The Little Bookroom

the limits of friendship

Angel Square. By Brian Doyle. Toronto: Groundwood Books, 1984.

Angel Square is one of a group of novels by Brian Doyle, collectively entitled The Low Life, that explore life in Ontario between 1890 and 1950. Tommy, the narrator, is determined to discover the identity of the man who beat up his best friend Sammy’s father. “It was because he’s Jewish. Some people around here don’t like you if you’re Jewish,” says his aunt Dottie. With the help of his best friends Coco and Gerald, Tommy negotiates the rigid ethnic boundaries of his neighborhood in the guise of The Shadow, pursuing his love for a schoolgirl, and trying to buy the right Christmas presents for his family all at the same time. This mystery takes on religious hatred without ever losing either its comic tone or the genuine menace that lurks in the Ottawa of the 1940s, nor does it compromise by offering an unmitigatedly happy ending. It is absolutely brilliant, and you must not miss it.

make new friends

My Name is Yoon. By Helen Recorvits. Illustrated by Gabi Swiatkowska. New York: Frances Foster Books, 2003.

Yoon comes from Korea to the United States with her parents. Soon after their arrival, in preparation for her new school, her father shows her how to write her name in English. “I did not like YOON. Lines. Circles. Each standing alone.” At school, the teacher also encourages her to write her name. But instead she writes CAT, preferring to be a cat, a cat that could hide in the corner and cuddle up close to her mother. The next day, Yoon is BIRD, a bird who could fly back to Korea. But that day she also shows her teacher the picture she has drawn of a robin, and gestures to demonstrate the similarity between the robin’s red breast and her own red dress. On the playground, a girl shares a cupcake with Yoon, who becomes CUPCAKE, a cupcake that she imagines her schoolmates would greet with excited delight. When finally she is YOON, her teacher embraces her and calls her by her true name. This book is all about the delicate gestures of friendship: smiling, sharing food, recognizing each other.

my friend

My Friend John. By Charlotte Zolotow. Illustrated by Amanda Harvey. New York: Doubleday, 2000.

There aren’t enough books for children about the profound intimacy that they share in a friendship. This book is about just that. Charlotte Zolotow’s spare, deeply felt text begins, “I know everything about John and he knows everything about me,” and concludes, “and everything important about each other we like.” In between, readers uncover the secret knowledge that these friends share, the rules that guide them, the ways in which they witness one another’s suffering and seek to mitigate that suffering. Amanda Harvey’s illustrations burst with energy. Together they show how much better the world is when you have a friend.

no one was with her when she died

We read Charlotte's Web aloud again. It is, of course, one of the great classics of U.S. children's literature in part because of the delicacy with which it handles the problems of social relationships: what it is to be alone and what it is to be a friend. But more than ever before, it struck me on this reading as a profound introduction to American culture. The riffs on boxing (as Charlotte recounts the story of her cousin catching the fly), and on religion (when Mr. Arable goes to tell the minister about the miracle of the web), on the dreariness of scientific authority (when Dr. Dorian muses to Mrs. Arable about the likelihood of animal speech) and the canniness of observation (when Mrs. Zuckerman observes that it is Charlotte rather than Wilbur who is extraordinary), the peculiar combination of the comic and the lyrical--all of these share some self-mocking quality that is intrinsic to the best of American culture, a refusal to take entirely seriously those things that we embrace, an awareness of their rootedness in a particular time and place.

My daughter claimed never to have heard it before, though I was sure I had already read it with her--and sure enough, there were passages that had her laughing, and saying, "Oh. I remember this part!" But there were things she had forgotten, too, big things--like the death of Charlotte. "Last Day," the chapter in which she dies, makes it very clear that Charlotte will not survive--Charlotte herself says so. But rather than allow her death to become the focus of the chapter, White redirects the readers' attention to the Wilbur's determination to do something for the friend he adores, and to the manner of her death: "No one was with her when she died." So the genius of this book, it seems to me, is that the death of the heroine is not the end of the story. And as a result, children are allowed to grieve her death in the context of a life that goes on, in the context of the life she was so determined to save--in the context of Wilbur's life. Their grief is therefore, the grief we feel for the loss of a beloved friend, not the grief and terror we may feel in the face of death itself. The specificity of Charlotte's death allows children to see that death is indeed a part of life, and that life goes on--not uncaringly or callously, but that it goes on nonetheless, and that we can continue to feel joy in it.

And then a few days later, I read this op-ed in the New York Times on hog farming and the appalling conditions in which pigs are currently raised, and the specter of death that hangs over Wilbur seemed so much less terrifying than the lives these pigs lead. See it for yourself here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/14/opinion/14niman.html?em&ex=1174190400&en=9c89521e6d388787&ei=5070

And then I went looking for humanely raised pork. So if you eat meat, as we do on occasion, you might want to know about Eat Wild, where you can locate producers of pastured-raised animals. Look here: http://www.eatwild.com/index.html