The first days of Passover were a severe trial for me. Oh– no, not the holiday itself. No, I mean that I was in Toronto for them. Well, that was ok, too, because I got to visit Mabel’s Fables, which the Spriggan calls Mabel’s Stables. Actually, he fell so deeply in love with Mabel’s Fables that we went twice because he asked every single hour of every day when we were going back until we did go back, and, believe me, I wasn’t the parent who needed to be persuaded. So that was ok. But what was less ok was how I kept getting delivery notifications from UPS that I was getting boxes from Candlewick– and I wasn’t home to open them.
Truly, I was suffering severe torture of the spirit. But I came home to a beautiful pile– just look at these!
Which one calls your name? To me it’s a beautiful mix of authors and illustrators I already know and love and ones I had yet to explore. Some were surprises, some familiar.
Normally I’d be leaping to the unfamiliar, the one you may never have heard of. But there was one book in that pile from a very familiar author, but one who keeps surprising me, and this was no exception: Kate DiCamillo has two books in there, and I want to tell you about Orris and Timble. (I also loved Ferris and I hope you will get it and read it, too. In fact, the Changeling loved Ferris so much that even though she’s not allowed to read my review copies at the table because I keep them tidy so I can donate them, she snuck it to the table and dropped yoghurt on it and got a scolding.)
Why Orris and Timble? What about it got that pull of needing to talk about it? We all know that Kate DiCamillo is a reliable author and what she writes is good, so why bother? Well, the funny thing about Kate DiCamillo is that the first book I read by her was The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane and I thought two things: a) I really love this author, and b) I do not click with this book. My very dear friend from Grades 7 and 8 gave me Edward Tulane when I was in undergrad, and we were both fascinated by it, and discussed it happily. And it wasn’t a book I loved, though I fell in love with the author right away. And I’ve returned to Kate DiCamillo over the years, fascinated by her inventiveness, her voice, and her trust in her readers. She is to words what Sergio Ruzzier is to illustration: his method does not alter, but his inventiveness within it is endlessly fresh and brilliant; she writes in a similar fashion from book to book, but with boundless inventiveness.
I think that Orris and Timble strikes a new note again, but, as in The Beatryce Prophecy, she starts out telling us very little because she doesn’t need to. We’ll catch up.
By the way, how do you feel about the term “signposting” in book talk? I kind of hate it because it makes all books feel plot-bound. Now, I hate plots, too. Why do we need them? Tell me a story, and tell it how you like, but you, the author, should know what you’re doing, and I’ll catch up or I won’t. Alan Garner only sometimes bothers with a plot, but he always has something to say, and doesn’t say anything but what he needs to say, and either you catch up or you don’t. Probably, at this point, my husband would mention Proust, and the Changeling would screech, I would roll my eyes, and the Spriggan would throw back his head and giggle and tell him he’s a pie. No one knows what that means, by the way, but I think Kate DiCamillo would absolutely understand and would have a toddler calling his dad a pie in her next book.
I think that Orris and Timble, like The Beatryce Prophecy, is simply telling a story where there’s a plot of some kind (more so in The Beatryce Prophecy, less prominently so in Orris and Timble) but the plot isn’t the point of the story. As readers, we catch on fairly well, fairly early, to who Orris is: he’s a rather cranky rat, a rat we want to know more about. He reaches us, somehow, and we don’t know why, but we want to know why. In fact, we would very much like to know why it is that we want to know more of him, because, really– it’s puzzling.
That’s why we need Timble, the little owl. Timble helps us figure out Orris. And it’s not very long before they become a story we love. Timble loves hearing stories. Orris has stories to tell but no one to hear them. And we? We listen. We are an audience to their story. A cranky, sweet, ornery, and tender story.
It’s a story of stories, a story that goes beyond plot and into voice and into the heart.
Fresh and old, new and deeply rooted– it has everything I love about Kate DiCamillo, but is wholly original.
Also? Please note that the illustrations from Carmen Mok, whose work I first saw on Here Babies, There Babies by Nancy Cohen, are as tender and fresh as the words on the page. Altogether, it’s a lovely book for a fairly new or a more developed reader, and if you’re an old and cranky adult muttering about nothing being good these days, you may well find a new spring by reading this, too.
I’ve been plagued by a thought for a while, and here it is: I’m dissatisfied with the Jewish picture books I’m seeing. They aren’t good enough.
Let me put it this way: I want a Jewish picture book that will win the Caldecott, not the Sydney Taylor Book Award. Let me be even more demanding: I do not want five books that are STBA level; I want one book that’s so good it can’t be passed over for the Caldecott, no matter what else has come out.
Hear me out.
I was shelving picture books and lamenting that Amy Schwartz, author and illustrator of 13 Stories about Harris and 13 Stories about Ayana, is no longer around to make her beautiful picture books. And as I thought that, I mused for about the thousandth time, at a conservative estimate, about how unJewish not only her books but also those of many of the best Jewish children’s book authors are. Here are some other particularly notable Jewish authors and illustrators of picture books, past and present: Ezra Jack Keats, Ruth Krauss, Maurice Sendak, Trina Schart Hyman, Anita Lobel, Arnold Lobel, Paul O. Zelinsky– shall I go on? Now, among all of these, we have scant titles that are very Jewish.
And I don’t really care about that, or not too much, for two reasons. The first reason is that the titles that those authors did create are so very, very good I feel confident they put forward the books that they needed to make. I feel no sense of loss, because what they made shone so brightly. Second, and more importantly, I think that much of what the brilliant author of this incisive article by Jesse Green, The Gay History of America’s Classic Children’s Books, said about gayness in early American kids’ lit could apply in terms of Jewishness. In a subtle way, it did come into some of those early books, through anxiety, marginalization, humour, and trauma, and when it was explicit, as in the case of Sendak’s illustrations of I.B. Singer’s stories and Trina Schart Hyman’s art for Eric Kimmel’s Hershel books, the quality was superlative, unmissable.
Further, in that period, there really were some giants who did work that’s been, I think, largely forgotten today, which is a shame not only because I think the work is staggering in its quality but because I think we can learn from the style. Uri Shulevitz illustrated Sholem Aleichem’s Hanukah Money, a vividly glorious book, a book beautiful in its dank ugliness, a book I can’t imagine anyone publishing today because where’s the plot? (It doesn’t need a plot. Plots are strictly optional.) It’s superbly, honestly human, and precipitates the reader into a world with the same distinctness as Canadians might recall from Roch Carrier’s Le Chandail de hockey. I can’t think of an American equivalent right now and have an inkling that this is an area where Americans might be missing out. As for Margot Zemach, though she did many books that were not at all related to anything Jewish, much of her notable work, including It Could Always Be Worse, came from Yiddish literature. (Modern Israeli author-illustrator Einat Tsarfati’s It Could Be Worse is absolutely stellar, and distinctly unJewish. This is absolutely fine. Not every book needs to be Jewish.) Hanukah Money and It Could Always Be Worse are examples of books you’ll almost certainly find in a good public library or maybe on an older relative’s bookshelf. Both are very shtetl, very Eastern European. And if you don’t know to look for them, they probably won’t find you.
In other words: through about the 90s, there were occasional Jewish picture books from Jewish authors and illustrators that were scintillating, published by mainstream publishers. A few are still around, others are harder to find. And some are in a style that go far beyond what the pedestrian story-arc-and-main-character books of today would do.
Today, we have fewer and bigger publishers. We are seeing a plethora of books published. And the Jewish books, by and large, are not Caldecott material; certainly there hasn’t been an explicitly Jewish Caldecott achievement (with the cautious exception of the 2009 Honor for Uri Shulevitz’s How I Learned Geography, very perhaps, depending on how you define “explicitly Jewish”) since Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins received a Caldecott Honor in 1990. That’s pretty measly.
And I wonder. The Jewish authors and illustrators are there, they’re doing good work. Sometimes they’re doing really, really excellent work and sometimes they’re doing good work and sometimes they’re doing subpar work, just like everyone else. But of their really, really excellent work, a lot of it isn’t Jewish, and the range of topics is slim.
Where is that slimness coming from? My best guess, and I think my best guess is a decent guess, is that we’re not pushing for excellence in Jewish kids’ lit; we’re pushing for being seen at all. For what’s called “representation.” My issue is that I’m selfish and demanding: I don’t want to be represented for the sake of being represented. I want good books. I want, in fact, excellent books overall, and I want a subset of those excellent books to be Jewish (and everyone else; I’m talking to Jewish stuff because that’s me, that’s all).
I said “we’re pushing for being seen at all.” Who is “we”? We, the audience. We, the parents and grandparents– and maybe the librarians and teachers, too. The people with the buying power. (Not the kids, by the way. The real crux of every issue in children’s book publishing, from quality to book bans and beyond, is that the true audience– the kids– don’t have the buying power. What do the kids want? They want to have fun, want to be challenged, want to enjoy their books.) Well, teachers and parents want something for their kids that’s Jewish, that ticks the representation box, and the mainstream publishers look and say, “OK, let’s do another Chanukah story.” (Or, worse, another historical fiction about the Holocaust. I’ll get there later, but I don’t want to get too angry too early here.)
I think kids deserve better. Note: I did not say Jewish children. I do not want a book “good enough” to qualify as representing Jewish children for Jewish children, patting them on the heads and saying, “You’re seen now.” I do not want books “good enough” to read for Chanukah in a classroom, assuming that the two kids over there are now included in the rest of the room. I want excellent books, end of story, period, for kids. And I want a subset of those to include Jewish stories. Note that Jewish history encompasses upward of 3000 years and we turn up all over the globe.
I’m not going to go into an analysis of recent Jewish picture books. For one thing, I don’t want to get into arguments about whether a given book is or is not really good, or… That’s not what I’m here for. My argument is, quite simply, that as readers we can and should look for better from publishers, overall, and publishers should seek more excellent books, including Jewish ones.
Why do I think that the current crop isn’t good enough, by the way? I’ve already linked twice to my previous piece on excellent books, and I’m linking again. It explains my standards. I read a lot of books. I read a huge number of picture books. And I know that I know about books. I simply think we could be doing better, because I read books and I know books. So I’m going to state below what we have quite enough of already, what I do not want to see more of, and then I’m going to go into what I think we could do differently.
What do I not want? I don’t want more holiday books right now. We have quite enough for Chanukkah, and, simply put, no Chanukkah books published since that 1990 Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins have been better than it, so if that manuscript submitted to you isn’t better, and you’re not planning on getting art by someone as good as Trina Schart Hyman (I won’t ask you to find better, since you can’t, she’s the pinnacle), then write back to that author and ask if they have a different Jewish story. If you must get one that’s linked to a holiday, make sure it’s a truthful, excellent story. See below.
If not about a holiday, what might a different Jewish story look like? It will not be Holocaust fiction!!! Publishers, hear me: We have other stories than Chanukah, the Holocaust, or Chanukah during the Holocaust. And here I’m going to repeat a paragraph, cut and pasted, from my earlier piece on excellent books:
If a book fails to tell a full truth to the audience, that will be discernible. That’s something I’ve talked about before, too. It’s absolutely key. You will sense the absence, swept aside. Silence is not absence and is not untruth: On the Trapline employs silence deliberately, a knife in the heart. Absence, elision, is often untruth.
Holocaust historical fiction is (almost always) untruth; it is (almost always) a lie to the reader. All those people unmentioned, off the page? We feel that absence, that elision. Be absolutely careful there.
This is what I, as a Jewish reader and Jewish parent, hear when I see nothing Jewish but Chanukah and the Holocaust: I hear that you have no idea who I am and you’re not interested.
Of the notable Jewish authors and illustrators mentioned above, two are actually Holocaust survivors, Uri Shulevitz and Anita Lobel. Anita Lobel and her younger brother were hidden and ran and hidden and caught and sent to concentration camps. I know this because, by word of mouth, I found out, astonished, that she’d written No Pretty Pictures, the memoirs of her life during the Holocaust in Poland, and I immediately found and read the book. Despite moving in children’s book circles for years, I had never heard of the book before. I have seen many historical fiction novels about the Holocaust, and heroic rescues, and the ghost of Catherine de Medici somehow helping rescue Jews– which I guess is ok to put in a book these days? But I hadn’t heard of these memoirs. I can only guess that they’re too uncomfortably real, whereas historical fiction puts it at a safe distance, because it’s an untruth, a safe lie. A way to represent Jewish tragedy without having to learn the galling truth. That’s why they’re safe to give kids. And safe for adults. Because adults– again, the ones with the buying power– don’t like fear and discomfort. Death is scary enough, but killing someone is far worse. Putting yourself in the shoes of the killer or the killed is horrifying, a sickening truth to have to get to know. I know, because I read the No Pretty Pictures. I felt I owed it to Anita Lobel, and I owed it to myself. I am not glad I did it; it was intensely painful, and gladness doesn’t enter into it. I am not glad that I read a book that was so clearly and unflinchingly delineated, so precise in its description of the suffering inflicted on real human beings, flawed non-innocents, real children, true people in all their living imperfection, that I was left shaking and nauseous when I finished, seeing my own children in my mind’s eye and desperately needing to hold them, to feel them alive. Because that is what the horror of the Holocaust was. It was sadism and murder and starvation. Why would I be glad to read it? Why would it be comfortable?
And why do you want to publish fiction about this?
I am, however, satisfied with having read the book. I can say, unequivocally: enough with the safe, untrue fiction. Only write fiction that tells a truth that nonfiction can’t. This goes so far beyond children’s books, of course. It’s a bigger issue. If you enjoy imagining Jews being killed and heroically saved, that is something you might think about interrogating. Here’s how to handle the Holocaust: You, the adult, should read actual testimony from survivors. You, the adult, should not hand pared down, sanitized versions to children. Just tell them the truth, be honest about what you’re omitting and why, and tell them to wait until they’re old enough to handle the full material. Publishers, teachers, and parents should note that not everything in the world needs to be turned into “a book about” in order to delegate teaching hard things to kids. You are allowed to have conversations.
As for interrogating why you turn to these topics repeatedly? I want to ask you to do just that, actually. And I want you to consider whether an integrally Jewish story could be excellent enough to read, even as a non-Jew. I think it can.
Here’s a story.
It is the first century of the common era and the Romans have laid siege to Jerusalem. Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, seeing that the conquest of Jerusalem, which would surely entail the destruction of the Second Temple, is inevitable, recognizes that if the Temple, the very seat of Jewish practice, is destroyed without any other plan in place, Judaism itself is at stake. And so he makes a plan: he has himself smuggled out of the city in a coffin. It is a desperate act. He has himself brought to Vespasian, then a commander of the Roman army, and, after correctly prophesying that Vespasian will be made emperor, he is granted three wishes, and asks for the safety of the city of Yavne and for the school there, for all the students of Rabban Gamliel. He also asks for a physician to treat Rabbi Tzadok, who had fasted assiduously to save Jerusalem, though ultimately unsuccessfully. The school at Yavne ultimately saved and preserved Judaism; once the Temple was destroyed, the methods of Jewish observance tied to it were beyond reach, but Yavne and all the sages there saved our ability to be Jews.
There would have been no Jewish history as we know it after the Temple if it hadn’t been for the radical heroism of Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai and the steady, assiduous brilliance of the rabbis of Yavne who doggedly built a rooted, staggering corpus of Jewish learning that asks and answers questions Jews up until today study and discuss as we practice Judaism, even after the Temple establishment was smashed and looted by the conquering Romans, including that very Vespasian.
What of that is the rooted truth of history and what is storytelling and mythos? Does it matter? That is the story of us, of Jews: myth and drama and desperate cleverness and history, all rolled in one story that’s more than the sum of those bits and pieces.
Here are the steps. First, see excellence in a story; Second, write it. Jews? As you do that, perhaps, wonder: can there be excellence in a Jewish story?
Teachers, parents, book-buyers: Ask for better books. Publishers: Please, I’m begging you, no more dull, sappy schlock “about Chanukah,” or anything of the kind. No more. If you don’t have a real manuscript in your hand, an excellent one, one that demands of you that you find only the finest art for this one– look further! You’ll find one, I promise.
I don’t want to settle for less any longer.
I don’t want you to print me another one thinking it be considered, maybe, for the Sydney Taylor Book Award. That at least it’ll be representation.
I want you to think you’re going for the Caldecott. I want that for every book you acquire, and that should include the Jewish ones.
Don’t let’s make decent books. Let’s make brilliant, stupendous, fantastical, scintillating, laughing, feeling, excellent books.
I am, and always have been, bad at reading. I didn’t read The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin as a kid. I first read it in, I think, January 2024, not very long ago. I should have read it as a kid; I certainly know that now, after having read it at age 36, eagerly enjoying the story and language in a double-helix of relaxing and letting the story romp and, simultaneously, admiring the deft skill of the author. But someone gave me the book, so I didn’t read it. It took a lot to overcome the natural suspicion with which I approached books given as gifts; either I needed a personal nudge from someone whose opinion I trusted, or I needed to be bored with only that book to hand, or else it needed better than usual cover art and a blurb that didn’t sound stupid. I was, as I said, a very bad reader. Fortunately, someone my daughter, age 10, still a Changeling, trusted gave her a copy of The Westing Game, and she read it, and she loved it, and she told me I should read it. So, at a guess, 28 years or so after it was given to me, I finally read it. And then I went to the Brookline Booksmith and, lo and behold… Mac Barnett wrote a new introduction to it.
I got it. I had to get it. I was curious what he thought. Yes, fine, we already had a copy but– I wanted to know. I had my thoughts about this book I’d neglected for almost three decades, but I wanted to know what the author of Sam and Dave Dig a Hole, that saga of twists and turns, had to say.
I have a confession to make.
As soon as I read the introduction, I told a lie. I threw the book down and threw a tantrum at the same time: “I hate Mac Barnett!”
I mean, I don’t hate Mac Barnett. I haven’t met him in person and I always try, very hard, to reserve true and visceral loathing for people I’ve met and can detest on an up close and personal basis. And I’m not in the least petty enough to hate someone just for the crime of saying what I wish I’d thought of more lucidly than I could have and with exemplary structure: embedding the argument being made about Ellen Raskin’s literary skills in a structure which exemplifies the lessons learned from her in an exquisitely constructed homage to her. I think. You should get this edition– and please read Mac Barnett’s introduction– and judge for yourself if it’s that good. I think it is.
Blast it.
But what really, really got my goat is that he came out ahead of me at what I so hoity-toity think of as my own game. (I’m not good at chess, Sandy, sorry.)
I love sentence structure. I love style. I love voice and rhythm and beauty in writing. My love of Cat Valente’s Fairyland books and Peter S. Beagle’s Tamsin come heavily down to a love of their textured, beautiful sentences. I will tell anyone who will or won’t listen that just because a book is fun to read for content doesn’t make it fun to read aloud, and that prose style matters to the content, too, don’t you see?
If Ellen Raskin hadn’t been so skilled in subtly shaping her unexpected sentences, matching them to voice and thought and wrapping them around twists and turns, the novel would have collapsed into a boring mystery: first you don’t know what happened, then you do, the end. Boom.
And here was Mac Barnett writing about sentences. And I hadn’t given the topic a single thought.
Instead, uncharacteristically for me, I thought about character and plot.
I still don’t care about plot, not at all, really. The plot is a vessel moving from Beginning to End. I do have to admit that Ellen Raskin created a really exciting plot. Like Terry Pratchett, she has the eye of both specificity and breadth to see that a beginning is chosen, and she deftly picks up pieces here and there and back and forth, making me think less of someone playing chess and more of someone creating bobbin lace– though, from what I’ve read of her, the cigarette would get in the way so she couldn’t do that. A pin moved here… one there… between the threads, a pattern unfolds.
The threads are the words, those gorgeously textured, plainspoken phrases. The pins? Those are her characters. Those ugly, flawed, beautiful people she scars and makes us love. Books all over the place take characters and make you question them. Ellen Raskin starts off making us question the people, almost every single one presented as an enigma, or, particularly, as suspicious or unlikeable. And then, bit by bit, conversation by conversation, sentence by sentence, she makes them open up to us, and, as they do, we open up to them.
I recall, when I bought the book, that the conscientious bookseller noted that she loves the book, “and it does have some outdated language, but I think…” she paused, searching for the right words, so I tried to help out with, clumsily, “it doesn’t have an outdated heart. It cares about the people.” She nodded agreement.
A moment that struck me: the dressmaker with the permanent smile crooning to the young man in the wheelchair, Chris, who loves watching birds. Chris’s brother, Theo, abruptly tells her that Chris isn’t a baby. Chris’s thoughts, unspoken to the other characters, but read by us, interject: he doesn’t mind. He knows that she has pain under that smile. Later, we learn, her daughter had been born with what we, today, call Down Syndrome, and had died at age 19. She’d adored her daughter and continues to mourn her. Gradually, these inner lives and inner thoughts and sympathies come clear as paths cross paths and conversations interweave across the book. Threads deftly crossing make the pictures, each sentence shaped to each character so that nothing more is ever revealed than one person’s soul at a time, meeting another’s.
This is craftsmanship at its best. I don’t think it takes all that much to take a pretty picture of a person and spoil it. Ellen Raskin plucks a person from the street, takes your first impression, and then, bit by bit, helps you understand the wholeness and the richness of each person’s life. You may not love each character equally– but you will come away with more sympathy for each than you had at first.
I was quite prepared to loathe pretty Angela. And, somehow, she was the one who caught me. Her desperation was mine, hard and fast. Boom. I loved her. Theo, too. Almost every twist with him, every turn of his story, I thought, “Been there, Theo. I feel for you.” I liked him from the beginning, though. Angela? She surprised me.
And so it went– moving with each character, somehow the invisible craft slid by me. Mac Barnett, though, he’s a master lacemaker in his own right: he spotted the heart of the craft. Phrase by forthright, twisting, scintillating phrase, the characters dart around each other, pulling the picture together.
Oh yes, I know it’s a terrible analogy; delicate lace doesn’t feel right to such straight-talking writers, does it? But just you try to do it. I think you might find bobbin lace easier to create.
In the not too distant past, I’ve written or referred to book bannings and censorship, particularly in the USA, quite often. I stressed that it’s not about the quality of the books, but about access to books, hence the title “A Defense of Mediocre Books.” Despite the temptation to defend books by adding, “And it’s really good!” I think it’s essential to keep in mind that we defend access because censorship is wrong, not because the books are always good.
That issue has not gone away. (Even poor William Shakespeare, a poet and playwright of some promise, is under attack. I’m positive all the pseudo-intellectuals who were so outraged that a few universities attempted to find ways to teach something apart from the Immortal Bard, occasionally, will now be rallying to his defense once more… Or shouldn’t I hold my breath?) But I continue to feel a restless dissatisfaction with conversations about excellence in literature, especially, of course, in literature for children– and, even more particularly, in picture books.
Too many reviews, articles, and conversations focus on the content of the books, and much less on the level of skill in composition of all kinds.
Here’s an article which garnered a lot of attention not too long agoand the title could have been spouted by me in a far-too-honest dream: “Let the Kids Get Weird: The Adult Problem with Children’s Books.” If you know me personally, you’ve probably gotten messages from me along those lines. It might be “adults need to get over themselves,” but the sentiment is the same. I also agree with much of the article: Jon Klassen writes very much in the tradition of the Old Masters, one might say, of picture books, directly in the lineage of Ruth Krauss and Maurice Sendak, as the author points out. The transgressive streak has always been there, and Jon Klassen is not really doing something new in the act of writing darkness. What he is doing is bringing his own original freshness of voice and style to the process. Otilla in The Skull could, in fact, be a cousin to Ida from Outside Over There.
Now, here’s an interesting note. Outside Over There “only” got a Caldecott Honor; the Medal that year went to Jumanji by Chris Van Allsburg, and other Honors were Stephen Gammell for Where the Buffaloes Begin, the Provensens for A Visit to William Blake’s Inn, and Anita Lobel for On Market Street. Not a bad year. Now, despite all the press and eager discourse about the content of The Skull, and, simply, about the dark skulliness of the book– it didn’t get a Caldecott or Newbery, Medal or Honor, at all. I was stunned, because the book was so manifestly excellent.
The problem is that it’s extremely hard to nail down excellence, and, in a way, and particularly with awards, it’s a moving target. What are people judging by? Is there a checklist? How do you determine excellence? Is there such a thing? When you’re assessing picture books published in 2023, you’re not comparing them to Outside Over There, but to each other. Or are you? I’m not on any awards committees and often as I howl that “the Caldecott committee should have called me for my opinion!” I really hope never to be on one of those committees, but I do know how I assess excellence, and I want to offer it as food for thought, and because I’m incurably analytical and know a thing or two about reading, both books and art.
I don’t compare books, as such, to each other, not by way of saying that a book has to be as good as Exhibit A to be Worthy of X Award. I didn’t read like that as a grad student and I don’t now. What I did then and did now is look at what a given work does on its own, and whether it’s fulfilling its own goals. In the case of a picture book, that takes the additional nuance of reading the art as well as the text, and seeing how they speak together.
Now. First thing: is excellence even a thing you can talk about? I absolutely know that it’s a touchy subject. And for good reason. There’s plenty of people who use the very idea of classic literature, for example, as a way to run down reading anything else or enjoying books at all– as though enjoying books is somehow wrong! That thing I wrote about adults thinking being happy is a bad thing? There are people who do that to books, and, obviously, that’s a shitty thing to do to literature. It’s an even worse thing to do to me, because the reaction makes it hard to talk about quality.
The reaction? Well, there’s a big movement among readers right now to be more open and accessible and I love that. One thing I hear a lot is that “a book might not be to your taste but someone else might love it, and that doesn’t mean it’s not good.” I agree completely! Everyone should enjoy the books they enjoy and there’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure there. Put the romance novels front and centre. I recommend Jasmine Guillory’s By the Book as a particularly fun and deliciously romantic read. But I think the topic of who enjoys what is different from assessing skill and excellence.
Part of the problem with the conversation spurred by the book bans (and pseudo-intellectuals who see High Literature as a means to a cultural end rather than as a glory to be enjoyed) is that they deter dialogue and make critical reading a bad thing. I try to keep criticism back no matter what, and to make it constructive when I am critical, but if a book is challenged my immediate reaction is to defend access to it, and, by extension, support the book, even if I think it needed another few rounds of editing or I simply didn’t like it much. It’s frustrating! I want to have hard and complicated conversations! And I do think we need them.
I actually want to be able to critique books as well as review them positively, if I’m speaking honestly. Critiques are thrilling, enjoyable. I love reading Roxane Gay’s and James Baldwin’s! They have an unerring eye for quality and I learn from their analyses. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to do that? But that does mean expressing a sense of what quality, excellence, and skill entail. And, yes, I do think that excellence is on some ways separate from taste. I think it’s hard to pin down, but I think it’s worth the effort. In many ways, I think the question goes back to my reference above to whether a work is fulfilling its own goals: is this book its own best book?
Here are some things I do and some questions I ask when editing a manuscript or when reading a finished picture book. I watch my first reaction. Do I want to read it again? Why does the book matter? What does it do? What does it want to be when it grows up? Who are you, book? Take off the dust jacket. Who are you, narrator? Does the art tell the same story as the text? Do they add to each other? Who are you characters? Look at the font. What are the colours doing? Are they saturated, monochrome, dusty, old, new? Read aloud, preferably once to a group and once with a kid on knees. Do I want to do that? Is it exciting? Am I persuading myself to? Did I hunt kids down just to read to them? What’s my instinct? Am I surprised? Does being surprised surprise me? Who was the audience for that book? Do I think the author nailed reaching the audience? What do the kids think? Watch page turns! And on and on.
Friends. Readers. Picture books are not easy!
I’m going to say something awful, given that I know how overworked editors are, given that readers want books faster and want more books and that it already takes so long to get a book from manuscript stage to shelves: I have seen way too many books in the past 5 years that have badly needed more time and attention at the writing stage. And, yes, authors, I know that’s hard for you, too. Most often, when I think that, and then I feel guilty (“They wrote the book they wanted to, though!” “Fine, but it didn’t land, and better it be helped to land, no?”) and then I drill into that (“What would have helped?”) my answer is one of those questions in that paragraph up there: “Who was the audience for that book?” and then I know “I do not think the author nailed reaching their audience. Drat!” (Why “drat?” Because I want to like books, that’s why. I am looking to enjoy them, and I’m sad when I can’t.)
That’s not a new problem and it’s not an easy one. We all know I loveA Child of Books. I loved it so much from the time it came out that when the Changeling played putting me to bed when she was very little, she would pull it out to read to me as my bedtime story. I have, since then, used it in classes for kids about writing their own picture books, mostly because I wanted more chances to read it. And, that book? The one I love? I don’t think it’s got an easy answer on “who’s the audience?” Kids frequently don’t love it as much as I do, and those who do are often a bit older. My Changeling likes it better now than when she was 5 years old “tucking me in.” Then, she was reading it to me for me. Now, if I see her looking at it, it’s because she thinks it’s a lovely book. I still love it better than she does.
Now, Outside Over There is absolutely weird and terrifies many adults I know. It’s patently obvious that it’s wholly unsuitable for children; for crying out loud, the mother ignores her crying baby, leaving the baby to the older child, who clearly doesn’t want the responsibility, and is inattentive, letting the goblins come in through the window and steal the baby away. It also might just be my 3-year-old Spriggan’s favourite book by Sendak. The art is so exquisite I gave a copy to a museum curator of my acquaintance in Paris as my example of the best of American art he may not know. He was stunned and delighted and I was horrifically smug to have found something he didn’t know. (I’ve heard many flaws attributed to me, but I think my smugness might be my worst character flaw.) Now, I may think it’s the world’s most perfect book, but I have to say it’s not a great book for reading to a group of kids. I would select something like Have You Ever Seen a Flower? by Shawn Harris, a fine example of a book that surprised me to pieces, instead, if I had a crowd of littles to read to. You want to whisper terrifyingly in the ear of a toddler when reading Outside Over There. Oh, I love that book. I love reading it aloud. I love Ida. I love the goblins. There is absolutely no way that book should work for kids– and it does.
The palpable, tricky difference is that at some level both Outside Over There and Have You Ever Seen a Flower? know their child audience, are suited to it, in a way that A Child of Books doesn’t recognize a specific audience. This doesn’t mean that I like A Child of Books one little bit less, but I often feel dissatisfied reading it aloud. I’ve read it to kids often and enjoyed it and so did they. But it never generated the closeness that I’ve gotten with other books. My memory is of my daughter being nice to me, the sweetheart! Not of an arm around a snuggly child, our minds thrilling together on the page, each seeing and hearing in our own way, at the same time, sympathetically.
Is recognizing an audience the key difference that makes a book less excellent? No. It’s just an example of a way that a book can be really good and beloved but somehow miss a certain mark on one point. And I also think it’s symptomatic of something else. Because here’s another thing I haven’t mentioned yet. Truthfulness.
If a book fails to tell a full truth to the audience, that will be discernible. That’s something I’ve talked about before, too. It’s absolutely key. You will sense the absence, swept aside. Silence is not absence and is not untruth: On the Trapline employs silence deliberately, a knife in the heart. Absence, elision, is often untruth.
Let’s go back to Outside Over There because I think it’s a hard book for adults to accept, and it’s indisputably excellent, and no one likes to hear that combination. Also it’s not exactly politically loaded at the moment, but still adults find it hard, which is perfect for the purpose of what I want to do: I want to poke you. I want you to squirm when you think about books that avoid the hard things that Outside Over There does and does so well. You can’t deny the excellence and you can’t avoid the hardness.
Now, this book tells the absolute truth. And kids know it. The book I’ve had adult friends tell me they would like to reread sometime “but maybe not at night or I’ll never sleep” is one of my Spriggan’s favourite bedtime stoies. Things my Spriggan has told me in reading this book: “The baby is crying! The baby wants Mama. Mama, pick up the baby! Do they miss Papa? Oh no, the baby is reaching for Mama, poor baby is reaching for Ida…” He gets it, is the point. The one really hard bit he hasn’t yet latched onto is that maybe Ida is looking out the window and “never watched” because she’s angry and abandoned herself. Forced into a role, forced to be “such a good big sister,” almost a mother in her own right, that’s not easy for a kid– and not fair to the baby, either.
My Spriggan also admires the art– the flowers and the dog and he loves seeing Mozart at the end. He loves the language. One of his current phrases he loves to roll around his tongue is “nasty goblin’s bride.” The art, language, and work as a whole is all out there, outside over there, and perfectly beautiful, honed to the highest degree of lyricism. Have you noticed, when reading it, that it’s a poem? Try scanning this. It’s possible, you will see, and a little challenging. (Poetic note: it alters throughout the book, note particularly Papa’s inset song, but you can sense an underlying form which is, I firmly believe, deliberately fractured in order to steer clear of regularity.)
When Papa was away at sea, and Mama in the arbor, Ida played her wonder horn to rock the baby still– but never watched.
No, it doesn’t scan as a perfect ballad measure, but it scans. The art dances around German Romanticism, too, while the sense of neglect, of an appearance of familial intimacy that’s internally vulnerable, takes on an extra cadence of meaning coming from a creator whose family was murdered by the Nazis. The Nazis, of course, claimed that tradition of German Romanticism as their heritage– while denying it to the Jews who were instrumental in creating that artistic tradition, and then murdering them. Taken together, this merging of forms and fractures could be chaotic, a mess. But the book doesn’t feel chaotic. Its harmonious with a turbulent heart. It is searingly honest.
At the same time, it’s passionate in its representation of personality and of relationships, incisive through the eyes to the heart, while remaining dispassionate in judgment. Is Mama a bad mother for neglecting her children, or is it valid to be immobilized by churning feelings? Sendak doesn’t say. Is Ida bad for not watching, or good and brave for rescuing? Sendak doesn’t say. What is Ida’s serious mistake and why is she foolish? I don’t know, Sendak doesn’t say. I think something different every time I read it.
The book is, in every sense, emotionally truthful. There isn’t a single false note in the internal lives of the characters, even when it’s uncomfortable. Which it often is. I have only the haziest idea of what the book is “about,” and I don’t give a flying fuck about that because it doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s beautiful and true.
Very well. Pay attention to your audience, write truthfully, carefully, and make exquisite art. Easy-peasy and off you go! Does every book have to be that intense, though?
No. I believe that Sandra Boynton’s absurd board books are excellent. Take Moo, Baa, La La La, for example. The pigs are dancing and singing with incredible joy. Page turn: a voice (whose voice?) shouts them to conformity. They look bored, annoyed. I have never, ever made that turn without a hint of an internal twinge of regret. Page turn: Rhinoceroses? How are we going from the farm to– rhinoceroses? The overall arc, the presentation, is standard. Placid. The trim and the format are cheerful, but the adult earnestness is the equivalent of Jon Klassen’s deadpan turtles. The absurdity rolls right out there into a toddler’s lap, bringing sheer joy, and just a twinge of pathos over the bored pigs who would really rather be allowed to dance.
Or what about Gyo Fujikawa’s Let’s Play!, where the arc is not a plot, but a day of play? That’s another book I’ve been asked to read a thousand times. Within it, you catch, whether by the art or the text or an interplay of both together, dozens of moments of palpable truth. I can only imagine Gyo Fujikawa’s sharp and sympathetic eyes and ears capturing scenes around her and putting them down with an honesty that grabs the child reader; both of my children have been fascinated, always, by the little bare feet and tiny interactions on the page. The scene that always caught me is this:
I’m fascinated by the picture and the child walking away– does she not like the portrait, not want to be pictured, want a turn? Who is saying, “Would you like to paint a picture?” and to whom? My imagination leaps to a daycare teacher trying to figure out why the girl is walking away. What’s wrong, sweetie? But my Spriggan giggled and pointed to something I had completely missed in focusing on the conflict: the kid under the easel, reaching into the jar of paint. “The baby is eating paint!” he chuckled. “Baby has bare feet!” Is the little one eating paint or just smearing it around? I don’t know. My toddler has, I’m certain, observed other toddlers eating paint, or trying to. Either way, it’s a vividly real picture, with words and art and inner landscapes, of so many aspects of childhood. It’s an impressive achievement.
I have a bit of a wish list in terms of the future of excellent picture books: ditch attempts at iambic metres unless you’re a poet, know what you’re doing, and have a reason; give me absurdity; plot doesn’t matter; if someone can tell me what the book is “about,” I don’t want to read it; and give me all of your hardest, ugliest, most uncomfortable feelings.
Of course, this is me. This is my wish. These are my thoughts on excellence. I am not, and I never have, thought there is one true way. In fact, I know that after I post this, I’ll have second thoughts about points I made within this piece. I could and will argue with myself. But one thing I know I won’t compromise on is this: kids deserve the very, very best in literature, and there are books that are of the very highest quality. I want to see more books like that, and I want them for the kids of today and tomorrow. I want good books for bad children, as Ursula Nordstrom so wickedly, so beautifully said! And I’d love to see people talk more about what that looks like.
I want to end with Otilla, as I began. She could be a cousin to Ida, I said. What did she run away from? I don’t know, but I think she tumbled backwards out the window, turned around, and ran. And then, in the dark, she picked herself up, and walked into courage, ending up in the light. Which is just what Ida did.
Robie Harris, a passionate advocate for approaching children with nothing less than the truth, has died. That’s a link to the PW obituary with many anecdotes and quotes from people who knew her well and have memories to share, and I encourage you to read it.
My story is not that of a friend or colleague, but of a reader, a book-buyer, a parent.
The first Robie Harris book we got was It’s So Amazing! back when the Changeling was three and started asking questions which, in hindsight, were quite precocious. (The Spriggan is very different and his questions are about where his friendly mosquitoes sleep at night, and do I like his bats? These are creatures he is very familiar with and no one else can see. So far, reality is less interesting to him.) I answered all the precocious questions as well as I could and quickly became swamped– and went to the library and, above all, to the Children’s Book Shop where Terri took me by the hand, as she always did. (Oh, how I miss the Children’s Book Shop!) I had a few books to start with, but only one stuck: It’s So Amazing! It was the best by a long mile, and it’s taken me the seven years since to understand why.
I am so lucky I had that Children’s Book Shop to guide me in those days of parenthood. Instinctively, I knew I wanted excellence and truth for my child. Big book shops can be bewildering there; I’ve still never been to Powell’s and, if I’m honest, I have no desire to go there. I remember being nervous, initially, of asking Terri for help finding a book about bodies and sexuality for a three-year-old, not because I didn’t think it was right, but because I was worried she might judge me, she might not understand how hard it was to satisfy that serious little girl with my paltry information!
But Terri did understand, and she was a proponent of the truth, and she knew who to reach for who would never patronize and never shuffle away from telling a practical truth– even when the truth is that some people do feel a bit like shuffling and stammering and hiding in a book whereas others are excited and ebullient and want to hear and tell it all all all. That is one of the truths that doesn’t, in my opinion, get lauded enough in talking about Robie Harris. She doesn’t just give the truth of the latest research or the truth about bodies and so on.
She gives the human truth: Humans are complicated, they change, and that’s perfectly normal.
I have written before about emotional truths and I still think that’s the most important thing I’ve posted here. The fact is that I didn’t need the content of the book that badly– except for the part where I could hand it to the kid and get a blessed 15 minutes’ peace while she read it before she came up with “did you know…?” I did need permission to give that information, and we both needed the validation that embarrassment and hesitation is normal. The need for privacy and time is normal. Everyone goes at their own pace, and that’s ok. More than that, it’s amazing, because human variety is amazing. You, the parent? You’re doing great. You, the kid? You’re amazing, you’re awesome!
Robie Harris is incredibly, beautifully validating.
I do not think I am the only parent who felt nervous asking for a book about sex for a precocious little Changeling. Many of us grew up with awkwardness, shame, and insufficient information– or with questions being deferred and dismissed, or being lied to, or… it goes on. I was pretty lucky, overall, but absolutely I was scared and angry the first few times I was faced with being cat-called or whistled at, and absolutely I was dismissed or blamed for expressing it: “You’re bragging, you can’t take a compliment, you’re inviting it…” I got all of that. And I knew I wanted better for my kid, but I had all my old confusion. I needed help to get past that.
Robie Harris didn’t just help my daughter; she helped me. “Yes, it’s ok. I can help answer those questions,” her books told me, “but also– did you know that your body is amazing? Did you know that you’re perfectly normal? Did you know that not only your kids are wonderful, but you are, too? You’re doing fine, Mama!”
Robie Harris was an advocate for truth, and I sure hope that her legacy lives on for generations. Book banners have gone for her, hard and fierce, because they do not want us to feel validated. Defy that– and own the truth: You are perfectly normal. A perfectly amazing author said so.
Happy New Year! But… What does that mean, “happy,” really? Do we know?
If you spend any time with small kids, you’ll have picked up on a truth we adults notice less among ourselves: emotional experiences can be contagious. When one toddler cries, the rest of the room can become concerned. When one toddler giggles, the others gravitate to the fun. When my Spriggan giggles, so do I, and he checks with me, “Are you happy?” Yes, I tell him, I’m happy because you make me happy.
This new book from Michael Rosen, I Am Happy, is contagious happiness in a cheerful yellow cover.
I wondered, at first sight of the title, whether it would be a book about feelings, and I admit to a sinking feeling of dread as I contemplated the thought of another book about feelings. A catalogue? A permission slip? Details with diagrams, maybe. Please, no. Then I saw it was by Michael Rosen and I saw the gleeful dog on the cover and the sense of dread dissipated. I trust Michael Rosen; I generally expect him to be honest and straightforward.
And this isn’t a book about happiness. It simply is happiness. You see that ever so simple dog on the cover? That dog is happy. Really, REALLY happy. So happy that we get to watch the dog bounding through the book, chasing a cat’s bubbles and pulling the initially skeptical cat by the paw into a waltz until, swept off all four paws, the cat is just as happy as the dog. They walk on clouds, pulling a squirrel into their midst, and dance in a fountain with a rabbit joining in. If you can finish the book on the last line: “Let’s play all day!” without immediately, and sincerely, adding, “I am happy!” then you’re more of a rule-follower than I am.
Many adults, I think, forget to think about happiness. Adults are a judgmental species of human. We assess each feeling according to a moral code. Consider the following options: fun (tentatively ok, but slightly naughty; decidedly naughty if undertaken after 9 pm), pleasure (decadent and definitely naughty at any hour of the day), and joy (that one is ok so long as it’s elevated, but is most likely to meet conventionally moral criteria during work hours), but happiness is somehow not really on the menu. And, honestly, all of the above are on the dessert menu, to be chosen for a special treat but not in the usual calorie count. Happiness, maybe on the kiddie menu? How can we be happy in a world where bad things happen? Is it even ethical?
I just deleted a far too descriptive paragraph of the awfulness out there, realizing we all know it and I don’t want it on my blog at the moment. Thank me later. The point was all in one sentence: Who can even hear a giggle for all the yelling? We ignore giggles. Giggles are what kids do, and we’re busy having important conversations about serious things.
Most adults, I think, don’t think it’s right to be happy. Kids can be, we suppose, because they are innocent and naive and don’t know how bad things are.
They’ll grow out of it. Sigh. All too soon, right? They’ll learn.
I absolutely loathe that attitude. It makes me angry. First and foremost: even very young children aren’t naively happy; they’re acutely aware that a skinned knee hurts, that a friend might push you and you’ll both be angry, and that when someone yells, that’s scary. (NB: Maybe, fellow adults, we should turn down the volume a bit?) They also express happiness when it’s anyone’s birthday and there’s cake, they help up a friend who fell down and hug them, and they say “please” when grabbing a toy from another friend and “thank you” before the other child realizes they hadn’t meant to share it. (That one always makes me chuckle inside, so long as it all works out.) They experience and openly show a full range of feelings. (That’s called “maturity.” Adults should work on that.)
What Michael Rosen does here is sheer brilliance: the book is a simple read aloud, and boy have I tested this one out so I can testify that it’s so simple it practically reads itself off your tongue while you and the kid sliding off your lap giggle along with it. That simplicity is absolutely key. To a child, it’s distillation of a feeling they experience and show every time they wake up on the right side of the bed, or a parent gives them the right cereal in the right bowl with the right spoon, or they get a card with a kitty on it in the mail. That reflection of their experience is reassuring and warming. It helps them feel stable, and it’s a way to share it with their caregiver. To the adult reading along, it’s a wholesome contagion and permission. I highly suggest accepting that permission and exposing yourself to the contagion.
Share the child’s happiness. It’s ok. Actually, experiencing a range of feelings is so far from being a bad thing, it’s actually what being human is. And, as I said, it’s mature. Here’s a permission slip from another adult to be happy: “Dear Adult, You have my permission to laugh out loud and walk on a cloud. Go on. Be happy. Off you fly.* Signed, Another Adult”
[*Footnote: I don’t want to be accused of plagiarism, so, yes, I slipped a quote from The Woman Who Turned Children Into Birds by David Almond and Laura Carlin in there. Nanty Solo also gives you permission to be happy.]
Look, emotions aren’t inherently good or bad. Anger can be important motivation to stand up for justice or to right a wrong. That said, it can stand between friends, inhibiting dialogue and simmering into ugliness until it curdles to pettiness and spite. Happiness can be thoughtless or even sadistic in the wrong place. It can also be generous, beautiful, or bubbly. At its very best, it can soothe a day into a gorgeous rest to energize tomorrow. Let your child be happy, and join them.
For a child, it’s simply gorgeous to see normal, beautiful feelings represented so realistically. But it’s only as good as the sharing. So enter into it on the level of the kid you’re reading to. Trust me. Join them.
Well, that time of year is here, the one where people buy books for other people and maybe themselves, right? And one thing you’ve all been waiting for is what I recommend. Brace yourselves: this post has a lot of books in it, and they’re all good.
First of all, I want to tell you something: book choices are personal, and this goes for kids as well as grown-ups. If I tell you that a book is good, and, by the way, I know full well I’m correct– that book may still not be someone else’s taste. For kids who aren’t yet reading to themselves, one other thing is critical: the book must be a pleasure for the adult reading with the child. The book must not just be beautiful and nicely crafted; it must be a good mutual experience between adult and child. Thus, every book I recommend for reading aloud here is one I’ve test-driven, as it were. But, always, think about what other books the kid in question has enjoyed, and choose accordingly.
I’m having a hard time not mentioning books I’ve already recommended this year because they’re so good, so I’m going to start with some of those, some I’ve recommended on previous years, or ones I’ve missed.
As for books I have not yet told you about? And maybe ones that are, as it were, seasonal? Here goes.
First up, I’m giving you what is quite simply the very best new children’s Christmas book I’ve read in a long time: How Does Santa Go Down the Chimney? by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen. I’d say something cute like “it’s just annoying how those two can never turn out a dud together,” but it would be a lie. Every single time I see they’ve teamed up, I get a spurt of joy inside, because I know that I’ll get something beautiful. The bone-deep knowledge that it will be excellent is reassuring, and the anticipation of how it will be new and delightful this time– that’s where the surprise comes in. This time? It’s the child’s eye view, serious and thoughtful, truthful and confident, of what we might call the Physics of Santa. There’s none of this nonsense of pandering to what a child might think; this is a child’s eyes, somehow. Like Crockett Johnson, Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen have not lost the knowledge of childhood, and they have the additional depth of observing and talking with kids of their own to get the cadence of a child’s mental voice. And so the child thinking about how Santa can go down a chimney, not be barked at by dogs, or get into a house that doesn’t have a chimney– that child feels a bit like Harold, to me, only the illustrations are distinctly Jon Klassen. Even when Santa’s doing his laundry because his classic red suit got sooty, I thought, “Oh! Yes. Of course he’d have a sailor tattoo, and be wearing trunks with red hearts on, that makes so much sense.” Because that’s how Jon Klassen does it. He looks at the page, and he says, “I know. This is the visual truth behind Mac Barnett’s words.” And then the words and the art are put into a book, and we, the readers, look and say, “Oh! Yes. Of course.” And that’s that. The logic is perfect. We get the truth in a book– not the truth of how Santa goes down the chimney, we have no idea how Santa does that. But we get the truth of how this child thinks about it, and we, too, are so glad for that child that Santa does it. This is my top “every kid who celebrates Christmas needs this book” idea.
One of the very best reading experiences I’ve had with the Spriggan is– absolutely everything I’ve read him by David Almond. A Way to the Stars by David Almond and Gill Smith is just as beautiful to share with a small child on a lap as The Woman Who Turned Children into Birds, and it’s cozier. It’s a cuddle instead of a soar. This book is good for autumn and winter, somehow, for reading under a blanket together. I don’t know the last time I’ve read a book that was so kind, simply kind to read. Not nice, not charming, not lovely– kind. I’ve never met David Almond, but I’ve got an inkling he must just be an incredibly warm and genuine human being because to be able to convey this sort of feeling on the page– how else could you do that? Well, in this book, Joe wants so badly to find a way to the stars. His friends laugh at him, “In your dreams!,” but his dad pipes up over their jeers. He’s not talking to the other kids; he’s talking to his Joe, who wants a way to the stars. Dad says to let him finish his chores and then the two of them will figure it out. (After reading a plethora of books where parents are busy and distracted and don’t notice their kids, I find it refreshing to see a parent notice what’s going on and come in with a suggestion.) The sparse text, without tags for “he said,” “Joe said,” “Dad said,” is the winner here. There’s one page– you’ll find out which one I mean when you buy it and read it– I’ve never read the same way twice, and I’ve read this aloud many times. It’s a wonderfully flexible book that way; and the flexibility, you’ll see, is the point. Joe does find a way to the stars, however you want to read that. The very elasticity of the text and images is the point; the unwavering truth at the core is the love, joy, and confidence between Dad and Joe. That stability allows everything else to feel elastic; every tumble is a laugh when you’ve got the unwavering support of each other right there.
Speaking of reading aloud– Sergio Ruzzier. There is no picture book author today who is better at creating a voice and structure between words and images on the page to spring into your own story-reading cuddles with a kid around, maybe 4 years old? Though my Spriggan is 3 and absolutely adores every Sergio Ruzzier book we’ve got– and whenever I read him This Is Not a Picture Book!, “No!” said Custard the Squirrel, or The Real Story, children of all ages materialize out of thin air and stand listening and looking at the page over our shoulders. I particularly recommend these for parents who aren’t confident in reading aloud; Sergio Ruzzier has done so much of the work for you that I think it’s impossible not to get lost in the experience. As for The Real Story, has any other parent ever had a vacation-time mishap of the nature, say, of a broken dish and disappearing goodies? Possibly? Have you ever requested an account from a child of what may have occurred? Have you desired to hear “what really happened,” or, perchance, “the real story?” I think this would be a great book to have at hand as unstructured time which may result in such mishaps is on the horizon… But that’s just my ploy to get you to buy it and read it with a kid. The true joy of the book? The true joy is that it’s a story that reveals the joyful, chaotic, yet somehow structured heart of storytelling, and that’s the real story here.
Here’s another Christmas story: Jack and the Manger by Andy Jones with art by Darka Erselji. Now, this is a little harder to come by in hard copy (though well worth the effort), and I’m hoping Running the Goat will reprint it. I do believe they’re considering it. You can get ebook or audio easily, though, and Andy Jones reads beautifully. This is a classic Jack tale, a Jack tale Nativity story. To me, as a medievalist, it evokes the old idea of the Miracle plays, in a way, or of holding a Nativity play at the local manor house. A bit of gently subversive humour here, a grin and a poke there, but without fundamental disrespect. The yearning for peace and joy at the heart of Christmas is there, but the trappings, instead of fluff and syrup, are all in the figure of the folk hero, Jack– so heart and humour are on a pedestal, and the lowliest are up high.
The last picture book I’m going to mention is one I blithely thought was going into the list up top of “books I’ve already told you about,” but apparently I haven’t, if my search tool isn’t deceiving me, but I’m frankly shocked. A Big Bed for Little Snow by Grace Lin is a perfect, quiet, dream of a winter story. Based in Chinese storytelling but feeling somehow like it reaches right into the heart of that “oh, of course!” of any nature explanation myth, it’s the kind of story that as you reach the final pages will make the read-to and the reader-alouder want to flip right back to page one for a second, excited yet cozy, read. I love it, and so does every kid I’ve read it with. That’s rather a lot of kids.
I can’t believe I haven’t told you about one of my “most-recommended” series for kids. The First Cat in Space Ate Pizzaand The First Cat in Space and the Soup of Doom by Mac Barnett and Shawn Harris is, well, very funny, very good characters, wonderful art– yes, of course. Also, they are as clever as anything I’ve ever read. Dante, move over, here comes the real team for a tour of any new and exciting space! Visit the Moon with First Cat and LOZ 4000! Both books have absolutely incredible pacing and, above all, brilliant page turns. One thing I love about these books is how extraordinarily well they combine keeping the kids going on a fabulous adventure, including delicious twists and turns along the way, with bringing in all kinds of wonderful tropes and references that enrich the story and will entertain adult readers, but never feel like winking asides the kids won’t get. Mac Barnett and Shawn Harris are simply, beautifully, brilliant at talking to all their readers at once.
Well, I’m going to confess that I have not read all of the following books for older children, but they are the ones my Changeling stole from a box from Candlewick, won’t give back, and she’s kind of hoarding them in her bed like a dragon hoards gold– or maybe like A-Through-L, the wyvern who is half library from The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, might make his nest. I’m hoping she’ll let me read them one day, since she says they’re superb and that I should really read them. Oh, should I, now?
First up is The Little Match Girl Strikes Back by Emma Carroll and Lauren Child. She stole this one in a fit of outraged skepticism. She absolutely hates the Andersen story, The Little Match Girl, and I’ve told her repeatedly that she’s not alone, even Sendak, who was a huge fan of Andersen, couldn’t stand the awfulness of that story, the saccharine cruelty. I told her this book was supposed to turn the nastiness on its head, and she glared at me disbelievingly and snatched the book. About an hour later she was all aglow with fervour: “This book is great! It takes everything nasty about the story and turns it around– she gets a name and she changes things and does things… It’s really good, and the writing is good, too.” I can’t even say, “I told you so,” because, as mentioned, I haven’t gotten to read it. It’s ok, I’m not bitter. (NB: Homeschooling may seem like a good idea at the time, but your kids get more chances to steal your books. These are the things no one tells you.)
I’m going to be honest– with The Puppets of Spelhorst by Kate DiCamillo I knew I didn’t stand a chance, and, frankly, I don’t have to read it to recommend it. Kate DiCamillo, and look at the cover. Go forth and buy. But I would very much like to read it. As soon as I saw it, I thought of The Magicians of Caprona by Diana Wynne Jones, also with puppets. Eventually, after much exasperating wrangling of trying to get her nose out of the book, I got the following answers: “oh, yeah, I can see that– the puppets, yes.” Asking more, I got, “it’s a book of mysteries you don’t need the answers to.” Well, now I really want to read it. I may just going to get my own copy, dammit.
For books I’ve read that you should definitely give, top of the list are these two. I’ve thought of Osmo Unknown and the Eightpenny Woods by Catherynne M. Valente (pssst if you order at that link and ask in the order comments, you may be able to get a signed copy and– if timing works– you may be able to get it signed and personalized to the recipient) and The Ogress and the Orphans by Kelly Barnhill as a team for so long that I’m surprised I never told you about the wonderful Ogress. The rock, root, and heart of these two books is generosity and understanding. You cannot feel sympathy without empathy, they want you to know. Open your doors, they say. Make a pie and bring it to a neighbour, listen to children, and make that tea for two. These books want to tell you they understand that the world is hard, but they remind you, also, it is also beautiful, and that glittering gold in a dragon’s hoard isn’t more valuable than the kindness in a smile. I can vouch for it that these would be pleasurable to read aloud as a family, a chapter a night, perhaps.
I’m trying to think of a single book that speaks to me more completely as the kid I was than Time of Green Magic by Hilary McKay. Do you know a kid who reads so completely, so deeply, they seem to vanish into the book? This book is for that kid. But its more than that. It’s a book that, as in my daughter’s description of The Puppets of Spelhorst, doesn’t feel the need to tell you every single thing about it. It’s a book that trusts the reader, a book that trusts both kids and parents and reassures them both that they’re loved. It’s a book that understands why you really want to hug the tiger at the zoo, and doesn’t tell you that you’re stupid, but also wants you to be safe. It’s a very understanding and very accepting book. I suggest you read it before giving it to that kid, and if you want to use the “I should know what my kids are reading, just in case there are questions” excuse, I’ll roll my eyes at you but accept it. I think you should read it first because before you know it, it’ll have been dropped in the bath, lost front and back cover, and be totally wrecked with love, so you should read it first. (“Things I’ve Learned from Experience” 27b, section iii.)
I’m going to end with a book I haven’t known how to talk about by an author I consistently fail to be able to discuss cogently: Treacle Walker by Alan Garner. Shortlisted for the Booker should tell you something. Also, I ordered three copies from the UK before it was finally released over here, and when my fabulous cousin told me she was going to London and would I like any books? I asked for “any books on the shelves by Alan Garner– Treacle Walker is wonderful.” (I wish you all cousins as fabulous as mine.) But, still, I couldn’t figure out what to say about the book except that “like all books by Alan Garner, it’s all in the book, all on the pages, there’s nothing else to say.” Finally, I was talking to a friend who reads more literary fiction (as opposed to all of the unliterary fiction on the shelves, I always think), and was trying to tell give her a sense of Treacle Walker so she could make a call on whether to read it. (I’m going to take the leap and give her a copy, which is an act of great trust; I never give copies of this book except where I feel like the relationship can survive “what if they don’t like it?”) I wrote this to her, and I don’t think I can improve on it: “I would say that his books are not so much a read experience as a lived experience. I cannot tell you what they are about, including this one. Ignore the flap copy– the flap copy was written by somebody who was told that they had to write flap copy so that it could be published, and threw something together in desperation. There is no clear ‘about,’ but there is a clear feeling as you read that you are living through an experience that slowly unfolds just the way that when you’re looking at an illustration done in pen and ink with deft lines your eyes are tracing over on the page, they come together in an image, an experience in your mind. This isn’t about plot and character. This is just beautiful writing and something that can only be done in words on a page; not cinema, not a play, not anything but words on a page.” And so, I dare you– read it and see.
Sometimes you just know a book is your heart’s friend, before it’s more than a work in progress. Then– then you have to wait. Wait until you can hold it in your hands.
You may, possibly, end up sending messages to the illustrator every once in a while, exclaiming with joy and excitement over the beautiful samples of the art she’s posted and raving about the energetic lines and ceaseless energy on the page.
Sorry, Barbara. I may have gotten a little carried away.
When I did, actually, hold the review copy I was sent in my hands, I actually teared up from sheer happiness at having it, and with gratitude for being in a place where people actually send me books to look at.
I think that’s relevant to this book. Once upon a time, books for children to enjoy didn’t exist. Then came the story told in Balderdash!, also by Michelle Markel, with art by Nancy Carpenter. But it took still longer for books for children to be taken seriously by many, as literature and art (thank you, Caldecott), and it’s still a struggle. But here, in Tomfoolery!, by Michelle Markel and Barbara McClintock, the story of how picture books with vivid art, for delight and inspiration, started to jump off the pages and sweep us away.
How often do you read a picture book where something doesn’t quite click– a line of poetry doesn’t scan, a character does something out of character, a page turn feels abrupt or too slow, and when you mention it to another adult, they shrug and say, “I mean, you can get away with that in a book for kids,” and then you pick up the Norton Anthology of Important Literature that Leaves Out Sendak and smack them over the head with it? Perhaps that last bit is my fantasy but the number of times I’ve more or less been told to get over myself, it’s just books for kids and kids don’t know better–
When you think about it, I’m actually a very saint for patience; I haven’t once concussed anyone with a pretentious tome.
I’ve got my soapbox right here, so I’m going to climb it and say this loudly and clearly:
Children are whole human beings, just in a smaller size, and they have taste and will voice it.
They’re people and people like all kinds of books, of varying quality. And, in my not inconsiderable experience, the ones kids really go for, interact with, and, most importantly, return to and ask for repeatedly are books that take them seriously. Populate their rooms with excellent books, and you’ll both be happy; that mutual enjoyment is what encourages a love of books as books for years to come.
I feel particularly good, finally posting this review on the Spriggan’s third birthday, because I feel like he walked right out of one of the pages of this energetic, vivid, and vigorous book. This book is a testament to the joy and power of romping right by those who look down on children, and oh isn’t it good to leave those patronizing adults behind?– those who might, like Randolph Caldecott’s father, want to push children from fantasyland to working in a sensible bank when they grow up, get them to graduate from mere picture books to the next thing.
No! We know better, Michelle Markel, Barbara McClintock, Maurice Sendak, Randolph Caldecott– and you, my reader, and I, too. There is no graduating from a truly worthwhile picture book, from one worthy of the Caldecott Medal, named for Randolph Caldecott, whose story is so beautifully rendered, as much in art and design as in words, in this book.
Have you ever doodled in the margins? I did, scraps of dialogue and little scrolls based on manuscript illuminations. I bet you anything Barbara McClintock was (and is) a doodler, and I’m not sure whether Michelle Markel was an art doodler, but who wants to bet she was a word doodler? The page of Caldecott doodling donkey heads on bank stationery made me laugh– as I saw them leaping off the page, and young Caldecott tipping his hat and, quite literally, walking off the right side of the spread, then leaping over the page turn into London with his portfolio under his arm. There, in London, I spotted exactly where my Spriggan would be, watching the fiddler in the street as Caldecott strides into view… until, on the next page, I saw myself in Caldecott, huddled quiet in a chair, missing the countryside and wanting to be better at his craft.
This is the energy of the book. It holds us all, holds multitudes, high and low energy, with ceaseless motion of mind and body, for even as the restless Caldecott lies exhausted in bed, his pencil and pen record the energy of his mind and imagination.
This book is a gift, especially at this time in the picture book world. Today, I feel a caution in the world of picture books; not to offend, not to overstep, not to go too far, and absolutely never should one produce anything that isn’t “age appropriate.” (I still don’t know what’s age appropriate; please don’t tell on me.) Randolph Caldecott feels breathless, incautious, and frenetic. And there, on one spread, we see the range of what he has given us– the left asks us: “Randolph Caldecott– WHAT HAS HE DONE?” while the right side tells us of the joy and worlds he has given children through his characters, while below the words we see the Caldecott Winners of the future (and how I loved to see Sendak and Pinkney of blessed memory alongside Sophie Blackall).
(Let me have an aside on Jerry Pinkney, I know both author and illustrator won’t mind a bit: have you read Just Jerry? You must, I promise you. Oh it gave me all the feelings in the world. Seeing that picture of him with his lion and mouse, so daring and so vivid, just as Caldecott would have loved, gave me a warm glow.)
Above those Caldecott winners I see the wind blowing and birds flying, and I can only hope the winds are carrying the caution of these times, rambunctiously thrown aside by artists today, and letting more experiments fly with the birds. Randolph Caldecott paved the way, as Michelle Markel and Barbara McClintock so ably demonstrate here, to giving children art as deft and brilliant as any in galleries– literature that blends art and texts and creates new worlds. This book is not just an ode to a great figure, but a testament to the fact that you neither can nor should “get away with it in a book for kids.” Kids are people, whole people, and merit the very best, as do those reading with them. This book is the very best, and its creators did full justice to the glorious history of the picture book.
This is my third whack at writing this and by God I will post this today. I absolutely refuse to let war take more comfort and beauty from us, and, come hell and/or high water, I will post this review before the book is released, which is tomorrow. First things first, then: the book is The Little Books of the Little Brontës by Sara O’Leary and Briony May Smith, and you can just skip everything else here and take my word for it that you really, really want to go buy this book from your local indie, or from mine, and I ever so kindly supplied the link. Now, two paragraphs about the bitter crap, referenced yesterday, too, in my post here, or you can skip down and read the review.
A few notes about the Situation of All Things. I’ve been coping with a lot– well, I could leave it at that, couldn’t I? I think it’s true of many of us. This is my primary “place I write things” on the internet, but I should let you know that I do, in fact, have other places I appear. Notably, these days, I review Jewish books over at Kolture, which I link to as a whole due to the wide variety of excellent stuff there, but you can search for the Children’s Bookroom and find me. Once upon a time I was on a little site called Twitter which was ultimately acquired in a positively presidential tantrum by a poor fellow who was very annoyed people were saying mean things about him, but after he broke the site, I did a bit of soul-searching and realized something: I only ever joined any social media account because I felt an obligation to the publishers who sent me review copies and, above all, to the authors and illustrators (such as Sara O’Leary and Briony May Smith down below this paragraph– I promise I’m getting to you!) to give them easy ways to share my reviews telling people the books are good. What that means, and I swear I’m not only this dense, is that I feel this is professional. (I honest to God am not always this stupid, but yes this only just dawned on me.) So, I started an Instagram account I’ll tell you about (I’ll add a nice linky button on the main page, too, when I get to it, but here it is in the post): find me @childrensbookroom on Instagram, and here’s a link that’s supposed to take you there if you do use Instagram…
… and it’s actually been fun to just post pictures of review copies, random books I love, so it’s a bit of additional stuff about kids’ books, if that’s your cup of tea. And I guess that takes me from the Musk world to the Gawd-help-us Zuckerberg world. Well, ultimately, as I said: this is my home base, so this is where I’m all dug in, and you will always find me here, with lots of bookish things. This is the home of “Deborah seeking excellence in children’s literature,” and I do not intend to change that.
To the book! I’m going to be blunt about this one: I’ve been excited about this book since it was a scintilla of an idea mentioned by the author on what-was-Twitter-at-the-time, back when that website was still a mostly reliably useful place to get publishing news, not that I’m bitter. I recall Sara O’Leary mentioning that she thought it would be fun to do a book on the little books the Brontë children used to make. I think one of Charlotte Brontë’s little books was up for sale at the time (it ultimately went, as it ought, to the Parsonage), and there was a flurry of excitement. I responded with, I’m certain, my usual level of articulate encouragement (“Dear God, you have got to write that,” or some level of equally embarrassing burbling through the keyboard at an innocent author).
I was, therefore, lucky to notice and receive periodic updates that the book was happening: there was a deal, a title, an illustrator, a release date, and, finally, a review copy (which my daughter tried to steal; not unusual, but I did, I admit, demand first reader’s rights to this one). And this is the book! The Little Books of the Little Brontës by Sara O’Leary and Briony May Smith, a perfect match of author and illustrator.
I’m not sure where to begin with this, except that I want you to trust me that this is a book you and your family and your school and your library and your class and your friends need.
I have written a few times now about books that feel completely honest and say more than the words on the page. Sara O’Leary, in particular, exemplifies this in large part by her trust to her illustrators, and Briony May Smith more than proved herself trustworthy in this book, meaning that the book is charged, in the interplay of text and art, with vigour, beauty, and imagination. (I’m a little gutted this one won’t be eligible for the Caldecott due to residency rules, but I’m interested to watch myriad other awards– this is a winner.)
The basic, underlying truth of this book is that children love small books. (I kind of hope that a tiny companion book comes out, Tundra? Or tiny notebooks for Christmas gifts?) This is known, it’s not a mystery. Think of Beatrix Potter and the small size she advocated for when she wrote Peter Rabbit, and think of The Nutshell Library. The size was the point, for that. But have you never seen children making their own small books? It’s such a common game among the imaginative set.
Interesting personal story: I’ve twice done a “make your own picture book” class for groups of children. I make them each a dummy book for page layout before they create the final book. The students are always, always enchanted by the tiny dummy book. They’re excited to do the final book because it’s their book, of course. But they squeal over the little dummy book.
Sara O’Leary takes us back in time and shows us that children have always been children, and tells the child who loves to make a small book today that they’re not alone and have companions in storytelling. I felt very much that she was talking to me approximately 28 years ago. (Sara, would you very much mind nipping back 28 years to tell me then that I’d be able to talk to a real live author in the future? It would mean an awful lot.)
Now, this is not the first Brontë-world book I’ve written about. I’m shocked to see that The Glass Town Game was published six years ago (it still feels like yesterday to me), but these two books really feel partnered in my mind: They are the books of an author who loves another author and wants to share the secret heart of what makes the books magical with a new generation. “Here, this is the glorious soul of my beloved books; I’m giving you a gift.”
In The Glass Town Game, Catherynne M. Valente wanted to share the worlds the Brontë children lived in: their characters, their games, their gloriously vivid imaginings. The Little Books of the Little Brontës is similar in many ways, but, speaking to a younger audience, it reaches to a more basic level of sharing. Charlotte is making Anne a little book. My Changeling has made the Spriggan many little books, which, of course, we keep as carefully as we can while also letting the Spriggan hug and enjoy and destroy them– it’s a bit of a process. Any child in that zone between my two will be caught by this picture book of story-hungry children hiding and running and playing and then writing their little books between themselves. “The books they write are tiny, but the worlds inside them are huge,” Sara O’Leary writes. If that doesn’t make the kid on your lap light up with recognition, I’m not sure what will.
(I normally balk at backmatter, I really prefer to let a book stand on its own– but who can resist the “How to Make Your Own Little Book” at the back of this one?)
And it’s not just the text. It’s not even just Briony May Smith’s illustrations in the book, though they are active and calm and evocative of the Parsonage and the moors… It’s the book as a book. I do have pictures of under the dust jacket and of the endpapers but I’m not sharing them because I want you to go buy the book and look for yourself, touch the cover yourself! Although the book isn’t tiny, it feels somehow private. The endpapers feel like a scrap of wallpaper the children might have found and used for a cover. The cover under the dustjacket feels like a Victorian cameo, almost.
What is it about the Brontës as a topic? The Glass Town Game also felt like an intimate read, just for me. My daughter, when she read it, felt just the same, and played at being Emile Brontë for a week or so. Now, here we have another Brontë book, and it also feels intimate, lovely, and just perfect for a cozy read followed by, perhaps, accidentally leaving a bunch of nice scrap paper where a child could find it.
Watch this space for a giveaway. Books like these are to be shared, giving children that space to see the hugeness of the worlds inside them recognized on the page, so they’ll set them down on other pages, whether small or large.
For crying out loud, I have two draft book reviews sitting while the world burns and I will get them out next week, but right now I have a thing to say. Apparently, from the ferocity with which everyone is posting everything right now, so does everyone else. While everyone else is suddenly an expert in geopolitics and religion and ethics– I’m sticking to what, to be quite clear, I arrogantly believe I’m an expert in: books for kids.
For Jews right now, times are scarier than they’ve ever been in my lifetime, and let’s also be candid and acknowledge that for a wide variety of other people times are scary and bewildering, too; but those are not my worlds and while each of you who is scared and bewildered has my sympathy, I’m not speaking to what I don’t know.
Now, when times are scary, the instinct for many parents is to look for resources. Frequently, those resources are external. Why? We so often need something to “start the conversation” or “help show something I’m not expert about.” Today, doing French storytime at my wonderful library, I asked one of the excellent children’s librarians (and the Brookline Public Library has a stellar team) whether they’d had parents checking in about the situation in Israel and Gaza. “Parents are definitely looking for books on Israel. Do you have thoughts?” Well, honestly, I’m not sure she was asking that last question I jumped in so fast. “There’s only one book they need, and it’s not about Israel,” I told her, “it’s The Woman Who Turned Children into Birds.“
And I’m going to tell you what I told her and what I’ve told others:
Books for children on Israel, Palestine, anything supposedly relevant to this situation which is not so much “complicated” as people are delicately saying, but impassioned, ugly, bitter, scary, heroic, and an intensely messy morass of overwhelming feelings, are utterly irrelevant to what’s going on. You will not find the information you need in books for children, because, first of all, the information does not exist, and, second, the conversation you want to open with them is about the messy morass of overwhelming feelings, not about the geopolitics.
Let me unpack that. The information doesn’t exist because what adults want is someone to sort out “the situation” so it can be simple on the page. Ibrahim X. Kendi could write The Antiracist Baby because, honestly, that’s a pretty simple concept: there’s systemic racism in the world and it’s not enough to acknowledge that passively, we must actively combat it. All of that is in that board book. (I do not love it as a board book, too many words, but it doesn’t avoid a single thing and it’s pitched right for a child older than board book age.) Books on Israel and Palestine avoid a huge amount. Please look at my review of Homeland, probably the most recent picture book relating to the region from a mainstream publisher, and you will see that even back then I was saying the same thing: I was looking for more openess, and, I presume, the author felt a good deal more than she wrote down. Now, the situation in Gaza is not simple, and if you think it is, you’re wrong– and with that statement I offended at least one reader who passionately supports the people of Gaza and one reader who passionately supports the Israelis, right now, before I got to the period of the sentence. Bam, I proved my point. You can’t write a picture book while you are trying to avoid that truth. I italicize that because I think it is absolutely possible to write that picture book, but first you have to admit that you have to accept the morass of feelings involved. To be blunt, publishing today will not risk that. (Dear publishers: prove me wrong, I beg you.)
To my second point, the conversation you need to open is about the messy morass of overwhelming feelings, not about the geopolitics. Why? That’s the part we parents don’t want to deal with, and where we need the support! If we were ok with that, we could totally handle sharing the geopolitical scenario with no problem. We’re overwhelmed with feelings, we’ve been crying in the shower so they won’t hear us! Well, with my earnest sympathy because I, too, have cried in the shower so I wouldn’t be heard, stop that. Kids know something scary is going on and will be imbibing your fear and anxiety but not the tools to cope with those feelings; help them get the tools by facing the fear.
I recommended, above, The Woman Who Turned Children Into Birds by David Almond and Laura Carlin for good reason. When Nanty Solo comes to town, the adults are terrified of this strange woman who turns children into birds. The children are warned away and they want her to leave. The children, however, long to fly and, strange to tell, prohibitions don’t work– they go to her anyway. The adults are horrified and Nanty Solo says, “But what on earth are you frightened of?” (Orthodox Jews don’t get tattoos, but if I ever had one, it would be of those words.) Ultimately, the adults do join the children, and oh they all have the glorious freedom of the sky.
Isn’t that it? All of it, all in one glorious experience of reading with a child on your lap and beautiful art to match? And, snuggled together, you can whisper that you’ve been afraid, that you have friends you fear for, family you love, and you wish they could fly.
I promise you, after that, I believe that you know what your kids are ready to hear about the geopolitics, and I trust you to share that. I will, of course, disagree with you on some points. The situation in Gaza, after all, is not simple or it would have been resolved long ago.
The good thing about this is that any book that is honest, emotionally honest, will help you. Are you angry? Where the Wild Things Are is all anger and heart and the raw passion of gnashing teeth and rolling eyes. Are you feeling either that you wish you could open your home and your heart to everyone in pain (The Mouse Who Carried His House on His Back) or thinking more about the instability of homes in the world at all (The Shelter)? Or maybe you’re finding that you’re feeling really out of place wherever you are, you’re trapped in a wrong place and words are all wrong– you feel… I Talk Like a River. (And, by the way, if you’re thinking, “No! I can’t do that! Or I do feel no I don’t but I can’t–!” then read these to yourself first and maybe think about seeking help for you right now.)
And do you know what else is good? These books will help with everything else, too. The situation in this world, humans with other humans, is not simple, or else we’d have been living in harmony long ago. I trust you to share this with your kids. But don’t look for single-serving books about a thing; look to share the honest, raw beating heart inside, and only extraordinary, pulsing books can help you there.
The Children's Bookroom 