To be fair, children’s literature has grown Lip a lot since Sandburg’s time. Books now address issues (racism, the environment’) unheard of just a few years ago. A lot of the efforts are ham-handed, but quite a few are extraordinarily sophisticated. If you want a point of comparison, check out More Rootabagas (Knopf. $18). a collection of posthumously published Sandburg tales which today read like case studies in willed whimsy. Then read Grandfather’s Journey by Allen Say (Houghton Mifflin. $16.95 the story of Say’s Japanese grandfatber’s immigration to America. It can’t help getting the multicultural seal of approval, but this wonderfully illustrated book never preaches, never condescends, and it has what its competition so painfully lacks: a strong narrative. In a few hundred well-chosen words. Say describes how his grandfather spent his whole life torn between his love for his homeland and his love for his adopted country. It is a book about cultural identity and homesickness, but it offers no easy answers, preferring instead to explore the mysteries of mixed emotions. And it is told with such enchanting simplicity that even a small child can comprehend it.
Similarly, The Boy Who Lived With the Seals, by Rafe Martin and David Shannon (Putnam. $14.95), starts off on the multicultural bandwagon (it’s a retelling of a Chinook Indian folk tale) and then heads off in a wholly unexpected direction: the boy, rescued by his parents from his watery life with the seals, goes back to the seals. It’s an unsettling but satisfying conclusion, just how a good story ought to end. Likewise, This Land Is My Land by George Littlechild (Children’s Book Press. $15.95), a Cree Indian, tells a story in paintings and collages and words that let you know you are listening to an individual, not a type: “I have a fear of mountains. I’m scared of closed-in spaces like those spaces in between the mountains, because I grew up on the plains where it’s flat.”
And The Last Giants, by Francois Place (Godine. $15.95), is further proof that you can keep your heart in the right place without lecturing. The fictional account of a 19th-century naturalist whose hubristic discovery of a race of giants leads to their destruction, the book is a caution against scientific arrogance. It is also a wonderfully haunting tale that can be read for the sheer thrill of its adventure–and its exquisite pen and watercolor illustrations.
Increasingly, the quality of illustration outstrips the quality of writing in children’s books, so it’s reassuring to come upon books where the balance is more or less equal. William Joyce’s Santa Calls (HarperCollins. $18) welds vigorous art to solid storytelling. Journeys to the North Pole notoriously trip over a host of cliches, but Joyce avoids most of them by remembering that the best part of childhood is conducted behind the grown-ups’ backs. His pint-size heroes make their outing appropriately unsupervised and unsanctioned. This version of Toyland tips its hat to Oz and to Nemo’s Slumberland, but with redoubtable young Art Atchinson Aimesworth (inventor, adventurer and fighter of crime), his sister, Esther, and his sidekick, Spaulding, Joyce makes this a journey both classic and new. Plainly he, too, is on the side of Sandburg’s “anarchs,” and this paean to pluck would surely win the late poet’s approval.
Even more rambunctious is Timothy Bush’s stunning debut, James in the House of Aunt Prudence (Crown. $13), in which a young boy visits his aunt’s house and discovers a live bear (friendly) and a host of other (not friendly) beasts, including monkeys, mice, bats and an octopus. Drawing or writing, Bush’s pen is loaded with wit.
Wild Fox (Down East Books. $15.95) recounts author Cherie Mason’s tetchy friendship with a crippled fox near her Maine home, and Jo Ellen McAllister Stammen’s colored-pencil illustrations are a perfect complement to the author’s laconic, evocative style. In a more traditional vein, the pastel master Gary Kelley continues to explore the works of Washington Irving with Rip Van Winkle (Creative Editions. $21.95), while the superb Soviet emigre artist Gennady Spirin has illuminated Nikolai Gogol’s The Nose (Godine. $17.95) and Gulliver’s Adventures in Lilliput (Philomel. $15.95), with Jonathan Swift’s tale adapted by Ann Keay Beneduce. Spirin’s detailed art is such a lush visual feast that you don’t know whether to look at it or eat it with a spoon. In verse, the poet Jack Prelutsky is in a class by himself but Peter Sis’s loony art is every bit the match for Prelutsky’s rhymes in The Dragons Are Singing Tonight (Greenwillow. $15), a winsome tribute to the fiery reptiles (“I made a mechanical dragon/Of bottle tops, hinges and strings,/Of thrown away clocks and unmendable socks,/Of hangers and worn innersprings”).
The one case where words matter least is picture books for small fry, and this year’s entries are as strong as ever. Beginning readers can have a field day unriddling the puns and puzzles hidden in the text of The Worthy Wonders Lost at Sea by Jody Linscott and collagist Claudia Porges Holland (Doubleday. 815). Christopher Wormell’s A Number of Animals (Creative Editions. $19.95) is by far the year’s best counting book. Kate Green’s text describes a chick looking for its mother, but it’s Wormell’s striking block prints that make the book. Counting to 10 has never looked more beautiful. And in Noah’s Ark (Candlewick. $14.95), Lucy Cousins once again proves her knack for childlike art that never gets too cute in her retelling of the Biblical tale.
In the See How They Grow series (Dorling Kindersley. $7.95 each), the stages of life of a herd of animals (from puppies to penguins,) are articulated in elegantly simple photographs and uncluttered text. Here again, as in all their graphically beguiling books, the folks at Dorling Kindersley have almost singlehandedly rejuvenated if not reinvented the often moribund world of nonfiction books for children. Suddenly the field is full of engaging, informative works. In One Small Square: Backyard and One Small Square: Seashore (Freeman. $14.95 each), Donald Silver and illustrator Patricia Wynne encourage budding naturalists to explore and catalog a small patch of familiar earth, from soil to bugs to birds. Carol Carrick’s Whaling Days (Clarion. $15.95), with vivid woodcuts from David Frampton, recounts the glory days of a now dishonored industry. But while Carrick freely admits her objections to modern whaling practices, she does not let her opinions cloud her research. This is balanced, exciting history.
The subtitle of Lives of the Musicians (Harcourt Brace. $18.95) best conveys the flavor of this absorbing if irreverent work: “Good Times, Bad Times (And What the Neighbors Thought).” Briefly retelling the lives of composers and musicians from Bach to Woody Guthrie, author Kathleen Krull, abetted by illustrator Kathryn Hewitt, unstuffs a host of shirts and delivers wonderful musical trivia. Did you know that Arthur Sullivan, of Gilbert and Sullivan, wrote the hymn “Onward Christian Soldiers”?
As children’s literature has grown up over the last few decades, and ducklings have made way for stronger stuff, so, too, has a generation of children’s book authors come of age. Raised on postwar kids’ books, the baby boomers are recycling their own pasts–or at least the typefaces and graphics. Their books are characterized by a deadpan Dick & Jane simplicity that’s been fussed over and revved up. Lane Smith, half of the team that produced the phenomesuccessful “Stinky Cheese Man,” is a master of this ironic style, and kids, for whatever reason, lap it up. He’s up to his usual tricks with The Happy Hocky Family! (Viking. $13.99). A series of droll situations, the book plays off the condescending “see Spot run” diction of ’50s books, with hilarious results: “I like to study nature. I have an an farm. These ants are my responsibility.”
And Smith is running with quite a pack. Postmodernist irony is everywhere in children’s literature. Mr. Lunch Takes a Plane Ride, by J. Otto Siebold and Vivian Walsh (Viking. $14.99), is stupid pet tricks from the performer’s point of view. Chris Van Allsburg’s The Sweetest Fig (Houghton Mifflin. $17.95) is, as ever with Van Allsburg, surreal, but these illustrations are among his best, and the story is a dandy. It features a greedy, self-centered Parisian dentist, Monsieur Bibot, who is given some magic figs that will make his dreams come true. The hardhearted Bibot remains skeptical until one morning when he winds up in his underwear on the street while the Eiffel Tower droops over limply. (Go sit on Grandfather Freud’s knee and he’ll explain.) Maira Kalman, temporarily abandoning (one hopes) her serial chronicle of Max the Dog, delivers Chicken Soup, Boots (Viking. $15), a book nominally about jobs and professions but really a collection of wacky tales about colorful characters, such as Mr. Romeo Valentine, a barber who “can give you a gattop in 12 minutes flat,” and the astronomer Dr. Venezuela Katz, who “is hoping to hear ‘Hello, how are you, did you order a pizza?’ from people living far out in the Milky Way Galaxy.” Kalman can be so hip it hurts, but she tells such good stories that you can’t stay mad at her.
Speaking of staying mad, Patty Jane Pepper has decided to stay in her room for the rest of her life. The heroine of Now Everybody Really Hates Me by Jane Read Martin and Patricia Marx with illustrations by Roz Chast (HarperCollins. $14), Patty Jane has been sent to her room for hitting her little brother on the head and calling him a dumbbell at his birthday party. She vigorously denies the charge. “I did not hit Theodore. I touched him hard.” And anyway she’s never coming out. Ever. “Unless we are having something good to eat tonight. If it’s good it will be my last meal.” This book contains no meaning, no morals, no messages. It merely captures in every poor-poor-pitiful-me detail the way children stew when they are aggrieved. But that, when you think about it, is quite a feat.
As many children’s books take on more mature subjects, the best of the writers and illustrators (Martin and Marx, Kalman, Joyce) are frequently taking childhood itself as their subject. They tackle the territory unsentimentally, with humor and a keen sense of the way kids really are. So in that spirit, what could be better to end with than Sean Kelly and Ron Hauge’s Boom BabyMoon (Dell. $7.99), a fond, right-on-target parody of Margaret Wise Brown’s classic “Goodnight Moon”? Instead of bears in chairs and a red balloon, this book bids good night to things might actually find in eries these days: “Goodnight machine that makes white noise/And motor skill-improving toys/Good-night contour-cornered, neat/Hypoallergenic sheet…Goodnight orthodontic spoon/And hardcover copy of Goodnight Moon’.”
