September 29, 2011

Our Best Book from this week's library haul: Wolves by Emily Gravett

We love Emily Gravett at our house– Monkey and Me, Orange Pear Apple Bear, Meerkat Mail, Dogs, Spells— but her Wolves was never on the library shelf, though I looked for it week after week. Turns out because it was on the older readers library shelf, probably because it’s another book in which a rabbit gets devoured (hi Jon Klassen! Don’t worry. You’re all working in the Beatrix Potter tradition. Everything will be fine…). We read it a few times, then Harriet decided it would join the realm of “too scary”, but then we got the new Chirp in the mail, which does a profile of wolves including baby ones (this is key. No such thing as a scary baby), and so now we love wolves and Wolves, and Emily Gravett’s good book is back in ours.

The poor bunny (who’s not so innocent, I think. Surely, he’s a hat thief) takes a book out of the library to learn about wolves (and Gravett gives us an images of the end papers from the rabbit’s book with the date-due slip and the checkout card that actually comes out of the book, and even though ours is a library book (yes, a library book with a library book inside it– trippy), nobody’s lost it yet– magic!). He’s got his nose in the book through the rest of this book, making the mistake that’s as old as literacy, thinking that books will tell you all you need to know. Not necessarily. Not if, for example, you’re so enthralled in your wolf education that you walk right in the path of a wolf’s 42 sharp teeth.  As you’re reading about how wolves eat many different animals including…  rabbits.

Gravett includes a disclaimer– no rabbits were injured, the book is only fiction. And then “for more sensitive readers”, she gives us an alternate ending in which bunny and wolf become fast friends and share a sandwich. The end. But the final page, with a pile of the bunny’s unopened mail (including a letter from the library– Wolves is overdue) suggests that all might not be well after all in the land of bunny. But I took care not to point that out to Harriet.

September 27, 2011

Banned Books Week: We're reading Katie-Morag

We didn’t have to go out of our way to find a book to read for ALA Banned Books Week, because Katie-Morag and the Tiresome Ted was already in our library haul. Our friend Melanie has written already about Katie Morag and her struggles with the censor (and it was actually Melanie who introduced us to Katie Morag in the first place, and her home on the Isle of Struay in the Hebrides). The main problem with the book is that Katie Morag’s mother feeds her babies during the narrative, and sometimes doesn’t put her breast away immediately. As you can see from the illustrations, Mrs. MacColl’s breasts are hardly sexualized, and neither is the rest of her really (except for in Katie Morag and the Riddles where Katie Morag tries her on her saucy nightie, but this just adds a marvelous new dimension to her character).

Mairi Hedderwick’s Katie Morag books have the kinds of illustrations (like Shirley Hughes’) that paint a household out to its very corners, and all the stuff tossed here and there, and picking out the details is fascinating for readers young and old. The breastfeeding and the breasts themselves are just part of the big happy mess, which also involves characters with complicated (and believable) gender roles, the good and bad of a close-knit community, the spirited Katie Morag with her huge emotional spectrum (also believable), and a story that doesn’t patronize its readers.

We’ve become Katie Morag devotees here in the couple of months, and it’s nice to mark Banned Books Week by reading a banned book that’s so wonderful. (Though a lot of them are, aren’t they? Do shitty books ever get banned? Do some books get banned, and liberals throw up their hands, and think, “Well, it’s probably for the best anyway…”)

September 26, 2011

Author Interviews at Pickle Me This: Jon Klassen

I’m excited to be part of the Jon Klassen blog tour for I Want My Hat Back. At our house, we first discovered Klassen’s work with Cat’s Night Out, which not only won the Governor General’s Award for Illustration, but also received the enormous honour of being our Best Book of Library Haul on July 25th 2011. I also enjoyed  his interview at the fabulous kids’ book blog 7 Impossible Things Before Breakfast. Clearly, Klassen is an interesting guy (check out his blog for some proof) and I’d love to know more about the trajectory of his career, why he’s so fixated on oblong shapes, what his own hat looks like (and if he’s ever lost it), but I am not going to ask.

Most of the writers I interview on my blog write chapter books (for adults) instead of picture books, and I have strong feelings about these interviews focusing on the works themselves rather than their creators, and just because the work in question here is 250 words in length shouldn’t make it an exception. I Want My Hat Back is also good enough that it doesn’t have to be an exception. In these 250 words and the drawings, even with all the understatement in both, there is a whole lot going on, between the lines in particular.

Klassen is an Ontario-born illustrator now living in Los Angeles. He was kind enough to answer my questions via email.

I: So, is this a book whose words accompany the drawings, or is it the other way around? Was it from images or words that this story originated? If it was from images, was the story implicit in the pictures, or did you have to go searching for a plot?

JK: I’m not sure it’s either one or the other, as far as what accompanies what. The story came from just the idea of a book with the title “I Want My Hat Back”, and a character on the cover who wasn’t wearing a hat. It was done being written before the pictures, but the writing had the notes about the pictures in it. I wanted a story where the characters didn’t have to do very much physically, so knowing that helped in the writing, but it wasn’t a case of having the characters first and then looking for something for them to do.

I: The bear’s character is rife with contradiction: he has a single-minded fixation upon locating his hat, yet he misses the hat when it’s right before his eyes. When the situation has never been more urgent and he fears never seeing his hat again, his response is to lie down on the ground in despair. When we read him aloud at our house, he speaks in a monotone. How do you read the bear?

JK: I read the whole thing in monotone too. I wanted to try to and make it like the animals were given lines to read off of cue cards. That’s why, at the beginning, the animals are looking at us and not each other. The bear doesn’t see the hat initially because he’s sort of in the play by then and is just waiting for that scene to be done, so he’s not really paying attention. When he realises later what the rabbit has done, it’s like he forgets he’s in the play and becomes a bear again and does what a bear would do if he learned that this had been done to him.

I: I can understand the bear’s limited perspective though. Don’t tell anybody, but the first time I read your book, I completely missed the twist on the last page, the “hat on the rabbit’s head”, to speak in metaphoric terms. One man’s obvious is another man’s subtle, or maybe it depends how fast one man is reading. How do you draw the line? (I’m speaking in metaphoric terms again re. line-drawing)

JK: Keeping that last thing sort of subtle has turned out to be pretty handy when people wonder if the story is too mean for kids. Visually, the problem the book started with is solved at the end, and younger kids, I think, might stop there. That what actually happened is kind of easy to miss sort of saves it for older kids who are reading it to themselves, or are at least paying more attention to the words. I don’t want the book to come off as antagonistic or especially cynical or anything, and I hope that by stashing it away in that last paragraph that we’ve already heard earlier, it gets excused from that.

I: The key to this story’s success is its really simple language, and repetition. Were these a limitation or an aid to you as wrote the story? Similarly with the basic nature of the drawings (ie that the animals are devoid of facial expression). Can limits have an expansive quality?

JK: I think they definitely can. I’d never written a book before, so the formality of narration was really intimidating and I kept feeling like a fake. When the idea came up of doing the whole thing in dialogue I got a lot more comfortable with it. The stiffness of the language was really the only way I felt comfortable getting the facts across, and the drawings of the animals are kind of the same way. The feeling I wanted to get into the illustrations of them was the same expression you get from a pet that you dress up. They look kind of surprised, they don’t want to move, and they are just generally unimpressed.  I think they all have better things they could be doing, but I have this story I want to do, so just hold still for a minute.

I: Is this a story about lying? About complacency? About carnivores? About hats? How do you explain it?

JK: I like to think that it’s just a story about itself. It came together so randomly that I can’t really claim a big message. The only abstract idea I had when it was being made was about the rabbit being indifferent, and how threatening indifference can feel. When the bear comes back to him and accuses him of something he’s pretty obviously guilty of, the rabbit doesn’t have a reaction. And when it becomes clearer what the punishment is going to be for this, he still doesn’t really react. He’s silent and unapologetic for this thing he did, and there really isn’t any way you can think of dealing with such indifference. There’s no reasoning with it, so the bear does what he does.

I: Until the story’s conclusion, the bear takes real action just once, when he helps out the turtle and lifts him atop the stone he’s been struggling to climb all day. But then the turtle is stranded there, isn’t he? Isn’t that kind of terrifying? What happens to the turtle??

JK: I think the turtle’s going to be fine. I wanted the bear to do something like that to remind us that even though he’s polite and sad and everything, he is still physically capable of picking most of these guys up off the ground, which is an important thing to keep in mind.
It sounds strange to say given that the turtle only has one line in the book, but I think I “get” him more than most of the other characters in the story, so I’m hoping there will be a book just about him some day.

September 22, 2011

Our Best Book from the library haul: Me… Jane by Patrick McDonnell

Patrick McDonnell’s Me… Jane is the story of an ordinary little girl with a stuffed chimpanzee who just happens to grow up to be Jane Goodall. Significant for being the first biography Harriet’s ever encountered, it also stands up on its own merits as a picture book with delightful illustrations of little Jane getting up to adventures ordinary (sneaking into the hen house to watch hens laying eggs) and extraordinary (Jane imagining herself like Jane from the Tarzan stories swinging on vines through the jungles of Africa). The story awakes its reader to the “magical world full of joy and wonder”, and also tells tells the inspiring story of a little who dared to dream big and whose dreams came true.

In addition to McDonnell’s sweet cartoon rendering of Jane and all the animals, the text pages are enhanced by gorgeous scientific drawings of plants, insects, and other animals. Most remarkable are the samples of Jane Goodall’s own juvenilia,  including official documents from a childhood club called “The Aligator Society”.

The end of the book contains a detailed “About Jane Goodall” section and even “A Message from Jane”, which urges that “the life of each one of us matters in the scheme of things”. From even the littlest stories come great things. Or maybe the message is more that even great things have little stories at the heart of them.

September 8, 2011

Our Best Book from this week's library haul: Has Anyone Seen My Emily Greene?

We immediately knew that Norma Fox Mazer’s Has Anyone Seen My Emily Greene? would be our best book from this week’s library haul (and there were a lot of contenders). First, because it’s in verse. Maybe it’s just because half of our audience is a two year old, but verse really appeals. It’s also a lot of fun if you’re the one reading aloud. And then there’s Emily herself: “She’s my barefoot dancer, my brown-eyed prancer; my girl who loves the colour red, and roses and rhymes and ribbons and bread.” Don’t you just love her already? We love that the story gives Daddy the spotlight for once, as he walks around the house looking for his Emily who is perhaps not as well hid as she imagines she is. SPOILERS AHEAD: He finds her just in time for lunch. I also like this book because it’s by Norma Fox Mazer, whose paperback novels I devoured as an adolescent.

BONUS: Last week’s Best Book from the Library Haul was Andrew Larsen’s much-acclaimed The Imaginary Garden, but I didn’t get a chance to post about it. The story is about a little girl called Theo whose grandfather leaves behind his beautiful garden when he relocates to an apartment whose only outdoor space is a rather bleak balcony. That her grandfather is also a painter, however, brings forth a rather inspired solution to the bleak balcony problem as Theo and Poppa begin to create a new garden on a blank sheet of canvas, beginning with the soil and growing the imaginary garden as you would an actual one.

Harriet liked the pictures, and the lines about the colours. What I like best about this book is that the considerable back story implied– that perhaps Grandma has died, that Poppa is no longer able to maintain his old garden, that he’s getting older and his life has just become a whole lot smaller– is really hardly implied at all. The imaginary garden is the story, and it’s a lovely one, made richer for the poignancy at its outlying edges. But that Larsen avoided making the life lessons the story, those old preachy predictable plot-lines that are so familiar, is a credit to him as a writer, that he gives his readers credit enough to discover the story for themselves.

Anyway, so you can imagine why I felt very honoured to be publishing a guest post by Larsen at Canadian Bookshelf today. You should check it out– it’s wonderful.

August 26, 2011

Our Best Books from this week's library haul: Big Wolf & Little Wolf and You're Finally Here

I do like my picture books to have a message, but one curled up so tiny in the core of the story that you don’t even notice it until you think about it. We don’t like our picture books to patronize, of course, and a little silliness is always welcome, but as a student of literature, I am accustomed to deconstructing the best books and coming up with something, something greater than the whole.

In Nadine Brun-Cosme and Oliver Tallec’s Big Wolf & Little Wolf, I suppose that something is a message about an older sibling’s fear of his place being usurped by a younger. I think a child who’s experiencing such fears could be led to some good conversations by discussing this book, but this is not the reason this is one of our favourite books this week. No, we like it because Brun-Cosme has named her two wolves Big Wolf and Little Wolf, and when you’re two years old, the big/little dichotomy is endlessly fascinating. Also, because when you’re two, you feel an affinity with “little” things. When Little Wolf (who’s moved into Big Wolf’s territory in a way that’s quite presumptuous) disappears, Harriet becomes very concerned. “Where is Little Wolf?” she asks on every page, and then when we finally catch a glimpse of Little Wolf way off on the horizon, she feels as though she’s done something heroic in locating him. It’s a story about friendship, love and sharing: “For the first time he said to himself that a little one, indeed a very little one, had taken up space in his heart. A lot of space.” And let’s face it, we all know what that’s like…

Bonus: Our bonus book of the week is You’re Finally Here by Melanie Watt, which we can’t take any credit for discovering because the librarian handed it to us. It’s a bit of a metafictional riff of Mo Willems’ We Are In a Book, except that the bunny rabbit here has no qualms about being a storybook character. He’s just bored, waiting for the reader to finally arrive, and then when we do, he can’t quite hold his tongue– What took us so long? Because he hates waiting, and it’s rude to keep someone waiting, and he so harangues us in a most amusing fashion with blazing text and fury that Harriet finds funny. And then his cell-phone rings, and we discover who’s the rude one after all…

August 16, 2011

Baby Lit: Little Miss Austen

Here’s a tip for all you booksellers out there: stock the Baby Lit series, and the books will be snapped up by those of us with more money than brains. (And this is saying something. I don’t actually have that much money.) I don’t even like Pride & Prejudice, but I had to have this gorgeous board book, which is actually more worthwhile than its genius gimmick might suggest. It’s a counting book, P&P from 1-10– 1 English Village (with a green!), 2 handsome gentlemen, 3 houses, etc., and each item cumulates to tell Austen’s story (kind of). The illustrations are lovely, stylishly designed with floral detailing and demask backgrounds– you can see a couple of pages here.

From the publisher’s pages, the series (which, so far, also includes Romeo and Juliet, but I don’t think they die at the end) is “a fashionable way to introduce your toddler to the world of classic literature”. And heaven forbid you introduce your toddler to classic literature in an unfashionable way, or forget to do it until they’ve turned four and it’s already too late.

Qualms aside, the book is cute, and I’m a middle-class white person who lives in the city and buys artisanal cheese. Books like this were made for people like me. What else are you going to do?

August 12, 2011

Our Best Book from this week's library haul: A Flock of Shoes by Sarah Tsaing

This week’s best book from the library was A Flock of Shoes by Sarah Tsaing, illustrated by Qin Leng. It’s the story of a little girl called Abby whose beloved summer sandals fly south in the fall, and send her postcards from tropical islands (“We miss you to the bottom of our soles”). While the shoes are away, she falls in love with a pair of boots that navigate the snow and ice so well, but when spring finally comes, the boots are compelled to jump aboard a northbound train (postcard: “Early nights and gorgeous lights, but we still miss the warm wiggle of your toes.” [Tsaing is also a poet, and it shows].) But the sandals fly back again, fattened up from their time abroad, and they’re big enough to fit Abby’s growing feet.

At first, I wasn’t sure about the book because the story doesn’t completely make sense, and I didn’t understand what the story was a metaphor for, and what the message was. And then I understand that there really wasn’t one, actually, and that this is an old fashioned fairy tale whose message is in its lyricism and magic. It’s immediately appealing to the shoe-mad, which most little girls I know are, and Harriet has asked me to read it to her over and over again.

July 29, 2011

Best Book from this week's library haul: If I Were a Lion by Sarah Weeks and Heather Solomon

Our best book this week was  If I Were a Lion by Sarah Weeks and illustrated by Heather M. Solomon. It’s the story of a little girl (who look like a kewpie doll. Some people find such illustrations creepy, but I love their weirdness) who has been making some trouble. She never owns up to exactly what kind of trouble, but there is evidence of scribbling on the wall and cereal poured all over the kitchen floor. Her mother has just called her wild, and banished her to the Time-Out chair, and though the girl will admit that the Time-Out is probably necessary, she takes serious offence to “wild” slur. Because she doesn’t roar, she doesn’t have scales or feathers, she doesn’t swing through the trees etc. etc. And she proceeds to go through a catalogue of amazing wildness and imagines the animals she speaks of wreaking havoc on the house. She’s not ferocious, she says, just precocious. When her mother finally calms down she’ll see, “that the opposite of wild is me.”

Naturally, it’s written in verse. Most of our Best Books are. It also taught Harriet the word “opposite”, which is the most abstract term she’s comprehended yet, and I’m glad she’s smart enough to understand the opposite of coffee is tea.

July 25, 2011

Best Book from this week's library haul: Cats' Night Out by Stutson/Klassen

There was no sticker on the cover, so it was only just now that I learned that our Best Book from this week’s library haul was awarded the 2010 Governor General’s Award for Illustration. The book is Cats’ Night Out by Caroline Stutson and illustrated by J. Klassen, which we love for its verse: “Two cats samba, dressed in white/ on the rooftop Saturday night.” It counts up by twos to, “Twenty conga left and right/ in splashy florals, plaids and stripes”, and I am especially partial to  the twelve town tabbies doing the twist. Anyway, the neighbours start complaining and the show gets shut down, but the illustrations of the nighttime cityscape are marvellous fun, it’s cats after all, and the verse has a jazzy rhythm even we like, and we hate jazz. We were happy to find this book, though we had plenty of gems this week– Harriet has discovered Corduroy and is in love, and we’re also reading Katie-Morag based on Melanie’s recommendation.