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.

early readers

Wolfram Hanel, The Other Side of the Bridge (New York: North-South Books, 1996).

Finding compelling books for the youngest of the "middle readers" (that group of readers aged 8-12) who are still just getting comfortable with reading to themselves, can be  real challenge. So many early readers feel babyish to these children. They understandably want books that engage them intellectually and emotionally without overwhelming them with the task of reading. Hanel's The Other Side of the Bridge fits the bill nicely.

The hero, Andy, is a boy who loves nature. One day, he decides to go into the woods to look for spring. He walks far, tremendously far, until he reaches an old wooden bridge that everyone is afraid to cross because on the other side of it lives Old Jaspar, about whom there are terrible stories. But Andy wants to see if spring has come to other side of the bridge. And sure enough, he discovers that there are flowers in bloom there!

He is so absorbed in them that he doesn't notice the growing dark and the cold and the rain. Not until it has begun to snow does he observe the change in the weather. And then he can't retrace his steps--the snow has transformed the landscape. He is lost and alone. As he wanders through the snow, he stumbles upon a rabbit, and they continue together until Andy, too cold and tired to go on, lies down in the snow and dreams...

The satisfying resolution sees Andy not only safely home but reinstated among his peers in an equally happy way.

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.

Sleep Well, Little Bear

Letting go and going to sleep is such a hard thing for little children to do. And so stories about the process abound. You probably had a favorite one as a child yourself. Here's a lovely one by Quint Buchholz that is still in print--you may also find it at the library.

Quint Buchholz, Sleep Well, Little Bear. (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994). A little stuffed bear gets ready for bed, but even after changing into his pajamas, and hearing a story, and saying a prayer, and singing a song, and getting five kisses, a drink of water from the blue cup, and putting on his sleeping socks, and having someone blow warm air under the covers, he still can't go to sleep. He is not tired. So he gets out of bed and builds a staircase of books to the window, where he gazes out on the landscape illuminated by moonlight. Everywhere he looks, he sees traces of the events of the day--a shirt fluttering in the breeze on the dock, the sound of a violin, the lights of the barge. The pace and language of this book are so slow and peaceful, it's impossible not feel sleepy yourself.

A view from abroad

Why read international children’s books? Because doing so helps us—children and adults alike—to understand the ways in which we are similar and different. When we carry each other’s stories in our hearts, we are more compassionate with each other. Yet in any recent year, only about 1% of books in print or in libraries in the United States are translations from other languages into English. Books originally published in English in other countries are more numerous on our shelves, but awareness of their country of origin is not always explicit. For those of us who live in the United States, physically isolated from so much of the world, it is essential that we find a way to foster a sense of community with the rest of the world. For young children, books are a good beginning.

Every other month, or whenever I can manage it, I'll alternate between reviews of books originally published in English and books originally published in a language other than English, so as to achieve the greatest coverage of the international titles that are currently available in the United States. At the same time, I will make an effort to provide meaningful geographical coverage, reviewing books not only from Europe, but also from Asia, Africa, and the Americas. I cannot provide a thorough examination of each national or regional literature that I take up, as in every region in which one exists it is far too rich to be examined in its entirety. Rather, I hope to open the door onto another world of writing, another way of understanding childhood, to see who else is writing for children, what the world looks like to them, and how they hope to help children to make sense of that world.

Starting now (well, really starting last Friday), I'll be looking at books from Germany. Of late, Cornelia Funke and Kai Meyer have been exciting tremendous international interest as German authors for middle readers and young adults. But what about other works by German authors? Here's a charming one for babies and toddlers, rare since books for such young children are infrequently translated--probably because many books for the youngest readers are wordless, and seem therefore not to need translation. In practice, of course, this means that they tend not published for audiences other than the original one. Look for this in the library, or via inter-library loan.

Helmut Spanner, Mouse in the Kitchen (New York: St. Martin's, 1995). This wordless book for babies and toddlers consists of a series of twelve images printed on a heavy folding panel, six images to a side. A fuzzy brown mouse explores a single kitchen utensil in each picture. And while some of the objects are immediately familiar, others--the bundt pan, the metric scale--are redolent of another place. Most charming of all is the picture f the mouse next to the bottle opener, crowned with a bottle cap. A great introduction to another culture for the very young.

happy birthday, erich kastner

It's Erich Kastner's birthday today. He's the author of many books for children, the best-known of which is Emil and the Detectives.

Emil is a wonderful, light-hearted mystery. It concerns the young Emil Tischbein who lives with his widowed mother in the town of Neustadt. Frau Tischbein, who works as a hairdresser, scrimps and saves on a regular basis to send money to her own mother, who lives in Berlin. But this quarter, she's late with the money, and to make up for it, decides to send Emil himself to Berlin to hand-deliver the expected sum. He is dispatched with many warnings not to lose the money and not to get off at the wrong station. But who could have known that he would share the train compartment with such an odd assortment of people, among them the sinister Man in the Bowler Hat....

Despite his valiant efforts to remain awake on the train, Emil drifts off to sleep, dreams a terrible dream, and awakens alone to find that his money is gone--stolen from the inner breast pocket of his jacket to which it had been pinned! And as the Man in the Bowler Hat had been the last person remaining in the compartment, Emil is convinced that this man must be the thief. So when he sees a bowler hat in the crowd leaving the platform at the station before his own, he makes the hasty decision to follow it in the desperate hope of reclaiming the money.

Fortunately, Emil attracts friends as well as enemies, from a friendly gentleman on Tram 177 who pays his fare, to Gustav, and two dozen of his friends, who decide to help Emil recover his property. And so they set up an elaborate rota to tail the thief, and ultimately, to confront him.

For a child, this book is pure magic, the perfect fantasy of defying the pitiless power of the adult world. And it is compelling, because Emil and his friends are believable children with the feelings of such children: "The city was so large, and Emil was so small. And no-one was interested in knowing why he had no money and why he did not know where he was going to get off the tram. Four million people lived in Berlin and not one of them was interested in Emil Tischbein.... What was going to happen? Emil swallowed hard and felt very unhappy and lonely." And by exploiting their abilities as children--to make alliances with each other, to run wild in the street, to play at hide-and-seek, to devise secret codes, and to eat on the run--they are able to vanquish the evils of that other world.

For an adult reader, there is a heart-breaking quality to the book, as well. Emil belongs to that generation born during the First World War. He is therefore destined to serve in the Second World War. The gaiety, the insolence, and the urbanity of this interwar moment, as perceived from the child's point of view, is soon to vanish, and the meaning of the dangers of trains to be utterly transformed. But for this moment, children can band together and defy the corruption and the stupidity, the slyness and the rigidity of the adult world. Read this with children of six and up.