In the old days, children’s librarians were viewed as the gatekeepers of quality books for youth. That meant that they had to divide the wheat from the chaff. The good from the bad. The sterling from the meh. We still do that to a degree, though standards, like the times we are in, change. You see, there was a moment in history when one of the worst things you could call a children’s book was “novelty”. “Novelty” meant that a book was half a sneeze away from being a mere toy. “Novelty” meant that a book was going to appeal to a kid with fancy doodads and whizbangs, rather than with a good and coherent story. So Pat the Bunny was labeled a novelty and pop-up books were deemed novelties. You rarely saw them on library shelves. Time passed and the good side of novelty books, of those titles you can feel or beep or play with in some manner, has won out in the end. Though you’ll still find some of the weakest picture books soaked in glitter in an effort to appeal to the sparkle-eyed child consumer, when it comes to interactive books a lot of publishers have found a way to combine strong stories with great art. Fortune Cookies might be a good example of this. It has a pull-tab premise, but if you printed it as a regular picture book without a tab in sight it will still stand as a strong title on its own. If it is a novelty then that is only because it is novel in its own right.
One day a small girl received a box full of seven fortune cookies. Dutifully she opens one each day for a week. At first the fortunes are fairly straightforward. Readers can pull the little tabs containing the fortunes out of the cookies, like the first one “You will lose something you don’t need”. The next day the girl loses a tooth. When the next fortune reads “Money is like the wind” she uses her tooth fairy money to buy a kite. Fortunes and real life continue to weave back and forth with the girl losing her kite, finding a cat, losing the cat, making a wish, and ending up at the end with seven little kittens. She names each one after a day of the week, making this not only a book about fortunes and the ups and downs of an average child’s week, but also a handy tool for teaching the concept of Monday through Sunday.
A. (or Albert) Bitterman is the nom de plume of one Pete Cowdin, proprietor of the much lauded, much imitated, never excelled (or so I hear) Reading Reptile bookstore of Kansas City, Missouri. Now I’m a weird reviewer of children’s books. I like to read way more into them than was the author’s intent. And yes, I admit it, when I picked up this book one of my first thoughts aside from “I could really go for a cookie right now” (do you know they make flavored fortune cookies these days?) was “Oh good! A book about free will!” So let’s see how the text stands up to this gleeful reinterpretation. Here we have a girl sent a mysterious box of fortune cookies from “Uncle Albert” (a sly reference to Albert Bitterman himself). When she reads the fortunes they have a tendency to either come true or allude to a true situation that will occur. Rather than try to
It’s crazy the things we have to do to get our books noticed!
Funny – I chose the same book to review this morning – and I also thought that the white background was a plus. I enjoy Chris Raschka’s work (I loved Little Black Crow!) but I found that this was more accessible than his Caldecott winner, The Hello Goodbye Window. Altogether a fun book! I reviewed it with The Runaway Wok, also good fun.
Love Fortune Cookies and Reading Reptile!
I got to read Pete’s copy in the store. The illustrations are warm, the text is wise. I’ve been counting the days until I can buy my own copy.