Byatt on Tatar’s Enchanted Hunters

This is a grown-up book for grown-up people who haven’t forgotten being childhood readers. It satisfies imagination and curiosity, revisiting things you suddenly remember clearly, telling you new things you didn’t know.

A. S. Byatt reviews Maria Tatar’s Enchanted Hunters in the Guardian.

Oh, that Corpse!

If you aren’t following The Exquisite Corpse Adventure I recommend you do so pronto.  Just to recap, it is based on the game where one person writes a bit of a story and then passes it on to the next person to continue.  In this case the highfalutin people doing the writing and illustrating are having a complete blast with this wild and wooly game.  You may think of some of them only in terms of dark and serious writing, but you would be wrong, wrong, wrong.  Sure, we expect zany behavior from our Ambassador, but did you know that Katherine Paterson, Susan Cooper, and Kate DiCamillo are equal if not able to top him?  Episode 4 has just gone up and I can only say that Nancy and Joe (like those names?) are intrepid, brave, plucky, and that clown is s-c-a-r-y.

Coming Soon: Rita Williams-Garcia’s One Crazy Summer

My eyes stung. I was spilling-over mad. I couldn’t stop what I had to say, even if she stood over me and became my crazy mother mountain and knocked me down. I was spilling over.

It is the summer of 1968 and eleven-year-old Delphine and her two younger sisters Vonetta and Fern have been sent from Brooklyn, New York to Oakland, California to spend the summer with a mother they don’t know at all. A mother who abandoned them after Fern was born.

Cecile is still a mother who wants nothing to do with them. She refuses to call Fern by her name, leaves them to get their own meals, and makes it very clear that she wants them out of her hair and home during the day so she can do her work as a poet.  And so she immediately sends them off to the Black Panther’s People’s Center. “Can’t miss it. Nothing but black folks in black clothes rapping revolution and a line of hungry black kids.” They are to go for the free breakfast, stay there all day for the program, and just keep out of her way till evening.

Delphine is used to taking care of her sisters and while she is horrified at the thought of spending their days with the Black Panthers she also isn’t totally surprised — the stories Big Ma, her grandmother, has told them about Cecile are right in keeping with this sort of behavior. Clearly Cecile has zero interest in them. Zero. And so the three girls make their way to the Center where they meet Black Panthers, learn about them, and, as the summer goes on, contribute their own part to the movement. And by the end, they have gotten to know their mother, one of the more unique mothers of recent children’s literature.

Rita Williams-Garcia has created unforgettable characters in the three girls and their mother —they are sure to linger in your mind long after you have closed the book. Especially Delphine — she tells their story and she tells it straight. There are big and powerful moments in the book — say a poetry reading at a rally — and small sharp moments as well — say requests by whites to photograph the three girls. Big or small, they feel absolutely real and true to the characters, the times, and the ideals of the times. And finally, there is the writing — spare, poetic, and incredibly moving.

Come January, keep your eyes peeled for Rita Williams-Garcia’s One Crazy Summer. It is a keeper.

Arggh: Two Great Events at the Same Time

I’m in need of a time-turner for this Saturday.  Anyone got a spare they can lend me?  You see, there are two events that I badly want to go to taking place at the very same time at opposite ends of town.

In midtown at Betsy Bird’s library there is the monthly Literary Cafe featuring a wonderful panel built around the Cybils.  I’m honored to be a middle grade fiction judge this year and so would love to meet the creators of the award and hear all they have to say.

And then uptown at the NYPL’s Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture there is a program featuring Phillip Hoose and Claudette Colvin, author and subject of one of my favorite books of the year, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice.

If no time turner shows up in the next couple of days I’m going for Hoose and Colvin because I think the opportunity to hear and see both of them is too important to pass up.  More on the book, the talk, and them anon.

Thinking Hard About Newbery, Audience, and Insensitivity

A difficult yet though-provoking discussion is currently going on at the superb SLJ Heavy Medal blog.   In, “A Season of Gifts…Don’t Throw the Popcorn” (a side reference to a comment made by Roger Sutton on his blog), Nina Lindsay raises some important questions regarding Richard Peck’s latest book.  In subsequent posts (as of this writing they are The Grinch Who Stole Christmas,” “Lifting the Veil,” and “Racially Insensitive“), she and her fellow blogger Jonathan Hunt as well as commenters — myself included — have been grappling with some very challenging issues.  Hard stuff, but important.  Highly recommended.

The Exquisite Corpse Adventure has Begun

The Library of Congress’s Center for the Book and the National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance have joined forces to create a very entertaining online serial story — The Exquisite Corpse Adventure.

It is that old game — having one person start a story, fold over the paper, and then give it to the next person to continue. At the end the paper is unfolded and the whole, usually hilarious story, is read in its entirety.  In this case, the participating writers and illustrators are a very impressive bunch.  There’s M.T. Anderson, Natalie Babbitt, Calef Brown, Susan Cooper, Kate Di Camillo, Timothy Basil Ering, Nikki Grimes, Shannon Hale, Daniel Handler aka Lemony Snicket, Steven Kellogg, Gregory Maguire, Megan McDonald, Patricia and Fredrick McKissack, Linda Sue Park, Katherine Paterson, James Ransome, Jon Scieszka, and Chris Van Dusen.  Wow,  right?

Do go and check out Jon Scieszka and Chris Van Dusen’s first episode here.  For resources and more check out the NCBLA’s dedicated site here.

92nd Street Y Children’s Reading Series

The venerable 92nd Street Y here in NYC (near by school , it so happens) has the Unterberg Poetry Center which is full of all sorts of intriguing programs. This year they’ve started a new Children’s Reading Series on Saturdays featuring, “classic literature for children, read by actors and writers.” First up is Rosemary Harris this Saturday reading from the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde.  In December you can hear and see Lois Lowry, and in March they’ve got The World of E. B. White: An Afternoon with Roger Angell.  Pretty impressive, I’d say!

Adaptations and Such

I’ve seen several expressions of relief by children’s book folk after they viewed the new Where the Wild Things Are movie featurette in which Maurice Sendak expresses confidence and appreciation for Spike Jonze’s vision for his book.  While I too am happy that it has met with Sendak’s approval, I also want to point out that Jonze is a very, very unconventional filmmaker and the film is likely to be a very different aesthetic experience from the book.  The two movies of his I’ve seen were smart, engaging, and seriously weird.  Just be prepared is all I say.

The first one I saw was Being John Malkovich — incredibly strange and very endearing, I thought.  Here’s the trailer:

The only other one I’ve seen is Adaptation. Given that its plot involves someone trying to adapt a book for a movie, well isn’t that what Jonze is doing with Where the Wild Things Are? In the case of Adaptation, it is a real book, Susan Orlean’s nonfiction book The Orchid Thief, and things go from bad to worse — hopefully that doesn’t happen with Max’s story! Here’s the trailer:

And here’s the new featurette mentioned above for anyone who hasn’t yet seen it.

Coming Soon: Matt Phelan’s The Storm in the Barn

Matt Phelan’s The Storm in the Barn is a beautiful, moving, and singular graphic novel, the story of eleven-year-old Jack Clark, his family, and his town during the 1937 Dust Bowl in Kansas.  Phelan’s palatte, sparse text, lines, and dusty images evoke the time and place perfectly.  It is a tricky thing to tell a tale that is both ultra-realistic and tinged with the supernatural, one that is both fable and historic.  Go too far in one direction and the story becomes overly moralizing; go too far the other and it just falls flat.  Phelan straddles the line perfectly. The atmosphere is thick with dust, with sadness, with pain, with wonder and, finally with hope.  Jack is a moving protagonist, worried about real things, inquisitive, scared, and ultimately brave.  This is an Americana story — the images harken back to the iconic photographs of Dorothea Lange, there are references to that very American literary fairy tale, L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz.  Keep an eye out for it this fall — it is a wonder.

The Pura Belpré Award Celebration with Yuyi Morales’ Special Treat

I had always heard that the Pura Belpré Award Celebration was wonderful so this year I went and, yes it was!  The room was festively decorated, the presentations and speeches were moving, and it ended with a completely delightful dance performance by a troupe of little girls.

The highlight of the afternoon for me was the vivacious and talented Yuyi Morales who received an honor for the writing and the medal for the illustration of her charming alphabet book, Just in Case.

At the end of her acceptance speech she presented the following video. Enjoy!