To an adult, this year’s children’s books only confirm some obvious truths: that there’s a reason little-known folk tales are little known; that the only famous people who should write children’s books are people who got famous writing children’s books; that multicultural good intentions are no substitute for a good story. But to a child–who knows? Even supermodel Paulina Porizkova’s fashionably biodiverse (and thoroughly disagreeable) The Adventures of Ralphie the Roach (Doubleday. $15), co-written with co-model Joanne Russell, may fire some young imagination. City kids, though, aren’t likely to see the magic of a story in which humans are the villains and the roaches take over.
Another obvious truth: bowdlerizing the classics is bad. So thumbs up for Glen Rounds’s George Booth–like Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf (Holiday House. $14.95). The two stupid pigs get eaten, and so does the wolf. And thumbs down for Eric A. Kimmel’s “lighter alternative” to the singsong nursery tale The Old Woman and Her Pig (Holiday House. $14.95). Instead of the traditional beating and biting, the stick begins to “poke” the dog and the dog begins to “nip” the pig. While he was at it, why didn’t Kimmel make the pig a hamster? But although Iona and Peter Opie’s edition of The Classic Fairy Tales (Oxford. $25) is essential reading-it presents such stories as “Sleeping Beauty” and “Cinderella” in their earliest surviving English texts-it’s strong medicine even for purists. In the 18th-century “Jack the Giant-Killer,” the giant took a knife, “ript open his own Belly from the Bottom to the Top, and out dropt his Tripes and Trolly-bubs.” We also get Gustave Dore’s suppressed illustration showing the ogre in “Hop o’ My Thumb” cutting his sleeping daughters’ throats; the unsuspecting parent may not thank the Opies when that page gets turned.
This year’s most gussied-up classic is Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes (Atlantic Monthly. $40): slipcased, with gilded plastic scissors dangling from the ribbon bookmark. The overblown presentation suits the story, as do designer Karl Lagerfeld’s lushly camp illustrations, which make the emperor a fat, rouged drag queen, red-nippled breasts bulging above his corset. (Parental discretion advised.) Still, $40 for a tale whose moral is “get real”? At $12.95 each, Everyman’s Library offers such standards as Peter Pan, Treasure Island and more, all with the right illustrators: W. W. Denslow for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, John Tenniel for the Alice books, Kipling for his own Just So Stories. But shop around. Books of Wonder has facsimile first editions of Oz books ($14.95 to $22.95)-in color, not barebones black and white. And its Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ($15) is stunningly reproduced from prints taken from the original engravings.
Those trendy revisionists Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith, author and illustrator of the 1989 best seller “The True Story of the Three Little Pigs,” are back with The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales (Viking. $16). It reads like a kids’ book by Bart Simpson, and that’s not a compliment. “Why is that page blank?” as Red Hen. “Where is that lazy narrator? Where is that lazy illustrator?” And where is the kid who wants a labored exercise in postmodern metafiction, in which the table of contents (not the sky) falls on Chicken Licken? Well, the book has sold more than 165,000 copies since October; they can’t all have gone to the Yale English department.
As for those gentle but imaginative books we used to have-publishers are making pots of money reissuing them. Margaret Wise Browns A Child’s Good Night Book (HarperCollins. $10), with Jean Charlot’s restful, harmoniously composed pictures, has now come out in its original, 1943 size-perfect for near the top of a stocking. And today’s writer-illustrators still put out refreshingly old-fashioned hooks. Chris L. Demarest’s My Little Red ear (Caroline House. $14.95) is your basic wish-voyage in watercolors: the little boy’s toy car takes him up mountains, through cities, across the Egyptian desert-and home to bed at nightfall. Rose Bursik’s Amelia’s Fantastic Flight (Holt. $14.95) is virtually the same story with a little girl and a toy plane.
A Leaf Named Bud (Children’s Universe. $12.95), by Paula and Sara Schwartz-with the latter’s bright, loony-cartoony illustrations-also has a comforting circular structure. A leaf buds on a spring day, gets greener, then yellower, then redder, then purpler, then flies off the tree to dance under a night sky “With his new-found friends.” Richard McGuire’s The Orange Book (Children’s Universe. $14.95) is a sort of anti-counting book: its witty, ’40s-retro illustrations follow the enigmatic fates of 14 oranges individually, not cumulatively. No. 8, for instance, rolls off the deck of an ocean liner. Why? Because.
Chris Van Allsburg is hardly gentle-even his Santa in “The Polar Express” is eerie-but The Widow’s Broom (Houghton Mifflin. $17.95), about a broom that can walk, wield an ax and play one-stick piano, shows him at his spooky best. Greg Couch’s illustrations for Jeff Brumbeau’s The Man in the Moon in Love (Stewart, Tabori & Chang. $14.95) could also scare a younger child-but it all ends cozily. The moon man’s lady love even lays off the sweet-potato pie when he moves in with her-she seems to drop about 50 pounds in a single page. This may be the first contemporary children’s book with a subtext connecting eating disorders and sexual frustration. Don’t bet it will be the last.
At least they’re still writing heartwarming, eye-misting animal stories. In Tony Johnston’s The Promise (HarperCollins. $15), a girl helps an old farmer deliver a calf The mustached old geezer in Pamela Keavney’s warm-fuzzy pictures was once a boy who helped another old farmer deliver a … Shameless, but it does the trick. More shameless is Marie Killilea’s Newf (Philomel. $14.95), illustrated by Ian Schoenherr, about a big black dog and a little white kitty. Thrilling rescues from waves and snowdrifts, and a concluding cuddle. If, as Bruno Bettelheim argued, tales of witches and giants help children cope with fear, sentimental animal stories allow controlled exploration of an equally profound feeling: unconditional love.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, kids can cope with their feelings until the cows come home and it won’t help them deal with playmates like Bootsie Barker, the tiny terrorist in Barbara Bottner’s Bootsie Barker Bites (Putnam. $14.95). Adult reason is useless against a pint-size psycho who pulls the narrator’s hair and devises games in which “you get to be a worm.” Ann Herbert Scott’s reissued Sam (Philomel. $14.95), first published in 1967, takes on a problem closer to home. Sam’s parents and siblings shoo him away: Why don’t you go outside? Why don’t you go inside? He finally bursts into tears-and gets the attention he needs. Symeon Shimin’s realistic drawings-Sam looks like his mom; his brother takes after dad-perfectly complement a perfect story. In a better world, it would be incidental that this loving family is black. Even in this world, few kids will have trouble empathizing with Sam.
Which brings us to the subject we’ve been putting off. Again, multiculturalism is the trend of the year in children’s publishing, and it dovetails with the industry’s perennial plundering of folk material. This year it’s brought us indecipherable Native American riddles (You grab it, I grab it. Answer. air), preachy proto-environmentalist folk tales from Nigeria, singing trees from Switzerland, flying gourds from North Carolina. But it’s also brought us Rafe Martin’s The Rough-Face Girl (Putnam. $14.95), a welcome rediscovery of an American Indian Cinderella variant whose heroine is both a religious mystic and a seeker after true love.
Better still, Patricia C. McKissack’s A Million Fish … More or Less (Knopf. $14) is an original tribute both to black life in bayou country and to the American tall tale. Young Hugh Thomas listens to Papa-Daddy and Elder Abbajon’s whoppers about 500-pound turkeys and cottonmouths with legs, then goes off to a mysterious bayou. He catches three fish-and then a million more. Various improbable animals devour the million, but he keeps the three-and gains a place among his yarn-spinning elders. It’s hard to name another children’s story in which joining the community of adults requires intensifying the imagination rather than relinquishing it. Auden, whose own inner journey brought him from lead mining to poetry rather than vice versa, would have approved. So will any child who likes to think that growing up might just have its compensations.
ILLUSTRATIONS (4): A pint-size psycho, a Native American Cinderella, sleepy-time bunnies and tall tales from the bayou: (Clockwise from above) ‘Bootsie Barker Bites,’ illustrated by Peggy Rathmann; ‘The Rough-Face Girl,’ illustrated by David Shannon; ‘A Child’s Good Night Book,‘illustrated by Jean Charlot; A Million Fish … More or Less,’ illustrated by Dena Schutzer (PEGGY RATHMANN, DAVID SHANNON, JEAN CHARLOT, DENA SCHUTZER)
PHOTO: A gentle, loony-cartoony look at nature’s yearly cycle: From A Leaf Named Bud’ (SARA SCHWARTZ)
MAKE WAY FOR MEMORIES
Roly-poly, pell-mell, tumble-bumble. Who doesn’t recognize that childhood mantra from the beloved (14 million copies sold) Little Golden Book “The Poky Little Puppy”? Maybe you heard it on a long-ago lap, or recently read it to someone sitting on yours. This fall the PLP is being feted, along with “Doctor Dan the Bandage Man” (a Band-Aid came in every copy) and a whole library of other memories, as Little Golden Books marks-what else?-its golden anniversary.
In 1942 Simon & Schuster and the Western Printing and Lithographing Company launched the high-quality golden-spined books for 25 cents each, in supermarkets and variety stores as well as book outlets. A huge success, they’ve sold more than 1 billion copies and now sell 50 million annually-often for less than a dollar. Each volume still bears a nameplate announcing, “This book belongs to. . .” In many stories, the theme is that exploring the wider world is terrific-but so is coming home again. That’s where you can pull a little chair up to a little table, and write your name in your very own book.
