Innovation of Cabret

8/14/2019 Innovation of Cabret

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EVERY FRIDAY. By Dan Yaccarino. Henry Holt. $16.95. (Ages 3 to 7) Friday is my favoriteday, a small boy tells us, because every Friday he and his dad go for breakfast together at thelocal diner. In cheerful gouache illustrations, they wave to passersby, watch shops open andbuildings going up; everyone is rushing, but were taking our time. A note from the author tellsus the book is based on his weekly ritual with his own son. It is also a valentine to good dads and

neighborhood diners, and a reminder on Fathers Day that the little traditions are sometimesthe best ones.

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From 'Daffodil, Crocodile'

MY CAT COPIES ME. By Yoon-duck Kwon. Kane/Miller. $15.95. (Ages 4 to 8) Kwonssimple text and pared-down illustrations (influenced by traditional Korean art) evoke the firstlove of having a pet of ones own. Smelling the flowers, or watching bugs, she always copiesme, says a little girl, who thinks of her cat as her best friend. Gradually we notice that there areno other friends around, or family members; when mother works late, I hide under my blanket.Then the story takes an unexpected turn. I will copy my cat! the girl announces. The cat

larger than life-size, with a martial-arts-like stance becomes a fantasy partner as the girldecides, Like my cat, Ill stretch my body. (Ill stretch my mind, too.) I wont be scared ofanything!

AT THE FIREFLY GATE. By Linda Newbery. David Fickling/Random House. $15.99. (Ages10 and up) When Henry finds himself moving with his parents to a village in Suffolk, England,far from his best friend Nabil or anything else he cares about, he is soon caught up in a mysteryseemingly invisible to everyone but him. Somehow his mind is invaded by the memories of aWorld War II navigator who never returned after an ill-fated bombing run; is that the shadowyfigure who waits in the dark at the garden gate? Newbery skillfully keeps the tension high, andreaders will be eager to know the outcome.

THE DAY MY MOTHER LEFT. By James Prosek. Simon & Schuster. $15.99. (Ages 12 and

up) Prosek, who wrote his well-received Trout: An Illustrated History when he was still ateenager, shows where some of his youthful determination came from. His own mother left whenhe was a boy, and like 9-year-old Jeremy in this semiautobiographical novel, he turned to natureand drawing for salvation. Although the mothers motivation never becomes entirely clear, theauthor unforgettably captures the way she took almost nothing with her, yet she tookeverything except Jeremys talent and his will to survive.

DAFFODIL, CROCODILE. By Emily Jenkins. Pictures by Tomek Bogacki. Frances FosterBooks/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $16. (Ages 4 to 8) A girl who is angry about being pigeonholed


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as a nice little girl (along with her sisters, Violet and Rose) puts on a green papier-mchcrocodile head for a day, with big teeth: Wheres my pretty little, clean little flower? Mommyasks. I ate her, said the crocodile. The point isnt subtle, but Daffodils satisfying escape frompretty perfection will reassure girls that breaking the mold and getting their knees dirty issometimes a very good idea, even if some people think they are being weird.

Christopher Myerss take on the greatest nonsense verse in the English-speaking world abasketball face-off combines brio and whimsy with more energy than a power forward. Butdoesnt shooting hoops with the Jubjub Bird and the Bandersnatch require an incredible leap ofthe imagination?


JABBERWOCKY

The Classic Poem From Lewis Carrolls Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There.

Illustrated by Christopher Myers.

Unpaged. Jump at the Sun/Hyperion Books for Children. $15.99. (Ages 5 to 9)

Not as much as you might think. Myerss prodigious research on the history of Jabberwockyled him to Lewis Carrolls diaries, where, as he explains in an endnote, he discovered the wordollamalitzli, written in the margin. Its Mesoamerican religious and ritual significance, he tellsus, involves a rubber ball and a stone hoop affixed high on a wall. So its not much of a stretchto arrive at Myerss conceit that a precursor of a basketball court is what Lewis Carroll had inmind as a setting for his mock epic poem.

Myerss giant Jabberwock would put LeBron to shame. He palms the ball like a walnut anddunks like Yao Ming on stilts. Inexplicably, he is depicted with 12 fingers on one page and 13 onanother. Or is it 14? No matter. Hes a presence, as they say in the broadcasters booth, andseemingly invincible until the boy hero appears with vorpal sneakers (the vorpal blade wentsnicker-snack!) in hand.

The big lout came whiffling through the tulgey wood the outdoor court and burbled asit came! But the kid, an implacable foe, knows a thing or two about snicker-snack. The game isover in short order, and the boy gallops triumphantly (galumphing) back to his father.

Carrolls classic appeared in his Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There. Itseems very pretty, Alice said, but its rather hard to understand! True, the poem has beenexplained in numerous ways. Even Carrolls and Humpty Dumptys views of various wordsoften diverge.

But searching for meaning may be beside the point. Nonsense, T. S. Eliot reminded us, is not anabsence of sense but a parody of it. Some of the portmanteau words Carroll invented chortle,burble, frabjous and others are now fully vested members of the lexicon. And the versesstructure is a mirror, as Alice discovered, of classical English poetry.

But that should not detract from Myerss inventive and colorful homage. Award-winning bookslike Blues Journey, Jazz and Harlem, his Caldecott Honor book (these three were writtenby his father, Walter Dean Myers), have earned for Myerss art a grand and growing reputation.His Jabberwocky reflects once more his signature style and his willingness to take risks.

Myers can rest easy under the Tumtum tree, while his imagery could make you believe thatsomewhere in Mount Cemetery in Surrey, England, Lewis Carroll is attempting a graceful spinmove.
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J. Patrick Lewis is the author of many childrens books, including The Brothers War andMichelangelos World.

Some of the most accomplished graphic novels in existence are never identified as such. MauriceSendaks In the Night Kitchen comes to mind, as does Peggy Rathmanns Good Night,Gorilla and David Wiesners recent Caldecott winner Flotsam. Sendak, Rathmann and

Wiesner are best known as childrens book illustrators, but these particular works are purecomics in the way they construct their narratives.


THE ARRIVAL

By Shaun Tan.

Unpaged. Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic. $19.99. (Ages 10 and up)

Shaun Tans latest book could also end up tucked away with the picture books in bookstores. Butit plainly acknowledges its medium by presenting quotations on its back cover from graphic-novel luminaries like Jeff Smith, Marjane Satrapi, Craig Thompson and Art Spiegelman.

Tan has been walking the fine line between picture books and graphic novels for years now.The Rabbits (2003), written by John Marsden, has a fight montage that reads like a comic,using panels and captions to advance the action. And The Lost Thing (2004), both written andillustrated by Tan, could also be classified as a graphic novel. Although the storys prose bearsalmost all the narrative responsibility, the interplay between text and image, and the paneledlayouts, foreshadow Tans eventual headlong leap into the medium of comics. With TheArrival, Tan the graphic novelist has finally arrived.

The Arrival tells not an immigrants story, but the immigrants story. Its protagonist, a youngfather with vaguely Eurasian features, leaves his home to create a better life for his family in adistant land of opportunity. He struggles to find a job, a place to stay and a sense of meaning inhis new existence. Along the way he befriends other, more established immigrants. He listens totheir stories and benefits from their kindnesses. The young father reunites with his family asThe Arrival draws to a close, and the distant land finally becomes home.

By placing photorealistic human figures in abstract, surreal environments, Tan evokes theintimacy of an individual immigrant experience without ever settling on a specific person, timeor place. His drawings depict architecture and clothing that are at once historic and futuristic.Shadowy dragons tails haunt the Old Country, while the new land consists of structures andcreatures that look like a 6-year-olds drawings brought to three-dimensional life.

Tan even avoids pinning his story to a particular language. The Arrival is completely wordless.A system of incomprehensible yet eerily familiar symbols takes the place of words on signs anddocuments.

Though Tan is a native-born Australian, an American ambience pervades his book. Even before

the title page, he treats the reader to a full spread of small black-and-white portraits, depictingfaces of every shape, age and color. Each pair of eyes projects the living lifelessness of passportphotos. These are the mythic huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

When the protagonist finally makes his way to the shores of his new home, he is greeted by twogiant statues, twin Statues of Liberty. He then sets up residence in a city that, though clearlyfantastical (a white Pac-Man-like creature infests his apartment instead of cockroaches),resembles New Yorks historically ethnic neighborhoods. By borrowing American imagery to
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communicate an otherwise universal story, Tan highlights just how central the immigrantexperience is to the way America defines itself.

The cover of The Arrival, made to look like old, worn leather, establishes a family photoalbum motif that Tan faithfully carries through the entire book. Inside, borderless sepia panelsare arranged in careful grids. Creases and unidentifiable splotches elegantly blemish many of the

pages. Tan completely eschews motion lines, sound effects and any other comics storytellingdevices that would not be found in photographs. Even the spaces between the panels suggest aphoto album: instead of the pencil-thin gutters found in most graphic novels, he uses generoushalf-inch strips of yellowed paper.

The effect is mesmerizing. Reading The Arrival feels like paging through a family treasurenewly discovered up in the attic. However, the sheer beauty of Tans artwork sometimes gets inthe way of his narrative. His panels, like the best photographs, capture the timelessness ofparticular moments, which can inadvertently endanger the illusion of time passing that a graphicnovelist strives to create. The Arrival would almost rather be looked at than read.

Still, that his biggest flaw is making his pictures too pretty speaks to Tans skill as a storyteller.In one especially effective scene, the protagonist opens his suitcase to find a ghostly image of his

wife and daughter eating dinner. A chair sits empty at the table, reserved for him. A momentlater, the suitcases actual contents replace the image. The protagonist pulls out a family portraitand nails it to the wall with his shoe. He sits back to contemplate it. A sequence of panels thencarries the reader away from him and out the window, showing first his apartment building andfinally his adopted city. The city teems with bubbling smoke, swirling highways and origamibirds. The young father is lost, both in the quietness of his own memories and in the bustle of analien land.

Such visual eloquence can only motivate readers to seek out any future graphic novels fromShaun Tan, regardless of where they might be shelved.

Gene Luen Yangs American Born Chinese was a finalist in 2006 for the National BookAward for Juvenile Fiction and winner of the Michael L. Printz Award.

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By SARA LONDONPublished: November 11, 2007

In the 1940s, childrens books with holes or windows, as well as those with flaps, tabs, bumpsand berms, were likened to toys, introducing new dimensionality to the growing picture-bookgenre. Todays die cuts (a publishers term for books with holes of various shapes) range fromintricate playthings to simple tools for learning.


Illustration by Laura Vaccaro Seeger

FIRST THE EGG

Written and illustrated by Laura Vaccaro Seeger.

Unpaged. A Neal Porter Book/Roaring Brook Press. $14.95. (Ages 2 to 6)

Instructing readers in the ways of the world while moving them with magic is the methodbeautifully realized in the die-cut concept books of Laura Vaccaro Seeger. An Emmy Awardwinner for television animation, Seeger began her career in childrens books with I Had aRooster (2001), bringing warmth and vitality to a traditional folk song. (She is a relation bymarriage ofPete Seeger, who wrote the books foreword.) In the half-dozen years since, she hasfound a way to make cutout images and simple words resonate with surprising originality.

The Hidden Alphabet (2003) makes the ordinary march of letters less regimental. A pointygray mouse may be viewed through the window of a shiny black page, but when the page panelis lifted, the child sees that the rodent is merely a wedge of the letter M and the M itselflooks a lot like cheese. Lemons Are Not Red (2004) again turns a basic recipe into anirresistible treat. Seegers introduction to the world of color becomes a game of matching. In theopening spread, a lemon-shaped window shows a bold red fruit. Lemons are not red, we read.When the page is turned, the correction occurs; the lemon-shaped window (cut into a red page)falls upon yellow, revealing a proper lemon: Lemons are yellow and Apples are red. And onit goes, with white reindeer, blue grass and so on.

The playground of perception seems to be Seegers most natural arena. Her latest feat ofingenuity, First the Egg, is deceptively simple: It opens with an egg cutout, which, with a page
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turn, becomes a plump yellow chick; tadpole morphs into frog; seed grows into flower. ButSeeger adds a metafictional twist: word segues into a handwritten draft of the story were inthe process of reading. A daub of pigment similarly evolves into a painted landscapeincorporating chicken, frog and flower. Seegers final pages bring us full circle: the chickenreturns to its nest and lays the egg! (The books front and back covers playfully continue thechicken-egg conundrum.)

Unlike the bold graphic style of Black? White! Day? Night! (2006), which usedmonochromatic printed color and bold contrasts to demonstrate opposites, First the Egghighlights the texture of the brushstroke. Young readers may be tempted to sniff the swirl of pinkpetals or trace the caterpillars ridged frame.

Seegers versatility (and productivity) is impressive. She has negotiated the world of friendship(Dog and Bear, new this year) and emotion (Walter Was Worried, from 2005). First theEgg arrives as an eye-catching reminder that making it new is always possible and thatlearning can be made sheer delight.

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By JOANNA RUDGE LONG

Published: April 15, 2007

Do children still know how to play? The flourishing market for picture books that promoteplaying as worthwhile (and, yes, fun) suggests that many of us arent confident that they do, orthat parents do enough to encourage them. Still, the impulse to make believe is strong at a veryyoung age. Imagination animates toys, turns pots into drums, gives nature a role. As Dylan
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Thomas remembered in Fern Hill: I was prince of the apple towns / ... I lordly had the treesand leaves / Trail with daisies and barley / Down the rivers of the windfall light.


Enlarge This Image

NOT A BOX

Written and illustrated by Antoinette Portis.

Unpaged. HarperCollins Publishers. $12.99. (Ages 2 to 6)

THE BIRTHDAY BOX

Written and illustrated by Leslie Patricelli.

Unpaged. Candlewick Press. $15.99. (Ages 2 to 5)

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Last Month's Children's Book Reviews

Children's Books Special Section: Fall 2006Enlarge This Image
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Enlarge This Image

Childrens books have long celebrated that kind of creative play. A. A. Milnes Winnie-the-

Pooh still satisfies children who dream of toys coming alive. From the same era, the children inArthur Ransomes 1930 tale Swallows and Amazons turn an island camping trip into a spiritedfree-for-all between pirates and a shipshape crew. A generation later, John Burningham useddelicious irony in Come Away From the Water, Shirley to present a small girls lushly paintedfantasy life in counterpoint with her sketchily drawn parents, who sit in beach chairs issuing thewarnings that inspire her wild scenarios.

While Shirleys parents havent an inkling of her thrilling make-believe, the parents inSwallows and Amazons sympathize with their childrens plans for adult-free sailing and islandlife. Daddys cabled permission is classic: Better drowned than duffers if not duffers wontdrown. Such books depict the kind of free-wheeling play we fondly remember. Theyre alsoexciting stories with memorable characters.

A lot of new picture books seem to reflect the concern that creative play is becoming a thing ofthe past. Some merely portray imaginative activities, as if children might not think to inventthem. Antoinette Portiss Not a Box (an Honor Book for the 2007 Geisel Award, given bythe American Library Association for the most distinguished book for beginning readers) isone of these. Portis enlivens it, though, with a developing argument between her rabbit characterand an annoying offstage voice: Why are you sitting in a box? ... What are you doing on top ofthat box? Its not a box! retorts the rabbit, in words emblazoned on a full page of primary red.And, later, Its NOT NOT NOT NOT a box!
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The square book, seemingly made of brown cardboard, itself looks amusingly like a box, from its11.5 oz. net weight to its admonitory this side up. Also, those offstage questions are set onbox-brown pages, which, like the rabbits increasingly exasperated replies, appear on the left.Meanwhile, in the illustrations on the right, sober black-and-white reality alternates with therabbits fantasies, which are boldly drawn in brilliant red against jubilant yellow; the actualrabbit and box are evoked by just a few broad, black, lightly feathered lines. The unquenchablehero perches atop Rabbit Peak, hoses a burning building, blasts off into space. The graphicsare handsome, the debate authentically childlike. Still, theres just the one idea: imaginationtransforms. And the conclusion lacks punch. Asked, finally, Well, what is it then? the best therabbit can come up with is: Its my Not-a-Box!

In The Birthday Box, Leslie Patricelli offers a similar riff on the same idea. Once itsunwrapped, the box of the title turns out to contain a doggy playmate, Oscar; the box itselfbecomes a plane, a ship, a sled and, at last (in good picture book tradition), the bed where thetwo characters curl up for a nap. Patricellis several board books feature the same round-faced,diaper-clad tot, who looks barely a year old an age when children are less likely to engage indramatic play than to have fun simply putting something into a box and taking it out again, likeEeyore. Certainly no preschooler will be capable of snipping holes in sturdy cardboard, asshown. But babies will relate to the bright colors, clear drawings and toddler-proven activities:ripping off gift wrap, climbing onto a box and sharing stories. I am very lucky, the tot tellsOscar as they snuggle down in their cardboard bed. Today is my birthday, and I got a box!

Both of these books are well worth a few readings, and theyll remind parents what play can be.Still, they dont offer the kind of story that draws children back, over and over, to relive events,visit beloved characters and pore over details the kind that sparks spontaneous, creative andindependent play.

The best moment in this tour de force of paper engineering arrives just as the front cover opens,when a graceful swirl of slim white strips a sinuous fan, playing delicately with its ownshadows springs up. The accompanying text reads, White grasses tip tap and 90 Black

Spots, though the square-topped lengths of paper dont resemble waving grass so much aselongated piano keys. Diligent counters will indeed find 45 of them, and the black dots on bothsides of each tip.


600 BLACK SPOTS

A Pop-Up Book for Children of All Ages.

Written and illustrated by David A. Carter.

Unpaged. Little Simon/Simon & Schuster Childrens Publishing. $19.99. (Ages 3 and up)

What with 10 virtuoso pop-ups altogether, fans may well pardon David A. Carter for a text that,aside from its challenge to find all the spots, counts for little his commentary ranges from the

self-evident Yellow on red and 19 Black Spots to the arch Tipsy tassels teeter and theparticularly inapt Twisting still life sunflower, dominated by a hefty red doughnut.

Never mind; the paper sculptures are the main event here. Some recall landmarks of 20th-centuryart; the grand finale, Fauve kaboom, hints broadly at the artists inspiration. Spontaneousforms entwine pays tribute to Matisses late work with scissors. So do the colors usedthroughout: the blacks, whites and bright primaries that also made up Mondrians best-knownpalette. Mondrian floats with shadows and 60 Black Spots, writes Carter of the familiar
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rectilinear patterns that he renders here in three dimensions, adding black discs to every surface.Yes, there are 60 of these spots, though it may take a few tries to get that result.

The book challenges readers powers of reasoning in other ways. Deep reflective hocus pocushas die-cut holes as well as flaps within flaps. Should we count the one square hole? Hiddenspots are seen only in a mirror. Do we count their reflections, too? A varicolored grid has fixed

spots along with holes that change color when tabs are pulled. These can be detected by feel;still, you have to remember which were already black before you pulled the tab out anothernotch. What with dangling dots, tipping towers and multiple vantage points, it may take somerecounts turning, angling for a better view before youre sure youve got it right.

Robert Sabudas books enchant because of the felicity with which he renders familiar stories orsubjects into form and movement in The Movable Mother Goose (1999), to take just oneexample. The pioneering graphic designer Bruno Munari propelled a story, or an idea, withcreative series of flaps within flaps (Whos There? Open the Door!, 1957); or fosteredinterplay between the visual and the verbal with spare, deftly drawn images and strategic cuts tocreate an entrancing journey (In the Dark of the Night, 1956).

Carter ignores such goals; still, his book is handsome and fun to explore. Unlike its popular

predecessors, One Red Dot (2004) and Blue 2 (2006), where readers also look for dots indifferent settings, its not intended for those just learning to count. Nor is it appropriate forchildren without the dexterity to treat it kindly. Its pleasures arent narrative but visual, andenhanced by an appreciation for the abstract. As such, the book does what it sets out to do, anddoes it with style. But its likely to intrigue the grown-ups more than the young.

The illustrator Guy Billout works the narrow but fertile territory where clarity intersects withmystery. Its a place where the graffiti might read Ren Magritte Was Here (de Chirico, Too),but Billouts concerns are his own: his drawings (or are they paintings? or both?) often employtricks of scale and perspective, along with large expanses of deceptively flat color, compositionsthat resolve in witty visual jokes while tapping deeper currents of unease. Theyre bright,figuratively and literally, like dreams dreamt under a noonday desert sun rather than in the usual

shape-shifting murk.Skip to next paragraph

THE FROG WHO WANTED TO SEE THE SEA

Written and illustrated by Guy Billout.

29 pp. Creative Editions. $17.95. (Ages 7 and up)

HUG TIME

Written and illustrated by Patrick McDonnell.

Unpaged. Little, Brown & Company. $14.99. (Ages 3 to 6)

Billout is perhaps best known for his long association with The Atlantic Monthly, but he alsomakes regular visits to the Book Reviews list of each years 10 best illustrated books forchildren. The Frog Who Wanted to See the Sea is his latest picture book, and its lovely, withfolk tale overtones and illustrations kids and adults can lose themselves in. (Isnt that what wereally want from a picture book a low-tech virtual-reality experience?)

Our heroine is Alice, a little green frog who is growing restless within the confines of her smallpond: Alice knew every inch of the ponds murky bottom and every hiding place among the


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reeds. She knew, too, that she could swim from one side to the other with 28 kicks of her backlegs. Spurred by a loquacious sea gull, Alice gets it into her head to leave home, taking only arolled-up lily pad great detail to venture forth and see the ocean. A quest narrative, as theysay.

The psychological hook for young children (or midlife parents) is obvious. Fortunately, Billout,

whose writing is as disciplined as his artwork, doesnt drive home the point with a nail gun in themanner of, say, Katzenberg-era Disney animation. Instead his story unfolds simply, with grace,nuance and high style. I particularly loved his description of Alices first sighting of the ocean,which comes after a troubled sleep adrift on her pad: When Alice awoke the next morning, allshe could see was blue. She looked in every direction for green riverbanks. In a moment of bothjoy and fright, she realized that she had reached the sea. Alice croaked softly. ... The only replywas a gust of wind that blew across the surface of the water.

The hook here the lostness is again compelling, and the illustration, of Alice riding a wavethat honors Billouts debt to traditional Japanese printmaking, is a thing of subtle beauty. But itsthat moment of both joy and fright that really gets me. Beyond encouraging feelings, howmany childrens books bother with that kind of emotional duality, let alone conflict?

While Alice eventually makes it back to her pond safe, sound and as waterlogged as anamphibian would want to be, the moral of her story wont be Theres no place like home.Billout understands that most of his readers, or listeners, will continue to find the wider worldbeguiling, as they should, and his book ends with an outward-bound coda that small childrenmay find both unsettling and alluring and funny. He knows exactly how to challenge them, atalent less obvious than his draftsmanship but no less remarkable.

Patrick McDonnells Hug Time shares the strengths and weaknesses of his syndicated comicstrip, Mutts. Depending on your taste for pet humor and warm puppies, you may find the stripa wee bit cloying, or you may find it sweet and heartfelt. Either way, you cant fail to be charmedby the drawings themselves, unless maybe you just hate comics. (Whats wrong with you?)McDonnell is a student of George Herrimans Krazy Kat, but the cartoonist he really puts me

in mind of is Charles M. Schulz. Like Schulz at the height of his powers, McDonnell is anexpressionist in minimalists clothing when it comes to character: both can evoke volleys ofemotion with only a scant graphic arsenal of well-placed dots and short, perfectly etched lines.

But if Schulzs great subjects were angst, frustration and self-loathing, McDonnell traffics incozier fare. Hug Time stars Jules, a kitten character from Mutts. Told in loosely rhymed,loosely scanned verse, the story begins: There once was a kitten so filled with love / He wantedto give the whole world a hug. And so he does: Jules travels the globe to hug, among others, achimpanzee, a giraffe, a gnu, a panda, a wombat and a humuhumu fish (fun to read aloud,whether you know how to pronounce it or not). Ill give away the ending: The world is so big .../ And yet so small, / Its time that we embrace it all. / Thats something that we all can do. / Startwith the one whos closest to you.

Hard to argue with that if youre a 4-year-old, or the parent of one, however much the cynic ineither of you might want to. Hard also to argue with McDonnells sublime drawing of teenyJules just managing to hug the chin of a huge, very content blue whale the whale might bepurring or his evocation of a starry night sky with aJackson Pollockvocabulary of blots anddrips. Simple but effective, like the book itself.

Children's Books
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The Cold War Kid

Illustration by Peter Sis

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By LEONARD S. MARCUS
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Published: November 11, 2007

In the spring of 1957, a Hungarian girl appeared one day in my second-grade class in MountVernon, N.Y. Our teacher urged us to welcome the new arrival, who spoke no English and wouldbe staying in our class temporarily. Her family, we were told, had just come to America toescape the Russians.


THE WALL

Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain.

Written and illustrated by Peter Sis.

Unpaged. Frances Foster Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $18. (Ages 8 and up)

Enlarge This Image

Illustration by Peter Sis

On the playground days later, during a game of cowboys and Indians, one of the second-gradeboys picked up a stick, aimed it like a gun and fired at a classmate, who fell to the ground witha theatrical flourish. I was enjoying the spectacle from my perch on a nearby rock when a blood-curdling scream rang out across the schoolyard. It was the new girl. She too had been watchingthe game. When she saw the boy fall to the ground I somehow knew this instantly shethought it was because he really had been shot. The girl, I later learned, had had reason to thinkthis, having lived through the brutal suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising.

Children make what sense they can of the life they are given. Far from our sun-splashedsuburban playground during those same years, the artist Peter Sis was a schoolboy growing up inSoviet-dominated Czechoslovakia. In The Wall, he tells the story of his early years as a citizenof that Eastern bloc nation, where he learned at school to think and draw what he was told, andof his gradual rejection of Communism. (In Los Angeles in 1982 to make a film for the Czechgovernment, Sis chose not to return to his homeland.)

The story unfolds in a word-and-picture montage consisting of a spare, fable-like narrative,

introductory and closing notes, a historical timeline, diary excerpts, childhood drawings, familyphotos and, at the center of it all, a sequence of playful but intense pen-line drawings, many ofthem arrayed in storyboard panels.

The Peoples Militia enforces the new order. ... The display of red flags on state holidays COMPULSORY. ... Western radio is banned (and jammed). For young readers unfamiliar withcold war-era history, timeline entries like these are a lot to absorb. As Sis writes in his afterword:Now when my American family goes to visit my Czech family in the colorful city of Prague, itis hard to convince them it was ever a dark place full of fear, suspicion and lies.
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To bridge the gap, Sis presents his readers with graphic equivalents for the feel as well as thesubstance of the life he knew. People in the drawings are scaled down, toylike. They look as ifthey could be easily crushed. The predominance of black and white suggests the diminishedpossibilities under Communism for freedom of expression. Where touches of color do appear on a demonstration banner, as a star shape on the side of a military tank the color is usuallyred. When a full rainbow of colors makes its voluptuous appearance in the later illustrations, wetoo feel the rush of joy that unrestrained color came to symbolize in the lives of Sis and hisfriends.

Because children know all about tattling and betrayal, young readers of The Wall will be ableto imagine the atmosphere of fear implied in a passing reference to the Czech governmentspolicy of encouraging schoolchildren to inform on their parents, and one another, for speakingout against the regime. Children in fact know a great deal about tyranny. They learn about it onthe playground, as the English folklorists Iona and Peter Opie showed in The Lore andLanguage of Schoolchildren (1959), a study of traditional schoolyard chants and rhymes thatlaid bare the cruelty implicit in much childhood group behavior. How sympathetically did myclassmates and I react to our visitors alarmed misreading of our innocent war game? That Ihave no memory of this prompts me to fear the worst.

The Wall is a brave book for acknowledging, as Sis writes, how easy it is to brainwash achild, and for taking on a serious subject at a time when feel-good childrens books are widelyassumed to be what sells. It is also a challenging book, and with its blizzard of fleetingreferences to everything from the Hungarian uprising to the Beach Boys, 8- and 9-year-olds willmost likely need a parent or other handy font of knowledge to help them make their way to theend.

Compressing history into fable can confuse matters. On November 9, 1989, Sis writes, thewall fell. On that date, the Berlin Wall a hugely symbolic stretch of the Iron Curtain didcome down. But when did the setting of The Wall shift to Germany from Czechoslovakia,where the Velvet Revolution that ended Communist rule followed days and weeks later?

For Sis as for so many others, the collapse of the Eastern blocs oppressive governments was adream come true. In The Wall, the ecstatic energy and big-spirited inventiveness of the artistsdrawings make the once all but unimaginable realization of that dream visible for all to see.

Yet history should perhaps have the last word. In The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989, Frederick Taylor writes that notwithstanding their public protestations of outrage,Western leaders, including President John F. Kennedy, were more relieved than angered by theSoviets sealing off of East Berlin, a move that effectively put a lid for a generation on a highlyvolatile situation. To ordinary people around the world, it may have seemed that freedom, justiceand integrity all lay on one side of the wall, and terror, injustice and lies on the other. What if infact the wall served the governments purposes on both sides equally well? How dark a fablewould it take to tell that tale?

THIS IS NOT A PUMPKINWritten and illustrated by Bob Staake. Simon & Schuster. $6.99. (Ages 1 to 4)The cheerful visual joke in this handsome board book recalls Magrittes this is not a pipepainting (and the cover recalls his cool blue-sky backgrounds). But it will also prove irresistibleto all Halloween-besotted children: what isnt a pumpkin but is round and orange, with gapingeyes and a gap-toothed grin? The slowly developing image gives few clues to its true identity,but a toddler would guess for sure.

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Enlarge This Image

From This Is Not a Pumpkin

From Old Penn Station

THREE LITTLE GHOSTIESBy Pippa Goodhart. Illustrated by

AnnaLaura Cantone. Bloomsbury. $16.95. (Ages 3 to 6)In a comical mixed-media collage, three small ghosts set off on a scare spree (I scared somemean witches, sitting in dark ditches, lipsticking their lipses, plotting evil trickses, brags one),sending ghouls and ogres galumphing. But they meet their match with a little boy whos beentelling us the story one boo! and they tumble-tangle fled and were sent home to bed.

LIGHTSHIPWritten and illustrated by Brian Floca. Richard Jackson/Atheneum. $16.99. (Ages 4 to 7)Until they were retired in the 1980s, lightships were like floating lighthouses, warning oncomingboats of reefs and other dangers. In this fascinating account, not lacking a touch of humor wesee the crew swearing #@*%&! as a cruise ship comes too close the boat stays at anchor inone sure spot, an image of quiet steadfastness. Flocas meticulous drawings are based on Light

Vessel 87, now docked at the South Street Seaport Museum in Manhattan.OLD PENN STATIONWritten and illustrated by William Low.Holt. $16.95. (Ages 5 to 9)Low is a lover of trains and New York architecture, his authors bio says. That much is clearfrom this homage to the great McKim, Mead & White building that was destroyed in 1963.Digital and oil-painted images convey the grandeur of old Pennsylvania Station a half-million cubic feet of granite, ornamented with clocks, maidens and eagles. Low eloquently
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conveys the loss, but reminds us that after the demolition, outraged conservationists formed thecitys Landmarks Preservation Commission and saved Grand Central Terminal from the samefate.

SKELLY THE SKELETON GIRLWritten and illustrated by Jimmy Pickering.

Simon & Schuster. (Ages 4 to 7)Skelly, a cheerful skeleton girl in a black party dress, lives in a creepy haunted-looking house ona hill, with cobwebs, deaths heads (her relatives) and a monster under the stairs. When she findsa bone on the floor, she sets out to discover whose it is in one of the more comical images,she takes an X-ray of herself: Could it be a bone from me? No, it wasnt mine. After askingghosts, spiders and other boneless folks, she finds the source of the bone and makes a new friend a skeleton dog.

A FIELD GUIDE TO HIGH SCHOOLBy Marissa Walsh. Delacorte. $15.99. (Ages 12 and up)When her ultracool older sister, Claire, leaves for Yale, Andie faces freshman year at her high-pressure private school alone. But not quite: Claire has left her a field guide to school how

to dress, how to act, who to be. (School starts the minute you leave the house in the morning,whether you take the bus, drive or walk. You must be on.) Walshs first novel is a smart andknowing satire that is probably all too on target as the survival guide it pretends to be.

In 1991, my wife and I wandered into Eeyores Books for Children on the Upper West Side,looking to freshen the nightly round of bedtime stories. The Houdini Box, by Brian Selznick,sat right by the cash register.


THE INVENTION OF HUGO CABRET

A Novel in Words and Pictures.

By Brian Selznick.

Illustrated. 533 pp. Scholastic Press. $22.99. (Ages 9 and up)


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Related

Video: 'A Trip to the Moon,' by Georges Mlis (1902. Courtesty

of archive.org)

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Davies. Illustrated by Neal Layton.

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Selznick was working at the store at the time, which helps explain the great placement. Yet hishandsome picture book, with its rich language and engaging pencil drawings, was a real find. Ittold a story with unexpected emotional power: A boy obsessed with Harry Houdini actuallymeets his idol in Grand Central Terminal. He is enthralled, then disillusioned, then years later triumphantly makes the connection he had been yearning for all his life. The book presentsdeep mysteries, shattered dreams and dreams regained. Our children loved it, and so did we.

In the years since, Selznick has become known more for his artwork than for his writing,illustrating books like The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins, written by Barbara Kerley(which won a Caldecott Honor in 2002). But he still has stories of his own to tell, and now heresa big one: The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

It is wonderful.

Take that overused word literally: Hugo Cabret evokes wonder. At more than 500 pages, itsproportions seem Potteresque, yet it makes for quick reading because Selznicks amazingdrawings take up most of the book. While they may lack the virtuosity of Chris Van Allsburgswork or David Wiesners, their slight roughness gives them urgency. The result is a captivatingwork of fiction that young readers with a taste for complex plots and a touch of magic thinkHarry H., not Harry P. can love.

This is much more than a graphic novel: it is more like a silent film on paper. The briefintroduction states this explicitly: I want you to picture yourself sitting in the darkness, like thebeginning of a movie. ... You will eventually spot a boy amid the crowd, and he will start tomove through the train station. Follow him, because this is Hugo Cabret. His head is full ofsecrets, and hes waiting for his story to begin.

And then it does, opening with a tight shot of the moon. As you turn the pages, the frame widens,the moon makes its way across the sky over Paris in 1931 and the dawn breaks over a train
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station. The imagined camera zooms through the doors to take in the crowd, and there is Hugo.Disheveled but intent, he skulks through the station and slips behind a ventilation grate in a darkpassage, giving a glimpse of the holes in the sole of his shoe.

Hugo is 12, an orphan devoted to his fathers trade, clockmaking. Before dying, his father hadtaken Hugo to a museum where he worked part time and showed him an astonishing thing: a

clockwork man, moldering and broken in the attic. The automaton sat at a desk and held a pen;when he was repaired and wound up, it was clear, he would write something.

The automaton is the sort of device magicians of earlier days made to amaze their audiences.They knew back then what Arthur C. Clarke would tell us: any sufficiently advanced technologyis indistinguishable from magic.

The machines have a hold on Selznick too: the idea for the novel, he tells us in theacknowledgments, came after he read about the automata collected by Georges Mlis, the greatsilent filmmaker who created A Trip to the Moon in 1902. [Watch the video. ( Courtesty ofarchive.org)] A museum neglected the machines and eventually threw them away. I imagined aboy finding those machines in the garbage, and at that moment, Hugo and this story were born,he writes.

The story takes Hugo through tragedy and isolation. His father dies in a fire at the museum, andthe boys drunken uncle, the timekeeper at a train station, takes him in. The uncle soondisappears, and Hugo is left on his own, stealing food to survive and keeping the stations clocksrunning so no one will notice his uncle is gone. Meanwhile, he retrieves the automaton from thewreckage of the museum and carries on his fathers efforts.

Hugo had continued thinking about the note that it would eventually write. And the more heworked on the automaton, the more he came to believe something that he knew was completelycrazy. Hugo felt sure that the note was going to answer all his questions and tell him what to donow that he was alone. The note was going to save his life.

For the parts he needs, Hugo steals wind-up toys from an old toymaker who maintains a booth at

the station. But when the old man, Georges, catches him, Hugo discovers hes not the only onewith secrets. Georgess goddaughter, Isabelle, has the key to the intertwined mysteries and thedetermination to help Hugo learn to trust others again.

The story is full of twists and surprises, and it is especially touching for being based in part onthe real-life troubles of Georges Mlis, who went from being a magician to a visionaryfilmmaker, then suffered reversals that left him working at a toy booth in a railway station ...

Enough. Everybody hates the guy who gives away the ending. Its enough to say that HugoCabret sits at the nexus of magic and storytelling and film, and that Brian Selznick who,perhaps not so coincidentally, has the Hollywood legend David O. Selznick in his family tree shows us a little magic of his own.
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