Often, in the world of literature and story hours and sharing books, we forget about old favorites in favor of the newest and brightest and shiniest.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with new books.  Indeed, I’d be out of a job if it were not for them!  But every once in a while I pull something off the shelf that I haven’t shared with the children for a very long time just to see how it plays.  I did that last week with Robert McCloskey’s 1958 Caldecott winner Time of Wonder and this one is a keeper.  The language is mesmerizing and quiet, hurricane notwithstanding.  The watercolor illustrations are dated but it doesn’t matter.  As readers and listeners, we get it.  This is a different time and place but, no matter where we are, – Maine, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Nebraska, New York – summers still hold that magic, that time of wonder.  Borrow this one from the library and share it on a rain-filled evening. 

Still, new books roll in with alarming regularity, which can only mean that I may really be caught up with book orders.  How is that even possible?

I admit it.  I was a Fractured Fairy Tale fan growing up.  Prince?  Oh come now.  Who ARE you kidding?!?  So when a retold tale comes through I am incredibly picky and not just a little cynical.  Snoring Beauty by Bruce Hale fills the bill nicely.  I laughed out loud.  Mr. Hale’s characters are as tongue in cheek as they can be.  And just wait until you meet Beebo, the fairy no one invited.  Whoa!    One of my favorite sentences:  “And up at the main table with the king and queen sat seven of the funkiest fairies you’ve ever seen:  Hexus and Blexus, Nostrilene and Umpudine, Fleabitis and Tintinnitus, and Fred (who wasn’t really a fairy, but no one had the heart to tell him).”  Come on!  You know it’s funny.

Anita Lobel has been writing and illustrating children’s books for many, many years.  On Market Street won a Caldecott Honor. This time Ms. Lobel has presented us with another winner; a book that is absolutely stunning in its simplicity.  Hello, Day! shows the youngest child how each animal greets the day.  Four words on each page is just enough for babies and toddlers learning sounds, but the illustrations will enchant an older child.  These marker, pencil, watercolor and gouache pieces are simply breathtaking – bright and full and perfect.  The illustrations move this book from a baby lapsit to a book to share with children of all ages. 

Suzy Lee’s The Wave is lovely.  It’s a wordless book in which a curious little girl plays with a wave and the wave plays back.  Anyone who has seen a child do this will know that Ms. Lee has caught it perfectly – the fun, the tension, the giddiness, the joy.  The charcoal and acrylic illustrations are perfect.  This would be one of my top five except there is one bad gutter crop that someone missed.  I hope they correct it in subsequent printings because this could be a perfect little book.

As for music….I have discovered The Puppini Sisters and I have to tell you – you have not heard Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” until you have heard it in three part harmony ala The Andrews Sisters.  The kids and I have been giggling for about an hour.  In addition, on Betcha Bottom Dollar there are a couple of my favorites from the forties including “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” so how can one go wrong!  Enjoy.

And so it goes

One of my favorite seniors came in today to say good-bye.  She is off to the Air Force.  I should be used to this – the sinking feeling in my gut that this child who is leaving will come back forever changed.  She is of course doing it for the travel and the education and the perks that are promised.  My heart aches.  We have done the whole, “But honey, how about college?”  I will when I get out.  This is going to pay for college.  “What about Iraq? Or some other conflict?”  I won’t have to go.  They already told me.  “That’s what the National Guard thought.”  That indulgent smile happens then, that smile that believes everyone else was just plain stupid when they read the fine print.  SHE wasn’t lied to.  SHE won’t have to go anywhere.  HER government wouldn’t lie to HER.

Shortly after H.’s visit an eighth grade girl walked in, looking sadder than usual.  “What’s up, sweet girl?”  My brother left for the Marines today.  “Ah.”  He gave me this, she said indicating a dog tag with the word Marine embossed on it.  I’m not taking it off until he comes back.  “That’s a good thing,” I replied, praying fervently that he did, in fact, come back.  And I’m wearing one of his t-shirts.  They won’t fit him anymore after he’s done. “Yeah.”  This is a child who is very comfortable grabbing a seat and reading a novel or graphic novel or just leafing through magazines for an hour or so.  She couldn’t light tonight.  She wandered the familiar stacks, touching books as though they were old friends.  No replacement for a brother off to someplace not as reassuring as college.  She started to leave, quietly, shoulders bowed a bit more than usual.   Then she turned.  I’m not allowed to wear his My Chemical Romance t-shirt – EVER.  She smiled then.  At least some things stay the same.

And so it goes. 

There’s a great deal of hurry up and wait in this remodeling business.  Hurry up and choose a color.  Hurry up and buy the paint.  Okay.  Let’s start.  But w—a—i—t!  First you have to move everything out of the way and that generally means deciding what stays and what goes.  W—a—i—t—i—n—g.  Then you have to find somewhere to put the stuff while you remodel whatever room you’re doing.  Swell – two rooms unfit for human habitation.  Then you have to patch all the holes in the walls.  The compound has to dry. W—a—i—t—i—n—g.  Eventually, you get to the painting.  Everything needs two coats.  Everything.  W—a—i—t between coats.  Really none of this waiting is a big deal except that whatever one planned to get done in a day invariably takes three because there is work and the occasional need for sleep, for heaven’s sake.  (I have discovered that painting when one is half exhausted is counterproductive.)  So that’s what I’m doing – waiting.  Sheesh!.

Oh – a helpful hint.  The reason one should wear gloves when stripping furniture has nothing to do with the fact that the stain and paint get all over one’s hands and thus one looks like one bathed one’s hands in beet juice.  Nor is the reason for wearing gloves that the grit gets under one’s fingernails and even a wire brush and straight Clorox only serve to make it gray instead of black – a rather bizarre constrast to the beet juice fingers.  The REAL reason one should wear gloves when stripping a piece of furniture is that once the piece is done and lovely, the skin on one’s hands begins to strip off as well.  The plus side of this sloughing is that the stain and paint color are finally gone and the grime is gone from under the fingernails.  This is because at least twelve layers of skin are being sloughed.  The downside is that one’s hands look like one has been the victim of an exfoliation gone terribly wrong.  And sadly, the sloughing does not remove one’s fingerprints as one had hoped so the bank heist is definitely out.  Rats!

Book Review

Rachel Cohn isn’t afraid to tackle tough issues.  I love meeting her characters.  They are fresh, opinionated, arrogant, and vulnerable as only teenagers can be.  Cohn writes their lives honestly, and even though you may want to smack them between the eyes to get their attention, you also want to wrap them up in your lap and tell them the world won’t end today.  That’s an adult’s perspective, obviously, but the teens seem to love these characters as well.  I read Gingerbread out loud to an eighth grade class when it first came out and Cohn hasn’t written fast enough for that crowd since.  But always, it was her characters that drew me in.  In her latest novel, You Know Where to Find Me, something else entirely pulled me into the pages.  Certainly the characters are as rich as one would expect and the subject matter is as edgy as it can get – too many drugs and too much smoking in this one to even think about sex.  What pulled me in here was the sheer intensity of the writing and the experience.  I was in Miles’ head and it wasn’t happy place to be, but the healing – oh the healing.  I was there for that as well, and it was redemptive.  The imagery is stronger in this novel than in Cohn’s previous work.  It is as though she has pulled out the stops and let her words flow across the page.  Don’t be fooled – there are no easy answers here.  This is not a book for the immature or the faint of heart.  Bad things happen and poor choices are made.  But this is absolutely a journey worth taking. 

Time for a second coat on the bookcase.

And so it goes.

The leaves on the maples are turning over – silver side up.  This, like cows facing the same direction as they lie in the pasture, is supposed to indicate rain in the offing.  It is as reliable an indicator as the weather people who don’t seem to know what to do with Lake Erie let alone Lake Erie AND global warming.  So maybe it will rain and maybe it won’t.  We need it.  The flowers are thirsty and the trees are beginning to wilt.  Never a good sign.  It is sad that our fellow travelers pay the price for our indulgence.

I am in a reflective mood brought on by the purging of a bookcase.  We are a book family.  Indeed we have always been a book family.  For years it was because there was no library close at hand.  And then when we moved to the village it was because our tiny library could not hold the esoteric and eccentric tastes of a family of autodidacts.  However, once the village library – my home away from home – became part of a consortium it was like Christmas everyday of the week.  In the last 10 years, I think I have only been unable to find a book that struck someone’s fancy twice.  For the most part the material is out there.  So, I am weeding the home collection.  Just mine.  Everyone else is responsible for his or her own collection but I have limited the space.  No one is very happy.  However, it has to be done.  So there I was this morning, clearing out my own collection.  I did not get rid of anything that made my heart beat a little faster or that made my hand linger over the cover and certainly not anything that I opened and read a paragraph or two when I should have been moving quickly on to the next.  So all the poetry stayed.  Thomas Merton and May Sarton and Virginia Woolf remain.  Rita Mae Brown remains because she makes me laugh – at least the Hunsenmeir books.  I really could unload her others as I think about it. 

What surprised me was what I was able to get rid of without a look back.  Being a theatre major I hung on to collections of plays and individual scripts for years just on the off chance that I might need them someday.  I retired from directing two years ago and haven’t looked back.  This time round, I was able to carefully and lovingly put old scripts and collections of plays in boxes for the library book sale.  I kept Lillian Hellman and a couple of text books and my senior research from college.  But the rest of them – gone.  It’s the end of an era – a final admission that I really am done with that part of my life.  It’s a relief – this being done.  It’s kinda cool.

Yes!  A storm is blowing in.  Perfect.  Curling up with a good book – one I borrowed from the library – and awaiting the deluge.

And so it goes.

I am always surprised at the connections humans forge.  The best of them are created unintentionally.  They just happen.  And they are a gift from something much greater than our own human-ness.  Friendship comes almost unbidden.  The best of these realtionships are no work at all.  There is understanding and knowing and trust without conscious effort.  Truly these relationships are to be celebrated – quietly, without fanfare or marching bands or parades. If anything at all is needed to mark the occasion it should be something simple like a cup of tea and an afternoon by the river.  Or maybe here, in this space, where the only thing that needs to be said is thank you.

In other news…the weather cooled and the summer reading numbers climbed.  I don’t know that they will be as good as last year’s but I am less despairing now.  However, even as I bemoan our numbers I have a sudden and quite unwelcome insight as to why those numbers are poor.  Confirmed now by two people in the know, it would appear that middle school reading – that is to say reading in grades 6, 7, and 8 – will be taught on-line with a supervising teacher whose role is to keep the peace and keep students on task but not to actually do anything that smacks of discussion or vocabulary building or understanding ideas and concepts in a piece of literature.  Is it wrong to interpret this to mean that the school system itself does not value the written word, does not see the joy that can be achieved by the understanding of literature?  Why should the children borrow books when the school system they attend does not value print?  I do not have the entire story yet.  I do not know if this is part of a larger, more comprehensive plan.  History would say that it is not.  That this is a way to stick kids someplace with a largely self-directed program and hope for the best.  The impact this latest scheme will have on matters far greater than library summer reading participation remains to be seen.  Still, I don’t feel quite so badly or so guilty about the drop in numbers.

And so it goes.

I thought summer reading numbers were in the dumper.  Now I know summer reading numbers are in the dumper.  Program numbers are right where they should be, maybe even a little higher than in previous years.  But the borrowing and returning books part of the summer has bottomed out.  Not even the loot is an incentive.  The kids come in, go to whatever the day’s activity is and leave without borrowing a thing.  This is rather sad.  The children want the bells and whistles, the something to do to occupy a couple of hours but actually reading….not so much.  I can kick myself six ways to Sunday, but let’s face it, the program has been a rousing success for years.  There was no gradual decline, just an instant dumping.  I can’t account for it. 

Part of it may well be the weather – a typical spring of gradually warming days that allowed for outside play was almost nonexistent this year.  We went from winter to unbearably hot and back to cold.  Perhaps they are getting the beach in while they can.  A friend asked if perhaps they were out of town at grandma’s house being cared for.  It’s possible but usually we have the grandchildren in the village.  And certainly we all agreed the theme is really lame this year – Don’t Bug Me! I’m Reading! just isn’t very exciting.  There is also the fact that family dynamics have changed and in households that just last year could get by with just one parent working now have two which makes the day’s end really rushed.  Add into this mix video games, home internet access, hand held games and assorted other electronic gadgets and gizmos and I feel like I am joining the dodo in the land of extinction. 

And how much of this is my own energy level?  I won’t wear it all but I have to take some of it.  I knew I was flat when I went to the elementary school but I had hoped that I had done a decent job selling it.  I hear my words repeated:  “Hi Mrs. Norman.  I’m here for my cheap plastic junk!” say the 5^th graders giggling, so they heard it and got it.  And the littlies delight in saying, loud enough for me to hear, “Don’t bug me, Mom!  I’m READING!” so they heard it to.  So where are the rest of them?  Where are they? 

I am going to start asking the kids.  They’ll know.  And they won’t hesitate to tell me what they think.  That might help some.  I just want to know what caused the failure.  Pah.

And so it goes.

Those of us who work in library land have been weaned on the phrase “Don’t judge a book by its cover.”  Come to think of it, many of us have been weaned on that phrase and it has guided our perceptions of books and people and all manner of things, animate and not.  Still, we do judge books by their covers.  Those of us who talk book all day long know that the most difficult ones to sell are the ones with covers that appear to be too young or too dull or too fantastic for the reader at hand.  Still we natter on about action and romance and animals and … “Just read the first 20 pages.  I promise you’ll like it and if you don’t put it down and there is no harm done.”  However, if we judge people by their covers we miss important details and the potential for harm is very real.

This was brought home to me today when a pair of little girls whom I’ve know since both were in diapers came in to collect their loot for summer reading.  They are beautiful children – sparkly clean, shiny faces, glowing, smiling eyes.  As happens on occasion, one of their cards had fines that were too high to allow for book borrowing.  I am a veritable tyrant when it comes to overdue dvds and cds but an embarrassingly soft touch when it comes to books and the dilemma that a child who wants to read, can’t because her library card is beyond salvageable.  It happened that the offending item was a book.  “Do you know where the book is, S.?”  “Yes.  It’s at my Dad’s house.”  That should have been a clue.  I missed it.  “My dad’s house” not “At home under the bed.”  “Okay, how about this?  How about when you get home you look around and see if you can find it and bring it back.”  Her brown eyes flashed anger, “I don’t go to that house anymore.  I’m never going to that house.”  The older of the two said, “Yes we can.  Dad can pick us up and drive us over and we can get the book.  We have to go back there anyway to pack.”  The brown eyes flashed once more, “I’m NOT going back there.  And I am NOT packing.  DAD can pack.”  That’s a great deal of anger masked by pretty clothes and good grooming.  The older of the two rolled her eyes.  I waived the fine on the book and was updating their records – two different addresses.  The older of the two said, “We are moving to Grandma’s so you might as well change the addresses to her house.”  She peered over my shoulder as exclaimed, “Oh my gosh, that was two houses ago.”  And then she giggled at her own record and said, “We haven’t lived there in about three years.”  There are six children, I think.  Always clean, polite, respectful.  And coming undone.  I said to the eldest, “Thank goodness for grandma’s, huh?”  She smiled shyly and said, “Yes.” 

The point here is that it isn’t only the children with the tattered clothes and dirty faces that suffer.  You can’t know by looking.  You can’t assume based on appearance.  You have to pay attention.  You have to read a few pages before you jump to conclusions.  The library cards were repaired, books selected, loot gathered and they skipped out the door, shining and bright and hurting.  There’s a support system there.  Thank God for Grandmas and any other adult who takes a moment to remember that all children need to be loved.

End of lecture.

Late.  Why I am awake is beyond me.  It isn’t the heat.  The air conditioners are in the windows and it is actually quite pleasant in here.  The headache I had earlier in the day is gone.  There is, however, a storm looming.  It hangs over the village like a heavy blanket.  The dogs are looking at me as if I have lost what little is left of my mind.

One rarely takes into consideration how stressful this redecorating nonsense is on animals.  Bonnie wants her pasture back.  It was bad enough when her sheep changed their sleeping arrangements with the re-done bedroom but all these strange smells and the movement up and down of furniture and trash has her in a snit.  And now her favorite sheep is awake and restless in the middle of the night and she stares in wide eyed wonder trying very hard to herd me back to bed.  She’ll settle, eventually, poor thing, happily content in the coolness of the living room, void of carpet and couch, and smelling suspicious with linseed oil and turpentine hanging in the air.

It was a long day yesterday and perhaps this wakefulness comes from thoughts that can’t seem to land.  When did I become a person who passively waited for something to happen and lose the person who took action?  How did that happen?  It was a gradual loss, unnoticeable to anyone really looking.  I continue to fight what I consider the good fight at work, advocating for children whenever possible, and perhaps that was a kind of shroud thrown over life at home.   The children feel free to speak now and recall things I had long forgotten.  S. said today, “I never noticed his absence, Mom, because you were always there.  It was you and us and it was all we needed.  You were always there.  We had you and we knew that.  We still know that.”  In some ways that is incredibly gratifying.  It is the life I wanted to build for my children – that certain knowledge that no matter what I would be there but in building that life did I somehow exclude their father?  Am I right in thinking that one is only excluded if one chooses to be?

Tomorrow – or later today - brings painting the ceiling in the living room and refinishing a dresser that is covered in multiple layers of paint.  That project is going to take more than linseed oil and turpentine to reveal the beauty of the wood underneath.  With each step of this project, I spend time in my own heart, scraping away the layers, looking for what lies there, what lives underneath the paint.  It is a good thing, this journey, requiring solvents and steel wool and elbow grease, both the metaphorical and the real.  And the journey, while difficult and occasionally fraught, is both essential and exciting.

And so it goes.

In our house Goodnight Moon was the going to bed book for years.  I still love to read it aloud to the grands.  There is something remarkably soothing about the rhythm and pattern of the words.  This children’s classic has a new friend on the bedtime bookshelf.  The House in the Night is a cumulative piece inspired by an old nursery rhyme.  Kids love cumulative tales because the repetition is comforting and familiar.  The writing is quite serviceable but the scratchboard and watercolor illustrations are absolutely breathtaking.  Black, white and yellow, three colors only, draw the reader’s eye around the page.  This simple children’s book is absolutely striking.

 

I am not a huge fan of series picture books. They have a tendency to get redundant and silly.  Nor was I a big fan of Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus until I read it with a group of children and saw the magic.  The kids loved it.  That silly pigeon and his dialogue with the readers/listeners who get pulled into his antics and machinations almost unwittingly results in a great deal of giggling and laughter.  However, when I went to Mo Willems’ website and saw that the latest title was The Pigeon Wants a Puppy I was not impressed.  “Come on!” thought I.  “Not another cute little getting a puppy book.  Blech.”  I forgot that the only person more sarcastic and sardonic and cynical than I is Willems’ himself.  This is absolutely NOT a cute little getting a puppy book.  Well it is.  But it isn’t.  You know what I mean?  Of course you don’t.  You should take a gander the next time you’re in the library.  If you don’t laugh out loud or at least smile there’s something wrong with you and you should go eat a hotdog.

 

Emily Gravett is rapidly becoming one of my favorite author/illustrators.  I love the whimsy of Wolves.  All children living in a large noisy family will grasp the subtleties of Meerkat Mail and children in smaller families will love the adventure.  I wasn’t a big fan of Orange, Pear, Apple, Bear but the rest of the world was so I’m blaming that on me and not the book.  I am, however, a HUGE fan of her latest book Monkey and Me.  It starts at the end-pages.  The inside of the front cover is a little girl trying to put her body into tights.  The tights have a mind of their own but the girl is determined and…(turn the page)….successful!  She and her monkey, whose arms and legs are just as unruly as thought tights, go off to see any number of creatures.  Discriminating readers will look carefully at the illustrations and attempt to predict who exactly the intrepid pair go to visit next.  This one is grand fun from end-page to end-page (where it looks like Monkey and Me just might be getting some company.)

In the Garden

Who knew that bubbles actually lose their elasticity over time?  I did not.  At first, when the bubble bath in the library was decidedly not bubbly, I thought the fan was too fierce and blowing the solution right off the wand.  Nope, that wasn’t it.  Still  meager pickings in the bubble department.  Harumph.  I don’t know who was more disappointed me or the children. A quick run to the staff room allowed for the theft of dish soap and water (I didn’t have to steal the water but they get cranky when I use supplies for projects and then … forget that I used them for projects….) and those created mediocre bubbles so it wasn’t a total failure but still not the kind of wide eyed experience I like the bubble bath to be.  So one of our patrons who was on her way out of the Village and into civilization offered to pick up genuine bubble solution and we are in business for this afternoon.  I tested them yesterday just to reassure myself it wasn’t the fan and there will be bubbling this afternoon and evening at Ye Olde Library.

Speculation about the Swuck:  A bird?  A vegetable?  A mineral?  An oil rich deposit somewhere off Lake Erie?  Hmmmmm.  Perhaps tomorrow, my curious friends, perhaps tomorrow.

Book Reviews

It is interesting, once book award season is done for another year, to think about the also rans.  For some reason or another, there are certain authors who ought to win awards but because of the competition in a particular year or some other unfathomable and bizarre turn of events never do win the big ones.  Barbara O’Connor is one such author and one of my favorites. I first met her characters with the novel Moonpie and Ivy, a little bit of a book with a wallop of class and style and language that touched me deeply.  Each book of hers I read after that was a pleasure and an experience well worth having.  I just finished Greetings from Nowhere and I am compelled to say, quite emphatically, READ THIS BOOK. O’Connor weaves a multi-generational tale like no one else around.  The relationships are real.  As I move closer and closer to being one of the Elders I understand how real those relationships are.  As each of the characters grows into a new awareness of self through knowing the others, they each begin to understand that Nowhere becomes Somewhere when hope is involved.

Kevin Henkes is probably best known for his picture books.  Kitten’s First Full Moon won the Caldecott Medal in 2005 and a well deserved win it was too.  I love that simple little book.  But one of my favorite thing about Henkes’ writing happens when he moves from picture books to novel.  It is then that he uses words to create the pictures and what a master he is.  I loved Olive’s Ocean, winner of a Newbury Honor, and so did my mother.  It was a book I read to her on one of her infrequent hospital stays before she died.

His latest offering, Bird Lake Moon, is breathtaking.  The language is simple and descriptive giving a clear and poignant picture of a friendship, a family, and a lake.  There are no unnecessary adverbs or adjectives weakening this prose.  Bird Lake Moon is as clear as a night sky, as full as the moon, and as clear as the bark of a dog on a cloudless night.  Kevin Henkes writes much better than I do – thank goodness!

And so it goes.