Jay Bushara emailed me a while ago about his site One Potato. I am so glad he did. One Potato is an online children’s bookstore specializing in lost and overlooked titles. Exposing my children to books at a young age is important to me. I take the girls to the library often for story time then we hunt for new books to devour. We have story time with the girls twice a day- before nap and bedtimes. I love that One Potato introduces great children’s book authors to us. I asked Jay, the founder of One Potato to share with us his top five children’s book. Jay simply said…
Children’s picture books are often useful, sometimes glorious, and they are everywhere, the stuff left over from growing up and moving on, proverbial needles in the hay.
Too often we settle for the hay. This is understandable. Still, new parents in particular are likely to be become disenchanted if they go looking for the magic of children’s literature amid the piles of merchandising tie-ins at their local superstores.
The traffic in pallid substitutes seems a self-defeating proposition at best, at worst a little smarmy and disingenuous. We all might do better – consumers and makers and foisters, yes, us – by remembering what it is that books, or good books anyway, do unequivocally well. James Cameron can, amazingly, send you hurtling through galaxies, but all of his horses and all of his men still cannot assemble a landscape as vital and fiercely original as some of our boldest children’s authors and illustrators:
Like Stian Hole. You probably will not find his Garmann’s Summer stocked at Barnes & Noble (as I did a couple of years ago, when it was published) but you would be wise to snap it up if you did. Funny, fearful, curious and completely unaffected, here is a book that never ceases to surprise. A 6-year-old boy spends much of his summer visiting with three old aunts who are not long for this world, and not overly worried about what awaits them. He pulls at his teeth – still not loose – and frets about the twins next door who can ride bicycles and read and spell backwards, and shed teeth with impressive regularity. But of course he is changed – from contemplating ladybugs and tunneling in the hedges, from chats with his mother and father, and from waving goodbye to the boat carrying his aunts to wherever and (maybe) forever. The greatest and most permanent transformations usually happen where no one else can see, and they are an awesome responsibility, summer or not.
Like Stephen Gammell, whose artwork remains immediately recognizable beneath even the thickest layers of dust gathering in the remotest of library aisles. In Monster Mama he collaborates with the writer Liz Rozenberg to create the sort of unforgettable darkness that even the glossiest of picture book heroines might not be able to negotiate. Without a little help:
“No matter where you go, or what you do,” says a little boy’s mother, “I will be there. Because I am your mother, even if I am a monster – and I love you.” That is about the measure of this story: syntactically a little odd, artistically extremely odd. The pictures look like painted strings dragged across the page, with here and there a brush-tip splatter and explosion, but this strikingly macabre vision of a normal school-going child and his freakish, cave-dwelling Mama finally amounts to nothing more menacing than our best (if primal) notions of motherhood, and it shines brighter for all of the shadows.
Like Bo Holmberg and Eva Ericksson. In A Day with Dad, these unassuming Swedes tread closer to a difficult subject than American picture book makers commonly dare. There’s a divorce somewhere in the background here, still this is a story determined to look at the simple, even ritual acts of putting something back together – a hot dog, a movie, the library – rather than lingering on whatever broke it. This is unblinkingly hopeful, essential, magnificent, and you could happen across this title somewhere in the middle of Amazon’s bottomless inventory – then probably happen past it.
Similarly, Amazon carries hundreds of books by the infinitely inventive Maira Kalman, but you would not probably be able to find them without a flashlight. Hey Willy, See the Pyramids shows this author and illustrator at her jumping, jazzy, barely-tethered best. Here are eleven little stories strung together as one: the story a sister tells her little brother to get him to go to sleep. Or nearly:
“The end,” Lulu whispers.
I think I am asleep.
Then Lulu shuffles back
to her bed
and we both see flying chairs
and green hats
and pink things
and sink some and
slowly sink
into sleep.”
All of these illustrations are the stuff of dreams, good, bad, mysterious – but impossible? If dreams – as we are interminably reminding our children – can sometimes come true, then why not supply them with the widest, most fanciful palate?
And words. Let’s give them words. To sing to, to puzzle with, to live by. To circle and remember the smallest of details in the grandest of stories – well, that is a gift, but also a responsibility. The Lorax – arguably the Lawrence of Arabia of children’s picture books – takes about fourteen minutes to read, and ends with an admonition that somehow manages to clarify the difference between a bungled, regrettable history and the stuff we can actually change:
“UNLESS someone like you
cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
It’s not.”
What a great find!
I started very early to read and was encouraged by my parents to read as widely as possible. Of course I enjoyed Enid Blyton’s books, and so did my own children in their turn. Then there was Beatrix Potter. and then I developed a liking for Georgette Heyer’s historical romances (they are absolutely the funniest). I know , as parents we are supposed to guide our children;s choices in literature, but sometimes the nicest or most interesting books are the most unusual ones. My father introduced me to an author called Thorne Smith (whose books are now out of print, but very enjoyable), and one of my favourite authors now, and whom my children also enjoy is Terry Pratchett. Give your children, as they get a bit older, exposure to a wider range of books, and let them also choose.