Goodnight, Readers

Picture books, past and present

Be Brave, Charlie by Patricia Miles Martin and illustrated by Bonnie Johnson; Colors; My Father’s Luncheonette by Melanie Hope Greenberg; The Missing Gift by S. R. Baeker; Too Short Fred by Susan Meddaugh; TV Dinner by Betsy Everett; Nana in the City by Lauren Castillo; Spaceships and Rockets by Deborah Lock; Snake’s Birthday by Alvin Wellington; Monty and the Mushrooms by Dev Petty and illustrated by Jared Chapman; and Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrations by Clement Hurd

Be Brave, Charlie — a book by Patricia Miles Martin — is set on an Indian reservation. Our hero, Charlie, is a little boy who does not want to go to a boarding school. It’s run by his people, theoretically designed to teach the youth things they could use. But he does not want to go. An uncle of Charlie’s drives up and down in his truck, arriving periodically every few days to pick Charlie up, so he can take him to school. But Charlie runs and hides and, until he is induced into going, never assents to head off to board and to learn.

What Charlie finds out, albeit slowly, is that other people are as afraid of going to a new place as he is. And that, provided he joins up and joins in, he might profit from being forced into education.

This seems like fairly good advice for children who don’t want the white man’s schooling. But whether it is a good story that children would like and find exciting is less certain.

The Missing Gift is set in the universe of the mid-90s Disney Pocahontas film and uses some of the movie’s characters to tell a very simple story about being unnecessarily suspicious of your friends and why, if you’re wrong, you should apologise in order to preserve your friendships. Because it uses the assets from what I presume is a well-resourced, extensive Disney image library, its pictures are nicely drawn, if a touch flat and without a lot of depth and variety.

Meanwhile, Too Short Fred by Susan Meddaugh tells the story of a tiny young cat, Fred, who is self-conscious about his height in a universe where all the other small cats at school are bigger than him. As I myself am a feeble, minute, shrimpy 5'11", I know all too well Fred’s pain. The book, in a series of very brief stories in which Fred’s stature is not an obstacle but on occasion an asset, is decently drawn but not very good.

My Father’s Luncheonette is very much as described: a quirky little story about a small girl visiting her father’s diner of an evening, enjoying some of the food on offer, treating a friend, mopping the floors, and generally being the apple of her dad’s eye. It’s charming enough, although very simple. TV Dinner by Betsy Everett is a funny play on words with some intriguing colour choices. It is not simply drawn, although its premise is very straight and high-concept.

Colors is a very straightforward book which simply lists colours and items in the real world that correspond. I hit my head lately and so I find something like that very soothing and predictable.

I particularly liked the illustrations of Nana in the City by Lauren Castillo. The book is quite beautifully illustrated, with real blending of colours, strong use of perspective, and a charming style which arrives very comfortably between a kind of soft-edged urban realism and a calming soup of warm emotions. The lesson of the book — that it’s not necessary to fear the big city — might be a good thing if you have a nervous child who does not want to visit a relative or friend in the metropolis (we don’t want children to spend their youths worrying about car accidents, either, although they do still often happen). But to the severely pessimistic mind, this one seems more and more out of step with the kind of advice some people might actually want to give their children in the near future.

This is nonetheless a very nice book and when I was a very small boy and not a tired man, I think I would have liked it a good deal.

Another book I would without doubt have loved as a little boy is Spaceships and Rockets by Deborah Lock. This one is an intriguing and very light look at space travel, something all children must be born fascinated by and ready to learn more about. The DK style of educational books for very young children is so powerful and slick that I wondered for a moment if I had already seen this one, and may even have read it in my own childhood. But a quick look proved that actually, it was published twenty years too late for me. I would have loved it then.

Monty and the Mushrooms by Dev Petty, which is illustrated by Jared Chapman, is a fantastic book about the fundamental dispute between a marmot who wants only to live in peace and quiet and a tribe of self-sporing mushrooms who are the biggest, loudest, most disruptive chatterboxes the world has ever seen. I didn’t know that mushrooms were famous for being loud and annoying, all while uninvited, but this book makes the case convincingly that they are. This book is extremely funny and I recommend it.

Snake’s Birthday by Alvin Wellington is a joke book. It’s purposefully bad and made in MS Paint or something similar. Most of the lines are nonsensical. I regret to say that, in all candour, I thought this one was very entertaining and I laughed more or less incessantly throughout. The funniest thing of all was the author photo and his potted biography.

I concluded today’s reading with Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown. It’s a classic for a reason. Goodnight, newsletter. Goodnight, newsletter readers.

Sweet dreams.