The Little Bookroom

telling it again

Mary Pope Osbone, Kate and the Beanstalk. Illustrated by Giselle Potter. (New York: Aladdin Books, 2000.)

The story of Jack and the beanstalk always frightened me as a child--and not just the giant himself. The rage of Jack's mother, his stupidity, the giant's cupidity, the unjustness of the ending--all of it horrified me. But here is a reworking of the tale that is tremendously satisfying because of its emphasis on justness.

Kate and her mother are terribly poor, and so are forced to sell their only cow at market. But on her return, Kate encounters a beggar who offers her a handful of magic beans that shine like dark gold. Her mother, however, is despairing, and throws the beans out the window. Kate, unable to sleep that night, goes into the garden, where she discovers a gigantic beanstalk that stretches into the clouds. And she climbs it.

She arrives in another country, where an old woman tells her the story of a noble knight murdered for his treasures, his wife and child spared only by their absence, but suffering now in terrible poverty. The return of the treasure that is rightfully theirs would save them. Kate determines to help them. She enters the castle not once but three times to rescue each precious object, and only then does she discover the whole truth of the castle.

Potter's stylized drawings strike just the right note here, dramatizing the story while removing it from the realm of the real.

metafiction for children

I'm sorry about yesterday--we're all getting better, but things seem to be moving at a snail's. And one child's interruption led to the loss of yesterday's work. But here I am with...

Catherine and Laurence Anholt, Come Back, Jack! (Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press, 1993).

The endpapers of this little book are filled with nursery rhymes, and the title page features a picture of two little children sitting together over a book. "There was once a little girl who didn't like books," this story begins. But her little brother Jack does, and one day, when she is supposed to be watching him, he disappears into his book. She hurries after him, to find herself standing on a hill, listening to the sound of crying--it's Jill at the bottom, just having tumbled down. But Jack has moved on. His heroic sister follows him through one rhyme after another, until at last they emerge from the book. The Anholts always create such sweet confections of children that this slight book is hard to resist, and tremendously exciting for those who can see the delicate web of references being built.