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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Security Blanket: Mad at Mommy

I don't know if Komako Sakai's 2010 picture book Mad at Mommy will be considered a classic or not, but as far as we're concerned, it oughta be. Our four-year-old has recently rediscovered it and taken it very much to heart.

In a way, the title (along with one's expectations that a picture book for young kids will generally have a happy ending) reveals all you need to know about the plot: Our protagonist, a young bunny, is angry at his mommy bunny for...well, all sorts of terribly unjust things. She sleeps late sometimes and makes him wait for breakfast. She hogs the TV for boring adult programs so he can't watch cartoons. She even says he can't marry her when he grows up. In fact, he's so mad at her that he decides to leave home. Which he does. For a minute, anyway.

This is, of course, well-travelled territory for kids' picture books, with Where the Wild Things Are

the most famous example. As always in such cases, it's the author's execution that makes a take on the standard exceptional; Sakai is particularly talented at imbuing her bunny characters with emotion via their facial expressions—the slow burn of the seething kid bunny, the sympathetic-but-not-without-effort mommy bunny. The effect is to give Mad at Mommy a realistic feel—since we've all, parents and kids, been there many, many times—that brings a smile to recognition to all and, thanks to the expected turn at the end, still delivers on the warm fuzzies.

As for why Griff has suddenly taken hard to Sakai's book...well, we're just going to leave that one alone as long as we can.

[Cover image courtesy of Arthur A. Levine Books]

New Books: A Home for Bird

Philip C. Stead established himself as an author with a talent for channeling the charm of classic children's books last year with his and his wife, Erin's, breakout hit A Sick Day for Amos McGee. His follow-up, A Home for Bird, which came out earlier this summer—and which he not only wrote, but illustrated as well—more than upholds the standard, capturing the sweet, slightly wistful quality of a certain brand of kid lit (with roots that go back at least as far as Winnie-the-Pooh) in both his narrative and his exquisite crayon-and-gouache illustrations.

A Home for Bird is really about Vernon, an almost painfully earnest toad, who one day encounters a colorful but silent and motionless bird while he's out "foraging for interesting things." (We know Bird is silent and motionless because he's made out of wood, but Vernon merely takes him for the quiet type.) He takes Bird to meet his friends Skunk and Porcupine, explaining to them that Bird is "shy, but also a very good listener," but the continued silence leads him to suspect that his new friend is sad about something.

The three animals decide that perhaps Bird is missing his home, and so Vernon resolves to get him back to it—something of a challenge, given that he has no idea where or (even what) that home might be, and of course Bird can't tell him. Undaunted, Vernon sets sail downriver with Bird (in a teacup he's found) and finds several possible places of Bird's origin—but his friend's silence tells him he hasn't discovered the right place.

So Vernon ties their boat to a helium balloon to explore further; wondering aloud, in a moment of fear and doubt as they take off, whether this was a wise move, he takes Bird's silence in response as impressively stoic bravery. They eventually touch down near a farmhouse, where a surprising yet remarkably uncontrived happy ending awaits both adventurers.

Stead's touch is perfect throughout, his crayon- and brushstrokes lending a loose, laid-back feeling to the proceedings while also being full of wonderful details, right down to the foraged bottle-cap sun hat Vernon wears in the boat. The tone of the text matches that feel precisely; Vernon becomes pretty difficult not to love within a couple of pages, and I doubt much of this book's intended audience—or even those well outside it age-wise—will resist. (Our four-year-old certainly hasn't.)

It's a neat trick to write a fully original picture book that has all the best qualities of a classic of the genre. I think it's safe to say at this point that this author has the knack.

[Cover image courtesy of Macmillan USA]

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Old School: The Bear That Wasn't

It's one of those precious delights of parenthood to share a book we loved as kids ourselves to our own children, and to relive that thrill of discovery through their eyes. But it's a completely different kind of pleasure, and one nearly as great, to discover a classic with your kids, one you somehow missed yourself in your own childhood.

I mainly knew of Frank Tashlin as a famous animator (of Looney Tunes fame) and Hollywood screenwriter and director (of Jerry Lewis movies), and hadn't been aware that he'd dabbled in children's books. Then Dash's grandmother gave him a copy of the author's 1946 The Bear That Wasn't. It's a wonderful allegorical tale of a bear who is awakened from a long sleep by humans who are convinced he is not in fact a bear, but a very hairy man in a fur coat, and that therefore he should get to work on the large factory project that's sprung up around him as he slept.

The bear calmly tries to tell the men otherwise, but is lectured over and over again, as he moves up to the highest levels of the corporate chain, that he must stop being silly and accept that he is not a bear. He heads to the zoo, aiming to get support from his fellow bears for his true identity, but even here he's out of luck: The zoo bears point out that if he were a real bear, he'd be behind bars like they are.

Worn down, he figures that maybe they're all right after all and he's not a bear, and proceeds to live life as a human, working hard in a factory every day. And it's not until circumstances lead him to solve the problem of a cold winter as a bear would that he concludes that he was right and all the bureaucrats were wrong after all, with Tashlin's sublime final sentence: "No indeed, he knew he wasn't a silly man, and he wasn't a silly Bear either."

The message of individuality, of knowing who you are and not letting anyone tell you otherwise, is certainly loud and clear in this tale—as is the criticism of those who insist that anything repeated often enough must be true. But it's Tashlin's tone throughout that really makes the book a classic, mesmerizing to readers of all ages: The bear's quiet sense of puzzlement in the face of a series of humans who are arrogantly confident in their mistakenness is both sympathetic and very funny; you have the sense that the bear is never exactly convinced of his humanity himself, but just decides it's no use arguing anymore. (And there's a lesson there, too, of course.) The humans themselves are an amusing (though not harmless) parody of wrongheadness, becoming angrier and angrier when the bear stubbornly keeps insisting he's ursine.

Dash adores this book (and I can only hope he takes its message to heart as he grows up); it's quickly become one of his enduring favorites. And I'm really glad to have discovered it myself, even at the advanced age of 42!

P.S.: When posting this, I stumbled across an animated version of The Bear That Wasn't. Apparently Tashlin didn't feel it conveyed the message of the book quite as he desired, but it's still worth a look:



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

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New Books: No Bears

I've said it before, but I keep finding new evidence: There's something special about Australian-born picture-book authors and illustrators. (For anyone who hasn't read my prior encomiums on this subject, the short version: Check out the work of Martine Murray, Sophie Blackall, and Freya Blackwood for starters.)

The most recent example is a new favorite of our three-year-old's, No Bears, written by Meg McKinlay and illustrated by Leila Rudge, in which a girl named Ella—one of those matter-of-fact, feisty girls Australia is apparently full of, given how perfectly the nation's authors capture the type—tells us about the book she's writing. It's an adventure story about a princess, but this narrator wants to make things clear from the start: There will be no bears in this tale, because "I'm tired of bears. Every time you read a book, it's just BEARS BEARS BEARS—horrible furry bears slurping honey in awful little caves. You don't need BEARS for a book."

And she goes on to prove the point: Her princess is kidnapped by a terrible monster, then rescued by a fairy godmother, without a bear to be seen. Well, except for that one outside the "frame" of the illustrations, who seems to be helping Ella create both the story and the art. And who also seems to step into the story herself momentarily to save the day when that fairy godmother has misplaced her wand. And who can be seen at the end telling all Ella's characters what really happened. But other than that, nope, no bears here at all.

No Bears is sweet, it's funny, it's clever, and it's visually imaginative. In other words, it's everything I've come to expect from a picture book from Australians!

[Cover image courtesy of Candlewick Press]

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New Books: The Cheshire Cheese Cat

In their new chapter book, The Cheshire Cheese Cat, Carmen Agra Deedy and Randall Wright put a couple of twists on the old "what if a cat and a mouse became friends?" trope (a favorite of mine ever since I first came across The Cricket in Times Square).

The first is that their cat protagonist, Skilley enters into a relationship with Pip, the mouse, initially as a business proposition: To get off the streets of Victorian London, he has become a mouser in a particularly infested pub. There's one problem, though: He doesn't eat mice—he prefers cheese. So he and the mice, represented by Pip, form a pact: He will catch them when in view of humans, then let them go when not. In return, the mice will give him ample portions of the pub's own delectable and proprietary cheese (which is stored in a place the mice can get to but cats cannot).

All is going swimmingly until another alley cat who does have the usual taste for mouse flesh enters the mix, and Skilley must find a way to protect his new friends. Complicating matters further is the presence of a grumpy, marooned raven in the pub's attic, whose absence from his Tower of London home, through a series of misunderstandings, risks becoming a reason for a full-scale war between England and France.

The second twist is that the pub in question happens to be the haunt of several of London's best writers, including Wilkie Collins, William Thackeray, and Charles Dickens, to the last of which this entire book is an homage. Dickens is having a bit of writer's block over the opening of his new novel about the French Revolution, and the goings-on at the pub prove to be a welcome distraction for him. In the end, the famous writer, the cat, and the mouse are able to do one another good turns, one of which has a monumental impact on literary history.

The Cheshire Cheese Cat, which also features illustrations by the formidable Barry Moser, is perfect in tone and spirit for young chapter-book readers, with enough adventure and plot twists to keep interest levels high without ever veering into anything truly upsetting or scary. It also may serve as an introduction to the work of Dickens himself, whose books are among the most accesible of adult classics to literary-minded kids. (If you're heading in that direction, by the way, I'd recommend starting with audiobooks, in which Dickens's intoxicating use of language comes across well—or, for the approaching season, A Christmas Carol. Or both!)

[Cover image courtesy of Peachtree Publishers]

New Books: I Want My Hat Back

Every now and then, you run into a book that establishes its author—someone whose work you weren't familiar with—as a force to be reckoned with. It happens with books for adults, and it certainly happens with kid lit; we've all heard the stories of Maurice Sendak's meteoric entry into the pantheon with Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen, while Brian Selznick's about-to-be-a-Scorsese-film The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a more recent example.

Well, allow me to nominate Jon Klassen as another entry in the ledger. His first picture book, I Want My Hat Back, has such a strong, whimsical yet black-humor-laden voice to go with its striking, lovely illustrations that it immediately places Klassen among the leading lights of his field.

It's all the more remarkable for its plot's simplicity: An exceedingly deadpan bear has lost his hat, and goes from animal to animal asking if any of them has seen it. They are, in various ways, of little help—one has seen a hat but not the bear's hat; another has seen no hats at all—but one rabbit's manic response that he's seen nothing, nothing at all, strikes our protagonist in retrospect as suspicious. His reaction to this realization leads to the book's delightful, unexpectedly dark punch line, which will fill the wicked minds of kids and parents alike with glee. (Lemony Snicket is a fan, which may be all you need to know.) Klassen has created an instant classic, and I can't wait to see what he comes up with next.

[Photo: Whitney Webster.]

New Books: Can We Save the Tiger?

Most parents are familiar with today’s earnestly conscientious children’s nonfiction that tries to teach young readers about environmentalism and conservation. Most of these titles, I'm sorry to say, are not so great: lecturing, often self-righteous, and—the worst sin of all for a children's book—dull. Some even take a propagandist, indoctrinating tone, which I find especially alarming in kids’ books even when I agree with the author's argument. (Still, they're mostly harmless, since they bore children stiff and quickly get buried in the farthest reaches of the bookshelf.)

But reading on these subjects for the younger set doesn't have to be limited to the classic allegories of The Lorax; there are a happy few standouts in the genre as well, such as Raymond Bial’s A Handful of Dirt and Dan Yaccarino’s The Fantastic Undersea Life of Jacques Cousteau. Joining their ranks is a new picture book from author Martin Jenkins and artist Vicky White, Can We Save the Tiger? Jenkins avoids the high-handed tone of many books on animal extinction, and instead calmly and reasonably puts forward the facts for kids to examine for themselves.

First, he defines the term extinction itself, with references to some of the more famous vanished creatures—the dodo, the auk, the marsupial wolf—each rendered, as is every animal here, in White's stunning, meticulously detailed pencil and oil illustrations. Then Jenkins introduces many of today’s endangered species, leading with the always appealing tiger. (He clearly knows his audience.) In each case, he briefly runs through the situation that has put the animal in such dire circumstances—the fierceness and beauty of the tiger, as well as its need for wide spaces in the face of ever-encroaching human expansion; the introduction of a previously unknown predator to the habitat of the partula snail; and so on.

Perhaps best of all, Jenkins is surprisingly nonjudgmental, writing with understanding about the reasons why people have made decisions that have been so devastating to these animals. Which leads him to his key point: Because the endangerment of so many of these creatures is almost intrinsic to their very state of existence in the modern world, it will take a concerted effort from humanity to save them. Then, to drive home that such efforts are not lost causes, he turns to a success story—the comeback of the American bison—to show it can be done.

Somehow Jenkins accomplishes all of this in a handful of short, informative sentences that take up far less space on most pages than White's marvelous art does, and that are manageable for fairly young readers without being too juvenile for middle schoolers. And in his brief conclusion, he lets the forceful simplicity of his argument speak for itself:

“…Sometimes it might all seem to be too much, especially when there are so many other important things to worry about. But if we stop trying, the chances are that pretty soon we’ll end up with a world where there are no tigers or elephants, or sawfishes or whooping cranes, or albatrosses or ground iguanas. And I think that would be a shame, don’t you?”

[Images courtesy of Candlewick Press]

New Music: Underground Playground

Let’s face it: For just about any parent who likes hip-hop, the phrase “hip-hop for kids” is filled with dread. Almost all of the attempts at it can be summed up by the word joke—either intentional (I give Elmo’s occasional rapping on Sesame Street, which is meant to be funny, a pass) or horribly, horribly not. So I once tended to view the few children’s hip-hop CDs I encountered with skepticism.

Then Secret Agent 23 Skidoo came out with his first album, Easy, in 2008. As I’ve written before, and so many other reviewers wrote at the time, it was a revelation: “kid-hop,” as he calls it, was suddenly a viable genre after all. The key—really the key for almost all art forms for kids—was that 23 Skidoo doesn’t dumb things down for children. The subject matter was obviously different than it would be on an adult rap album, but the beats, the rhythms, and the rhymes were not, for the first time in my experience. (It didn’t hurt that 23 Skidoo has been a rapper and producer of grown-up hip-hop, with Asheville group G.F.E., for well over a decade—though it also must be said that others of similar description have made such forays with far less success.)

My wife and kids loved Easy as much as I did, and it got tons of play around the house. We found ourselves eagerly anticipating his follow-up, though my own anticipation was tempered by a little knowledge of sophomore slumps. Now that he was established, could 23 Skidoo maintain his high standards without simply repeating himself?

I shouldn’t have worried. Underground Playground, which comes out August 31 (tomorrow!), is still clearly the work of the reigning king of kid-hop, but it expands on his debut, too. He dabbles in crossover with other genres, from the sunny singsong reggae of “Road Trip” to the Pogues-esque final section of “Wildlife” (representing a cheetah, fittingly enough). Meanwhile, his lyrics again convey positive messages on subjects like friendship (“Secret Handshake”) and honesty (the Public Enemy–tinged “Speak the Truth”) without ever getting finger-waggy, or losing the loose sense of fun that’s the core of so much quality hip-hop. (The verbiage in “Mind Over Matter,” a song about being yourself—perhaps 23 Skidoo’s core message—is a particular highlight.)

Perhaps most important, the beats and riffs he lays down are top-notch—catchy and addictive, they have your head bouncing in no time. Even here the new album pushes envelopes, though. While the cement is still the old-school hip-hop sound this artist clearly loves (think KRS-One), you also hear the influence of more modern names, especially in the song arrangements: Eminem, Jay-Z. Frankly, the eclectic nature of 23 Skidoo’s work is reminiscent of a lot of people, but if I had to pick one, it'd have to be Michael Franti, with whom he shares both positivity of message and an ability to rap effectively over many different styles of music.

Like its predecessor, Underground Playground is an awful lot of fun to listen to, and if your kids are anything like mine, they'll be asking to hear certain tracks over and over. (It’s been getting serious car mileage lately for us!) And you won’t mind a bit. In fact, when you realize you’ve left it on in the car when the kids aren’t around, you might just leave it in there, and coast down the road with your head nodding.

As a taste, here's a video for another track from the album, “Chase the Rain”:



[Image courtesy of Secret Agent 23 Skidoo]

New Books: How Animals Work

There are a lot of science and nature books for kids out there—nearly every publishing house, large and small, seems to have its own line. Unlike with most other genres with this kind of volume, though, most of them are pretty good, covering their chosen subject (bats, say, or animals of the jungle habitat) with the right depth for the age level they’re aimed at and, of course, lots of great full-color photography. We probably own 10 or 15 of these little volumes, all told, all from different series but nonetheless quite similar, and entirely satisfying to our five-year-old.

But I haven’t written about them much, mainly because there’s often so little to distinguish one line of books from another. All of them are good, but it’s rare to find one that stands out. DK’s How Animals Work does, and not solely because it’s a much larger volume than the rest. It’s kind of a coffee-table book for kids, really, 192 pages long with a hard cover, and featuring enough really big full-color photos  to keep a kid happy for months.

But as the title suggests, there’s another reason this book will be especially appealing to the science-minded youngster. It uses all that extra space not only to load up on more amazing images, but also to go beyond the basic factoids you usually find in kiddie science books, and delve into how and why animals do the things they do. So alongside that amazing closeup of a snake, you find out exactly how snakes slither. (No spoilers here.) To Dash’s delight, there are in-depth diagrams of the bodies of those bats, too, demonstrating how each anatomical feature that’s vital to the creature’s survival functions.

It goes on and on like that for pages, in something of a parent’s dream: a long, attractive-to-behold book that even a slightly science-minded child can get lost in for stretches of time, learning all the while. The book’s official age range from the publisher is 8 to 12, and some of the biology discussed will be over the heads of children younger than that, but at five, Dash adores this book. Better still, I think he’s going to treasure it for years.

[Cover image courtesy of DK Publishing.]