On Hiatus...

The lack of postings since November had probably made this a bit obvious, but I figured I might as well make it official: A job change that's much more demanding on my time and also includes some slight overlap in subject matter has forced me to put this blog on hiatus.

Time will tell whether I'll be able to simply restart things here (or perhaps somewhere else) at some point, either just as before or in some sort of abbreviated format. I'll post more as soon as I know.

On the off chance, though, that this is the end for YKFK, I'd like to thank everyone who's been reading over the last couple of years; it's been a wonderful and revelatory experience for me, and I hope I've been able to be of some use to you all from time to time in navigating the world of kids' entertainment! I am indebted to you all.

All best, and hopefully more to come in the near-ish future.

New(ish) Books: Wolf Story

You'd think that at some point the New York Review Children's Collection would just run out of obscure, unknown and out-of-print kid lit that's astonishingly brilliant to reissue. But they don't. It's really a testament to both their editorial and archival skills, as well as to the vast amount of great forgotten work out there to be found and reissued for our benefit.

The latest from NYRCC might be my personal favorite of their entire canon: Wolf Story, from 1947, by William McCleery, who was a reporter, a magazine editor, and a playwright. (It also contains excellent illustrations by Warren Chappell.) It's part of—maybe even a forerunner of?—what is now a burgeoning "meta" kid-book genre, i.e., the story that makes the telling of the story part of the story, with The Princess Bride as a good example.

Here, the focus is completely flipped, so that we're mostly in the "real" world of the father who's telling the story of the book's title and his six-year-old son, Michael. (Michael's best friend, Stefan, also makes an appearance.) That story itself—about a wolf trying to steal (and, naturally, eat) a farmer's prize chicken, only to be foiled by the brave, smart, and coincidentally six-year-old son of the farmer—is really less plot than background.

Because what McCleery is really doing is describing the affectionate, sometimes frustrating, often hilarious negotiations that go on between parent and child in the storytelling process. And I've never seen an author capture it better—from the early demands, and attempts at parental resistance to those demands (the father desperately wishes to avoid yet another story about a wolf, but Michael relentlessly drives him to adapt the tale so that his favorite fearsome creature will be included), to the shared joy between parent and child of continuing and finishing a story that's become a collaboration.

Kids of the boy's age and a little older are likely to find the storytelling-about-storytelling aspect fascinating (even if it's no longer as novel as it probably was in 1947). And parents will find plenty to smile sentimentally about in the accurate depictions of how we get wrapped around our kids' fingers in such situations.

But even better, both kids and especially parents will also find plenty to laugh about, thanks to McCleery's dry, charming writing style. The father—one of those dads who seems to speak to children as he does to adults, with no condescension—is both aware of and constantly bemused by his son's fierce knowledge of exactly what he wants from his story (one gets the sense that Dad also knows resistance is ultimately futile). His matter-of-fact way of establishing guidelines for the wolf tale (or trying to, anyway) is both appealing and very funny:

And the man continued: "Once upon a time there was a hen. She was called Rainbow because her feathers were of many different colors: red and pink and purple and lavender and magenta—" The boy yawned. "—and violet and yellow and orange."

"That will be enough colors," said the boy.

"And green and dark green and light green..."

 "Daddy! Stop!" cried the boy. "Stop saying so many colors. You're putting me to sleep."

"Why not?" said the man. "This is bedtime."

"But I want some story first!" said the boy. "Not just colors."

"All right, all right," said the man. "Well, Rainbow lived with many other hens in a house on a farm at the edge of a deep dark forest and in the deep dark forest lived a guess what."

"A wolf," said the boy, sitting up in bed.

"No, sir!" cried the man.

"Make it that a wolf lived in the deep dark forest," said the boy.

"Please," said the man. "Anything but a wolf. A weasel, a ferret, a lion, and elephant."

 "A wolf," said the boy.

Isn't that just frighteningly familiar and on-the-nose?

There's one more reason I found Wolf Story particularly thrilling, though, and it's one that I have to admit has little to do with any appeal to young kids. The father tells his tale in episodic fashion, mostly (after this initial bedtime scene) during a series of weekend outings with the two boys. Since the family live in downtown Manhattan, we therefore get a wonderful, personal, day-to-day view of what a dad would do with two young boys in New York City in 1947. (The whole thing is clearly pretty autobiographical—the book is even dedicated to McCreery's son, Mike!) The field trips include Fort Tryon Park, as well as Jones Beach for some autumn kite-flying (via the FDR Drive and the Triborough Bridge, oddly enough—I guess McCreery didn't like tunnels?). To someone who grew up in the city like me, this glimpse of your basic weekend jaunt of an earlier era is irresistible.

All of which is to say that, while Wolf Story works marvelously as a book to read with children, as intended—the meta magic works for them just fine—it's as much or perhaps even more a book that will delight parents, making us laugh and smile and marvel, especially those of us with attachment to New York City.

In other words, in the long run, this book is likely to end up not on my son's bookshelf, but on mine. I admit it. And I'm so pleased—and grateful to the NYRCC—to have discovered it.

[Cover image courtesy of the New York Review Children's Collection]

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New Feature: In the Moment

You'll notice at the right here a new feature on this blog—one I've essentially ripped off wholesale from my friend and former colleague and blogging role model Jenny Rosenstrach of Dinner, A Love Story. (I am giving it a different name here, though; I have some pride/shame.) 

"In the Moment" will be a short running list of each of my sons' favorites of the moment—books, songs, toys, movies, what have you, their passions of the day. I was playing with silly names for each of their lists, but when I started seriously thinking about using the horrible Harry Potter pun "Griff Adores" for his list, I backed away from the language games slowly.

Like so many kids, Dash and Griff are alternately obsessive and fickle, and in unpredictable ways, so I expect that certain items may stay on the lists for months, while others flit on and back off within days. I'll certainly write full posts about many or most of the items (or will have done so already, in some cases), but the lists will provide a fuller, more comprehensive view of the stuff our family likes most than I ever have time to cover in posts.


[Photo: Whitney Webster]

Status Report

Just to explain the sudden complete lack of posting (as opposed to the slow posting of the last couple of months): I wanted to be sure the existence of this blog was OK with a new boss at the day job. Permission has now been reissued, and posts of a more prolific nature should be forthcoming, starting later today.

Photo: Whitney Webster

Inspiration Information

It's a new month, so I can put up one more housekeeping post: Momfilter, a new parenting/lifestyle website from the founding editors of Cookie magazine, is live! As I mentioned a little while back, I'll be cross-posting there and here on kids' entertainment each and every Friday (starting this coming Friday!); I'll also be contributing to the site on subjects outside of kids' entertainment.

But since anyone reading this likely has read their fill of me already, the real draw is, well, everything else: Brilliant ideas and solutions and thoughts from some of the savviest, smartest parents I know on nearly every subject known to parenting. As Pilar and Yolanda put it, the idea is "just the right balance of inspiration and information"—which happens to be not only the perfect aspiration for a parenting website, but also a subtle (and I'm gonna say intentional) reference to a great Shuggie Otis tune. Check Momfilter out!

Being Counted

I should avoid more than one housekeeping post a month, but I wanted to quickly note that this blog has been selected as one of the SAY 100, for which experts in ten different genres each picked ten websites they feel "create engaging content, drive conversation, and shape opinion." Momover author Dana Wood curated the parenting list, and I'm truly honored that she considers my meanderings on kids' entertainment worthy of such remarkable company, both within and outside my category. (Thanks so much, Dana!)

And so this post is, first of all, a welcome to any readers who are discovering this site via the SAY 100; I pledge to exert every effort to live up to the recommendation! But it's also an exhortation to my existing readership to check out the SAY 100 list for themselves—it's well worth the click-through. Several of my existing favorite online writers (Mark Bittman, say) are there, but I've also already discovered many new favorites. And with every link I click, I'm a little more humbled to be on a list alongside them all!

Looking Forward

As was probably becoming obvious, I'm abandoning the continuation of the 2010 year-end posts, feeling that what's there should suffice, and more to the point, it's February 2011 already, so time to turn to this year! My posting schedule has also fallen victim to the relentless snow and even more relentless viruses, but I am indeed gearing up for new and incredibly relevant posts, starting this week.

I'll also take this chance to announce that within the next few weeks, I'm also going to start writing for Momfilter, an about-to-launch parenting website created by two of my former colleagues from Cookie magazine. As part of my work there, I'll be cross-posting entries from this blog every Friday.

I'll put up a notice here once the site is live; I think any of my readers who don't already know of Momfilter from its Facebook persona (though I suspect I owe a good percentage of them to it!) will love it for its brilliant take on...well, just about every subject that's important to the life of a modern parent: viable travel destinations, dinner solutions, style inspiration (for parents and kids alike), birthday-party ideas...and, of course, children's entertainment!