bookbk: Hey, Fox's mom is pregnant in this book! Look at this! First I thought she was just drawn with a big dress on, but no, she's really totally pregnant.
Spouse: Yep, I noticed that.
bookbk: But she's not pregnant in the later books. See? Look, here in Fox All Week. She's standing up, and you can see: not pregnant. And there's no baby in any of them. It's weird.
Spouse: Well, maybe that was Louise she was pregnant with.
bookbk: No, cause, see, look, Louise is here in this first book too! Fox's mom is bugging him to watch her. That's what the whole book is about: "Fox, look after little Louise," blah blah blah.
Spouse: Huh.
bookbk: I hope it wasn't stillborn. That would be so sad.
Spouse: I think you're reading too much into this.
bookbk: Maybe that's why Fox acts up so much. Maybe he's really upset about the stillbirth of his baby sibling, and no one else ever talks about it, so he's, like, carrying the whole emotional load for his family. That's how come he's always getting in trouble.
Spouse: You are looney tunes.
bookbk: Wow. These books seem so funny on the surface. But there's this whole tragic undercurrent when you get down to it.
Showing posts with label early reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label early reading. Show all posts
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Can you ever forget your first?
Truth be told, I'm a little fuzzy on mine, though I distinctly remember being very proud to sound out the first pages of Green Eggs and Ham: "I AM SAM. SAM I AM." So quite possibly the first book I read on my own was that classic of the genre.
Not everyone is so predictable, though. Phantom's son LG, for example, has shown a nonfictional and artistic bent in his first solo reading choice, and it looks like his little sister is right behind him.
As for my own daughter, despite being surrounded by the cream of the crop of picture books and early readers thanks to her two librarian parents, the very first book she finished on her own, on a memorable snow day early in the winter, was this deathless title. Just goes to show you that you never know what's going to be the book that hooks a kid, and that adults' literary judgments aren't the only measuring stick.
Not everyone is so predictable, though. Phantom's son LG, for example, has shown a nonfictional and artistic bent in his first solo reading choice, and it looks like his little sister is right behind him.
As for my own daughter, despite being surrounded by the cream of the crop of picture books and early readers thanks to her two librarian parents, the very first book she finished on her own, on a memorable snow day early in the winter, was this deathless title. Just goes to show you that you never know what's going to be the book that hooks a kid, and that adults' literary judgments aren't the only measuring stick.
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