Winged Steeds, Mockingbirds and British Chieftains: Read-Aloud Thursday

It’s been awhile since I participated in a Read-Aloud Thursday, but we’re partaking of our usual eclectic reading repast around here. I’ll start with picture books and move up through the ranks in difficulty.

I tend to forget about the books on my night table shelf, but this week my 7-year-old unearthed two early Wesley Dennis books from my childhood collection that are literally falling apart. I came upon her kneeling on the floor beside my bed poring over them. Flip and Flip and the Cows feature the colt Flip as he learns how to jump the brook in his pasture, and then how to deal with the frighteningly horned cows in a neighboring pasture. Though the storylines are quite simple, Dennis’s marvellously expressive black and white illustrations brought forth delighted laughter even from my 10-year-old. Granted, we’re horse fans around here. But the charm of these quiet stories, though it stands in contrast to the flashier and more colorful art work of more recent stories, shines. No wonder Wesley Dennis went on to become well known as the illustrator of Marguerite Henry’s books.

When Flip longs to jump the brook, he has a dream that he sprouts wings. That’s my segue into this gorgeous and very different picture book retelling of the legend of Pegasus and Bellerophon. I just extolled the simplicity of Wesley Dennis’s pictures, but the rich color and detail of K.Y. Craft’s illustrations are what attracted my daughters to this book on the library shelf. The story is a familiar one, and the pictures are framable. One heads-up: those of the chimera are potentially disturbing to younger children — it looks a little like the balrog in the movie version of LOTR.

The Adventures of Mr Mocker is one of Thornton W. Burgess’s Bedtime Storybooks. We have a number of these, inherited from my father. I reviewed The Adventures of Johnny Chuck last year, but one of the drawbacks of switching blog hosts several months ago is that a number of posts were lost — and that was one of them.

The Adventures of Mr Mocker has the trademark features of Thornton Burgess: a grandfatherly narrator, the familiar personified and chatty animals of the Green Meadows and Green Forest and Smiling Pool, and in general a kinder and gentler take on the red-in-tooth-and-claw food chain. Like the Beatrix Potter stories, these tales might be sidestepped by readers who think, like Eustace in Dawn Treader, that talking animals are “silly and vulgar and sentimental.” But here as in Potter, there is a fair amount of underlying naturalistic knowledge to be found. The setting here is not the barnyard and the wainscoting, as for Potter, but the woods, where a mystery is unfolding: Sammy Jay is accused of screaming at night, when in fact he’s sleeping. Who could it be? I suppose it’s obvious that for us in our birdwatching phase right now, this is a good choice. The chapters are short and permit us to read three or four a night, so we’ll finish this one quickly.

Last but not least, and either the most difficult or the most easy depending on how you look at it, comes Beric the Briton, G.A. Henty’s historical novel about the British rebellion against Rome. As we wrap up our history study this year with the fall of Rome, this story fleshes out in detail Queen Boadicea’s passionate but fatally disorganized war effort, and follows Iceni chieftain Beric as he’s taken captive to Nero’s Rome.

G.A. Henty’s books are heavily detailed, and I haven’t succeeded very well myself in sustaining the reading effort all the way to the end of one of his books. (Yes, I’m ashamed of this.) But they are full of adventure, and in this case Jim Weiss of Greathall Productions has provided an audiobook version that slightly abridges the story and makes it possible to ingest the whole work much more quickly than we would be able to do at the pace of a chapter a night.

The girls are loving it, even though it has its share of violence. I’m not sure what age range I’ll endorse it for once we’ve finished it. At present, Beric has been captured by the Romans, and I know from the description that we’ll be getting a taste of gladiatorial combat as well as persecution of Christians. Unfortunately these things really happened, and they are part of the roots of our civilization. My philosophy on such things is to give the kids an age-appropriate glimpse, and be available to process it with them as questions or reactions arise. At the center of it all we have Beric, who by all measures so far is a true hero — for his character and intelligence, as well as his courage and brawn.

I’m trusting Jim Weiss on this. We’ve enjoyed his readings of our Story of the World texts, as well as Greek Myths, Treasure Island, Tales from the Old Testament, and in a new addition I won over at Thick and Thin Things, Sherlock Holmes for Children. Beric is as engaging as these others have been. When I entered my daughter’s room to say that dinner was ready the other night, Younger Daughter was bouncing wildly on the bed and exclaiming, “They won! They won! They beat the Romans!” About a half an hour later at dinner, she remarked irrelevantly but pensively, “I like Jim Weiss’s voice. It’s so caaaaalm.” Whenever I ask Older Daughter what she thinks, I get a detailed summary of the plot. With this level of involvement, I’m anticipating good things all the way to the end of this nine-hour listening extravaganza.

If you’d like to share what your family is reading aloud this week, or get some ideas by seeing what others are reading, visit Read Aloud Thursday at Hope Is the Word.