Archive by Author | Sherry

Happy Birthday to Charlotte Zolotow

Charlotte Zolotow was born Charlotte Gertrude Shapiro on this date in 1915 in Norfolk, Virginia. Because her books have been so beautifully meaningful to me and so treasured by my children, I included ten of her more than seventy books in my preschool read aloud curriculum, Picture Book Preschool. (Only two other authors, Peter Spier and Gail Gibbons, have that many books on the Picture Book Preschool reading list.)

Big Sister and Little Sister. I love this story of how a little sister hides from her slightly overbearing big sister, but repents when she hears Big Sister crying. It’s the classic sister story.

I Like To Be Little. Originally titled I Want to Be Little, a child rejoices in the things she can do and enjoy because she’s still small.

Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present. This book won a Caldecott Honor for Maurice Sendak’s watercolor illustrations, but I love it for the story. According to Ms. Zolotow, Mr. Rabbit is inspired by Harvey, the six foot tall friend of Elwood P. Dowd. But Mr. Rabbit is so wonderfully helpful and at the same time a bit dense as he suggests the same sorts of impractical presents over and over.

Over and Over. A little girl experiences the year as a series of holidays and events and then learns that everything will happen over and over every year. “She remembered a snowman and a pumpkin, a Christmas tree and a birthday cake, a Thanksgiving dinner, and valentines. But they were all mixed up in her mind.”

Sleepy Book. The perfect bedtime story about how pigeons and bears and kittens and fish and finally children go to sleep, the children “warm under their blankets in their beds.”

Something Is Going to Happen. Unfortunately out of print, this book describes how a family wakes up with the feeling that “something is going to happen,” and they discover that it has snowed in the night.

The Storm Book. In this one, Ms. Zolotow writes about an impending summer storm instead of a snowfall, but the sense that something exciting is going to happen is palpable in this book as the children play outside and then watch the storm come and go.

Summer Is. A seasonal concept book that takes the reader through all four seasons with a poetic text full of tangible, memorable seasonal details. Also out of print, darn it.

The Summer Night.

William’s Doll. Here’s the story of how Willliam’s Doll came to be, and although it was somewhat controversial back in the 1970’s when it was published, William’s Doll has become a beloved picture book portrayal of how all children need to learn to nurture as well as build and throw a ball. In talking about WIlliam’s Doll, Ms. Zolotow says that she’s a feminist, but that the book wasn’t written to bolster feminist ideology. Well, I’m not a feminist, but I think William’s Doll is a fine story for boys and girls who want to play with the toys that give them joy whether they’re “boy toys” or “girl toys”.

Now it’s your turn. Please leave a link to your post celebrating Charlotte Zolotow’s birthday, her work, her influence as an editor, or anything else Zolotow-related. Ms. Zolotow’s daughter, author Crescent Dragonwagon has promised to stop by and read the posts to Ms. Zolotow who is vision-impaired, but still living in her home.

Crescent Dragonwagon: me & my semi-famous aging mother: navigating love with fierce persistence

The next Semicolon Author Celebration will be July 10th, a celebration of the life and work of John Calvin, an author of a very different stripe from Charlotte Zolotow. However, if you’re a fan of Mr. Calvin, a Calvinist, or a semi-Calvinist, think about writing something to link on that date.

Tennyson by Lesley M.M. Blume

Jun25

Strange things had happened at Innisfree before. In fact, strange was usually normal at Innisfree. But what had happened the night before was a new sort of strange. A frightening, unsettling sort of strange, the sort of strange that nags at you when you try not to think about it, flickers behind your eyelids when you try to go to bed at night and won’t let the sleep come.

Sadie hadn’t come home.”

The setting is the backwoods of Mississippi during the Great Depression, and Sadie is the wannabe poet and writer mother of our heroine, Tennyson. She disappears during a game of hide-and-seek, at dusk, when Tennyson, her little sister Hattie, and their father Emery come home but Sadie doesn’t. Emery is so besotted with his Sadie that he goes to look for her and leaves the girls at his childhood home, a decaying hulk of a Louisiana plantation home called Aigredoux. There the two girls make the acquaintance of their long estranged family members:

Aunt Henrietta Fontaine, a faded Southern matriarch who writes dozens of letters on thin blue paper to the U.S. government each week, asking them to return her family’s fortune, lost in the Civil War, so that Aigredoux can be restored to its former glory.

Uncle Twigs, the President of the Louisiana Society for the Strict Enforcement of the Proper Use of the English Language.

Zulma, the black servant, cook, and confidante, descendant of slaves, who stays at Aigredoux because “there’s more of my family’s bones buried out back than there are Fontaine bones. Aigredoux belongs just as much to me as it does to you–more so, maybe.”

While reading this hauntingly strange Southern novel, I felt as if Blume were channeling Faulkner—for children. Then again, I’ve never actually read Faulkner, so how would I know? The atmosphere of faded and rotting gentility built on a foundation of slavery and brutality was so strong and was just what I would imagine would be found in Faulkner’s novels. Aigredoux “pushed its way into Tennyson’s dreams and made her see funerals and spiders.”

I must say that I liked this novel, but I’m not sure children or even most teens would “get it.” It’s not very realistic, but then I’m not sure it’s meant to be. (SPOILERS) Tennyson dreams things that actually happened. Then, she writes stories that are accepted by a New York magazine and published to universal acclaim. No explanation is given for these events. No ghosts. No clairvoyance. No magic. No precocious genius. Zulma does call Tennyson a “voodoo girl.”

Still, there was certain something about the story that has me still thinking about it days after reading it. Tennyson might be for the poet and the dreamer and the quirky, individualistic wild child in all of us.

Other reviews:

The Reading Zone: In many ways, Tennyson reminded me of Natalie Babbittâ€™s Tuck Everlasting. Both books treat children as intelligent human beings by handling realistic situations and stories. Yet they both embrace the magical realism that is all too often missing in childrenâ€™s fiction.

Semicolon Author Celebrations

Jun23

I just had a wonderful brainstorm of an idea. (I don’t get those too often, so I must take advantage.)

I’ve been posting on Semicolon about authors and their birthdays almost since the blog began back in 2004. I enjoy learning about new-to-me authors and celebrating favorite authors on their birthdays.

So, I thought why not have blogosphere-wide celebration for certain of my favorite authors on their birthdays? I pick an author with an upcoming birthday, let folks know about the celebration, and if you enjoy that author too, you can post about his/her books: reviews, the time you met Author X, or whatever is related to that particular author, maybe a list of read-alikes for other adoring fans.

I checked my author birthday book, and the first Semicolon Author Birthday Celebration will be held on June 26th, this Thursday for:

Charlotte Zolotow

Ms. Zolotow, if you’re unfamiliar with her work, is the author of many, many beloved and classic picture books, more than seventy according to her website. She also worked as an editor for Harper Collins Publishers, editing books with such authors as Paul Fleischman, Judith Viorst, Laurence Yep, Patricia MacLachlan, Karla Kuskin, and many others.

I’l get back to you about my favorite Charlotte Zolotow books on Thursday. In the meantime, if you are a lover of Ms. Zolotow’s work, please plan to write a post in honor of her birthday, and come back and link here on Thursday so that we can celebrate together. (You can re-post something you’ve written in the past if you’d like.) If you’re just hearing about Charlotte Zolotow in this post, check out some of her books and let us know what your impressions are. And in the meantime, please spread the word.

Other upcoming celebrations (all on Thursdays so that we can remember):
July 10: John Calvin, b. 1509.

July 17: Isaac Watts, b.1674.

July 24: Alexandre Dumas, pere, b.1802.

August 7: Betsy Byars, b.1928.

August 28: Tasha Tudor, b.1915, d.2008.

Keeping It Simple

Jun23

I found this You-Tube video at the blog Mommy Life and had to share it:

What’s your cardboard testimony?
Mine: I thought I had it all together/
I learned that God is not a tame lion, but He is faithful.

Chasing Normal by Lisa Papademetriou

Jun23

Page 3: The twelve year old narrator of this story, Mieka, finds out that her grandmother, the paternal one that she’s never met, is sick, and she and her father are going to Houston for a three week visit.

Immediately, my radar kicked in. I live in Houston. I hate movies and books about Houston and about Texas in which it’s obvious that the author or director never set foot in the state or didn’t pay much attention when she did. I turned to back of the book and read that the author lives with her husband in Massachusetts. Bad sign. So, the first thing I’m looking at as I read is whether or not Ms. Papademetriou got Houston right:

Check one, Houston IS hot, and walking outside in the summer does feel like getting “smacked in the face by a solid mass of heat.”

Check two, the teenage girls do wear flip-flops and tankinis, and lots of people have a swimming pool in the backyard.

Check three, Camp Franklin sounds just like an Episcopalian day camp would be with Bible stories and skits and art projects and team-building challenges and singing repetitive choruses.

Check four, Houston does have huge cockroaches that actually fly short distances, and it is disgusting.

Check five, the place names are right, The Galleria, River Oaks.

Check six, people in Houston do deal with the heat “mostly by never going outside.” And “everything is drive-through.”

So, I was so worried about whether or not the author would get Houston right, and then when the cousins in the story ended up in the church day camp, whether or not the author would get church right, that I almost missed the story. The story was about being real and kind at the same time, and of course all of the Texans in the story were rich, hypocritical, and materialistic. I say “of course” because in addition to being concerned about how Texas is portrayed in fiction, I’m also a bit defensive about how Texans come across in fiction, too. I have a theory that the bragging that we Texans are famous for is really an inferiority complex that we have as a result of so much misunderstanding and bad press directed at us from the East Coast and the West Coast. Not all Texans are rich. Most of us can’t afford to shop at the Galleria. And we’re no more fake and materialistic than the rest of the country. (Although people who live in River Oaks might be a little on the rich, spoiled, shopaholic side. 🙂

We all come to stories with our own preconceptions, prejudices, and defense mechanisms. I’ll have to admit that I got so lost in mine that I’m not sure how good or not this children’s fiction novel is. I thought it had some good moments, such as when Mieka makes a special bowl in art class at the day camp. But it all felt a little too predictable to me. Spoilers here if you haven’t read the book, but I knew that Mieka’s cousin Greta would turn out to be O.K. underneath all the fake perfection. And I knew Mieka’s dad wouldn’t take the job in Houston and betray his artistic calling. And I knew cousin Mark wasn’t really a genius.

Nice try, but it really didn’t stand up to the Houston heat as far as I’m concerned. Let me know if you read it and review it and like it better.

The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G.K. Chesterton

Jun21

Weird. Nightmare-ish. Imaginative. Chestertonian. Spoilers follow.

The Man Who Was Thursday fits all of these adjectives, and to be honest I’m not sure I understand what Chesterton was doing in this novel about a subversive policeman poet who infiltrates and stands against the forces of anarchy. Only it turns out that there are no real anarchists? Or maybe only one or two? Is Chesterton saying that evil is, in the end, only an illusion? That God provides men with the illusion of evil in order to test them and give them the opportunity to suffer and show courage? Or is it that in order to confront real evil, men must “tested by fire” and know suffering? Maybe I’m not intelligent enough for Chesterton.

However that may be, the plot moves quickly and furiously through madcap chases and revelations and surprises. The characters are rather difficult to keep straight, especially since their essential personalities keep changing or being revealed to be other than what the reader first thought them to be. The story is full of such twists and turns and unexpected developments, and by this literary technique Chesterton draws his readers into a dream world in which reality changes colors and aspects in a rapid-fire sequence of fantastical events.

The penultimate scene in the novel is a Job-like Council in which a Real Anarchist confronts the forces of Law and Order and Righteousness. And the Real Anarchist is answered, as Job was answered, with a question: “Can ye drink of the cup I drink of?” The themes of the novel are revealed to be those of redemption through suffering and of the seemingly contradictory faces of God, his justice and his mercy.

It’s a strange nightmare of a vision, and yet Kafka said of Chesterton’s writing, “He is so gay, one might almost believe he had found God.” C.S. Lewis apparently (according to my book’s introduction by Jonathan Lethem) compared Chesterton to Kafka, but Lethem says that Chesterton is instead the anti-Kafka, “so thrilled by his acrobatic stroll along the razor’s edge of nihilism the he earns his sunniness anew on every page.” The book does end with more questions than answers, but also with the main character having “an unnatural buoyancy in his body and a crystal simplicity in his mind that seemed to be superior to everything that he said or did. He felt he was in possession of some impossible good news, which made every other thing a triviality, but an adorable triviality.” Chesterton’s vision of the epic battle of Good versus Evil ends with a sunrise.

NOTE: I thought the strange and bewildering variety of covers at Amazon was somewhat illustrative of the many ways in which Chesterton’s nightmare turned into good news has been understood (or misunderstood) by various people. In a brief commentary appended to my edition, Chesterton even writes that a group of Bolshevists in Eastern Europe, without the author’s permission, “tried to turn this anti-Anarchist romance into an Anarchist play. Heaven only knows what they really made of it; beyond apparently making it mean the opposite of everything it meant.” If so, Chesterton has only himself to thank for writing a story with so many 180 degree turns and unmaskings that when a reader is finished he’s so confused that he’s not sure what’s opposite and what’s inside.

Poetry Friday: June 20, 2008

Jun20

What is Poetry Friday?

The Poetry Friday round-up is here today. Please leave a link to your poetry post in the linky (scroll down past the poems). My poetry selections for today were written by Mr. Gilbert K. Chesterton. Or were they?

Variations of an Air

Old King Cole
Was a merry old soul
And a merry old soul was he
He called for his pipe
and he called for his bowl
and he called for his fiddlers three

after Lord Tennyson

Cole, that unwearied prince of Colchester,
Growing more gay with age and with long days
Deeper in laughter and desire of life
As that Virginian climber on our walls
Flames scarlet with the fading of the year;
Called for his wassail and that other weed
Virginian also, from the western woods
Where English Raleigh checked the boast of Spain,
And lighting joy with joy, and piling up
Pleasure as crown for pleasure, bade me bring
Those three, the minstrels whose emblazoned coats
Shone with the oyster-shells of Colchester;
And these three played, and playing grew more fain
Of mirth and music; till the heathen came
And the King slept beside the northern sea.

after W.B. Yeats

Of an old King in a story
From the grey sea-folk I have heard
Whose heart was no more broken
Than the wings of a bird.

As soon as the moon was silver
And the thin stars began,
He took his pipe and his tankard,
Like an old peasant man.

And three tall shadows were with him
And came at his command;
And played before him for ever
The fiddles of fairyland.

And he died in the young summer
Of the world’s desire;
Before our hearts were broken
Like sticks in a fire.

after Walt Whitman

Me clairvoyant,
Me conscious of you, old camarado,
Needing no telescope, lorgnette, field-glass, opera-glass, myopic pince-nez,
Me piercing two thousand years with eye naked and not ashamed;
The crown cannot hide you from me,
Musty old feudal-heraldic trappings cannot hide you from me,
I perceive that you drink.
(I am drinking with you. I am as drunk as you are.)
I see you are inhaling tobacco, puffing, smoking, spitting
(I do not object to your spitting),
You prophetic of American largeness,
You anticipating the broad masculine manners of these States;
I see in you also there are movements, tremors, tears, desire for the melodious,
I salute your three violinists, endlessly making vibrations,
Rigid, relentless, capable of going on for ever;
They play my accompaniment; but I shall take no notice of any accompaniment;
I myself am a complete orchestra.
So long.

Celebrate the Day: June 20, 2008

Jun19

World Refugee Day was established by the UN General Assembly in 2000 to promote awareness of the vast numbers of refugees worldwide.

Some children’s/YA books about immigrants and refugees:
Home of the Brave by Katherine Applegate. Semicolon review here.

Diamonds in the Shadow by Caroline B. Cooney. I read this book several months ago, but never reviewed it. It was great story of a family in the U.S. who sponsor a refugee family only to find out that the refugee family is hiding some dangerous secrets.

Children of the River by Linda Crews.

Nonfiction for adults about refugees:
Behind the Burqa: Our Life in Afghanistan and How We Escaped to Freedom by “Sulima” and “Hala” as told to Batya Swift Yasgur. Semicolon review here.

Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishamel Beah.

Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail by Malika Oufkir and Michele Fitoussi. Semicolon review here.

More June Celebrations, Links, and Birthdays.

Tasha Tudor: August 28, 1915 – June 18, 2008

Jun19

Oh, my, I just read that Tasha Tudor died yesterday at her home in Marlboro, Vermont.

“Einstein said that time is like a river, it flows in bends. If we could only step back around the turns, we could travel in either direction. I’m sure it’s possible. When I die, I’m going right back to the 1830s. I’m not even afraid of dying. I think it must be quite exciting.” ~Tasha Tudor

Tasha Tudor and Family website.

Tasha Tudor’s World by Joan Donaldson.

My favorite Tasha Tudor books.

“Life isnâ€™t long enough to do all you could accomplish. And what a privilege even to be alive. In spite of all the pollutions and horrors, how beautiful this world is. Supposing you only saw the stars once every year. Think what you would think. The wonder of it!” ~Tasha Tudor

In which I invite Tasha Tudor to tea.

Carmon remembers Tasha Tudor.

Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary by Pamela Dean

Jun19

Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary by Pamela Dean. Recommended at Chasing Ray. (Read her review for a much better understanding of the book than I got.)

This book is the sort of story that you read straight through to the end, then shake your head, and think, “I must have missed something.” Then you try to decide whether to go back and re-read, and if you’re me, you don’t.

Gentian is a precocious, gifted, astronomy-loving, fourteen/fifteen year old middle sister. Her parents are involved, but hip and hands-off, allowing the three girls to explore and make their own decisions. Therefore Gentian, and to a lesser extent her sisters, come under the spell of Dominic, the new boy next door. I couldn’t figure out whether Dominic was a vampire, since he only seems to come out at night, or a warlock, since he casts a spell over Gentian that makes her forget her friends and family, or something else, something faery.

I wish someone else would read this one and explain it to me. I liked the characters enough to want to know what was going on, but I didn’t think I would gain any understanding by taking a second tour through the book. In fact, the characters, Gentian, her sisters, her family, and her friends, reminded me of Madeleine L’Engle’s characters, and that was enough to keep me reading. Maybe I just don’t know enough about the occult because it definitely felt occult-ish with all the star-gazing and pagan philosophy and magick, with a k.