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

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

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)

Childlike Wonder

Christmas at our house has always been an occasion for favorite stories that capture something magical about the season. There are a dozen marvelous reads to delight grown-ups and kids alike but here are three of the most wondrous—add them to your holiday reads to recall a time when you believed in everything and knew all the best stories were real.

A Pussycat’s Christmas is a gift from Margaret Wise Brown, the author of Goodnight Moon and an entrancing, hypnotic writer. Our treasured copy is a hardback published by HarperCollins with illustrations by Anne Mortimer. Pussycat is a creature of now. She experiences everything through her senses and so do we, following along with her as she frolics in the falling snow, hears the sounds of tinkling ice and distant sleigh bells, smells Christmas trees, apples and tangerines, sees shining ornaments and bows on packages and pounces in sheer joy—until she is put out in the hall. Undaunted, she listens for carolers and waits for the family to go to midnight services before she pushes open the living room door and plays with crackling paper, shining glass orbs and curling ribbons. It’s the perfect book to read a small, excited child to sleep on Christmas Eve—the cadence of the lines soothes and lulls and the details remind you of how tiny a thing happiness is, and how easy to obtain.

Auntie Claus by Elise Primavera, published by Harcourt Brace & Company, is a delightful romp through fantasy with an Auntie Mame character who keeps huge holiday secrets and a spoiled little girl named Sophie who visits her every afternoon for tea. Auntie Claus lives in the penthouse atop the Bing Cherry Hotel in New York City where Sophie’s family lives, too, on a lower floor. The red and green velvet, white ermine and gilt pad—undoubtedly on the Upper East Side—looks like an ornate Santa’s workshop and has a large oil painting of the man himself over the fireplace. Auntie Claus wears a mysterious diamond key around her neck and instructs Sophie in the finer points of etiquette, emphasizing always that it is better to give than to receive. And every year, just after Halloween, Auntie Claus goes on an unexplained trip and doesn’t return until Valentine’s Day. One year, Sophie decides to find her own answers and stows away in one of the many boxes packed for Auntie Claus’s trip. The diamond key unlocks an old elevator that shoots up into the sky with Sophie, boxed and wide-eyed, in the baggage. What happens after that explains a great deal to Sophie who returns to her bratty brother and ordinary life with an open heart and a legacy of giving. For Christmas that year, Sophie gets a tiny jewel box from Auntie Claus with a small diamond key of her own. Fantastical, whimsical retelling of the Santa Claus legend and a caution to greedy children everywhere.  

Frederick by Leo Lionni, published by Alfred A. Knopf, was a Caldecott Honor Book and is a truly beloved book in a house of readers and writers. Frederick and the other field mice live in an old stone wall on an abandoned farm and work all summer and into the autumn to gather nuts, wheat, straw and corn for the long cold winter. Frederick drives them crazy. He sits all day gathering the rays of the sun, staring at the colors of the meadow and collecting words. The rest of the family hauls ears of corn, fallen grain and nesting materials from the fields and badgers Frederick about his lack of industry. When the snow falls, they snuggle into their safe space in the wall and nibble supplies, huddling together for warmth. But, as the supplies dwindle and the bitter cold seeps into their bones, they turn to Frederick and ask him to share what he has gathered for winter. And Frederick gives them an imaginary sun to cheer them, the memory of the red, blue and green flowers and leaves and a lovely poem to celebrate four seasons and a small family of chilly mice who are warmed and heartened by his words.

Chalice – Robin McKinley

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Chalice is a different reading experience from the Robin McKinley versions of classic fairytales like Beauty and the Beast. It really is another world and it takes some time to sort out what is going on and what it means. Once you work your way in, you are hooked, though, and it’s a fast clip through the action of the plot to the very satisfying finish.

In the demesne of Willowlands, Mirasol is a beekeeper from one of the old families. She hears the earthlines murmur and protest and her abilities land her the position of Chalice when the Master and the Chalice die in some disaster of disharmony with the forces of nature they govern. The demesnes are kept whole and balanced by the Master, Chalice and Circle—each has a specific role. The Chalice must bind the land and people and the Master together to create a profound harmony but Marisol despairs because there is no Master and she does not have the long years of apprenticship that prepare someone for her role. As she struggles to absorb myriad arcane rules and protocols and provide the service required of a Chalice, she takes frequent refuge in her small woodright and tends her bees. Bees and honey she knows better than anything else—Marisol’s honey is the best in Willowlands and it has energizing and healing powers.

And then the Circle sends for the old Master’s younger brother to be the new Master. The younger son of another old lineage, he was shipped off to become a Priest of Fire when his arrogant brother became Master. Now he returns to protect the land and no one knows if someone who is far into the process of becoming Fire can even be around humans or safeguard Willowlands. An accidental touch from him will sear flesh right to the bone.

Intrigue abounds. Outsiders arrive to wrest control from the half-Fire, half-human Master.  Marisol tries to win the trust of the people and perform the Chalice rituals that keep the land from tearing apart. The story is amazing, unexpected, beautifully written and engaging. It’s fantasy but not a classic fairytale. There is trickery, romance, challenge, cataclysmic upheaval and villainy to deal with. Marisol inadvertently commits a grievous error that could destroy the land and will certainly wreck her own life. It’s an odd story but never a dull one.

Robin McKinley must live in another realm entirely when she writes these books. Chalice is such a completely realized world—and such a complex and foreign one—that I can’t imagine how she moves into that space to write and then emerges to have lunch or talk to ordinary people. Bravo to her for pulling it off, though. The bees are a force to be reckoned with and so, in the end, is the beekeeper. You can almost taste the honey, feel the fire and the fear, and see the spells that heal villagers and rifts in the land as the Chalice works her uncertain magic, hoping somehow it will be enough.  

Chalice    Robin McKinley | Firebird  2008

The Flint Heart — Katherine Paterson & John Paterson

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The Flint Heart is a fairy tale adapted from the work of Eden Phillpotts, a prolific writer who lived from 1862 to 1960 and told stories set in his beloved Devon county moors. Katherine Paterson, Newbery and National Book Award-winning writer, and her husband John, base this book-length tale on Phillpotts’ style as well as his imaginary worlds. It is a large, heavy, beautiful book with an amazing amount of white space, thick coated pages, and gorgeous illustrations by John Rocco who worked at Dreamworks on Shrek and at Walt Disney Imagineering and drew the art for the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series.

At first, the language seems very simple and the story very broadly drawn, as if it is carefully rendered for unsophisticated readers. But first impressions can be misleading and this one is. The Patersons have filled the pages with charming characters, captivating names—like Jacky Toads, a Zagabog and a Snick, a pixie who reads dictionaries and a philosopher fairy king who dispenses judgment based on Point of View. Small children will love the illustrations and the story. Older children—no limits on age–will love the clever wordplay and humor.

In The Flint Heart, the region of Dartmoor is plagued from prehistory by a dark magic encapsulated in a rock chip strung on a leather cord. Place it around your neck, or even in your pocket, and all the light and warmth and kindness goes right out of you, to be replaced by homicidal, self-centered, authoritarian, barbaric behavior that makes a shambles of your community and cannot be resisted. Shades of Tolkien and that cursed ring, although Tolkien’s ring was written after Phillpott’s work.

How a couple of brave and imaginative children, a badly injured German hot-water bottle named Bismark and the helpful fairies, pixies and forest creatures defeat the flint heart is the central quest of the book but the digressions are as entertaining as the story. Read it and learn why the tortoise really won the race and what actually frightened Little Miss Muffet. Multiply naughts to discover why you can’t be marked off for them on an exam. Enjoy the interesting vocabulary and a tale told in nineteenth-century language smoothed out to make perfect sense to a twenty-first-century child.

The Flint Heart is fun and it doesn’t dumb anything down for children. That alone is worth the book—no least-common-denominator, one-syllable-from-an-approved-list-of-age-appropriate-vocabulary words, as suitable for a chimp as a child, in this adventure. (Deep apologies to primates.) There is a moral to this story but it doesn’t get in the way. And the human, beast, hot-water bottle and fairy/pixie worlds live more or less happily-ever-after once the heart meets its ultimate fate—with a surprise twist. No spoilers. Grab a willing kid and The Flint Heart and settle in to find out for yourself.    

The Flint Heart   Katherine Paterson & John Paterson | Candlewick Press  2011