The Tale of Hilda Louise – Olivier Dunrea

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I am reading a suspense that is a well-written pleasure and very dense. So I’m double-dipping—reading shorter books while I finish this one. Absolutely disastrous for productivity—the windows are not washed, the for-pay work is behind—but I just turn my back on it all and slip into a book. Or two. The back-up book is a children’s tale that is magical and probably useful as well.

The Tale of Hilda Louise is a beautiful picture book with painted pages, mellifluous language and wonderful art. Hilda Louise is an orphan in Paris. She lives in a kind orphanage where the little girls wear frocks with aprons and hats like Madeline. Madame Zanzibar, the orphanage matron, is attentive and nurturing and given to exclaiming things like “Mon Dieu!” when Hilda Louise begins gently floating just off the ground one day.

This new skill, which improves by leaps and bounds, is the envy of all the other orphans and extremely useful for rescuing escaped balloons, balls from trees and baby birds fallen from their nests. No one discourages her so Hilda Louise works it to get better at flying. One day, a puff of wind carries her over the orphanage wall and all of Paris.

Hilda Louise does a pretty fair bird’s-eye tour of the main landmarks, the Eiffel Tower, the Bois de Boulogne, Notre Dame, the Arc de Triomphe. But things get interesting when she floats through a window into the garret studio of an artist with the same red hair as her own. Olivier Dunrea’s story is charming. It’s a fairytale but one that is grounded in details that make it perfectly believable.

Fin de siècle Paris is picturesque and serves to remove the events from contemporary reality enough to make the book a safe read. I think the story would be particularly terrific for a kid who has been adopted. Hilda Louise is touched by magic but she is the agent of her own rescue. She parlays her ability and her adaptability to circumstance into a new story for herself. Happily ever after is still an excellent ending.

The Tale of Hilda Louise   Olivier Dunrea | Farrar Straus Giroux   1996

The String Bean – Edmond Séchan

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I first encountered The String Bean (Le Haricot) as a film and loved it. The mostly black and white French movie by Edmond Séchan, who also created the text for the book, has music but no dialog. It is the story of an old Parisian seamstress who lives alone, many floors up a winding staircase in a dark, shabby building. She is wizened and bent but her spirit is full of color and life.

Each day, after she makes glittering, pearl-encrusted evening bags for sale to elegant shops and has her sparse and simple meal, she puts on her hat and goes out to the public gardens. Wandering the Tuileries—scenes that are in color–the old woman dreams of the lush gardens of her childhood. On the way home, she makes a stop to window-gaze at a florist’s, full of gorgeous blooms she could never afford. One day, she finds an old clay pot with a dead plant that someone has tossed in the trash. She takes the pot home.

Once she has removed the dead plant with her only fork, she carefully pokes a bean into the soil and waters it. Then she sets the pot on her window ledge where it will get the few rays of sun to reach her apartment every day. She tries to protect the seedling from predatory pigeons and neighbors shaking out dusty rugs; she stakes the new leaves so the stem will grow tall. But the pigeons are too many and the sun is too weak for her plant to survive. She pulls a chair out to the hall, where a patch of brighter sun from a skylight will fall on the plant, and sets the pot on the seat.

It isn’t enough. The bean plant wilts and grows pale. So she decides to clandestinely transfer it to a boxwood border surrounding the Tuileries flower gardens. She will lose her daily companion but the bean plant will get plenty of sun and water to flower and grow. What happens next is both heartbreaking and hopeful. The photographs and straightforward text of the book are evocative and powerful, just as the film is.

The tale is an allegory for life and hope that is deceptively simple. As a book, The String Bean could certainly be handed to a kid but the emotions and the underlying concepts are very big—it might take some guidance or some maturity for the story to be appreciated. I’m happy to have experienced both the film and the book. You might have to search for a copy of either but the hunt would be worth it.    

The String Bean   Edmond Séchan | Doubleday  1982

La Historia de los Colores – Subcomandante Marcos

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I bought the t-shirt in Palenque. The market there had all the typicos that catch tourists’ eyes but I spied a souvenir shirt with a black and white photograph of a masked guerrilla fighter on it and the caption Subcomandante Marcos. I knew who he was—at least I knew what could be known about him. Marcos was a legendary insurgent leader who might have been a college professor or a university grad student or some other lettered and middle class Mexican. But he had gone underground, taken to the wilderness in the mountains of Chiapas and become the spokesman for the Zapatista guerrilla forces against the Mexican government in the cause of rights for the indigenous people.

Very romantic story but the issues were real and the lives of the people in Chiapas could have used some economic and social justice. I hiked through the jungle for hours with a Lacandon boy as guide to visit the remarkable murals in the ruins of Bonampak. I wandered over the beautiful feminine ruins at Palenque and shared some local rice and beans and brew with fellow travelers. I got shin splints, mosquito bites, astonishing views and great photographs—all research for a novel and soul food for my adventurer’s heart. And when I got home to Manhattan, I wore the t-shirt.

I wore it for a few years; it complemented my pinko hippie credentials nicely. I stopped wearing it after 9-11 when I got funny looks and realized that the masked photograph looked a little bit like Bin Laden. But by then I had unearthed La Historia de los Colores at the Strand bookstore and I read it to my very young kid in Spanish. The book, by Subcomandante Marcos, is a bilingual retelling of a Mayan legend about how colors came to be in a black and white and gray world. The Story of Colors has lush art by Domitila Dominguez on thick coated stock—it’s a pleasure to handle. Today, I re-read it in English.

Probably just as well I read the Spanish to the four-year-old as the legend is very Mayan—the gods are constantly picking fights and bitching about things when they aren’t discovering red in the color of blood and making love so they could become tired and fall asleep. Once they’ve found enough colors, they have a sort of paintball fight at the top of a ceiba tree and get colors all over everything. Boys. In the end, after an interesting evolution of the handful of colors the gods turn up, they grab a macaw and stretch its skimpy gray feathers long enough to hold all the hues and entrust the colors to the bird for safekeeping.

So that’s how the macaw turned into a crayon box and how the world came alive in reds, greens, blues and yellows. For fun, my copy has an errata sheet tucked into it that explains that the National Endowment for the Arts withdrew committed funding for the book. Was the funding failure due to the bad-boy author or the copulation of the colors to give us all those rainbow shades? Congressional pressure, no doubt. Uptight idiots—who elects these people? Not me. I just keep subversive literature around my house where even children can find it. <G> Good book.

The Story of Colors / La Historia de los Colores: A Bilingual Folktale from the Jungles of Chiapas (English and Spanish Edition)    Subcomandante Marcos | Cinco Puntos Press   1996

In the Night Kitchen – Maurice Sendak

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Where the Wild Things Are is the mirror of everybody’s bed-with-no-supper childhood wickedness. It is a classic experience captured in a classic book. But Maurice Sendak was a wild child who never grew up and a darker and funnier book, no less magnetic to children, is his In the Night Kitchen. It was a favorite read-aloud of ours with its marvelous art, explicitly naked Mickey who fell out of his PJs and into the batter in the kitchen when the rest of the household was sleeping, the giant milk bottle, and the prop plane made of cake dough.

In truth, the text is a bit druggy—it doesn’t actually make sense but who cares? Mickey is a fantastical hero from Olympus; it’s his dream so he can do whatever he likes. And he does. The bakers rely on him for a crucial missing ingredient, so Mickey flies over the Milky Way and braves some spectacular diving to bring back milk for the morning cake.

In the Night Kitchen is wacky, wonderful, incantatory and impossible, just the sort of thing that would appeal to the warped humor beloved of children and their free-spirited grown-ups. God bless the milk and God bless Mickey—and God bless Maurice Sendak, wherever he is, inspired fiend of kiddie lit. Thanks to Maurice–and Mickey–we have cake every morning.

In the Night Kitchen (Caldecott Collection)   Maurice Sendak | Harper Collins 25^th Anniversary Edition

Ida B – Katherine Hannigan

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Ida B is a planner with big ideas about having fun, avoiding incarceration in kindergarten and managing the trees and the brook on her family’s land. She’s too exuberant for classroom schedules and too sharp to be fooled about it so Mama homeschools her and that is just about perfect. Katherine Hannigan’s Ida B…and Her Plans to Maximize Fun, Avoid Disaster, and (Possibly) Save the World is the story of how a bright, imaginative and rather stubborn little girl faces the loss of everything comforting she knows and fights back the only way she knows how—with her whole self.

Ida B would be in fourth grade when Mama gets a diagnosis of cancer, Daddy turns into the Deputy of Doom and Disaster and suddenly she is catching the smelly old yellow bus in the morning. So much goes wrong when the tight-knit, warm family is split wide open by illness that Ida B shrinks her heart into a hard black stone and refuses to go along with anything. Part of her beloved orchard is sold to pay the medical bills and the new owners cut down trees who are her friends in order to build a house. The kids in school welcome her but Ida B turns her back on them. Her strong feelings threaten to overwhelm her all the time so she withdraws from the family and nurtures a major case of misery.

But after she discovers how hurtful her clever revenge on the new neighbors is, Ida B begins to feel a little regret. Maybe a LOT of regret. Only fixing what you’ve broken is a million times harder than not breaking it in the first place. As her empathetic teacher gently draws her out in the classroom, Ida B finds a reason to unlock her heart, risk responding to the love and pain of her parents and make her peace with the remaining trees on the property. Damage is damage, she decides. But love is just as enduring and an intelligent and independent soul ought to be able to balance the good and the bad in her life.

The story gets off to a folksy and slow start that made me wonder if I was in for a colloquial slog through cute kids and country living. But Ida B grows on you—the book and the character—and her struggle is very well portrayed. I’d recommend it as a good children’s to younger middle grade book and a particularly excellent choice for a child who is dealing with loss or illness in the family. Even on the dark days, the ones that zoom a million miles beyond wrong, Ida B manages to be fun as well as instructive—snooty cat, slobbering hound, clairvoyant trees, preoccupied but caring parents and all.     

Ida B: . . . and Her Plans to Maximize Fun, Avoid Disaster, and (Possibly) Save the World   Katherine Hannigan | Harper Trophy  2004

Ma Jiang and the Orange Ants – Barbara Ann Porte

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Ma Jiang and the Orange Ants is a sophisticated picture book, written by Barbara Ann Porte and beautifully illustrated by Annie Cannon. It tells the story of a young girl in a traditional peasant family long ago in China and how political circumstances at the time conspire to challenge her cleverness and courage.

Ma Jiang’s family makes a living by selling orange ants—the voracious insect eaters that protect the tender fruit of orange trees from pests. The ants are a kind of natural pesticide and they are fierce enough to bite people who climb to the tops of trees to cut down their nests. Jiang’s older brothers and father collect the ants, her mother weaves the fine rush bags to hold the nests and Jiang helps with selling the orange ants in the market.

But one day all the available men in the community are conscripted by the Emperor’s soldiers and marched off to build the Great Wall. This means disaster for the Ma family—both older brothers and father are gone, leaving only baby Bao, Jiang and her mother. There is no one to catch the ants. The baby is too little and the risky climbing is men’s work. Then an old beekeeper buys some of the rush mats and bags and pays in the only currency he has, honey. And while she is minding Bao, Jiang gets an idea.

How Jiang solves the income dilemma and saves her family from starvation is brilliant and bold. As they begin to prosper, the only sorrow is the continual absence of the conscripted brothers and father. Throughout the story, which is resolved in a very dramatic and satisfying conclusion, the conditions of life in ancient China are presented in a lovely text that is mellifluous when read aloud and would be an interesting challenge for a young reader. The pictures are exquisite—every page is a full scene, edge-to-edge, with plenty of information about the society Jiang lives in.

Ma Jiang and the Orange Ants is a good story, a constructive example of resourcefulness and responsibility, an excellent cultural primer and pure pleasure to read and examine. Children’s books can be small wonders of information and entertainment and this one is a tale to relish.

Ma Jiang & The Orange Ants   Barbara Ann Porte | Orchard Books   2000

The Giver – Lois Lowry

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I never read The Giver. When I picked out books for my kid to read, The Giver always looked too sad, too solemn, too serious. Now that we are both dystopia fiends—probably because we live in a dystopia—the other insatiable reader in the house has passed along The Giver to me. Lois Lowry won the Newbery Medal for this amazing tale of what it means to be human and how even pain is a privilege to be treasured. The Newbery must have been no contest that year because the novel is flawless and superb.

Jonas lives very carefully and precisely in the Sameness. Children are guided, year by year, by immutable rules that govern behavior. At certain ages you have jackets that fasten in the back so you learn interdependence. Then you graduate to front-buttoning jackets and in a year or so to your own bike as you are gradually introduced to more independence from your family unit. Pain is contained by medication. Courtesy is absolute. Everyone has an assigned role in life and at twelve you receive your Assignment—the task you will learn and perform until you are old enough for the House of the Old and, one day, celebrated and Released.

It is December and Jonas, an Eleven about to become a Twelve, is nervous, anticipating the news he will get at the annual Ceremony but unsure about which job he will draw. His father, who works at Nurturing with the newchildren has requested and been given permission to bring home an infant who is too fussy and failing to thrive. The baby will be Released if it doesn’t reach weight and development milestones by the time it should be transferred to a family who has applied for a child. But Jonas doesn’t think Nurturing will be his Assignment. He certainly won’t be a Birthmother, coddled for three births in as many years and then graduated to Laborer for the rest of life. He can’t imagine himself as Caretaker of the Old, a Doctor, or a Director of Recreation.

But then the Chief Elder skips him when she is handing out Assignments and his anticipation turns to anxiety. His unease isn’t much relieved when, at the end of the Ceremony, she explains to the puzzled audience that Jonas has been selected to be the Receiver of Memory, a prestigious and mysterious position that is seldom awarded and little understood. Jonas begins to study with the old Receiver, the Giver, and is stunned at the unusual transmission of skills that comprises his apprenticeship. And everything changes.

Jonas learns about the exhilarating and excruciating colors of life, about feelings he didn’t know could exist, about history, wisdom and emotion. The Giver shows him what Release really means and awakens a humanity that has been trained out of everyone in the community for generations. And, as Jonas awakens, he discovers that his bland and comfortable life is really an intolerable nightmare. The choices he will have to make demand a courage he isn’t sure he has.

It’s an extraordinary book, smooth as a polished stone, and as capable of stunning you as a polished stone aimed to hit you squarely between the eyes. The Giver explores the demanding terrain of memory, the significance of what it means to give, and the impulse to know the truth and follow it into an uncertain future.

The Giver (Newbery Medal Book)   Lois Lowry | Delacorte Press 1993

Chomp – Carl Hiaasen

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Hooray for Carl Hiaasen and Chomp, the latest in his Florida wilderness adventures for intrepid kids. Chomp, as you might deduce, deals with a very large and toothy alligator but the comic romp (sorry, irresistible rhyming compulsion) ranges all over the exotic flora and fauna of the Everglades and the reckless foibles of the flawed human species as well. It’s wild, in every sense of the word. And it’s fun, because Hiaasen’s children’s books are educational and hilarious and this one is no exception.

Wahoo Cray plans to change his name to something normal as soon as he hits eighteen and can do so legally. For the time being, he helps his father wrangle the menagerie of critters that live on their property at the edge of the Glades, tossing nuked whole chickens to Alice the gator, who accidentally crunched off his thumb once, and feeding pythons, monkeys, turtles and whatever else wanders into their “zoo”. Wahoo’s mom is a language teacher who flies off to China as the book opens to make some cash from tin-eared executives so the family can catch up on the mortgage and avoid foreclosure. Not much money has been coming in since dad was conked on the head by a frozen giant iguana that tumbled out of a palm tree during a cold snap.

By the time a reader digests all this madness, the arrival of a reality TV crew and a fake made-for-television survivalist and adventurer seems almost tame. Alice nearly chomps the back end off the TV star when he ignores the Cray duo’s warning about provoking her. The show then hires the two of them to guide the production into the real Everglades to encounter actual wild creatures for the star to wrestle into submission and probably roast over a counterfeit campfire. While collecting supplies for the expedition, they rescue a girl named Tuna with a major shiner in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart where she lives with her drunk, abusive father in a trailer. And then things really get interesting.

Throughout the violence–staged and real–with chopper shots, stunt doubles, razor-toothed wildlife, crashed air boats and loaded guns, Hiaasen delivers a boatload of information about indigenous and invasive species, the destructive incursion of people into a pristine wilderness, the idiocy of same species, and the wonders to be glimpsed when you venture off the beaten trails. There are good old boys—and bad old boys—greedy media types, plucky kids, deluded and well-meaning grown-ups, fortuitous and disastrous accidents and nonstop action. He even manages to sneak in a subplot about vampires, capitalizing on the current craze for the paranormal without sacrificing the fine intelligence and irony that give every incident a delicious twist.  

Hiaasen has delivered another knock-out punch. Hoot, Flush and Scat are his previous books for kids and the discriminating adults I know who have sampled them are as enamored of the formula as younger readers. May he never run out of environmental crusades to wage so we can look forward to many more one-syllable escapades in Florida’s endangered and endlessly entertaining ecosystems. Chomp is excellent. Devour it at your earliest opportunity.

Chomp    Carl Hiaasen | Alfred A. Knopf   2012

The Story of the Root Children – Sibylle von Olfers

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Under the ground, deep in the earth, among the roots of the trees, the little root-children were fast asleep all winter long. So begins the lyrical, magical story of nature that delights us as a read-aloud every spring and fall. The Story of the Root Children is a celebration of the seasons through a fairytale about Mother Earth and the enchanted flower creatures she dresses in beautiful colors for their half-year above ground. It is a more innocent Persephone and Demeter, Gaia adorned in her most festive clothes. There are snow-drops, forget-me-nots, buttercups and poppies—each meadow flower choosing a bit of cloth for a summer dress.

Beetles, ladybirds, butterflies and snails appear right on time as the trees green and the air softens. The story is gentle, poetic, many-layered and spiced with grumbling insects, industrious ants and a chill autumn wind. I discovered this tiny treasure when I was collecting a library for a very small child and we have enjoyed it ever since. The story appeals to our pagan, pantheistic sensibilities but it is a charming secular tale that doesn’t refute science or deify anything—and it can help to demystify death and loss as well as explain the life cycles of a year.

Another seasonal marker in our New York City neighborhood is the tulip festival in our community garden. Every April the wonderful garden on West 90^th Street erupts in a kaleidoscope of vivid blooms that are breathtaking for an instant and then gone for another year. The garden is in its glory right now and too seductive to ignore.

Tulips are showier blooms than the field flowers of The Root Children but they provide equivalent spellbinding magic. The book and the garden are balm for the spirit after the rigors of an unforgiving winter. Sometimes it helps to be reminded of the inexorable rhythm of the days and months, measured in the fragile petals of fairies and flowers.

Story of the Root Children   Sibylle von Olfers | Floris Books 1997

(originally published in Germany 1906)

The Calder Game – Blue Balliett

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The Calder Game is the third in Blue Balliett’s series about some eccentric Chicago middle school kids who solve mysteries using an idiosyncratic belief in coincidence and their own curiosity. Chasing Vermeer was the first book to introduce Petra who has a magical relationship with language and Calder who keeps a pocketful of pentominoes and is a mathier kid. Together they made a formidable, if sometimes perplexing team. A great fascination of book one was the puzzle around the Vermeer paintings and it led to perusal of the Vermeers in our own museum across the park—a delightful follow-up to an engaging book.

In The Calder Game, the third member of the trio, Calder’s friend Tommy who was introduced in book two (haven’t read it) gets his ink. I don’t find him a very compelling character—in fact, he is anything but appealing. Picks his nose, for one thing, and is too easily ruffled. But his presence does take some of the action away from Petra to her detriment. She seems a less strong character in this episode and that is a loss.

The story begins as Calder takes a trip to Oxford with his father, after a disastrous class excursion to the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art to see an ambitious Calder retrospective. Calder, who was named after the artist, lugs his pocketful of pentominoes with him and is stunned to find a giant Calder sculpture installed in the medieval town square in the small village outside of Oxford where he and his dad are staying. Dad takes off for a conference at the university, leaving Calder to sightsee on his own and things pretty much go downhill from there.

A village full of suspicious characters resents the sudden appearance of a sculpture no one wants, ominous looks and coincidences shadow Calder’s tourism, nearby Blenheim Palace has a legendary maze that hides ugly secrets and ancient landscaping that might be deadly, a fat cat shows up rather often at auspicious moments. Then the Calder sculpture and Calder himself disappear. You need a powerful willing suspension of disbelief to puzzle through the rest of the story. Petra, Tommy and a neighbor are flown over from Chicago to help in the search for Calder. The neighbor has thoughtfully procured some sort of Chicago official police detective IDs for them so they can ignore police lines and sleuth at will. They come and go day and night without much supervision. Calder’s father and the neighbor believe the children will solve the mystery of the disappearances.

There’s a lot of adventure and the kids do act independently. The resolution of the various riddles—and crimes—is tricky to guess at because it doesn’t/can’t make sense until the explanations at the end. A bright boy like Calder doesn’t know that a cave with an entrance and cracks in the rocks isn’t a sealed oxygen-free chamber. Americans are boors and bad guys before they are heroes and okay after all. It’s very puzzly—a hallmark of these books—and it was entertaining. But the illogical bits were very distracting and I wish they were more seamlessly incorporated. Nice to learn about an artist, a math tool that looks like a toy, a few museums and botanical gardens. But Chasing Vermeer was a better book—Calder and Petra were a tough team together. Add the nose-picking Tommy and, not so much.

The Calder Game   Blue Balliett  | Scholastic   2008