Category Archives: Children’s Books

by

The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic

RiseAndFallOfMountMajestic

What do you do when your ten-year-old daughter hands you a book and says, “You have to read this. Then, I want to see it on your blog. And I’ll help.”

You read it, of course. So I did.

Persimmony Smudge lives in Candlenut, by the Willow Wood, where the summit of Mount Majestic is plainly visible. The castle of King Lucas the Loftier is there, and to all appearances it’s an ordinary mountain. But appearances can be deceiving. Underneath it sleeps a giant. If he awakes, the whole island will be destroyed, and it’s up to Persimmony to spread the word to a skeptical population of Leaf-eaters, Rumblebumps, King and villagers.

It’s a tall order, but somehow we always believe that Persimmony, a spunky 10-year-old heroine with hair like dirty dishwater, will rise to the occasion. She and her band of unlikely companions — a poetry-writing general, the shriveled and fearful Worvil, and an aged potter named Theodore — all work together to save the day.

The book is filled with memorable characters, including Mrs. Smudge, who has moral objections to many things including reading and birthday parties; King Lucas, whose favorite food is pepper; and Theodore, who makes magic pots that produce not necessarily what you want, but what you need.

I love the story’s premise. Who hasn’t looked at a hillside and had the fleeting thought, “That looks like a giant sleeping”? Yet what an uncertain, wonder-filled world it would be if the ground underfoot might rise up and crumble any minute. Also under the ground are the Leaf-eaters, a humanish species with their own code of conduct and a deep-seated grudge against the “Sunspitters” who live on the earth’s surface. Somehow the surface-dwellers need to make a kind of peace with these and other forces beyond their control.

The conclusion affirms the wonder and the gift of each day, but not without a few thrills and chills along the way. Both my daughter and I were a little disappointed with one mystery that never gets solved, and I wished we could have gotten to know the giant a little better. But all in all it was a great adventure story with a very likable heroine. I especially liked that this was the first book my daughter has ever assigned to me!

by

Now I Remember: The Autobiography of Thornton W. Burgess

lightfoot

Sometimes you can enjoy a series of books, but grow disillusioned when you read the author’s biography. (This happened to me when I read Elizabeth Goudge’s autobiography.) But in Thornton Burgess’s case, I find my respect and liking for the man greatly increased by reading his autobiography. And I am drawn back to the stories of the Green Meadows and the Green Forest now that I have learned more about their back story and motivation.

I grew up with the Thornton Burgess books. My parents passed some on to me, and my grandmother gave me some new ones for Christmas one year. My favorite was Lightfoot the Deer, but over the years (and more recently, with my daughters) I’ve read the respective adventures of Paddy the Beaver, Johnny Chuck, Grandfather Frog, Peter Rabbit, Longlegs the Heron, Mr. Mocker, Chatterer the Red Squirrel, and The Burgess Bird Book. I have to say that though I enjoyed them as a child, I took them in fairly small doses. They are written in a sentimental style, and the animals are given human characteristics — including human speech. The pictures by celebrated illustrator Harrison Cady are very distinctive, but they never really appealed to me.

Since reading the books with my daughters I’ve noticed that underneath the stylistic trappings, there is quite a bit of real nature knowledge. As we come upon different animals in our travels, it’s becoming a reflex to reach first not just for the Handbook of Nature Study or an animal encyclopedia, but for a Thornton Burgess book as well. And we find ourselves referring to the “folk in fur and feathers” (as Burgess calls them) around the yard by his names for them: Chatterer, Happy Jack, Sammy Jay, and so on.

Now I Remember was published in 1960, when Burgess was 86. Despite the distinctive, grandfatherly voice that pervades the stories, I really had no idea who the man behind them was. Born in Sandwich, Massachusetts and a self-identifying lifelong Cape Codder no matter where else he lived, he was an only child who lost his father in his first year of life. As a boy he helped earn money by collecting plants, tending cows, and trapping muskrats, and these outdoor rambles laid a foundation of nature observation that later blossomed into his best-known tales. “Studying the wild things and their ways that I might better outwit and kill them, I was with complete unawareness laying the foundations for my lifework, which began happily when I put away the gun for camera and typewriter,” Burgess explains.

He went to business school for a year, but that was the extent of his post-high school education. As a writer he began by writing advertising copy; the nature stories began when his 5-year-old son was staying with relatives (he was married twice; only a year into marriage, his first wife died at the birth of their son), and he would send him stories about the “little people” of the Green Meadows and Green Forest and Smiling Pool. Burgess wrote 15,000 stories for newspapers and magazines and well over 100 books. An amateur naturalist, he built on the foundation of his early years of firsthand observation through study and field research, always aspiring to accuracy and avoidance of becoming what President Teddy Roosevelt termed “nature fakers.” Though his writing career began in the desire to simply entertain and make a living, he quickly realized that his books had educational value, and he became a strong advocate for nature study and conservation. He worked to pass laws protecting migrant wildlife, and started various clubs associated with his stories and radio programs with rewards for conserving behavior and nature study: the Bedtime Stories Club, the Green Meadow Club, the Radio Nature League, and even the Happy Jack Squirrel Saving Club for children buying thrift stamps and bonds during World War I.

My daughter is sitting here as I type this, and I asked her what she likes best about the Burgess stories. She replies, “The animals mostly get along. There is real nature in them, but the animals get along.” This is intentional, as Burgess explains. Children learn quickly enough of the cruelty in the world. He felt strongly that in stories for children they should not be treated to the “realism” of their favorite characters getting eaten. That’s why Reddy Fox never gets Peter Rabbit. At one point in Burgess’s lifetime, an editorial gently poked fun at this by asking, “When Does Old Man Coyote Eat?” But on the whole the safety of the fictional world, though not totally realistic, is one of the features that held readers so devotedly.

I had mixed feelings about some things. These days it’s hard to imagine stories as propoganda to get children to invest in war efforts. But at the same time I found myself wistful for the kind of national unity and community that existed then, and for the moral consensus that surrounded the war effort. We live in a much more ideologically fragmented age — less naive, but with a knowledge that has come at some cost.

I also hesitate at Burgess’s repeated assertion that nature stories are ideal vehicles for conveying morals because of children’s innate sense of superiority to animals. Again, we live in a different age when it’s not fashionable to think in such a tiered way about nature; ecosystems and webs of life are inherently more democratic than superior and inferior species. Yet I’m also a Christian who remembers that the first responsibility humans are given in Genesis is to steward the Creation. There is a hierarchy of sorts; who can deny that humans display qualities that are unique among all species? The ability to reason and reflect and alter our environment can be used for good or ill, and can be exercised with the humility that comes with recognizing that we are dependent on the health of the world around us. So I found myself qualifying and revising some of Burgess’s views.

Even though I felt some of these differences, I found Burgess to be an extremely gracious personality, and my strongest impression as I close the book is liking for him. This book includes an account of events in his literary life, description of his writing habits, memories of childhood, various philosophies of life, personal and professional associations, and excerpts of letters from readers over the years that he has accumulated in a scrapbook. It could have come off as self-adulation, but it doesn’t. Instead what comes across is his great appreciation for his readers, and the enormous encouragement and inspiration they provided him. He sees himself as indebted to them.

I come away from Now I Remember knowing I would have been one of the many who loved this author and felt a sense of personal connection with him. His stories were a part of daily life in the newspapers for thousands of people and provided not just nature knowledge, but a sense of stability and decency in a rapidly changing world. His impact is much greater than I knew.

  • Images courtesy of Gutenberg.
  • Visit the Thornton Burgess Society here.
  • See the book on Amazon here.
by

The Invention of Hugo Cabret

invention-of-hugo-cabret

The girls and I finished The Invention of Hugo Cabret early last week. Now three years old, this story — which I’m going to call an experimental novel — won a Caldecott in 2008 and has been made into a movie coming out this Thanksgiving. (You can see the trailer at Amazon.)

On the up side, it’s a really neat concept. As the image shows, it’s a very thick book, but hundreds of pages are illustrations that tell the story every bit as much as the text. The illustrations are all in black and white and really enhance the book’s mysterious ambience. Pages of actual text are sometimes full-length, and sometimes only an inch or so of text surrounded by lots of white space. You can read the book quickly despite its length. This is something I like in a read-aloud! I can imagine it would also be a real shot in the arm for a young reader who can feel the accomplishment of ingesting a weighty tome without taking six months to get through it. I still remember the pride of reading Roots and Gone with the Wind when I was in 8th grade. This book, recommended for ages 9 and up, would give a similar satisfaction to a slightly younger reader, I would think.

As far as the plot, well… somehow, it just didn’t work for me. I say this with trepidation, since this is a book Amy recommended very highly, and usually my reactions are very similar to hers. So read her review for a different perspective! The girls really liked the story; it had definite magnetism. But when it came time to put the plot into words, they had a hard time unifying the collection of elements in a way that seemed coherent or sensible.

Here’s how Amazon describes the plot:

Orphan, clock keeper, and thief, Hugo lives in the walls of a busy Paris train station, where his survival depends on secrets and anonymity. But when his world suddenly interlocks with an eccentric, bookish girl and a bitter old man who runs a toy booth in the station, Hugo’s undercover life, and his most precious secret, are put in jeopardy. A cryptic drawing, a treasured notebook, a stolen key, a mechanical man, and a hidden message from Hugo’s dead father form the backbone of this intricate, tender, and spellbinding mystery.

That’s a good teaser, but if you try to fill in some of the details it ends up sounding a little odd. I conclude that Hugo Cabret seems to be more a novel with a very unique and absorbing reading experience, less about plot than about imaginative involvement with an unfolding situation. It’s not a book to return to again and again (but then, what mystery is?), but as a one-time read it gave the girls and me an exciting ride.

by

Coraline

neil_gaiman_coraline

It’s with some degree of guilty pleasure that I liked this book. It’s a children’s book, much creepier than my usual fare, and it’s been around since 2002. It’s even been made into a movie. For some reason, when I saw it on the library shelf last week, I decided to check it out at last.

Coraline’s real life is rather mundane. Her parents are preoccupied in the way modern parents are — they work from their home, staring at computer screens. One day Coraline unlocks the door between her apartment and the empty one next door, and finds that instead of the usual brick wall there exists an alternate world.

It resembles her ordinary world in some ways, but it’s more interesting, and more centered around her interests and desires. The toybox is full of cool things, the food is tasty, and there are even models of her own parents there who seem much more focused on her. Her “other mother” and “other father” look like her real parents, except that their skin is white like bone, the other mother’s fingernails and teeth are a bit too long and pointy, and their eyes are shiny black buttons. They want Coraline to stay with them forever.

This is the classic children’s book in that it puts the child into a set of problems that she has to solve by herself, forcing her to clarify her values and save a few other people (including her parents) along the way. Coraline gets some help from the only other real-world visitor to the other world — a black cat who lurks silently in the real world, but talks in the other world. And she’s helped by the knowledge going into the experience that her parents really do love her. She’s quite resourceful in her own right and catches on to the rules of Other World quite well.

Several things, I liked. Gaiman has been compared to C.S. Lewis because this story (like Stardust, my only other Gaiman read) puts its protagonist into another world. But it’s much more macabre than any of the Narnia books. The Other Mother puts the White Witch to shame as a creepy sorceress. But the same successful collision between the everyday and the fantastic occurs when Coraline goes through the door.

I also liked the way the Other World seems fairly defined at the center, but gets less so in its outer reaches. When Coraline ventures into the woods of the Other World, the trees go from looking fairly real and detailed to, eventually, no more than a child’s drawing of trees, with a straight brown trunk and a blur of green at the top. Similarly, the Other Mother and Other Father look less and less like Coraline’s real parents to her. The Other Mother, it turns out, is the creator of the Other World, and Coraline recognizes that she has no power to actually create anything new. She can only copy and corrupt what already exists. Whether she knows it or not, this is a quality she shares with the devil of Christian theology.

The pull of the other world, and the Other Mother, to grasp and consume Coraline gives the adventure a quite perilous edge at times, and though the story is paced quickly and written simply enough for children (aged 9-12, the description says), and though the outcome isn’t ever really in doubt, I found Coraline plenty absorbing and entertaining.

by

Recent audiobooks

Since I’m immersed in a novel that will take me at least another week to finish, I thought I’d share some of the audiobooks that have filled the airwaves in our house lately in addition to the read-alouds. The girls enjoy listening to stories while playing with legos or fashioning habitats for tiny animal figurines, and lately they’ve heard…

School Days According to Humphrey (Betty Birney): The latest installment in the Humphrey the hamster series, this one covers Humphrey’s experience of a whole new group of students entering Room 23 in the fall. Read to perfection by William Dufris, this story has all the trademark features of previous Humphrey stories we’ve read. We often find ways to quote our favorite lines and to imitate Humphrey’s enthusiastic voice and speech patterns.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll): “It’s just so dreamlike and funny,” says Older Daughter. “Yeah,” agrees Younger Daughter, “growing and shrinking and growing again, meeting strange characters, you know — all of it.” This unabridged version is read by Jim Dale, who also reads James Herriot’s Treasury for Children. I enjoy the audiobook more than I enjoyed reading the original… oh for such a reading voice.

Sherlock Holmes for Children (abridged, read by Jim Weiss): My youngest is absolutely hilarious when she quotes long passages from this one by memory. We won this when Mouseprints had a giveaway, and it’s has been thoroughly worked into our imaginations through multiple listenings. Weiss contrasts the bumbling Watson and the suave Holmes beautifully.

Black Beauty (Anna Sewell): I do NOT enjoy this one, but oh how often I hear this sad tale of animal abuse with one of the best happy endings in literature. The girls know that if I’m around they have to skip over some of the worst scenes, beginning with the hunt just a few pages in.

Beric the Briton (G.A. Henty, abridged, read by Jim Weiss): I wrote about this one back here. Good stuff.

The Velveteen Rabbit (read by Meryl Streep): This is one I bought on tape when I had my first puppy after graduating from college. She would yip and cry at night, alone in the kitchen, till I came down and put a hand on her head and put in this tape. George Winston plays piano in the background. We’ve graduated to the CD set, and I consider this the definitive reading of this wonderful tale.

Those are the ones we’ve been hearing lately. We have others, and borrow others from the library. I don’t allow them as continual background noise, but when the girls are doing something that enables them to concentrate, they seem to be able to listen with attention. I always think of the scene from the movie Amadeus, when Mozart is composing a symphony with one hand and rolling a billiard ball with the other, always in the same pattern. It’s as if the concentration of the creative side of his brain is enhanced by keeping the hands busy. The girls too seem able to maintain busy hands and busy brains. And it saves me from the burden of rereading — which I value highly, but dislike doing aloud.

So there you have it. Back now to Kazuo Ishiguro’s dreamlike world in The Unconsoled. How will he pull it all together? It’s going to take some patience to find out…