Books

Anne of Green Gables

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Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

1908

Anne of Green Gables. There is no other character remotely like her. She is irrepressible, dramatic, talkative, imaginative, high-spirited, headstrong, passionate, ebullient, lively, impulsive, heedless. She is also sensitive, self-conscious, insecure, loving, generous, well-intentioned.

She first appears, waiting expectantly in a train station, as a skinny, freckled, green-eyed, redhead – a homely child. She enters the lives of Matthew and Marilla, an elderly brother and sister who had sent away for an orphan boy to help with the chores and haplessly ended up with an unlikely girl instead. She is a dreamer, bursting with imagination, exhilarated by the world. Matthew, a quiet shy gentle unpretentious and altogether good man, is quietly delighted by her. Anne recognizes immediately that though they could not be outwardly more different, they are really kindred spirits. Marilla is slower to warm. But over the course of five years, she responds to Anne’s hunger for love and eagerness to please, and comes to value Anne’s fundamental goodness and creative spirit. Anne is transformed by the undemonstrative love of Matthew and Marilla and their lives, in turn, are transformed by their act of selflessness.

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Lucy Maud Montgomery came from Prince Edward Island and her love of place is evidenced in the Anne books. She had an emotionally charged communion with nature that she bestows upon her fictional creation. Anne does not simply appreciate the natural world, she is intoxicated by it. The plot points are set pieces (Anne inadvertently dies her hair green instead of black, she unintentionally serves her bosom friend currant wine instead of raspberry cordial), but the descriptions of the Avonlea farmstead in the twilight, the apple tree allee in full blossom, the woodland flowers by the brook, as seen through Anne’s enraptured eyes, are always genuine. The setting is beautifully rendered, by author and character alike.

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Aside:

“Do you never imagine things different from what they really are?” asked Anne wide-eyed.

“No.”

“Oh!” Anne drew a long breath. “Oh, Miss – Marilla, how much you miss!”

 

The Cow Who Fell In the Canal

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The Cow Who Fell in the Canal by Phyllis Krasilovsky

1957

Illustrated by Peter Spier

The Cow Who Fell in the Canal is a quintessentially Dutch book, but like Hans Brinker, its quintessentially Dutch predecessor, it was not written by a Hollander. It was illustrated by one, and that is what confers its authentically Dutch flavor.

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The protagonist is Hendrika, a cow who grows restless, bored by her bucolic life with its monotonous cycle of chewing grass and making milk. The perpetual turning of the windmill makes her dizzy. She has the wanderlust – relieved one day when she falls into the canal, mounts an old raft, and floats her way to the city. Disembarking to the wonder of the inhabitants, she runs through the streets, savoring the novelties, until she happens upon the cheese market. There she encounters Mr. Hofstra, her farmer, who takes her back home. She returns to her pasture wearing a straw hat with streamers as a souvenir and is now content, enriched by her memories. It is a day-in-the-life story, albeit an unusual day, and it is delightfully free of morals.

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Peter Spier’s illustrations are what make this tale come alive. Like Richard Scarry, he fabricates richly detailed drawings that create a visual chorus to enliven the simple text. He conveys essence of Netherlands with a herring cart, bicycles leaning against a wall, wooden shoes, canals, and stair-cased roofs. For a child, there is much to absorb on every page.

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Spier has illustrated over 150 books and was honored with both the Caldecott Medal and the National Book Award for Noah’s Ark, a textless story perfectly suited to his delicate pen and ink watercolors. His most ambitious undertaking was People, an encyclopedic celebration of human diversity. The cover illustration includes some 500 humans and each one, even the tiny figures in the back row who are conveyed with only a few strokes, is an individual with a recognizable culture. He has a playful sense of humor, evident in the display of noses or hairstyles. He touches briefly on intolerance, inequality, and bullying and he shows a shanty town as well as a suburban neighborhood with the mansion on the hill, but the overwhelming sense is one of wonder at the splendorous variety of it all. On a single spread, he imagines how deadly life would be with soulless uniformity – army green buses, brown clothed humans, and identical boxy buildings. What a relief to turn the page and return to the colorful and exhilarating confusion of humanity. Here is a generous spirited artist who shares through his drawings his belief in the fundamental goodness of people, a characteristically Dutch attribute. All the more remarkable since Peter Spier spent several of his teenage years in Theresienstadt concentration camp.

 

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Rabbit Hill

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Rabbit Hill by Robert Lawson

1944

Illustrated by Robert Lawson

New Folks coming. New Folks coming. This refrain is passed from animal to animal, from Little Georgie to his Father and Mother, to Pokey the Woodchuck, Willie Fieldmouse, the Mole, Phewie the Skunk. After a period of privation, the animals are excited that the Big House on Rabbit Hill will be occupied once again. They watch as the Man, the Lady, and their old Cat, Mr. Muldoon, take up residence, plant a lush vegetable garden, and generate a bounty of kitchen scraps. (“’You will find, Phewie,’ said Father with some heat, ‘that good breeding and good garbage go hand in hand.’”) The Man and Lady celebrate the first harvest with a feast for the animals, with the words “There is Enough For All”.

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The plot does not seem like much, but this book has staying power. Robert Lawson created, largely through humorous dialogue, a distinct assortment of animal characters, beginning with the oratorical Father, variously viewed as eloquent or insufferably verbose (“He always continued until something stopped him.”), who constantly harkens back to his Kentucky bluegrass roots. There is the highstrung Mother in a perennial nervous state, the cheerful and enthusiastic Little Georgie, the folksy and curmudgeonly Uncle Analdas whose speech is peppered with “dingblasted” and “gumdinged”, and the loyal, courageous Willie Fieldmouse whose role it is to discover that Mr. Muldoon is just a harmless puffball.

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Robert Lawson is the only creator of children’s books to have been awarded both the Newberry Award (for Rabbit Hill in 1945) and the Caldecott Medal (for They Were Strong and Good, a chronicle of his forebears, in 1941). His preferred medium was pen and ink, but for Rabbit Hill, he created soft-washed pencil drawings with his meticulous hand, quite different from the bold thick-lined caricatures of The Story of Ferdinand or Wee Gillis.

After graduating from art school, Lawson joined a group of artists and designers in the Camouflage Corps in France. The military value of concealing patterning and coloration took hold during WWI and a large group of artists (including such talents as Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and Arshile Gorky) were recruited to design and paint camouflage disguises for war equipment and installations. There were no mass produced camouflage uniforms at the time, and it is remarkable that all such clothes, usually reserved for snipers, were individually hand-painted.

When the war was over, Lawson married and settled in Westport, Connecticut. He and his artist wife committed to each designing one Christmas card a day until the mortgage was paid off. It took three years. Their home, Rabbit Hill, was the inspiration for the book.

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Aside: “The warm sun had loosened his muscles: the air was invigorating; Little Georgie’s leaps grew longer and longer. Never had he felt so young and strong. His legs were like coiled springs of steel that released themselves of their own accord. He was hardly conscious of any effort, only of his hind feet pounding the ground, and each time they hit, those wonderful springs released and shot him through the air. He sailed over fences and stone walls as though they were mole runs. Why, this was almost like flying!”

Freight Train

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Freight Train by Donald Crews

1978

Illustrated by Donald Crews

There is something irresistible about trains: whether it be counting the cars on a long Santa Fe freight, or standing on an overpass and feeling the whoosh as a locomotive passes below, or taking an overnight with the pull-down bunks in the sleepers, or listening to a whistle in the quiet of a summer night. Unlike the obsession many 2 and 3 year olds have with backhoes and caterpillars, the fascination with trains is lifelong.

Donald Crews is an author/illustrator who has explored this fascination repeatedly, beginning with the elegant Freight Train. Born and raised in Newark, NJ, he had a father who worked on the railroad. During the summers, his mother took the children by train to Florida (it took 3 days and 2 nights) to visit their grandparents. In his dedication, Crews refers to “the countless freight trains passed and passing the big house in Cottondale”.

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Freight Train begins with a double page spread that is blank save for a track traversing the bottom and a simple introduction. On the following pages, the cars are introduced, one by one, each a different color. We see the stationary train in its entirety, and then it begins moving, the image becoming blurred as it picks up speed. The train passes through a tunnel (glimpsed through a rock window), over a trestle, past city skyscrapers, through the blackness of night and the whiteness of day, until it is gone, with only a trail of smoke marking its passage. Through its journey, the track is continuous on every page.

The text is spare and simple, yet remarkably elegant.

   “A train runs across this track.

     Red caboose at the back

     Orange tank car next

     Yellow hopper car

     Green cattle car

     Blue gondola car

     Purple box car

     A Black tender and

     A Black steam engine.

     Freight train.”

As the train begins moving, the words change rhythm to evoke the klakity-klak of locomotion. There are only 55 words, but each is perfectly placed.

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Big Tiger and Christian

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Big Tiger and Christian by Fritz Muhlenweg

1950

Illustrated by Rafaello Busoni

 

Out of print for many years, this is a book that happens into hands by chance. It is read in appreciation and amazement and continues to haunt the reader for decades more. It is a book that has inspired travels and changed lives. Yet it is almost completely unknown.

 

The story begins, in part, with Sven Hedin, a renowned Swedish explorer in the grand tradition, who did much to fill in the white patches on the map of Central Asia. In the 20’s and 30’s, he lead the Sino-Swedish Expedition to Mongolia, the Gobi Desert, and Xinjiang, accompanied by an international bevy of archeologists, geologists, meteorologists, geographers, astronomers, botanists, zoologists. He was honored along the way by having a glacier, a lunar crater, and a butterfly (among other things) named after him.  My Life as an Explorer is a riveting travelogue.

The story continues, in part, with Fritz Muhlenweg. He was working as a young accountant with the new German airline, Lufthansa, when he was posted to Hedin’s expedition (Lufthansa’s interest was a proposed Peking-Berlin air route). He made three trips to Mongolia before settling into a career as a painter and writer.

Muhlenweg’s reverence for Mongolian culture is palpable in the tale that was inspired by his travels, and few books provide a deeper sense of place.  There are yurts, camel caravans, dunes, tamarisk trees, roasted barley, and language (try “zook, zook” if you want your camel to kneel). This is the backdrop that gives texture and depth to an adventure story that quietly enthralls. Two 12-year old boys, one European and one Chinese, go kite-flying in Peking and end up as secret couriers for General Wu. They embark on a 1,500 mile mission to Urumchi, on the far side of the Gobi Desert, by train, truck, horse, camel, and foot.  They encounter lamas, honorable bandits, dishonorable thieves, shepherds, traders, soldiers, warlords, wild monks, a nomadic girl, and a black poodle who have names like Dog, Sevenstars, Good Fortune, Affliction, Moonlight, and Thunderbolt. There is an evil villain named Greencoat and his nemesis, an outlaw king referred to as The Venerable Chief, a kind of Mongolian Robin Hood, and there is a hidden treasure in an abandoned desert city. Apart from the villain, who is irredeemably wicked, the characters are nuanced. Muhlenweg is sympathetic to even the roughest scallywags and in his hands they tend to rise to the occasion to reveal a hidden goodness.

 

 

 

 

Amos & Boris

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Amos & Boris by William Steig

1971

Illustrated by William Steig

For seven decades, William Steig was instrumental in defining the visual landscape of The New Yorker. At the age of 23, during the Depression, he sold his first cartoon to The New Yorker for $40. By the time of his death at 96, he had contributed over 1,600 cartoons and 200 covers to the magazine. At an age when most people are winding down, he launched his second career. He was around 60 when he published his first children’s book. His fortieth was published several months before his death. For productive longevity, he was unparalleled. He was also unmatched for his combined brilliance as an illustrator and writer.

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The most lyrical and poetic of his books is Amos & Boris, an ode to the transcendent friendship between a mouse and a whale. Amos, enterprising and adventurous, builds a boat and takes to the sea (fulfilling a boyhood longing that Steig harbored). One night, feeling at one with the universe, he rolls off his boat and it goes sailing on without him. After a night of loneliness and despair, alone in the vast ocean, he is rescued by Boris, and in their ensuing week together, an abiding friendship grows. Years later, Boris is beached during a violent storm and Amos is able to effect his rescue in turn.

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In this book, as in many of his, Steig quietly alludes to the ineffable questions that perplex us all. What are we doing here? What is it all about? What is our role in the scheme of things? And in Amos’s case, would there be other mice in heaven? Steig’s worldview is not angst-ridden, far from it. His tonal palette is playful, humorous, life-affirming, passionate and mysterious. His answers revolve around friendship, love, and family.

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Steig’s illustrations, supple India ink lines and watercolor washes, were created with a childlike spontaneity and pleasure. His prose is startling in its complexity, elegance, and sheer joy. Steig delighted in word play (“’Pheasant, peasant? What a pleasant present!’”) and archaic vocabulary (“churlish knave”, “fusty fens”). He had a precise verbal eye, as when Boris is rolled “breaded with sand” into the sea or when Amos listens to the surf sounds, “the bursting breakers, the backwashes with rolling pebbles”. Who else has ever written like this for children?

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Aside: “One night, in a phosphorescent sea, he marveled at the sight of some whales spouting luminous water; and later, lying on the deck of his boat gazing at the immense, starry sky, the tiny mouse Amos, a little speck of a living thing in the vast living universe, felt thoroughly akin to it all. Overwhelmed by the beauty and mystery of everything, he rolled over and over and right off the deck of his boat and into the sea.”

Great Expectations

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Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

1861

We first encounter Pip in a desolate churchyard in the marshes, visiting the tombstones of his parents and five infant brothers, grasping that he is truly an orphan and alone in the world. Out of the bleakness, he is violently accosted by Magwitch, the escaped convict, who demands a file for his shackles and wittles for his stomach. The marshlands – wild, mysterious, apocalyptic – their silence broken only, on occasion, by the mournful horn announcing the escape of a prisoner from a convict ship, are an apposite setting to join two figures, forever thereafter intertwined, each with a moral compass more nuanced than would be initially expected. Few books begin with a first chapter as haunting as this.

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Dickens was a master at creating memorable characters, many of whom have become household fixtures – Ebenezer Scrooge, Oliver Twist, Little Nell. And then there were others, less well-known, whose names alone should buy them immortality – Wackford Squeers, the Reverand Septimus Crisparkle, Uriah Heep, Uncle Pumblechook. Scoundrel and angel, miser and spendthrift, judge and beggar, orphan and whore – Dickens could paint them all, some as comic caricatures, some as nuanced characters of profound complexity. Arguably, his crowning creation was Miss Havisham, the reclusive spinster, jilted on her wedding day, whose life is a memorial to that betrayal, timepieces frozen to that moment. She wanders her cobwebbed mansion in her moldering bridal gown, past the desiccated wedding cake on the dusty banquet table, plotting her misandristic revenge by grooming the icy Estella, her beautiful ward, to break the hearts of men (beginning, most notably, with Pip’s).

Dickens was also a master story-teller. His books were serialized in weekly literary magazines, each installment being eagerly awaited by his enthusiastic audience. Great Expectations came towards the end of his illustrious career, by which time his craft was finely honed. Unlike some of his novels (“loose baggy monsters” according to the disdainful Henry James), Great Expectations is tightly structured. It melds all the Dickensian ingredients – gothic shadows and Victorian sentimentality, scathing satire and sympathy for the working poor, humorous parody and anguished tragedy, plot twists and social commentary, psychological depth and melodrama – into a really great story.

Given a chance, children love Dickens, a chapter at a time, ideally read before a blazing hearth. Great Expectations is a perfect place to start. A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, and David Copperfield are good to follow.

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Voyage to the Bunny Planet

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Voyage to the Bunny Planet by Rosemary Wells

1992

Illustrated by Rosemary Wells

Voyage to the Bunny Planet comes as a sweet boxed set with three slim volumes. It deserves pride of place in every nursery library, as much for parent as for newborn, for it serves as the perfect introduction to the upcoming adventure.

In each story, a young bunny child has a trying day. Take Felix in The Island Light. He suffers the humiliation of being sick in art class at school. The Soviet army-style nurse gives him scalding tea that burns his tongue. After a punitive visit to a doctor, he takes a distressingly icy shower. His parents, distracted by the malfunctioning boiler, neglect to kiss him goodnight.

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Janet the Bunny Queen soars down from her celestial kingdom and carries Felix off to the Bunny Planet. He passes through an archway and lives the day that should have been, described in rhyming couplets. On a small island, Felix and his lighthouse keeper father weather a storm in their snug home, make apple pancakes, play gin together before a fire. The comfort of the scene is palpable, as is the closeness of father and son.

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Of the 125+ books that she has written, Rosemary Wells said that Voyage to the Bunny Planet best describes her spiritual core. With wry humor and empathy, she presents a litany of the miserable or humiliating moments of childhood – each one of which strikes a chord of recognition. The alternate reality of the Bunny Planet captures the ineffable magic of childhood – harvesting the first warm tomato of the summer, helping the mother make a soup, falling asleep on a mossy forest floor, making toasted tangerine (“Place the sections on a log, directly in the sun. Wait until they’re warm and crisp. Eat them when they’re done.”) Rosemary Wells’ vision encompasses both the tribulations and the quiet joys of childhood, but the spirit of a benevolent world, here embodied by Janet the Bunny Queen, always prevails.

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Aside: Rosemary Wells is always on the side of the angels. She created Getting to Know You as a celebration of the glorious and timeless Rogers and Hammerstein songbook. Sing the songs and see the musicals – Oklahoma, Carousel, The King and I, South Pacific. From exuberant (“Shall We Dance?”) to lyrical (“When the Children Are Asleep”), from funny (“Happy Talk”) to poignant (“If I Loved You”), in the canon of Broadway musicals, it doesn’t get any better than this.

The Borrowers

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The Borrowers by Mary Norton

1952

Illustrated by Diana Stanley

Whether the toy is a twig doll with a hollyhock skirt and an acorn cup or a Lego figure from a Star Wars set, children like to enact their fantasies in a miniature world. Whatever the era, diminutive has always held fascination. There is a long chain of authors who have fed this interest in a parallel world of small, anchored at one end by Jonathan Swift. No one much remembers the giant Brobdingnagians, but the image of the tiny Lilliputians staking the sleeping Gulliver to the ground is one that stays. T.H White continued the Lilliput story in his imaginative Mistress Masham’s Repose. There have been a slew of other books of variable quality. But the queen of small people was clearly Mary Norton, the brilliant English writer who created The Borrowers.

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Pod is the hardworking straightforward father, Homily the anxious harassed mother, and Arriety the spirited and curious 13 year old girl. They live under the kitchen floorboards of an old Georgian house in the English countryside, home to Great Aunt Sophie, a bedridden invalid who enjoys a decanter of Fine Old Pale Madeira every evening between 6:00 and midnight. There was a time when the house was full of borrowers, but the shrinking of the human household was accompanied by the emigration of the borrower families until only one remains. They live by quietly garnering from their human hosts – tea, sugar cubes, and biscuits, silver coins for plates, a lace handkerchief for a bedspread, a Queen Victoria postage stamp to hang as a portrait, discarded letters to wallpaper the sitting room with the writing running up and down in vertical stripes. Arriety’s bedroom is made from cigar boxes, so her view is of feathery palm trees and chiffon swirled ladies.

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Their survival depends on their invisibility – only Pod leaves their home for his borrowing forays and the only human being who sees him is Great Aunt Sophy, who assumes their long conversations are a figment of her Madeira-soaked imagination. Their routine is upset when a young boy arrives, sent from India to convalesce from rheumatic fever. Arriety encounters him on her first borrowing expedition, and the consequences of their resultant friendship threaten the existence of the borrower family. They are forced to flee, and their lives are taken up in the sequel, The Borrowers Afield.

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Mary Norton wrote six borrower books over a thirty year period – this is a rare series in which the sequels do not disappoint. The writing is light and intelligent, the characters subtly complex, the details inventive, and the stories fresh and truthful. The Borrowers was awarded the Carnegie Medal and ranks among the top children’s books ever written.

IMG_3547-629x1024The English editions of all but the last in the series were illustrated by Diana Stanley, and it is well worth hunting for them. She captured the tone of Norton’s writing and the nuances of the borrowers’ often precarious life. The same cannot be said for the illustrators of the American editions, Beth and Joe Krush, who seemed to be overly preoccupied by Victorian frippery, a style that Norton did not countenance.

Anne Frank

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Anne Frank by Josephine Poole

2005

Illustrated by Angela Barrett

When the conceptual artists, Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock, created their Holocaust memorial in Berlin, they hung eighty signs on lampposts in a neighborhood that had once been home to a significant population of prosperous assimilated Jews. Each sign had a simple image (an empty bird cage, a loaf of bread) on one side, of the kind one might find on an alphabet chart. The other side was printed with one of the many anti-Semitic proclamations issued between 1933 and 1945 that effected a gradual and relentless marginalization of the Jewish community. There were the substantive bans – those that prohibited employment, school attendance, emigration. More shocking, perhaps, were the more trivial and spiteful bans, devised simply to humiliate, posted after deportation of Berlin Jews was well underway. “In bakeries and cafes, signs must be posted stating that Jews and Poles may not purchase cakes. February 14, 1942” or “Jews are no longer allowed to have household pets. February 15, 1942.”

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There is much about the Holocaust that is unfathomable, especially to children, but the sundering of a child from a pet is a detail to which anyone who has loved a dog or a cat or a canary can relate. In Amsterdam, when the Frank family went into hiding in the secret annex, Anne had to take leave of Moortje, her kitty. Josephine Poole’s picture book biography recounts this tearful farewell. Anne was an exceptional child, with her fiery spirit and eloquent voice, but she was also an ordinary girl who led a life that would have been quite ordinary had it not intersected Hitler’s rise. She had an entertaining father and friends with whom she liked to see movies and a comfortable apartment and an affectionate cat – a life, in other words, that was similar to that of many children reading her story.

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Josephine Poole’s book is a good introduction to Anne Frank, and it is particularly valuable for providing historical context. What sets it apart are the evocative illustrations by the talented Angela Barrett. She is drawn to historical tales, which she illustrates with eloquence and an air of melancholy (see her Snow White, Joan of Arc, or The Hidden House), and her rich and somber watercolors convey the arc of Anne’s short life with a quiet intensity.

Aside: “’We had a canary. When we received the notice that Jews are forbidden from keeping pets, my husband found it impossible to part from the animal. Every sunny day, he put the bird-cage out on the window sill. Perhaps someone reported him, because one day he was summoned to the Gestapo.… After living in fear for many weeks, the police sent a postcard stating that I must pay a fee of 3 Reichs-marks to pick up my husband’s ashes.’ Rupert, 1943.” Places of Remembrance.