A Hale ‘Pale Male’ Makes Way for Hawklets

A picture book tells the story of an urban red-tailed hawk and the international outcry that erupted when the management of a Fifth Avenue co-op destroyed its nest

Pale Male: Citizen Hawk of New York City. By Janet Schulman. Illustrated by Meilo So. Knopf, 32 pp., $16.99. Ages 4 and up.

By Janice Harayda

Make way for hawklets. This delightful picture book tells the true story of a red-tailed hawk who became a star after he and his mate began raising chicks on a ledge on posh building on Fifth Avenue in the 1990s. Birdwatchers named him Pale Male and gathered in Central Park to study his family with binoculars and telescopes.

But residents of 927 Fifth Avenue disliked having their sidewalk littered with feathers, bird droppings and the remains of rats, pigeons and the occasional squirrel that the hawks ate. They persuaded the owners of the building to remove the hawks’ nest, an act that set off an international outcry and homegrown protests that — even in a city full of exhibitionists — commanded attention.

“Two protesters dressed as birds urged cars on Fifth Avenue to ‘Honk 4 Hawks.’” Janet Schulman writes. “Taxis, cars, and city buses honked. Trucks let out ear-piercing blasts of their air horns. Even fire trucks let loose their sirens.”

After the Audubon Society and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service got involved, the owners of the building restored the nests. And all of it could have turned into another of the dreary lectures on environmentalism that have come to infest picture books.

But Pale Male has less in common with those sermons-in-print than with Robert McCloskey’s endearing 1941 Caldecott Medal–winner Make Way for Duckings. Like that tale of Boston policeman who stops traffic so a family of ducks can cross the street, this book isn’t a brief for animal rights. It’s a celebration of wild creatures and the joy they can bring when, against the odds, they cross our urban paths.

Schulman clearly sympathizes with the hawks, but her text suggests why others might have different views, as do the wonderful illustrations, created with watercolor inks and colored pencils. One picture shows a sweeper in the hands of the pained-looking doorman who has to clean up the mess left by the hawks. Meilo So uses shifting visual perspectives to show New York City as it might look to the varied players in this drama — Pale Male soaring above Central Park, birdwatchers tracking him with their binoculars, a rich couple despairing in their plush co-op about the din caused by honking taxis and protestors. Schulman’s afterword on Pale Male is good, too: “He has now won the status of a true New York celebrity: his building is pointed out by tour-bus operators.”

Best line/picture: Both Schulman and So tweak wealthy residents of 927 Fifth in ways that are amusing but not mean. The rich couple despair in a living room that has faintly Victorian décor, including red walls and a rolled-arm red velvet sofa. It’s a subtle way of suggesting that they’re out of touch.

Worst line/picture: “Most of the tenants had been irked for years that they couldn’t legally get rid of the hawks. Then in 2003, during a time when many conservation and wildlife laws were being relaxed by President George W. Bush’s administration, the Migratory Bird Treaty was changed. It now permitted destruction of nests as long as there were no chicks in the nest. Hawks lay their eggs in March and the chicks fledge in June. In December Pale Male’s nest was empty. The owners of the hawk building were quick to take advantage of the new law.”

The problem with this paragraph isn’t really the jab at Bush but that, atypically for Schulman, it’s confusing. Why the sudden jump from June to December? Why does the paragraph say that the nest was “empty” then when the following one suggests that it was gone? And why does it call the people who lived in 927 Fifth Avenue “tenants” instead of “residents” when the building was a co-op?

Furthermore: Pale Male is likely to receive – and deserves – serious consideration for the American Library Association’s Caldecott Medal or one of its annual awards for “information books.” This is one of the year’s best gift books for children and maybe even a mother who loves bird-watching.

Update: Pale Male www.palemale.com and his current mate, Lola, still live on their ledge at 927 Fifth Avenue, but no more chicks have hatched since the nest was removed and restored. An update on their plight appeared in an article the May 1, 2008 New York Times, “Reprise: The Fifth Avenue Ballad of Pale Male and Lola.”

Published: March 2008 www.randomhouse.com/kids

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com

Ewww, It’s ‘Purplicious’ by Victoria Kann and Elizabeth Kann

Seeing red about the “Pinkalicious” series

Purplicious. Story by Victoria Kann and Elizabeth Kann. Pictures by Victoria Kann. HarperCollins, 32 pp., $16.99. Ages 4 and up.

By Janice Harayda

A reviewer for the American Library Association’s Booklist magazine said diplomatically that the art for Pinkalicious “won’t win any awards.” And a critic for School Library Journal showed a similar gift for understatement when she said that the title character can be “a bit obnoxious.” But the character known as Pinkalicious has inspired a New York show, Pinkalicious: The Musical. And the first book about her became a bestseller, aided by the pink-cupcake parties that the publisher urges parents to hold in her honor. What’s going on?

Pinkalicious is a young school-age girl with fixation on pink that borders on Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. In Pinkalicious she ate so many pink cupcakes that her skin and hair turned pink, then returned to normal after her doctor prescribed eating green vegetables. That premise might have seemed iffy enough in a book likely to reach many children who have a shaky grasp on biological cause-and-effect. But Pinkalicious and her companions were also so nasty, they set off a flurry of complaints on Amazon.com and elsewhere. And they clearly didn’t go to charm school before the sequel appeared.

In Purplicious, Pinkalicious cries into her pink hankie when her classmates taunt her about her love of pink. But she eventually makes a friend named Purplicious who decides that “Pink is powerful” after learning that she can change the color of a blue cake to purple by adding pink to the paint.

The problem with all of this isn’t really the stereotypical love of pink, though that alone might give some parents pause. A lot of preschoolers – and their older sisters – do love pink. And the creators of the series try to subvert the stereotype by having Pinkalicious’s classmates favor black, so that she’s the oddball.

The problem is partly that in Purplicious, Pinkalicious’s love of pink expresses itself, in part, in a rampant consumerism. Pinkalicious has “more than a hundred pink possessions” in her pink room: “I had a pink phone, a pink crayon, a pink piggy bank, pink underwear, a pink tiara, even a giant pink bunny.” She also sounds as though she’s competing in Junie B. Jones impersonation contest. She’s rude to her parents and brother and doesn’t apologize. And her friends are worse. “Pink is putrid,” one tells her. “Yeah, pink stinks!” adds another.

A more imaginative author – say, Rosemary Wells or Babette Cole – could have spun a girl’s fascination with pink into a witty fantasy without any of the meanness or commercialism. Another illustrator could have served up better art than Victoria Kann’s flat, digitized pictures of big-headed characters with bland features As it is, Pinkalicious is less an engaging character than an emerging brand. How long do you think it will take before some of her “hundred pink possessions” start showing up in stores?

Best line: None

Worst line: A typical line of dialogue: “Eww, it’s sooooo ugly.”

Published: 2007 www.elizabethkann.com

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

www.janiceharayda.com

Why Are Some Parents Seeing Red About ‘Pinkalicious’?

A reviewer for the American Library Association’s Booklist magazine said the pictures in Pinkalicious “won’t win any awards.” And School Library Journal admitted that its main character, a pink-obsessed girl named Pinkalicious, can be “a bit obnoxious.” But the book has inspired a New York musical and a new sequel. Has Pinkalicious become less obnoxious in Purplicious? Find out tomorrow when One-Minute Book Reviews reviews the series in its regular Saturday Children’s Corner.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

What I’m Reading — ‘Retribution,’ ‘Early Bird,’ ‘The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,’ ‘Purplicious’ and More

After weeks on the waiting list, I got The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao from the library. I’ve read only the first few pages of the book, which won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction, but they may be strongest opening pages I’ve read in a recent novel.

I’ve also started two nonfiction books that, so far, are terrific: Max Hastings’s new Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 and Rodney Rothman’s Early Bird: A Memoir of Premature Retirement. Hastings is a former foreign correspondent and Journalist of the Year in Britain, and the first 20 pages of his book are better than any 20 I’ve read by Stephen Ambrose (and a potential Father’s Day gift if Dad loves military history). Rothman is a former head writer for the Late Show With David Letterman, his book is charming account of his extended stay at the age of 28 in Florida retirement community, which I missed when it came out in 2005.

Did the library gods decide to reward me for slogging through all those Delete Key Awards books in February and March by sending only good books my way in late April? I might have thought so — until I read Purplicious, the sequel to Pinkalicious, both of which have some parents seeing red. More on those two on Saturday.

(c) 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Classic Picture Books Every Child Should Read — ‘The Story of Ferdinand’ — Burned by Hitler and Beloved by Children

Three generations have grown up with a tale of a gentle bull who would rather smell the flowers than fight

The Story of Ferdinand. Story by Munro Leaf. Pictures by Robert Lawson. Many editions. Ages 2 and up.

By Janice Harayda

The Story of Ferdinand is regarded today as a classic parable about nonviolence. But this delightful tale has little in common with the dreary lectures you find in many picture books on the same topic.

Ferdinand is young Spanish bull who likes to sit under a cork tree and “smell the flowers” instead of butting heads with other bulls his age. So he doesn’t seem to have a chance when scouts come looking for “the biggest, fastest, roughest bull to fight in the bull fights in Madrid.” But when Ferdinand sits on a bumblebee, he turns for an instant into a different creature and is hauled off in a cart to face the matador. In the bull ring he sees the flowers in the hair of the female spectators and “just sat down quietly and smelled.” So people have to take Ferdinand home to his pasture with the cork tree. And there, we learn on the last page, “He is very happy.”

Robert Lawson’s black-and-white etchings add wit and drama to Munro Leaf’s story while allowing Ferdinand to remain a bull, not a four-legged boy. Lawson’s justly celebrated pictures include perhaps the most exciting endpapers ever to appear in a picture book: They show children on a Madrid street pointing to a poster of a bull that says: “El Toro Feroz … Ferdinando.” Who says four-year-olds can’t appreciate irony?

First published in 1936, The Story of Ferdinand has a unique place in American children’s literature as “the first picture book labeled subversive,” the children’s author Sheryl Lee Saunders writes in Anita Silvey’s The Essential Guide to Children’s Books and Their Creators (Houghton Mifflin, 2002):

“Ferdinand created a global controversy overnight. The Story of Ferdinand was denigrated and banned in civil war–torn Spain, scorned and burned as propaganda by Hitler, and labeled in America as promoting fascism, anarchism, and communism. Others heralded the innocent bovine as an international emblem of pacifism.”

Leaf responded by saying that he wrote the story simply to amuse young children, and amuse it does. The Story of Ferdinand has appeared in more than 60 languages, has never gone out of print and has come out in a book-and-CD set. All of it makes this a supreme example of how children respond to a great story, told at the right level, even if their elders complain about its politics. As Saunders noted:

“Leaf’s ability to establish a strong character and comic situation with so few words is extraordinary; so, too, is Lawson’s gift at interpreting Leaf’s understated humor with spirited images that accurately reflect the emotions portrayed in the text. Both talents combined inseparably to craft the perfect picture book.”

Best line (the most famous): “He liked to sit just quietly and smell the flowers.”

Worst line: None. But the “just” in “He liked to sit just quietly” may sound to contemporary ears as though it’s in the wrong place in the sentence.

Published: 1936 (first edition), Most recent edition: September 2007 Puffin Storytime book-and-CD set, which includes the unabridged text of the original.

Furthermore: The Story of Ferdinand is one of many great picture books that didn’t get a Caldecott Medal or Honor designation. Leaf received a 1939 Caldecott Honor for his second picture-book collaboration with his friend Robert Lawson, Wee Gillis.

Reviews of books for children or teenagers appear on Saturdays on One-Minute Book Reviews. “Classic Picture Books Every Child Should Read” is an occasional series on the site.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

J. K. Rowling Will Lose, and Here’s Why

First, these words are being written by someone who thought Hillary Clinton couldn’t win New Hampshire after she got emotional a few days before the primary.

Second, I have no right to be writing about J. K. Rowling’s legal affairs, given that a) I have never finished a Harry Potter novel; b) I don’t usually cover publishing news; and c) my first-hand knowledge of Rowling consists almost entirely of having twice seen her on the street in front of a Tesco supermarket when I was living near her neighborhood in Edinburgh.

Even so, I must say it: Rowling and Warner Bros. Entertainment will lose their lawsuit against RDR Books, the would-be publisher of a book based on the Harry Potter Lexicon Web site www.hp-lexicon.org, which went to trial this week in a federal court in Manhattan. Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia University and copyright expert, made the best case I’ve read against her claims in an article in Slate in January
www.slate.com/id/2181776/pagenum/all/#page_start. The gist of it is that while Rowling has many rights as an author:

“ … Rowling is overstepping her bounds. She has confused the adaptations of a work, which she does own, with discussion of her work, which she doesn’t. Rowling owns both the original works themselves and any effort to adapt her book or characters to other media—films, computer games, and so on. Textually, the law gives her sway over any form in which her work may be ‘recast, transformed, or adapted.’ But she does not own discussion of her work—book reviews, literary criticism, or the fan guides that she’s suing. The law has never allowed authors to exercise that much control over public discussion of their creations.”

Wu didn’t predict that Rowling would lose, only expressed the view that she should, but that doesn’t need to stop the rest of us, does it?

That’s all I have to say, except that a) the Tesco in EH 8 has excellent white Stilton with apricots and b) I did predict the winner of this year’s Pulitzer for fiction.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com

Michael Dirda on Daniel Pinkwater’s ‘Sure-Fire Winners’ for Children

Michael Dirda is America’s best critic of books for children. He is also one of its best critics of books of any kind. Dirda won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism as a writer for the Washington Post and is the author of five books, including Classics for Pleasure (Harcourt, 2007). He writes about Daniel Pinkwater in these excerpts from a list of “sure-fire winners” for children in his Readings: Essays & Literary Entertainments (Indiana University Press, 2000), a collection of his work for the Post:

The Big Orange Splot (Scholastic, 32 pp., $4.99, paperback, ages 2 and up): “What Ferdinand is to nonviolence, this book is to nonconformity. When a seagull drops a bucket of paint on an ordinary house, Mr. Plumbean is led to create the home of his dreams – to the consternation of his neighbors.”

Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars (Dutton, 248 pp., varied prices and editions, ages 8 and up). “If I could have written any children’s book in the world, this is the one I would choose. Two misfit kids wander into a rundown part of town, purchase the Klugarsh mind-control system from a mysterious shopkeeper, and then embark on a series of hilarious and surprising adventures. Boyhood dreams come true … Almost as good: The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death.”

Visit the Michael Dirda archive at the Washington Post at www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/style/columns/dirdamichael/.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com

Jack Prelutsky’s Worst Book? The Magic Is Gone in ‘The Wizard,’ Illustrated by Brandon Dorman

A popular children’s poet casts no spell when he recycles earlier material

The Wizard. By Jack Prelutsky. Illustrated by Brandon Dorman. HarperCollins/Greenwillow, 32 pp., $16.99. Ages 4–8.

By Janice Harayda

The Wizard is the only picture book that a bookstore clerk has ever tried to talk me out buying. I wish I had taken her advice.

You know that how critics say that there’s a curse of the Nobel that keeps writers from doing great work after they become laureates, which Gabriel García Marquez beat with Love in the Time of Cholera? Jack Prelutsky seems to suffer from a similar jinx. Two of his worst books have come out since the Poetry Foundation named him the children’s poet laureate of the U.S., a title unrelated to the honor conferred by the Library of Congress. Early in 2007 Prelutsky served up uninspired sports poems in Good Sports. Now there’s The Wizard, a picture book based on the time-honored literary principle that Maureen Dowd has described as: “Never sell once what you can sell twice.”

The Wizard consists of a brief rhyming poem about sorcery that first appeared in Prelutsky’s 1976 book, Nightmares: Poems to Trouble Your Sleep. A magician who might have been airlifted from Hogwarts to his gray stone tower in a suburbia turns a bullfrog into a flea and the flea in to mice. He then causes other transformations until he brings the frog back with a warning that departs from the iambic tetrameter used elsewhere: “Should you encounter a toad or lizard, / look closely … / it may be the work of the wizard.”

As those strained lines suggest, The Wizard is the kind of weak poem that works best in a collection that includes stronger ones. And it gets no help from the lurid, digitized pictures, long on a shrill lime green with silver glitter on the cover. “It’s so commercial,” protested the bookstore clerk who tried to talk me out of buying it. She was right: If the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders wore green and white instead of blue and white, they might choose the shades in this book.

There’s a place for honest commercialism in children’s literature – for, say good spin-offs television shows – but the illustrations for The Wizard are among the most pretentious I’ve seen in a picture book. Brandon Dorman scatters the pages with objects found in Dutch vanitas paintings — a skull, a clock, flickering candles. In art these are classic symbols of mortality and the flight of time. In this book they are just clichés.

Prelutsky has written many good books of children’s poetry, including Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant, that don’t pander as this one does to the marketplace. But he may have little incentive to do more of them: The Wizard was a No. 1 New York Times bestseller.

Best line / picture: None is a good as a typical line in Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant. But these two lines make clear that four-year-olds can understand iambic tetrameter: “He spies a bullfrog by the door / and, stooping, scoops it off the floor.”

Worst line / picture: The wizard has “a tangled beard that hangs from his skin.” But in nearly all of Dorman’s pictures, the beard is as smooth as satin.

Published: October 2007 www.jackprelutsky.com, www.brandondorman.com and www.harpercollinschildrens.com.

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© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com

An Aardvark Gets the Last Laugh on a Bully in ‘Arthur’s April Fool’

Arthur and his friends hope to outwit a tyrant at a school assembly

Arthur’s April Fool (An Arthur Adventure). By Marc Brown. Little, Brown, 32 pp., $6.99, paperback. Ages 4–8.

By Janice Harayda

Wax lips. Rubber spiders. Sneezing powder. Remember how great April Fool’s Day used to be before the schools banned everything that was actually fun?

If you don’t, Marc Brown will remind you of it in this early installment in his picture-book series about Arthur, a friendly aardvark who wears owlish James Joyce glasses and dresses like the late Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. In Arthur’s April Fool, Arthur gets the last laugh on Binky Barnes, the school bully, at an April Fool’s Day assembly and shares the fun with the anthropomorphic animals from other species who form his circle of friends.

Brown’s cartoonish art tweaks the artifacts of Sputnik-era world that his characters inhabit — bunny slippers, Tinker Toys, chocolate cream pie, a red rotary telephone and a book called How to Win Friends and Influence People (written by “B. Peel,” a banana). And it’s too late to protest that his audience won’t get the jokes: Arthur got a show on PBS more than a decade ago and, in 2002, made TV Guide’s list of “the 50 greatest cartoon characters of all time.”

Best line/picture: Arthur’s sister, D.W., asks after Binky Barnes threatens to pulverize her brother: “After you get pulverized, can I have you room?”

Worst line/picture: The How to Win Friends and Influence People joke would have been funnier if Brown hadn’t used the real title of the book but had given it a slight twist the way he gives the name of its author, Norman Vincent Peale, a twist.

Published: 1983 www.marcbrownstudios.com and www.pbskids.org/arthur/.

One-Minute Book Reviews is for people who like to read but dislike hype and review inflation. Reviews of children’s books appear every Saturday on the site.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com

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‘Arthur’s April Fool’ — Coming Saturday to One-Minute Book Reviews

Wax lips. Rubber spiders. Sneezing powder. Remember how much fun April Fool’s Day used to be before the schools outlawed everything that was actually fun? On Saturday One-Minute Book Reviews will review Arthur’s April Fool, a picture book about perhaps the most popular aardvark in the history of children’s literature. In this installment in Marc Brown’s series, Arthur has to thwart a bully who threatens to spoil the April Fool’s Day assembly.

(c) 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Tasha Tudor’s Classic Easter Story About a Young Girl’s Holiday Dream

[This is a repost of a 2007 post.]

A young girl dreams of a magical journey on the back of a fawn in a picture book that’s been a holiday favorite for more than 60 years

A Tale for Easter. By Tasha Tudor. Aladdin, 32 pp., $5.99, paperback. Ages 4–8.

By Janice Harayda

This classic picture book is a kind of Easter counterpart to The Polar Express, though it has a smaller format than Chris Van Allsburg’s Christmas fable. Generations preschoolers and other young children have delighted in Tasha Tudor’s sentimental tale of a girl who, on the night before the holiday, dreams of taking a magical journey on the back of a “wee fawn” that shows her “rabbits smoothing their sleek coats,” lambs “in fields of buttercups” and other gentle creatures of the season.

A two-time Caldecott Honor artist, Tudor uses second-person narration and soft watercolors to show Easter through the eyes of girl who lived at around the time of the Civil War, to judge by her Little Women-ish dresses and bonnet. Tudor sets the tone early: “You never can tell what might happen on Easter. You’re not always sure when it is coming, even though you go to Sunday school … it is only when Good Friday comes, and you have hot cross buns for tea that you know for certain Easter will be the day after tomorrow.” And while a story this sweet won’t appeal to everybody, Tudor has following among all ages, including many adults. And A Tale for Easter is so widely available that you may be able to find in bookstores and libraries at the last minute.

Recommended if … you’re looking for a picture book that evokes the magic of a season of rebirth without getting into Christian theology. A Tale for Easter may especially appeal to a child who sees herself as a “girly-girl.”

Published: 1941 (first edition), January 2004 (Aladdin paperback reprint).

A new review of a book or books for children or teenagers appears every Saturday on One-Minute Book Reviews. To avoid missing these reviews, please bookmark this site or subscribe to the RSS feed. One-Minute Book Reviews is a noncommercial site that does not accept advertising or free books or promotional materials from publishers and provides an independent evaluation of books by an award-winning critic.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

An Interactive Map of Storybook England for Children — Another Reason Why U.K. Tourist Services Are Better Than Ours

An interactive map of storybook England shows places associated with Alice, Black Beauty, Harry Potter and other famous characters

One of the great pleasures of visiting Britain is that the government hires a lot of people who can help you find your way around instead of doing what we do here in the U.S., which is to tell visitors: “You want information about our country? Pray for a taxi driver who speaks English.” Pause. “If that fails, you could always ask the person who mugs you.”

Many of the helpful Brits work for the tourist boards Visit Britain www.visitbritain.com, Visit Scotland www.visitscotland.com and Visit Wales www.visitwales.com. And some of them came up with a great interactive online map of England that lets children learn about places linked to characters in books like Black Beauty, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the Harry Potter series.

I learned about this delightful storybook map from Ceri Radford, who wrote in her blog about books in the Telegraph: “You can browse by book title, then click to find out more about the work and its location. Kudos to Enjoy England, the marketing arm of Visit Britain, for coming up with the idea.” You can read more about it here blogs.telegraph.co.uk/arts/ceriradford/dec07/.

(c) 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Why Laura Ingalls Wilder’s ‘Little House’ Books Aren’t Just for Girls (Quote of the Day / Jonathan Yardley)

Many people think of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books as a series for girls. But is it true? Jonathan Yardley wrote about Wilder’s books his “Second Reading” series in the Washington Post and recalled how much he had enjoyed Little House on the Prairie and Little House in the Big Woods as a child:

“What surprises me a bit in thinking back to my own reaction to these books as a boy is that it seems to have made no difference at all that girls, not boys, were at the center of these stories. Most of my favorite books were about boys — Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s The Story of a Bad Boy, Booth Tarkington’s Penrod and Sam — but I remember with great affection, even if I can remember neither the title nor the author, a memoir of a girlhood spent in Manhattan’s Gramercy Park, and as my reading habits advanced I thought Little Women a much better book than Little Men, which of course it is.

“I say this not in order to lay claim to preternaturally premature feminism, but to make the point that Wilder’s books are open and accessible to readers of both sexes. The girls whom she portrays are thoroughly feminine, but they also know how to load guns and do chores in and out of the house. Indeed, the chief trouble with the Laura Ingalls Wilder industry as it now exists is that it idealizes the girls of the frontier far more than Wilder did. The front cover of my copy of Little House in the Big Woods shows two cute-as-buttons girls in a bright, sunny woods, wearing clothes that look right out of Ralph Lauren. That may be good TV, but it’s bad Laura Ingalls Wilder.”

To read all of Yardley’s comments on Wilder, click here: www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/07/AR2007110702595.html.

(c) 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

www.janiceharayda.com

Ezra Jack Keats’s Trailblazing Picture Book for Ages 5 and Under, ‘The Snowy Day’

A Caldecott medalist often called “the book that broke the color barrier” in mainstream children’s publishing

Winter still has enough muscle here in New Jersey that the library was closed for snow yesterday. So I couldn’t put my hands on a trailblazing book about the kind of weather we’re having now, Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day (Puffin, 40 pp., $6.99, paperback, and other editions). And because I haven’t read it, I’ll have to quote an excellent reference book and hope that teachers, librarians or others will jump in with comments.

“Keats illustrated nearly a dozen books before writing his first, The Snowy Day, which won the 1963 Caldecott Medal,” former children’s librarian Mary Mehlman Burns writes in The Essential Guide to Children’s Books and Their Creators (Houghton Mifflin, 2002), edited by Anita Silvey. “A celebration of color, texture, design, and childhood wonder, The Snowy Day is significant in that it was one of the first picture books in which a minority child is seen as Everychild. Years before, Keats had come across photos of a young boy, and he recalled that ‘his expressive face, his body attitudes, the way he wore his clothes, totally captivated me.’ The boy was to become Peter, who, in his red snowsuit, discovers the joys of dragging sticks and making tracks in the snow. After its publication, Keats found out that the photos had come from a 1940 Life magazine – he had retained the images for over 20 years.

“With solid and patterned paper as wedges of color, Keats www.ezra-jack-keats.org used collage to create endearing characters and energetic cityscapes, not only in The Snowy Day (1962) but also in Whistle for Willie (1964) and Peter’s Chair (1964).”

A generation of readers – black and white – is grateful to The Snowy Day, sometimes called “the book that broke the color barrier” in picture books from mainstream publishers. One of the latest editions is a DVD-and-book gift set that Viking published in September and includes Whistle for Willie.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com

A Great Presidents’ Day Book for 8-to-12-Year-Olds: Russell Freedman’s ‘Lincoln’

If the children’s department of your public library has put up a Presidents’ Day display, it probably includes Russell Freedman’s Lincoln: A Photobiography (Clarion, 160 pp., $20). And well it should. In this innovative book Freedman marries the picture-book and chapter-book forms to create a dynamic portrait of Abraham Lincoln that deals extensively with his youth and early adulthood but also covers his presidency and the Civil War. First published in 1987, Lincoln: A Photobiograpy was one of the most acclaimed books of children’s nonfiction of the 1980s, when it won the 1988 Newbery Medal and “Best Books of the Year” honors from School Library Journal and Publishers Weekly. Freedman has also written other excellent nonfiction books for tweens discussed in an earlier post www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2007/03/03/ (which recommended them for 9-to-12-year-olds, though they may appeal to some younger children who are strong readers).

(c) 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Snowbound With a Child? Don’t Forget ‘Henry and Mudge in the Sparkle Days’

Spring and all those daffodils can seem a long way off if you live in the Snowbelt or even in New Jersey, where we’ve had a frigid week. A book that could get a young child excited about lingering snow is Henry and Mudge in the Sparkle Days: The Fifth Book of Their Adventures (Henry and Mudge Ready-to-Read/Aladdin, 48 pp., $3.99, paperback, ages 4-8), with words by Cynthia Rylant and by Suçie Stevenson. A boy and his affectionate dog enjoy a different winter pleasure – the first snowfall, a Christmas Eve dinner and a family walk at night — in each of three amusing stories by one of the best author-illustrator teams working in the field of beginning-reader books. Other books in the series include Henry and Mudge: The First Book, Henry and Mudge and the Snowman Plan, Henry and Mudge and the Big Sleepover and Henry and Mudge and the Tall Tree House www.henryandmudge.com. A review of Henry and Mudge in the Sparkle Days, also available in hardcover and audio editions, appeared on Dec. 7, 2007 www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2007/12/07/.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

www.janiceharayda.com

www.janiceharayda.com

It’s Easy Being Mean in Jenny Offill and Nancy Carpenter’s Picture Book, ‘17 Things i’m not allowed to do anymore’

A young heroine gets away with her misbehavior by pretending she’s sorry for it in a book for preschoolers

17 Things i’m not allowed to do anymore. By Jenny Offill. Pictures by Nancy Carpenter. Random House/Schwartz & Wade, 32 pp., $15.99. Ages 2–6.

By Janice Harayda

Relentlessly mean-spirited children’s books aren’t new. What is new — and disheartening – is that they are being published for younger and younger ages.

Few fictional characters are more popular among 5-to-8-year-old girls than Junie B. Jones, whose generally remorseless meanness is a driving force in Barbara Park’s series about her. Now Jenny Offill gives us her spiritual descendant in 17 Things i’m not allowed to do anymore, a picture book likely to appeal to 2-to-4-year-olds. Offill’s young school-age heroine does 17 mostly nasty things, from treating her mother rudely to setting fire to friend’s shoe, and gets away with all of them because she pretends to be sorry.

Nancy Carpenter illustrates the misbehavior with an lively combination of pen-and-ink and digital images, printed on crumpled paper filed with an emery board. But nobody needs them when so many children’s authors have created amusing and high-spirited characters who aren’t as smug and manipulative as Offill’s petty tyrant. Any book by Dr. Seuss – or a witty contemporary writer like Rosemary Wells – is worth cartons of this misbegotten effort.

Best line/picture: “I had an idea to wash my hands in the dog’s bowl before dinner.” This is one of the few things the heroine does that’s funny without being mean.

Worst line/picture: The punctuation and capitalization of 17 Things I’m not allowed to do anymore. Yes, that’s how the title appears in the book.

Published: January 2007 www.randomhouse.com/kids

Furthermore: Offill and Carpenter live in Brooklyn, New York.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com

It’s Easy Being Mean in Children’s Picture Books — Coming Saturday

Relentless meanness isn’t new in children’s books. What is new that it’s showing up in books aimed at younger and younger ages. On Saturday One-Minute Book Reviews will review a picture book for preschoolers that exemplifies the trend with a mean-spirited heroine who feels no remorse for her misbehavior.

(c) 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Natalie Babbitt’s Cycle of Stories About an Out-of-Work Pirate, ‘Jack Plank Tells Tales’

The author of Tuck Everlasting returns with a lighter book about a reformed plunderer-of-the-high-seas

Jack Plank Tells Tales. Story and pictures by Natalie Babbitt. Scholastic/Michael Di Capua, 128 pp., $15.95. Ages 7–9 (ages 4 and up for reading aloud).

By Janice Harayda

Jack Plank Tells Tales is the book many parents have been waiting for – a pirate story for children too old for picture books but too young for Treasure Island. It lacks the psychological heft and stylistic perfection of Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting, a modern classic. But it’s several nautical miles beyond many other recent pirate stories, including Peter Pan rip-offs and cheesy movie tie-ins.

Jack Plank is an amiable out-of-work pirate who is cast off the ship Avarice because he lacks a talent for plunder: “You have to yell and make faces and rattle your sword, and once you’ve got people scared, you take things away from them.” So he has to find a new job after he settles into a boarding house on Jamaica in about 1720.

Each day he looks for work, with the proprietor’s 11-year-old daughter as his guide, and finds something wrong with one of his options. He can’t fish because it reminds him of a shipmate’s story of a man who turned into an octopus and can’t work in a sugarcane field because he would have to cross a bridge that brings to mind a sailor’s account of a troll. Each night he entertains the boardinghouse residents with another tale of why he has come up empty-handed, which leads soon to a job that suits him the way a deep harbor suits a galleon.

The stop-and-go narrative makes this book good bedtime reading for children who can handle its two deaths by stabbing even as the lack of a strong forward momentum may make it easier for others to put down. And there’s not much thematic development – this is light entertainment, an amusing cycle of stories billed by the publisher as a novel.

But Babbitt’s engaging pencil drawings – and a handsome jacket and design by Kathleen Westray – help to offset the narrative limits. The refusal of American Library Association www.ala.org to give Tuck Everlasting a Newbery Medal or Honor Book citation may have been the organization’s greatest awards blunder of the past 40 years, compounded by its continual failure to recognize Babbitt with the Margaret A. Edwards award for lifetime achievement. Lois Lowry is a good writer. But why Lowry has won the Edwards award and Babbitt hasn’t is a mystery that this appealing book only deepens.

Best line: Many of the tales in this book develop folkloric motifs such as that of the mummy’s hand, and its story of a girl raised by seagulls has an especially memorable illustration of a feral child.

Worst line: The last: “But it seems to be sure that, as Waddy Spoonton pointed out, it’s never too late to be happy.” This ending is unusually sugary – and clichéd – for Babbitt. And the text doesn’t really prepare you for it.

Published: May 2007 www.scholastic.com

Furthermore: Babbitt won a Newbery Honor Book designation for Kneeknock Rise, a completely inadequate recognition of her body of work from the ALA. As a former vice-president for awards of the National Book Critics Circle, I appreciate the great difficulty of getting literary prizes right. But the ALA is just embarrassing itself on this one.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com

A Tale by the Brothers Grimm Returns in ‘The Bearskinner,’ a Picture Book by Newbery Winner Laura Amy Schlitz and Max Grafe

A former soldier struggles to avoid losing his soul to the devil in a parable about faith, hope and charity

The Bearskinner. By Laura Amy Schlitz. Illustrated by Max Grafe. Candlewick, 32 pp., $16.99. Ages 4 and up.

By Janice Harayda

Laura Amy Schlitz is the newest supernova in the field of children’s literature. For years, she had a passionate following mainly among the students who listened to her stories at the Park School in Baltimore, where she is the librarian. But her visibility soared after she earned raves for her 2006 novel for ages 10 and up, A Drowned Maiden’s Hair. This year she won 2008 Newbery Medal for her cycle of one- and two-person plays, Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!, and she would be equally worthy of a major award for The Bearskinner, her retelling of a Faustian tale by the Brothers Grimm.

The grave and eloquent opening lines of the book set the tone: “They say that when a man gives up hope, the devil walks at his side. So begins this story: A soldier marched through a dark wood, and he did not march alone.” In this tale a hungry and cold soldier returns from war to find nothing left of his home and the people he loved. At his lowest moment, he accepts an offer from the devil, a man with a goat’s hoof for a left foot: For seven years, the soldier will have unlimited gold. But he must wear a bearskin and may not wash, pray or tell anyone of his dark bargain. If he does, he will lose his soul.

Clad in the skin of a bear he has just killed, the ex-soldier goes off to indulge his desires. After three years, he looks like a monster, and people flee from him. He loathes himself, too, and is thinking of ending his life. But he sees a starving mother and child who give him an idea – he will use Satan’s money to feed the poor. This act of charity leads to others that enable him to outwit the devil, throw off his bearskin and marry a kind woman who has seen the good heart behind the repulsive appearance.

All of this has aspects of both a fairy and morality tale. But Schlitz neither sentimentalizes nor preaches, and Max Grafe’s wonderful illustrations remind you the work of the late Leonard Baskin in their boldness, their restricted color palette and their use of fluid body lines to suggest inner turmoil. Grafe sets the text on yellowing pages that resemble parchment, or perhaps charred tree bark, which locates the story in the distant past and may soften its potentially frightening aspects. And his devil is one of the most original to appear in a picture book in years in years. Grafe casts Lucifer as a handsome devil in the literal sense of the phrase, a man who resembles 1930s matinee idol with slicked-back hair and a flowing green cloak. No ogre with a scar, his devil is a smooth operator – just like a lot of devils in real life.

Best line: The first lines of the book, quoted in the review.

Worst line: “He rode to the gambler’s house on a dapple-gray horse.” The use of “dapple-gray” is confusing. Why not “dappled gray”?

Published: November 2007 www.candlewick.com

Furthermore: Schlitz, a Baltimore librarian, won the 2008 Newbery Medal from the American Library Association www.ala.org, for her book of monologues and dialogues, Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices From a Medieval Village (Candlewick, $19.99), illustrated by Robert Byrd. She lives in Maryland. Grafe is a New York printmaker and illustrator.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.