Book review: _Dominic_ by William Steig

The other day, my son said the most wonderful thing for me:  “Can you recommend a book?”  I’ve tried to keep my mouth shut while I’ve watched him plow through mountains of garbage.  My general principle is that, if you expose your kids to enough really good stuff, they will soon get tired of the crap on their own–which is much more effective than hearing an adult say, “That book you’re enjoying is crap, so put it down!”  So he read a lot of Goosebumps (ptui), for instance, but also Tolkein and C.S. Lewis; and eventually, he started throwing out the Goosebumps of his own accord, just so no one else would read it.  (NB:  I don’t, of course, let the kids read just anything.  But there are good books and bad books, and then there’s a vast middleground of useless books.  The Goosebumps series falls into this category.)

Anyway, our local library is pretty small, but when my son asked for a recommendation, I happened on a couple of books by William Steig.  I thought Steig only did picture books — some of which are among our favorites.  But we found two which are designed for slightly older kids — say, grade 3 and up.  I read Dominic, and was completely delighted.

It  begins,

Dominic was a lively one, always up to something.  One day, more restless than usual, he decided there wasn’t enough going on in his own neighborhood to satisfy his need for adventure.  He just had to get away.

My ten-year-old son read this and realized that this book would speak directly to his adventure-dog heart.  Dominic finds some excitement immediately, and continues on his way, meeting a dying pig named Bartholomew Badger, an overwhelmed goose named Matilda Fox (the mismatched last names are a running joke, just for the heck of it)  and repeatedly falling afoul of the evil Doomsday Gang.

Steig’s language is sort of artificially elevated (and so younger readers or listeners might have to able to figure some words out by context:

Dominic was inside the rib cage, in a sort of succulent prison, and they might have trapped him there; but when they saw him chewing on the big bones with such furious dedication, they were paralyzed with terror.

Steig relishes fancy words, and he really pulls it off in Dominic — to much better effect, I think, than he does in some of his other books.  In The Toy Brother, for instance, the ornate language just draws attention to itself, and comes off as precious rather than playful.

Dominic is also nicely  illustrated by Steig in black-and-white.

Good stuff!  Perfect for the parent who wishes the boys in the family had some heroes who are easy to like, but who are not Captain Underpants.

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Yorinks and Egielski

I had totally forgotten about this book until one of the kids dragged it up yesterday evening:

Oh, Brother by Arthur Yorinks and Richard Egielski  

Like most of the books done by this pair, it’s quick, it’s funny, it’s more than a little weird, and it has a nice, happy ending.  Two brothers can’t stop squabbling with each other, not even when their life depends on it.  Things go from bad to worse until they have to hatch a ridiculous plan to survive — and when they get found out, all is well again.  Many nice touches, like the sad slump of the tailor’s mannequin when the brothers are in mourning.  Siblings who love each other but who are constantly trying to kill each other (or parents who have kids like this) will get a kick out of it.

Also check out a couple of the other crazy and wonderful books by this author/illustrator team:

Christmas in July (my husband can’t get through this book without cracking up.  It holds the memorable line:  “Hi, I’m Santa.  Got any pants?”)

It Happened in Pinsk (this one is priced outrageously for new editions, so you’d have to get it used.  I love this book so much.  Maybe a teeny bit like Kafka for kids, if Gregor Samsa turned back into a person and was happy and grateful for his life from there on out.)

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Book review: Erin Manning’s _The Telmaj_

 Oh, I forgot!  My 13-year-old daughter wrote a book review of Erin Manning’s new YA book,  The Telmaj.

A few excerpts from Erin’s interview with Acts of the Apostasy’s Larry D:

EM:  I’ve targeted the intermediate children’s fiction market, which encompasses readers ages 8-12, approximately. I think this market is under-served, especially when readers that age are looking for imaginative fiction like sci-fi.

Unfortunately, a lot of the attention is paid to the YA market of slightly older readers–but many kids in the 8-12 age range just aren’t ready for the sheer amount of graphic sex and violence on the YA shelf. I want to reach kids who’ve already read the Narnia series, perhaps, and want exciting stories, but who aren’t interested in the love life of sparkly vampires or teen zombies.

LarryD:  Yes, I noticed the lack of vampires, werewolves and pouty teen angst.

Later in the interview, Erin says:

 I initially thought about getting The Telmaj published by a Catholic fiction publisher because even though the book is not overtly Catholic I wanted to tell a story full of good and evil, right and wrong, and the kinds of virtues and values that seem to be sadly lacking in many children’s books these days. But the publisher I sent it to, while thinking it was very publishable, explained that she couldn’t publish anything but overtly Catholic fiction–that is, fiction that would show Catholic characters going to Catholic schools and Mass on Sunday, that sort of thing.

While I understood that, I think we’re reaching a point where even trying to tell a story in which characters struggle to do the right thing and have no trouble identifying certain evils really is writing Catholic fiction of a type. So many books, even for children, rely on a kind of “situational ethics” where whatever the characters we like do is good, and whatever the characters we don’t like are doing must be bad (unless they, too, are just the victims in all this). Sort of like how we view political parties these days.

I’m old-fashioned enough to think that for children, the reinforcement of the ideas of good and evil is a good thing to do–not in a cartoonishly simple way, but in a way that helps them ponder these kinds of questions.

 Hear, hear!  And here is my daughter’s short (and kind of adorable) review of the book:

 The Telmaj is, quite bluntly and frankly, a really good book. It was a little hard to get into, but once it got going I was captivated. It’s about a person named Smijj. (Another thing I really like about the book, is that I can actually pronounce the names of the people in the story. That does not happen a lot when I read Sci-Fi.) Anyway, Smijj is living on a planet no one really seems to care about. He is alone, jobless, and struggling to make an honest living, when opportunity arises. A space ship crew hires him to unload their cargo, and he is soon a part of their crew, and on his way to finding out who he is and why he has the ability to wish himself away to anywhere he wants. I recommend it to anyone who likes Science Fiction and Fantasy, or has an interest in space ships.

Erin expects the sequel to be out in May, and two more installments are in the works.

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Happy birthday, Ezra Jack Keats!

If you can believe it, his very first book was the exquisite The Snowy Day

I love the sense of quiet alertness conveyed with those blocks of color,

love that giant Mama,

love the simple portraits of the little sorrows and the great joys of childhood.

This was one of the first children’s books about a black kid.

More seasonable, another of my favorites illustrated by Ezra Jack Keats is Over in the Meadow:

My favorite counting song, so cozy and satisfying, and the pictures are intense and unforgettable.

Happy birthday, Ezra Jack Keats!   Thanks for all the colors.

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Maybe it was just one of those wacky coincidences

. . . but yesterday I wrote this post about how, sometimes, your efforts are actually an obstacle to spiritual progress, and you just have to step aside and let the Holy Spirit work.  And then, just a few hours later, I read this passage from C. S. Lewis’ Perelandra.

(Ransom, on an unfallen planet with an unfallen Lady, has been doing battle with his nemesis, and has just made the horrible realization that, if “the Un-Man” is the representative of Hell, then he himself must be the representative of Heaven.)

‘Oh, but this is nonsense,’ said the voluble self. He, Ransom, with his ridiculous piebald body and his ten times defeated arguments – what sort of a miracle was that? His mind darted hopefully down a side-alley that seemed to promise escape. Very well then. He had been brought here miraculously. He was in God’s hands. As long as he did his best – and he had done his best – God would see to the final issue. He had not succeeded. But he had done his best. No one could do more. “‘Tis not in mortals to command success.’ He must not be worried about the final result. Maleldil would see to that. And Maleldil would bring him safe back to Earth after his very real, though unsuccessful, efforts. Probably Maleldil’s real intention was that he should publish to the human race the truths he had learned on the planet Venus. As for the fate of Venus, that could not really rest upon his shoulders. It was in God’s hands. One must be content to leave it there. One must have Faith ….

It snapped like a violin string. Not one rag of all this evasion was left. Relentlessly, unmistakably, the Darkness pressed down upon him the knowledge that this picture of the situation was utterly false. His journey to Perelandra was not a moral exercise, nor a sham fight. If the issue lay in Maleldil’s hands, Ransom and the Lady were those hands. The fate of a world really depended on how they behaved in the next few hours.

The thing was irreducibly, nakedly real. They could, if they chose, decline to save the innocence of this new race, and if they declined its innocence would not be saved. It rested with no other creature in all time or all space. This he saw clearly, though as yet he had no inkling of what he could do.

The voluble self protested, wildly, swiftly, like the propeller of a ship racing when it is out of the water. The imprudence, the unfairness, the absurdity of it! Did Maleldil want to lose worlds? What was the sense of so arranging things that anything really important should finally and absolutely depend on such a man of straw as himself? And at that moment, far away ; on Earth, as he now could not help remembering, men were at war, and white-faced subalterns and freckled corporals who had but lately begun to shave, stood in horrible gaps or crawled forward in deadly darkness, awaking, like him, to the preposterous truth that all really depended on their actions; and far away in time Horatius stood on the bridge, and Constantine settled in his mind whether he would or would not embrace the new religion, and Eve herself stood looking upon the forbidden fruit and the Heaven of Heavens waited for her decision. He writhed and ground his teeth, but could not help seeing. Thus, and not otherwise, the world was made. Either something or nothing must depend on individual choices. And if something, who could set bounds to it? A stone may determine the course of a river. He was that stone at this horrible moment which had become the centre of the whole universe. The eldila of all worlds, the sinless organisms of everlasting, light, were silent in Deep Heaven to see what Elwin Ransom of Cambridge would do.

Oh, boy.  I think my 14-year-old is old enough to read at least the first two books of Lewis’ Space Trilogy.  In rereading Perelandra (which is book two), I’m amazed at how many of my ideas about what God is like, how grace works, how evil works, and what we are actually here for came from these books.

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Have you met Freddy the Pig?

No Register post today, while I get caught up on a thing or two.  In the mean time, a quick reading recommendation.  We’ve been listening to an audiobook of Freddy the Detective by Walter R. Brooks in the car, and it is ridiculously entertaining.  (The link is to the print version of the book; there are links to the audio version and other formats if you click through.)

The kids ask to hear it over and over again (it’s a full-length book, 270 pages), but I haven’t gotten tired of it yet.  The plot moves along nicely and has structure and logic, but you can drop in at any time and be amused by the nutty little descriptions and anecdotes that fill the story.  I laugh every time we get to the moment when Freddy the Pig realizes that Mrs. Wiggins (who is a cow, and more sensible than the other cows, Mrs. Wogus and Mrs. Wurzburger, but still a cow) has been contributing to the newest problem on Mr. Bean’s farm, which is that their new jail has become a little too popular:

You have probably never seen a cow blush.  And indeed, the sight is unusual.  There are two reasons for this.  One is that cows are a very simple people, who do whatever they feel like doing and never realize that sometimes they ought to be embarrassed.  You might think they lack finer feelings.  And in a way they do.  They are not sensitive.  But they are kind and good-natured, and if sometimes they seem rude, it is only due to their rather clumsy thoughtlessness.

The other reason is that cows’ faces are not built for blushing.  But as Mrs. Wiggins was so talented above her sisters in other directions, it is not to be marveled at that she could blush very handsomely.

Her flush deepened as Freddy spoke.  ”Why, I– now that you speak of it,” she stammered, “I see that you’re right, but — well, Freddy — land’s sakes — I might as well confess it to you, I got to feeling sorry for those prisoners myself yesterday, especially those two goats.  It seemed such a pity that they couldn’t be jumping round in the hills instead of sweltering in that hot barn.  And I went out and brought them a nice bunch of thistles for their supper.”

Freddy frowned.  ”That’s just it!”  he exclaimed.  ”That’s just it.  Sentimentality, that’s what’s going to ruin our jail. I did think, Mrs. W., that you had more sense.”
The cow looked a little angry.  ”If I knew what you were talking about,” she said stiffly, “perhaps I might agree with you.”

“Being sentimental?” said Freddy.  ”I’ll tell you what it is.  It’s going round looking for something or someone to cry over, just for the fun of crying.  You knew you weren’t doing those goats any good.  You just wanted to have a good time feeling sorry.”

The nice thing about Mrs. Wiggins was that she always admitted it when she was wrong.  She did so now after she thought about it for a few minutes.  ”I guess you’re right, Freddy.  I won’t do it again. . . “

Brooks fills his Freddy books with fully-realized animal characters — all believable, and most immensely likable.  Once you meet them, you will never forget Uncle Wesley, the pompous duck, and his easily-impressed nieces, Alice and Emma; the stout-hearted but sarcastic cat Jinx, the vicious rats, the emotionally fragile rabbits, the malicious fly, Zero, and dozens and dozens of others.

The human characters are also a hoot.  Freddy first discovers a robber’s hideout when he sees the two outlaws taking turns on an old swing, trying to shoot bricks out of the chimney when they get high enough.  And one robber is always knitting, and nagging the other one about not dressing warmly enough when he goes out robbing at night.

As you can see, the language is at a high level, but is wonderfully clear and lively.  It’s full of ideas, but it never even comes close to being preachy.  It’s an extraordinarily good-natured universe that these animals live in.  My 3- and 5-year-old kids seem to follow the plot perfectly well, and the older kids (girls and boys) are as amused and entertained as I am.

There are 26 Freddy the Pig books in all!  Do check them out — I can’t imagine anyone not liking Freddy the Pig and his friends.  If you can get your hands on the audio version, we think narrator John McDonough does a great job of changing his voice to bring out the various characters.

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Ten Good Books (and then some) Featuring Big Families

Today I talked about ten of my favorite “big family” books, but so many more didn’t make it onto the list.  Here are the ones I included.

(I know they ought to have authors’ names, but if that’s the worst of the problems with this list, (a) it’s a frickin miracle and (b) I almost bit through my own fist in a rage, trying to get the stupid, stupid thing to stupid do what I stupid wanted it to do, and between Amazon’s clonkiness and WordPress’s persnickety proprietary nonsense, and me being in the “all irate all the time” trimester, this is how it turned out. Think of it like an adventure!)

All-Of-A-Kind Family  (the series)

Cheaper by the Dozen

The Story of the Trapp Family Singers

The Father Who Had 10 Children

Heckedy Peg 

It Could Always Be Worse: A Yiddish Folk Tale

Mr & Mrs Pig’s Bulk Buy and the rest of the Mrs. Pig books

Nanny McPhee (Widescreen Edition) (the movie, which is not a book, but a movie)

The Weasley family in the Harry Potter Paperback Box Set (Books 1-7)

Half Magic

and the ones I wish I had had room for:

The Five Chinese Brothers

The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes

Five Children and It  and other E. Nesbit books

The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy and the rest of the series

The Saturdays (Melendy Quartet)

and the ones I am not familiar with, but which others recommended (thanks for your help! If I weren’t such a lazy swine, I’d link back to you all, not that you need it):

Classic Starts: Five Little Peppers and How They Grew 

The Relatives Came 

A Christmas Like Helen’s

The Bear That Heard Crying 

So Many Bunnies: A Bedtime ABC and Counting Book

Ten Kids, No Pets 

The Seven Silly Eaters

McBroom’s Wonderful One-Acre Farm: Three Tall Tales

It’s Too Noisy!

Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch

I Remember Mama: Play in Two Acts

Savvy

Spencer’s Mountain

Dinosaur Bob and His Adventures with the Family Lazardo

The Happy Hollisters series

The Wouldbegoods 

Happy Little Family (Fairchild Family Story)

The Family Minus

Come join us at the Register and add your favorites to the list!

Oh, and if perchance you are inclined to buy any of these books, my Christmas present savings fund, which we keep raiding for frivolous flights of fancy like dryer parts and, um, extra bone marrow for my poor sick grandmother, would love it if you would click through from my blog here, because I get a small percentage of each sale.  I forget if I’m supposed to mention that or not.  If you’re from the Amazon Associates program, please practice the following remark, “Aw, that dizzy broad don’t know what she’s talking about.  Nothing to see here, legal department — let’s move along.”

Yay, books!  Yay, small percentage!  Yay, big families!

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Guest Post: Fyodor Dosteovsky

My husband and I have started rereading The Brothers Karamazov, and are zipping through it  the blinding pace of nearly 2-3 chapters per week.  At this rate, we’ll have it finished before our kids borrow the book for college.  I thought you guys might appreciate this passage, as the monk Fr. Zosima recounts a conversation  with a famous doctor:

‘I love mankind,’ [the doctor] said, ‘but I marvel at myself:  the more  I love mankind in general, the less I love human beings in particular, separately, that is, as individual persons.  In my dreams,’ he said, ‘I would often arrive at fervent plans of devotion to mankind and might very possibly have gone to the Cross for human beings, had that been suddenly required of me, and yet I am unable to spend two days in the same room with someone else, and this I know from experience.  No sooner is that someone else close to me than her personality crushes my self-esteem and hampers my freedom.  In the space of a day and a night I am capable of coming to hate even the best of human beings:  one because he takes too long over dinner, another because he has a cold and is perpetually blowing his nose.  I become the enemy of others,’ he said, ‘very nearly as soon as they come into contact with me.  To compensate for this, however, it has always happened that the more I have hated human beings in particular, the more ardent has become my love for mankind in general.’

‘But then what is to be done?  What is to be done in such a case?  Is one to give oneself up to despair?’

[and Fr. Zosima responds:]  No, for it sufficient that you grieve over it.  Do what you are able, and it will be taken into consideration.  In your case, much of the work has already been done, for you have been able to understand yourself so deeply and sincerely!  If, however, you have spoken so sincerely to me now only in order to receive the kind of praise I have just given you for your truthfulness, then you will, of course, get nowhere in your heroic attempts at active love; it will all merely remain in your dreams, and the whole of your life will flit by like a wraith.  You will also, of course, forget about the life to come, and you will end by somehow acquiring a kind of calm.

I’m also reading Jurassic Park.  How about you?  What book is currently lulling you to sleep or keeping you awake all night?

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i can haz point?

Well, I’m happy to see (through the surveillance device I’ve had installed on this blog)

that many of you are checking out MousesHouses, the source of the picture of that nice little mouse doing the fan dance from the other day.  Now, normally a blog subtitled “Pictures from my own private mouseland” would send me screaming in the other direction, but for some reason, I really like these mice.

I am not a fan of cuteness in general, unless I gave birth to it myself

and animal-looking animals doing human things usually makes my skin crawl — at least, if the animals still look fully animal-like.  In Beatrix Potter’s work, for instance:  never liked those pictures (and the stories terrified me when I was little — all I remember is a lot of whippings, peckings, and terrified animal children hiding in baskets and watering cans. Was there more to those stories?).

Sometimes that rabbit he looks right into ya. Right into your eyes. And, you know, the thing about a rabbit... he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll's eyes. When he comes at ya, doesn't seem to be living... until he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then... ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin'.

source

I am fine with anthropomorphism, but I think the artist owes it to the viewer to put a little spark of humanity into the eye of the animal, if it’s going to be doing human things; and I also appreciate it when the illustrator doesn’t just make it look like the characters are people wearing animal suits, as in the deeply unpleasant Arthur series.

"Oh, oh, penmanship is more fun when your polo shirt is tucked in, kids!"

 

Mary Raynor is one illustrator who  does a great job of making the animals remain animal-like in their postures, even while playing with toy trains, going to the opera, or buying ketchup in bulk:

See how she’s teetering on her trotters, just like a mother pig would as she reached for a heavy bottle of ketchup.  (By the way, I heartily recommend the Pig family books by Raynor: Mrs. Pig’s Bulk Buy, Mr. and Mrs. Pig’s Evening Out, Garth Pig Steals the Show, and Mrs Pig Gets Cross.  It’s pretty much about my family, except that they’re British, and are pigs.

There was a story a while back about a recently-rediscovered collection of fanciful Victorian taxidermy.  These, at least, are well done, if somewhat, you know, full of dead kitties:

I’m not sure what drives a person to pour so much time, energy, and formaldehyde into a project like that, other than the fact that he has some time to kill while his wife is at her mother’s house, thinking things over.

In general, I think posing animals, whether dead or alive, and taking their picture is something that ought to be booed and hissed.  What do you think?  Does it ever turn out well?  The only exception I can think of is when people put a shirt and tie on labradors.  For some reason, that always gets me; and it sure looks like the dog is just glad to be getting some attention.  Harder than you’d think to find a picture online, though.

Well, now I just have to come up with a title for this post, to give the impression that it was about something.

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Another quick book recommendation

Since my son left his math book at the dentist’s office, pretty much all we’ve done in home school is a little spelling, a craft or two (you can pretend I didn’t say that if it makes you feel inadequate.  You wouldn’t feel inadequate if you saw our crafts, though), and read The Odyssey retold for children by Geraldine McCaughrean.

Sometimes I read, and sometimes the kids read aloud.  Kids who read silently far above grade level often don’t know how to read aloud, so this is a good exercise; and it also lets you get something done (like making lunch) while home schooling.  It’s also a good way of finding out that your mostly-excellent reader has a few kinks to iron out, phonics-wise.  (Translation:  the kid wouldn’t know a schwa from a hole in the ground.)

Here’s a passage we just read from this very engaging retelling, to give you an idea of the style:

By the light of lightning bolts which rained down around him, Odysseus saw the frightened, colourless eyes of fishes, and the suckered arms of reaching squid.  The waves that folded over him were shot through with eels and peppered with sharp barnacles and razorshells.  The troughs that swallowed him were deeper and darker than Charybdis, and the currents beneath dragged him three times round the ocean like dead Hector was dragged three times round the walls of Troy.

Pretty good, eh?  Nice and rhythmic for reading aloud, but not too complicated.  At the end of one chapter, my six-year-old son asked his eight-year-old brother, “Do you think Odysseus will make it home?  Mama, CAN I LOOK AHEAD?” and his brother said, “No, no, don’t find out!  I don’t know either!”  They haven’t been this excited since there was a dead mole in the sandbox.

Oh, and the illustrations in this book are wild and satisfying, too.  There are a few naked women — Sirens and whatnot — so you will have to use your judgment.  I didn’t want my son to be exposed to the unclothed female form, so when we got to that part, I just hid the book behind the baby, who, um, was nursing.

One final note:  I love ancient Greece.  I mean, I really, really love it.  A few weeks ago, I asked the six-year-old if he wanted to read Bible stories or Greek myths.  He chose Bible stories.  And I tried to talk him out of it.  Yes, I did.  Obviously, I’m not warping him too badly — I mean, he did choose the Bible stories — but it looks like I have a few kinks of my own to iron out.

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