Children's books Mature subjects for young readers
Donnelly, Daria
'This land is your land* Daria Donnelly 0n illicit love affair. Physician-assisted suicide. Bi-sexuality. Musings on the irrelevance of marriage. Suitable subjects for your favorite Commonweal...
...For me, there is one false note in this smart, large novel...
...Good art causes disturbance, and for disturbance you cannot beat fairy tales...
...I cannot imagine how she felt painting the implosion of the buildings: the raw energy of her brushstrokes is perfectly counterpointed by her spare text...
...What happened to Woody and me," Houston remarked, "are just mistakes of nature, things that will someday be overcome...
...Guthrie was America's troubadour, a singer who recorded and protested the evils of his time-segregation, Depression-era poverty, fascism-with rage and humor...
...Her latest, Sajfy's Angel (Margaret K. McElderry, $16,152 pp., ages 8-12), involves a girl's search for the stone angel that will connect her to her dead mother and grandfather...
...My favorite scene: after two harrowing stints in the Merchant Marine, Woody lands back in New York, grabs his guitar and hurries to the home of Pete Seeger, of whom Woody earlier had said: "I can't make him out...
...Pain, suffering, art, war, infidelity, love, and sacrifice...
...Chambers is closer in age to that war generation, yet he clearly relishes contemporary life, including its challenges (starting with young people's felt irrelevance...
...Cornelia Funke's The Thief Lord (Scholastic, $16.95, 349 pp., ages 8 and up) follows the fortunes of a band of homeless children in contemporary Venice...
...For four days, the Harvey, manned by these improvising amateurs under the direction of her retired NYFD Captain Bob Lenney, pumped inferno-fighting water from the river...
...His eyes are closed...
...But doing so also reveals that Chambers's narrative technique has never been so successful or so illuminating as in Postcards...
...That is the lack of attention given to the issues of pain and palliative care surrounding Geertrui and her decision (which gravely upsets the characters) to seek physician-assisted suicide...
...It is simply that because of events their actions have more gravity...
...Overlook the stock characters in Margaret McAllister's The Octave of Angels (Eerdmans, $16, 119 pp., ages 9 and up...
...There are sketches sent home to his children during his stint as a World War II battlefield artist...
...The young people who rose to the awful (and the stress is on awful) challenges of World War II are radiantly like their confreres fifty years on...
...In one exchange, Daan, Geertrui's grandson, and Jacob express Chambers's view of what novels are and what they should do...
...Kalman's pictures are fabulous: boldly colored, and, like her picture book Next Stop Grand Central, wittily journalistic, with every face individual and fresh...
...Children champion objects others think they have outgrown...
...They first reflect the book's subject, but the final ones depict monks and musicians, fountains, archways, and food...
...Standing before a painting by Rembrandt, Jacob says: "All art is love, because all art is about looking closely...
...But has the village's hospitality toward strangers improved...
...She is the master of comic indirection...
...They were glad to be alive and together...
...In Partridge's vivid telling, not just Woody comes alive but also Marjorie, his mother (who died of Huntington's in a mental hospital), his father, his first wife Mary, and a slew of associates and friends, his closest being the musician Cisco Houston...
...She also knows how to select pictures that are worth even more than a thousand words...
...I realize this is a novel and not a medical treatise, but young people should know, at least in passing, that the pain associated with advanced, terminal diseases can largely be controlled if doctors have the proper training...
...Look at the picture and decide...
...Think of The Little Engine That Could and The Velveteen Rabbit...
...She also acknowledges the cultural transformations that make these stories both important yet difficult to pass on...
...The means to eternal youth is hidden in Venice but, with the help of Ida Spavento, patroness of the orphanage of the Merciful Sisters, the children find something even better: a loving home...
...Her first biography was of the great photographer Dorothea Lange...
...Woody, who spent the last years of his life in an institution, unable to play music, is framed by two guitar players from the Terriers...
...Does anyone capture the foibles of parents with as much wit and forgiveness as Hilary McKay...
...He is still and present to the music...
...Maira Kalman, veteran New Yorker artist, has done it...
...Reading the novels together reveals Chambers's consistent focus on intellectually intense adolescents and on his expressed view that "writing and reading literature is a moral and a religious matter...
...So do Geertrui and the elder Jacob...
...Pleasure, both sybaritic and stolid, was a major object of the attention of British illustrator Edward Ardizzone (1900-79), as revealed in the collection, Sketches for Friends (David Godine, $19.95, 127 pp., adults...
...Though his young-adult novels share no characters and use narrative quite differently, all five, including Breaktime (1978), Dance on My Grave (1982), and The Toll Bridge (1992), are, says Chambers, a sequence...
...You won't find those here...
...Is it possible to make a great picture book about September 11...
...She prefers their raw folk power and still shocking ambiguity...
...These operatic picture books concern a fetchingly modest young boy and his adventures at sea...
...NOT for-* gotten...
...These are writ large in the life of Woody Guthrie, as told by Elizabeth Partridge in This Land Was Made for You and Me: The Life and Songs of Woody Guthrie (Viking, $21.99,217 pp., ages 12 and up...
...Juxtaposed narrative is a familiar style for Chambers, a former Anglican monk...
...There was much in Woody's life to leaven the agonies, however, and the infectious joy of his music making has never seemed clearer...
...And it does the heart good to know that one of the world's most famous children's illustrators spent more than a few afternoons writing imaginary letters in which he plays both an ad man for the Cumfi-Corset Company and his exasperated supervisor, begging the former to stop drawing half-naked women because the ads are aimed at genteel ladies...
...It is a well-told tale...
...that my thoughts, feelings, vocational choices, even the expressions of my most intimate desires are shaped by my era, its values, and its events...
...Come, stop crying and be a brave boy...
...On the next page stands one of his last songs, "God O God O God my God/God O God my God my God/ My God my God my God O God/ It's God my God O God O God...
...The heroes who died will be remembered forever...
...Chambers does many things beautifully in this novel: creates a real city, captures the way travel cracks one open, shows how vital the young are...
...For a reprieve, here are three breezy books for the middle reader...
...Jacob, and his hosts in Amsterdam-Daan, Ton, and Hille-fully embody the self-scrutiny, courtesy, curiosity, bravado, and sexual liveliness of the young...
...Deliriously wicked adults, along with loving, eccentric ones, iu&ke this a fun read...
...His Carnegie Medal-winning novel, Postcards from No Man's Land (Dutton, $19.99,312 pp., ages 16 and up), touches all these subjects as it masterfully weaves together two stories...
...My favorite photo opens the final chapter...
...One of my young test readers said she liked this book because it was "funny...
...Well, yes, in the hands of British storyteller Aidan Chambers...
...He is admirarly perceptive about adolescents...
...He doesn't look at girls, he doesn't drink, he doesn't smoke, the fellow's weird...
...Something new will be built...
...A man of prodigious energy, Guthrie wrote three thousand songs in two decades, crisscrossing America many times, performing for audiences large and small, rich and poor...
...When you read his childhood story (with its parallels to America's other great song man, Walt Whitman) you will understand Woody's desire to lose himself on the road, with a woman, or in a bottle...
...She wisely starts the story well before September 11, showing what New York was like in the 1930s,when the Harvey patrolled the Hudson...
...These days, that's very welcome...
...We are bound for Davy Jones's locker and tears won't help us now...
...A storm brews (as it does in every book), peril follows, and the evacuating seamen forget all about Tim, "so small and frightened that nobody noticed him...
...A brilliant observer, she is this book's spiritual center...
...Best is how he juxtaposes young people shaped by the mores of contemporary Amsterdam to the reserved boys and girls of the so-called greatest generation...
...He had many personal demons...
...When he hears Woody downstairs talking to his wife, he grabs his banjo, and the two soldier survivors play song after song together before even a hug or a hello...
...Suitable subjects for your favorite Commonweal child and grandchild...
...So much for the tough stuff...
...He heads to the bridge where the captain, who has refused to abandon ship, thusly consoles: '"Hello my lad...
...Writes Partridge "It was impossible to tell: Was his song an agonized cry for help, or a transcendent cry of joy...
...Tatar traces various efforts to sanitize the tales...
...Kalman captures the can-do spirit of New York...
...These work to keep the whole manageable for children but not sanitized...
...Be sure to notice the book's endpaper sketches...
...For even more melodrama and genre and gender play try Tim and Charlotte, Maurice Sendak's favorite...
...Painting...
...The two served in the Merchant Marine during World War II, and Houston's life would also be cut short-by stomach cancer...
...If you aren't familiar with Ardizzone's books, start with his unparalleled ten-volume Tim series...
...When those friends heard that planes had crashed into New York's tallest buildings, they jumped onto the Harvey and rushed to the site...
...Harvard professor Maria Tatar collects twenty-six in The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales (Norton, $35,445 pp., all ages...
...In their atmosphere, the three stories have a Catholic shimmer...
...He felt he would not mind going anywhere with the captain, even to Davy Jones's locker...
...A small English village prepares for its annual octave, established hundreds of years before when the abbot of the local, now-ruined monastery commanded villagers to fast and repent for eight days following the death of a young boy they had refused to help...
...For example, when Tim stows away in the inaugural 1936 Tim and the Brave Sea Captain (Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, $15.99, ages 5 and up), the captain does not get him home but rather issues a stern lecture and sets Tim to work scrubbing the deck...
...The risks: nostalgia, sentimentality, chastisement...
...Tough subjects, small people...
...that this reduces neither the intensity nor the importance of my experiences, but rather my sense of aloneness...
...Her Fire-boat: The Heroic Adventures of the John }. Harvey (Putnam, $16.99, ages 7 and up) is based on the true story of the Harvey (www.fireboat.org), a retired New York City fireboat that had been saved from the scrap heap by an association of friends...
...The first charts the transforming visit of seventeen-year-old Jacob Todd to Amsterdam to honor his namesake and grandfather, a British soldier who died in a nearby town in World War II...
...Send Ted a bottle of wine as a thank you and you might get a witty watercolor in return, of dancing bottles perhaps, or himself as Viking chief, or a happy character imbibing in some lovely pastoral...
...That's not nearly as great a tragedy as millions of people blown to hell in a war which could be avoided...
...Seeger had just finished his own army service...
...Opposite are the lyrics to one of his late, religious songs: "Christ youre still my best doctor/Jesus youre still my best doctor...
...Why does the book work...
...Her idiosyncratic notes, choice of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century illustrations, generous biographies and bibliographies make this a handsome volume...
...And since the experience of pain is perhaps more varied than other sensations, on this ground alone it deserves greater attention and imaginative treatment...
...Because Kalman eschews the genre of tragedy for something more familiar to children...
...And, it turns out, to her wonderfully eccentric adoptive family as well...
...The Harvey is back to being a very happy boat...
...The dual stories in Postcards provide rich opportunities for the adolescent reader to entertain certain facts that all of us find hard to acknowledge: that I am not the first person to have thought or felt a particular way...
...Or why not imagine that the cry, like that of Jesus, is both...
...She remained faithful even when he did not, and saw him through the days and years when Hunt-ington's disease ravaged his mind and made him erratic and menacing...
...I think she meant joyful, because something, even on that horrific day, is rescued...
...The festival is now a moneymaker...
...Daan concurs: "All true art, yes...
...So do the melodramatic children and action...
...NOT useless...
...Writing-literature-also...
...NOT scrapped...
...You may not like every character in Postcards (I did not) or what they do, but each is formed by a writer trying to pay keen attention, as Anne did...
...Angela Carter and, more recently, Adam Gopnik have drawn attention to the effect that the sexual revolution has had on understanding and on revising old tales...
...The fun for adults is watching childhood fantasies of how adults act...
...His 1987 novel, NIK: Now 1 Know, was about a teenage boy's intense (even mad) search to understand Christian faith...
...He was fortunate in his choice of his second wife, the dancer Marjorie Greenblatt Mazia, who embodied fortitude and care...
...The hydrants west of the World Trade Center were defunct...
...She ends after that grim day, following the recognition and awards the Harvey received, beginning the final pages: "Now the Twin Towers are gone...
...They stood hand in hand and waited for the end...
...The second is the first-person memoir of dying Dutch woman, Geertrui, who, as a teenager, hid, cared for, and loved that first Jacob Todd...
...Kalman ended this way instinctively, she says, allowing herself to draw what gives pleasure...
...Partridge knows how to tell a story...
...And bad art is the failure to observe with complete attention...
...And so does Anne Frank, young Jacob's (and Chambers's) favorite writer...
...As I read, I wondered if the certainty of our food supply has not equally altered how we think about our lives and equally prompted us to search for hidden meanings in these stories' hard facts...
Vol. 130 • April 2003 • No. 7
