Eight Great Kids Books!

Almost immediately (and usually well before - or flat-out in place of - any expressions of sympathy!) the other day, several of you emailed spotting the Achilles Heel of my heartfelt sickbed posting about darling little Stellaluna: you pointed out that I mentioned being sick in bed with a stack of kids books - i.e. not just the one.

This is absolutely true (and a bit whiplashy! I remember when there were only four readers of this site - and none of them was exactly at his sharpest at 8 in the morning on a Friday) - when I'm in particular need of some mental ice cream, I reach for my select shelf of favorite kids books, not just Stellaluna. Like all adult readers with a healthy, flexible imagination, I read kids books for pleasure quite without the encumbrance of having actual children anywhere nearby to spoil things. And whether I'm feeling sludgy or just fine, here are some of my perennial favorites:

People by Peter Spier (1980)

I've praised Spier here at Stevereads before, and this book may be his most epic achievement: nothing less than a hugely detailed, lavishly illustrated letter of love to the entire human race. All kinds of people are represented, all manner of dress, food, religion, pets, language (including sign!), occupation, habitat, hairstyle, even eye-shape - all are clearly and respectfully drawn, without any of the regional bias (conscious or un) that always seem to infect similar books. Every rank and station of person is here, from kings to commoners, and all the rich and varied iterations of mankind are on display in Spier's signature clean, quirky line-work.  There aren't many books I'd advocate should be given to every single living person on Earth, but this is certainly one of them. This is the first of them.

 

Dinosaur Bob and His Adventures with the Family Lazardo by William Joyce (1988)

While the Lazardo family is on African safari one year (they go on safari every year, right before the start of baseball season), young Scotty comes back to camp with an enormous dinosaur in tow and asks if he can keep it. Doctor Lazardo gives what has to be the perfect parental response to such a question: "I don't see why not." And so the family name their dinosaur Bob and pack him up for their return trip to Pimlico Hills. Bob adapts quickly to suburban family life, particularly enjoying his stint playing baseball for the Pimlico Pirates (he joins the team in a last-ditch effort to avoid trouble with the police, but it all turns out OK in the end), and everybody sings and dances until "late into the summer."

Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey (1941)

Can there be a list like this one that doesn't feature this marvellous book? Can there by a heart so cold that it doesn't warm to the adventures of Mrs. Mallard (Mr. Mallard is a bit of a good-time charlie and isn't around for most of the book's action) and her chicks Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Quack, Pack, and Quack as they negotiate their way from their home on Boston's Charles River to the pond in the Public Garden? The book features ducks'-eye views of the State House and Beacon Hill and Louisburg Square; it features the Old Corner Bookshop where certain book-worms used to spend oceans of time; it even features an enormous Irish beat-cop, once as steady a fixture of Boston as the river or the State House itself. Boston has embraced the book as its civil sacred text, and readers the world over continue to find it charming enough to buy and then lug back to whatever godforsaken country they're from.

Barn Dance! by Bill Martin, Jr. and John Archambault (1986)

This is quite possibly my single favorite kids book of them all. It's the story of a "skinny kid" (every family's ever-present dreamer) who responds to the enchantment of the night as it spreads over American farm country. He slips out of the house, past the sleeping hound-dog, down to the barn, where the scarecrow and the animals are having a spirited barn-dance, which he joins. Artist Ted Rand outdoes himself in the exuberance of those panels, but the really memorable thing about Barn Dance!'s art is Rand's incomparable ability to draw moonlight - he gives it a cold kind of warmth that fills the book with enchantment. But the enchantment lasts only as long as the night: when the horizon begins to turn purple, the owl says "Mornin's comin' closer/Mornin's comin' closer/The magic time is over.../Night'll soon be gone ..."

Paddle-to-the-Sea by Holling Clancy Holling (1941)

Readers of a certain age will remember the fad that sparked this cherished book (people once mailed things, sometimes just for the fun of it!), and readers of a certain sentimentality will recall its most effective evocation in pop culture - of course I refer to the character Chris Stevens' brief readings from the book at the end of "Final Frontier," quite possibly the single best episode of the TV series "Northern Exposure." The book recounts the epic journey made by a small carved canoe as it winds its way through water-courses far away from the little boy who carved Paddle-to-the-Sea in the first place. Eventually, miraculously, the circle is completed, and the little boy rejoices: "You, Little Traveler! You made the journey, the Long Journey. You now know the things I have yet to know. You, Little Traveler! You were given a name, a true name in my father's lodge. Good Medicine, Little Traveler! You are truly a Paddle Person, a Paddle-to-the-Sea!" (Some of us will also note the obvious influence of Longfellow on those words, and we'll silently gloat to ourselves).

Knuffle Bunny by Mo Willems (2005)

I think the inspiration behind this classic was purely trivial: I think Mo Willems thought it might be fun to use actual photos of New York City locales as backgrounds for his drawings about Trixie, whose loathesome hipster parents accidentally leave her beloved Knuffle Bunny behind at the laundromat, causing Trixie to panic and protest - ineffectively, it turns out, since she can't yet talk. Eventually the error is spotted and the family races back to the laundry. They search and search, and soon Trixie's dad finds Knuffle Bunny - at which point Trixie is so happy she actually says her first words: "Knuffle Bunny." But quick gimmick-inspiration or not, the book is instantly magical.

Sheep in a Shop by Nancy Shaw (1991)

Nancy Shaw's wonderful "Sheep" series (the sheep end up in many other places, including "In a Jeep") here perhaps touches on a sardonic nerve in somebody who's spend his entire life in retail; far too often (and without the saving humor), actual human customers behave just as destructively, cluelessly, and impulsively as the sheep do in this volume. "Sheep decide to buy a beach ball, Sheep prefer an out-of-reach ball" can provoke a wry grin in just about anybody who's manned a sales counter anywhere in the world, and "Sheep climb. Sheep grumble. Sheep reach. Sheep fumble" is likely to send some of those poor counter-helpers straight to the therapist they can't afford. The all-too-accurate illustrations are by Margot Apple.

Birdsong by Audrey Wood  (1997)

This is a strange book to end our rambles today, a book that feels a great deal older than 1997. It's an odd thing: writer Audrey Wood and great illustrator Robert Florczak take us through a tour of the United States bird-by-bird - and season by season. They show us kids (typically two, although young Yoshiko is alone and seems quite contented in the company of her hummingbirds) playing or working but usually ignoring the birds all around them, and the birds usually ignore them as well. Instead, in one beautiful full-page illustration after another, an extremely soothing laid-back natural world is evoked, a world that perhaps has never existed outside the confines of a kids book.

And there you have it! Eight perfect tonics for a slurpy day - or any kind of day, really.

Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!

What better time than Martin Luther King, Jr. Day to ponder the subject of oppression in the United States? And what better way than by looking at one of the starkest documents of oppression ever written? I refer, of course, to Mo Willems' disturbingly frank 2003 cri de coeur, Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!

The pigeon's story is the heart of the book - he is everypigeon - but since he can't get a break in the vicious mammalian patriarchy, his story is co-opted right at the onset by Massa Driver, who's smug, smiling Aryan features greet us the moment we open the book. He's just going to run a quick errand, he tells us - and from the wandering direction of his hands, we can infer that his 'errand' will take him to the red-light district (perhaps even the slave quarters? we can' be sure, and we hesitate to pre-judge) - but he wants to make a polite request of us before he goes: no matter what we do, we must promise not to let the pigeon drive the bus. It's in exactly this way that corrupt dictatorships work their perfidies - not with an unholstered gun but with a conspiratorial arm around the shoulder.

He's no sooner sauntered off than the object of his scorn shuffles on-stage, bobbing and pecking in the obsequious Stepin Fetchit posture he's learned through bitter years of dealing with people like Massa Driver. He's doing his best to be friendly and ingratiating, but he has one thing on his mind:

He'd like his chance at driving the bus. He's hoping you'll - we'll - give him that chance.

He's wheedling about it. He's faux-cheerful, his eyes exaggeratedly wide, his posture deferential. He tries to make a game of as his heart is breaking. He even invents a desperate tale of 'friends' of his - other pigeons with kinder Drivers, pigeons who are allowed to get behind the wheel.




Finally he's driven to that most galling of all admissions: "I have dreams too" - how many of us have walked right by a pigeon without granting even that simple fact? How many of us have stood around the water cooler passively listening while somebody told a pigeon-joke (do your folks back home in Stamford still call them "rats with wings"? Do you still let them?)?

It's our complacency as much as anything else that draws out his eruption of rage. He has born our iniquities and suffered our afflictions, and his avian soul cries out "ENOUGH!"



But the system is too strong. The time has not yet come. Massa Driver returns, cheerful (sated?) and confident. He asks us, tauntingly, if we've let the pigeon drive the bus - he knows his will is the stronger; he knows there have been no uprisings this day.

The pigeon - indeed, the pigeon inside all of us - has been defeated, and the oppression continues. The bus drives off, and the dream of a day when pigeons will proudly drive the bus ... that dream is deferred.

Bunny Redux!

Our books today take a second buck-toothed bite at the subject of bunny-centric kids books. In response to a deluge of emails (well, eight - but still....) from the silent majority, I've belatedly realized that what bunny books lack in zoological verisimilitude, they make up for in the near-psychotic enthusiasm they inspire in their fans, and I've been informed by a number of those fans (well, eight ...) that although I might have covered the three biggest, most popular, most influential bunny books here on Stevereads recently, I didn't do the subject full justice. So we're back for a quick P.S. before hopping on to other subjects.

I was sent many suggestions! Of the many bunny-books I cruelly neglected, however, three titles seemed to crop up on most of the lists I was sent, and that helps to narrow the field.

The earliest of these three titles is 1979's Bunnicula by Deborah and James Howe (with oddly appealing scratchy-line illustrations by Alan Daniel), the psychologically fraught story of what happens when the unsuspecting Monroe family brings home a bunny to keep as a pet. This ill-omened homecoming takes place on a dark and stormy night, and naturally the Monroe's two other pets - large, good-natured dog Harold and nervous, slightly spastic cat Chester - are curious. Harold, in his doglike way, placidly accepts the newcomer (at least, we're told this is doglike - having had a platoon of anal-retentive beagles in my life ... and now having a hyper-excitable pointer and a basset hound who is legally, medically certifiable, I wouldn't know first-hand), but Chester becomes convinced the bunny is in fact a vampire who intends to do in first
the Monroes - and then the world.

As all fans of Bunnicula will know - and as anybody who's ever met a cat will guess - it turns out the bunny is fairly harmless and that the real focus of the drama is how insane Chester is.



The bunny is also innocent in Mo Willems' great 1974 classic Knuffle Bunny, and how could it not be so, since the bunny in question is a stuffed animal? And not a Velveteen Rabbit-style stuffed animal that thinks and feels, but a just-ordinary stuffed animal (like my Barnesy the Noble Bear, for instance) that gets carted around from place to place.


The person doing the carting in Willems' funny little 'cautionary tale' is young Trixie, who takes her beloved Knuffle Bunny along when she accompanies her father to the laundromat. Trixie and her young parents live in New York City, and the lazy genius of Willems' story is to make the backgrounds of her pages actual photos, with the cartoon characters drawn onto them (this has also facilitated the Knuffle Bunny 'tours' that have sprung up in the city, since it's possible, 'Seinfeld'-style, to identify landmarks)(this is much the same reason why Japanese tourists who love Make Way for Ducklings always take pictures of real-life enormous Irish beat cops in Boston).

As Trixie and her dad are leaving the laundromat, Trixie has a horrifying realization: they've left her beloved Knuffle Bunny behind - in a washing machine. Hilarity ensues, and a heartwarming little happy ending is served up. The book is delightful and eminently re-readable, despite having only 30 words.

The third most popularly-suggested bunny-centric title will not, alas, be discussed here on Stevereads. It's something called Guess How Much I Love You, and it stars not only bunnies but jack-rabbits, and it's just too unbearably, mindlessly saccharine for inclusion here (ditto Pat the Bunny, for you handful of over-zealous advocates out there). No, these two late-breaking additions will have to do for now - but who knows what species we'll cover next, when we eventually return to the always-delightful world of kids books? Dogs would be too predictable coming from me, but there's always birds - and dinosaurs - and believe it or not, another round of BEARS wouldn't even come close to exhausting the treasures that are out there. We shall see!