This week: Good friends, perfect snow, a new Thumbelina and more...
ME AND YOU
By Geneviève Côté, Kids Can, 32 pages, $16.95, ages 3 to 5
A white rabbit with floppy, pink-tipped ears, and a fuchsia pink piglet face each other on the first double-page spread of this sweet confection of a picture book. Each stands at an easel and wields a paintbrush. On the following pages, rabbit says to piglet, “I wish I were just like you,” and piglet responds, saying, “I wish I were just like you.”
The pair continues the rhyming duet on successive pages, each longing in the gentlest way to have the other's long ears, say, or curly lemon twist tail, or button nose, or the tallest toes. For good measure, they put on each other's ears and feet, with stripy socks serving as substitutes for the real appendages. When rabbit declares, “I would be daring and loud!” pig leaps into the air, declaring, “I would be dainty as a cloud!”
There is an “oof!” and an “oops!” as both parties fall back to earth, so to speak. With new eyes, they take a good, long look at each other and see that each looks like the other. “ I like it better when you are you!” each says to the other. Hand in hand, they sing their final duet: “I am me and you are you./ That's why we love/ each other, me and you!”
PERFECT SNOW
By Barbara Reid, Scholastic, 32 pages, $19.99, ages 3 to 8
“SNOW!” Jim said. Snow, lots of it, is what Jim and his buddy, Scott, see when they look out of their respective windows one wintry morning. The very best thing would be a “snow day” on this school day, but, failing that, “recess will be great!”
The recess bell sets off “a stampede. Kids swarmed the snow like ants on a dropped ice cream cone.” Jim, daydreaming in class, has planned the construction of “a totally massive, indestructible Snow Fortress of Doom.” Scott has set his heart on building “the World's Greatest Snowman.” Mayhem ensues, snow flies and there's a “blizzard of destruction” carried out by an army of bright figures on a battleground of snow before the collaborative compromise, the “World's Greatest Totally Massive Snowman Fort!”, has its brief moment in the sun.
Barbara Reid works her magic once again in her signature medium, Plasticine, but she has added another dimension here: pen and watercolour comic strips that surround and extend the action that the Plasticine figures and scenes depict. The effect is dynamic, and the felicitous combination of the media lends this winter's tale an excitement that, in this case, neither medium by itself could have achieved.
BELLA'S TREE
By Janet Russell, illustrated by Jirina Marton, Groundwood, 35 pages, $19.95, ages 4 to 7
This heart-stoppingly, liltingly lovely debut book is the winner of the 2009 Governor-General's Award for Children's Literature – Illustration. It comes from Newfoundland, at least its author does, and so does the Bella of the title. “Bella, the girl lived with her Nan and Bruno, the famous dog, on top of a hill overlooking the sea.”
Bella's Nan, her grandmother, was famous for her berry picking, but advancing age has meant that this year, on this snow-laden Dec. 22, “the berries that Nan had not picked that fall and the gulls had not eat were now under that snow, and that made Nan crooked. … ‘I haven't got it in me to get us a tree,'” she says. After verbal pyrotechnics and physical feats. Bella, “only a slip of a thing” in her grandmother's eyes, persuades her Nan that she can wield an axe and cut down a Christmas tree.
Three trees are brought home on successive days – a leafless alder, a spruce and a pine – each with a resident bird – and while none meets with her Nan's approval, each is put up and decorated. On Christmas morning, the fourth tree that Bella brings home, a fir, at last provokes a smile from Nan. Looking at the bare fir tree, though, Nan wishes that she hadn't used all her decorations on the other three.
At that moment, “Fifty waxwings swooped in. They settled onto the fir tree and graced its every branch. They made the tree lovely, lovelier and more than loveliest. Nan and Bella and Bruno and even the other birds lost their tongues to it. All the songs from the tip of the lost tongues tumbled onto their toes, and their eyes could not stop blinking for the beauty, the beautier, the beautiest.”
Quite equal to the text they illustrate, Jirina Marton's oil pastel illustrations are magical.
THUMBELINA
By Hans Christian Andersen, retold by Brian Alderson, illustrated by Bagram Ibatoulline, Candlewick, 32 pages, $21, ages 4 to 8
Esteemed British children's book author Brian Alderson has put his own stamp on this sparkling version of the H.C. Andersen classic. His retelling eschews the florid and stolid in favour of the curt and dramatic. Because this book is, after all, a fairy tale, an economic deployment of words in the text is balanced by Bagram Ibatoulline's lush, fanciful, page-filling gouache-and-watercolour paintings.
This book begins with a double-page spread, most of which is a witch's overgrown and toadstool-ridden garden. A swallow sits on an overhanging branch of a tree, watching. “‘That's where it all started,' said the swallow. ‘That's where the woman went off to see the local witch. She wanted a baby real bad and thought the witch could help. ‘I don't mind what sort,' the woman said. ‘I just want a baby.'”
The woman was given a barleycorn to plant and in due course a bud appeared, “all tightly folded. Then – pop! – it opened out, and tucked up inside was a baby girl, no bigger than your thumb. So they called her Thumbelina.”
Thumbelina's passage through the world is not an easy one, to be sure, but she is saved from several fates, among them a dank home with a toad in the muddy bottom of a river, and marriage to and life underground with a vole – a catch, to be sure, according to a certain Mrs. Mouse, is the Man in Gray with “his fur pelisse and all those larders and drawing rooms!”
As the swallow began this story, so too he ends it, with a convincing account of Thumbelina's happy-ever-after life in his summer villa among the Crystal Fairies, married to the Crystal King.
A COYOTE SOLSTICE TALE
By Thomas King, illustrated by Gary Clement, Groundwood, 64 pages, $14.95, all ages
Mister Coyote is waiting for his friends, Beaver and Bear, Otter and Moose, to arrive at his house deep in the woods for a cozy, early-winter feast. But hark! “Then out in the heart of the forest/ Where the trees block the light of the moon/ Came the cadence of somebody prancing/ And humming a holiday tune.” That somebody was a girl, a little girl, “all dressed in red.”
“Hello, said the girl, I'm a reindeer./ And she pawed at the snow with her toes./ She had sticks in her hair and a green teddy bear/ And a red rubber ball on her nose.” And she's come, she says, to the house deep in the woods seeking “friendship, goodwill and peace.”
Mystified about her origins, the animals retrace her tracks through the woods. They end up on the edge of a clear-cut, facing a blindingly bright structure. It's a mall, the reindeer-girl explains, “no place that you want to go.”
And as this splendid satirical romp, with an equally splendid profusion of watercolour illustrations by the inimitable Gary Clement makes clear, a mall is something Coyote should never go near. Stymied at the cash register when asked whether he wishes to pay for his purchases (plasma screen TV for Otter, digital watch for Bear etc.) with credit or cash, or by a no-interest instalment plan, he can only say “Purchase?”
The reindeer girl says she's sorry they've had to see such a thing; it's why she pretends she's a reindeer. “The world was a wintry wonder/ With rumours of light in the east/ As the animals strolled to Coyote's/ To continue their seasonal feast.”
CLAY MAN: The Golem of Prague
Retold by Irene N. Watts, illustrated by Kathryn E. Shoemaker, Tundra, 84 pages, $21.99, ages 9 and up
Prague in 1595 is the place and time of this retelling of a classic tale, illustrated with heavily shadowed pencil drawings. The teller of the tale is a fictional Jacob, young son of the chief rabbi of the Prague ghetto at that time, Judah Loew (1520-1609).
One night, Jacob follows his father and his uncle to the Vltava River and watches them make a clay man from the reddish river clay. He's the tallest man that Jacob has ever seen. He hears his father say to the man, the golem who will be known as Josef, “You are like other men, yet not the same, You can hear and see more than others and go where ordinary men cannot go. Unlike men you cannot speak.”
This man, almost human but without a soul – a distinction that Jacob comes to understand too well – was made to stand guard during a perilous time for the residents of the ghetto. The ghetto was besieged at this time by the residents of the city outside the walls, eager to impugn the Jews with the “blood lie,” particularly during Passover, when it was rumoured that Christian children's blood was used in the making of matzoh.
Three years on, the golem has done his work well. The ghetto has withstood all the attacks and plots aimed at it, and the emperor, Rudolf, looks kindly upon the ghetto and the scholars who live within its walls, and unkindly upon those who attempt to blacken the community's reputation. One night, though, on the eve of the Sabbath, Josef, who obeys only the chief rabbi, goes berserk and threatens to kill Jacob. His father, having constructed the golem, must now deconstruct him, and Jacob, now almost 13 and on the verge of becoming a man, comes, for the first time, face to face with sorrow.
AGAINST THE ODDS
By Marjolijn Hof, translated by Johanna H. Prins and Johanna W. Prins, Groundwood, 124 pages, $18.95
“My father was on his way to a war. His suitcase was packed. He just had to say goodbye.
“Every now and then he went off to a war. At least once a year. You're heading the wrong way when you go off to a war. It's better to stay as far away from wars as you can. But my father is a doctor, and they need doctors in a war. My father likes to be needed.”
With these words from its precocious narrator, Kiki, this newly translated Dutch novel begins. It is a remarkably astute statement from one so young – Kiki is still in grade school – and it sets the stage for a novel in which the voice and feelings of its narrator ring absolutely true.
The title refers to the strategy that Kiki devises to convince herself that her father won't be killed. How can you have a dead dad and a dead pet mouse? Surely the odds are against that? To that end, her first step is to buy a dying mouse from a pet store and, when its time comes, bury it in the garden. That done, she breathes a sigh of relief.
But when her father goes missing, the stakes are raised considerably and the odds of his returning alive seem slim. The flatulent family dog's life is now imperilled. Hof's ear is acute for dialogue, and for its uses in transmitting information about a character. Kiki may be expressive – in her internal monologues as well as with others – but so, too, is her mother. Her patience with her daughter, her somewhat ambivalent articulation of her acceptance of her husband's need to be needed somewhere other than at home, and her impatience with her mother-in-law's anxious enquiries about her son, are conveyed with great skill.
By the novel's conclusion, Kiki's father has been found, but he is the victim of a land mine, and severely wounded. When he returns home, to hospital, Kiki's adjustment to her father's injury indicates that she is ready to stop playing the odds and settle for a different sort of reality.
PIECES OF ME
By Charlotte Gingras, translated by Susan Ouriou, Kids Can, 144 pages, $18.95, ages 12 and up
The 2009 Governor-General's Award for Translation is Susan Ouriou's reward for her work on this small jewel of a novel originally written in French (La liberté? Connais pas…, the winner of 1999 Governor's-General's Award for Children's Literature in French – Text ). The citation reads, “With Pieces of Me , Susan Ouriou has created a magical rendering of the exquisite original. Tenderly redrawing the portrait of a troubled teenage girl struggling to come into her own, Ouriou has sensitively captured all that is moving, poetic and funny about the novel's main character in a truly accomplished translation.”
The translation is indeed accomplished and, as the citation suggests, Ouriou had excellent material with which to work her magic. The deeply unhappy teen at the centre of this novel, Mirabelle, lives with her reclusive, mentally ill mother in a “half-basement.” Her father has left the family; it's unclear which came first, Mirabelle's mother's illness or her father's departure. Conditions at home have helped to make Mirabelle as unhappy, and almost as socially dysfunctional, as her mother.
Slowly, though, an unlikely friendship with a classmate as extroverted as Mirabelle is introverted, and a developing talent for art, nurtured by a remarkable teacher, begin to change Mirabelle's view of the world and her place in it. All her gains are demolished, though, when her biologist father is killed in a plane crash while doing research on the tundra of northern Quebec.
That Gingras can take her character and her reader on a moving and emotionally satisfying voyage back into the world is a testament to her skill as a novelist.
THE BRIDE'S FAREWELL
By Meg Rosoff , Doubleday Canada, 214 pages, $23.95, ages 14 and up
This latest book by British-based American writer Meg Rosoff brings her number of novels to four, each as different from the others as chalk from cheese, at least in terms of time and place.
All bear the mark of a hugely talented novelist for readers with an appetite for books that will take them deep into previously unexplored territory. Unlike its predecessors, though, The Bride's Farewell is set in time past. It begins on the morning of, “August the twelfth, eighteen hundred and something,” on the day that Pell Ridley, 20, was to be married to Birdie, the man with whom she has shared almost everything that has been good in her life.
On that day, Pell takes her horse Jack, and because she can't refuse him, her small brother Bean, and heads off for Salisbury Fair to find work. She's leaving because at the core of her being she knows that she doesn't want the same life as her mother's: unremitting poverty, endless childbirth, death in infancy of many of her children and an early death for herself. Pell's father, a hypocritical preacher and an abusive drunk, is no model of a husband or incentive for marriage.
Pell's time at the Salisbury Fair is ultimately disastrous: Duped by a horse dealer, she loses both her horse and her brother Bean. The novel becomes Pell's quest, and one whose trajectory includes a relentless search for her siblings, three of whom end up in a workhouse.
It also includes a Heathcliffian man, a poacher of few words who harbours Pell and … well, it would be giving away too much to say more. Safe to say, though, that this novel is played out in a breathtakingly beautiful but not always idyllic English countryside, which is soon to face the degradations of the Industrial Revolution, and that the central character is an incarnation and harbinger of the positive aspects of modernity. Pell Ridley will captivate the readers of this book.
