Feeling Kinda Crazy: Three Unusual Picture Books

The fact is, sometimes a book appeals to us, not because it's just the right thing to read to Jack and Jill Averagechild, but because it isn't. Here are a few unique picture book selections:

The Rock & Roll Alphabet by Jeffrey Schwartz, illustrated with photos by Chuck Boyd

I couldn't resist getting a review copy of this one. I mean, how cool is that? Granted, I don't think this book is really about teaching 4- and 5-year-olds the alphabet, but I think it could be a hoot for teaching 8- and 9-year-olds a little about American music.

I recently studied music history with a high school senior, and since he's an aspiring rocker, we spent a lot of time on American popular music. It's a rich history, building on things like the blues of Langston Hughes's day and the Celtic music that made its way to the Appalachian mountains long before Elvis was born.

Which brings us to Chuck Boyd, a photographer who worked with the rock stars of the 60's and 70's. This book was created in his honor by Jeffrey Schwartz, a historian specializing in rock and roll in general and Chuck Boyd's photography in particular.

Each letter of the alphabet in the book represents a rock star or a band, while every two pages of text comprises a rhymed couplet. For example, the first two pages read, "A is for Aretha, oft referred to as the Queen" and "B is for The Beatles in their 'Yellow Submarine'."

Of course, "C is for Cream and the British blues invasion," while "D is for The Doors and their sonic exploration."

Other letters I particularly liked were "K is for KISS, a sight to see on stage" (so true!) and Schwartz's solution to the problem of the X page, "X is for T-Rex, Bang a Gong, Get it On'."

As I studied the history of rock music with my student this year, it occurred to me that the disconnect between the young and the old, and between classical music (considered respectable but stodgy by some) and popular music (considered ubiquitous and undeserving by others) is a fault in our handling of cultural history. American popular music is sometimes tainted by its association with drugs and sex and the ritual trashing of hotel rooms, but it deserves to be honored for what it is: an amazing new creation that took place over the course of a mere hundred years or so.

If you're not a music buff, you may not be very interested in Schwartz's new alphabet and what it represents. But for some of us, it's a starting point for teaching kids about a colorful, powerful part of our past.

After all, Lady Gaga wouldn't be here if it weren't for Madonna, and Madonna owes a musical debt to everything from Motown dance music to Led Zeppelin, while the Rolling Stones freely acknowledge blues artist like Muddy Waters as a major musical influence (not to mention the source of the band's name), and on it goes...

The Rock & Roll Alphabet reminds us that music has a history, and that artists in every medium build on one another's work. If you don't want it for your kids, hey; get it for yourself! It may not be as big as the usual photographic tomes, but it makes a great miniature coffee table book.

You can preview The Rock & Roll Alphabet on YouTube.


A Rule Is To Break: A Child's Guide to Anarchy by John Seven and Jana Christy

"Chaos and kids go together like lemon and fish." That's the opening line of the e-mail I got telling me about this book.

In a world where the term "anarchy" is often associated with lawlessness in the sense of "here come them bandits and we don't got no sheriff to save us," a picture book teaching children to be anarchic may sound a little unnerving. But wait—take a look at this book (which Jules of Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast introduced along with more of the team's work in a recent post).

The main character is a little girl dressed in a red suit which at first glance looks like a devil costume; it actually turns out to be a wolf costume, in a nice homage to Where the Wild Things Are—a book which is pretty much about children and anarchy, too. (See also my post from a few years back, "Anarchy of the Imagination: Why I Love Children's Books.")

This little girl is a free spirit, and really, she simply acts out the exuberance we see all the time in small children. Like my new neighbor across the street, 4-year-old Louie, who jumps more often than he walks.

The first page of A Rule Is to Break says, "The opposite of rules is anarchy. There are plenty of ways to make anarchy." The illustration shows our wild child—who has blue hair, by the way—running past naked and grinning.

Next we get, "Don't look like everybody else. BE YOU!" And we see the girl sewing her red wolf costume, then wearing it.

Followed by, "When someone says 'Work!' you say 'Why?'"

And "Ignore school and read books. Use your brain!" This one shows the wild child up in a tree, happily reading a book.

But just when you might be thinking, "What will this book do to my sweet little child?" we turn the page and see, "Hug the ugliest monster you can find." With our red wolf-suited girl hugging a truly Sendak-worthy gray monster.

You may not appreciate the book's advice to "Paint pictures on your TV," but you might like "Forget about grocery stores and get dirty in your garden." I will restrain myself from giving you more, but suffice it to say, there's some great stuff in here.

Jana Christy's illustrations are clean and bright, with her personable red-clad child roaming freely across grocery sack-colored pages. The blue hair with the red wolf outfit is a great touch every single time it appears. Christy's artwork is cute without being cutesy. It succeeds without appearing to try too hard, an approach which perfectly matches its subject matter.

So—is this book only for the offspring of neo-hippies, rock musicians, and the more liberal sort of home-schoolers?

Not at all. If there was ever a book for starting a conversation about rules and the very idea of civilization and societies, for better or for worse, with 5- to 7-year-olds, it would be this one. Not to mention some of the advice is a lot of fun.

I was reminded of a rather amusing picture book called 17 Things I'm Not Allowed to Do Anymore by Jenny Offill and Nancy Carpenter, although John and Jana's book is far more free-wheeling and, I would say, appealing. (Offill's main character, also a girl, is restricted over and over, but her imagination just won't stop.)

Go beyond using A Rule Is to Break to teach your child a new vocabulary word, "anarchy," and use it to teach your child about out-of-the-box thinking, not to mention being true to oneself.

Which is really the point, I suspect.

Find out more about A Rule Is to Break and other works by this author-illustrator team (e.g., Happy Punks) at AuntieUncleBooks, home of the Wee Anarchists Un-Club.


La Bella Durmiente por Jacob y Wilhelm Grimm, con ilustraciones de Ana Juan

It's a little self-serving of me to throw this one in, considering it's in Spanish. A few days ago I had dinner with a friend I hadn't seen in 26 years, an Argentine woman, which took me back to my time spent in Argentina, of course. It was great hearing that unique Argentine Spanish spoken once again...

But I mostly got this book, which I ordered from Europe, because of the illustrations, not the text. I am a huuuuge fan of Ana Juan's artwork! In particular, I love her illustrations for Frida, Jonah Winter's biography of Frida Kahlo. See also her illustrations for Elena's Serenade by Campbell Geeslin and for The Jewel Box Ballerinas by Monique de Varennes. And her newest work, the illustrations for Catherynne M. Valente's much-talked-about middle grade fantasy novel, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. (See my recent review here.)

La Bella Durmiente, or Sleeping Beauty, is an old-fashioned fairy tale picture book, with a left-hand page of relatively dense text and and an illustration on the right-hand page. Rather than a retelling, the text is simply the original version by the Brothers Grimm, translated to Spanish. (The publisher is from Spain, Sopa de Cuentos, which means Soup of Stories or Story Soup.) Our story begins, "Hace mucho tiempo había un rey y una reina que exclamaban todos los días: —¡Ay, si tuviéramos un hijo! —y no consiguían tener nunca uno. Entonces sucedió que, estando la reina una vez en el baño, saltó un sapo del agua..."

In English this reads: "In times past there lived a king and queen, who said to each other every day of their lives, 'Would that we had a child!' and yet they had none. But it happened once that when the queen was bathing, there came a frog out of the water..."

So Juan's first illustration is a frog, looking out of the page.

The next illustration gives us a pleased-looking queen all dressed in black, holding her baby daughter, who is swaddled in cream. The king peers over the queen's shoulder like an Eastern potentate, while the queen wears one of those hats with a veil around the sides, her crown perched on top.

Juan's fairies are unique, sort of pink floaty shapes with barely discernible faces. I'm not sure how well they work, but it is nice to see a different approach. The evil fairy bursts onto the next page looking for all the world like a red Georgia O'Keefe flower, looming over the child, while the king and queen are shown off to one side, diminished.

A briar motif done in gray winds down the center of each spread, dividing the illustration from the text. It is also used to good effect on the endpapers.

I like the later images in the book best, when the princess goes up the stairs and then falls asleep. For instance, as the princess ascends a stone spiral stairway, her long robe billows out behind her, trailing around the spiral in a ghostly way. Very nice!

I also like how, when the prince shows up, Juan depicts him standing beside the bed, with the princess politely covering a yawn as she drags open her sleepy eyes. No kiss here, but a clever glimpse of how a real person wakes up!

In general I am not as fond of the artwork in La Bella Durmiente as I have been of Juan's illustrations in other books, but if you are, like me, a major fan, it might be worth your while to track down a copy.

Note: You can see more of Ana Juan's artwork at her website.

Anarchy of the Imagination: Why I Love Children’s Books

The only law I’ve ever been inclined to break is the speed limit. I believe humans need some kind of social structure in order to live well, and I’m basically a solid citizen. Among other considerations, social anarchy strikes me as being shortsighted.

But when it comes to the imagination, I’m all for anarchy. And children’s book writers are some of the most subversive people I know. One obvious example is Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, AKA the best picture book of all time. This book actually makes my mother uncomfortable, I suspect because she’d rather not be reminded that kids can be little monsters.

The audacious thing about children’s books is that they cast children as heroes and then refuse to spare them from the law of consequences. In the best children’s books, parents are generally absent from the scene as young characters struggle, problem solve, and pretty much take over the world, sometimes even saving it. In contrast, parents are the ultimate deus ex machina, so they are wisely avoided for pages on end. Max and his mother forgive each other at the conclusion of Sendak’s book because that’s what families do, but in the meantime, Max bravely faces and tames his own ravenous monsters.

Roald Dahl is another author known for his anarchic tendencies. The adults in his books are often despicable, for example the aunts in James and the Giant Peach or the headmistress and parents in Matilda. It’s easy to get caught up in this child-against-parent dynamic and feel, like my mother, vaguely troubled by it. However, Dahl’s adults are ultimately peripheral: what’s more important is the creative problem solving practiced by his young characters. After all, if your guardians are deeply evil, it’s a fantastic idea to befriend some oversized bugs and escape in a giant, rolling piece of fruit.

Where most television shows emphasize predictable solutions to paltry problems, children’s books offer their readers endless possibilities. These books go beyond encouraging kids to think outside the box. In fact, said box lies moldering and forgotten as children travel into enchanted forests or ride swift horses into the distance or follow winding paths of friendship in more realistic settings. The promise of unexpected possibilities is one of the great gifts of children’s literature.

I noticed that an Amazon customer recently reviewed Ingrid Law’s book Savvy with disdain. She was particularly bothered by the fact that Mibs and her friends and siblings choose to get on a bus with a stranger, clearly a high-risk social behavior. But Law isn’t writing a TV episode about serial killers, she’s describing an archetypal journey. Questions of protection are left behind when literary characters dive down rabbit holes, walk through wardrobes, or fight secret wars with their peers (see Printz winner Jellicoe Road). Two of the challenges Mibs faces are figuring out how to get where she’s going—in part by solving the discouraged Bible salesman’s problems—and how to make her savvy serve her cause even though it isn’t what she wanted it to be. Not talking to strangers is an easy real-life lesson to remember. Mibs’s problems require far more effort, imagination, and courage.

In Mo Willems’s books, characters are inclined to make assumptions about the world, and those assumptions regularly turn out to be wrong. That’s what it’s like to be a child, of course. Elephant and Piggie work it out together, but Pigeon is on his own, fighting an inexplicably uncooperative, faceless team of grown-ups. When his assumptions get turned upside down he must adapt, and fast, learning to think in new ways. For example, the Pigeon is sure he will love having a puppy—right up until he encounters one. But his enthusiasm is not squelched. Instead he quickly comes up with a fresh solution, a shiny new goal for himself.

In my favorite chapter of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, young Bod sets out to buy a headstone for his new friend, the ghost of a witch. Like Voltaire’s Candide, he is not nearly as frightened by the obstacles he encounters as he should be. When Bod’s original plan doesn’t work, he comes up with a new one, never losing sight of his compassionate purpose even when he must escape from a menacing pawnshop owner.

The cleverness, courage, and creativity of children's book heroes is one kind of anarchy: these young characters defy the limited expectations of their elders. A more overt type of anarchy is the necessity of avoiding adult supervision in order to accomplish the tasks of the plot. This is so familiar to readers of children's books that we tend to overlook it. Anarchy can also be a literary theme or a character trait. As such, it may be celebrated openly, as in Brock Cole's picture book Larky Mavis or a YA I just read, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart. Other times anarchy is a whisper, really just the power of a character being so thoroughly him- or herself. Winnie the Pooh is quietly determined to do his own thing, as is supposedly sweet Sara Crewe in the classic, A Little Princess. These subtler heroes may be just as powerful for the young reader as those more obvious warriors clankingly clad in full armor.

I was just talking to a teacher who gave his new student a typical writing assignment to test her skills: "Describe your favorite place." When she handed in her paper, my friend expected to see yet another description of "My Room" or "The Beach." But this girl had chosen well: Her favorite place was her mind.

Together, children’s book writers conspire to build a vast, edgeless playground of the imagination where children can deal with surprising situations in surprising ways. In this space, moral behavior is often rewarded, but so is creativity. Whereas in the real world, kids encounter few true opportunities to stretch their creative muscles and take risks, children’s book writers trust their young characters and the readers who accompany them to accomplish miraculous feats in the land formed from ink and myth.