The Little Bookroom

Farley Mowat, Owls in the Family. Illustrated by Robert Frankenberg. New York: Bantam, 1961.

Owls in the Family is a great comic novel, wonderful for reading aloud to children of seven and up, or for reading alone around the age of eight. It’s the story of a boy growing up on the Saskatchewan prairie between the wars who has absolute freedom to explore. In the course of his wanderings, he rescues not one but two orphaned owls, and brings them home, adding them to a backyard menagerie that includes gophers, rats, rabbits, and garter snakes. Based on Mowat’s own childhood, this is considered a Canadian classic, and with good reason.

dark is...

Jill Tomlinson, The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark. Illustrated by Susan Hellard. (London, 1968).

The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark is one of a series Tomlinson wrote for young readers, all of which focus on animals facing unexpected challenges. This is one of the best.

Plop is a baby owl who is afraid of the dark--largely because he doesn't understand what it is. When his mother asks him what he knows about the dark, he answers that it is black, and she responds, "'Well, that's wrong for a start. It can be silver or blue or gray or lots of other colors, but almost never black.'" And so she decides that he must spend some time outside the nest to learn about the dark.

On his first night, he encounters a boy of seven who can't wait for it to be dark so that he can see the night's fireworks, and from this boy he learns that dark is exciting. Next, an old lady tells him that dark is kind, hiding age and wear and shabbiness from view. A Boy Scout tells him that dark is fun, enhancing children's games; a little girl, that dark is necessary for Father Christmas to arrive. Still other encounters provide other perspectives on the dark, until, at last Plop is convinced that dark is super.

If you don't mind the overt references to Christmas, this is a great book for newish readers--long enough to feel like a real chapter book, but not too hard, funny and engaging, with a charming protagonist. A lovel picture book edition came out recently, but I was disappointed to find that the text had been abridged. Fin the real thing if you can.

one hundred years at least

Tony Johnston, The Barn Owls. Illustrated by Deborah Kogan Ray. Watertown, MA: Charlesbridge Publishing, 2000.

This is such a quiet book. "The barn has stood in the wheat field one hundred years at least." It shelters the barn owls, who wake by day and by night, who call and are answered or not answered, who hunt and hatch their eggs, among the mice and spiders and snakes who share the barn with them, as they have always done. Like other great nonfiction books for preschoolers, The Barn Owls is precise and poetic in its language, and powerful in its images--one painting of an owl in flight prompted a three-year-old reader to observe that it looked like a woman wearing a white cape stretching out her arms. And it is in this way that young children's interest in the world around them, especially the unseen world of the night (or, for many children, the world of the countryside), is sustained--not with the multiplicity of facts that enthrall the oldest elementary school children, nor even anthropomorphic narratives that charm those just beginning school, but rather with this steady gaze, this rhythmic repetition, this linking of time and nature, of owls and mice, of barns and animals.

coming home

Martin Waddell, Owl Babies. Illustrated by Patrick Benson. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press, 1992.

"Once there were three baby owls: Sarah and Percy and Bill." So begins this brilliant and beautiful book about being together and being apart. It is so well known at this point that I almost hesitate to recommend it, but I ca't not do so.

The owls live in a hole in a trunk of a tree with their mother. One night when they wake up, she is gone. Each owlet reponds to the situation in characteristic fashion: Sarah thinks things through, Percy expands upon her explanation, and Bill plaintively just wants their mother back. As they wait in the dark of the night and the forest, more frightened than they say, Sarah organizes them: "I think we should all sit on my branch." Then even she begins to lose faith in their mother's return. "And he baby owls closed their owl eyes and wished their Owl Mother would come." When she does, it is with a majesty that her affectionate scolding does nothing to undermine.

There are few picture books that so deeply communicate the feelings of their characters as does this one. Patrick Benson's close focus on the owlets renders their individuality and their samenesses, and when he (only once) allows us to see them in the vastness of the forest, we see their terrible vulnerability.

This is a wonderful book to share with a child who is struggling with the arbitrary comings and goings of the adult world, with feeling small in a very big world, with trusting that people always come back.

fear lends wings

Wolf Erlbruch, Mrs. Meyer the Bird (New York: Orchard Books, 1997).

This is an amazing book, real and surreal in a way that few American offerings are. (Chris Van Allsburg's work does come to mind by way of comparison, but the photo-realism of his paintings lends his work a verisimilitude that grounds his work more firmly in the real than Erlbruch's cartoonish drawings see to do.)

Here, in the wordless double-page spread that opens the book, we see Mrs. Meyer at her daily tasks, ironing, stopping for a cup of tea, dusting, as pale green object-thoughts float from her head. On the next age we discover that "Mrs. Meyer worried about everything." Mr. Meyer, by contrast, is carefree. She worries about that a bus might skid around the corner into her front yard. Would she have enough to feed the injured passengers? Would they like the food? And so it goes, from one worry to the next, until she finds a tiny naked bird in the garden. Its neediness spurs her into action. She nests the little creature in her husband's hat and feeds it day and night. It grows into a beautiful blackbird, but one which seems unable to fly. She names it Lindberg.

Mrs. Meyer begins to worry again. Has she not cared for Lindy adequately? But her pragmatism has not deserted her. She climbs a tree with the bird in her apron pocket, then sets him on the branch beside her, and begins flapping her arms up and down, hoping that Lindy will imitate her. But he does not. "Had she fed Lindy the wrong bugs? Or was he really a small penguin? And if he really was, how did he end up in her garden?"

Despite her worries, Mrs. Meyer rises to the crisis again. She knows what she must do: "She took a deep breath, spread her arms, stepped off the branch, and into the air." She flies. Still Lindy resists, until she nudges him off the branch. Together they fly over the fields until it is time to go home for tea.

A charming and puzzling book for young readers, who delight in the ridiculous, and wonder in the marvelous.