In Concert: Recess Monkey

It's a bit embarrassing how few live kids'-music shows my family has been to, given that I spend this much time writing about the subject. I always intend to bring the boys to see the acts we enjoy most, but something else always comes up on the weekend or day in question—a visiting relative, a nasty cold. And so a bunch of perfect opportunities have passed us by: Secret Agent 23 Skidoo, Lunch Money, They Might Be Giants. Lame, I know.

Well, not this time. Recess Monkey's much acclaimed The Final Funktier has been in permanent heavy rotation at our house since last summer, so when we saw they were coming east as part of the Just Kidding series at Symphony Space on the Upper West Side of NYC, I knew my six-year-old and I had to be there. (Plus, the hall they were playing there is the site of the old Thalia movie theater, where I spent many an idle weekend afternoon watching old movies as a kid myself. And now it's called the Leonard Nimoy Thalia! It was all meant to be, clearly.)

The band, three working grade-school teachers who were able to tour last week only because they were off for winter break(!), had already played an early show the same day. But you'd never have known that from their energy when they took the stage, grabbing the audience with their catchy uptempo numbers that got the little ones up and dancing. Dash was psyched to hear live versions of tracks he knows from the recent album ("Jet Pack," "Moon Boots," "Booster Seat"). But he was soon singing along with lead singer/guitarist Drew Holloway on tunes he was hearing for the first time as well; thanks in part to the engaging introductions by bassist Jack Forman, it hardly mattered whether you knew the material before you came or not.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that Recess Monkey is better than just about anyone out there at writing these fun, clever, very danceable songs. Dash had a blast, though by about two thirds of the way through the hour-or-so-long show he'd danced and spun himself into near exhaustion. (He was also briefly surprised to discover that the band's "manager," a plush simian named Mayor Monkey, did not move and talk by himself, but was assisted in both tasks by drummer Darin Henry.)

As for me, I was marveling at how these guys, at the top of their game and their field, were making a full NYC house of about a hundred kids and parents feel intimate, like a show played for a group of friends. I suppose being full-time schoolteachers probably helps there; as I asked Dash on the way home, "How cool would it be to have these guys as your teacher?"

After the show ended, the band ran to the back of the house to wish their enthusiastic fan base farewell. We bought a copy of the band's album-before-last, Field Trip, from them, and when the guys offered to sign it for Dash, he was thrilled to near speechlessness. I also confirmed a rumor I'd heard that Recess Monkey has a new album due out in June—their seventh!—continuing to uphold their reputation as the most prolific of today's great kids' musicians. (It's about superheroes, they said.)

Dash was beaming all the way home, looking over his signed CD sleeve, and I vowed that I'd do better at getting us out to more shows in the coming months. With spring approaching, there's no shortage of opportunities in the NYC area; the Just Kidding series itself has an upcoming Justin Roberts show on March 26, for instance. And every major U.S. city seems to have at least one series like this in town, but an even better way to find shows to attend is just to check out your favorite musicians' own websites and see if they might be heading your way anytime soon.

There's even another chance for New Yorkers to see Recess Monkey soon—they'll be playing the 92nd Street YTribeca on May 1. (Is school out that week too, or are they flying cross-country for the weekend?) Any fans who haven't seen them live yet should jump at the chance; we very well may go for seconds ourselves!

[Photo: Myles McDonnell]

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!

New Books: Where's Walrus?

 
Yes, once again I'm a sucker for a wordless picture book. And as usual, it's not just the sheer beauty of the art I'm enamored of—though the retro-style illustrations by its author, graphic designer Stephen Savage, are plenty appealing—but also the whimsy and the charming execution of its concept.

The title nod to Waldo notwithstanding, Where's Walrus? isn't a true visual-puzzle book, which will probably be a relief to the young toddlers that are its audience. (Nor, as far as I can tell, is it an Alan Parsons Project reference.) It's really part of the crafty-animal-escapes genre to which classics like Good Night, Gorilla and even Curious George belong. And its plot is disarmingly simple: A walrus takes a powder from the zoo, and a mustachioed zookeeper then chases him around as he blends in with a series of absurd city scenes, including a lunch counter out of a Hopper painting, a line of can-can dancers, and a row of shop-window mannequins.

It's all pretty silly—Walrus is in ridiculously plain sight on every spread—but that's precisely what will delight young readers. Our two-year-old is pleased as punch to have it both ways, triumphant that he can quickly answer the title question with every turn of the page--there he is, right there!—yet also giggling more and more with each one of those turns. I dare say parents won't be able to resist a smile now and then themselves.

[Images courtesy of Scholastic]

Now Playing: Recess Monkey

Just found out that one of our family's fave kids'-music groups is playing live in our area, and I wanted to make sure to get a blast out about it to those of you who live in or around NYC. Seattle's Recess Monkey, whose album The Final Funktier was on my and a lot of other smart people's best-of-2010 lists, is coming to Symphony Space on 95th Street & Broadway, as part of the venue's Just Kidding series, for two shows on Saturday, February 26: one at 11 A.M., the other at 2 P.M.

(For those in the D.C. area, the band will be hitting Jammin Java in Vienna, Virginia, on Sunday, February 27, at 10:30 A.M. as well.)

I've gone on and on about Recess Monkey in this space a few separate times now, so suffice it to say they're three supertight musicians whose songs are catchy, often surprisingly complex, and always incredibly fun. I've heard they also put on a heck of a live show, and I intend to be at the second show with my older son to find out for myself. Look for me there!

And in the meantime, here's one of the band's videos, "Jet Pack," off The Final Funktier:



[Photo: Kevin Fry, courtesy of Recess Monkey.]

Security Blanket: Neil Gaiman Novels

As I've mentioned before (endlessly, I know), my son Dash, now six, is a big fan of all things spooky and scary—ghosts, witches, vampires. The Nightmare Before Christmas has been a favorite movie since age three. So on reputation and subject matter alone, it was a no-brainer that he would, sooner or later, enjoy the children’s novels of Neil Gaiman.

Now, Dash devoured several of Gaiman's picture books—the macabre The Dangerous Alphabet, the sweet Blueberry Girl (out in paperback in March!)—the moment they came out. Both are standouts for their cleverness, but also feature a light touch that I found surprising, having only read Gaiman's early graphic-novel work (mainly Sandman) to that point. But even in Dangerous Alphabet, the writer demonstrates that he doesn't believe in sheltering young readers.

The novel Coraline, which I first encountered in perhaps its most frightening version, the P. Craig Russell–illustrated graphic novel (at left), even scared me a little. (The animated film is a Dora episode by comparison, drained of a good deal of the book's creepiness; I found it a little disappointing.) I was blown away by this book—by the storytelling skill, sure, but also by the seamless way Gaiman folds psychology into the tale: Is all this magical, creepy stuff really happening, or is it in the mind of a lonely, creative girl who's furious at her parents for neglecting her and flirting with the idea of an “other” mother and father, then realizing you have to be careful what you wish for? As with most great writing of this kind, the answer is up to the reader—and either way, the ending is deeply satisfying.

But Dash had just turned three when I finished Coraline, and it isn't scary in a playful way—it's really scary! (Even the original chapter-book version, which is slightly less vivid for not being explicitly illustrated, can induce chills—plus, at the time it was a bit ahead of Dash’s reading level anyway.) So while I was convinced of Gaiman's brilliance as a writer for kids, and I knew my son would eventually love his work, I felt I had to put this one off.

Not too long afterward, I got a copy of Gaiman's kid novella Odd and the Frost Giants, a Norse-mythology tale about an self-exiled boy and some anthropomorphic forest animals who need his help. (Gaiman’s work for children often seems to focus on kids forced, for one reason or another, to cope with difficult circumstances without parental help, at least of the traditional kind.) This was the perfect introduction: gentler and far less creepy than Coraline, it allows the author a chance to show off his lyrical side. It's a lovely book, the one that convinced my wife of Gaiman’s preeminence among active writers for children, as Coraline had done for me. And Dash took to its tone—offbeat and calmly proud of it—instantly.

I'm not sure if there was a teaser on our copy of Odd, or if Dash found out about it somewhere else, but he became obsessed with Gaiman's The Graveyard Book about this time, just based on the title. (The 19th-century graveyard one must walk through to get from our house to our town library might have had something to do with it, too.) I’d heard particularly great things about this one, including that it had won a Newbery, so I picked up a copy...and then discovered that it opens with the methodical murder of all the members of a family except their infant boy. (The better to set up the child-on-his-own trope, of course.)

I froze for a while. Dash hadn't encountered anything like this grim, realistic violence in his reading so far. Could he handle it? (Or was the question really, as so often, Could I handle it?) I mentally hemmed and hawed for a while, and Dash conveniently forgot about The Graveyard Book for a bit, allowing me some time to flip through the book some more on my own. I soon found that after the difficult setup, it settles into a gentler place; it wasn’t without frightening moments now and then, but it didn’t dwell in them, either.

Eventually Dash’s mind turned back to The Graveyard Book, and shortly after his sixth birthday I finally agreed to embark during his bedtime reading—fully aware that I might be launching a series of nightmares, and ready to stop at any time. And he was, no doubt, taken aback by the harshness of the book’s beginning. But I made sure we got past that part and through the true establishment of the premise—the infant is named Nobody and raised properly by the ghosts of all those buried in the titular graveyard—before he went to sleep the first night. No bad dreams resulted. And predictably, Dash was hooked.

So was I. Everything Gaiman had shown himself capable of in the books we’d read before was here in spades. The dark story is handled again with that surprisingly light touch, and it’s a true page-turner. The writing has depth, too, touching on philosophy, poetry, and other “serious” matters without getting bogging down in any. And just when you’re immersed in the thriller, Gaiman gives you a surprise gift—a beautifully lyrical chapter about a once-in-a-generation night when ghosts and the living dance together. (The living, naturally, don’t remember it.) It’s a breath in the middle of the book, a short lift that advances the plot not a whit. And it’s just perfect.

As it turns out, The Graveyard Book is closely based on—in fact, is Gaiman’s homage to—Kipling’s The Jungle Book, with the ghosts in the city graveyard taking the place of the animals who raise Mowgli. As always, Gaiman is subtle about this (I know the Kipling pretty well, and I didn’t even see the connection at first), and he never lets his references to the classic overwhelm his own narrative. You could read his book with no knowledge of Kipling and be perfectly satisfied.

But those familiar with The Jungle Book will find that Gaiman weaves a special magic in reference to it: His book makes you appreciate Kipling’s all the more, shearing it of the weight of Disney associations and “Bare Necessities,” and reminding you that for Mowgli, as for Nobody, this is life-and-death stuff, in the end. This ain’t old-fashioned Disney. (Now, a Pixar take on The Graveyard Book…that I’d pay to see!)

So I’ve learned two things in the course of this long story. First: Neil Gaiman is indeed at the very top level of writers for kids today, and we will continue to seek out and devour everything he produces. (Actually, we can start with Coraline; it wasn’t until I was writing this post that I remembered that I forgot to ever return to it with Dash!)

And second: As seems to usually happen, it’s the books and movies I’m most concerned will freak Dash out that become his very favorites. (And often mine.)

[Cover images courtesy of HarperCollins.]

New Books: The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation

Not for the first time, I’m stretching the definition of new here a bit. The first entry in this two-book series by M. T. Anderson came out in hardcover way back in 2006, and the only "new" aspect about either now is their debut in a lovely updated paperback format last month.

But, despite the National Book Award won by volume one, The Pox Party, both of these books were entirely new to me. And while that honor, stamped atop the covers of the new paperback editions, lifted my expectations of their quality, well...I had no idea. This is the best young-adult fiction I've read since I began covering children's books, and the first I'd recommend to adult friends as well since Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. Anderson's tale truly is astonishing.

It's about (and largely narrated by) the title character, the Boston-born son of an enslaved African woman in mid-eighteenth-century Boston. He is thus a slave himself, of course, but he doesn't know it for many years, as his "owner" is a the leader of a philosophical society that has decided, among its many other Enlightenment-inspired projects, to see what happens when you raise an African boy in European fashion. So Octavian and his mother (who develops a kind of salon of her own of infatuated society intellectuals and artists) wear fine clothes and eat well alongside their "masters," and perform no labor beyond that of Octavian's education, which matches the best available to white children—Latin, Greek, "modern" science, etc.

Eventually, however, Octavian discovers the truth—that he's not merely a slave, but one who's been the subject of a lifelong scientific experiment. Worse yet, circumstances eventually require the society to seek a new benefactor for its funding; the source of its continued operation is a group of southern plantation owners. They require that Octavian's "equality" experiment be rigged so that he will fail it, thus justifying their continued use of slavery to amount their riches, all of which has a predictably dire effect on the lives of both Octavian and his mother.

Meanwhile, amid all this, the hostilities between the American colonies and the English government are growing until the Revolutionary War finally breaks out. The bitter irony of the slave-owning colonists' fight for liberty is not lost on Octavian, as the New England patriots start to fear that English promises of liberation will cause their slaves to rise up against them. (A real-life regiment of ex-slaves that was created by Lord Dunmore, the colonial governor of Virginia, in response to Patrick Henry's uprising in that state, plays a central role in the second book, The Kingdom on the Waves.)

The real history, and Anderson's remarkable treatment of it—the American Revolution in these pages is neither as pure of motive nor as sure of success as it's generally portrayed, especially in books for children—would be enough on its own to make these books engrossing. But as vividly described as it is, it's really just the backdrop for the story, and the voice, of Octavian himself, as he discovers the devastating truth about his true place in his world, then questions that truth and finally refuses to let it define him. He's an unforgettably powerful character, rich and deep and real, the kind you start to see cinematically, hearing the voice of name actors (I settled on Larry Gilliard Jr. of The Wire) as you read Octavian’s words.

I should warn that these are among the most adult of young-adult books I’ve ever read. The text itself is dense, written as it is in true-to-era colonial language and sentence structure. And then there’s the subject matter: Not surprisingly given his situation, as well as the war he's living amidst, some extremely upsetting things happen to and around Octavian, and the reader is not spared their full force. That impact is part of what makes the work as strong as it is, in my opinion, but you’ll want to be sure your young adult is prepared. In other words, these are not the YA books with which most smart 10-year-olds will want to be stretching their boundaries.

But high-school kids who are strong readers looking for challenging adult-level material will be blown away by the Octavian Nothing books, I think. Heck, most parents will be blown away by them, as I certainly was.

[Images courtesy of Candlewick Press]

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!

2010 Wrap: DVDs

I'll get back to my final toys wrap-up post shortly, but I'm going to insert my video-of-the-year post first. It's not precisely the best movie or video we saw in 2010—that'd be Toy Story 3, predictably enough—but I figure few parents need me to tell them about movies they've probably seen already, and certainly have had ample chance to read reviews of. So other than to say we also liked How to Train Your Dragon quite a bit more than we expected to, I'll leave the big studio DVD releases alone.

Likewise, you know what TV shows your kids like best, and thus what TV-show collections you might want to own on DVD. (And these days, with DVRs and Netflix on-demand and 24-hour programming on Nick Jr. and the Disney Channel, who really needs DVDs of TV shows anyway?)

But there is one category of DVD that isn't as well advertised, or as much talked about, as Pixar movies and PBS Kids shows: the Scholastic Storybook Treasures DVDs. (For those unfamiliar, these are simply-animated versions of picture-book classics old and new, by everyone from Sendak to Willems.) I've sung the collection's praises before in this space—honestly, it's been our main video go-to for years now.

And our favorite of this year’s new releases in the series would have to be The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs!, from Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith's typically clever twist on the original tale. (If you don't know the wonderful book, it's narrated by "Alexander T. Wolf," who attempts to explain how his devastation of the first two pigs' homes and his attacks on the lives of all three were all just a big misunderstanding.) In the animated version—the art, as always in these videos, taken directly from the original illustrations—Paul Giamatti has a great time doing the voice of the seemingly earnest wolf. Our family enjoyed it an awful lot ourselves; it's one of those DVDs where you find yourself sneaking into the room to watch with your kids even when you were supposed to be, I don't know, making dinner or something. Giamatti's performance is irresistible.

Also as usual with these DVDs, the lead story is packaged with a bunch from the Scholastic Storybook back catalog with loosely similar themes. (Wallace's Lists, adapted from a book I didn't know and narrated nicely by Zach Braff, has also been popular with the boys.)

[Image courtesy of Scholastic Storybook Treasures]

2010 Wrap: Toys, Part 1

My experience of toys and games these days differs from that of the other categories of kids' entertainment. I manage to keep some semblance of track of the year's output of children's books and music and movies, but with toys I'm far less clued in. So this part of my 2010 wrap will be a bit broader than the others, with entries that definitely came out last year, entries that definitely didn't, and entries I'm not even sure about. (And I’m going to get finished with last year before the end of January, I swear!)

First off is an entry that decidedly did not come out last year, but that’s when we found it. Until my kids were old enough to be interested in them, I'd never quite gotten the appeal of customizable toys like Build-a-Bear and American Girl dolls. (But then, I am not a kid.) But this year, both my six-year-old and my two-year-old got robot fever, and then we stumbled over a place called RobotGalaxy. It's pretty much Build-a-Bear for machines: Kids create their own robots from various interchangeable parts, picking a head-and-torso core and various tool, shield, or weapon (yes, there are weapons, though they're expressed fairly broadly through shapes and lights) limbs. The staff helps children make their selections, gets them to give their creation a name, and then "activates" the robot in a little whistles-and-bells-laden chamber right out of Metropolis (but stripped of the sinister overtones, naturally).

The robots don't really do all that much—each arm or leg has a distinct function that's expressed via sounds and/or lights when you press its button, and each head speaks a few preprogrammed lines. There's also an online community you can connect the robot to via USB, with games and a little virtual world and such. But the price per robot (generally somewhere in the $50 to $75 range) is pretty steep for that. What I finally got about these customized-toy places, as I watched my son beam while he picked out his parts (including a female head-torso piece), is that a big part of what they're selling is the experience itself—the moments of free choice that don't present themselves too often to grade-school kids. The look on Dash's face as he went through the process was a mixture of pure delight and disbelief that this was even happening.

So while I can't really argue with anyone who says RobotGalaxy is overpriced based on the merits of the end product, I looked at the extra cost as thie price we paid for the show, as it were—a fee for Dash's glee, and our own warm feelings watching it. All those good vibes seemed to rub off on the robot herself, too—he plays with it far more than I would have expected for something with fairly limited features. (It would appear that the song-and-dance that accompanied its acquisition engaged his imagination pretty well.) Somewhat to my surprise (I can be pretty cheap), I haven't regretted the purchase, or the experience, at all.

2010 Wrap: Books, Part 5

 

  

The last of my trends relating to books I encountered last year builds on a discovery from my Cookie magazine years: Australian author Martine Murray's Henrietta: There's No One Better. (Say it with an Australian accent and it rhymes!) In a first-person-narrated stream of consciousness without any real plot, Murray crystalizes perfectly the energy, the randomly logical thought patterns, of a certain type of preschool girl we've all run across. Her accompanying illustrations, best described as "childlike with attitude," are equally spot-on. Often laugh-out-loud funny, with dazzling wordplay that always remains true to its protagonist's age and personality, the book remains among the best I've seen at capturing the essence of a child's character. (It shares something with Lauren Child's Charlie & Lola and Clarice Bean series in this regard.)

So I was thrilled to see two sequels from Murray arriving on these shores last year. And while the surprise factor—just at the author's amazing ability to pull this voice off so well—may be a thing of the past, both Henrietta the Great Go-Getter and Henrietta Gets a Letter are otherwise as delightful as the original, giving readers craving more of Henrietta exactly that.

Now, while I did notice that Henrietta shares certain of the more effusive, enthusiastic aspects of her personality with my Australian friends (there's one in particular I'm thinking of; she probably knows who she is on the off chance she's reading this), I had not at first thought of the qualities that set Murray's books apart as quintessentially Australian. Until, that is, a bit later last year, when I ran across Chris McKimmie's Two Peas in a Pod, on the surface a very different book from the Henrietta ones. For one thing, it has a plot—it's an entry in the classic "best friend moves away" genre. But it features an undeniably similar energy, and it likewise captures the mindset and point of view of a child marvelously through McKimmie's writing and vivid, expressive, often page-packing illustrations.

Combine this revelation with my previously expressed regard for Australian illustrators like Sophie Blackall and Freya Blackwood (whose lovely Half a World Away even covers the same subject as McKimmie's book; I guess friends' moving far away is a particularly common issue for Australian kids?), and I'm fully expecting a full-scale Australian invasion in kid lit any day now.

And that does it for my meandering path through my favorite new kids' books of 2010!

[Images: Courtesy of Independent Publishers Group]

2010 Wrap: Books, Part 4

Any parent with boys of the age to be reading chapter books can hardly help becoming aware of a genre aimed squarely at their kids: gross-out books, usually involving monsters or zombies or some other creepy creatures of one sort or another, with descriptive passages featuring gruesome details (of a cartoony nature, rather than a literal one) thereof. Based on the sheer volume, I imagine that some publishing study has identified this subject as particularly appealing to young boys, and thus particularly likely to get that demographic to put down the DS and start reading.

Judging by my six-year-old, the study wasn't wrong; while he's far from resistant to reading just about any type of book, spooky, creepy topics light up his eyes. I suppose it's nothing new, really; I recall  learning and delighting in the old classic about "great green globs of greasy, grimy gopher guts" at about this age.

Trouble is, the majority of the chapter books being churned out to satisfy this market are ... well, not very good—clearly written quickly and without much care. This bothers the target audience not one bit, from my observations, but it is a bit of a drag for those of us charged with reading these books to our kids occasionally.

Which is why I was so pleased last year to discover the Barnaby Grimes series of chapter books by the veteran British team of writer Paul Stewart and illustrator Chris Riddell. Set in a fictional city that's very closesly based on Georgian-era London, they recount the various adventures of a self-described "tick-tock lad"—an ancestor of modern bike messengers, basically, only Barnaby and the others in his trade get to their destinations by leaping over and rapelling down the rooflines of the city, in an early (and tktt) version of parkour. (I'm assuming this profession is entirely the authors' invention, but it's brilliant, opening up a somewhat overexposed time and place in completely new ways, and allowing Stewart and Riddell to make the world of their books their own.)

Barnaby's work inevitably seems to carry him into the path of all sorts of trouble, much of it supernatural. For instance, in Legion of the Dead, a delivery involving funeral materials leads him to a graveyard where the dead have apparently begun to rise (you can imagine the gross-out potential); a curse brought back from military campaigns in India turns out to be the culprit. Stewart and Riddell are smart enough, for these creepy tales, to stand on the shoulders of great writers past: Shades of Dickens and Kipling (as well as maybe a touch of Poe) are evident in their storytelling. Yet all the while, the writing remains at a level within, rather than removed from, its genre—these are not the marvelously macabre but also more literarily challenging children's books of Neil Gaiman (more on which soon, by the way). Which means your child can have his page-turning light gross-out lit, and you can smile, rather than grimace, as you read it to him.

Coming in part 5 (the last of the series): What came from a land down under...

[Image: Courtesy of David Fickling Books]

2010 Wrap: Books, Part 3

As an adult reader, I go for relatively little new fiction, in favor of older writing. I figure the cream of the crop has had more time to rise to the top, and certainly there's no shortage of classics that my schooling and personal reading have still left untouched. Given my extremely limited reading time (I am a parent of young kids, after all), my chances of striking literary gold seem stronger with that stuff.

Yet with children's books, in terms of what’s available in print, the choice has generally been between the giants of years past (Sendak and Ingalls Wilder and Seuss and the like) or the brand-spanking-new. Almost all the middle ground is out of print, only to be found with the help of a good local librarian. (Or such is my perception.)

Things have been changing, though, largely thanks to the New York Review of Books Children's Collection, which continues to publish five or so of their trademark beautiful hardcover reissues of forgotten out-of-print kids' titles every year. It appears 2010 was an early-1960s year: We got E. K. Spykman's sparkling, offbeat 1960 chapter book Terrible, Horrible Edie; Marjorie Winslow and Erik Blegvad's infintely charming 1961 cookbook for dolls, Mud Pies and Other Recipes; a whimsical 1963 fable from Rhoda Levine and Edward Gorey, Three Ladies Beside the Sea; and Alastair Reid and Bob Gill’s 1960 picture-book paean to creative imagination, Supposing. Everything NYBRCC selects to republish is of such high quality, and the volumes are such gorgeous little gems of book production (just the right amount of old-fashioned), that I've come to anticipate every new reissue—if you’ll pardon the oxymoron—with only slightly less eagerness than readers of Dickens's serials must have awaited the continuation of his novels.

Other publishers seem to have caught on, at least with regard to their own backlists; the year saw a number of compilation volumes of greatest hits past. David Macaulay reached back to some of the books with which he first made his name—the classic architecture-for-kids titles Cathedral, Castle, and Mosque—dusted them off, and updated them for the marvelous Built to Last. Sara Pennypacker's neurotically hilarious Stuart books got a (remarkably affordable!) three-book compilation edition as well, The Amazing World Of Stuart.

I hope the trend continues and enlarges; there's still an awful lot of good material out there waiting to be rediscovered. (Not to harp on it, but I'd certainly be obliged if some helpful publisher would reprint the personal childhood favorite I mentioned a post ago.) In the meantime, I'll go wait for the next scrumptious NYRBCC title.

Coming in part 4: Can gross-out books for boys be literary?

[Images: Courtesy of New York Review of Books Children's Collection (Supposing, Edie) and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Built)]

2010 Wrap: Books, Part 2

Another trend in kids' books last year was a continued surge in works either about or inspired by ancient Greek mythology. Much to my delight—as a child, I read these stories more than traditional Grimm fairy tales—this has been building for some time now, largely, I suspect, because of the phenomenal success of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series. Still, as recently as early last year I had trouble finding much to recommend to a friend whose daughter had plowed through the Riordan books and wanted to delve further into their original source material. (I ended up suggesting the classic D'Aulaires book, which is now nearly 50 years old.)

But 2010 brought a number of new entries. The two I liked best take very different approaches, one modern and cutting-edge, the other retro and, well, classical in style. Both, though, do a great job of capturing the feel of these ancient myths and presenting the narratives to kids in new, eye-opening ways, and of avoiding the stiff, stultifying tone that infects far too many kids' books on the subject. (As the Athenian playwrights knew—comedians and dramatists alike—these characters and stories are intended to be entertaining.)

The first was the subject of my very first post for this blog: George O'Connor's marvelous Olympians series, graphic-novel treatments of the tales of the major Greek gods. (Thus far we have Zeus and Athena, with hopefully many more on their way soon.) The conversion of the myths to the typical comic-book format and tone certainly has the effect of lightening the traditional weight of these stories, but that's a good thing—after all, the origin stories of the Olympian gods are among the more impenetrable myths in most retellings. O'Connor cuts right through that with his dynamic and colorful panels, while also remaining remarkably faithful to the original stories. His sources are the ancient poets and writers themselves (Hesiod, Pindar, etc.), and it shows. The results are irresistible to children—my older son couldn't put these books down for months—and also some of the clearest, most expressive, and I think truest representations in the English language of these old, old tales.

The second, which came out late in the year, handles the myths in more usual children's-book fashion. Greek Myths is a hardcover volume of concise retellings by Ann Turnbull of many of the more famous stories, accompanied by Sarah Young's gorgeous illustrations, which are modeled after classical Greek vase art. (The images bring to mind an out-of-print favorite of mine from my own childhood, a large-format Golden Books The Iliad and The Odyssey by Jane Werner Watson, illustrated in unforgettable fashion by Alice and Martin Provensen.) But if the format of Turnbull and Young's work is nothing new, their execution is among the best I've seen: clear storytelling and evocative art that, for me, catapults this book past the D'Aulaires' one (which, while groundbreaking in its time, feels pretty dated these days on both fronts). Going forward, Greek Myths will be my primary recommendation as a children's Greek-mythology primer.

Coming in part 3: Looking backward.

[Images courtesy of First Second Books (Zeus) and Candlewick Press (Greek Myths).]

2010 Wrap: Books, Part 1

I wrote about most of my favorite kids' books of 2010 in individual posts during the year, of course, and especially in this category, a true "best of" list would for the most part just echo those posts directly. So instead, I'm going to mention some of the trends I saw during the year in my and my kids' reading, which will allow me to give nods to both books I've covered in the blog and ones I've missed or not gotten around to yet.

And since I haven't been posting nearly as often as I'd like of late, and this post will probably get long enough that writing it will put things off another few days otherwise, I'm also going to break it up into multiple posts.

So, first off: As has been common in recent years, many of the most brilliant and revelatory picture books of the year were either nearly or entirely wordless. In some cases, the focus on image and imagination was the explicit point (David Wiesner's Art & Max, Suzy Lee's Shadow); in others, it was just a remarkably effective way of telling the story (Elisha Cooper's Beaver Is Lost and even his somewhat wordier Farm; Bill Thomson's Chalk; Lane Smith's It's a Book). All of them demonstrate one of the lessons Pixar—and Charlie Chaplin, for that matter—have been teaching creators of kids' entertainment for years now: Sometimes, a great idea told entirely through images is the best storytelling there is.

Tomorrow: What Rick Riordan hath wrought.

[Images courtesy of Chronicle Books (Shadow) and Macmillan (It's a Book)]

2010 Wrap: Music

As I've mentioned before, I don't feel confident that I'm seeing absolutely everything out there in kids' music, books, etc., these days, not like I did (or thought I did, anyway) when I was covering this beat for a national magazine. So a traditional "top 10" list for the year in each category seems presumptuous—I'm sure there's a ton of great stuff that came out in 2010 that I missed entirely.

So instead, I'm just going to humbly put forward a few posts of the best kids' entertainment I've seen this year. Most of it will be items I've covered previously in this blog, but a few will be stragglers I never got around to, or am still hoping to get to, if they came out recently.

I'll start with music, the easiest category for me to tackle because I've sort of done it already, as a voter in the annual Fids & Kamily Awards. I won't just reproduce my ballot here, though—the cutoff dates for that voting ended at October 2010 releases, and my best-of-what-I've-heard includes some stuff that came out after that date.

So here, in no particular order, are the kids' music CDs our family discovered this year that never seem to go out of rotation.

Underground Playground, Secret Agent 23 Skidoo. I've raved about Skidoo on multiple occasions already in this space, but I'm still blown away that anyone could manage to make hip-hop for children, well, listenable at all. And Skidoo's sophomore output (as his debut was) is far more than that; with his old-school beats and smart, sharp rhymes, he puts a smile on your face and a bounce in your kid's steps. And the other way around, too.


Mind of My Own, Frances England. She's the other artist I couldn't stop talking about this year, and her third album lived up to her first two. You know how, with a really good album by an artist you like, you gravitate toward certain songs on the first several listens, but then toward different ones after a few more, obsessing over each group in turn until nearly every track has been your "favorite"? This is that kind of album, for kids and parents alike.


The Final Funktier, Recess Monkey. This is undeniably a goofy CD, and in kids' music a little of that goes a long way, especially for parents. The difference with the prolific Recess Monkey that these guys are really good, as both songwriters and musicians. Their songs could hardly be catchier, and when you find yourself humming them to yourself at the office, you're not horrified like you are when the tune is "Elmo's World" or the map song from Dora. You just laugh at yourself for a moment—and then keep on humming.


Sunny Day, Elizabeth Mitchell. The most soothing voice in kids' music today is, not surprisingly, responsible for the standout "cool-down" album of the year. What is surprising—though really, given her previous track record, it shouldn't be—is her ability to preserve that warm, calm vibe through songs well beyond the comfort zone of the folk-acoustic genre. This CD can be the answer to a parent's craziest morning.


Original Friend, Lunch Money. I'm still planning a full writeup of this South Carolina trio's excellent third album, but suffice it to say for now that it hasn't emerged from the CD changer since we acquired it. With a sound that would fit right in on any indie or college radio station, and smart, smooth, irresistibly likeable vocals by guitarist Molly Ledford, Lunch Money is another of those special bands producing songs kids love that parents can often forget is kids' music.


Many Hands: Family Music for Haiti,various artists. This CD to benefit victims of the Haitian earthquake contains tracks by every single one of the artists I've just mentioned, as well as much of the rest of the genre's top talent, from Pete Seeger to Jonathan Coulton to They Might Be Giants to Gustafer Yellowgold to Dan Zanes...the list really does go on and on. Far and away the best kids' music compilation I've ever encountered, it's the perfect way to find out which of today's kids' musicians might be your children's (and your) favorites, and of course it serves a most worthy cause.

[Images, from top: courtesy of Secret Agent 23 Skidoo; courtesy of Frances England; Kevin Fry/courtesy of Recess Monkey; courtesy of Elizabeth Mitchell; Brandon Reese/courtesy of Lunch Moneycourtesy of Spare the Rock Records]

More Zanes Holiday Music

I realized recently that a traditional magazine-style "gift guide" for this blog would be kind of redundant—it would end up being largely a repetition of most of the new products I've written about this year, and anyone can get that already by simply clicking on "new books," etc., among the tags on the right sidebar.

However, I am working on a series of best-of-2010 posts, which will include both stuff I've covered here and things I either missed the first time around or just couldn't find space for. Those should begin later this week, I hope, assuming I vanquish my own remaining Christmas shopping as planned.

In the meantime, Dan Zanes has conveniently enough posted a couple more holiday songs on his website, first a simple acoustic performance of "Silent Night" (posted up top, for you traditionalists) and then a repost of his four-year-old holiday recording for Heifer International, "Holiday Time in Brooklyn" (below, for my Kings County readership). Check 'em out!

Old School: Tintin

I remember when a friend introduced me to the world of Tintin. I can't remember exactly how old I was, probably about seven or eight, and he brought out what looked like comic books...but they were bound, and different from American superhero ones. (Basically these were my first graphic novels, though that term wasn't yet in use, and seems rarely applied to bound Europeans series like Tintin and Asterix anyway.)

I was blown away by the adventures, the humor, and the storytelling, and I also recall being a bit hypnotized by the exoticism—these were from Europe, and at the time were a little hard to find in U.S. stores. (Well, only a few stores carried them, at any rate.) I tore through them, as many of my schoolmates did the same, and there was a little competition among us to grab copies of the ones we hadn't read yet from the school library.

In the last year or so, our six-year-old has been pulling down the three or four Tintin books I still have, and so I've been rediscovering them as he discovers them for the first time. As many parents have noted through the years, they are of their times (the Belgian writer-illustrator Hergé created the bulk of his oeuvre between 1930 and 1950) in ways both good and bad. The bad causes occasional generational hubbub—I vaguely remember one from when I was a kid, and recently there was a controversy at the Brooklyn Public Library that put one early Tintin book in a locked room.

Yes, there is some offensive stuff in the Tintin books. Most of it involves a general (and typical of much European pop culture of the time, as anyone who's read Agatha Christie novels knows) patronizing attitude toward nonwhite peoples of the globe. Tintin is almost invariably defending these peoples against violently racist and venal Europeans who want to abuse/enslave/exploit the hapless third-worlders, but there is unquestionably an offputting sense of innocent, simple races that must be protected and treated kindly by their European betters. In a few of the books, Herge goes beyond this into awful stereotype. (His portrayal of a group of Africans whom Tintin rescues from being enslaved by the bad guys in The Red Sea Sharks comes to mind, in how he makes them both appear and speak).

This is a bit uncomfortable, and difficult to explain to a young child—but I also think the all-too-recent past of open racism is a subject they're going to encounter sooner or later, especially in classic literature, film, or television from the period. Tintin books are as good a way to confront it as any. Better, even, since Herge's plots often use real history as their backdrop—The Blue Lotus, for instance, is explicit about (and extremely critical of) Japan's move to dominate China in the 1930s. His drawings of Asians use upsetting stereotypes, and his "the Japanese are bad; the Chinese are good" message is obviously simplistic, but he does make the Japansese characters bad mainly because they demonstrably do bad things, not simply because they're Japanese.

But none of this is the reason you'll want to read Tintin with your kids. It's because these are some of the seminal Western adventure stories, drawing on a prior generation of European thrillers and unquestionably influencing those that followed. (Reading the Scotland-set The Black Island with Dash, I couldn't help noticing how many of the story elements turn up in Hitchcock films—for instance, there's a scene in which a biplane dives to attack Tintin on the ground, just like the famous one that chases Cary Grant in North by Northwest, which was filmed some years later.) The stories are riveting, true page-turners; the characters broad but unforgettable, and quickly beloved to kids and adults alike, from the plucky hero himself to his blustery sidekick Captain Haddock to the brilliant but absent-minded Professor Calculus to the bumbling near-twin detectives Thompson and Thomson. I sense Dash is on the cusp of flying through the entire series just as I did more than 30 years ago. And I can't wait myself.

I should add that there's one more reason to be excited about Tintin right now: Steven Spielberg's 3-D animation Tintin movie is scheduled to arrive in theaters next December. Based on The Secret of the Unicorn and featuring a voice cast that includes Andy Serkis (Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies) as Captain Haddock, Daniel Craig as villain Red Rackham, and Jamie Bell (Billy Elliott) as Tintin himself, it would seem to have a good shot at doing the books justice. You can bet we'll be there.

[Image: Courtesy of Little, Brown]

New Music: (Free!) Dan Zanes Hanukkah Song

I suspect that the Venn diagram of my readership and Dan Zanes's devoted audience has quite a bit of overlap, but for those outside the Zanes circle: The award-winning kids'-music giant has released a nifty recording of the Hanukkah song "Ner Li" for free download on his website. And I even managed to get the news up here before the holiday ended—still a few more days! Check it out.

[Photo: Gala Narezo]

New Books: Other Goose

I always feel like I owe author-illustrator J. Otto Seibold. Back in my Cookie magazine days, his books ended up as the last cut from our Reviews section on a few separate occasions. (My blog is not exactly a fair substitute for coverage in a national print magazine, I know, but I do what I can.) As I recall, it was Seibold's prolific nature—he seems to come out with a new book annually at least—that worked against him: We always figured we'd be able to get one of his books in eventually. Then the magazine was shut down. There's a lesson there somewhere, isn't there?

At any rate, magazine space-limitation minutiae aside, Seibold's work always stands out among the crowd of picture books. It's mostly about his illustrative style, which is all his own: seemingly retro cartoon–inspired but using vivid colors and lots of marvelously offbeat embellishments. That makes sense, because the themes of his books tend to be pretty offbeat themselves; he's probably best known for Olive, the Other Reindeer, a collaboration with writer Vivian Walsh about a dog who becomes confused by the apparent mention of her name in the Rudolph song (get it?) and heads to the North Pole to become Santa's helper. (It even became an animated Christmas movie, made by Matt Groening and starring the voice of Drew Barrymore, among other stars.)

Seibold's latest, Other Goose, joins the growing group of nursery-rhyme mash-ups and takeoffs that seems to have begun with Lane Smith and Jon Scieszka's The Stinky Cheese Man. Less deconstructionist than its now-classic predecessor, Other Goose leans instead toward the purely eccentric, refashioning the old rhyming stories into new poems that...well, change the focus a bit. Humpty Dumpty's tragedy, for instance, is now about a lost shoe.

But the real draw, as always with Seibold, is the art itself; there's not another illustrator like him working today. (I don't think there really ever has been....) And while his manic, colorful, superbusy style probably won't appeal to every kid, or parent, those who embrace it will spend hours dazzled by spread after spread of visual eye candy, as our six-year-old did.

[Photos: Whitney Webster]

New DVDs: Toy Story 3

I suspect that most parents have seen Toy Story 3 by now, either in the theater this summer or on DVD since its recent release. (In the latter case, you've doubtless seen it…countless times.) Our family is no exception—Dash went with his mom when it first came out, and we've owned the DVD since a few seconds after it was available—but I myself had missed out on actually seeing it until this past weekend.

Anyway, no surprise: It's the usual Pixar masterpiece—funny, moving, playing simultaneously to kids and parents on a bunch of levels. Or at least it shouldn't have been a surprise to me, since the animation studio has been spoiling us all into such expectations for years now. But somehow, I hadn't been expecting as much this time around. My line of thinking when I first heard about the movie went something like: A second follow-up to a 15-year-old movie? Man, I'd really rather see Pixar break new ground. I guess Disney's just cashing in on the massively successful franchise. If Pixar is ever going to disappoint, this would be the one.

Well, I was wrong. Toy Story 3 offers up the same brand of ultrasmart writing, directing, and animation we've seen recently in WALL-E and Ratatouille. Once more, live-action studios could take lessons from Pixar's brain trust in matters like exposition, here provided in slightly-dark-yet-humorous form by a grizzled Chatter Telephone (playing the Elisha Cook, Jr. role) and, for the vital villain backstory, a burnt-out toy clown named Chuckles (voiced by the always brilliant Bud Luckey). And yet the bonds among the core group of toys, and between them and their now-grown owner, are realistic enough to make the film's deeper explorations of love and loss genuinely moving; Pixar's remain the only animated films at which kids often are called upon to comfort their parents, rather than the other way around.

So, Pixar: I can't believe I ever doubted you. I am so sorry. It will never happen again. Not even with your toughest test of my expectations yet, the upcoming Cars 2.

[Image: Courtesy of © Disney/Pixar. All Rights Reserved.]