Book Buds Kidlit Reviews

The Edge of the Forest

A few months back, Kelly Herold, from Big A little a, came up with a great idea. Why not a Web 'zine devoted to children's literature? And, hey, a bunch of us kidlit bloggers could write it!

Despite my hectic life, my byline somehow ended up on the first two features for the premier issue of The Edge of the Forest. One of the stories you'll recognize as my Black History Month post. There'll be a new issue every month with feature stories, interviews with authors and non-bloggie stuff like riffs and think pieces on our favorite reading matter.

Kelly had a good deal of help from Susan Thomsen of Chicken Spaghetti. The rest of the editorial board and their blogs are listed here.

So go take a hike! To The Edge of the Forest, I mean.

Reggae, Laurie Berkner reviews

The following is written by my husband, Brett Levy, and cross-posted at his blog.

Reggae Playground
Sometimes it takes me a while to decide if I like a song or album. That is the case with three CDs and one DVD that I received in late 2005.

Of the CDs, I warmed up quickest to Reggae Playground, which offers snippets of Caribbean sounds from a variety of artists. The music is light and fun, making it easy for your child to follow along.

Kids will probably enjoy Alain Schneider’s “Le Vieil Éléphant” the most. While the majority of the song is in French, the beat is universal.

Toots and the Maytals rendition of “Take Me Home Country Roads” will probably strike a bigger cord with parents than kids. That’s because of the cute play on words:

Take me home,
country road,
to the place,
I belong
West Jamaica …

I smile every time I hear “West Jamaica.”

This album shines because both parent and child can enjoy the music together. The melodies are more complex than most music directed at children, which parents will find more satisfying than say the Wiggles. But the distinct reggae beat holds children’s attention better than heavy, complex Western music.

We Are the Laurie Berkner Band
I took a while to warm up to Laurie Berkner. Well, let me step back. I took a while to warm up to her band.

When Seth and I first watched Laurie’s upcoming DVD, all of the songs – and the various tie-ins from TV shows and books – were new to us. That’s one of the pitfalls of watching zero commercial TV.

Seth seemed to like the music first time through, but I think he was at first unsure of the video. The colorful outfits worn by Berkner and her two band mates are bright like the Wiggles, but they’re constantly changing, which seemed to overwhelm his senses.

And to be honest, I was a bit distracted by the, um, bounciness of the ladies’ tops. Someone needs to talk to the wardrobe folk about that.

After the second viewing, though, Seth wanted to watch or listen to the DVD over and over again. In fact, he connects with Laurie’s music far deeper than Reggae Playground.

I suspect that’s because he’s still a toddler, and because Laurie’s music is, well, bouncy like her tops. For those who already own Laurie’s albums, take note that only one of the songs on the DVD is new: “Walk Along the River.”

There was one song I did not warm up to: “O Susannah,” which I guess is sung off-key by Brian Mueller on purpose. There is probably some inside joke that goes along with this song, but it sounds so butchered to me, I cringe every time it loops around.

The DVD comes with a short CD that includes “The Happiest Song I know,” which is also on Tom Chapin’s Some Assembly Required album. I reviewed that album in November. Maybe it’s Chapin’s more polished recording skills, but “Happiest Song” reveals just how silky Laurie’s voice can be. It’s one of my wife’s favorite songs off the Chapin album.

One World, One Kid
It’s hard to not like a 6-year-old kid who creates an album to cheer up a friend fighting cancer. The brainchild of Skyler Pia, 100 percent of the profit from One World One Kid benefits the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

While I’m not in love with the boy’s high-pitched voiceovers before each song, Skyler’s eclectic taste in music is excellent. In fact, most of these culturally-rich songs from around the world are mostly over Seth’s head and will be best enjoyed by parents and older kids.

The album is short, but only costs about $6.

A doggie tale

The Dog Who Cried Wolf

by Keiko Kasza

This is one of those "grass is always greener ..." stories designed to actually temper the call of the wild. Moka's a good doggie, 'til his owner reads him a book about wolves. So he scampers out one day to try his paw at the lupine life. Except food doesn't exactly land in his dish, and then there's those real wolves to worry about. Yipes!

Cute stuff, but I always worry that stories like this send an Oz-like message about home. Sooner or later, you have to kick the curs out, don't you? Okay, my pup's got at least 15 years before the front door hits him in the tail, but I want him to face the world feeling that if he wants to howl at the moon, go for it.

Yep, I'm reading too much into a kid's book. Again. I gotta stop that.

Rating: *\*\

Waxing and waning

How the Moon Regained Her Shape

by Janet Ruth Heller; illustrated by Ben Hodson

That mean ol' Sun, always flaring up at everyone. He roars at Moon, getting her all out of shape. But when she sees how many friends she has among animals and people on Earth, she perks up, poor girl.

Told and drawn as a Native American folk tale (I'm thinking Pacific Northwest?), the story should help kids understand how they can retreat from bullies and stick by the folks who love them. And, oh yeah, there's all these cool phases of the moon to learn about too.

As with most titles from this publisher, there's nifty facts and project ideas in the back.

Rating: *\*\

A little Latina magic

Dona Flor

by Pat Mora; illustrated by Raul Colon

A Gift of Gracias

by Julia Alvarez; illustrated by Beatriz Vidal

Perhaps it's odd or inappropriate to pair a magical realism story with a religious one, since many will insist that there's no suspense of disbelief in the latter, at least for the religiously inclined. That'd be missing what the stories have in common, which is more than the occasional Spanish phrase and Hispanic backdrop (and the fact that they arrived in the same box. Ah well).

One's a tall tale from what could be either the American Southwest or northern Mexico, the other's the Dominican legend of Our Lady of Altagracia (literally "High Grace").

Mora creates a larger-than-life heroine in the giantess Dona Flor, giving her oversized common sense as well as a heart as big as the hand-made tortillas that double as roofs for a grateful pueblo. When a puma's thunderous roars make both people and animals tremble, she righteously marches off to settle matters. How refreshing to see a protagonist who doesn't face every affront with a massive shot of testosterone, but with folksy wisdom and a wry smile.

Little Maria in The Gift of Gracias prays that her family won't have to leave colonial Hispaniola (today's Dominican Republic) after their olive crop fails. She's rewarded with a dream of planting oranges, accompanied by a vision of the Virgin. When her family plants orange seeds, the trees mature quickly and bear a life-saving harvest.

An aboriginal servant, Quisqueya, acts as a sort of Catholic spirit guide, appearing in Maria's dreams and later bringing home a blanket with the Virgin's likeness that's hung in the new orchard. Alvarez blurs the distinction between the folkloric and the sacred, with a Virgin firmly rooted in Dominican soil and native culture.

It makes the story decidedly Latino, just as Dona Flor, who may have girth akin to Paul Bunyan's, but whose story is only American in the largest possible sense -- an America that spans two continents and whose people are as likely to speak Spanish as not.

Both books channel Diego Rivera in their homage to peasants, though maybe that's not the right word. I think of Latino folk art when I see the rounded figures and earthy colors and the artists' celebration of the simple and everyday. Plus there's the usual clues: the flattened picture plane, the minimal use of light and shadow, the uncluttered compositions, and how the artists freely mix the mundane and the supernatural as if it were an expected thing. 

The act of planting orange seeds takes on a religious solemnity, for example, with figures praying as they stoop at their work. Vidal used a magnifying glass on the many details, but her pictures remain clear, straightforward depictions of a modest family's brush with divine grace.

Colon's Dona Flor soars, ethereal and sweet, the lines smudged and smoothed to make her literally soft around the edges, a depiction that is more awed than religious, but uplifting in its own way. 

Rating: *\*\*\

Where's Anne?

The books are piling up and I'm nowhere to be found. More exactly, I'm wiping dirty noses and trailing kleenex this week. Both kids are sick. Plus, the hubby's commuting to an early shift, and what with train schedules and such, I'm flying solo for 12-13 hours a day.

So much for my New Year's resolution to review books within a few weeks of their arrival. Hah! I'll be lucky if I get to the spring books by Christmas.

I did have a small epiphany this weekend. My mother and two of my brothers flew in with their families for a Bar Mitzvah. It was a singular chance to have everyone on my turf for a change (I usually trek back east). Plus there was a large-ish assortment of nieces, nephews, cousins and my favorite aunt and uncle.

There was widespread agreement I should be writing children's books, and that too much time has elapsed already. Get busy! Get writing! I've no idea if they were all conspiring with my husband, or if someone slipped something funny into the Manischewitz.

There's so much I don't know about getting published, it could fill, well, a whole blog. I promised to give it a try. My hope is to write funny and sometimes satirical poems for kids. I'm working on an essay for National Poetry Month in April, which I'll post here.

In fact, I'll be posting more essays/round-ups like the one on Black History Month below, and some personal reflections on my favorite poems and stories. There'll be more linky-love with other kidlit blogs and more participation in events like Chicken Spaghetti's blog carnival.

The goal is to gradually familiarize myself with the kidlit market, while stretching some writing muscles and having fun. Sometimes the review-only schtick feels a little stale, like I can only play one song. Then again, Liberace made a fortune playing Chopsticks, so there goes that analogy.

Like the new me? Tell me it doesn't make me look fat. Please.

Meanwhile, it's back to germ warfare with the little ones.

See you all next week.

Black History Month

How sad to lose Coretta Scott King within a few months of Rosa Parks, and during the month when we celebrate African American's contribution to our history. Below I listed a few finds from 2005 for teachers, librarians and of course parents that can be read year-round.

It’s not easy cramming 400 years of black history into a single month, and the shortest one at that. Children’s picture books can at least offer a snapshot of a person or a period, a single thread from the vast, multi-hued tapestry of the American story.

Not to stretch the textile analogy too thin, but Show Wayliterally weaves black history into its pages in this story of quilts sewn by author Jacqueline Woodson’s slave ancestors. The quilts were secret maps to the North, but in Woodson’s rhythmic narration become links to the women who toiled to keep the hope of freedom alive.

The art, like Woodson’s family history, is pieced together one scrap at a time. Illustrator Hudson Talbott used watercolor, chalk, muslin and pieces of work shirts and Bermuda shorts for collages that recreate news headlines, auction posters and the quilts themselves, as if layering black history so we can put the story in proper context.

And context is everything. Like tiles in a mosaic, sometimes you have to step back for that bigger picture to emerge. And those tiles are the stories of individuals who struggled, usually anonymously, but whose stories make for great reads.

Baseball’s more than a game in both Catching the Moonand Let Them Play, it’s a symbol of an “all-American” sport that not all Americans could enjoy equally. The 12-year-old black boys in Margot Theis Raven’s Let Them Play form a Little League team in South Carolina in 1955 only to see the white teams drop out to form a segregated league, dashing their championship hopes.

Catching the Moon tells the story of Marcenia Lyle, the only woman to play professional baseball for a Negro League team, capturing a moment in her girlhood when her skills won over the manager of the St. Louis Cardinals. In both, we see kids who play by the rules but still strike out, pardon the pun, through no fault of their own, and then go on to the bigger victory of personal integrity, pride, honor, whatever you wish to call the swelling feeling when you’ve made the bad guys eat crow.

Both books feature art that’s lifelike and detailed, as do several other notable books about African Americans that came out last year. The School Isn’t White follows a black family that painfully desegregates a Mississippi school district, and Joe-Joe's First Flight is a fictional work about a boy whose imagination soars when his father is denied a job as a pilot at a rural airport in the 1920s.

The realism makes the stories more stark and affecting, hammering home the details that separated blacks from whites: the work clothes and shabby houses, the “colored only” signs, but also the fierce determination and fiery looks, and that certain set of the jaw when you’re forced to swallow back your indignation.

Both Alec's Primerand The Old Africanalso fall loosely in this category too, with their respective stories about slavery. Alec Turner was a real man, born into slavery, who learned to read and fought in the Civil War before realizing his dream of freedom. The Old African tells a magical realist story about an old slave who leads his people back to Africa by walking across the ocean floor. The art, which used graphite, gouache, pastel and watercolor on paper, makes the unreal become real, with its relentlessly dark palette. Its unsparing look at slave holds and captivity might be a touch too graphic for the littlest readers, however.

Illustrators who departed from realism usually went down the Expressionist path, and none more dramatically than in Rosa, which recreates events on the fateful day when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala. bus. The book was recently picked as a runner-up for the Caldecott Medal.

It’s worth noting again Bryan Collier’s multi-media collages for the loving way he dwells on her glittering eyes, her glowing skin, her radiant peace that clearly clues us in to an inner strength invisible to the white people who glower and threaten and hover. He gives us close ups of those eyes staring straight at us (repeated on the cover) as the police officer leans in, and then of her hands twisting her purse strap, heightening the tension as he draws the confrontational moment out. Brilliant stuff.

Just so you don’t think every worthwhile book on black history has to be about oppression and resistance, pick up Baby on the Way, where a grandmother recounts her birth on a rural farm to her very urban grandson. Sean Squalls used swaths of earthy colors and a flattened landscape for a folksy feel, and author Karen English, like many other narrators mentioned above, seems to relish the rhythms and expressiveness of black English.

A Season for Mangoesbrings us to a Jamaican funeral and Mama Panya's Pancakesto a Kenyan village, if you’re interested in a small taste of the African diaspora. Again, these are just individual tales, but step back after reading them and a larger, more complete picture emerges of a people dispersed but unbowed.

Making space

I'm clearing out 2005 titles to make way for 2006, which are starting to arrive. A bundle are headed to my son's preschool, but I had to be selective. I was shocked how much schlock makes it into print. What do I do with all the books that suck?

While I ponder this tragic waste of trees, I'm having to tread carefully between stacks on the floor and coffee table.

Book Buds will return when the dust settles.