Maurice Sendak and Bumble-Ardy: “You Mustn’t Scare Parents”

by Tom B.

Maurice Sendak – the man responsible for such Library favorites as Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen – released the first book that he’s both written and illustrated in 30 YEARS earlier this month. (Not that Sendak hasn’t been working all this time. He’s still a prolific illustrator – my daughter is a BIG fan of Mommy?, his epic monster-mash of a pop-up book that he illustrated for author Arthur Yorinks in 2006.)

Maurice Sendak's Bumble-Ardy

Maurice Sendak’s Bumble-Ardy

His new book is called Bumble-Ardy, which we’re hoping to get our hands on soon. But, while promoting Bumble-Ardy, Sendak spoke to the New York Times and offered this fantastic insight on the responsibility that a children’s author has to his dual audiences of kids and parents:

You mustn’t scare parents. And I think with my books, I managed to scare parents. Randolph Caldecott was a sneaky guy. Because under the guise of stories about little animals, he had the same passion for childhood. If you just look at the surface of them, they look like nice English books for kiddies. But his books are troubling if you spend time with them. He inspired me. I adored Caldecott. Probably his idea, or my interpretation of him, was that children’s books should be fair to children. Not to soften or to weaken.

Before that, the attitude towards children was: Keep them calm, keep them happy, keep them snug and safe. It’s not a putdown of those earlier books. But basically, they went by the rules that children should be safe and that we adults should be their guardians. I got out of that, and I was considered outlandish. So be it.

{ 1 comment }

“Dad, We Watched a Movie at School Today about an Old Lady Who Kills Children”

by Tom B.

That was what my almost five-year-old daughter told me as I was getting her ready for bed tonight.

“What?” I said. “Wait, what was this? When was this?”

It had been raining today, so her kindergarten class had stayed inside for recess and watched a movie.

Teeny-Tiny and the Witch-Woman (1975) by Barbara K. Walker

The book in question….

“And it was about this old lady… and there was this scary part with hands at the beginning… it was so freaky… and the old lady, she was a witch… she would take children’s bones and boil them, and, if you want to get someone’s bones, you have to kill them. So this lady KILLED children, Dad. She killed like a hundred children. She had a fence of bones… no, I’m serious, Dad. She killed children. So many children. And ripped out their bones.”

“This was at school today?”

“Yes, I’m really telling the truth, Dad. It was a video from the people that made the Knuffle Bunny and Pete’s a Pizza videos, but it was about KILLING…”

That went on for a while.

It turns out – after some quick Google searches – that the video was an animated version of a book called Teeny-Tiny and the Witch-Woman (1975) by Barbara K. Walker, illustrated by Michael Foreman, which seems to be out of print. The cartoon adaptation was done by Weston Woods, a fantastic production company, owned by Scholastic, that specializes in animated versions of classic children’s books. (My daughter knows their Mo Willems and William Steig videos, which are great.)

I found Teeny-Tiny and the Witch-Woman on YouTube and… yeah, my daughter was right. That is freaky. Really freaky, right? (The hands are WAY scary.)

So, OK, Teeny-Tiny and the Witch-Woman – you’re on the radar of the Library now.

I’m going to try to track down a copy to see if the actual book is any less “freaky.” Oh, and I’m also going to enjoy about a month of questions from my kid about murdered children and the best way to collect the bones of young ones, so, thanks a lot, Teeny-Tiny.

{ 3 comments }

My Friends by Taro Gomi

by Tom B.

I kicked off the blog with a book that my daughter probably won’t read for several years, so it seems only fair that I shift over to a book she’s actually read – in fact, one of the first books we ever read to her. I don’t entirely remember how we got a copy of Taro Gomi’s My Friends, but the person who gave it to us deserves an annual thank you note. It’s that good.

My Friends by Taro Gomi

My Friends by Taro Gomi

Japanese author-illustrator Taro Gomi is probably best known as the mad genius behind the ultimate potty book, Everybody Poops – which, strangely enough, we’ve never read – and he also makes the coolest coloring books you’ve ever seen. (Seriously. If your kid is into coloring, Gomi’s Scribbles and Doodle books can’t be beat.) Gomi has additionally created some truly wonderful picture books for younger readers, and My Friends is one of our favorites.

It’s an ideal bedtime book. Truth be told, I literally read My Friends to my daughter at bedtime every single night I put her to bed from when she was five months old until she was about 15-months-old. Which I realize makes me sound fairly obsessive-compulsive, but so be it. Maybe my daughter’s incentive to learn to talk was her burning desire to ask me to change-up the bed-time reading. (“Daddy, STOP.”) But I don’t really think so. We still read My Friends from time to time even now, although now it functions as more of an “I Can Read” book than a cuddly bedtime book. (Pause as I mourn the passage of time to the tune of “Cat’s in the Cradle.”)

What’s so great about My Friends? It has a lot to offer in a very elegant package. The story is simple – we follow a young girl as, on each double-page spread, she tell us what she’s learned from the world around her. The majority of the lessons she’s learned come from animals. “I learned to walk with my friend the cat… I learned to jump from my friend the dog… I learned to climb from my friend the monkey…” As the book goes on, we see what the girl has learned from a variety of animal pals, from books, from teachers, from classmates, and it all ends with the “awww”-worthy declaration that “I learned to love from a friend like you.”

Taro Gomi Board Book Box Set

Boxed set of three Taro Gomi board books, including “My Friends”

Gomi’s illustrations are bright, charming, and have this underlying sense of fun and wonder that my daughter really responded to. Even when she was only a few months old, this is a book that made her light up. I mean, yes, I think My Friends is really well done, but the real reason I love it is because of the response it elicited from my kid. She’d smile and sit calmly while I read through the thick cardboard pages of the board book, occasionally trying to flip the pages herself. As she got older, we’d add animal sounds to the pages with animal illustrations, and the book evolved into a call-and-response story where, after I’d finish reading the page, she’d give me the correct corresponding animal noise (her gorilla was the best) or some finger movements we worked out to mirror the actions on the page. (Few things are funnier than watching a seven-month-old try to make her fingers run, jump, and/or karate kick.)

Plus, as a first-time father who is now aggressively aware of gender disparity in relation to his sweet little girl (irony noted), I really loved reading her a book with a strong female character who is out there in the world, learning from nature, kicking, jumping, exploring, excelling at school, and being affectionate, all at the same time.

[read the rest of the post…]

{ 3 comments }

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, illustrated by Jules Feiffer

by Tom B.

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

Cover of The Phantom Tollbooth, illustration by Jules Feiffer

I mention this on the site’s “About” page, but, when I first found out that I was going to be a father, the very next day, I went out and bought a copy of Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth for my kid – my kid who wasn’t going to be born for another nine months. Why? Because, in many ways, I think it’s the perfect children’s book.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Seuss, Silverstein, and Dahl, but there’s just something about the story and the narrative world that Juster puts together in Phantom Tollbooth that just floors me every time I read it.

For those unfamiliar, The Phantom Tollbooth is the story of Milo, a bored, apathetic kid, who, one day, finds a tollbooth that has mysteriously appeared in his bedroom. With nothing better to do, Milo gets in an old toy car, drives through the tollbooth, and finds himself in The Lands Beyond in the Kingdom of Wisdom, a pastiche of a fairy tale-land built around knowledge, wordplay, and mathematical nonsense. Milo makes friends with a watchdog – a pooch named Tock with a real clock in his center – travels through lands like Dictionopolis and The Island of Conclusions, and eventually quests to the Mountains of Ignorance to rescue the princesses Rhyme and Reason. (His travels are expertly illustrated by Jules Feiffer.)

The ironic wordplay and absurdism of The Phantom Tollbooth gets a lot of attention, and it should. My almost five-year-old daughter is currently getting  a lot of laughs out of the verbal misunderstandings in books like Peggy Parish’s Amelia Bedelia series, which I’m hoping will act as gateway drugs for one day introducing her to Tollbooth – in terms of fun with language, Tollbooth is like a nuclear bomb compared to Parish’s firecrackers. (If you want a far more insightful – and better written – take on Juster’s way with words, read the great Michael Chabon’s essay on Phantom Tollbooth, which will accompany a new fiftieth anniversary edition of the book that comes out this October.)

However, while the allusions and puns are fast and furious, they’ve never been my absolute favorite part of the text. For me, The Phantom Tollbooth has, first and foremost, always been about Milo, who, I think, is one of the greatest protagonists in all of children’s literature. [read the rest of the post…]

{ 3 comments }

How to Build a Library for Your Kids – Step #1: Get Some Books

by Tom B.

Was that too obvious a note to start on? Dammit. Well, hopefully, I can set the bar low with this first post and move upwards and onwards from there.

So, what is this blog about? First, check out our “About” page (again, too obvious?) to get my answer to the question – WHAT DOES “BUILDING A LIBRARY” MEAN?

Home libraries are fun

One of several branches of our in-home library

But, beyond that, let me give you the highlights. For the past five years, I’ve been obsessively collecting books for my daughter in the attempt to build her a nicely diverse and engaging library of books that she can read right now and books that (hopefully) she will read one day.

My library project has had its ups and downs, and I want to share my results. Why? Because a). I want to give parents, who are looking for new books for their own children, the benefit of our experience and maybe help recommend some really great books, and b). I just enjoy talking about kids’ books.

How is this going to work? Every week, I’ll profile different books in our library. I’ll give you a skeptical parent overview of the book, let you know if I recommend it as a buy or if I suggest that you pilot it via your local library, and I’ll help up some context around the book too – i.e. recommendations for other similar books, discussions of genre, characters, etc.

On the right, you’ll notice a sidebar called “My Dewey System.” This is my attempt to categorize the different books that you’ll be likely to find in a kid’s library. The categories in the sidebar will expand over the next week or so, but, at the moment, our list of categories includes:

Board Books, Picture Books, Easy Readers, Chapter Books, Young Adult Books, Poetry, Nonfiction, Comic Books, and, my favorite, Books My Kid Will Read in the Future.

Dust Cover Pile-Up

Dust covers roam like tumbleweeds in our house…

(Yeah, yeah, I know there are WAY more actual categories of children’s books, but this is what we’re going to start with.)

You’ll also find posts with original articles and general miscellany about kids books, links to other great resources on the web (check out our blog roll and Twitter sidebar for a very cool collection of links), and anything else I deem relevant. I’ve spent a lot of time collecting different resources in my hunt for the perfect books for my kid and now I want to spread the wealth – hopefully, some of you might actually find it valuable. (No worries, if not.)

And, most importantly, if you have a great book that you want to recommend or that you think any children’s library should not be without, PLEASE send me an email and let me know. There is a very, very selfish side to this project, in that I really want the dialogue to go both ways so I can reap some really excellent new book suggestions for my daughter.

Regardless, thanks for checking out the site and I hope you enjoy the ramblings of a self-obsessed, unlicensed, amateur children’s librarian. (Enjoy, tolerate… I’ll take what I can get.)

Tom

{ 0 comments }

Next Entries →