One book that We Like!

Since I'm hoping to have this blog give the false impression that I am a sunny and equanimical person, who likes the majority of books that she reads, let me balance out that cranky last post with a brief and praiseful offering: Antoinette Portis's Not a Box. It is good.

Oh, fine, here's a little more. It slightly looks like the first draft of a new Japanese children's character, but the tribute to imagination just works despite residual hyper-cuteness. The conceit is that the black lines represent the "real"--the little rabbit positioned in, on, or beside that cardboard box--while the super-imposed red drawings are pure fantasy--the box as building on fire, robot, spaceship, hot-air balloon, or more. A very prosaically-minded adult voice tries to squelch each imaginative move from off-screen ("Why are you spraying water on that box?" for example), but the rabbit/child sticks to his/her guns, insisting endlessly the title phrase. It captures very simply both the beauty and the sadness that children feel in realizing their mental landscape is not broadcast automatically to those they love.

Two Books that Did Not Work.

Last night we read several books that I did not love. For opposite reasons, which I suppose is instructive. First up, Mercer Mayer's Just a Baseball Game, which, like all of his books, is just straight up ugly to look at. I'm sorry, people who find Mercer Mayer's "keeping-it-real" snot-nosed story-telling compelling and dynamic, but I really don't like him. Just look at this cover and you've instantly comprehended a visual style which he somehow feels needs to be spread over a bazillion books, instead of, preferably, no books. (I should add that I make exception for There's a Crocodile Under My Bed, which pre-dates this inexplicably named "Look-Look" series of books about feeling and acting like a brat.)

So. Not much appreciation for Mercer Mayer by me. (And yet we read the book 2 times. Go figure.) Then YoungerKid picked out Lloyd Alexander and Trina Schart Hyman's The Fortune Tellers. And this one seems like it should be knocked out of the park: it has won all kinds of awards, and the author-illustrator team is dreamy--I'm basically living my entire life in anticipation of the day I can start reading Alexander's The Book of Three to OlderKid--but this book was pretty boring. That is, it's funny, but only to middle-aged people like me; the irony of a fortune teller whose "fortunes" are sayings like "You will be rich when you earn a lot of money" were totally lost on (the admittedly a little young for this) Older and YoungerKids. But then, the last part of the book veers wildly into a strange chronicle of the bad things that happen to this fortune teller, such as: falling off a balcony, being attacked by lions, being stung by hornets, being dropped by an eagle into a rushing river and never seen again...which, fine, it's a folk tale, but, that narrative turn really made no sense, and made the story seem bizarre without really lifting it up into unified and satisfying. And, maybe I'm excessively conditioned by Hyman's powerful work in her books Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood and St. George and the Dragon, but the strong lines of her illustrations seem inextricably rooted in a primitivist Grimm myth-world. Which is not to say that she can't try to break out of the box and visit Cameroon for this one, (which she apparently physically did), but the mixture of old and new aesthetic elements didn't quite work for me.