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Ravenna
By Stacey Curnow
Illustrated by Daniel Nevins
Grateful Steps
$12.95
ISBN: 978-1-935130-25-3
Ages 4-8
On shelves now.

Parables. They’re almost impossible to do in children’s books. The problem with a parable is that if it wants to teach something it often has to say what it means. Another way of saying that is that parables for children are explicit. A good parable for kids can be subtle, but most don’t bother. They take their messages and whap children over the head with them repeatedly. Then kids resent the message, and nobody ends up very happy. These thoughts reside in a dark corner of my brain at all times, and when I saw the picture book Ravenna and got the gist of its story I was certain that if I read it I’d find yet another preachy little number. Yet Ravenna is a different kind of book. First off, it bases its story on my favorite King Arthur legend, Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady (I’m partial to the Selina Hastings version myself). Second, the illustrations by artist Daniel Nevins set this little black and white title apart from the picture book pack. As for the writing itself, it’s not your usual fare. That’s not a bad thing. In an era of cookie-cutter wordplay it’s refreshing to read something that works as a whole and complete story while also upsetting your expectations. Doubtless there will be folks unnerved by what they find here, but for most this is just a strange, sweet story about a boy and a bear.

Galen’s your average mountain farm kid. He spends a lot of time outside, and then one day he hears that a new neighbor moved in with a bear. Intrigued, Galen pays the man a visit. While there he sees Ravenna, the bear, who is far more lovely than anything he could have imagined. It’s clear that Galen wants Ravenna for his own, but before she transfers her ownership, she tells him that he must first find out what every creature wants. After much discussion and thinking, Galen hits upon it. “All creatures want to be free!” Ravenna agrees that this is the answer and the two pass happy months together. However, it’s not long before Galen realizes that the answer to Ravenna’s question wasn’t just theoretical. And though he loves her, the boy must decide whether or not he’s prepared to do the right thing.

For some folks, there’s just no getting around the fact that this is a story about a boy in love with a bear. I’d agree, and it’s a little unusual sure, but let’s face it. If any kid was living in the wild and came across a pretty dancing bear that could also talk, don’t you think they’d want one too? There’s nothing untoward in Galen’s desire to own Ravenna. He just thinks she’s awesome and wants to be with her all the time. As for the moral of “if you love something, let it go” (those exact words aren’t used, but that’s the basic premise) it may be more pertinent to a kid than the original Sir Gawain story. In that tale, Gawain gives his wife the choice of being beautiful during the day or at night. In Ravenna a boy who owns a bear, a

It’s a Book
By Lane Smith
Roaring Brook Press (a division of Holtzbrinck)
$12.99
ISBN: 978-1-59643-606-0
On shelves now.

Where to begin? Begin at the beguine, I suppose. I’ve had It’s a Book sitting on my shelf for months and now the time is ripe. As you may have heard one place or another, it contains an off-color word at the end (“jackass”, belated spoiler alert) and it makes fun of folks who prefer online zips and whizbangs to good old-fashioned paper books. So what are we to make of it? Well, I hate to lob this designation on any author or illustrator I like, but this is so clearly a picture book for grown-ups that it squeaks. While kids today slip from electronic readers to paper books and back again like svelte otters, it is the grown-ups around them that are heard cooing and purring every time a shiny new electronic toy hits the market. For those who love the printed page, such enthusiasm can be scary. Kids don’t fear for the so-called “death of the book” but some of their caregivers certainly do, and so for them Lane Smith has penned an exchange between a pixel-happy donkey and the monkey (slash ape) who just wants to read his book in peace.

Hedging his bets right from the start, Smith begins by pulling his punch as far back as it can reasonably go. Turn to the title page and you read, “It’s a mouse. It’s a jackass. It’s a monkey.” Ignoring the fact that the monkey is actually an ape (though he may be hiding his tail beneath his, uh, muumuu?), the story begins with the donkey asking the primate what he’s got there. “It’s a book.” Not understanding the donkey tries to figure out the use of such an object. “Can it text?” “No.” “Tweet?” “No.” “Wi-Fi?” “No.” Eventually the donkey gets to see what a book really can do and when his companion asks if he can have his book back he gets a pretty straightforward, “No,” echoing his own earlier dismissals. The donkey, to his credit, offers to charge the book up when he’s done, but the mouse perched on the top of the monkey’s (slash ape’s) head clarifies everything, “You don’t have to . . .” Turn the page. “It’s a book, jackass.”

In the past, Smith was king at walking the fine line between adult humor and children’s humor. Books like The Happy Hockey Family remain spot on. Kids find them funny just on a basic humor level and adults love the sly jabs at easy reading books of yore. This balance was once a Smith trademark, but lately he’s been falling too far on the adult side of the equation. When I mention The Elephant in the Room to other children’s librarians I often meet with blank stares. Though it came out just a year before It’s a Book, this title was a pretty strange concoction. In it a donkey (a jackass?) asks another about “the elephant in the room”. His companion then launches into a series of unspoken topics that might be that elephant until, at the end, we see an actual elephant sitting in the room. After trying to figure out if there was a political point to the story (donkeys and elephants rarely co-mingle for any other reason) it occurred to me that the book made no sense. Of course the first thing a child reader is going to assume when they hear the term “elephant in the room” is that there’s an actual elephant there. Only adults would go along with the donkey’s string of inte

Farm
By Elisha Cooper
Orchard Books (an imprint of Scholastic)
$17.99
ISBN: 978-0-545-07075-1
Ages 5-10
On shelves now

As a children’s librarian living in New York City, I get a really skewed view of the world. For example, a book like Christoph Niemann’s Subway will get released and all the children I see are hugely into it. For them, the subway is a part of life and that book shows them what they already know. What I have to remind myself is that Manhattan children, for all their charms, are aberrations. Lots of kids in the United States haven’t a clue what a working subway system looks or feels like. So when a book like Farm falls into my lap my brain has to do a 180 in the opposite direction. Lots of city kids have never been to a real working farm before. They understand them in the vaguest of senses. Growing up they learned that animals lived on the farm with a moo moo here and a baa baa there. Actual working farms, however, are the kinds of things you see outside your car window on your way from one part of the country to another. They are near magical places. All that land. All that sky. That’s why I’m delighted that a book like Farm even exists. It has a twofold purpose. For kids who have never experienced a farm firsthand, it provides a glimpse into a world as different and magical as any fantasy land. And for kids who already have a working knowledge of farms and the countryside, the book is a magnificent mirror that takes the practical beauty of their everyday lives and spins it into storytelling gold.

We begin in that time when spring has only started to make some headway against winter. When the days start to warm up but the fields are just a mass of brown dirt. We meet the equipment, the family, the hired hands, and the animals. We watch the tiller turn the soil, “the fields change from the color of milk chocolate to the color of dark chocolate.” We see seeds being planted, rains come, and crops grow. We meet the cats and the cows, and follow the family into town on occasion. There are summer nights and days and kids going back to school once again. To crops come in, the winter falls, and it’s all in the life of a single farm.

Kids love process. Not all kids, but a lot of them. They like to know how things are made and how things come to be. Farm, in a sense, is all about process, but it doesn’t get hung up on the concept. So you’ll learn about different kinds of farms, how tractors work, and what the various seasons resemble. But you’ll also see the downtime of the farmer and his kids. They go to town and chat with neighbors. The boy amuses himself by throwing tomatoes at birds or building forts out of straw. The girl, who is getting older, spends time reading books or staying away from home more and more often. Best of all, kids these days have a tendency to think that farming is an occupation of the past. So this book works in current technology without making it so prominent that the book will date anytime soon. A broken tractor means that a farmer has to call a neighbor on his cell to get it fixed. Much later during the harvesting “The farmer checks the corn’s yield on his computer and ta

Dotty
By Erica S. Perl
Illustrated by Julia Denos
Abrams Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 978-0-8109-8962-7
$16.95
Ages 4-8
On shelves now.

Seems to me that picture books get split into very particular genres pretty quickly. I actually keep lists of them on my computer at work, depending on how many requests I receive. There are the Bully picture books. The Dinosaur picture books. The People in Our Community picture books. And then there are two genres that sometimes get split up and sometimes merge together. These would be the Invisible Friend picture books and the Starting School picture books. Now you’ll see a fair amount of bringing your blankie to school picture books out there (Owen being the best example). And you’ll see more than a few anxiety-ridden titles. Imaginary friends at school books are rarer, though you do see them occasionally (the Kevin Henkes title Jessica comes immediately to mind). Now with Dotty we’ve a title that takes two different ideas, combines them, and comes up with a way of showing that putting away childish things is a selective process.

On the first day of school Ida takes care to bring with her a new lunchbox, a pair of striped leggings, and her imaginary friend Dotty. Dotty resembles nothing so much as a benign combination of cow and toadstool. At school, Ida discovers that many of her classmates have similar companions. There are Max’s twin sea serpents, Benny’s razor-toothed R.O.U.S., and Katya’s doodle-brought-to-life Keekoo. As the school year progresses, however, Ida discovers that more and more of her schoolmates have stopped bringing their friends to class. By the time spring comes around Ida is on the receiving end of the now worldly Katya’s teasing and she reacts angrily. The two girls write “apology” notes, and then Ida has a discussion with her teacher Ms. Raymond. After promising that she’ll explain to Dotty that pushing people is inappropriate, Ida spots a red leash belonging to her teacher, not dissimilar at all from Dotty’s leash. It may well be that special friends are the kinds you keep with you always.

Essentially, in this book you’re looking at the changes a kid goes through in the course of a single year of school. With that in mind, Perl’s choices are pretty interesting. For example, Ida’s friend Katya begins the book with a tiny imaginary friend that swings on her braids. Later she gets a haircut and keeps the creature in her pocket secretly. That haircut sort of marks a rite of passage for Katya. The growing out of imaginary friends is shown in different ways. I would have liked some clarification on what grade Ida was in, of course. This seems to be her first day of school ever, which would mean that this is Kindergarten. Still, these kids look older than Kindergarteners, and the pseudo-apologetic notes written near the end are more 1st or 2nd grade material.

2 Comments on Review of the Day: Dotty by Erica S. Perl, last added: 10/9/2010