by Shirley Jackson
Harriet is amazing, and so too turn out to be the books she randomly plucks off the shelf at the library. And this week it was 9 Magic Wishes by Shirley Jackson, a book I didn’t even realize existed. This new edition is illustrated by Miles Hyman, Jackson’s grandson, who so perfectly managed to capture the essence of Shirley Jackson: the Gothic architecture of the house, the cat’s constant presence, the weirdness. But there is nothing sinister here, and the book is absolutely charming. The prose displaying Jackson’s skill with cadence and euphony. It’s the story of a strange day during which all the trees were flying balloons, and a magician came down the street granting 9 magic wishes, but what if you only want 8? (My favourite wish was “a little box, and inside was another little box and inside is another little box and inside is another little box and inside is an elephant.”)
November 29, 2011
Frog and Toad: The Letter
Without a bit of exaggeration, I promise you that “The Letter” by Arnold Lobel is the very best short story I’ve read lately. A chapter in Lobel’s book Frog and Toad Are Friends, “The Letter” begins with Frog coming along to discover his friend Toad sitting on his porch looking sad. Toad explains that this is his sad time of day, because it’s the time of day when he waits for the mail, but not once has he ever received a letter.
Toad, characteristically, is resigned to his sadness, but Frog wants to help his friend. So he rushes home and he writes Toad a letter, arranging to have it delivered to Toad by– and wait for it– “a snail that he knew.” And I’m not going to give away any spoilers here, but I suspect you can surmise where the rest of the story might go.
Frog and Toad is a recent discovery for us, part of the Classic I Can Read Books whose series include both Frances and Little Bear, who we love. All three series are simple in their language, but magic in their depths, in their strangeness, their child’s-eye-view of the world revealing such startling vision. The characters are all lovable, real in their foibles, and driven by a very human kind of motivation (which is remarkable, actually, when we’re talking about toads, badgers, and bears).
Frog and Toad in particular is philosophy and poetry, provocative, but also comforting. And they’re funny, on the surface yes, but also underlyingly so in a way that young readers won’t necessarily understand, but won’t feel foolish for missing either. Arnold Lobel never patronizes. What a truly masterful storyteller.
November 20, 2011
T is for Toronto
Just in case I wasn’t totally steeped in Toronto already, having just finished the Eatons’ biography, they scheduled the Santa Claus Parade for this weekend. We’ve never been before, even though it goes by right around the corner from our house, but we made it out this year because Harriet’s at the perfect age to be overwhelmed by the magic of it all. She enjoyed the whole thing, found the giant Barbie appropriately disturbing, and said that the Mother Goose float was her favourite of all of them. Which is unsurprising really, because we’re Mother Goose mad around our house these days.
Since Harriet arrived in our lives, we’ve come into possession of no less than four Mother Goose Books, which you might think is overkill but each offers something slightly different– we’ve got Scott Gustafson’s stunningly gorgeous Favourite Nursery Rhymes from Mother Goose which is handled with care, a second-hand copy of Iona Opie’s My Very First Mother Goose which is loved with wild abandon, Richard Scarry’s Best Mother Goose Ever with its illustrations guaranteed to transfix wee ones (and also its admirably subversive violent edge), and the nice and portable Sing a Song of Mother Goose by Barbara Reid.
I’ve also come ’round to “Bat bat come under my hat…” and no longer think it’s stupid.
