The Little Bookroom

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.

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.

running away and following after

Margaret Wise Brown, The Runaway Bunny. Illustrated by Clement Hurd. New York: HarperCollins, 1942.

When a child is first able to walk and to run with ease, the urge to do so overtakes them, and they run everywhere. Adults dashing after the child only add to the delight of this game, the child chortling and running, running, running... But with this newfound ability come newfound fears--what if I run so fast and so far that they can never find me again?

This is where The Runaway Bunny comes in. When a child is caught in this moment of autonomy and its correspondent fears, this book is immensely consoling. A little bunny wants to run away. His mother assures him that she will run after him. But what if I change?, he wonders, what then? For every transformation that he can imagine, his mother imagines another that will allow her to stay close by without impinging on the transformation itself, until finally, he decides just to be her little bunny, and eat carrots with her.

Although the story is often deeply disturbing to adults, with its mother bunny who seems unable to let go, to let her child make his wn way into the world, the truth is that children who are experimenting with running away for the very first time in their lives, who are coming to grips with the notion that they can put so much space between themselves and those who love them as to be lost, it is an enormously comforting read.

being brave

My Four Lions. By Bernice Gold. Illustrated by Joanne Stanbridge. Toronto: Annick Press, 1999.

My Four Lions celebrates the power of the imagination to sustain us through the challenges of every day. On the title page, a boy prepares to leave his classroom, his backpack on his back, and a beautiful picture of a lion that he has drawn half-rolled in his hand. Across the copyright page and the page of acknowledgements, he trudges through snowy streets in the blue light of early dusk. As he walks through the darkening streets, up the stairs and down the halls of his apartment building on the left-hand pages, we see into the world of his imagination on the right-hand pages. For while in fact he walks bundled in the cold thin light of winter, in his mind—and in the words of the story—he walks through summery woods to his camp to meet with his friends, four lions who guard his campfire. As he enters the empty apartment, we see him take down from a shelf the box containing the four paper lions who guard him in his mother’s absence. He feeds them and tells them stories, “to make them stay brave.” And on his mother’s smiling return home, pizza in hand, he shows her the picture he has drawn at school, while the lions of his imagination smile benevolently upon them from his bedroom: “And I know when I sleep they will guard me till morning.” The respect for the courage of children is palpable here. This is a wonderful story.

darkness and dragons

There’s a Dragon Downstairs. By Hilary McKay. Illustrated by Amanda Harvey. New York: Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2003.

Every night, tucked safe in bed, Sophie hears a dragon rattling in through the cat flap, slinking into the living room, growing and growing in the dark. Frightened, she goes to her parents’ room, and her mother sweetly and smilingly brings her downstairs to show her the utter absence of dragons. But Sophie continues to hear it at night. Her many efforts to frighten it away disguised as a knight, a firefighter and a princess likewise fail. But when she resolves to go downstairs as herself, she solves the mystery at the heart of her fear. Hilary McKay wonderfully describes the ways in which nighttime fears evaporate in daylight only to return at dusk, while Amanda Harvey’s soft watercolors reassure young listeners that everything will be alright long before the outcome of the story is clear.

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.