January 16th, 2012
New kids books to start the year right
This Christmas was exceptional for the calibre of picture books that we were given as gifts– so many new discoveries, books exactly in line with the kind of stuff we like, books we’d long been waiting for, though we hadn’t even known it. It was quite a novelty, because as bookish people, we’re used to making our own literary discoveries, used to friends buying us something other than books because they assume we’ve read them all already. But not so! What follows is an absolute trove of delights.
When I Was Small by Sara O’Leary/Julie Morstad: I’ve been buying Sara O’Leary’s Henry books for little people since long before I had a little person of my own. This latest installment is as lovely as the rest, as Henry asks his mother to tell him stories of that long-ago never-never time before he was born, back when she was small. In the pattern of the previous books, she tells him about the small girl she once was, back when she wore the same shoes as her doll, when she had a ladybug for a pet, slept in a mitten, and bathed in a bird bath. And then she shares with Henry a dream she had that connects her past to his present.
There Were Monkeys in My Kitchen by Sheree Fitch/Sidney Smith: We love Sheree Fitch, and 
Nimbus Press’ re-issue of her books by (with new illustrations by Sidney Smith) is cause for celebration. In this rollicking rhyme, Willa Wellougby discovers that her house has been overtaken by a variety of simian creatures, including go-go apes and square dancing monkeys. The monkeys are agents of chaos, and poor Willa has to contend with them alone, because she’s been calling the police and the RCMP and getting no response. And when the Mounties finally arrive, it might just be too late.
I Want to Go to the Moon by Tom Saunders: A picture book biography of Neil Armstrong, in verse! Tom Saunders’ story began as a song, and it’s recorded on the CD included with the book. The illustrations are vivid and engaging, the bouncing verse outlining Young’s story and underlining a message that impossible dreams can be realized. Only problem is that the verse stays in your head, and in our family we’ve taken to hurling, “You’ll never go to the moon, Neil,” as a cryptic insult.
The High Street by Alice Melvin: The Tate publishes books– who knew? And it’s no surprise that 
they’re gorgeously designed and illustrated. This was one of two books that Harriet received for Christmas intended to nurture her inner consumer. In this story, a small girl goes shopping with a rhyming list of things to get, and knocks items off one-by-one. But the best part is wall of the shops cut away so that we get to see inside, and also what’s going on in the space above the shop. A must-have for the English fetishists among us.
The Cow Who Fell in the Canal by Phyllis Krasilovsky: Harriet’s grandmother picked this one up on a recent trip to Holland, and we adored it, as we like vintage picture books in general, and the illustrations are reminiscent of Marjorie Flack’s. This story of a cow who (surprise!) falls into a canal is simple and funny, and its illustrations offer marvelous glimpses of Dutch landscapes.
The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes by Dubose Heyward/Marjorie Flack: 
Speaking of Marjorie Flack, here she is, illustrating this ahead-of-its-time feminist tale. Basically, this is Dee Dee Myers’ Why Women Should Rule the World compressed into storybook bunny form. A single mother bunny is chosen to become the new Easter bunny because the skills she has acquired managing her brood and her household are applicable to the competitive world of egg distribution. Apparently, we can do it all!
Who Will Comfort Toffle? by Tove Jansson: Our first Tove Jansson picture book was The Book of Moomin, Mimble and Little My, much beloved. And we like this one even better, the story of lonely Toffle who’s content to haul his suitcase about and remain the fringes of society. Then he discovers a Miffle who’s in need of comfort as much as he is, so he makes it his mission to track the Miffle down and discover the pleasures (and comforts) of friendship with her. The last page is unbelievably lovely, and I only wish I’d known of it during that period about five years ago when everyone kept asking me to do readings at their weddings.
On Market Street by Arnold Lobel and Anita Lobel. Our second shopping book, written by Arnold 
Lobel (!) and illlustrated by his wife Anita. And it’s an ABC book, and B is for books, so basically this book is perfect, and when T is for toys, we discover a Frog and Toad allusion in the picture. I can’t believe I’d never heard of this one, which won the Caldecott Medal in 1982.
Press Here by Herve Tullet: A book like none I’ve ever seen, but maybe a bit like the iPad. But better. Because it requires imagination to make it go, not to mention fingers for pressing, arms for shaking, breath for blowing the dots away. A truly engaging book with great design, and a lot of fun to “read”.
January 12th, 2012
Nursery Rhyme Comics: 50 Timeless Rhymes from 50 Great Cartoonists by Chris Duffy (ed)
For me, motherhood has been a portal to the wonderful world of comics, and I’ve been making more frequent visits ever since Little Island Comics opened up around the corner from my house. As a child, I never got past Archie, which is not to say I was not a devoted fan, but Archie is hardly the cream of the comics crop. In the company of Harriet, however, I’ve been working my way through Tintin’s adventure The Red Sea Sharks, which is wonderful, and Harriet loves it too, though I’m pretty sure she understands about none of it. She also has a Silly Lilly book that I quite enjoy, and we enjoy the Moomin storybooks so much that we’re going to have get started on reading the comic strip collections.
I also think that it’s rude to hang out in bookstores and not buy anything, so when we were all there a couple of weekends back, we picked out Nursery Rhyme Comics, which was edited by Chris Duffy. Now, you mightn’t have thought that our household needed a fifth Mother Goose Collection, but we did! We did. If you scroll down to the photo of Harriet reading in bed, you’ll see that this book is what she’s been lost to, and her parents like it just as much. It includes some rhymes we didn’t know before, all the favourites we knew already, and each one reborn in the style of a notable contemporary cartoonist. (I am not very cool. The only one I’ve heard of is Kate Beaton, but I know that she is very cool.)
The old woman who lives in the shoe has a rock and roll band, Jack Be Nimble is petulant and ashamed with a hole in his pants, the King of Hearts is a terrible, terrible tyrant who gets what’s coming to him, Little Boy Blue’s sleeping is cause for a party, the hickory dickory dock mouse is actually a bell ringer. The cartoonists’ styles are remarkably contrasting, each one interesting and vivid in its own way, rendering simple nursery rhymes into stories, and this book a remarkably rich collection.
January 5th, 2012
We are pretty impressed with ourselves
Stuart is excited because he built the walls, I am excited because I was the visionary of the floor, and Harriet (who hasn’t seen and/or broken the finished product yet, because it was completed after her bedtime) was pretty enthuasiastic about the opportunity to eat some white glue.
Thanks to Ruth Ohi for the inspiration.
December 8th, 2011
Virginia Lee Burton and the Graphic Novel
I’ve enjoyed Virginia Lee Burton’s books for as long as I can remember, though never more than I have in the past year as I’ve come to understand her approach to book design (and how far-reaching was her influence). Anyway, last weekend our friend Aaron picked our copy of Katy and the Big Snow, which has no dust cover because Harriet has declared it her mission to rid books the world over of their dust jackets (plus the jacket was already battered– this was a discarded library book we bought for a quarter. Jacket has been put away to avoid further battering).
And Aaron said, “Don’t you think this looks like something by Seth?” And we thought, 
“Hey, he’s right,” of course. And because I know very little about Seth or about cartooning, I did a bit of googling, and found this blog post from Drawn & Quarterly entitled “Virgina Lee Burton: Godmother of the Graphic Novel.” So goes the post:
I always find it curious when people draw distinctions between kids comics and kids picture books, basically you’re telling stories with pictures in both instances, and the art can’t be separated from the words. Why is Sara Varon’s Robot Dreams a comic, while Chicken and Cat is not? And really, aren’t graphic novels just pictures books for adults. Semantics, I know.
The post is referring to a slide show with the “Godmother of the Graphic Novel” title presented by cartoonist James Sturm. The site it was published on seems no longer current, and the slideshow itself isn’t functional, which is driving me crazy, because I want to see it so badly! I’ve scoured the internet for Sturm’s contact info, but no dice. So I’m disappointed, but also excited that the importance of Virginia Lee Burton might be greater than I’ve imagined yet.
December 4th, 2011
On urban picture books, and concepts of home
I was holding Harriet’s hand the other day as we walked up the flight of stairs to our door when I heard her say under her little-girl breath, “four flights of stairs to family’s apartment.” I recognized it as a line from Corduroy, and asked her, “Whose apartment?” She said, “Lisa’s.” I said, “Did you know that we also live in an apartment?” She said, “No. We live at home.”
I appreciate Don Freeman’s illustrations in Corduroy, probably for similar reasons black parents would have appreciated them when the book was published in the 1960s: here is a picture book that reflects the reality of my child’s life. Lisa’s is an urban world, with stairwells, department stores, laundromats and sidewalks. And it’s a world far removed from the one that I grew up in, at the end of a cul de sac, with a big backyard. I grew up in neighbourhoods where they didn’t even have sidewalks, and the only store nearby was a Beckers. The families we looked down upon were those with single-car garages, and the families who looked down on us had driveways made from interlocking brick.
Such a childhood served me well– who needs sidewalks when you can play in the street? And manicured lawns are fine and well when there are ravines to explore, and creeks to wade in, and games of Nicky Nicky Nine Doors to be won. But the choices we made for our family would be different– we want to be able to walk to our places of work, and not have to work so much, and not working so much means we don’t own a house, and not owning a house means we get to live in the apartment of our dreams in a neighbourhood close to the places where we work, and so it goes, a most unvicious cycle.
Ours not such an unusual choice, of course, and this is underlined by the so many wonderful children’s books these days depicting urban life. In fact, some of these books commodify urban life to such hipsterish effect– I’m thinking about Urban Babies Wear Black, or the various board books we own about sushi. We’re big fans of Mo Willems’ Knuffle Bunny Books, and for a long time, I would read these and wonder if Harriet’s urban life wasn’t urban enough, and were we denying her a proper childhood in a Brooklyn brownstone? And then I read an article about the time Willems has to spend photoshopping the unsavoury elements of his neighbourhood out of the books’ photographic illustrations, and came to terms with our urban life as it is.
Urban life presented how it is is why we love Bob Graham’s Oscar’s Half Birthday, with the graffiti in its streets and the wonderful rumble of the train overhead. It’s why we love Subway by Anastasia Suen and Karen Katz (“We go down to go uptown. Down down down in the subway”). Joanne Schwartz and Matt Beam’s City Alphabet and City Numbers present city grit in all its glory. And Don Freeman’s contemporary too, Ezra Jack Keats, whose sidewalks and alleys are ways of delight. Even Shirley Hughes’ books with their domestic focus have the city as their backdrop– buses, stoops, parks and traffic.
We are fortunate that some of our very favourite urban stories are set in the city where we live: Allan Moak’s A Big City ABC, poems from Alligator Pie, Who Goes to the Park by Warabe Aska, Jonathan Cleaned Up and Then He Heard a Sound by Robert Munsch, and when Harriet’s bigger, I hope she’ll enjoy Bernice Thurman Hunter’s Booky books as much as I did. One of our favourite books of all time is Teddy Jam’s Night Cars, set against a Toronto streetscape, and we love the familiar TTC as presented in Barbara Reid’s The Subway Mouse. (Find more Toronto kids books as recommended by Imagining Toronto‘s Amy Lavender Harris.)
The urban setting in children’s literature has become one we can almost take for granted over the past 50 years, thanks to pioneering author/illustrators like Freeman and Keats. These days, children’s books are working to further broaden notions of home in stories like Maxine Trottier’s Migrant, about a young girl belonging to a family of itinerant workers. In Laurel Croza’s award-winning I Know Here, a girl whose home is a trailer in Northern Saskatchewan contemplates a move across the country to Toronto, and takes stock of all she knows and loves about the place where she lives. Martha Stewart Conrad‘s books (we like Getting There) show children from communities all over the world enacting various versions of every day life, portraying the fascinating ways in which we’re all alike and different at once.
How wonderful that my child’s storybook worlds can be as diverse as the one we see outside our window. And once she understands that home is a concept that is broader than just this place where we live, she’ll know how hers fits in with all the rest of them.
November 29th, 2011
Frog and Toad: The Letter
Without a bit of exaggeration, I promise you that “The Letter” by Arnold Lobel is the very best short story I’ve read lately. A chapter in Lobel’s book Frog and Toad Are Friends, “The Letter” begins with Frog coming along to discover his friend Toad sitting on his porch looking sad. Toad explains that this is his sad time of day, because it’s the time of day when he waits for the mail, but not once has he ever received a letter.
Toad, characteristically, is resigned to his sadness, but Frog wants to help his friend. So he rushes home and he writes Toad a letter, arranging to have it delivered to Toad by– and wait for it– “a snail that he knew.” And I’m not going to give away any spoilers here, but I suspect you can surmise where the rest of the story might go.
Frog and Toad is a recent discovery for us, part of the Classic I Can Read Books whose series include both Frances and Little Bear, who we love. All three series are simple in their language, but magic in their depths, in their strangeness, their child’s-eye-view of the world revealing such startling vision. The characters are all lovable, real in their foibles, and driven by a very human kind of motivation (which is remarkable, actually, when we’re talking about toads, badgers, and bears).
Frog and Toad in particular is philosophy and poetry, provocative, but also comforting. And they’re funny, on the surface yes, but also underlyingly so in a way that young readers won’t necessarily understand, but won’t feel foolish for missing either. Arnold Lobel never patronizes. What a truly masterful storyteller.
November 20th, 2011
T is for Toronto
Just in case I wasn’t totally steeped in Toronto already, having just finished the Eatons’ biography, they scheduled the Santa Claus Parade for this weekend. We’ve never been before, even though it goes by right around the corner from our house, but we made it out this year because Harriet’s at the perfect age to be overwhelmed by the magic of it all. She enjoyed the whole thing, found the giant Barbie appropriately disturbing, and said that the Mother Goose float was her favourite of all of them. Which is unsurprising really, because we’re Mother Goose mad around our house these days.
Since Harriet arrived in our lives, we’ve come into possession of no less than four Mother Goose Books, which you might think is overkill but each offers something slightly different– we’ve got Scott Gustafson’s stunningly gorgeous Favourite Nursery Rhymes from Mother Goose which is handled with care, a second-hand copy of Iona Opie’s My Very First Mother Goose which is loved with wild abandon, Richard Scarry’s Best Mother Goose Ever with its illustrations guaranteed to transfix wee ones (and also its admirably subversive violent edge), and the nice and portable Sing a Song of Mother Goose by Barbara Reid.
I’ve also come ’round to “Bat bat come under my hat…” and no longer think it’s stupid.
October 23rd, 2011
New Kids Books We’ve Been Enjoying
Hooray for Amanda and her Alligator by Mo Willems: Willems is the best part of parenthood, his stories of Elephant & Piggie, Knuffle-Bunny and that notorious Pigeon never failing to delight, but I think that Amanda and her Alligator is my favourite yet. Amanda arrives home from the library with a stack of books, and her toy alligator has been waiting to play with her. Over 6 1/2 chapters, Amanda reads though her library stack (mostly nonfiction– my favourite is Climbing Things for Fun and Profit, or maybe Build It Yourself: Jet Packs!), and sets upon adventures with Alligator without ever leaving her room. The drawings are clear and simple, the stories too, and they’re heartwarming (though not ickily so) as they are funny. 
A Few Blocks by Cybele Young: There is nothing simple about the illustrations of Cybele Young’s book A Few Blocks, in which imagination transforms the few blocks it takes to walk to school into a rich fantasy world. Ferdie doesn’t want to go school, but his sister Viola coaxes him along the way by creating adventure out of the ordinary, just as Young herself does through collage of her drawings which transform ordinary bits of neighbourhood into a giant sailing ship, a knight’s battleground, a superhero’s stomping ground.
A Daisy is a Daisy is a Daisy (except when it’s a girl’s name) by Linda Wolfsgruber: A Daisy… is a strange book that will probably appeal most to anyone with a flower name, or those of us who read baby name books as a pasttime. Gorgeously illustrated, Wolfsgruber shows that girls all over the world are named after flowers, and in all kinds of different languages. In Greek, Ianthe means violet, and she is Jolan in Hungarian, and Yolanda in Spanish. In Dutch, Mirte means Myrtle, she’s Hadassah in Hebrew, and Mirta in Spanish and Greek. “And Chloe is a very young sprout…”
Caramba and Henry by Marie-Louise Gay: “Stella and Sam?” said Harriet the first time she saw this book, and it doesn’t even matter that it’s not, because Marie-Louise Gay is always good. Though I don’t get him, Caramba, the cat who can’t fly. “But cats can’t fly!” I keep protesting, and people shout back at me, “That’s the point. Isn’t it awesome?” I’m not sure, but Harriet has never batted an eye, the story is great, the full page spreads absolutely breathtaking in their scope. Marie-Louise Gay is a treasure.
Molito by Rosemary Sullivan and Juan Optiz, illustration by Colleen Sullivan: Rosemary Sullivan is a friend of mine, and Harriet loves drums, so we were set to love this book from the get-go. The story of a little mole who dares to climb up from the underworld and discovers a whole other world out there of music, dancing and light. But losing himself to this world would require losing the friends and music he made in his life underground, so Molito seeks a way to make a connection between the two. “Above and below/ In the dark and the light/ Upside down and upside right/ Below your feet and above your head/ There’s just one world./ There’s just one world.” Colleen Sullivan’s illustrations are delightful in their detail, and the book also comes with a CD of Molito’s music. 
Bumble-Ardy by Maurice Sendak: I’m more confused by Maurice Sendak than I am by Caramba, actually, but my appreciation for Sendak’s new book Bumble-Ardy was underlined when I read his interview in The Paris Review. Harriet just likes the pigs, the birthday party and the pictures. The rhyme is a bit ripped off from Ludwig Bemelmans, reminding us of a someone we once knew who left the house at half-past nine in rain or shine, but I’m less confused than I was with Outside Over There, and there is depth here that reader young and old can tumble into and wander around in. Every time I read it, I appreciate it more.
October 17th, 2011
Our visit to Little Island Comics
By pure coincidence, this is my third post in a row dealing with islands and oceans. And this is an especially joyful post because the gist of it is that a new children’s bookstore has just opened up around the corner from my house. Little Island Comics is brought to you by the people behind The Beguiling, and is the first comic book store in North America catering exclusively to children. They cater not just with comics either, but also with a wide variety of beautiful books that seem to mostly just have gorgeous illustrations in common. We stopped by on Saturday and the store was full to bursting with children of all ages (and their parents). Though the big kids in the store seemed enthralled by the wares, we also found much to choose from for the Harriet set, and settled on a Tiny Titans comic, and Maurice Sendak’s new book Bumble-Ardy. Staff were approachable, knowledgeable, and thrilled with all the activity going on in the store. And there’s bound to be more of it– Little Island Comics has a space in the back where comic workshops and other events will be conducted. Check their blog to stay abreast of happenings. We’re looking forward to our next visit!
*Check out their profile from last weekend’s Globe and Mail.
October 10th, 2011
What Sally Draper must have been reading: Virginia Lee Burton and Mad Men
Virginia Lee Burton’s father was an engineer, and her mother was an artist, which is probably a surprise to nobody familiar with her work. Burton’s early books (Choo Choo, Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, Katy and the Big Snow) are celebrations of man’s power to harness his environment with the use of technology, Burton’s vivid illustrations investing her fascinating machines with life and personality. Even 80 years after the publication of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, that steam shovel Mary-Anne appeals to young readers, and part of that timelessness is that Mary-Anne’s story of technological prowess (she could dig as much in a day as a hundred men in a week) was already about nostalgia even when the book was new. Burton’s work does not become dated, because within it she has acknowledged the passage of time. Mary-Anne was already the relic of a dying age, steam shovels being replaced by diesel-powered diggers, and Burton showed even as she glorified technology that progress did not necessarily lead to better.
But the pastoral age that Mike Mulligan… hearkens back to is a pretty curious one. Children have always loved this book because children are fascinated by machinery and learning how things work (Burton: “Children have an avid appetite for knowledge. They like to learn, provided that the subject matter is presented to them in an interesting way”), but for an adult-reader to understand Mary-Anne as the story’s heroine represents a significant departure from how we in the 21st century have come to understand our relationship to the environment. Mary-Anne who can level hills to make roads for automobiles to drive on, and dig holes to turn grassland into skyscrapers, and is powered by filthy coal– that Burton’s steam shovel continues to be a lovable storybook character is a testament to the enduring qualities of her book as a whole.
Mike Mulligan was published in 1939, and in 1942, Burton published her most celebrated book, The Little House, which won the 
Caldecott Award that year (whose ceremony, it is noted in Barbara Elleman’s fascinating biography Virginia Lee Burton: A Life in Art, was attended by Lillian Smith, president of the Children’s Library Association and head of children’s services at the Toronto Public Library). And from these dates and these books’ acclaim, we can only assume that both found a place within the personal library of Sally Draper, who was born in 1955. Unlike her parents, Sally is rarely seen reading (until Season 4 when she’s spotted with a Nancy Drew), so the contents of her early library can only be inferred, but if the connections between Burton’s world and the Man Men universe are any indication, these books should be an essential part of any Mad Men reading list.
Part of the appeal of both Mike Mulligan and Mad Men is our own nostalgia, but the nostalgia already implicit within these works’ conception of modernity makes our own present ring doubly hollow. In both works, the Future is now, and the present is shining, but something essential has been irrevocably lost, and it has been too late to turn back forever now.
Modernity is symbolized by the city in Mad Men, and also in Burton’s work, no more so than in The Little House. In both works, the city is to be escaped from, its edges a pastoral idyll, though in both works, the city is creeping. In Mad Men, this is shown by suburban life’s failure to be protection enough from the vices and sordidness the city entails. Even in Arcadia (ie Ossining NY), there is infidelity, family violence, divorce, and women lock themselves in the house all day, drinking too much and smashing chairs up. The outside world is brought in every night by the dad in his hat coming home on the train, and by the television’s incessant blare.
The creeping is literalised in Burton’s The Little House, which sits contentedly on its hill as the sun goes up and down, and as the seasons change. And then the lights of the city began to seem closer, and roads appear (courtesy of that same steam shovel we know so well from Mike Mulligan, as Harriet is always delighted to point out). There are new houses, and then the buildings around the house grow higher, and a subway is dug underneath, and trams run back and forth, and eventually the house is left abandoned and unloved in the middle of an urban wasteland. (And in this book, indeed, Burton has presaged and synthesized the ideas of Rachel Carson and Jane Jacobs).
But the book’s conclusion is as curious as is Mary-Anne’s status as hero instead of villain. The story of The Little House is resolved when a great-great grandaughter of the man who’d built the house discovers the place in its derelict state, and decides to move it back out to the countryside. Traffic is halted as the house is lifted up from its foundations and placed on a truck, then driven down a big road, then a small road, and eventually the house is settled down on a little hill much like the one it once called home (before that first hill was levelled by a steam shovel). Same apple trees and flowers, and the house can see the sky again, the sunrise in the morning, the moon shining high at night. “The stars twinkled all around her…/ A new moon was coming up…/ It was Spring…/ and all was quiet and peaceful in the country.”
The first few times I read this book as an adult, I figured the moral had something to do with white flight, and the death and death of the 
American city. Until I realized that Burton hadn’t presaged Carson/Jacobs so much, and then I thought about the book in the context of its own time, and Mad Men’s. The story’s point, according to Elleman’s book, is that “the further away we get from nature and the simple way of life the less happy we are.” It is a story of the environment with man still at its centre, and with this notion of the city as a place to move away from is an understanding that the space “away out there” is infinite, inexhaustible. (See Kathryn Davis’s Hell and the spaces at the back of medicine cabinets for razor blade disposal in the mid 20th century house– that throwing something “away” was to make it disappear.)
In “The Gold Violin” (Mad Men, Season 2), the Drapers retreat further from urban/suburban life by partaking in a rare family outing, a picnic (although they get there in a brand new Cadillac, so modernity has certainly not been left behind). At the end of the picnic (which has involved smoking while horizontal and peeing behind trees), Betty Draper picks up the picnic blanket and shakes away accumulated rubbish, letting it fall down onto the grass where she’ll leave it.
As in Burton’s The Little House, the world away out there is still ours for the taking, to be used and made noble by our relationship to it.
