I’m hot and cold on book trailers – I generally like the idea, but sometimes take issue with the execution – but I have to say I really, really dig this simple, short promotional spot that Macmillan put together for Lane Smith’s Grandpa Green.
It sells the visual appeal of the book and, I think, gives you a nice sample of its tone and voice as well. Check it out.
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If you’re still on the fence about some of the board books that I recommended yesterday, you should definitely check out this Weston Woods animated version of Pete’s a Pizza by William Steig. Sure, the book is better, but it’s a really charming video and the narration by Chevy Chase is surprisingly great. Honestly, aside from Community, this is the best thing that Chase has done for YEARS.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCchxTFepPc
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Before I get into my discussion of Jack Prelutsky’s The Wizard, I want to tell you about a fantastic Halloween reading tradition that’s sprung up over the past few years called All Hallow’s Read, which apparently originated with a blog post by Neil Gaiman in 2010. It’s all about… well, I’ll let Gaiman explain it himself:
That’s it. On the week of Halloween (or on the day itself), give someone you know – adult, kid, or in between – a scary book to read.
Simple yet elegant. I love the concept for many reasons. First of all, if you can actually find a book that really, truly scares you, it’s an amazing sensation. Finding out that reading words on a printed page can actually chill you to the core of your being is a staggering, unrivaled experience, and it often gets dismissed by people who look down their nose at “genre” fiction. Personally, if a book can actually scare me, I find the experience way more affecting than a book that can make me cry. I cry all the time (ask my wife – it’s a sickness), but scaring me while I’m sitting on the couch reading in the middle of the day? That’s a hard act to pull off.
Secondly, I love that there’s this aspect of All Hallow’s Read that’s all about figuring out your audience. It’s not just finding a book that YOU might find scary. You’re trying to find a book that will scare your mother, your daughter, your pal, your co-worker – some real thought has to go into that selection. The book has to have the APPROPRIATE scare level for the person you have in mind. Your nephew might be a little tame and timid, but can’t get enough of campfire ghost stories. Your best friend might despise gore, but might love the existential dread of a Lovecraft novel. Psychological suspense might bore your sister to tears, but she ADORES blood and guts. It’s like choosing the perfect holiday gift for your friends and family, only with marginally more viscera and tentacled gods.
I decided to get in on the All Hallow’s Read fun this year and find a scary book to share with my daughter, which… was a challenge. She’s almost five and is a bit of a scaredy-cat. And it’s hard to predict what will or won’t resonate as scary with her. She can’t get enough of Jim Henson’s Labyrinth or The Dark Crystal – both of which have some decidedly weird and dark moments – but curls up in anxiety whenever she sees a picture of a gun or whenever there’s an especially creepy background shadow in a picture book spread. (I’m 95% certain that she never even realized that she was supposed to be afraid of the dark until I read her The Berenstain Bears in the Dark, so, thanks a lot, Stan and Jan.)
The Wizard by Jack Prelutsky
So I had to stay away from murder, death, weapons, unfriendly monsters, situations that couldn’t be explained away as fairy tales, overt threats towards children, and particularly spooky illustrations. In other words, I didn’t have a ton to work with. But I eventually found the perfect All Hallow’s Read book for my daughter in the 2007 picture book adaptation of Jack Prelutsky’s poem The Wizard, illustrated by Brandon Dorman – a book that I think is a PERFECT Halloween read for nervous young readers looking for a slight dose of spookiness before bed.
If you don’t already know, Jack Prelutsky was named the first Children’s Poet Laureate in 2006 and, for decades, he’s been a major force in children’s poetry. When asked to name great poets for young readers, I normally rattle off the names “Silverstein, Seuss, and Prelutsky” on instinct before my brain has time to start thinking of other options. If you have third graders or older – or younger kids with particularly strong constitutions – who would revel in tales of monsters and mutilation, you can’t go wrong with Prelutsky’s perfect-for-Halloween poetry collections, Nightmares: Poems to Trouble Your Sleep or The Headless Horseman Rides Tonight: More Poems to Trouble Your Sleep. Both are way fun and are accompanied by a series of Edward Gorey-esque illustrations created by the great Arnold Lobel. [read the rest of the post…]
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Kneel before the Substitute Creacher!
We did our normal Friday trip to our local library last week and came home with some old favorites – my daughter enjoys the Dirk Bones early readers – and some fun new titles. One of the standout titles was Substitute Creacher by Chris Gall, which was the perfect book for an almost-five-year-old, in October, who just had her first subtitute teacher experience last week. Gall’s artwork is big and bold – cartoonish, but in the crazy bombastic style of a 1950s monster movie poster. It’s like Harry Allard’s Miss Nelson is Missing mixed with Kang and Kodos from The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror episodes.
I’ll write a longer entry on it one day, but we’ve had a GREAT intial reaction to it so far. Here’s the book trailer, so you can decide for yourself if your kid is ready to experience the campy horror of… the Substitute Creacher.
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Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, a 1970 picture book following a child’s romp through a surreal nocturnal bakery, is a weird book, but it’s up to your own personal interpretation whether it’s “delightfully weird” or “uncomfortably weird.”
In the Night Kitchen
I first became aware of it thanks to its reputation as “the book with the naked kid” – the young hero, three-year-old Mickey, loses his clothes early in the story, and he spends a fair amount of the rest of the tale naked, with his penis frequently visible. That choice alone has caused the book to be challenged or banned on several occasions and, while, sure, it is unusual to see a naked child in a picture book, it’s a fairly lame cause for controversy. Mickey isn’t sexualized AT ALL and, let’s be honest, most kids, thanks to diaper changes or older or younger siblings, have seen a baby or toddler naked before.
I’d wager ten bucks that any parent who ever tried to have In the Night Kitchen removed from their local library laughed like crazy whenever their two-year-old did a pre-bath naked run through their house, particularly if it was in front of company, so it’s ridiculous to try to turn Mickey’s nakedness into anything perverse or predatory. When we first read the book, my daughter snorted and giggled at seeing Mickey naked for the first time, but, every subsequent time we’ve read it, his nudity has almost never come up. When she does notice it now, she just smiles and says, “He lost his clothes. What a goofball.”
But, all nakedness aside, I do find In the Night Kitchen to be a fairly difficult book to read. Don’t get me wrong – my daughter LOVES it. She thinks it’s funny and strange, she loves pouring over the little details in the backgrounds of the Night Kitchen, and she has fond memories of visiting Philadelphia’s Please Touch Kids’ Museum where she played on huge reproductions of scenes from Night Kitchen and Where the Wild Things Are. (It’s an awesome museum.) If you ask her to tell you what the story of In the Night Kitchen is, she can’t really verbalize it, but she knows, without a doubt, that she likes it.
My issue with In the Night Kitchen is a rhythm thing. For whatever reason, when reading Night Kitchen at bed-time, I find myself tripping over the words constantly. I just can’t figure out its groove. The words are presented more like verse than a normal narrative – and maybe that’s coloring my reading of it – but all of my attempts to find its poetic cadence have failed miserably. And I realize that it’s my problem, not Sendak’s. It’s not fair for me to fault him for my inability to hone in on the perfect inflection for his story. I like that everything about In the Night Kitchen is atypical. I like that it’s not a sentimental, sing-song nursery rhyme. I’m a guy who loves Vonnegut and Terry Gilliam movies – I like weird. However, on a personal level, I find reading In the Night Kitchen out loud a strangely jarring experience. It’s a kind of weird that I’ve never fully figured out and, at some level, it makes me uncomfortable.
Which, in and of itself, is weird. Fill a picture book with a thousand naked children and I won’t bat an eye, but get a little surreal and atonal with the free verse, and I get all frustrated and cranky. Again, this speaks to my failings, not the book’s, but while I love Sendak, I will admit that In the Night Kitchen is not a book for everyone. For me, In the Night Kitchen is a PERFECT library book – it has the potential to be a big hit or a big miss, depending on your household, so being able to pilot it at your local library first before bringing it home is a very good thing.
If there are any other parents out there who have my rhythm or weirdness issues with In the Night Kitchen, I found two videos that might help. The first is a Weston Woods animated version of In the Night Kitchen, which, honestly, really helped me in terms of hearing how someone else reads the story. And the second is an extremely funny video from the Dad Labs – called “Owen’s Reading Nook” – where the reader, Owen… has some very honest reactions to the inherent WTF weirdness of In the Night Kitchen. Enjoy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTSBAADKHBk
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It’s Friday, so I thought I’d take a break from obsessing over my own collection of books and share with you a few links, videos, and other resources that might help you start building your own library of awesome kids titles.
For starters, keeping with September’s apparent theme of “new works from massively iconic children’s lit authors”, a new Dr. Seuss book was released this week – The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories, a collection of short illustrated pieces that Seuss originally created for magazines decades ago. (New Sendak, new Shel Silverstein, new Seuss – this September has been amazing month for kids lit… and alliteration.) The book was assembled by self-proclaimed “Seuss-o-logist” Charles Cohen and this video explains how the volume came to be
So, obviously, The Bippolo Seed looks like a killer addition for your home library if your kids are big Seuss fans.
In terms of general library building:
Kids LOVE Harry Allard books.
Check out this fantastic list titled “Building a Home Library of Children’s Books: 50 Must-Have Titles” by Pat Wroclawski, the children’s book consultant at The Book Stall at Chestnut Court in Winnetka, Illinois. Pat includes all of the core titles you’d expect – Brown Bear, Brown Bear, Goodnight Moon, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, etc. – but the list gets extra bonus points for some very cool suggestions beyond the normal canonical works, including fantastic titles like Miss Nelson is Missing by Harry Allard and James Marshall, A Chair for My Mother by Vera Williams, The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs by A. Wolf by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith, and more.
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Little Lit: It Was a Dark and Silly Night....
Parents: If you haven’t heard of Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly’s Little Lit books yet, man-oh-man, are you missing out. Little Lit is an extremely cool series of kid-focused comics anthologies, all organized around a specific theme. There have been three volumes so far – Folklore & Fairy Tale Funnies, Strange Stories for Strange Kids, and It Was a Dark and Silly Night – and one collected volume of the whole series so far called Big Fat Little Lit. Each volume has attracted a murderer’s row of amazing writers and illustrators as contributors – people like David Sedaris, Ian Falconer, Maurice Sendak, Crockett Johnson, Chris Ware, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, Jules Feiffer, Neil Gaiman, William Joyce, Lewis Trondheim, Lemony Snicket, Spiegelman himself, and lots, lots more.
It’s a breathtaking collection of talent and we’ve already got two Little Lit volumes on my “Books My Kid Will Read in the Future” shelf. (Expect full breakdowns on them in the future. I’ve got a whole comics themed week of entries planned for sometime in October.) The stories skew a bit older than my daughter – I think a 7 or 8-year-old would think they were the coolest books they’ve ever seen – but there are a few stories that I think I could get away reading with my 4-year-old at the moment, namely David Sedaris and Ian Falconer’s Shrek-esque team-up “Pretty Ugly.” (After Squirrel Meets Chipmunk, I definitely want a full-on twisted kids’ book from Sedaris and Falconer sometime in the near future.)
I was reminded of the Little Lit series today thanks to Neil Gaiman’s new Tumblr blog where he posted an animated version of his contribution to the It Was a Dark and Silly Night volume (illustrated by the great Gahan Wilson) that was adapted by director Steven-Charles Jaffe.
Check it out below and get a taste of the chaotic fun of the Little Lit books.
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This September has been an oddly momentous month for children’s literature – first, we got the publication of Bumble-Ardy, Maurice Sendak’s first new illustrated and authored children’s story in 30 years, and then, if that wasn’t enough, this week, we get the release of Every Thing On It, a brand-new collection of 130 previously unreleased poems and drawings from the late, great Shel Silverstein, only the second “new” collection of Silverstein’s work to be released since his death in 1999. Talk about an embarrassment of riches.
What a great September
My family is particularly excited about Every Thing On It. Shel Silverstein is a master of language, particularly in using language to speak directly into the brain stems of eager children. We started reading to my daughter from A Light in the Attic and Where the Sidewalk Ends when she was three years old and, at first, I really didn’t think that my daughter was going to have the patience to sit and listen to poetry being read to her. It just seemed very… abstract, esoteric, it didn’t seem to have the immediacy of a picture book. I thought she’d be bored. However, once we got started, I quickly realized a profound and universal truth – I get things wrong ALL THE TIME. (Take a note, dear readers. That truth is going to come up again and again on this blog.)
Me being horribly, pig-headedly, stupendously WRONG has occurred multiple times during my brief tenure as a parent so far, and it has almost always involved situations where I completely underestimate my kid. Reading Shel Silverstein was one of those situations. She LOVED the poems. She was quiet, attentive, enraptured. After the second night of reading a selection of Shel poems before bed, she had already MEMORIZED some of the shorter ones. It was uncanny, and it really speaks to Silverstein’s ninja-like virtuosity with words and images and how he was able to use that skill to engage whole generations of young readers. For an author with the, hands down, scariest back-cover photo in the history of children’s lit, Shel Silverstein was a tremendous friend and ally to kids all over the world, speaking to them – never speaking down to them – with such depth, sophistication, and a sense of fun that they couldn’t help but love the guy.
So, in honor of the publication of Every Thing On It, here are two classic videos of Shel doing what he does best, entertaining everyone around him.
The first video is an extremely cool clip of Shel appearing on The Johnny Cash Show back in 1970 where he does a few songs, including a duet with Cash (Silverstein wrote the lyrics to one of Cash’s most famous songs “A Boy Named Sue”). The second video is an animated clip of Shel reading “Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me Too” from Where the Sidewalk Ends, which is one of my daughter’s favorite poems. Enjoy.
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I’ve spent a lot of time hunting down books to add to my daughter’s collection and, hands down, one of the best parts of that experience is stumbling upon a book that I’ve never heard of before and slowly and suddenly realizing… “Oh, this is a good one.” You just get hit with this wave on unexpected pleasure, the sort of heady ego-boost that comes from accidentally finding yourself exposed to, what seems like, secret knowledge. “Oh, I’ve found a very, very good book here. And I didn’t hear about it from a friend or from a book review or a librarian… I found it MYSELF. I’m the person who gets to tell everyone I know about this one.” Don’t ask me why. But it gives me a little shot of endorphins, which is really, really sad.
Bats at the Library
This was my experience with being introduced to Bats at the Library by Brian Lies, a completely sensational picture book, all about a charming colony of bats expressing their love for their local library. Remember that smug little sense of self-importance I spoke of earlier? I was totally awash in that sensation when my daughter and I discovered Bats at the Library in the remains of a very picked-over children’s section in a going out-of-business bookstore back in March. And, trust me, that hipster-esque ego charge of finding a book that “you probably haven’t heard of” becomes even more sad when you later realize that, even though you’ve never heard of it personally, the book in question was a best-seller (12 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list) and a major award winner (won the 2010 Bill Martin, Jr. Picture Book Award, among other prizes). It’s like bragging that you found this great new little boutique called “Target” that you just can’t wait to show to all your friends.
But, regardless of my lame personal hang-ups and constant need for affirmation, Bats at the Library has become a big favorite in our household on its merits alone. The basic premise is simple – a group of bored bats are excited to discover that a window has been left open at the town’s library, so the colony heads over for an impromptu “Bat Night at the library!” The good-natured, excitable bats (think Stellaluna, only cuter) have a grand old time, playing with the overhead projectors, splashing around in the water fountain, exploring pop-up books, and reading, reading, reading. Lies is a masterful artist – his playful, detail-packed paintings remind me of the great David Wiesner – and, in Bats at the Library, his verse is almost just as equally well-executed. His rhyming lines balance the bats’ cheeky excitement with a real reverence for the pleasures of reading. To quote the bats at the end of their adventure: [read the rest of the post…]
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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.
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.
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