Can we make some broad categories of how parents are represented in children’s books? I was reading All-of-a-kind Family to Sylvia tonight and thinking, the portrayal of Mama is really nauseating — it’s not enough for her to be wide awake instantly when she hears Sarah crying, the narrator has to say “wide awake as she always was when she knew one of her children needed her” (quoted inexactly from memory). And this type of portrayal is pretty common I think — I seem to remember the parents in the Little House books being painted at every turn as superlatively competent, and I’m sure there are many other similar titles I’m not thinking of right now. What are some other parental types?

Danny Champion of the World came to mind right away. My memory of it is pretty unclear but I seem to remember Danny’s father being very competent, yes, but in a pretty roguish way — is that an accurate memory? Moominmamma (who may be sui generis) is loving and motherly but quite unconcerned with always knowing what to do. Absent parents of course abound. What else? Are there any parents who are presented as actively incompetent, always messing things up, without being “bad guys”? Are there any parents who are presented as bad guys — talking about children’s books here, not young adult where bad parents are a common trope.

I think it bears repeating (though I’ve said it many times before) just how much the quality of a good children’s book is improved through reading it aloud. It brings out the rhythm of the language much more strongly than does the silent recitation you do when you’re reading to yourself; and rhythm is, so I think, a key attribute of a good children’s book.

By way of example, after I read Redfox’s post on Food, I ordered The Magic Pudding. It arrived a week or so ago and I enjoyed reading it over a couple of nights. Tonight I started reading it to Sylvia for bedtime stories, and wow — it is such a fun book! The poems hold together much better when chanted and the shanties when sung. My reaction to reading it aloud was much stronger than it had been to reading it to myself and it served as a good reminder that books like this are intended to be read aloud.

One other note: I see several text-only editions of this book on Amazon, and it seems weird to me. The pictures are at least half the book!

(Cross-posted from READIN.)

The whole book The Magic Pudding is a huge amount of fun; but the last chapter is a big improvement over the rest in terms of the author’s confidence and command of his voice. The rhyming and doggerel are more clever and inventive. The characters grow to fill out their roles in a way that they don’t, really, in the first three chapters. And the courtroom sequence is just hilarious.

Well… not Snow t’be sure. But I just got his new book of essays, Other Colors, and it contains at least 3 pieces that make excellent reading-out-loud material: “I’m Not Going To School”, which is in the voice of his daughter Rüya and lacks the funny ending of Silverstein’s like-titled piece; “Rüya and Us”; and “When Rüya is Sad”. I say “at least” because I just opened the book at random when I was with my daughter and happened on this trio. (Sylvia was into it enough that when I finished one piece she would ask to hear the next.)

Update: On further reading, it seems like these pieces are among the short sketches he wrote for the humor magazine Oküz, and that several of the others in this group would also be good for reading to kids.

Update, the next day: Wow! Sylvia asked to hear these three pieces again today and the second reading was just wonderful! She’s been thinking about them overnight and was asking questions, and making extrapolations and identifying Rüya’s thoughts and actions with her own… We spent more time talking about the essays than reading the text.

I am reading Pamuk’s short essay “When the Furniture is Talking, How Can You Sleep?” this morning and thinking, wow — this would be excellent for reading to Sylvia. So I slip into my reading-aloud mode of scanning ahead and making minor edits in vocabulary and punctuation to make the piece more naturally fit my voice — though with this work there is very little for the editor to do, Pamuk (and his superlatively gifted translator Freely) is such a close fit for me. But I did catch one word that I thought my daughter would probably not understand, “attendant” as an adjective — well there were a couple of words that are probably not in her vocabulary, but all besides this one were in positions that seem to me easy to interpolate — and wondered what I would do with it if I were actually reading the essay to her. I might just skip over it, read “the sense of responsibility”, which I think would be just about as meaningful as “the attendant sense of responsibility”; I might try to substitute another word but I don’t think I could come up with one gracefully on the spur of the moment. I might try to restructure the clause but that probably would not come off well either. Or I might of course just read the sentence as it stood on the page.

(Another strategy: when I was reading “When Rüya is Sad” last night and hit the phrase “lying on the divan”, I read it as “lying on the divan (that means sofa), …” Today when I read past “divan” she asked to see where it said that, so I pointed it out to her, and she nodded.)

The other day, I had the chance to introduce a friend of mine to Oddballs, William Sleator’s collection of stories about growing up in the early Sixties. (The book is described as "semi-autobiographical" various places, but I take Sleator at his word when he asserts, that "unlikely as it may seem—I have told only one lie about my family in this book." Call it a memoir; it’s at least twice as truthy as A Million Little Pieces.) The stories are about an ethnic childhood, and the ethnicity is "weird"; Sleator’s parents were too young old to be hippies and too professional (his father was a professor; his mother was a research physician) to be beatniks, but they were full-on weird. Sleator’s stories reflect the sensibilities of the man who would grow up to give me nightmares with House of Stairs and make me read and laugh and re-read with Interstellar Pig:

When my sister Vicky and I were teenagers we talked a lot about hating people. Hating came easily to us. We would be walking down the street, notice a perfect stranger, and be suddenly struck by how much we hated that person. And at the dinner table we would go on and on about all the popular kids we hated at high school. Our father, who has a very logical mind, sometimes cautioned us about this. “Don’t waste your hate,” he would say. “Save it up for important things, like your family, or the President.” We responded by quoting the famous line from Medea: “Loathing is endless. Hate is a bottomless cup; I pour and pour.”