Consistency Errors in Goodnight Moon and Other Book Issues for an Obsessive One-Year-Old

My son (almost age 23 months) insists on reading the same books every night, usually three or four or five times. I’m very glad he loves to read, but I’m getting a bit weary of picture books. I do think we’ve had some winners in our Library Loot the past two weeks, though, so I thought it’s time to share what we are reading once again. Continue reading »

The Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle Treasury by Betty MacDonald

Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle is a magical friend to children, with her upside-down house and delicious cookies that are always waiting for you. She’s also a wonderful help to parents, who often don’t know how to solve the problems of parenthood.

When I was young I loved learning Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s “cures” for naughty children’s problems, such as not putting away toys, answering back, and refusing to take a bath. Her cures were ridiculous and magical, and they were funny.

However, as an adult, reading three volumes of such stories in The Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle Treasury by Betty MacDonald became tiring. In some respects, the sequels failed to live up to the original, and I was horribly disappointed. Continue reading »

A Caldecott Celebration by Leonard Marcus

In A Caldecott Celebration: Six Artists and Their Paths to the Caldecott Medal, Leonard Marcus illustrates the long road six Caldecott illustrators followed to produce to an award-winning book. This book is a combination of biography and art history as it looks at how six artists approached children’s book illustration over the last six decades.

I love the children’s books Marcus highlights, and it was truly fascinating to learn the stories behind them. The books he highlights are these (one for each decade).

• Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey (1942 Caldecott Medal winner)
• Cinderella by Marcia Brown (1955 winner)
• Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak (1964 winner)
• Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig (1970 winner)
• Jumanji by Chris Van Allsburg (1982 winner)
• Tuesday by David Weisner (1992 winner) Continue reading »

Golden Legacy by Leonard Marcus

When, in 1918, a clerk erroneously ordered twelve times the number of children’s books, Western Publishing Company may have faced ruin. Instead, the company persuaded Woolworth’s department stores to sell it, a practice unusual since children’s books were normally only sold during the holiday season.

Years later, in the 1930s, one publishing novice was inspired when his three-year-old tossed a picture book into the bathtub, which destroyed it, of course. He reflected at the time that

given the wear and tear to which children naturally subjected all their belongings, lower-priced books might be greatly appreciated by parents. (p 29)

Such are two very small stories illustrating how (and why) Golden Books roared to life in 1942. In Golden Legacy, Leonard Marcus shows how the development of Golden Books changed the face of children’s book publishing forever because of resourceful people who thought outside the box. For the first time, children’s books were 25 cents, and not $2 or $3. Instead of buying just one book, parents bought twelve. Children had many books at their disposal, and The Poky Little Puppy has since been the best-selling children’s picture book of all time. Continue reading »

Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales

Reading Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales was a repetitive process. My 630-page leather edition (from Barnes and Noble Books; not same version as the Amazon link at left) included numerous retellings of stories very similar; it felt as if the compilers were taking translations from multiple sources. Then again, maybe the Grimm brothers wrote down similar stories with similar themes multiple times for their readers. They were, after all, trying capture the folk tales of the era; maybe those folk tales were likewise repetitive.

The Barnes and Noble edition I read did not include an introduction, so my experience was simply with the stories themselves. Despite the repetition of stories, I highly enjoyed reading the collection, especially as I took them slowly, reading a few stories (up to 20 or 30 pages) a day, mostly in the evening before bed. True “bedtime stories.”

But these stories probably aren’t for children, unless the children are pretty thick-skinned. (Note that I classify it, on this site, as Fiction, not Children’s Literature.) Grimm’s stories had blatant morals (such as how laziness leads to your death and wicked stepmothers who abuse children must, in the end, meet their horrendous end) and gruesome violence (such as stepmothers who decapitate stepchildren, girls so desperate to get a man they cut off their toes, and travelers who blind starving fellow travelers as payment for food).

Nevertheless, I still enjoyed the retreat into a world in which the animals one meets on the path are really princes in disguise, in which the dead come back to life, and in which magical fairies and witches regularly rescue those who really are deserving of assistance.

I don’t want to live in the world of the Brother’s Grimm. The violence and retribution is horrendous. Yet, the fairy aspects of the tales made some of them magical, and I look forward to visiting other fairy tales in the future – including Charles Perrault and Hans Christian Andersen.

Have you read Grimm? What was your verdict: Violent or Magical? I, personally, am torn between the two. Continue reading »

Death in Children’s Literature: Love You Forever by Robert Munsch

In the picture book Love You Forever, Robert Munsch captures every mother’s feelings of unconditional love. I can’t read it without my eyes tearing, and I love the tender expressions of love. But I wonder if children like it. Continue reading »

Baby’s Sunday Salon, January 4

I’ve been reading my son Horns to Toes and In Between by Sandra Boynton since he was four months old. This month, he began pointing to his head for the first page, as I’ve always done when we read it. I was so excited to see it. He’s learning! He also had fun trying to see his belly button. What a fun age he is at! (He’s now 15 months old.) Continue reading »

Baby’s Sunday Salon, November 9

In addition to the board books I usually read my son, I’ve also been reading a number of picture books with him this month. Because he’s still only a year old, he doesn’t pay much attention past the first few pages, but I’m having fun revisiting some old classics. Now I know what he should be reading in the coming years! Continue reading »

Ingenuity and Authority: Who Really Wrote Aesop’s Fables?

A few months ago, I read a version of Aesop’s Fables that I found online at Project Gutenberg, written and published in the early 1900s. I thought I’d read Aesop’s Fables.

I was interested, then, to read in chapter two (“Ingenuity and Authority”) of Seth Lerer’s Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter that Aesop’s fables differ markedly from generation and generation. The history of Aesop’s fables (the Aesopica), then, illustrates how the translators changed the message of a translated text, especially in literature for children. This prompted a question: How are the authors’ purposes and translators’ objectives subversively included in modern children’s literature, and does it matter? Continue reading »

Baby’s Sunday Salon, October 5

My baby turns one year old this week. I can’t believe he’s so old, and yet I can’t believe he’s only been in my life for one short year.

I’ve never really done Sunday Salon, but there are so many great books I’m finding at my local library for my son, I thought I’d share what I’m reading to him, with him, and about him these days. Continue reading »