I’m no story theorist. I can quote the rudimentary ideas that the pros like to bandy about, but I’ve never made a serious study of their rules and regI’m no story theorist. I can quote the rudimentary ideas that the pros like to bandy about, but I’ve never made a serious study of their rules and regulations (The Secrets of Story being the sole exception, naturally). Still, there are a couple ideas I’ve picked up over the years that make sense to me. For example, let’s consider the idea of the “passive protagonist”. This would be a character that can't or won’t do anything to change their circumstances. It’s supposed to be a bad thing. The ultimate withering insult to a writer. “Oh. Your main character? They’re a little . . . passive, wouldn’t you say?” The horror. And yet, consider how many children’s books feature toys or puppets that cannot move. Sure, the bulk of stories tend to go the Pinocchio/ Mouse and His Child route and allow their characters a bit of impetus and movement, and why not? Quite frankly that’s the easier story to write. But Kate DiCamillo has never been a particular fan of doing things the easy way. That’s why her latest story The Puppets of Spelhorst is so utterly fascinating. After reading it, I’ve had to rethink my entire “passive protagonist” theory as it relates to stories of children’s toys. But much more importantly, this is the kind of book that’s going to appeal to kids young and old. A contemporary classic with ingrained appeal and the occasional jolt of weirdness to keep things interesting.
Five puppets hang in the window of a toy shop: An owl, a boy, a girl, a king, and wolf. One day, an old sailor named Spelhorst buys them, if only because he’s entranced by the girl puppet’s eyes. When he dies, the puppets are taken from place to place, only to ultimately end up in the possession of two young girls. While each puppet has his or her own dreams about what they’d like to accomplish in life, they know they must stick together. Only through great trials, separation, reunification, and the power of storytelling itself, do they come to realize their true purpose.
I like watching Kate DiCamillo grow and change as a writer. I don’t know why, but no other author seems to exhibit such an interesting trajectory. She comes out of the gate with Because of Winn-Dixie (strong start), wins herself some awards, and then shifts a little. She writes younger ( Mercy Watson) and older but ultimately writes what she wants to, not what she has to. Her choices are not obvious. She might co-write a book about best friends one moment and then do a three book series of three friends in Florida the next. Then a superpowered squirrel. Then a malicious goat. With The Puppets of Spelhorst she’s written a shorter story. Just a scant 160 pages, and with all the trappings of a bedtime tale. The focus starts with an old man, fixates on the puppets, occasionally breaks free to get the thoughts and opinions of other humans, but ultimately stays with the toys in the end. This may sound hectic, but DiCamillo’s a sure hand. You are never confused about who is speaking at any given moment. All told, in spite of a harrowing separation halfway through the book, I found this a comforting story. Friends are separated, but they come together again. A story is told, and everyone gets a part.
All that I’ve written here is true, but none of it explains how DiCamillo makes this book work. You see, this isn’t the first time she’s had a passive protagonist before. Years and years ago she wrote a book called The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane about a china rabbit toy. And at the time of its, I was not a particular fan. There was something about that strong undercurrent of cruelty that ran through both it and her Newbery winning Despereaux that felt wrong. But on top of that, there was the fact that while horrible thing after horrible thing happens to Edward (and no one’s life is much better after having met him) he can do nothing to change his circumstances. His attitude, sure. But his circumstances? Not at all. Interestingly, this deep and abiding frustration I’d felt with that book never came up at all with Puppets. Why is that? I’ve pondered this for a long time, and at last I came to the conclusion that I was wrong about my criticism of Tulane all those years ago. My reaction to it was never, honestly, based on the fact that he was a “passive protagonist”. Not really. If that had been my issue then I would have had the same problem with Puppets. No, like this book, Tulane showed how a protagonist’s interior life can be as interesting as their physical one. The difference, I think, is in how each book depicts the cruelty of the world. In Tulane actions happen without meaning. A fry cook might destroy your main character’s head for literally no reason at all. But in Puppets, when cruelty happens it’s never malicious. If it happens it happens because characters are wrapped up in their own lives and cannot consider the effects their actions might have on others. So when I read this book, I can see myself in both the heroes and the villains. In Tulane I never had that chance.
Another reason I enjoyed this book particularly came when I realized that in Tulane the main character is utterly alone in the world. In Puppets the main characters rely upon one another. Each has his or her own adventure (except for the King, but you really aren’t all that upset on his account). They don’t always appreciate what anyone else has to say at first, but as the book continues you realize that they rely upon one another. Plus, their thoughts are given the chance to sometimes be internal and sometimes shared with others. Was this the reason why I enjoyed this book as much as I did?
Maybe. But not entirely.
Turns out, the true reason came only at the book’s very end.
You see, I’d walked into this book truly believing (probably because of the title) that the heroes of this book were, in fact, the titular puppets of Spelhorst. But they’re not, are they? Not really. They’re great characters and you care for them. Therefore, they are most certainly the protagonists of the text. But are they the heroes? I liked very much the interior journey each character took (even the king, to some extent) and that made them folks I rooted for. However, the true hero of this tale is only revealed at the story’s end and, like the puppets, once you realize who it is, you too would follow that person to the ends of the earth. Once I shifted my thinking and realized this, the entire book’s success fell into place. For the puppets, each one of them has dreams and hopes, however, fabulous or outlandish. And through fabulous and occasionally outlandish means, they fulfill their destinies. But the hero of this tale can’t fulfill their dreams within the confines of this particular story. And so the tale ends with them setting off to see the world, the way they wanted to. It’s so oddly satisfying. I hope kids see it the same way.
Now I would like to request, quite swiftly, that someone go on and set the three songs we see in this book to music, stat. Nothing ever happens quickly in the art world, but things are capable of happening very quickly on social media. So if one of those nice musically-inclined young people who grew up with DiCamillo’s books when they were little could heed my call and please make tunes to accompany her words, I’d be much obliged.
I do feel a bit bad that I haven’t mentioned artist Julie Morstad until this moment. I first encountered Morstad’s art years ago when I found her illustrating a Robert Louis Stevenson poem called The Swing in board book form. Instantly I was charmed, and I’ve faithfully followed the trajectory of her career in children’s literature ever since. Her pairing with DiCamillo reminds me of when DiCamillo was paired with Sophie Blackall for The Beatryce Prophecy. Critics like myself were left just thinking, “Well, duh. Haven’t they worked together before?” They have not. Certainly DiCamillo has never done anything at all with Morstad in the past, but linking the two together is mild genius. Morstad’s art is subdued but not emotionless. Her puppets in this book look out onto the world blankly, but you can sense, just looking at them, their interior lives. When humans make their appearance on the page (as humans are, sadly, wont to do) there’s an almost Edward Gorey-esque quality to their detachment. You feel for them… but honestly you feel for the puppets more. (Additional Note: If we do not see a Kate DiCamillo/Jon Klassed at some point in the next five years I shall think it a very great mistake on the part of the publishers. I mean, the obvious pattern here is Blackall to Morstad to Klassen. Debate me if you will).
There’s so much more to talk about with this book. The role of the girls who play with the puppets and how their very different impressions of them cause great changes. The role of the maid Jane Twiddum and what she wants. Heck, there’s a whole undercurrent of feminism and the roles puppets and living women play within society, but I suppose I’ll save that for someone else’s thesis. The important thing to understand is that this is a story where it doesn’t matter how physically passive you are. Your interior life, your hopes and dreams and goals, that’s the thing that matters. That’s what’s going to make you into an active protagonist in the end, regardless of whether or not you have the ability to move. The Puppets of Spelhorst taught me that. Now imagine what it could teach your own children....more
The animal book. Much maligned. Loathed. Occasionally abhorred. Standouts aside (I see you, Charlotte) it’s a genre of children’s book that can go reaThe animal book. Much maligned. Loathed. Occasionally abhorred. Standouts aside (I see you, Charlotte) it’s a genre of children’s book that can go real bad, real fast. I have heard actual, honest-to-goodness children’s librarians say point blank that they cannot stand animals chapter book fiction. True story. And yet the reasons vary wildly. Some only associate such books with death (as with the aforementioned Charlotte, The Underneath, etc.). Some find them cutesy or too twee for words (I’m not naming names here). Others dislike them because they are too often avatars for some grand metaphors about the human condition (most recently seen in The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse). And when you hear that an author of books for adults has written such a title (strike one) and that their publisher is calling it “a timeless story for readers of all ages” (strike two), the hairs on the back of my neck stand straight up and refuse to come down, despite my best entreaties. The author in question is Dave Eggers. My relationship to his children’s books has been touch and go. I certainly consider Her Right Foot his informational fiction picture book about the Statue of Liberty, to be one of the greats. But when it comes to chapter book fiction, the last thing of his I read was The Lifters which was . . . nice. A perfectly decent book. But life is too short for the perfectly decent, particularly when we’re talking about an animal book. Yet the blurbs on this new title were from folks I trust like Jon Klassen and Jon Scieszka and Annie Barrows. And with art by Shawn Harris, this at the very least looked interesting. So saying, I tell those of you who are like myself that though you may not be the biggest fan of books populated by furry woodland creatures (and, yes, that definitely is this book in a nutshell), read The Eyes and the Impossible and you will find a thoroughly well-written, occasionally touching, funny, strange little book that sticks both its landing and in your memory. It might even turn you around on the whole animal fiction thing.
Johannes occupies a park. The only free dog there, he is everywhere at once, running so fast you could never catch him. Here he works for the park’s three resident Bison. For them, he is “the eyes”, and he has helper animals that report to him daily. Things have stayed the same for quite some time, but suddenly there is a shift. A strange new building. Odd rectangles that enthrall Johannes and ensnare him. Strange hoards of animals that descend on the park and eat everything in sight. And strangest of all, Johannes has concocted a plan so wild and strange, it may change everything about his life from now on.
Dave Eggers probably is perfectly aware of people like me so, to ease at least some of our fears, this is what he writes in the book even before the story has started:
“This is a work of fiction. No places are real places. No animals are real animals. And, most crucially, no animals symbolize people. It is a tendency of the human species to see themselves in everything, to assume all living things, animals in particular, are simply corollaries to humans, but in this book, that is not the case. Here, the dogs are dogs, the birds are birds, goats are goats, the Bison Bison.”
He is also, I am sure, equally aware that it is the right of the reader to interpret whatever they read through their own lens, in strict defiance of the author if needs be. Even so, I appreciated the note. One assumes he is attempting to head off at the pass future interview questions from child and adult alike, wondering what it all means. Perhaps he is doing students a favor by trying waylay their teachers from giving them writing assignments that would demand they give a lofty weight and meaning to these critters in some outsized capacity. It may all be for nought, but I appreciate the effort. Also, as someone who gets real tired of novel-length metaphors real fast, it’s nice to get a modicum of reassurance right at the start. I suspect that there are many kids out there who will feel the same way.
Animal fiction has one distinct advantage over other kinds of middle grade chapter books that I have failed to mention until now: They make excellent classroom readalouds. Now truth be told I have not yet attempted to read The Eyes and the Impossible out loud to anyone. I think I may do so with my son fairly soon, but I know enough about the book to say with certainty that this book isn’t quite as simple as, say, The One and Only Ivan. A teacher considering it may wish to give it a practice run at home before debuting it before an audience. After all, the book opens with, “I turn I turn I turn before I lie to sleep and I rise before the Sun. I sleep inside and sleep outside and have slept in the hollow of a thousand-year-old tree.” It’s not exactly Ulysses for kids, but it's not exactly NOT Ulysses either. Even so, I think it could enthrall, if done properly. Just make sure you’re up for bringing your best performance.
Considering its quality, it’s a bit funny that I’ve taken this long to get to the actual writing in the book. It’s good. Quite good. Very good even. What is truly remarkable about Mr. Eggers as a writer is that he has found innumerable ways to say the otherwise simple phrase of, “I ran” here. Johannes never says he simply ran. Every time he takes off we are treated to these delicious descriptions of his speed, and no two ever repeat. “I run like a rocket. I run like a laser. You have never seen speed like mine. When I run I pull at the earth and make it turn.” Johannes speaks like a canine Mohammed Ali. When he brags, his exaggerations take on a grandiosity that grows increasingly delicious the more outsized that they become. A person could read an entire book entirely consisting of Johannes’ brags and it would be enough.
I think that’s the key to The Eyes and the Impossible, actually. Eggers has a nice sturdy plot, where interesting things happen, but he also fills the book (it’s almost sneaky) with beautiful language. Often that language, as when Johannes brags, is funny, and for kids it’s like the humor means they’re allowed to enjoy the writing. It gives them a pass. So you’ll get lines like, “I can make my way up quickly, like a feather lifted by wind, because my speed is light flight and my claws like promises kept,” and it works. The bravado convinces you, even as the language enthralls. How else could Eggers write something like this: “You are wondering about the sweater. You are wondering if the sweater altered my running ability, or my ability to reach the speed of light by throwing the future into the past and being the mechanism that turns the world.” The man has guts, I'll tell ya that.
And thumbs up on the characters in this story, by the way. Naturally I enjoyed the plot (there are repeated moments that read like some kind of furry footed version of Ocean’s 11) and its well-deserved ending. I liked very much the moment when Johannes confronts some rude goats and they almost immediately fall to worshipping him on sight. And being set on an island, I can almost completely visualize the stage production of this book. But beyond all of that I liked the characters and their individual arcs in particular. Johannes, our lead, is interesting because in spite of his braggadocio, you aren’t put off in the least. You like him, possibly because his behaviors are so very familiar and so very dog. His friends never quite fall into standard types, either. With their limited page time, it would have been easy to just slap them into individual scenes, each with a single personality quirk. Instead, they all seem to have interior lives and, in some cases, a multitude of quirks. Some of them even get character arcs, if you can believe it. And all this with such a slim page count too.
Though he never really tells us what a “pupusa” is, or why Johannes likes to eat them so much (a great number of things dogs eat are completely disgusting, so I like to think that Dave Eggers has spared us some great and terrible knowledge here), for the most part this book wraps up every dangling plot thread, by the story’s end, while still allowing the readers to speculate about what happens after that last page. It is little wonder that the man behind the nation-wide 826 initiatives where kids do a fair amount of creative writing has handed us a book that ends with what is essentially a gigantic writing prompt. Yet I would bet every penny I’ve earned in my life that Dave Eggers wouldn’t touch a sequel to this book with a ten-foot-pole. Though it has a certain Stuart Little-esque ending, and you’re left wanting to know more, some kids will be strangely satisfied. Others will probably reenact the fury I myself felt in third grade when my teacher finished reading the previously mentioned Stuart Little and I felt horribly cheated. You know what happens to those kids? They write their own endings. Their own sequels. And then they become writers themselves. Smart move, Mr. Eggers, sir.
Seems a bit of a pity not to mention Shawn Harris in all of this. The guy classes up this joint, and does it in a rather unique way. Now Harris is a bit of an enigma as a children’s book artist. Sometimes I feel like he follows a compunction to never illustrate the same way twice. That instinct has served him well, as his Caldecott Honor for Have You Ever Seen a Flower? attests (and Caldecott committees adore it when you change up your style). Now he’s done something utterly original with this book. I didn’t pick up on it at first either. Essentially, he’s taken ten paintings of classical landscapes, mostly from the 1800s (with a single 1600s van Rusdael for spice) and added Johannes to each one. Added so well, in fact, that you can hardly imagine the landscapes without him. It isn’t simply a matter of injecting a dog into a scene either. Look at the painting “Forest Interior” (1878) by Berndt Lindholm. This is one of the few paintings where Johannes is moving quite close to the viewer. He runs down a path and the sun hits his fur at precisely the same angle that it hits the trees and ground. Harris has even inserted his shadow, completing the illusion that he’s been here all along. That minute attention to detail pays off almost too well. I’m not sure how Shawn Harris is going to feel about thousands and thousands of children assuming he painted each of these images entirely from scratch, but he’s about to receive that honor.
A confident writer that is confident for good reason is deeply satisfying. Any one of us could try to write our own version of this story, and not a single one of us would write it the way that Dave Eggers has. I devoured this book in a single sitting and would reread it happily if asked to do so, which I cannot say for every kids book I pick up. It’s the writing, man. It dares to be better, but doesn’t lose young readers along the way. There’s excitement and goats and near drownings and ridiculous disguises. It’s a legitimately fun book that soaked itself in great writing and isn’t afraid to show that writing off. I don’t know if it has what it takes to become a massive hit. I don’t know if other adult gatekeepers will agree with me on what it is doing (and how well). All I know is that that doggone publisher is actually right. It really is a book for all ages. Oh, how I cringe to say that, but it’s true! A work of animal fiction. A title you can read with the whole family. A fun book. A worthy book. A great one. ...more
In retrospect, I was probably a bit too optimistic. Cast your mind back a little to when, for just a moment there, books for children began to experimIn retrospect, I was probably a bit too optimistic. Cast your mind back a little to when, for just a moment there, books for children began to experiment with their visual elements. We were seeing things like Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret, a massive tome of a title, win a Caldecott for best picture book. Books like The Arrival by Shaun Tan, which straddle what we think of as graphic novels (to say nothing of picture books as well) weren't just popular but critically acclaimed. It was exciting! The categories were falling by the wayside. Comics were getting respect and trying new things! And then . . . I dunno, man. I don’t want to say it all went stagnant since we’ve had so many wonderful books in the interim, but after that initial flush of creativity it was like everyone doubled down on staying in their lane. Picture books look like picture books and they’re rarely very long. Comics look like comics and inevitably they have the same print size. It’s rare that my little heart goes pitta-pat when I see something that’s different…. but never say never. When you least expect it, sometimes you’re lucky enough to be handed a book that is equal parts fable and mystery. A picture book and a graphic novel and an early chapter book and a bedtime story all rolled into one impossible-to-define package. I'm not even kidding when I say that When You Look Up by Decur gives you a deep and abiding faith in 21st century storytelling. Now if only I could figure out where to shelve it...
A boy named Lorenzo and his mother move to a big old house in the country. When he encounters his new room he finds an old roll top desk sitting on one side. Some light exploring yields a secret door hiding a large notebook. Inside are fantastical stories of all kinds. In the first (“The Bronze Dragon”) a little rabbit makes a mistake and almost pays a terrible price. “The Boot and the Hat” tells the tale of a cat that comes to the aid of the giraffe it so desperately loves. “The Factory,” in contrast, is a desperately sad and scary tale of a quail that watches its friends become consumed on the factory line where they work. At this point, Lorenzo begins to realize that there are real world equivalents to the things he reads in the notebook. Yet it isn’t until he reads the last story, “My Dream Voyager,” that Lorenzo cracks the mystery of the notebook and the truth that sometimes we don’t want to be rescued. We just want to be found.
Americans don’t like things that look very different. We’re quite enamored of things that, instead, remind us of other things. For example, we very much like it when our picture books pay homage to classic artistic styles of the past. We revel in art that emulates the artists we already love. But when it comes to art from other cultures or countries, something freezes up inside of us. It’s as if we fear to appreciate what we’re seeing. Because I am a librarian, I have a tendency to use my children as test subjects. As such, I read When You Look Up to my six-year-old son, wondering how he’d take the whole thing. I’ve mentioned before that librarians will have a hard time figuring out where in the collection to put this book. I’ve seen Baker & Taylor (our distributor) list it as a graphic novel, and I understand the instinct. It is, after all, very visual. But while there are occasionally panels and sometimes some speech balloons, this book can also feel like an extended multi-part picture book. Thanks to the look of it, my son was captivated from the start. I think it gave him more of an emotional ride than he was expecting. He was surprised by the sadness of “The Factory” and seemed to take comfort in both the last story in the notebook “My Dream Voyager” which, in turn, echoes the same bittersweet (but mostly sweet) feeling you have at the end of the book. Parents that give this book a try with their kids will find it to be exceedingly accessible.
Because each story in the notebook is accompanied by art made of cut paper, so too has Decur taken the time to make sure that while most of the book is all paints and colored pencil lines, the notebook’s stories are cut paper. Alas, the publication page doesn’t confess to the medium in which Decur is working. What we do know is that the art in this book really does use paint and cut paper. Moreover, Decur is a self-taught artist. That fact is extraordinary to me as his art style, while utterly unique, feels so self-confident and accomplished. And, thanks to the cleverness of his plotting, I loved the visual callbacks throughout the story. Some you’ll notice right away (like the boy scout outfit on the kitty/kid) but others make take a reread or two.
I could wax eloquent on the art all day long (and it’s hard not to when you have such a magnificent combination of styles, angles, panels, and points of view) but I think all the reviewers of this book will probably do that. Let’s just acknowledge as well the fact that you can draw pretty books all day, but unless the story inside hits home it won’t count for boo. The translation from the original Spanish by Chloe Garcia Roberts deserves its own little shout out. There’s a succinctness to the writing that serves the plotting well. But surprisingly (at least to me) it’s the plot that I may have loved most. This is the kind of book that’s clever without giving away evidence of its cleverness until you reach the end. The whole time you’re reading this you’re participating in a kind of mystery without even knowing it. This came to me as such a relief, particularly since early on the book strives a bit too hard to drill home the put-down-your-phone-and-experience-the-world messaging (Laszlo even tries to make a book's image larger with his fingers). All that sort of disappears as the plot picks up. And one could probably grumble that the storyline relies on an awful lot on coincidences (example: Lorenzo overhears two aides in a retirement community mention that one of the people there spends his days just cutting little pieces of paper and instantly he knows the man has a connection to the notebook). I wasn’t bothered by any of that. To my mind it’s just a clever way of having the universe show us we don’t have to be alone.
Every time I read this book, I discover something new on its pages. It’s the kind of story that rewards re-readings. But the real kicker? Honestly, this is one of those titles that is not only cool in appearance, kids will honestly like it. Don’t be put off by its attractive, literary look, oh parents of the young. This is the artistic beauty of a book you’ve been waiting for. And for those of you that have been desperately searching for a cool gift for a kid (the one that marks you as a special, slightly kooky person in a child’s life) When You Look Up is the perfect gift. Honestly, who cares if you don't know where to shelve it? A book that's quite a bit smarter and more beautiful than it has any right to be.
I do not trust adult novelists. Not, as a general rule, when they start dipping their toes into the world of children’s literature. I am interested, iI do not trust adult novelists. Not, as a general rule, when they start dipping their toes into the world of children’s literature. I am interested, in their attempts, yes, and, truth be told, I am more inclined to pick up their books than with a hitherto unknown writer. Yet time and again I am disappointed by the results. I am not saying that an adult novelist is incapable of writing well for children. Neil Gaiman seemed to figure it out. Catherynne Valente is passable. But on the whole, these authors have a very hard time transferring their talents to a younger audience. Often they try too hard, dumbing down the material, failing to respect the intelligence of the child reader. In this light Rivka Galchen is an interesting case. A novelist and writer, if you’ve read a piece in the New Yorker about a children’s book or children’s book creator, odds are Ms. Galchen was behind it. More importantly, in her new book for kids, Rat Rule 79, she deftly avoids that disrespect so many authors indulge in. This book understands children and gives them some credit for figuring out how the world works around them. It takes a great big swing and, in some ways, misses, but I’d rather read a book from someone who shoots for the moon than one that always plays it safe. Never boring. Consistently fascinating.
Fred is grumpy, but she has every reason in the world to be. If you were constantly moving to new cities with your mom you might feel the same way. So when Fred has a particularly peevish night, telling her mother she has no interest in a birthday party with kids she doesn’t even know, she has no idea what’s coming next. Certainly not that she’d see her mom walk into a glowy, magical paper lantern in their living room. Or that by following she’d find herself in a land ruled by a mysterious Rat whose rules and ultimatums are never broken or challenged. Now, armed with several new friends, Fred is setting off to free the Rat, find her mother, and see if there’s any way to return home, if you can truly call a place you’ve just moved to that.
At its heart Rat Rule 79 is falling into the old Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland format. This is, I should note, probably the most difficult kind of children’s novel to attempt. On its surface it may feel rather freeing. You drop your main character into a fairy world rife with puns or bits of wordplay (or even numbers!) and you don’t have to fret about the trappings of reality. You’ll find books like The Phantom Tollbooth that replicate this model, but that’s sort of a best-case scenario. For the most part, such a book is very very difficult to maintain. We’re talking about books where character development is not the highest of priorities and where BIG ideas are on parade for the reader’s love. The advantage of such books is that they appeal to those child readers that enjoy feeling smart and clever because they’re getting a high percentage of what the author is saying. Yet the vast majority of these kinds of stories end up fairly forgotten. For Galchen to make Rat Rule 79 in that mold, she had to feel fairly confident that this was the only way this story could possibly go down. In a weird way, you gotta respect that.
There are choices that the book made that make a lot of sense to me. The chapter headings, for one, are an infinite source of enjoyment. Here’s just a sampling: “A Sorry Chapter. The Technically True Chapter. The Other Chapter. What Does This Chapter Look Like to You? Chapter Ate. The Empty Set. Interrogative Chapter. Chapter Grue.” They go on but you get the idea. At the book’s heart, it just seems to be having a lot of fun with the material. It seems strange to say but when an adult writer is reveling in cleverness, child readers will often tap into that enjoyment too. There are her descriptions, which can say things like, “Her spotted feathers looked humbly magnificent like the seed pattern in a kiwi.” There are the moments like the one where Fred figures out how to outwit the Rat’s visiting hours by being literally "on time". And there are the characters, the dialogue, the names and places, and the general sense that everything is going somewhere and that if you just follow long enough you might be able to get there too.
But at other times there were choices that just baffled me. Let us, for example, try to figure out what our heroine’s problem is. Fred and her mother, we are told at the start (in “Chapter Tuesday”) move from town to town for no particular reason. In the last six years they have moved five times. Ostensibly this is because Fred’s mother is a math professor. Her mom suggests they hold a birthday party and Fred isn’t interested. Soon thereafter her mother disappears into a giant lantern and Fred is determined to find her. But rather than focus on the problem of Fred having to find a home all the time, the book instead chooses to believe that the problem was Fred’s refusal to have a birthday party. She’s also, it can be said, supposed to find her mom, and there are little mysterious mom hints and clues spotted throughout the story. Indeed, when you take into account the subplot involving The Rat and her son, it seems that it would be natural for the course of the book to examine that particular relationship in some manner, however peripheral. And there is a bit of that here and there. Galchen is reaching out and attempting to grasp at some very big ideas, all wrapped up in children aging and birthdays and what it’s like for parents when their children get older. But because none of that ties into Fred’s central search, finding her mom, it feels as if the book is so close to coalescing into something brilliant, but didn’t quite get there. Which is a pity because it’s quite an enjoyable read.
For the record, I can find no flaw in the decision to tap artist Elena Megalos as the illustrator. This is, by all accounts, her first children’s book and she’s an ideal match for the material. From the charming endpapers showing an elephant dancing with an umbrella to the colors of the spot art (red, gray, black, and pink), to the little details in each of the characters (a mongoose mom wearing a sporting t-shirt and backpack), the art of Megalos is a consistent delight. In bedtime tales of this sort, art should come as a delectable treat every time it appears on a page. This art does precisely that. Tonally, it’s a perfect complement to Galchen’s particular form of levelheaded whimsy. You wouldn’t exchange the art here for anyone else’s in the world.
How much should you really demand from a children’s book? It’s a tricky question. On the one hand, I like my books for kids to be satisfying. And 90% of this book is precisely that. It’s only when you get to the end that you realize that so much here has been for naught. But then go back and read the beautiful lines. Look at the design and the art, which are so strangely satisfying. This is a gift book at its core. A book that hip adults buy for their nieces and nephews. It is also a book that sits on a shelf and is slipped off by a kid with curiosity, eschewing the other shiny books around it that look so very samey after a while. This book doesn’t look like anything but itself. It doesn’t read like anything but what it is. It is not flashy but it is weirdly engrossing. I think it could have been truly great, but there’s no shame in being merely grand. A book that bucks conformity with every pretty page. Swings big. Aims for the stars.
It took a year and a half for me to notice, but by then it was too late.
I moved to the Chicago area from New York City in what can only be described aIt took a year and a half for me to notice, but by then it was too late.
I moved to the Chicago area from New York City in what can only be described as a fairly seamless transition. Going from one large metropolitan area to another large metropolitan area, albeit one with suburbs, didn't prove to be a huge a shock to the system. Job in place? Check. Car acquired? Check. House purchased? Check. Yup. Seemed I had everything sewed up in a neat little bow. And it wasn’t until much later that I learned a shocking fact about my new home. I was at work one day when out of the blue I asked my colleagues, all innocence, “Hey, guys? What’s the big famous children’s book character based in Chicago?” Their silence sliced through my heart. In NYC you just don’t know how lucky you are. There’s Eloise in her Plaza, Peter and Willie in Prospect Park, and any number of books being churned out every single year as little paeans to the city that never sleeps. I never thought of it as an exclusive right. I mean, Paris has Madeline, doesn’t it? But soon enough it became clear that for all its charms, most major cities in America lack that most basic and unassailable right: The right to have some famous children’s books set in your town. You might think then that when Bolivar passed under my nose I sneered at it. That I found it yet another Manhattan love letter like so many that had come before. Well, I tried, I really did, but that lasted all of two pages. Instead I was sucked into a book that loves New York City so well that it can accurately depict the view of Zabar’s from the subway. So move over, Lyle Lyle Crocodile and your East 88th Street digs. Looks like there’s a new reptile in town, and his apartment on West 78th Street may well eclipse everyone who came before. Manhattan loves a dinosaur.
If you were a dinosaur, where would you choose to live? You might think somewhere remote, far from the crush of humanity. But what if you were a big time fan of museums, bookstores, music, and The New Yorker? What if you really liked people, and didn’t want to eat them? New York City might be the right place for you. The crazy thing is that in a place like Manhattan (specifically the Upper West Side) Bolivar the dinosaur lives in complete and perfect peace. Why? Because everyone in the city is too busy to see what’s right in front of their noses. Everyone, that is, except for a kid named Sybil. Like the oracle that shares her name, no one believes Sybil when she says that a real live dinosaur lives next to her apartment. Trying to photograph him is a bust. Stalking doesn’t help. It really isn’t until there’s a mix-up in the Mayor’s office that Bolivar appears in the spotlight and finds himself relying on someone else. Someone who was right under his nose all the time. It seems that failing to notice the extraordinary is not a uniquely human trait.
Part of what makes this book so interesting is that upon picking it up you’re not exactly sure what it is. What we have here is a strange kind of graphic novel/picture book/bedtime novel hybrid. The publisher is Archaia, known for their comics, and indeed there are a enough speech balloons to indicate that’s where it should be shelved. But the size of the book, and the narrative text that appears fairly regularly, definitely makes the book feel more like a very long picture book. A 224-page picture book, to be precise. You see the problem. Even as recently as ten years ago, librarians would have been tearing their hair out, desperate to figure out where to catalog this puppy. These days it’s a post-Hugo Cabret world, baby. The blurring of the traditional lines hardly raises an eyebrow anymore. If I was a betting woman, I’d say that since the publisher is Archaia, most libraries and bookstores will shelve Bolivar in the graphic novel / comic book section. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. Good, because due to the sheer number of picture books published in a given year Bolivar would disappear in a sea of other, mediocre dinosaur tales faster than you can say ARK-EE-OP-TER-RICKS. Graphic novels, in contrast, are few and far between. In a given year, true quality middle grade graphic novels hardly ever surpass the number fifteen. That said, when parents look for bedtime fare (which this book most certainly is) they don’t often head towards the comics. Hopefully the enterprising souls that select this for their libraries and bookstores will also know how to market it properly. It deserves a bit of attention.
There’s a moment in one of the books in The Borrowers series (I think it’s The Borrowers Aloft) when Arrietty asks her father why she and her other tiny family members are able to so freely fly in a tiny hot air balloon above people’s heads and not be spotted. Her father answers that big people spend an inordinate amount of time looking down, not paying attention to anything that rests higher than their sightline. It’s funny, but that line has stayed with me for years and years. The idea that you can be so wrapped up in your own head that you miss seeing something marvelous. So no, I didn’t find the idea that Bolivar could essentially walk through the streets of Manhattan, and even go so far as to inadvertently impersonate the mayor, all that far fetched. When I lived in the city I’d plug my earbuds in and shut out a city that tried every day, as hard as it could, to grab my attention. There could easily have been dinosaurs wandering the streets, you bet. Probably more in the Village than the Upper West Side though, eh?
Sure hope you’re a fan of cross-hatching because as an art style, Rubin’s a bit fond of it. And yet, as strange as it may sound, the artist I thought of the most while reading this wasn’t Bill Watterson or Maurice Sendak (though they certainly did occur to me from time to time) but rather Mike Curato. The fine attention to detail as it pertains to the streets of New York City may be done in a different style than Curato, but that same level of detail is there. So is the love. The thing about Rubin’s book is that the artist’s sheer palpitating love for NYC virtually emanates off of the page. At any given time I could randomly flip in the book to some detail or moment that felt like the city. *flip* There’s a wisteria vine, unchecked, climbing up a brownstone. *flip* There’s a painting of Peter Stuyvesant, wooden leg and all, in the mayor’s office. *flip* There’s the orange of the 1 train’s seats (and the requisite tourist ducking their head to try and make sense of the subway map). *flip* Heck, there’s even a teeny bowl of pickles on the table in the deli where Bolivar gets his corned beef sandwiches.
On a grander scale is the setting itself: New York in the early 21st century. After a while the sheer number of locations begins to add up . . . and yet Rubin isn’t trying to earn points by cramming the best-known places into the tale. The Upper West Side is the primary location, with logical trips to places like Central Park, The Natural History Museum, the aforementioned Zabar’s, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and more. I half hoped that Bolivar would hop the 2 or 3 at 72nd Street and go to the New York Public Library on 42nd and 5th, but soon I discovered another, very practical, reason for keeping the dino close to home. If Sybil is to realistically follow him around, her travels should be restricted to her immediate corner of the city. This begs the obvious question as to why the reader can swallow the fact that there’s a living breathing dinosaur tromping around Manhattan in the broad daylight while the idea of a kid walking the street alone strains credulity, but that’s a topic for another day.
Happily, Rubin does a good job of keeping his adult jokes to a minimum. When they do pop up they don’t pull a Shrek and rub the inappropriate reference in your face. It’s much subtler than that. For example I was very taken with the moment when Bolivar forgets himself momentarily and believes that a dinosaur is chasing him along with the crowd of people before him. As he tries to escape he murmurs, “Must go faster . . . must go faster . . .” Jeff Goldblum himself would be impressed. There are visual gags for New Yorkers too. “Papaya Czar” instead of “Papaya King” was one of my own pet favorites.
My sole objection to the book pertains to a nonexistent character. There are some unfortunate moments when Sybil’s mom mentions the existence of Sybil’s dad. Unfortunate, I say, because each time this happened it felt distinctly like a holdover from an earlier draft of the book when Sybil even had a father. Sybil’s mom is so clearly a single mother that these lines threw my daughter and I off a bit as we were reading the story and left us uncertain. Was there some negligent father lurking around the corners of the book somewhere? Was the mom in some advanced state of psychosis due to the stress of her job and child and making up a fake husband? Or was it just a typo? You be the judge.
If you read the little biography of Sean Rubin in the back of this book you discover that though he was born in Brooklyn and (if an oblique reference in the Acknowledgements is to be believed) lived on the Upper West Side for a time, he now resides in Charlottesville, Virginia. Which means he’s a transplant like myself. This book may have started when inspiration was no farther than just outside his front door, but in the process of its creation it has become an ode to a city long loved and left behind. The thing is, you don’t have to be a New Yorker, or even like NYC, to thoroughly enjoy this book. Bolivar the dinosaur speaks to the introvert in all of us. That part deep down inside that encourages us to hide away from the world, keep to ourselves, and avoid any and all connections for fear of getting hurt. Dinosaurs may not be around anymore but Bolivars abound. Even little Bolivars who will pick up this book and instantly connect with someone just like them. So for the Bolivars and the Manhattan-lovers, the graphic novel enthusiasts and the parents just looking for a good bedtime story, Bolivar the book is the place to go. Dino-mite stuff.
There are far fewer robot middle grade books out there than you might expect. This is probably because, as a general rule, robots fall into the Data fThere are far fewer robot middle grade books out there than you might expect. This is probably because, as a general rule, robots fall into the Data from Star Trek trap. Their sole purpose in any narrative is to explain what it is to be human. You see this all the time in pop culture, so it stands to reason you’d see it a bit in children’s books too. Never you mind that a cool robot is basically a kid’s dream companion. Take away the kid, put the robot on its own, and you have yourself some philosophy lite. Maybe that’s why I liked Peter Brown’s The Wild Robot as much as I did. The heroine of this book is mechanical but she’s not wrestling with the question of what it means to feel emotions or any of that. She's a bit more interested in survival and then, after a bit of time, connection. Folks say this book is like Hatchet or My Side of the Mountain. Maybe so, but it’s also a pretty good book about shedding civilization and going wild. In short, living many a city kid’s dream.
The first thing she is aware of is that she is bound in a crate by cords. Once those are severed she looks about. Roz is a robot. She appears to be on an island in the sea. Around her are the shattered remains of a good many other robots. How she has gotten here, she doesn’t know, but it doesn’t take long for her to realize that she is in dire need of shelter and allies. Roz is not a robot built for the outdoors, but part of her programming enables her to adapt. Learning the languages of the denizens of the forest, Roz is initially rebuffed (to put it mildly) by the animals living there. After a while, though, she adopts a gosling she accidentally orphaned and together they learn, grow, and come to be invaluable members of the community. And when Roz faces a threat from the outside, it’s her new friends and extended family that will come to her aid.
They say that all good stories can be easily categorized into seven slots. One of the best known is “a stranger comes to town”. Roz is precisely that and her story is familiar in a lot of ways. The stranger arrives and is shunned or actively opposed. Then they win over the local populace and must subsequently defend it against an incoming enemy or be protected by it. But there is another kind of book this conjures up as well. The notion of going from “civilized” to “wild” carries the weight of all kinds of historical appropriations. Smart of Brown then to stick with robots and animals. Roz is a kind of anti-Pinocchio. Instead of trying to figure out how to fit in better with civilization, she spends the bulk of her time trying to figure out how to shed it like a skin. In his career, Brown has wrestled continually with the notion of civilization vs. nature, particularly as it relates to being “wild”. The most obvious example of this, prior to The Wild Robot, was his picture book Mr. Tiger Goes Wild. Yet somehow it manages to find its way into many of the books he does. Consider the following:
• My Teacher Is a Monster! (No, I Am Not) – A child sees his teacher as a creature best befitting a page in “Where the Wild Things Are” until, by getting to know her, she is humanized in his sight.
• The Curious Garden – Nature reclaims abandoned civilization, and is tamed in the process.
• Creepy Carrots – Brown didn’t write this one but it’s not hard to see how the image of nature (in the form of carrots) terrorizing a bunny in his suburban home could hold some appeal.
• Even the Chowder books and his first picture book The Flight of the Dodo had elements of animals wrestling with their own natures.
In this book, Brown presents us with a robot created with the sole purpose of serving in a domestic capacity. Are we seeing only the good side of nature and eschewing the terrible? Brown does clearly have a bias at work here, but this is not a peaceable kingdom where the lamb lays down next to the lion unless necessity dictates that it do so. Though the animals do have a dawn truce, Brown notes at one moment how occasionally one animal or another might go missing, relocating involuntarily to the belly of one of its neighbors. Nasty weather plays a significant role in the plot, beaching Roz at the start, and providing a winter storm of unprecedented cruelty later on. Even so, those comparisons of this book to Hatchet and My Side of the Mountain aren’t far off the mark. Nature is cold and cruel but it’s still better than dull samey samey civilization.
Of course, you read every book through your own personal lens. If you’re an adult reading a children’s book then you’re not only reading a book through your own lens but through the lens you had when you were the intended audience’s age as well. It’s sort of a dual method of book consumption. My inner ten-year-old certainly enjoyed this book, that’s for sure. Thirty-eight-year-old me had a very different reaction. I liked it, sure I did. But I also spent much of this book agog that it was such a good parenting title. Are we absolutely certain Peter Brown doesn’t have some secret children squirreled away somewhere? I mean, if you were to ask me what the theme of this book truly is, I’d have to answer you in all honesty that it’s about how we see the world anew through the eyes of our children. A kid would probably say it’s about how awesome it is to be a robot in the wild. Both are true.
If you’re familiar with a Peter Brown picture book then you might have a sense of his artistic style. His depiction of Roz is very interesting. It was exceedingly nice to see that though the book refers to her in the feminine, it’s not like the pictures depict her as anything but a functional robot, glowing eyes and all. Even covered in flowers she looks more like an extra from Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky than anything else. Her mouth is an expressionless slit but in her movements you can catch a bit of verve and drive. Alas, the illustrations are in black and white and not the lovely color of which we know Brown to be capable. Colored art in middle grade novels is a pricey affair. A publisher needs to really and truly believe in a book to give it color. That said, with this book appearing regularly on the New York Times bestseller list, you’d think they’d have known what they had at the time. Maybe we can get a full-color anniversary edition in a decade or so.
Like most robot books, Brown does cheat a little. It’s hard not to. We are told from the start that Roz is without emotions, but fairly early on this statement is called into question. One might argue quite reasonably that early statements like. “As you might know, robots don’t really feel emotions. Not the way animals do.” Those italics at the beginning of the sentence are important. They suggest that this is standard information passed down by those in the know and that they believe you shouldn’t question it. But, of course, the very next sentence does precisely that. “And yet . . .” Then again, those italics aren’t special to that chapter. In fact, all the chapters in this book begin with the first few words italicized. So it could well be that Brown is serious when he says that Roz can’t feel emotions. Can she learn them then? The book’s foggy on that point, possibly purposely so, but in that uncertainty plenty will find Brown’s loving robot a bit more difficult to swallow than others. Books of this sort work on their own internal logic anyway. I know one reader who seriously wondered why the RECO robots had no on/off switches. Others, why she could understand animal speech. You go with as much as you can believe and the writer pulls you in the rest of the way.
I’ve read books for kids where robots are in charge of the future and threaten heroes in tandem with nature. I’ve read books for kids where robots don’t understand why they’re denied the same rights as the humans around them. I even read a book once about a robot who tended a human child, loving her as her parents would have, adapting her to her alien planet’s environment over the years (that one’s Keeper of the Isis Light by Monica Hughes and you MUST check it out, if you get a chance). But I have never read a robot book quite as simple and to the point as Peter Brown’s. Nor have I read such comforting bedtime reading in a while. Lucky is the kid that gets tucked in and read this at night. An excellent science fiction / parenting / adventure / survival novel, jam packed with robotic bits and pieces. If this is the beginning of the robot domination, I say bring it on.
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