Fifty Books, #3: The Shy Little Girl

The Shy Little Girl, by Phyllis Krasilovsky, tells the story of—surprise!--a little girl named Anne who suffers from paralyzing shyness, which she eventually overcomes by making friends with Claudia, a new girl in her class. That’s it; that’s the tweet book.

It’s a simple story, but it spoke to me deeply when I first encountered it at age four or five (The copyright date given is 1970). I was a shy little girl myself [a fact which tends to shock people who’ve known me only in my older, more gregarious incarnation], and the possibility that 1) a shy person could meet one Very Special Friend, and 2) a shy person could stop being shy – gave this book a magical feeling to me that it still retains today.

Much of the magic comes from the illustrations, by the late, great, incomparable Trina Schart Hyman*. The 60s color scheme of mustard yellows and browns and an occasional, striking pop of pink.  The expressive faces on each individual child in the school scenes, so that each spread tells a whole story in itself, almost like Norman Rockwell. The striking technique, in a number of those group scenes, of rendering only Anne – and then only Anne and Claudia-- in color, while the other characters are black-and-white line drawings, so that the two significant characters are highlighted, like Tony and Maria each haloed in light in the “Dance at the Gym” scene in “West Side Story”.

I don’t make that comparison lightly: this book is, essentially, a love story. That the love is a friendship between two kids of roughly six or seven, rather than a romance between teenagers or adults, is of less consequence than the importance of the friendship to Anne’s emotional development: as much as any romantic heroine, Anne is changed by love.

Claudia thinks Anne’s freckles, which she’s been self-conscious about, are “like gold dust.” She admires Annes’s height, so Anne stops slouching and stands up straight. As she spends time with Claudia, “Anne discovered she liked to talk, and that it was fun to make someone laugh.” She begins to speak up in class and to join in games at recess. Because Claudia thinks Anne is worthwhile, and Anne loves Claudia and values her opinion, she learns to think of herself as worthwhile too, and transforms from a lonely, sad, shy child to a socially confident girl who knows her place in the world.

That this all has the feel of a fairy tale is doubly fitting: Trina Schart Hyman is perhaps best-known for her depictions of fairy tales—she won the Caldecott Medal in 1985 for her illustrations for Saint George and the Dragon, and one of her three Caldecott honors was for a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood. Even more, though, “Lonely girl saved by love” is the plot of many a fairy tale.

Is it true? Does it really work like that? I certainly thought it would, as a child, and spent many years believing a friendship like Anne and Claudia’s would cure my shyness and sadness. The Shy Little Girl gave a shape to something I’m sure I’d already had an inchoate yearning for. It was, I think, my template for a loving relationship – so much so that when, a few decades later, I wrote a queer young adult urban fantasy story set in a city on the border of Elfland, the scene where young heroine and her love interest meet, in a junkyard strewn with useless discarded appliances, unconsciously echoes the illustration spread where Anne and Claudia meet at recess.

Of course, one thing I’ve learned as an adult is that fiction is not a reliable roadmap for living, and that having a friend (or a girlfriend, or a boyfriend) all by itself doesn’t cure shyness, or not liking yourself.. But it is true that seeing yourself through the loving eyes of someone you in turn love can help you discover your own worth.  And when I’ve been lucky enough to have that happen, I believe I was able to recognize and value what I’d found partly because I’d had this story in the deep bedrock of my mind for over forty years.

Stories might not be literal truth. But sometimes, they capture true magic.

*in 1973, a few years after this book’s publication TSN would become the inaugural art director at Cricket magazine, to which I was an inaugural subscriber, and would subsequently become the first artist whose distinctive style I could identify – her detailed, expressive, spidery illustrations in that magazine jumped right out at me, and I found them at first scary and even repellent, but then, as sometimes happened, they grew on me and she became my favorite illustrator, and has remained so. In a used bookstore [when I used to go to used bookstore] I would snap up anything with Trina Schart Hyman illustrations or even a cover by her – and she did many covers, as a working illustrator her whole life.

Fifty Books, #2: Ariel

 

My synagogue’s choir director was hosting a party that day. The adults were talking and chatting and the kids were running around. “Volare” played over and over on the stereo. I was twelve and bored and didn’t fit in anywhere. I sidled over to the bookcase in the corner to see what I could find.

What I found was a slim white spine on the bottom shelf, the title a single word in a blocky, slightly flourished font: ARIEL, [by] Sylvia Plath. I slid it out, plonked myself down on the floor, and my universe broke open.

To be totally, completely honest, I cannot swear to this day that I’ve read every poem in the book. I think I’ve only ever skimmed the bee poems all this time, for example. And yet, and yet, I think it is fair to say that the afternoon I opened ARIEL marked a passage from childhood to…whatever the next thing was. Not exactly adulthood or maturity. But an intimation of a bigger world, a deeper drop, a darker dark. And an understanding that you could write about it.

A second full disclosure: I didn’t come to it entirely cold, that party afternoon. My mother, on the bedroom bookshelves where she kept her paperback John Updike books and “Best Stories of the 1950s” and an early edition of “The Catcher in the Rye” I wish I’d snagged, had a nonfiction book about the phenomenon of suicide called THE SAVAGE GOD, by A. Alvarez, which included a whole chapter about Plath, as a poet, a suicide, and a personal friend of the author’s. I haven’t gone back to that book since, but the New York Times review calls it “melodramatic” and I think, retroactively, that sounds about right.

It was definitely melodramatic enough to be fascinating to a literary near-adolescent who was already somewhat melodramatically inclined, and I’m sure the mystique of Plath, as much as the poems themselves, had something to do with my penchant, in the months after I first read them, for gazing out the moonlit window in my pajamas and reading “Lady Lazarus” aloud over and over until I had it memorized.

Since that time, I’ve read volumes’ worth of other words by and about Plath: her autobiographical novel “The Bell Jar;” her letters to her mother and to her boyfriend, then husband, then ex-husband, Ted Hughes; theories and screeds about her life, her marriage, her drive and competitiveness, her parenting, her feelings about Smith and English winters and the literary scene of the 1960s, her worthiness [or not] as a feminist icon/adversary/cautionary tale, even her opinions of near-contemporary poet Adrienne Rich.

In high school, as a prank, I submitted her villanelle “Mad Girl’s Love Song” to the literary magazine on whose editorial board I sat; the consensus among my fellow editors was that it was too sentimental for publication. By college, I’d come around to that opinion myself, and thought of Plath’s poetry as something romantically adolescent I’d outgrown, like my fondness for the Greek goddess Artemis; my college’s patron goddess [yes, we had a patron goddess] was Athena, goddess of wisdom and war, the opposite of sentimental: hard-headed, pragmatic, adult.

Now, decades older than Plath ever got to be, with my own parenthood and failed marriage and bitter dark winters behind me, I’ve turned around again. I mean, yes, there are things about Plath, at this remove, that are…okay, let’s just say problematic. The imagery about Nazis and Jews reads as cringey and appropriative to me now. There is, infamously, an actual N-bomb in the title poem – shocking and transgressive even then, as I’m sure it was meant to be. And, aside from any political considerations, I do not think, if we’d met in person as contemporaries, that I would probably have liked the fierce, blonde, competitive, ambitious, very very straight young woman who Sylvia Plath appears to have been.

But it’s not always about liking, is it? It’s not about whether the poems are sentimental or offensive or do they romanticize suicide or do too many adolescent girls like them too much. It’s about whether the poems, themselves, get at something true.

And the third truth is: I don’t know if I can ever really know. The poems in ARIEL are so interwoven in my mind with the experience of finding them, reading about them, reading and listening and talking and hearing about their author, that I can’t evaluate them just for themselves, as words on a page, as I asked my fellow high school magazine editors to do.

But I think there’s a reason that more than forty years after that fateful party afternoon, there are whole passages I can tell you by heart, and not just from “Lady Lazarus” :

“Love set you going like a fat gold watch.”

“I should sit on a rock off Cornwall and comb my hair./ I should wear tiger pants, I should have an affair./ we should meet in another life, we should meet in air,/me and you.”

“You do not do, you do not do/ Any more, black shoe/ In which I have lived like a foot / For thirty years, poor and white / Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.”

“What a million filaments. /The peanut-crunching crowd/ Shoves in to see/ Them unwrap me hand and foot--/ The big strip tease.”

“I rocked shut/ As a seashell./ They had to call and call/ And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.”

 “The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea/and comes from a country as far away as health.”

Those words, those images, cracked me open that day in suburban New Jersey, circa 1979, revealing raw, sometimes ugly truths about the world and myself that I was just starting to understand. And I’ve stayed cracked open, more or less, for my whole life.

And maybe that’s enough.

Fifty Books, #1: Cindy Bakes a Funny Cake

 

You will not find Cindy Bakes a Funny Cake: A Hallmark Pop-Up Book (by Dean Wally; illustrated by Susan Stoehr Morris) [Youtube storytime link] on any list of classics, or must-reads, or Best Children's Books of the 20th Century. It has been out of print for decades, and no one, as far as I can see, is clamoring for it to be brought back. It doesn't even have a listing on WorldCat, the worldwide catalog of library holdings.

And back when it *was* in print? It was published not by a venerable Big Five publishing house, or a cool edgy indie press, but by: Hallmark. Yes, a greeting card company is responsible for this title.

God, I loved the crap out of this book. Still do, TBH.

I can't be the only one, either. Else, why would used copies be selling for upwardsof $50 a pop? I mean, it is a pop-up book --haha, no pun intended)-- and those are harder to preserve over the course of (gods help me) 55-odd years [n.b. I'm not sure exactly when Cindy Bakes a Funny Cake was first published. There is no copyright date on my copy of the book. One online source puts it at 1979, but that can't possibly be correct, as I couldn't have been more than five or six when, by whatever means - maybe at the supermarket?- it found its way into my tiny little preschool hands and thence into my heart, forever.]

So, you may be wondering, what is this marvelous tale?

Well, it's the story of red-haired little Cindy Hicks, aged "almost six," who, finding herself with nothing to do one afternoon, decides to bake a cake. Since Cindy's reach exceeds her literacy-related grasp, her recipe turns out somewhat improvisational, and includes "a pound of flour, at least--/Baking soda, chocolate syrup / And a dozen cakes of YEAST!!!" [capitalization and emphases in the original text] [and yes, this is a rhyming picture book. I know, it is sounding more and more twee. But there's just something about it, I tell you.]

That's it. That's the tweet book. It does what it says on the tin: Cindy bakes a [funny] cake, yeast-related mayhem ensues, and then (spoiler alert) all is saved by her big sister, who was upstairs on the phone the whole time. Basically, it's a retelling of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice,"-- a little like the venerable Strega Nona, by the venerable Tomie De Paola, except that Strega Nona didn't come out until 1975, and by then I was deep into full-length novels, thankyouverymuch, and would have scorned to read a picture book. 

What makes this book so special? Why, having long lost my original copy (which, if memory serves, I had also written the page numbers on in red magic marker), was I willing to shell out for a used edition and have it shipped all the way up here to the Northlands so I can continue to reread and cherish it into my golden years?

I think a lot of it is the slightly Mary-Engelbreit-esque pop-up illustrations. The hardest part of composing this blog post has been not including photos of every. single. magical. page of Cindy and her sweet hopeful little face and her red polka-dot hair bow and her mustard-and-green 60s kitchen.There's one page where Cindy is kneeling on the (green) kitchen counter, and when you pull the pull tab, the (green) kitchen cabinet door opens and Cindy's arms reach forward so she can gather the ingredients and it is just for some reason so charming. The world needs more cooking-themed pop-up books. 

But my very favorite page, the one that encapsulates the magic of Cindy Bakes a Funny Cake, is the third full-page spread, in which we see the eponymous cake baking in the oven. When you pull the tab at the bottom of the page, the batter POPS[!!!] right out of the oven door, and you begin to see the implications -- fully realized in the subsequent pages - of ALL THAT PINK CAKE DOUGH TAKING OVER EVERYTHING. It's like the twee-est ever horror story. 

  

n.b.: In all the years I loved this book, I'd never given any thought to the author, Dean Walley. When I did look up his name, in preparing for this post, I found that he was actually quite a prolific author, and wrote many other picture books, mostly for Hallmark. He was never famous, but he had what sounds like a fulfiling and meaningful life filled with words and stories. He lived until 2017, and you can read his obituary here. 

Fifty Books: An Introduction of Sorts

 Nobody reads blogs any more. So no one will even notice this! Hahahahahaha! This is the perfect time to sneak back on to my old book blog!

I have an Idea. Just something fun to do while I'm procrastinating on my Serious Writing. And the idea is this, just simply this: to write about books I love. Especially kids' books. Especially older books [say, before 2000]. With no agenda except that: books I love, and why I love them. Say, fifty books. 

If I were going to rename this blog, I'd call it just that: Fifty Books. It it not at all catchy or clever or even interesting. But it's interesting to me. 

I will confess to being inspired by Ann Patchett's Friday video posts, which she always starts "I'm Ann Patchett at Parnassus Books, and it's Friday, and if you haven't read this book, it's new to you." Then she does a short lovely impassioned booktalk about some book I have almost never heard of. Usually it's an older book [though usually still in print]. Mine will not all be in print. But if you haven't read them, they'll be new to you. 

Endings have always been my Achilles heel - I never know how to wrap things up. But my day job now is about 50% diplomatic emails, and about 25% meetings of one kind or another, and both have taught me that you don't always have to make a song and dance of it, you can just sign off. 

So, signing off. For now. More soon. 

Where Am I?

Hi, all. *tap tap*. Is this thing on?

After a wonderful weekend at KidLitCon 2011, it occurred to me that I do have a book blog of my very own, sorely neglected though it might be. So, hi. I'm still here. Well, mostly not HERE, at least not at the moment. But around somewhere.

If you stumble upon this site and want to see what I'm blogging about these days, your best bet is the tor.com website, where I've been posting somewhat irregularly on science fiction and fantasy for kids and teens. I'm also on Twitter as elskushner.

Oh, and right before my birthday I won this picture-book manuscript contest. Then I screamed and babbled happily for a while. Now I'm waiting for more news and will share as it hits my inbox.

Back in the Saddle

Well, hello there! Long time, no see!

I just found out that my last "Librarian Mom" post at the Scholastic Parent Voices website was just that: my last. Scholastic is switching to a new model with their upcoming new site design, and my services are no longer required. I'm bummed: it was a fun two-and-a-half years; I was thrilled to be part of Scholastic's site, and it was swell to be paid for writing about something that I love to write about.

So now I'm back here at my old Blogger kidlit blog, looking around, dusting the place off, thinking about what I can do with it. I have to admit, part of me is pleased to be back, even though I'm disappointed to lose the Scholastic gig. I feel a little more free to rant here in my own space. And it'll be nice to be able to link to other publishers' sites.

For now, though, since they've given me permission to repost my old posts, here's the one I wrote this morning. Sheesh. If I'd known it was gonna be my last one, I might've tried for something a little more substantial:

Canine Sibling Rivalry

One of my colleagues recently became a grandmother! I asked her yesterday how the new family was doing, and she said that the parents and baby are fine, happy, healthy...but the family dog is perturbed. I said, "There should be a new-baby-in-the-house book for dogs!" and we both laughed for a minute and then simultaneously remembered that there actually is such a book: Madeleine L'Engle's The Other Dog, in which Touche the Poodle catalogs the ways in which the new "dog" that her people have brought home is utterly inferior to her own charming self. Touche is particularly scornful of the diaper-changing that she witnesses, noting sniffily that "White cloths or no, I would never do it in the house," but eventually admits that "in spite of myself...I am getting very fond of our other dog."

L'Engle's book isn't the only one where a dog has to adjust to a tiny, screamy, attention-monopolizing intruder. As it turns out, there is a whole mini-genre on the topic. In McDuff and the Baby, by Rosemary Wells and Susan Jeffers, the scrappy little Westie, who first appeared as a stray rescued by Fred and Lucy in McDuff Moves In, faces disruption in his cozy retro household. With the arrival of the baby, Fred and Lucy no longer read the comics to McDuff, or take him for walks, and he can't hear the radio over the baby's crying. He retaliates, in charmingly understated fashion, by glowering at the baby (which no one notices), and then by refusing his food, which does get Fred and Lucy's attention. When they make an effort to include McDuff, he and the baby begin to enjoy each other's company, and the book ends with the two exchanging convivial "woof"s.

In Truelove, by Babbette Cole, the displaced hero is so demoralized by the change in the household that, after all his gifts and advances are ignored, and the love song he sings (or howls) for the baby gets him kicked out to the porch for being too loud, he runs away and joins a pack of homeless dogs and has to be rescued from the pound. The fact that this story is told mostly in the pictures, while the text is a series of cliched sayings about love ( like "Love gives you strength" and "Love makes your heart sing," ) makes it all the more poignant.

Any of these would be a great present for a family with a new baby and a beloved dog...or a beloved older sibling, who might be able to relate!

Where to Find Me

Well, I should've done this months ago, but better late than never:

For now, this blog is on hiaitus, though that chould always change; I'm posting once a week on children's books and divers related topics at Scholastic's Librarian Mom blog, and apparently that is all the kidlit blogging I am capable of without exploding into a mass of pathetic goo. So, go on over there and say hi!

(Just watch-- now that I've gone and posted this, I'll suddenly get the urge to post about something kids'-book-related that doesn't fit into the Scholastic blog's parameters, and then this post will be moot. Happens every time. Until then, though, this post will be up top.)