Book Review: Contes Jaunes

Title: Contes Jaunes

Author: Gérard A. Dubé and Andrée Soucie-Dubé

Date: 1986

Publisher: Guérin

ISBN: 2-7601-0077-4

Length: 176 pages

Illustrations: many colorful drawings

Quote: “Contes jaunes rassemble une variété de textes conçus spécialement pour l’initiation à la lecture chez les débutants.”

In other words, this is a French Canadian first grade reader. It will also work for home-schooled students, or students at schools that are enlightened enough to offer language immersion programs in the primary grades.

It might be too juvenile for high school students learning French. This is the sort of book n which dogs playing in the snow are shown not only sitting on sleds and making snowmen, but sitting down in a human position. There’s a Chicken Little story in which what hits Petit Poussin on the head is an apple, and the wise old owl tells him to eat it up quickly before someone else does. And Frère Jacques, and a French version of “This little piggy,” and similar nonsense.

In an ideal world, adult readers would be eager to share this book with children. We don’t live in an ideal world. We live in a world where, after France balked at supporting our war with Iraq, the few U.S. libraries that stocked children’s books in French discarded their collections...even when the communities the libraries served included Haitian, Algerian, and Ivorian immigrants. Still, one can hope that American adults will recover their senses. French may be less of an international language than it once was but it’s still the language in which many of the world’s great books were written.

Book Review: Little Bear and Mommy

Title: Little Bear and Mommy

Author: Petula Edwards

Quote: "Little Bear...is very hungry and he went searching for food."

Little Bear leaves the cozy cave without Mommy, but he misses Mommy and heads back to the cave, where Mommy has caught a fish for him. 

This is a picture book. The quality of the story and pictures is average; not Dr. Seuss or Good Night Moon, but a book preliterate children are likely to sit still to listen to. It doesn't look great in a computer browser but it's readable. Know your students; this is a story children who have learned to read are likely to reject as "babyish."

Book Review: The Bible Story the Book of Beginnings

Book Review: The Bible Story: The Book of Beginnings

Author: Arthur S. Maxwell

Date: 1994

Publisher: Review & Herald

ISBN: 0-8280-0795-0

Length: 96 pages

Illustrations: many full-page color paintings

Quote: “The Bible Story provides the widest coverage of any Bible storybook on the market...all the stories suitable for telling to children, form Genesis to Revelation.”

Arthur S. Maxwell (1896-1970) collected several true, instructive Bedtime Stories for children, and wrote some nonfiction for adults, but his life’s work was The Bible Story. During his lifetime the series was printed in ten volumes, all copiously illustrated with beautiful full-color paintings. These books were bound to stay bound through years of abuse by generations of children—and puppies. The paper was remarkably mildew-resistant; the glossy, colorful covers were peanut-butter-and-jelly-proof. I know of no American book that was a better example of the bookbinder’s craft than the original Bible Story set. 

(Maxwell was not American--his life began in England and ended in Australia--but his publishers were US-based. The Bible Story, as a picture book whose high market value owed a lot to the paintings and the binding, could even be classified as a Maryland book since several of the paintings were done in Maryland. Many a pleasant afternoon can be spent finding the real-world versions of Bible Story paintings northeast of Washington.) 

In the 1990s, however, some tasteless innovator decided to change a good thing, and so The Bible Story is now being printed in twelve volumes. Although the language has been changed too, the most obvious difference is the quality of the new edition—or the lack of it. The paper is thinner and slicker. The pages are glued, not sewn, so they won’t lie flat and Grandma can’t read aloud while she knits. The covers won’t take much scrubbing. The binding is guaranteed to fall apart the very first time a puppy drags it under the porch to chew on it. It is still a better bound volume than many children’s books on the market today, but this one will not be enjoyed by generation after generation of children.

The innovator wanted to use recent translations of the Bible. “Language that today’s children readily understand”? Not quite. Children do not understand “vegetation” more easily than they understand “herb yielding seed.” Children do not understand “hallowed” at an earlier age than they understand “made holy.” Children learn “serpent” as easily as they learn “snake.” Maxwell wrote histories using King James’ and Queen Elizabeth’s words alternately to help children realize that they were synonyms, but the innovator changed the vocabulary to include only the “modern” words, making Maxwell’s stories sound repetitious and clunky. This may have been a favor to parents who had learned English as a foreign language, but it’s no favor to children like Maxwell as a boy, or like me as a girl, who are fascinated by exotic words and names, who may enjoy the rich strangeness of the King James' Version's language before they’re old enough to understand its content.

The long-term effect of dumbing down biblical or classical language is not to make traditional books more accessible to children; it is to cut off children’s access to older language, and thus to older books, and thus to ideas. Children can learn words like “tilled the earth” and “beast of the field” by seeing them used alternately with “worked the soil” and “farm animals.” Learning is what childhood is all about. By learning obscure phrases, as Maxwell intended them to do, through hearing those phrases alongside their modern equivalents, children were prepared to understand the Bible, and also Shakespeare, Milton, Paine, Jefferson, Adam Smith, and Margaret Cavendish, if they so chose. By being taught that they “can’t” understand the language of older books, children are prepared to be defeated by any opportunity they may get to become educated adults.

There is another effect of using the new translations of the Bible. The Geneva Bible, Authorized Version (KJV), and Revised Standard Version (RSV) are works in the public domain—not copyrighted. The up-to-the-minute translations are copyrighted, and the copyright holders demand credit (and payment). Some readers may believe, as I do, that it is not only tasteless but blasphemous for mortals to claim commercial copyrights on the Bible. The publishers of this travesty of Maxwell’s Bible Story claim to believe that the Bible is the Word of God. How, when, and to whom did God assign the copyright on the Word of God?

It gets worse, Gentle Readers. My review copy of the first volume of the “new” Bible Story was marked “Display Copy,” the one pediatricians and dentists will be offered to store in their waiting rooms, to encourage children to beg their parents to buy the rest of the set. The “display copy” marketing technique worked well during Maxwell’s lifetime. But this particular “display copy” can’t serve its intended purpose very well, because it was so hastily slapped together that not only does it identify itself as “the first of 10 volumes” on the back cover and “the first of 12 volumes” inside, but it also cuts off in mid-sentence on page 96. I am not mean enough to have made this up if I’d sat down and worked at it. Nothing has fallen out or been torn out., The table of contents still promises 187 pages of stories, and the last 90 of those pages have not been glued in.

The Bible Story is global—multilingual and ecumenical. Maxwell had the books vetted by ministers in several denominations, including a probably Messianic Jewish Rabbi, to ensure that they could be used by all the major religious groups. (Maxwell, personally, was a Seventh-Day Adventist.) The stories are available in several other languages as well as English. And they’re still distributed by deserving college students who board with church members, during the summer, and sell the books door to door for tuition money. And you can still call your local S.D.A. church and request that a deserving student bring a complete set of Bible Story books out for your inspection. But you should know that the older editions were much, much better bargains than the new edition. Review & Herald needs to be held to its own standard. 

Book Review: Brain Meets the Mes

Title: Brain Meets the Mes

Author: Menesh Patel

Illustrator: Elena Oplakanska

Date: 2022

Quote: "Once upon a time there was a Super-Cat called Brain."

His home was on the planet Aurelius, but he suddenly found himself on a different planet, where he met a dragon, Mother Me, with three young "Mini-Mes." Once he's in their den the dragon family discuss how to cook him, but Brain finds a way to escape. 

But he still has to find a way back to his own planet. There will be more rhyming picture books to tell how he accomplishes that. 

This terribly whimsical picture book is a little rough around the edges for use with children. Its verse form is basically a Nashery, a form that seems to have great appeal for Indian writers in English. Individual stanzas of a Nashery can resemble perfect or imperfect couplets in older forms, but a Nashery is supposed to be varied with irregular rhythms and rhymes strained into place for comic effect, so that's acceptable. However, the storyline also mentions the dragons' "wine collection," and the punctuation does not reflect the quirks of individual speech but is just plain inaccurate. A good picture book should teach children accurate spelling, grammar, and verse form if it's written in verse. So this one's unlikely to make it into libraries or classrooms.

It might still appeal to an adult who collects children's books, probably for readng aloud with children, and who can explain that this is only an e-book, not a real printed book, because the author made some mistakes in writing it. I don't think it can hurt children to know that even real grown-up writers make mistakes. 

Book Review: God's Love in Action

Title: God's Love in Action

Author: Kiana Jackson-Resendez

Date: 2024

ISBN: 979-8-9899419-1-9

Quote: "I've got the rhythm of love."

This quirky picture book features Isaias, "the first student" at a school where all the other students are color drawings. Isaias does some things that children should know better than to do before they go to school. The text then invites child readers to touch the book, or the computer screen, to indicate what he ought to do in each situation. Should Isaias push another child aside on his way up the slide, or wait in line behind the other child (who is a cartoon figure while Isaias is a live photo spliced into the drawing)? In between scenes Isaias dances to a refrain, "I've got the rhythm of love."

Having been a five-year-old who really did, of my own free will, "practice" for school by playing with imaginary classmates, being mindful of whether I might have bumped into an imaginary person while racing around the room, I can say that this way of presenting basic information about good manners makes intuitive sense for some children. Whether parents want to teach children to put their hands on computer screens is another question. I'd teach children to touch screens only with the special stylus or, better yet, use only electronic devices that have proper keyboards. 

The PDF e-book I received looks as if there is or will soon be an interactive version with sound and animation. I didn't get that version.

Book Review for 7.18.24: Books for Benjamin

Title: Books for Benjamin

Author: R.G. de Rouen

Illustrations: watercolor paintings by Uliana Barabash

Date: 2022

Publisher: R.G. de Rouen

ISBN: the e-book shows ISBN's, but they're illegible

Quote: "Benjamin...would rather read about adventures in a giant peach than eat one."

"Bookworm" is a nickname, usually for a person who reads or collects books, but also for any of several insects that eat paper. None of these insects is a worm, scientifically speaking. Some are beetle larvae, one is a moth larva, and some don't even have a wormy shape, like booklice (a.k.a. bark lice) and silverfish. Booklice actually eat mold, and the damp wood or processed wood fibre on which it grows; some other paper-eating insects also eat only the wet, moldy, or otherwise decaying parts away from books. The insects that eat vegetables mostly belong to different biological "families."

But in this thoroughly unscientific fable, Benjamin Bookworm leaves a family of "worms" who eat rotten vegetables and, after some mishaps, getsinto a library where he can live on air and read books for the rest of his days. He moves to the Library of Congress and is givent he job of stamping his smiling face on books next to the date of publication to remind himself which books he's read. If you doubt this, just look in a book and see the sidewise smile beside the...

At least the writer explains what the copyright symbol really is, at the end.

I chortled. This is not a book I'd want to read to a four-year-old every night for a year, but it is the sort of thing that belongs among the free-reading books at the back of a primary school room, or int he school library. 

Probably a perfect aunt would not buy this book for, or recommnd it to, children who use their high tolerance for "worm" stories to gross out friends or family members with lower tolerance. A surprising amount of this web site's current content reflects the fact that I've never claimed to be a perfect aunt. 

Book Review: Where There's a Will There's a Why

Title: Where There's a Will There's a Why

Author:  Nina Gill

Date: 2020

Publisher; Nina Gill

Quote: "ANSWER THREE QUESTIONS FOR A BURGER!"

Will is the name of the pug dog in the pictures suggested by a short list of topics about which Gill thought parents need to talk with children: Chores, Hygiene, Global Warming, Poverty and Inequality, Bullies, Candy, Media, Plastic Pollution. 

Well, this is a picture book that suggests starting points for discussion. You, the parent, are free to discuss how speculation about "global climate change" has been exploited by people who don't want to do the work of fighting local warming, which really exists. You're free to discuss why greedheads encourage trend followers like Gill to talk about candy, which can erode teeth, rather than chemical pollution, which can actually kill people. You're free to discuss the exploitation of the COVID panic as a form of bullying.

But, in view of the actual layout of the book--bizarre type font, lots of white letters on pastel-colored backgrounds--you might prefer to print your own sermon notes in a readable font with black letters on white paper. 

And your review questions probably won't specify a junky food treat for children to demand.

Nina Gill deserves some props for encouraging parent-child communication, though more thought could have gone into this book.

Book Review: Dylan's Cosydoze

Title: Dylan's Cosydoze

Author: Elsa Joseph

Date: 2017

Publisher: New Generation

Quote: "`Where is Dylan's Cosydoze?' asked Mum, her face turning white. 'We really do have to find it or he won't sleep tonight!'"

Dylan is one of those coddled children who are still wearing specially absorbent (and toxic) "nappies" though they're clearly able to go to the toilet, and who are indulged in obsessions with having a favorite blanket, toy, pillow, etc. "for security," without which they're unable to sleep. Dylan likes to visit his grandmother, but when her dog borrows his Cosydoze, a favorite sheet on which he's been allowed to become dependent, he "howls," throws extra food on the floor, and throws all the other toys out of his crib. Only when he finds his Cosydoze does he settle down and go to sleep. Now "it's grown-up time," says Gran. "Shall we play a game...or watch a DVD? Or look through my old pictures when we've had our tea?" But tiresome little Dylan has tired his parents out so thoroughly that they're asleep on the sofa.

In my mind the "ghost," or memory, of my mother, is saying, "What a stupid book. What a stupid family. I don't want to read that book any more. If those grown-ups had any sense, they would just let that silly little Dylan howl for his Cosydoze until he got tired and fell asleep. Then in the morning he'd know that he was able to sleep without the Cosydoze." 

Well, if her children were anything to judge by, my mother might have been less than an expert on rearing children who tiptoe around other people's "feelings"...but although we all had favorite toys, pillows, shirts, etc., we did learn not to howl and make ourselves tiresome if we misplaced them. And also we were all housebroken before age two/ 

None of The Nephews ever behaved like disgusting little Dylan in this book, either. It was possible for adults to enjoy visits from them.

Book Review: Where There's a Will There's a Why

Title: Where There's a Will There's a Why

Author: Nina Gill

Date: 2021

Publisher: Nina Gll

Quote: "ANSWER 3 QUESTIONS WIN A BURGER."

In this picture book (or e-book), Will is a pug dog who appears in pictures the illustrator associated with various topics on which you, the parent, presumably want to offer moral guidance to your child...topics like personal hygiene, stranger danger, bullying, poverty and inequality, and global warming. 

Well, Will only offers suggestions. You, the parent, are free to talk to the child about the political exploitation of fears of "global" warming by people who don't want to make the effort to reverse local warming, You're free to talk about how the greedheads have carefully made sure that Will woofs about candy instead of chemical pollution, how the sugar in candy can erode your teeth but if there's chemical pollution in your vegan protein spread on wholemeal bread that can kill you. There's not a page about the COVID panic but there is one about bullying, which you can use.

But considering the way this book is printed, in a grotesque typefont with lots of white letters on pastel-colored backgrounds, you might find it easier to write your own sermon notes, using a standard typefont to show black letters on a white background, and maybe adding cute computer-generated pictures or even stories about your own cute animal character. 

Your character probably won't tell kids what specific, not necessarily healthy, food treat they should demand after answering the review questions.

In any case, Nina Gill has provided a list of topics to talk about with children. That's a start toward improving parent-child communication.

Book Review for 6.4.24: Opposites

Title: Opposites 

Author: Love Chibis

Date: 2022

Publisher: Joqlie Publishing

Length: 8 pages

Quote: "Big. Small."

Most of the words in this mini-picture-book are publication information. The text consists of pairs of single words, each pair placed on facing pages, illustrated by cartoons.

There's nothing wrong with this kind of book but I don't like its being published as an e-book. It is the kind of book that needs to be printed on cloth or heavy cardboard, for toddlers to carry around and probably chew on. 

Book Review: Kids on Earth Costa Rica

Title: Kids on Earth Costa Rica

Author: Sensei Paul David

Date: 2023

Publisher: Sensei Publishing

ISBN: 978-1-7771913-6-8

Quote: "Costa Rica's rainy season lasts from roughly May to November." 

This book seems to have been written about the same time as the author's Blue Morphos book, reviewed last week. It's a longer, more informative book, with colorful cartoon drawings instead of photos. The Disney-faced characters dragged in as presenters are pretty off-putting but the book is full of information about the current state of things in Costa Rica.

Basically, and other web pages say the same, Costa Rica is a great big tourist attraction. There are lakes that take up more of Earth's surface than this country. The climate is equatorial, at least a little too warm for active people's comfort for most of the year; instead of summer and winter they have a rainy season and a drier season. Humans never lived or thought they were meant to live on much of this land, and have chosen, at least for now, to preserve a lot of it as natural rainforest. In between the beaches are mountains, some of which are volcanoes. The mountains are covered in greenery and full of animal life, including six different kinds of wild felines and fantastic tropical birds. Some of the land produces crops like pineapples and bananas, and some has been built up into towns. 

The main source of the country's wealth is tourism. The language is Spanish but, considering where the richest tourists come from, people learn English at school. Surfing, deep sea diving, and nature walks are serious business for people like our cartoon hosts, Joaquin and Yocsary. It sounds a bit idealistic and unsustainable, but for some people living on a narrow strip of volcanic mountains in between oceans near the equator might be an ideal too. Costa Rica is one of those small countries that don't even have a regular army; they rely on being nice to everyone and hoping everyone will be nice to them. For now, at least, it all exists. For how long? With the volcanoes? Who knows? 

This book won't disappoint students looking for information; it contains lots of fun facts. The pictures, unfortunately, do things like suggesting that a jaguar and a margay are the same size. If you want to teach children to ignore the silly pictures and read the words, this book might be a great choice. Call attenton to the drawing of Costa Rica's six kinds of wild cats, all drawn the same size, and then look up the average size of each species. 

New Book Review: Blue Morpho Butterfly

Title: Kids on Earth: Wildlife Adventures: Explore the World: Blue Morpho Butterfly: Costa Rica

Author: Sensei Paul David

Date: 2023

Publisher: Sensei Publishing

ISBN: 978-`077848-158-1

Quote: "The Blue Morpho butterfly is one of the largest butterflies in the world, with a wingspan of up to 8 inches."

To my taste, that's overdoing things, but some people like their butterflies large. 

This web site will focus on the Morphos in due time. They certainly have a beautiful range of colors--pale, cerulean, or indigo blue above, depending on how the light strikes them, and beige, brown, or blackish below--and a commanding presence. Swallowtails, Monarchs, and Diana Fritillaries catch the eye, but Morphos, which are similar in shape and color to Diana Fritillaries only more than twice the size, cannot be ignored. More than other butterflies they fail to fit into the category "bugs," as Americans dismissively call most insects, and remind us that they are animals--small and dumb, as animals go, but. Still.

It's a pleasure to be able to report that, when we look at Morphos, we'll see more about them than this book does. Of course, that's partly a difference of focus. Our "Butterfly of the Week" feature is for science students age ten to ninety, and this book seems to be for primary school students who like the idea of a book that counts lots of "chapters" consisting of a paragraph of text and a big glossy picture. Sensei Paul David counts this book as giving 30 fun facts about the Blue Morpho. I count three--it's big, it's fast, and it's a pollinator--and from that point the book drifts off into considering ways people use images of this butterfly in art. There are some live photos and some digital splices of butterfly photos into different kinds of backgrounds. Apart from postage stamps, and the Monarch-inspired dance costumes in California and Mexico, this web site has generally done little more than acknowledge that butterflies are often used in art. 

(Well, consider Zazzle. The photos of live butterflies in the "Save the Butterflies" Collection aren't unique, but they're a minority among the "butterfly" designs Zazzle prints. A majority are fancy sketches, hard to identify with any real species. Of identifiable butterfly images used on Zazzle, even though most of the designers and customers are in North America, the vast majority of the butterflies are Blue Morphos.)

This book has little to say about the lives of the giant butterflies designed to look camouflages against the sky, and won't satisfy a future biology major. It will delight future arts majors with its emphasis on images and symbolism. Any book with a photo of a Blue Morpho on every other page is guaranteed to be pretty, and this one is. Know your students. Sensei Paul David doesn't talk down to young readers, so teachers, grandparents, etc., can always tell the disappointed science majors they bought this book for their own pleasure. It's delicious eye candy.

Book Review: El Nino Que Era Muy Hombre

Book Review: El Niño que Era Muy Hombre

Author: Andreu Martin

Date: 1991

Publisher: Anaya

ISBN: 84-207-4495-6

Length: 78 pages

Illustrations: colorful cartoons by Francesc Rovira

Quote: “Había una vez un niño que quería ser pirata. Y había un pirata que no quería ser niño...el pirata y el niño eran la misma persona.”

In the 1670s our fictional hero, the orphan Roger Rawley, is bound out to Captain Malatormenta. Roger tried to prove himself a real man who was always tough and never cried. After surviving a shipwreck, Roger found himself sharing an island, apparerntly near South America, with a family of religious fanatics who even tried to make peace with the natives. In order to live with them, he has to give up his tough macho-man habits and “be a boy” again.

Many writers and readers would say that this is a story for older readers, and necessarily loses a great deal when cut down to picture-book length. The payoff is that, although El Niño Que Era Muy Hombre was published for children in Spain, it’s accessible to high school and college students learning Spanish as a second language.

In addition to the cartoons, this book also includes a tune to be hummed, whistled, or sung in two-part harmony.

Book Review: Where I'm Coming From

Title: Where I'm Coming From 

Author: Barbara Brandon-Croft

Date: 2023

Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly (Farrar Straus)

ISBN: 978-1-77046-568-8

Length: 186 e-pages

Quote: "You should know better than to listen to me; I certainly don't."

So few women cartoonists have been syndicated that it was still possible for Barbara Brandon-Croft to be the first Black American woman who had a syndicated cartoon strip. 

She drew the strip only weekly; it wasn't widely syndicated, probably not, for example, appearing in your daily newspaper. I'd seen reprints of some of these cartoons but hadn't seen them printed regularly as a series.

One thing that made the cartoons meaningful was the simplicity of the drawings. Brandon-Croft always showed her characters facing the reader. At first she drew only the faces; then, to make the facial expressions clearer, she started adding hands, sometimes holding something (usually a phone), often detached from the faces as if the characters' shirts faded into the background. 

There were a few extra characters beside the nine regulars and the daughter who accompanied one of them. Two of the extras appear in this book. Men were part of the storyline but were never drawn in the cartoons; women were either talking to them on the phone or talking about them. All nine primary characters were single, although one of them had a daughter. All could be described as baby-boomers; they weren't all the same age, but apparently all grew up in the same neighborhood and had been friends for a long time. 

All were Black left-wingers, though Monica, whose isolation is emphasized by her never appearing in a conversation with the others in this book, usually appeared talking about the fact that she looked White. If there was any more to Monica's story than that, it's not been selected for reprinting in this book. I feel that Monica has been tokenized and discriminated against. She reads, in this book, like a character thrown in because people asked for her, created entirely from reader suggestions, not based on anyone Brandon-Croft really knew. The others seem to have to be based on people Brandon-Croft knew.

The others are Alisha, the sweet spiritual type; Cheryl, the loud, snarky, bossy woman (who is exploited by a boyfriend); Jackie, the emotional one; Judy, the supportive listening friend; Lekesia, the political nut who hardly seems to have time left over for a personal life other than work and activism; Lydia, the mother, usually drawn with daughter in tow; Nicole, the one who knows she's cute and dreads getting older; and Sonya, whom the author described as a "true stand-by-your-man kind of woman" who can stay loyal to her boyfriend because she "don't take no mess" from him, but in this book we don't see her relationship and recognize her as the older one with the wardrobe of hats. 

Many of their expressions of support for each other, their disagreements, their quarrels (as distinct from disagreements), and their demonstrations of enduring and endearing friendship, also happen to be funny. Still, the point of a cartoon series called Where I'm Coming From was to make political statements that represent the group "Black women." They're meant to resonate with readers who are either Black or women, but perhaps even more they're meant to explain things to readers who are neither.

One of the extras, we're told, is a lesbian. In the one cartoon that shows her face, in this book, before Cheryl introduces her Cousin Dee to Alisha, she warns Dee that it's not necessary "to tell the entire world what your sexual preference is," though Dee is feeling infatuated with the liberation of having told her family. On being introduced Alisha says, "Hi. How are you?" and Dee blurts, "I'm gay. How are you?" Well...that minority-within-a-minority was represented. Now, I asked as I looked at that cartoon, what about the conservatives?

But I have to be fair. Brandon-Croft, daughter of cartoonist Brumsic Brandon, grew up in Washington, D.C. In a city where trimming the federal budget instantly brings to mind the un-neighborly idea of taking away the jobs that brought your neighbors to your neighborhood, you don't hear a lot from the conservatives. They're there, but they tend to be more discreet than Cousin Dee. Staying balanced is most easily done on those regular road trips back to the home state. For a minority of Washingtonians the District is their home state...or something. That's a political issue this book does not raise.

Allowing for its political bias, I liked this book and expect most readers will, too, if they let themselves. The characters' expressions are a delight, and their overall solidarity, even when they're quarrelling, is an inspiration.

Book Review: Une Semaine Agitee

(Reclaimed from Blogjob.)

Title: Une Semaine Agitée

Author: Georges Kolebka

Date: 1983

Publisher: Bayard Presse

ISBN: 2-7009-0081-2

Length: 34 pages

Illustrations: color drawings

Quote: “J’ai cueilli pour vous / des bouquets d’images…”

During “one agitated week,” Carapate the cartoon turtle decides to see the world and make new friends. Her adventures are a whimsical mix of things real turtles don’t do (like housekeeping) and things real turtles can do (like turning over on her back and being unable to get up again without help). Along the way, the book is also padded out with little rhymes and quizzes.

This book is easy enough for high school students taking first-year French, but may be too juvenile to entertain them. It’s really aimed at French-speaking five-year-olds.

Carapate is presumably not a close relative of our box turtles (http://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2015/07/phenology-box-turtles.html), but a European Pond Terrapin (Emys orbicularis, scientific name; tortue boueuse, common name).

This Ukrainian specimen, photographed by George Chernilevsky, might be a distant relative of Carapate. Very distant. Pond terrapins are not great travellers. Adventurous individuals like Carapate might get as far as a kilometer from their home ponds, but females lay their eggs at home. Males are smaller and lighter, can travel further, and have occasionally been found four kilometers from home. Nevertheless, scientists believe pond terrapins can be traced to their home neighborhood by DNA tests. Individuals usually live about fifty years; a few have lived eighty or a hundred years.

More about pond terrapins at Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_pond_turtle

If you go to Provence, in France, you can meet pond terrapins and other European chelonian species at a zoo that specializes in chelonians:

http://www.beyond.fr/sites/turtlevillage.html

There’s more to say about my physical copy of the book than there is to say about its contents. I never intended to buy this book. It belonged to a library. I checked it out once, then lost it. Since it’s such a thin paperback that it could easily be lost between or inside bigger picture books, I didn’t even try to find it, in the library or at home, but just paid for it. A few years later it slipped out of a big coffee-table book that belonged to me. Well, so now did Une Semaine Agitee belong to me. Nobody particularly wanted to keep it, so out to the market it went. It’s a thin, flimsy picture book, well worn. I think I let a child take it free of charge.

Then I checked Amazon and realized that this little book for little people might be considered valuable. Note the Amazon information above…there’s a page for Kolebka, but this book isn’t on it. Am I the only bookseller in the United States who’s willing to resell Une Semaine Agitee? Amazon-France and Amazon-Canada list the title, but don’t show a current price. The other U.S. online booksellers don’t list the title.

Does anyone really want a copy of this book? Kolebka is a well respected author who has other novels and picture books in print. I’ve not seen any of them. If you want to encourage a writer by buying Une Semaine Agitee as a Fair Trade Book, let me know, and I’ll look up the current price and availability information.

Posted on October 7, 2015 Categories A Fair Trade Book, French Tags European pond terrapin, terrapin

Book Review: What Is a River?

Title: What Is a River?

Author: Monika Vaicenaviciene

Date: 2019 (in Swedish), 2021 (in English)

Publisher: Enchanted Lion

ISBN: 978-1-59270-279-4

Length: pages not numbered

Illustrations: by the author

Quote: "A river travels to many places: prairies and cities, dense forests and lush meadows, steppes and tundra, mountains and valleys." 

Of the five books Enchanted Lion sent me this is the one I would have liked most in primary school. It's a picture book for a reader who wants to learn something and won't be scared by words like "estuary" and "capybara." Early in the book readers meet the word "delta." "Delta" is one of the words I can remember learning, from a Golden Book Encyclopedia entry, when I was five years old. What Is a River? is written on the same level as the Golden Book Encyclopedia, with enough pretty pictures to fascinate pre-reading children and enough information to be a worthwhile first book for uninformed adults. 

It's a story: Grandchild sits on the bank beside Grandmother, who is embroidering, and asks Grandmother to tell about the river. Grandmother obliges with a delightful overview of fact, fiction, fantasy, and folklore about rivers. Her sources of information are international, Internet-friendly, with fun facts about a river on every real continent and about some imaginary rivers. There's a little about shipping, a little about dams, a little about the wildlife that can be found near rivers. 

It's a beautiful study in the colors of water. If working at a computer leaves you wishing your child had and enjoyed that old "picture" book, Black Black Beautiful Black, these studies in blue, grey, green, and sand-colors may be the next best thing for your tired eyes. There's an actual physical chemical in our eyes that is depleted when we look at screens, paper, lights, and white, red, yellow, or brown things, and restored when we look at blue, green, grey, and black things. That makes this book literally a sight for sore eyes, something that will actually make adults feel good when we read it with children.

It leaves readers with an appetite for more information--and the keywords they can use to start looking up more facts. 

One way this book could be improved is the typefont. The age at which children learn to read is determined by the developmentof their eyea.. Girls' eyes often mature enough for them to enjoy reading at age six or earlier. Boys who know how to read, in theory, may be reluctant, slow, or poor readers up to age ten just because they're not yet able to see the print clearly. Picture books are usually printed with large clear "Roman" type, to allow as many primary school children to read as much as possible. This one's printed in one of those terribly cute fonts that look like hand lettering, 12-point or even 10-point, smaller than the letters I tell Google to display on your screen at this web site. Precocious readers may enjoy the sophisticated look of small type. Less precocious readers, and adults with tired eyes, may not only find it hard to read unfamiliar words in an unfamiliar font, but fail to notice some of the informative captions. This is very much an artist's book; I suspect the Swedish edition really was hand-printed.

Still, this book is a joy and a delight, just as it is. If your tired eyes appreciate the pictures but can't read the captions, I'll print a samizdat copy for you.

Book Review: The Happiness of a Dog with a Ball in Its Mouth

Title: The Happiness of a Dog with a Ball in Its Mouth 

Author: Bruce Handy

Illustrator: Hyewon Yum

Date: 2021

Publisher; Enchanted Lion

ISBN: 978-1-59270-351-7

Length: pages aren't numbered; I count 52 very decorative pages, some of which fold out, so some might count more

Quote: "The patience of a dog at the door. The happiness of a dog with a ball in its mouth."

This is a feel-good book. Each page or two-page illustrates, in color, one of the universal pleasures of life, with different combinations of people and animals. The author/illustrator team even consider "The distance of a journey. The happiness of getting there" from the viewpoint of ants raiding a sugar canister. 

Although the pictures are the point, and the text consists of captions for the pictures, adults can enjoy reading this book aloud to children until they memorize it. The pictures are clever, cute, and tasteful. Children who are still fascinated with their body processes can learn something from the illustrations of "holding in" and "letting go"...with no need to mention further details. Children who want more "story" could, as I remember doing around age five, make up their own series of stories or poems to go with the pictures...there's a word for that genre of stories and poems, "ekphrastic," and some children are quite good at it.

A really commercial web site would demand more words for a blog post. This web site generally takes the position that a book review should be shorter than the book itself.

Book Review: How War Changed Rondo

Title: How War Changed Rondo 

Author (Ukrainian): Romana Romanyshyn and Andriy Lesiv

Translator: Oksana Lushchevska

Date (Ukrainian): 2015 

Date (English): 2021

Publisher (Ukrainian): Vydavnystvo Staroho Leva (Old Lion Publishing House)

Publisher (English): Enchanted Lion

ISBN: 978-1-59270-367-8

Length: 36 pages

Illustrations by the authors

Quote: "The town of Rondo was like no other...Everyone liked living in Rondo."

Rondo is not a real town; it's a collage of things that suggest creativity and a good life. The main characters in this story about surviving war are a light bulb called Danko, a tied-balloon dog called Fabian, and an origami bird called Zirka. /Houses in Rondo resemble a birdhouse, a grounded hot-air balloon, a dollhouse, a fort, a jewel box, a lighthouse, labyrinths, and other whimsical collage-y things. Flowers in Rondo sing; "vocal performances of the town's anthem--Mozart's Rondo alla Turca--were the biggest draw." 

Hello? Would anyone like to listen to a performance of Mozart's Rondo alla Turca? 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeEmGvm7kDk

It has no vocal parts. So this is a book of surreal silliness, which may be the best way for children to absorb information about the horrors of war.

In any case the evocative wackiness of this picture book ought to appeal to adults. I can imagine children not understanding enough to like this book, but for an adult who fails to respond to it there is probably no hope.

Ukraine is not a bad place. Russia is not a bad place. War is a bad thing. War is never a good idea. This web site supports neither side of a war because this web site supports ending it. Whoever stops fighting first wins. Maybe they should use their creativity, like the characters in this book. Mozart never wrote a song to sing to the tune of his Rondo alla Turca. Maybe those poor Euro-idjits should stop fighting and write one. 

Book Review: Bedtime Bible Story Book

Title: Bedtime Bible Story Book

Author: Jesse Lyman Hurlbut

Publisher: Barbour

Date: 1989

ISBN: 1-55748-264-0

Length: 510 pages

Quote: “This great world of ours is very old; so old that no one knows when it was made.”

It takes a certain rashness to try to improve on “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The quote above is Hurlbut’s effort in that direction. From it I think the whole book can be fairly judged.

Children love bedtime stories and don’t insist on their being especially well-written ones, so this fat, flimsy paperback (the front cover fell off my copy) may be the bargain it was marketed as being. One thick book, light enough to read in bed, summarizes all the kid-friendly stories from Genesis to Revelation.

If you can get Arthur Maxwell’s Bible Story, or Elsie Egermeier’s Life of Jesus, or The Children’s Bible, you’re almost certain to think they’re more attractive Bible story books than this one. Children do like the colorful pictures in those books.

However, the line drawings by Kathy Arbuckle may be this book’s best feature. Children love making pictures colorful, and if a child who frequently visited me had reached the stage of being able to color in its own drawings, the drawings in the more advanced children’s coloring books, traced maps, etc., with reasonable fidelity to the lines, I might offer that child this book as a reward. The line drawings are excellent for coloring in.

Some children may prefer a Bible story book they can decorate for themselves to one with beautiful museum-quality paintings reprinted in it.

 

Book Review: The Grand Expedition

Title: The Grand Expedition 

Author: Emma Adbaige

Date: 2018

Publisher: Enchanted Lion

Length: 28 pages

ISBN: 978-1-59270-245-9

Illustrations by the author

Quote: "Iben takes a jump rope, too. 'In case we need a lasso!'"

How old are the narrator and her smaller brother Iben? Three and four years old, I'd guess. All by themselves, without adult help, they're allowed to set up a little tent in the back yard and stay out in it until a mosquito bites one of them. The narrator feels it necessary to specify what people do in the bathroom, too. They don't have, or want, any adults teaching them anything about real hiking or camping. Their idea of an expedition is to stay outside for an hour or two. 

Do children want to read about children as childish as these two? While they're at the sitting-on-someone's-knee-and-being-read-to stage, as Iben and his unnamed sister appear to be, children enjoy almost anything that is read to them.  If they have room to act out any physical movement that takes place in the story, they're delighted. A story that encourages them to walk out into the yard and then back into the house might appeal.

Adults, for whom children have become cute, like stories about very small children just as they are. Children, whose survival instincts are screaming at them to outgrow being cute and become competent as fast as possible, tend to prefer stories about children who are a little more mature and competent than themselves. A picture book where the main character has not had the benefit of an experience the child audience had just yesterday will be tossed aside, "for babies." When I was four years old I was not much more of an outdoorsman than Iben and his sister, but I wanted books that taught me more, not books that stopped where I was. When my brother was four years old and had a seven-year-old to keep up with, he was a more competent outdoorsman than Iben and his sister. I suspect either of us would have dismissed The Grand Expedition as "a baby's book" at any age beyond two.

For me, the specification of why the narrator goes to the bathroom would be the deal breaker. I think children need encouragement to keep such details to themselves. However, one reason why children's books have so often featured such idiotically anthropomorphic animal characters is the contemptuous way children tend to reject stories they see as aimed toward children younger or less competent than they are. If you read aloud to a child who thinks it's amusing to talk like a Judy Blume character, you might try this book as a corrective. "Aren't those two little town children babyish and ignorant? All they do is sit in their tent reading a book. They don't even watch for birds. That's the kind of child who says things like 'need to poop' instead of 'want to come back inside," might work on children who are five or six and have learned a few key outdoor skills like killing their own mosquitoes.

If you prefer not to encourage uncharitable displays of contempt toward children a year or two behind yours, there are sillier cartoon books (The Berenstain Bears Camp Out, We're Going on a Bear Hunt) written for children just beginning to read. There are more substantial books about camping and nature too (Boy Scout Handbooks and Girl Scout Handbooks for a start, and it's a mistake to underestimate young nature lovers' willingness to read grown-up field guides once their eyes have developed enough that they can see the letters). 

Much as I'd like to say that all of the books Enchanted Lion sent me for review are classics every child should enjoy...I think this one has some value, but the time window when it's likely to be enjoyed is very narrow. If you've not seen your grandchildren in the last week or two but they seem about the ages of the rug rats in the (terribly cute) pictures, they're probably too old for this book. 

There is a secondary time window for this book. Adults tend to love Lisa Adbaige's lifelike-cartoon-style drawings. Adults will be charmed by the fact that, for the whole afternoon during which this story takes place, the little white-blond (Swedish) moppets are alone with their white-blond Dad, and don't see this as a novelty. Mother presumably has her own job, and nobody worries about her being out of the house all day. For some adults that may seem like a very fresh and liberating motif in a children's book. For some adults this book would make a lovely gift.