Security Blanket: Audiobooks for Your Kids

The categories of kids' entertainment (as of all entertainment, I guess) are blurring these days. I've covered audiobooks before, and I've covered the amazing variety of out-of-copyright (and thus free or extremely inexpensive) online books, and I've covered iPhone/iPad apps. Now there's a product that combines all three: Audiobooks for Your Kids, an $0.99 app that provides audio versions of public-domain classics, from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to The Secret Garden to The Jungle Book.

All are read by volunteers from around the country (via the LibriVox project—if you find yourself so motivated, you can join in and do one yourself!), and while none of them will be mistaken for Patrick Stewart, the ones I’ve heard so far are all perfectly solid. And especially for parents traveling this summer, the price (the aforementioned 99 cents for everything, all 30 books, with more promised) and the accessibility (anywhere you have a consistent enough 3G signal for moderate streaming) can't be beat.

[Image from the 1895 edition of The Jungle Book (in the public domain) courtesy of Wikimedia Commons]

Old School: Alice in Wonderland

I think I must have read Lewis Carroll’s classics at some point in my early childhood, but I honestly don’t remember doing so. In many ways, I feel like my knowledge of them is more piecemeal, picked up from the many references to them in other literature and art. So I never really expected Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass to become major players in bedtime reading with my kids.

But my five-year-old, Dash, saw some of those amazing original John Tenniel illustrations from the book on some wallpaper or something, and took to them immediately. (I think it was the Cheshire cat that initially drew him in.) That led to our picking up a copy, and eventually the book made its way to his nightstand.

And he loves it. The delightfully light tone; the surreal...well, lack of plot; the offbeat characters—all of it’s very much his cup of tea. (Sorry.) He enjoys the way the narrative just abruptly breaks off into a random, probably nonsensical poem from time to time. Some of the puns and wordplay are a little over his head right now, but there’s not enough of that to bother him. Having recently also seen the old Disney adaptation of the story, Dash has gone back to the original and is having a lot of fun seeing what was changed for the movie and what was not.

It’s also been an education to me, since my memories of the book were so hazy; seeing it through Dash’s eyes as we read it together has been a great experience. I’ve had two separate revelations. First, just how very weird these books are! I’d forgotten how boldly Carroll takes the story every which way he pleases, disregarding tropes of linear narrative and story structure entirely when he wants to. It’s still a breath of fresh air, frankly, even all these years after it was written.

Second—and this shouldn’t really have been a revelation, since there had to be a reason his books have been so beloved for so long—I was taken aback by, simply, how well-written these stories are. In what must be no surprise to many parents who were more familiar with Carroll than I’d been, they are truly a great pleasure to read. I’m really glad Dash saw the Cheshire cat on that wallpaper.

As a side note, another nice thing about Carroll’s work, for the busy and/or vacationing parent, is that it’s  completely out of copyright. In practical terms, this means you can download a copy onto your laptop or phone right now for free, or pay less than the cost of one printed book to get a more aesthetically pleasing version of the text of this book (with many other classics) for your iPhone.

[Image: Public domain, from Wikimedia Commons.]

New Books: Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl

Daniel Pinkwater has been writing children’s books for a long time. Long enough, in fact, that I remember reading some of them back in grade school. I recall really enjoying them, but he’s written so many—and was so prolific even back then—that I can’t figure out exactly which ones they were among the titles in his “works by” lists. (This is driving me nuts, to the point where I’ll probably soon be sighted in my local library sitting in the children’s section, leafing through multiple Pinkwater volumes.) Still, the author’s name summons a vague memory of cleverly offbeat writing.

Now, I was aware that Pinkwater, who’s also now known for his appearances reviewing children’s books on NPR, was still as prolific as ever, but I hadn’t kept up with his work of the last, oh, twenty years, not having had kids of the age to appreciate them until quite recently. (His chapter books seem to be generally labeled as for ages nine to twelve, though as always with such recommendations, that seems a little high on the low end to me. Come to think of it, it might be a little low on the high end, too, in his case.)

Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl, his latest, is a spun off of two other recent Pinkwater novels, The Neddiad and The Yggysey (get it?); its main character, Big Audrey, was a supporting one in those two. But being unfamiliar with the previous books, as I am, isn’t a problem—the novel stands on its own. It’s narrated in the first person by Audrey herself—who, yes, has cat whiskers. Right off the bat, she informs the reader that she’s from another plane of existence—though, as we later discover, that’s not actually the explanation for the cat whiskers. (At this point, it all started to come back to me: One of the delights of Pinkwater’s writing is that the many, many unusual things that happen in it are treated matter-of-factly. They just are.)

Audrey begins the story in our plane of existence (well, Los Angeles, so kinda), having accompanied the heroes of the earlier books on their return from hers. She is working at a doughnut shop (about which she remarks, “Doughnuts are not unknown where I come from, but they are not used as food”), but decides her destiny lies elsewhere and heads east to Poughkeepsie, New York. There she finds work in a UFO-themed bookstore, whose owners instantly and happily convince themselves that her whiskered appearance mean she’s an extraterrestrial. (Audrey is too polite to disenchant them of their delight over this.)

She soon finds some new friends, both of whom are temporary residents of the local old-fashioned insane asylum: an extremely eccentric Vassar professor and a girl from the surrounding foothills who can read minds. Neither is really all that crazy, so when rumors about an old Dutch house in the area and flying saucers start to intersect with Audrey’s own hazy memories of her origins, they check themselves out to help her investigate.

I could go on—the story continues to calmly unfold along equally outlandish lines—but you get the point: This is strange stuff. And not that forced kind of strange one finds in many studiously offbeat kids’ books—the oddness just flows naturally, and each wild turn comes with a twinkle, the author’s winks at the reader. Pinkwater also folds sly references into the narrative—for instance, the characters have a brief discussion about whether bats eat cats or the other way around, which will strike a chord with fans of Lewis Carroll. (The best thing about this one was that while it was subtly done, it wasn’t one of those just-for-the-parents shout-outs—Dash, who’s been reading Alice in Wonderland recently, noticed the nod to Carroll immediately, maybe before I did.)

And Pinkwater writes masterfully. You always feel you’re in good hands as you take the ride with him—you may raise your eyebrows a lot, but he keeps you turning the pages to see what’s going to happen next. He’s funny, too, in a remarkably dry way; I had a bemused, ready-for-anything smile on my face all the way through the 288-page book. (If you happen to be reading it aloud to someone, you may even require brief pauses from time to time to regain your composure.)

Now, I suspect this kind of writing, as top-notch as it is, isn’t for everyone, child and parent alike. (I’m not sure what the bellwether would be for kids, but if you’re a parent who hates the early novels of Paul Auster, say, that might be a sign Pinkwater’s not for you.) But if you and your kids enjoy random, imaginative, and definitely weird plotlines, laced through with intelligent wit, I think you’ll find Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl, as well as the rest of this author’s voluminous oeuvre, a gold mine.

[Image courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.]