Harry, the Dirty Dog by Gene Zion

May8

Zion, Gene. Harry the Dirty Dog. Illustrated by Margaret Bloy Graham. Harper, 1956.

Here’s another book that was first published in 1956, the year before I was born. And it’s remained in print all the years since then because it tells a classic story of a dog who doesn’t want a bath. (I remember some children who were much like Harry–bath-resistant.) Because Harry, a white dog with black spots, runs away when it’s bath time, he gets very dirty and turns into an unrecognizable black dog with white spots. And when his own family doesn’t recognize him, well, Harry begs for that bath that he so successfully avoided at the beginning of the story. I could read this story over and over and not get tired of it, which is why it’s one of the 520 books listed in Picture Book Preschool.

I have A Harry the Dirty Dog Treasury in my library with Harry the Dirty Dog and two more stories about Harry, No Roses for Harry and Harry by the Sea. In No Roses for Harry, Harry’s hated sweater from grandmother unravels, to his delight. And in Harry by the Sea, another Picture Book Preschool selection, Harry, covered in seaweed, is mistaken for a sea monster. Harry and the Lady Next Door is the fourth and last of the Harry books. All four Harry books, whether you read them in the treasury or individually, are warm and funny and just a delight that no preschooler should miss out on.

Illustrator Margaret Bloy Graham and author Gene Zion were a husband and wife team collaborating on the Harry books. And a fine team they were. Unfortunately, the couple divorced in 1968, and there were no more books about Harry, the dirty dog after that. Margaret Bloy Graham did, however write and illustrate at least one book of her own, Be Nice to Spiders, which is also a Picture Book Preschool selection in the week themed “Creepy Crawly Creatures.” Mr. Zion, on the other hand, quit writing after their 14-year long collaboration ended with the divorce.

I’m thankful they were together long enough to give us Harry, one of the great dogs of picture book literature. You can check out all of the Harry books by Gene Zion and Margaret Bloy Graham from Meriadoc Homeschool Library.

The Little Fish That Got Away by Bernadine Cook

May7

Cook, Bernadine. The Little Fish That Got Away. Illustrated by Crockett Johnson. William R. Scott, 1956.

This little book was published the year before I was born, in hardcover and then in a paperback edition from Scholastic. Then it went out of print at some point, and for a long time, the old Scholastic paperbacks were all that could be found. Then, HarperCollins published a new edition in 2005 and again in 2019, and now it’s readily available, new and used at reasonable prices for the used books.

If the cover reminds you of The Carrot Seed and Harold and the Purple Crayon, that’s because Crockett Johnson illustrated all three. Crockett Johnson was the pen name for author, cartoonist, and painter David Johnson Leisk. He was married to children’s author Ruth Krauss, who wrote The Carrot Seed and many other picture books. Johnson’s little round faced boys with the big eyes are iconic, easily recognizable in this book about a boy who goes fishing–and about the fish that he caught and the one that got away.

“Once upon a time there was a boy who liked to go fishing. . . He went fishing every day. But he never, no never, got any fish. All he ever did catch was a bad cold. But ONE day . . .”

The story goes on to tell about the boy’s adventures with a GREAT GREAT big fish, a GREAT big fish, a BIG fish, and finally a little fish. Can you guess which one got away?

The story is repetitive, which children love. Of course, it lends itself to being read aloud. I can get a little tired of repeating the same phrases over and over again for each of the boy’s attempts at catching a fish, but I haven’t met a child yet who gets tired of the repeating choruses. And the ending, which escapes the repetitive cycle, is funny every time.

The Little Fish That Got Away is a Picture Book Preschool selection. It can be seen as teaching tool for learning about relative sizes of things, but I wouldn’t suggest pointing that aspect out to little children. Let them enjoy the story and pick up on the “math” and measurements as they listen. Children absorb learning better if they are not force fed.

You can also check out The Little Fish That Got Away from Meriadoc Homeschool Library.

The ABC Bunny by Wanda Gag

May6

Wanda Gag, author of Millions of Cats and Gone Is Gone, or The Story of a Man Who Wanted To Do Housework, also wrote The ABC Bunny, in which the aforesaid bunnies crash and dash and meet up with all kinds of other alphabetically named forest creatures and events and objects– all the way from “A for Apple, big and red” to “Z for ZERO, Close the Book.” In this book, X, always a letter I check in alphabet books because it’s so hard find words that begin with X, is “for eXit–off, away,” with a picture of a rabbit rushing to hide in his burrow.

Really, though, I like the text in this book, but the pictures are so delightful that they could carry an entire wordless book by themselves. These illustrations of bunny rabbits doing everything that can be done by rabbits in a forest or a garden, are black and white lithographs, similar to those in Millions of Cats if you are familiar with that classic. However while the cats and the little old man and lady in Millions of Cats are exquisitely tiny and quaint, these rabbits and their fellow forest creatures are big and bold and full of dash and flash and dart. I just love them!

In the front of my book and again in the back there is music for you to sing the text as an ABC Song. I don’t sight read music, so I don’t know if the tune is catchy or not, but if you do, let me know what you think. The music was written by Wanda Gag’s younger sister, Flavia Gag. The words in the book were hand lettered by Wanda’s younger brother, Howard. And Wanda created The ABC Bunny for Gary, her small nephew. So it’s a family collaborative endeavor, shared with the world.

Alphabet books are kind of hit and miss with me. “A is for Apple, B is for Boy,” just doesn’t engage adults or young children unless there’s something added to the illustrations or the text itself to make the book more appealing and nourishing. The written story in this one is fine, well written enough to win Ms. Gag a Newbery Honor for her work in The ABC Bunny in 1934. However, I think it would have garnered a Caldecott Honor or Award, had the Caldecott been around in 1934. As far as I’m concerned, in The ABC Bunny the “eXtra” is in the pictures (and maybe the song.) Wanda Gag’s artistry was enough to make this one a Picture Book Preschool selection, one of the ten ABC books included in Picture Book Preschool.

You can check out a copy of ABC Bunny from Meriadoc Homeschool Library. Or you can purchase your own copy, brand new, since this 1933 book is actually in print from University of Minnesota Press.

Learn more about this and other living books at Biblioguides.

And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street by Dr. Seuss

May5

Theodore Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, was born in 1904 in Springfield, MA. His first book was To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, and it was rejected by 27 publishers before being published by Vanguard Press in 1937. Dr. Seuss wrote 46 children’s books, and although Mulberry Street wasn’t his best-selling book, it was enduring in its popularity.

In this children’s classic picture book, Marco’s father wants him to “keep your eyelids up and see what you can see,” but also admonishes young Marco to “Stop telling such outlandish tales” about what he does see on his way to school. So Marco is caught between a rock and a hard place. He can’t tell his dad that the only thing he saw was a horse and a wagon on Mulberry Street. So he embellishes just a little, and then a lot!

The horse and wagon turn into a mob, a circus, complete with a brass band, a blue elephant, some even stranger beasts, and people from all over the world. There was some controversy about this book a few years ago, and the Seuss estate pulled the book out of print. Which of course, made the price for used copies of story go sky-high. Most of the controversy had to do with this picture of a “Chinese boy” (originally called a “Chinaman”). You can decide for yourself if you think the picture is offensive or not.

At any rate, when it was first published, the New York Times gave it a good review, and the famous and somewhat dictatorial arbiter of children’s literature at the time, librarian Anne Carroll Moore of the New York Public Library, said it was “as original in conception, as spontaneous in the rendering as it is true to the imagination of a small boy.” She then sent a copy to her friend Beatrix Potter, who wrote, “What an amusing picture book … I think it the cleverest book I have met with for many years.” I’m in agreement with The New York Times (1937), Miss Moore, and Ms. Potter, which is why To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street is a Picture Book Preschool selection.

To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street is a journey of the imagination, encouraging kids to enjoy all the wonder that their little minds can conjure, while eventually returning to earth with the sober truth. Marco finally tells his father what he really did see on Mulberry Street, or does he? Perhaps imagination is just as real as Reality, just in a different way.

A Chair for My Mother by Vera B. Williams

May4

Vera B. Williams was an American illustrator and author who wrote several popular picture books for children. The two that I’m most familiar with are A Chair for My Mother, which won a Caldecott Honor, and Three Days on a River in a Red Canoe, the story journal of a mother-daughter-aunt canoe trip. A Chair for My Mother is a beautiful homely story about a girl whose family experiences a fire in their apartment. No one is hurt, but all of their possessions are destroyed in the fire. Their community and family come together to give them things to help them start again, but the one thing they don’t have is a soft, comfortable chair for the girl’s mother to relax in after a hard day of work at the diner. So the family begins to save up their money in a big jar to buy a chair for mother (and grandmother who lives with them). It’s such a good book about a working class family and about how families work together to manage their money and save for something important. I feel as if the book teaches gratitude and delayed gratification and teamwork and so much more, but in a story, not a sermon.

A Chair for My Mother would be a lovely book to read for a Mother’s Day story time, and it’s one of the books in the (May) Mothers week for Picture Book Preschool. But really this book would be appropriate for anytime of year. The chair the family end up buying is bright and colorful, and the family in the book is endearing and sweet. A multi-generational family story like this one is good for reading together anytime.

Ms. Williams’ bio sounds as if she led a colorful life: she helped start a “community” (sounds like a commune) in the hills of North Carolina and a school based on the Summerhill model. Then she moved to Canada and lived on a houseboat for a while, where she illustrated her first book. Oh, and she spent a month in the federal penitentiary in West Virginia after a “peaceful blockade of the Pentagon.” 

“I don’t make a point of ending up in jail. But if you try to put your hopes and beliefs for a better life into effect, arrest is sometimes a hazard. As a person who works for children, who raised three children . . . I have to be able to say I did something to try to save our planet from destruction.”

It sounds as if our politics would differ, but I do appreciate Ms. Williams’ books.

The Bicycle Man by Allen Say

May3

Say, Allen. The Bicycle Man. Parnassus Press, 1982.

Allen Say is a Japanese-American author, born in Yokohama, Japan. Say came to the U.S. just after WWII with his father. His father enrolled him in a military school in California, and Say hated the school and the United States. He was expelled from military school after a year, enabling him to explore California on his own. He began to write and illustrate children’s books while doing advertising photography for a living.

I suppose that even after having been expelled from military school, Mr. Say still had some respect for the American military and its soldiers and an appreciation for his adopted country and its new relationship with Japan and the Japanese. His book The Bicycle Man is set in Japan immediately after World War II. In the story, two American soldiers visit a Japanese schoolyard on “sportsday” and show the children tricks on a bicycle. Actually, while one of the two soldiers is a red-headed white guy, the one who does the bicycle tricks is a black soldier. It’s a story of international and even interracial healing and understanding after World War II, an event that tore the world apart in many ways and places.

The school in The Bicycle Man looks a lot like the school that Allen Say describes from his childhood.

“When I was a small boy I went to a school in the south island of Japan. The schoolhouse stood halfway up a tall green mountain. It was made of wood and the wood was gray with age. When a strong wind blew, the trees made the sound of waves and the building creaked like an old sailing ship. From the playground, we could see the town, the ships in the harbor, the shining sea.”

Allen Say wrote this autobiographical story from his memory of that school and of a special sports day in which the American occupiers and the children and educators of a small Japanese school came together to enjoy an innocent performance of bicycle tricks. And Say’s illustrations take the reader back to that time and place and show off the budding friendship that began to take place between the U.S. and Japan despite the terrible memories of war and destruction.

Say also won a Caldecott Award for his book Grandfather’s Journey about his own grandfather’s immigration to the United States.

The Big Green Pocketbook by Candice Ransom

May2

Ransom, Candice. The Big Green Pocketbook. Illustrated by Felicia Bond. A Laura Geringer Book/HarperCollins, 1993.

First of all, does anyone really call a purse a “pocketbook”? And what’s more, in the cataloging information, one of the subject headings for this book is HANDBAGS–FICTION. Does anyone call a purse a “handbag” these days? Maybe, I might say “I left my bag in the restroom,” but handbag? Pocketbook? Maybe it’s regional. Or perhaps the author just wanted kids to learn a new word. Pocketbook. It is a rather important sounding word.

So, The Big Green Pocketbook is the story of a little girl whose big green pocketbook is empty. She can’t think of anything to put in it at home, but when the girl and her mother go to town on the bus, she collects many items to store in her big green pocketbook: a bus ticket, a lollipop, a keychain, a sample calendar, some crayons, and more. Now her pocketbook is full of treasures. The author describes each place that the mother and the little girl visit during the course of their morning errands with simple, but evocative text. However, as the girl and her mother arrive home after a long morning in the city, the story takes a critical turn. Nevertheless, all ends well with some help from a friendly bus driver.

Felicia Bond, who also did the illustrations for If You Give a Mouse a Cookie and its many sequels, does a lovely job of showing the little girl and her mother and the big green pocketbook that the little girl fills with treasures from her morning in the city. Just looking through the cheerful and colorful pictures in this book can tell the story, and nonreaders will enjoy being reminded of the story, just by perusing the pages on their own, after having it read aloud once or twice.

A Pocket for Corduroy by Don Freeman and Katy No-Pocket by Emmy Payne would be good followup reads for this one. And you might want to have an old pocket or pocketbook or purse, or even a handbag, to give your preschooler after the reading, so that she–or he–can collect treasures in her very own Big [Color] Pocketbook.

The Big Green Pocketbook by Candice Ransom is a Picture Book Preschool selection, and it can be checked out as a part of the PBP Farms and Cities Picture Book Treasure Box from Meriadoc Homeschool Library.

Biblioguides: The Big Green Pocketbook by Candice Ransom.

The Adventures of Taxi Dog by Debra and Sal Barracca

May1

Barracca, Debra and Sal. The Adventures of Taxi Dog. Illustrated by Mark Buehner. Dial Books for Young Readers, 1990.

My name is Maxi
   I ride in a taxi
      Around New York City all day.
I sit next to Jim
   (I belong to him)
      But it wasn't always this way.


Maxi is a homeless dog in the Big Apple until one day he meets Jim, a taxi driver. Jim takes Maxi home and feeds him and ties a red scarf around Maxi’s neck. Then Maxi gets to ride in Jim’s taxicab every day and “see all the sights . . . uptown and down.” Maxi and Jim pick up and transport all sorts of interesting fares: a businessman, an opera singer, a pregnant lady about to give birth, two clowns, and even a chimpanzee. And Maxi sometimes provides a bit of entertainment for the passengers as they ride through NYC to their destinations.

“The art for this book was prepared by using oil paints over acrylics. It was then camera-separated and reproduced in red, yellow, blue, and black.” I don’t know exactly what that process looks like, but the result is colorful, crowded montage of city life with black and yellow taxicab frames around many of the pages that contain only text. The illustrations fill the other pages with Maxi mostly at the center of each picture.

Children will love the rhyming text and the dog’s-eye view of New York City, which is why this Reading Rainbow book made the grade to be added to the Expanded Edition of Picture Book Preschool. The author blurb in the back of the book says that Debra and Sal Barracca were inspired to write The Adventures of Taxi Dog after riding in a taxi whose owner kept his dog with him in the front seat. I wonder if that taxi driver knows that he and his dog inspired a beautiful and vibrant picture book.

I just found out, by way of another private lending librarian, that there are at Least three more books by the Barraccas about Maxi the Taxi Dog:

  • Maxi the Hero
  • Maxi the Star
  • A Taxi Dog Christmas

If you want to donate one of these other Maxi books to the library, I won’t turn it down. I’m quite fond of dogs–in books.

You can check out The Adventures of Taxi Dog along with other books listed in Picture Book Preschool under the themes of Farms and Cities as a part of the PBP Farms and Cities Picture Book Treasure Box from Meriadoc Homeschool Library.

Valley of Dragons by Christina Baehr

Apr24

The series, The Secrets of Ormdale by Christina Baehr:

  • Wormwood Abbey, Book #1
  • Drake Hall, Book #2
  • Castle of the Winds, Book #3
  • City of Serpents, Book #4
  • Valley of Dragons, Book #5

I already reviewed the first book in this series, and now that I’ve finished all five books in The Secrets of Ormdale saga, I’m going to give you my thoughts on the entire series, rather than review each book individually. My immediate reaction is: excellent fantasy and romance fiction! Set in Victorian London and Yorkshire, these books are appropriately Victorian, with a nod to “new ideas” (at the time) such as women’s suffrage and equality of the sexes and classes. Each book tells a separate contained story, and yet each one leads on to the next. The themes and characters are obviously influenced by Christian and Charlotte Mason ideas and principles, but with a light touch, not at all didactic. There is some exploration of the status and plight of Jewish people in England during the time period when many Ashkenazi Jews were fleeing Eastern Europe to come to British shores. And the central character and narrator, Edith Worms, is a part of a delightful and deeply Christian family who live their commitment to Christ and his teachings rather than grounding their Christianity in Victorian cultural morality.

So, that’s the overview. As for Book #5 in the series, Valley of Dragons, it is much longer than the other four books in the series, clocking in at 499 pages. But the author needed all of those pages to finish her story. As the story commences in Book #5, there are yet many secrets to be revealed, prisoners to be released, enemies to be defeated, and dragons to be tamed.

About those dragons, these stories do feature reptiles, many kinds of serpents, salamanders, cockatrices, basilisks, sea monsters, wyverns, and lizards–even a Quetzalcoatl–all collectively termed as dragons in this alternate world. Indeed, Britain harbors at least four families of dragon keepers who have kept their many species of dragons safe and secret for centuries.

Some literary experts insist that dragons and serpents must always only be shown in literature as “bad guys”, archetypal monsters and symbols of satanic influence, like the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Anyone who writes about a “good dragon” or a dragon ally or pet is inverting the symbols and distorting the fundamental meaning of the literary tradition, and maybe even Scripture itself. However, Edith Worms and her father, a clergyman, and I beg to differ:

“‘You said once that the church had been a comfort to you when you were young, Father, because it mentioned dragons. But aren’t they always a symbol of evil in the scriptures?’

‘A symbol, yes. To say evil is like a dragon is to say evil is deadly and long-lived. . . . But not all of the dragons in the scriptures are evil. What of Job’s leviathan? You will not find a passage more full of wonder than that. Everything was good when it was created. . . .’

‘When I look at the dragons, I see something beautiful–something worth protecting,” I said. . . . “But the people of Dale, they see something fearful. Something only an archangel can save them from.’

‘God made both people and dragons, my dear. What we must find is a way for us to live together peacefully–as He intended. . . ,’ Father said encouragingly.”

Dragons can certainly signify evil and danger and monstrosity with in the literary tradition, but they can also simply stand for power and peril and wonder within that same tradition. Stories are not bound by such petty rules of literary nitpicking. Nor is Scripture. The serpent on a pole that Mose was instructed to elevate before the Israelites in the wilderness was a symbol and vehicle of healing (Numbers 21:4-9). The dragons in The Secrets of Ormdale are certainly dangerous, like lions and tigers are dangerous, but they are subject to men (and women) to whom God gave the job of tending His creation, including all kinds of reptiles, even dragons.

Dragons aside for the moment, these books are all about secrets, especially family secrets, and how they can destroy relationships and even block love itself. The books do involve romance as Edith learns to “open her heart” and accept the pain and loss that loving someone can entail. The romantic scenes themselves are completely chaste, with only a few kisses described, but there are allusions to the perversion of sexual attraction as one character recalls being sexually assaulted and another is kidnapped and almost forced into an unwilling marriage.

I thought these books with their emphasis on freedom and openness and the free choices of responsible men and women to care for each other in mutual, self-sacrificial and loving relationship were a perfect antidote to the typical Gothic romance with its brooding atmosphere of secrets and seduction. In The Secrets of Ormdale, all secrets are eventually brought out into the open, and the happily-ever-after is built on a firm foundation of mutual respect and truth.

The entire series, The Secrets of Ormdale, is available for check out from Meriadoc Homeschool Library for adults and young adult who are prepared for romantic themes, practical young heroines, and of course, beautiful and perilous dragons.

Will’s Race for Home by Jewell Parker Rhodes

Apr22

Rhodes, Jewell Parker. Will’s Race for Home: A Western. Illustrated by Olga and Aleksey Ivanov. Little, Brown and Company, 2025.

This middle grade novel is indeed a western, but a bit different from most books in the genre. Set in 1889 before and during the Oklahoma Land Rush, the story features twelve year old Will, and his family who are Black sharecroppers on a farm in Texas. Will’s father is a taciturn man, formerly enslaved, and tired of working on another man’s land. Will doesn’t understand his father, and doesn’t believe his father cares much for him. Then life changes when Father hears about free land available in Oklahoma for those who rush in to claim it. He is anxious to travel to the border to try to be one of the few who benefit from the opportunity.

Father needs someone to go with him, someone he can count on when the journey becomes difficult. So since Will can read and since there’s no one else, Will becomes his father’s trusted companion on the long way to Oklahoma and the land rush. The book also chronicles Will’s internal journey toward becoming what his father calls “tough”, becoming a man.

At first, I didn’t particularly like the prose style the book was written in: lots of short choppy sentences, with phrases interspersed between the sentences. “Sometimes Grandpa lets me try shooting a rabbit. Not often. I’m a bad shot.” “Father and Grandpa study the map. Marking, re-marking the trail. Praying for ten miles a day.” But as I read I began to appreciate the spare, straightforward prose as a reflection of the character of Will’s father in particular, and of the other western men they meet along the way. These are men who work hard and don’t always have much to say, but when they do speak, it’s important enough to require listening. The kind of man Will eventually will become, too.

So, it’s a coming of age story, a western, and a boy’s tale. In her afterword, Ms. Rhodes writes,

“Tales of African Americans on the western frontier are few. But having spent most of my life in the West and as a historical fiction writer, I felt compelled to explore the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889. . . Will’s Race for Home is only one story, exploring a fictional African American family experiencing tragedy and triumph in their quest for freedom and a home in a ‘promised land.’ Will, the son of formerly enslaved people, is my hero. He has resilience, courage and loyalty.”

Many boys , and even some girls, would enjoy this story becoming a man at the turn of the century in the Wild West. There is some extended, and I think balanced, discussion, in short bursts, of guns and violence and when to use a gun and when to threaten violence in self-defense. And the ideas about the use of guns and violence are put to the test when Will must defend his family’s land claim from claim-jumping thieves.

I haven’t read too many middle grade fiction books from 2025 yet to compare, but this one is a favorite so far. Will is my hero, too. And with the tie-in to history and the Oklahoma Land Rush, I may very well put this novel on my wish list for Meriadoc Homeschool LIbrary’s collection.