From: Ginny Moore Kruse <gmkruse>
Date: Fri, 08 Dec 2000 17:35:30 -0600

Thanks to everyone who has stepped forward with book titles, lists, thoughts and observations about their reading. Thanks, Art, Sharon, Lee, Dean, Amy, Betty, Janice, Monica and Laurie.

Monica left us with some questions based on an earlier recommendation of the very complex picture book "Madlenka" by Peter Sis (Farrar). Quite a few of us heard Peter Sis speak at the USBBY program given with the Children's Literature Assembly of the National Council of Teachers of English. Maybe someone else can interpret his comments better than I, because I had to miss most of his speech. What I did hear him say there and at the Book Expo last spring in Chicago is that this is Madlenka's view of her world, which is a very young child's sense of the block, neighborhood and community of her young experience. Her world is The World to her, it's her impressions of the world, and it's about her imagination, as well. "Madlenka" is not a geography book. Others who heard Peter Sis speak at one place or another want to express what he says about it with greater clarity?

Meanwhile, I want to recommend some of my favorites of the year:

"Max" written and illustrated by Bob Graham (Candlewick) is a delightful picture book romp featuring an underachieving little preschool superhero and his family's expectations for him to be able to fly.

"You Can't Take a Balloon into the National Gallery" by Jcqueline Preiss Weitzman and Robin Preiss Glasser (Dial) offers two wordless adventures in Washington, D.C. One takes place inside the National Gallery while a woman and two children (presumably Grandma, her grandson and granddaughter) view more than a dozen actual art objects one can see in the NG. They've left a balloon outside in the care of a sidewalk photographer who poses tourists with a lifesize replica of George Washington. The balloon blows away just as it did in their earlier book "You Can't Take a Balloon into the Metropolitan Museum". The photographer tucks the Father of Our Country under her arm and races through the tourist destinations on the Mall in DC. Children will see "faces from history" throughout her escapade, just as they'll notice that art imitates life or is it the other way around? Lots of levels here for lots of ages.

"The Color of My Words" by Lynn Joseph (HarperCollins) is a compelling contemporary novel set in the Dominican Republic involving a 12-year-old girl with an interest in writing and a growing awareness of the inequities experienced by her family and the economically impoverished coastal community of which they're an integral part. This brief novel reminds me more of Frances Temple's wonderful novel
"Tonight, by Sea" than anything I've read since then. Its somewhat sweet jacket doesn't begin to reflect the power of Joseph's story - or her elegant language choices.

"The Year of Miss Agnes" by Kirkpatrick Hill (McElderry Books) relates one year in the experience of rural children living in a remote Alaskan village during 1948. The narrator is a 10-year-old girl, one of the Athabascan children whom the new teacher actually plans to teach. And teach she does, changing their lives forever. That the book is dedicated to "Sylvia Ashton-Warner and all unorthodox teachers..." gives a sense of what this new teacher might be like. She brings the world to children who've never been taken seriously before in this one-room school. This is a very easy to read, short book containing much more action than the book jacket implies.

"At the Sign of the Star" by Katherine Sturtevant (Farrar) is a treasure of a novel set in a 17th century London bookseller's home/business/family. Meg, the young narrator, is more interested in how books are written, printed, published and sold than she is about being matched with a prospective husband and becoming a wife/mother as everyone expects her to be. Meg's an intelligent, high-spirited girl whose resentment of her young stepmother takes original twists, as does the plot. A terrific book, wonderfully written, very absorbing, full of historical details, compelling characters, all contained within a well-paced story. Some information about the publishing, plays and writers of the time are included, but they never slow down the action. The chapter titles are titles of actual books and are based on the author's expertise in that field of knowledge. Don't miss it.

I, too, enjoyed "I Was a Rat!" written by Philip Pullman and illustrated by Kevin Hawkes ((U.S. edition: Knopf). See Katy Horning's
 CCBC Book of the Week review of this book: http://www.education.wisc.edu/ccbc/review00.htm#pullman (and other Book of the Week reviews, too, for more suggestions) It's a terrific book to read aloud, but you don't want to miss the highly visual
"tabloid" pages helping to unfold the fast paced adventure. Plenty of satire here depending on the age or sophistication of the readers.

And there are more... Which books do you want to call to everyone's attention?

Ginny Moore Kruse gmkruse at ccbc.education.wisc.edu Cooperative Children's Book Center www.education.wisc.edu/ccbc/ A Library of the School of Education, University of Wisconsin Madison
Received on Fri 08 Dec 2000 05:35:30 PM CST