September 27th, 2011
Banned Books Week: We’re reading Katie-Morag
We didn’t have to go out of our way to find a book to read for ALA Banned Books Week, because Katie-Morag and the Tiresome Ted was already in our library haul. Our friend Melanie has written already about Katie Morag and her struggles with the censor (and it was actually Melanie who introduced us to Katie Morag in the first place, and her home on the Isle of Struay in the Hebrides). The main problem with the book is that Katie Morag’s mother feeds her babies during the narrative, and sometimes doesn’t put her breast away immediately. As you can see from the illustrations, Mrs. MacColl’s breasts are hardly sexualized, and neither is the rest of her really (except for in Katie Morag and the Riddles where Katie Morag tries her on her saucy nightie, but this just adds a marvelous new dimension to her character).
Mairi Hedderwick’s Katie Morag books have the kinds of illustrations (like Shirley Hughes’) that paint a household out to its very corners, and all the stuff tossed here and there, and picking out the details is fascinating for readers young and old. The breastfeeding and the breasts themselves are just part of the big happy mess, which also involves characters with complicated (and believable) gender roles, the good and bad of a close-knit community, the spirited Katie Morag with her huge emotional spectrum (also believable), and a story that doesn’t patronize its readers.
We’ve become Katie Morag devotees here in the couple of months, and it’s nice to mark Banned Books Week by reading a banned book that’s so wonderful. (Though a lot of them are, aren’t they? Do shitty books ever get banned? Do some books get banned, and liberals throw up their hands, and think, “Well, it’s probably for the best anyway…”)
September 26th, 2011
Author Interviews at Pickle Me This: Jon Klassen
I’m excited to be part of the Jon Klassen blog tour for I Want My Hat Back. At our house, we first discovered Klassen’s work with Cat’s Night Out, which not only won the Governor General’s Award for Illustration, but also received the enormous honour of being our Best Book of Library Haul on July 25th 2011. I also enjoyed his interview at the fabulous kids’ book blog 7 Impossible Things Before Breakfast. Clearly, Klassen is an interesting guy (check out his blog for some proof) and I’d love to know more about the trajectory of his career, why he’s so fixated on oblong shapes, what his own hat looks like (and if he’s ever lost it), but I am not going to ask.
Most of the writers I interview on my blog write chapter books (for adults) instead of picture books, 
and I have strong feelings about these interviews focusing on the works themselves rather than their creators, and just because the work in question here is 250 words in length shouldn’t make it an exception. I Want My Hat Back is also good enough that it doesn’t have to be an exception. In these 250 words and the drawings, even with all the understatement in both, there is a whole lot going on, between the lines in particular.
Klassen is an Ontario-born illustrator now living in Los Angeles. He was kind enough to answer my questions via email.
I: So, is this a book whose words accompany the drawings, or is it the other way around? Was it from images or words that this story originated? If it was from images, was the story implicit in the pictures, or did you have to go searching for a plot?
JK: I’m not sure it’s either one or the other, as far as what accompanies what. The story came from just the idea of a book with the title “I Want My Hat Back”, and a character on the cover who wasn’t wearing a hat. It was done being written before the pictures, but the writing had the notes about the pictures in it. I wanted a story where the characters didn’t have to do very much physically, so knowing that helped in the writing, but it wasn’t a case of having the characters first and then looking for something for them to do.
I: The bear’s character is rife with contradiction: he has a single-minded fixation upon locating his hat, yet he misses the hat when it’s right before his eyes. When the situation has never been more urgent and he fears never seeing his hat again, his response is to lie down on the ground in despair. When we read him aloud at our house, he speaks in a monotone. How do you read the bear?
JK: I read the whole thing in monotone too. I wanted to try to and make it like the animals were given lines to read off of cue cards. That’s why, at the beginning, the animals are looking at us and not each other. The bear doesn’t see the hat initially because he’s sort of in the play by then and is just waiting for that scene to be done, so he’s not really paying attention. When he realises later what the rabbit has done, it’s like he forgets he’s in the play and becomes a bear again and does what a bear would do if he learned that this had been done to him.
I: I can understand the bear’s limited perspective though. Don’t tell anybody, but the first time I read your book, I completely missed the twist on the last page, the “hat on the rabbit’s head”, to speak in metaphoric terms. One man’s obvious is another man’s subtle, or maybe it depends how fast one man is reading. How do you draw the line? (I’m speaking in metaphoric terms again re. line-drawing)
JK: Keeping that last thing sort of subtle has turned out to be pretty handy when people wonder if the story is too mean for kids. Visually, the problem the book started with is solved at the end, and younger kids, I think, might stop there. That what actually happened is kind of easy to miss sort of saves it for older kids who are reading it to themselves, or are at least paying more attention to the words. I don’t want the book to come off as antagonistic or especially cynical or anything, and I hope that by stashing it away in that last paragraph that we’ve already heard earlier, it gets excused from that.
I: The key to this story’s success is its really simple language, and repetition. Were these a limitation or an aid to you as wrote the story? Similarly with the basic nature of the drawings (ie that the animals are devoid of facial expression). Can limits have an expansive quality?
JK: I think they definitely can. I’d never written a book before, so the formality of narration was really intimidating and I kept feeling 
like a fake. When the idea came up of doing the whole thing in dialogue I got a lot more comfortable with it. The stiffness of the language was really the only way I felt comfortable getting the facts across, and the drawings of the animals are kind of the same way. The feeling I wanted to get into the illustrations of them was the same expression you get from a pet that you dress up. They look kind of surprised, they don’t want to move, and they are just generally unimpressed. I think they all have better things they could be doing, but I have this story I want to do, so just hold still for a minute.
I: Is this a story about lying? About complacency? About carnivores? About hats? How do you explain it?
JK: I like to think that it’s just a story about itself. It came together so randomly that I can’t really claim a big message. The only abstract idea I had when it was being made was about the rabbit being indifferent, and how threatening indifference can feel. When the bear comes back to him and accuses him of something he’s pretty obviously guilty of, the rabbit doesn’t have a reaction. And when it becomes clearer what the punishment is going to be for this, he still doesn’t really react. He’s silent and unapologetic for this thing he did, and there really isn’t any way you can think of dealing with such indifference. There’s no reasoning with it, so the bear does what he does.
I: Until the story’s conclusion, the bear takes real action just once, when he helps out the turtle and lifts him atop the stone he’s been struggling to climb all day. But then the turtle is stranded there, isn’t he? Isn’t that kind of terrifying? What happens to the turtle??
JK: I think the turtle’s going to be fine. I wanted the bear to do something like that to remind us that even though he’s polite and sad and everything, he is still physically capable of picking most of these guys up off the ground, which is an important thing to keep in mind.
It sounds strange to say given that the turtle only has one line in the book, but I think I “get” him more than most of the other characters in the story, so I’m hoping there will be a book just about him some day.
August 16th, 2011
Baby Lit: Little Miss Austen
Here’s a tip for all you booksellers out there: stock the Baby Lit series, and the books will be snapped up by those of us with more money than brains. (And this is saying something. I don’t actually have that much money.) I don’t even like Pride & Prejudice, but I had to have this gorgeous board book, which is actually more worthwhile than its genius gimmick might suggest. It’s a counting book, P&P from 1-10– 1 English Village (with a green!), 2 handsome gentlemen, 3 houses, etc., and each item cumulates to tell Austen’s story (kind of). The illustrations are lovely, stylishly designed with floral detailing and demask backgrounds– you can see a couple of pages here.
From the publisher’s pages, the series (which, so far, also includes Romeo and Juliet, but I don’t think they die at the end) is “a fashionable way to introduce your toddler to the world of classic literature”. And heaven forbid you introduce your toddler to classic literature in an unfashionable way, or forget to do it until they’ve turned four and it’s already too late.
Qualms aside, the book is cute, and I’m a middle-class white person who lives in the city and buys artisanal cheese. Books like this were made for people like me. What else are you going to do?
June 15th, 2011
Our Best Book from this week’s library haul: Oscar’s Half Birthday by Bob Graham
This week, we asked our librarian to recommend books about “alternative” families, because Harriet is obsessed with the construction of family units and we thought now would be a good time to broaden her little mind a bit, so we took out And Tango Makes Three. The librarian also suggested Oscar’s Half-Birthday, whose family construction is fairly standard, but whose urban, hipster, inter-racial parents will help acclimatize Harriet to families way cooler than her own. And happily, these details (along with the urban scenery of abandoned shopping carts and graffiti) are pretty incidental to a lovely story celebrating baby Oscar’s half-birthday, which climaxes with the picnicking population of an entire hillside erupting into song. (The song is also “Happy Birthday”, which is currently Harriet’s favourite, so we liked that too.) My favourite part of the book is big sister Millie, however, with her coat-hanger fairy-wings and green dinosaur puppet– if my daughter is going to have a role model from a book, I’d hope it could be one like this.
Also, the writing is so good. Like this, “…the half-birthday boy, OSCAR, sits tilted at an angle, his fingers curled into Millie’s tuna sandwich. His shoulders are hunched, his head nods, and the light shines through his ears, illuminating them like little lanterns.” Exactly!
May 31st, 2011
Magic Cities at the Osborne Collection
I wish I’d written this post weeks ago, because it would have given you more than four days to make your own visit to the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books (at the Lillian H. Smith Library) to see the Magic Cities Exhibit, which closes on Saturday (June 4). But I couldn’t have posted it, because I only went to the exhibit yesterday, but I’m putting this post up anyway in order to urge all those who can to go and see it for themselves.
I’ve written about this before (scroll down), but I love houses, and literary houses in particular: Howards End, To the Lighthouse, Anne of Green Gables (and the girls of Lantern Hill. New Moon, Silverbush etc. Clearly LM Montgomery loved houses too). Most of my favourite books have a house at their centres, and it was the case when I was little too– I loved the way illustrations showed houses with a wall removed so that you could see life going on inside it. (I still feel similarly when the outlines of rooms from a demolished buildings are visible on the wall of the house still standing next door). I loved Virginia Lee Burton’s The Little House, as well, and now so too does Harriet.
So it was with great joy that I discovered that the Magic Cities exhibit is all about houses. Pop-up books with castles inside, picture books about how houses are built, and the parts of houses, and the early ways that children learn about architecture. (Though, surprisingly, I did not see reference to A House is a House for Me). Novels about houses like Green Gables, and Green Knowe, that Little House on the Prairie, and books about neighbourhoods, and different kinds of cities and towns. Lovingly curated with every wonderful book you’ve ever forgotten, the exhibit features books old and new, original artwork, and plenty to reflect on and delight in. So glad I got to take a look at it before it turns over to the summer exhibit (which is Turtle Mania! I’ll be checking that one out too).
May 17th, 2011
Knowing the story before the story was told
“Every night, after tea, his mother took him on her lap and read to him. It was the moment in his day above all others which was understandable to him, one where he lived in coherent companionship and liberty. there, horses, ducks, rabbits, foxes and other animals talked, had adventures, and were friends. His mother read well. She read slowly and clearly. She let him see the book as she read and since she re-read the same books many times, he came to memorize the story on each page, cued by the illustration on it or on the facing page. And knowing the story before the story was told was security, power, delight and beauty.” –Pete Sanger, “Leaping Time” in The New Quarterly 118
April 19th, 2011
Best Books About Bunnies
It’s that time of year again, when all the serious thinkers in the world start compiling lists of best books about bunnies. We’re still secular fundamentalists over here, but our inner pagans have happily appropriated Easter and all its spring-time loveliness (inc. Cadbury’s contributions to it). Plus we love rabbits–me: Miffy. Harriet: rabbits in general, which are “bunnies” always. Hate real rabbits though. Nasty creatures… But that’s another story. In the meantime, here are our favourite rabbits at the moment from the land of picture books.
Moon Rabbit/Brown Rabbit in the City by Natalie Russell. We have these books out of the library all the time, which give a laporine twist on the country mouse/city mouse scenario. The pictures are gorgeous, a bit retro, decorated with collagey patterned touches, and feature delightful things like teapots, guitars, and a double-decker bus. Moon Rabbit (which Harriet calls Moon Bunny) is about a city dwelling rabbit who looks out at the big moon and wonders if there is anyone else in the world like her. When she inadvertently wanders off into the outskirts of town, she meets a guitar-playing brown rabbit whose music makes her happy. They have fun together, until she begins to long for home, so she returns even though she’ll miss her friend, but he makes plans to see her soon. His visit is the subject of the second book, which is just as lovely.
Roslyn Rutabaga and the Biggest Hole on Earth by Marie Louise Gay. The illustrations here are vibrant, textured, and leap right 
off the page. Roslyn is a bouncy bunny with long ears and big dreams: she’s determined to dig the biggest hole on earth (and maybe even meet a penguin when she gets to the South Pole). She’s not sure where to dig the hole, however, and then once she determines where to start, she discovers she’s digging in a worm’s front yard, in mole’s living room, and in a dog’s bone storage area. Clearly underground is less barren than she ever imagined (and if I were preposterous, I would suppose that this story actually an allegory about European colonization). She’s just about discouraged when her dad comes outside and makes her realize (but in a most unsentimental fashion) that she can dig the biggest hole on earth in her imagination. And then they eat lunch.
Without You (and Me and You) by Genevieve Cote. We love, love, love Genevieve, who draws the best teapots, and this is the book that Harriet will receive as a gift on Sunday morning. This latest book is the story of two best friends (pig and rabbit) who have learned to celebrate their differences in theory, but find that day-to-day realities make the practice more difficult than they’d supposed. After an argument, they decide they don’t need one another anyway, but quickly discover that life is way less fun and interesting without a best friend to share it with. Not an allegory about European colonization, but a sweet and simple story that’s familiar to anyone and (spoiler alert) has a beautiful, happy ending.
The Velveteen Rabbit (Abridged) by Margery Williams, illustrated by Don Daily. My mom gave this to 
Harriet for Easter last year, and of course, it’s well known, but I highlight it here because the abridgement is great. For kids a bit too small to appreciate the full story, here is the story stripped down but not in a way that takes away from the plot or the prose.
The Quiet Book by Deborah Underwood, illustrated byRenata Liwska. Bunnies are just one of the creatures that features in this weird, wonderful book about the various kinds of quiet (“swimming under water quiet”, “Right before you yell “Surprise!” quiet”, “Trying not to hiccup quiet”). Not simply a list of quiets, a plot can be detected by the action in the pictures, but not entirely–for example, why was the little moose colouring on the wall? And we’re still trying to figure out how the little bear swimming underwater ended up with an injured tail. But I love that– picture books with as much subtext as a novel, and how the best ones are those you’ll never be altogether finished reading.
April 1st, 2011
A teapot for Harriet
Our friend Genevieve Côté sent us this picture today, to satisfy Harriet’s love of teapots. (Harriet is a teapot tyrant. She will hand you a crayon and say, “Teapot, happy” and you have no choice but to comply, to draw that teapot, and don’t even try to forget the happy smile.)
We were excited to see Genevieve’s new book yesterday at Book City. Without You is the sequel to her acclaimed 2009 book Me and You, and I will be buying it for Harriet for her birthday. Genevieve has a thing for teapots too, and Harriet loves finding them in her gorgeous illustrations.
March 24th, 2011
The original chronicler of motherhood
Lately I’ve been turning to Shirley Hughes’ Alfie books whenever I’m in need of parenting guidance. (I am also reading another book called Toddler Taming that recommends spanking and tying up children with rope, quite unabashedly, but then it was written in 1984 when that sort of thing was de rigueur. But actually, casual cruelty aside(!), it’s a great book. Just let me explain… Review to come.) I love Shirley Hughes, and I really love Alfie, and Harriet loves him too, so we’ve read his stories an awful lot.
And I don’t think the experience of parenthood has ever been better articulated in literature than with this one paragraph from Alfie Gets in First: “Mum put the brake on the push-chair and left Annie Rose at the bottom of the steps while she lifted the basket of shopping up to the top. Then she found the key and opened the front door. Alfie dashed in ahead of her. “I’ve won, I’ve won!” he shouted. Mum put the shopping down in the hall and went back down the steps to lift Annie Rose out of her push chair. But what do you think Alfie did then?”
This kind of tedious maneuvering is the story of my life, and if you’ve ever lived such a life, you understand that Mum has spent ages strategizing the perfect order in which to perform the tasks that will deliver her children and groceries into her house with maximum efficiency. I absolutely adore that recognition. Never mind Rachel Cusk as chronicler of motherhood, no, Shirley Hughes absolutely did it first.
I love her illustrations, and am fascinated by the interior of Alfie’s house. Harriet likes to comb the pictures for teapots, and I love to spot what else is cluttering the corners: discarded shoes, soccer balls, old ties, umbrellas, toy teacups, tennis rackets, folded strollers, and acorns.
Though Alfie’s mum, however rumpled, is a far better mum/mom than I am. Which I’m absolutely fine with, having chosen to take Alfie and Annie Rose’s dad as the parent upon which I model myself. He’s not around as much as Mum (and there I fall short. I never seem to go away), but when he is around, he’s usually behind a newspaper. I love that when in Alfie’s Feet, he takes Alfie to the park, he takes care to bring his book and his newspaper. A parent after my own heart, I think, and Alfie doesn’t seem any less content as he splashes through the puddles, his dad reading the paper on a park bench behind him.
More:
March 21st, 2011
My Adventures in the Land of Books
Our last vacation was in the land that books forgot, so I was excited to get away to England, the storybook centre of the universe. 
Whenever we go to England, we always come back with enough books to fill another suitcase (especially that one time), and this trip was no exception. Though I had less luck in the charity shops than I was hoping for– they used to be rife with 1960s Penguin Paperbacks but they’re all gone now, and now all that’s left are copies of Jenny Colgan novels that came free with a copy of Cosmopolitan. And the children’s books picks were rubbish in the charity shops, but I suppose I can imagine why the second-hand children’s book market might have its challenges.
The only books I ended up getting in charity shops were I Am Not Tired and I Will Not Go to Bed by Lauren Childs at the Oxfam in Ilkley, and Tyler’s Row by Miss Read at The Panopticon Shop in Glasgow (which is a charity shop to rebuild a theatre that burned down in 1938, and we sort of got turned off their cause when they made Stuart wait out in the rain with the pram). I also got a Brambley Hedge treasury at the Oxfam in Fleetwood.
And though I didn’t end up buying anything, the Oxfam Bookshop in Glasgow was beautiful– 
much more boutique than charity shop. It was in the same square as the massive old building (now vacant) that used to house Borders, and I was informed that the loss of that store had been a tragedy– it had been a wonderful place. We also had a good time in the Waterstones in Glasgow, which looked like not much from the outside, but as I rode the escalator down to the lower level, revealed itself to have this hidden middle section between the two floors, sort of like the half-floor in Being John Malkovich, and also a coffee shop, with made my reluctant partner in bookshopping a very happy man. We found the children’s section, and Harriet hurled picture books, and then ate part of a sandwich that she found on the floor.
I was thrilled to discover The Grove Bookshop in Ilkley, because independent bookshops are few and far between even in England, and also because this one was bustling. The store has gorgeous window displays, a great selection, and seemed like a thriving community hub. There was a line-up at the till, and another woman there to pick up her special order. I delighted in the selection of Penguin merch, and bought a tote bag, and also Old Filth by Jane Gardam (and now I have to read The Man in the Wooden Hat). I also like The Grove Bookshop in Ilkley because their website boasts a “fast and efficient ordering system [which] means the vast majority of customer orders arrive the following day.”
We spent our second-last day in London, and had scheduled bookshops a-plenty. I was so happy 
to have a chance to visit Persephone Books, and actually, I’m grateful that budget constraints forced a limit of one book only, or else I would have bought the place out. Their books are so lovely, the shop so homey (but 
crowded! With Persephone books! Can you imagine anything more wonderful?), and I wanted to paw everything. To keep my fellow-travellers happy, I’d pre-selected my purchases so there was less browsing than you might imagine, but if I’d started, I never would have left and would no longer have a family.
I also enjoyed visiting the London Review Bookshop, which was not too far away. 
The Cake Shop proved disappointing, sadly, as it was too small to accommodate Harriet’s stroller or Harriet, and was crowded with people discussing existential things who probably didn’t want to listen to Harriet talk about her bum. I bought The Tortoise and the Hare here, though I’d been debating another Rachel Cusk instead, being that day in the thralls of her book The Lucky Ones. And I am a little bit sorry now that I didn’t get the Rachel Cusk books, because she’s so great, and I never found another of her novels in a bookshop the rest of the time we were in England.
Under Waterloo Bridge, I was happy to see the booksellers again, as well as a bit of sunshine. I didn’t buy anything because nothing immediately struck my eye, and because Stuart and Harriet were being very patient but I didn’t want to push them too far. I am sure if I’d browsed just a little while longer, I would have come up with one treasure or another. (I also wonder if the fact that I found less treasures amongst the used books this trip is because it’s now been a few years since I bought everything Margaret Drabble ever wrote.)
We spent the rest of our London day at The Tate Modern, and I enjoyed exploring 
both its bookshops with their wonderful selections of children’s books. It was especially exciting to see Sara O’Leary‘s beautiful Where You Came From on display, amidst some fine company.
We spent our last day in Windsor, where I tried and failed to find a bookish treasure in the charity shops (including a wonderfully stocked Oxfam Bookshop, but everything good they had, I had already). We stopped in at the Windsor Waterstones and bought Harriet The Gruffalo and Alfie’s Feet, and I tried and failed to find a Rachel Cusk novel to buy, just as I would do the next day at the airport. Regrets, I’ve had a few.
But not too many. Our trip was full of bookish wonder. I arrived home with a most respectable stack, and what’s more, I’ve since read each and every one of them.
