Advent List 2011

Preparations for Christmas are upon us. Sadly, most preparation rituals do not seem to have much to do with the coming of a bearded prophet who recalled to us the poor, the outcast, the refugee, the dispossessed, the imprisoned, the widow and the orphan. Instead, we are bombarded with tinny carols, silly plastic evergreen wreaths strung from the light poles as the Australian summer begins to sizzle, and exhortations to buy buy buy.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about developing some small non-commercial rituals for Christmas with my kids; and, as I am story crazy, they of course involved a pile of picture books. So then I put together a list of some of the books we will read during the four weeks leading up to Christmas; you can read the list here.

However, many of the books on the list are out of print and hard to get. Meanwhile, since then I have found lots more wonderful stories, so I have drawn up a new list, adding the new stories and letting go of some of the old.

These are not Santa stories. Nor are most of them explicitly Christmassy, let alone Christian. Instead, they are stories which honour and celebrate hope, joy, generosity, gratitude, sacrifice, community and love. In particular, several focus on welcoming the stranger into our midst, which has always been a central calling to both Jewish and Christian peoples and would seem particularly appropriate as some of us, at least, prepare to welcome in the form of a baby the most strange and wonderful human the world has ever seen – and a refugee, to boot.

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So let’s start with that. Jane Kurtz has written a lovely book about immigrant children, In the Small, Small Night. Kofi and Abena have recently arrived in America, but Kofi is so worried that he will forget his family in Ghana that he cannot fall asleep. So his sister Abena, recalling the village storyteller so far away, recounts two traditional stories from home: Anansi and the pot of wisdom; and the turtle and the vulture. As Kofi listens to the stories, he is soothed back to sleep.

The story is told without a hint of mawkishness, yet it is very touching as these two young children, so far from home, talk about their fears and what they have left behind. What is just as moving is the way Abena has brought the gift of storytelling with her from Ghana. The wisdom contained in the stories will sustain them as they start at a new school, in a new culture, where everything is different.



Sean Tan’s The Arrival charts the journey of another immigrant. This book without words is for all ages, as the story is told through hundreds of eerie sepia-toned illustrations. The Arrival will raise all sorts of questions about why people flee and resettle, questions which may be extended to the Advent stories or to the refugees in our midst.



Nail Soup is a retelling of a traditional folk tale which reminds us to welcome in the stranger. A traveller, denied all but the meanest of shelter and sustenance, convinces his host that he will make soup out of a nail. As the 'soup' bubbles away, the host is gradually persuaded to add ingredients that turn it into a generous meal they can share, demonstrating that a little hospitality leads to a rich bounty for all.



Welcoming in the refugee and the traveller is all well and good, but we are also to care for the poor in our midst. In The Happy Prince, Jane Ray retells Oscar Wilde's tale in which the statue of a prince gives all it has – its ruby eyes, its gold leaf – to the city’s poor via an obliging swallow. Ray’s richly detailed illustrations add greatly to the story.



The Quiltmaker's Gift is similarly themed, as a fabulously wealthy and utterly miserable king yearns for the one thing he cannot have: a patchwork quilt from the famed quiltmaker, who gives her quilts only to the poor. The quiltmaker tells the king that she will only make him a quilt once he has given everything away, and he gradually learns that joy is found not in material objects, but in self-sacrifice and caring for others. The detailed illustrations, which include dozens of quilt squares themed to the story, are absorbing.



Thinking of self-sacrifice recalls The Mousehole Cat, a tale from Cornwall. When winter storms close the harbour and bring a Cornish fishing village to the brink of starvation, Old Tom and his cat Mowser find a way out and brave the wind and the waves to catch fish for the town, knowing that there is a good chance that they will never return.



Old Tom reasons that there is nobody left to grieve for him; it frees him to risk his life to feed others. In Amelia Ellicott's Garden, a more passive older person feels abandoned by Time. Amelia struggles to maintain her beautiful garden and longingly remembers when she had people to share it with. It is not until a great windstorm blows her garden, her chickens and even Amelia over the fence that she discovers the host of neighbours – from all over the world – living in the flats next door who long to share the garden, and their lives, with her.



Getting to know one’s neighbour, the first step to love, also features in Rose Meets Mr Wintergarten. In this lovely book by Bob Graham, a young girl moves into a new neighbourhood. When she loses her ball over the fence, her openness and her fairy cakes disarm the miserly neighbour who has terrified the area’s children for decades.



Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge is a good neighbour, too. He lives next door to an old people’s home and is particular friends with Miss Nancy Alison Delacourt Cooper, who has four names just like him. Miss Nancy has lost her memory, and Wilfrid Gordon sets out to find it for her.



Margaret Wild’s Hop Little Hare is a simple story, also showing the love between the generations. It is not until Little Hare spies sheep nibbling at a curative boffle bush, which will ease his grandfather’s rheumatism, that he feels sufficiently motivated to hop!



A more complex gift giving between young and old features in the classic, Now One Foot, Now the Other. Bob teaches his grandson to stack blocks, tell stories and walk. When Bob has a stroke, it is the little boy who patiently teaches his grandfather to stack blocks, tell stories and walk again, using the same loving words his grandfather once used with him.



Love handed down between the generations is also found in Love You Forever, by Robert Munch, which he wrote in homage to his two children who were stillborn. In this story, a mother sings a special song to her son as he moves through the life stages; and as she ages and nears the end of her life, her son takes up the mantle and begins to sing it to his daughter.



Of course, we are called to love not just our family, our neighbour, the poor, the traveller, or the refugee; we are called to love our enemy, too. A Child's Garden tells of hope in oppressive circumstances. A boy tends a vine which throws out seeds on either side of a high barbed wire fence; the next season, vines grow on both sides of the fence and intertwine, symbolising hope for a future peace.



The story of the vine recalls, too, that we are to love the earth and everything in it. For All Creatures uses gliding alliterative language to describe and celebrate all manner of things that creep and crawl, run and jump, slither and slide upon the earth. ‘For spirals, shells and slowness, smallness and shyness, and for scribbled silver secrets, we are thankful.’



This celebration of the natural world is also seen in Owl Moon, in which a young girl goes out late one night with her father to see an owl. Owl Moon is a hauntingly beautiful children’s book, drenched in awe. A good book to read quietly late at night, just before bedtime.



In Jeannie Baker’s Belonging, like so many of her books, we are shown one way to be partners in the creation: and outside our very own back window! Like The Arrival, it is told entirely in pictures, making it a book that people of all abilities can pore over.



Let’s finish with two books about Christmas. The first is a lively rendition of The Nativity by Julie Vivas. Drawing from the gospel writer Luke’s account, she illustrates the story in her singular style: the angel Gabriel is a ragged punk and shares a cuppa with Mary; the naked newborn, hands outstretched, is still attached to the umbilical cord; shepherds loom, peering into the cot; and in the final scene, Mary pegs out nappies. In Vivas's interpretation, the Christmas story is not a far-off super-spiritual event, but something immediate, physical and real, that happens even now. I particularly love that Mary is enormously pregnant, pendulous breasts and all, rather than a skinny medieval nymph.



Finally, what would an Australian Christmas be without a reading of Wombat Divine? Wombat desperately wants to be in the Christmas play, but he is too short, too clumsy, and too heavy for any of the parts. At last, Emu finds him the perfect role and Wombat is, quite simply, divine.

As are all these stories. Read, prepare, enjoy.

Mortimer, Mohammed and Me

This piece appeared in Zadok Perspectives No. 111 (Winter 2011). The Spring edition is out now, with my reflection on praying into the night.

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Mortimer, Mohammed and Me

Every Friday, I spend a few hours reading with kids at a local school. I listen to each child read their reader, and then I offer them a choice: they can go back to the classroom activity, or they can have a story read to them, which they choose from the books I bring in. Mostly, they want to listen to a story; and mostly, they choose a little book by Robert Munsch, called Mortimer.

Mortimer can’t sleep, so instead he sings loudly (‘Bang-bang, rattle-ding-bang, Gonna make my noise all day’) and drives his family crazy. Person after person comes upstairs to tell Mortimer to be quiet, but as soon as they reach the bottom of the stairs he starts singing again. Eventually, the family becomes so agitated that they start yelling at each other; and while Mortimer waits for someone else to come up, he falls fast asleep.

As you can imagine, it is a very loud book. I have to sing Mortimer’s song four times; and mimic the sound of lots of people coming upstairs and shouting at him; and evoke the noise of Mortimer’s mother and father and seventeen brothers and sisters and even the police yelling downstairs – this book is a riot.

Meanwhile the listening child sits, spellbound; sings Mortimer’s song along with me; and almost invariably gets the giggles.

I read Mortimer aloud fifteen to twenty times each week; and at times I find myself wanting to rush. They’ve all heard it before, many times. There are very few volunteers and lots of kids, and I would like to read with every child every week – but I can’t. I find myself thinking that if we hurry this story or read less of the reader or maybe even give up reading stories but focus on the readers instead, then I’ll get to one more, and one more, and one more, child.

Yet the whole point is to give these kids, mostly refugees with very few books at home, the opportunity to wallow in stories just as my own children have wallowed. We can’t do that in a rush.

So I work hard to breathe deep; to sit on the class list so it doesn’t catch my eye; to read fast when the story begs to be read fast; to read slow when the story begs to be drawn out; to make room for quiet spaces and expectant pauses; and to look at the face of each child and etch it onto my heart.

One Friday, I was reading Mortimer for perhaps the seventeenth time, as always achingly aware of the kids I wouldn’t get to and wrestling with the impulse to race. I glanced at Mohammed, listening with rapt attention, and I suddenly realised that we were on God’s time.

Between two words, I dropped into that great yawning space, that vast universe where there is more than enough time for love however long it takes; and in this spinning dizzying sense of the infinite I was surrounded by a great rumble of belly laughter, a deep chuckling, love wiping its eyes in hilarity at the story of Mortimer and at all the little boys and girls who drive their parents crazy, and at all the crazy adults who think that love can be scheduled or rushed.

And then I was back at school, where I found myself sitting on the carpet singing ‘Bang-bang, rattle-ding-bang, Gonna make my noise all day’ and beside me Mohammed was now singing, his face aglow, and I started to hoot and he got the giggles and a classmate joined in and another picked up the thread of song, and surrounding us all were the floating filaments, the echoes of heavenly laughter.

(The boy’s name has been changed. Robert Munsch has a fantastic website where you can look at his books and listen to stories; Mortimer is here.)

How Little Lori Visited Times Square

Some books are ridiculous, unnecessary and perfect. Little Lori wants to visit Times Square. He hops on every form of public transport: bus, train, taxi, helicopter, horse and cart and more; and ends up in all manner of places: South Ferry, Queens, Staten Island, Central Park, and finally Macy's. Yet sadly, by the end of the day, he still hasn't managed to visit Times Square.

After such a long and frustrating journey, Little Lori sits on the sidewalk and howls with disappointment. Then a large talking turtle appears and they................................ have............................ a.................................... conversation; the turtle offers to give Little Lori a ride to Times Square.

The text is spare and amusing; the illustrations delightful. Little Lori's great tantrum outside Macy's is beautifully depicted, page after page of a raging, sobbing, snuffling child while the turtle slowly speaks. I could go into a long over-interpretive ramble about how the story touches on the mysteries of the city to a child; the thrilling adventure of travelling alone; the thwarted longings of most children; the need to slow down to get where you're going...

Instead, I will say only that this is a story for children and adults alike. My two, five and seven year olds all love it; I love it; and we borrow it from the library time and again just to see grandpa guffaw as he reads it aloud. If you like New York, or Maurice Sendak, or jokes for adults, or stories for kids, or public transport, or interesting billboards, you will like this book; our family loves all these things; thus How Little Lori Visited Times Square is considered to be, quite simply, perfect.

Paper Bag Princess / Mortimer / Love You Forever

I'm a great fan of Robert Munsch's picture books, which is a good thing since I am required to read one or two or three or four of them most days. Munsch uses key phrases over and over in his books, making them rhythmical and enjoyable to read aloud; and he often writes with the voice of a child, which is alternately hilarious and terribly moving.

The Paper Bag Princess is a feminist fairy story. A princess wearing only a paper bag rescues her prince from a terrible dragon, only to be told her clothes are revolting and her hair is a mess. She tells the prince where to go, calls off the wedding and says,' You are a bum!', which occasions hilarious laughter in my family (sadly, in the expurgated version at our local library, she calls him a toad, not nearly as naughty or funny).

Mortimer is a little boy who sings loudly when he is supposed to be going to sleep. It drives his family crazy, even his seventeen brothers and sisters – so much so that they call in the police. The police lecture him, then go downstairs; Mortimer starts singing again; and the noise sends everyone berserk. While they're all yelling at each other, Mortimer finally falls asleep.

In Love You Forever, a mother sings the same song to her son every night, 'I'll love you forever, I'll like you for always, As long as I'm living, My baby you'll be.'. As the boy ages, the mother takes more and more ludicrous steps to sing the song – such as boarding a bus in the middle of the night, letting herself into her son's apartment and singing over his bed – which are heart-warmingly ridiculous.

Near the end, she calls her son to say 'You'd better come and see me because I am really old and sick.' Her son comes, and she tries to sing '[b]ut she was too old and sick to finish the song', and he has to sing to her, instead. And then he goes home and sings to his own little baby, and every time I read it – which is most days – I choke up.

I find Love You Forever especially poignant because both my mother and my mother-in-law died before we had children, and I often feel that our kids missed out on the special experience of a grandmother's love. This book reminds me that whether or not they are living, our parents give us gifts – a special song, a prayer, a handful of stories, an ability – and it is up to us to recognise these gifts and pass them on. It also suggests that love endures, even after the death of the loved one; in fact, Munsch wrote the story in memoriam to his two still-born children.

PS – Munsch has a fabulous website here, where, among other things, you can listen to and download mp3 files of him telling a heap of his stories with sound effects! The Paper Bag Princess is here; Mortimer is here; Love You Forever is here.

PPS – Paul Mitchell recently wrote a very moving piece about the prayer he has given his daughter here.

Tuck Everlasting

'The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning...'. Thus begins Tuck Everlasting, a beautifully written book for older children which addresses the serious matters of life and death, loyalty and property, in the most thoughtful way.

The story centres on young Winnie, confined to a hot and dusty garden at the height of summer. Between one thing and another, she slips out the gate and into the woods owned by her family, and there stumbles upon a boy, Jesse Tuck, drinking at a spring. It transpires that the spring gives the drinker eternal life, and although the boy appears to be in his late teens he has lived for more than a hundred years. Winnie soon meets the rest of the Tuck family, and together they explore the pros and cons of eternal life versus the normal realities of living, maturing and dying.

Matters are complicated by a manipulative stranger who wants to market the water and make his fortune. When disaster strikes, Winnie has to decide whether to capitulate to the powers that be, or to defend the Tucks and keep them, and their secret, safe.

While there are elements of the story that I am not entirely comfortable with – a kidnapping and an act of violence justified by the need to keep the secret – overall the book is stunning. The author explores difficult questions with a deft touch, lightly dancing in and out of the issues in such a way that the reader never feels mired.

The writing shimmers and glides, and is rich in metaphor. No doubt violating every rule of children's books, which usually plunge straight into the action, Tuck Everlasting begins with a slow elegant description of the longest, hottest week of summer; then moves on to describe the road outside young Winnie's house.

This road was, from one direction, trodden out by cows, and the author describes its gentle meandering timelessness suggestive of 'slow chewing and thoughtful contemplation of the infinite'; this is the direction from which the Tucks appear. On the other side of the woods, the road belongs to people and runs efficiently from A to B; it is from this direction that the rapacious stranger appears. The book is full of such imagery which adds greatly to its depth.

The story is told from Winnie's perspective, and conveys the dreamy world that children inhabit. Most adults are shadowy background figures and the road, the woods and a toad are more real to young Winnie. Into this private world erupt the Tucks. Wise and innocent, thoughtful and silly, they are childlike and treat Winnie as an equal; for these qualities, they earn her loyalty and trust.

This latter quality is reflective of the author's tone. She trusts her readers with complex ideas, and ends with a bittersweet epilogue which brings the themes to their natural conclusion.

Intelligent dreamy children will drink up the story in all its rich fullness; intelligent dreamy adults will wallow in its language and metaphors. It is a book to read slowly, to oneself or aloud, savouring every crafted sentence and idea. Although written for children, it is one of those classics which adults too will enjoy, one which people of all ages will carry with them in word and image for many years after reading.

Arabel and Mortimer

Most chapter books for young girls are dross. They are churned off a production line, following a set formula and featuring fairies, or magic ponies or kittens. The asinine heroines become ecstatic over clothes and sparkles; they have a minor adventure which reconciles them with a jealous peer; and at the end, everyone's wearing pink. All in all, these books make me sick. Excuse me while I go puke in the corner.

But there are antidotes to this nauseating drivel. One of our favourites are the Arabel and Mortimer stories by Joan Aiken. Arabel is four and lives in Rumbury Town, an ancient suburb of London. One day, Arabel's father, a taxi driver, finds a bedraggled black bird in the road. He brings the bird home to be nursed; Arabel falls in love, and christens the raven Mortimer.

Mortimer is no end of trouble. Like all ravens, he's endlessly inquisitive and perpetually destructive. He's forever slipping away for a quiet bit of investigation, which usually involves his strong beak and some expensive piece of equipment. In Mortimer and the Sword Excalibur (found in Arabel and Mortimer, and also published separately), Mortimer wreaks havoc on Arabel's mother's sewing machine and the vile pink dress she is making for Arabel, then hurls a banana across the room where it is messily impaled on the bristles of a broom. Arabel and Mortimer are sent out of the house in disgrace to play at the park across the road, where they meet up with Arabel's friends: Sandy, a unicycle-riding teenage boy, and Mr Walpole, the groundsman. While they chat, Mortimer seizes the opportunity to hijack the council ride-on mower and terrorise the other park goers, mow swathes out of the daffodil beds, and send the mower plunging into a building excavation site.

At the bottom of the pit lies a mysterious round stone table. The mower smashes it to smithereens. Mortimer flutters out carrying a priceless ancient sword which had been stuck in the table... and then manages to destroy it also, to the shock and distress of the investigating scholar and the curious crowd. Adults will enjoy the mythical allusions; children will relish the destructive chaos.

In other stories, Mortimer shuts down the London Underground, destroys a radio tower, and generally drives everyone except Arabel mad. The stories are wildly inventive, and, to children at least, laugh-out-loud fun. Mortimer is fascinating; and Arabel is absolutely charming. She is a quiet bookish child who loves to skateboard, and gets into all sorts of scrapes thanks to him.

The books are also enjoyable for adults coopted into reading aloud. In The Mystery of Mr Jones's Disappearing Taxi, now sadly out of print, books featured include the Complete Oxford Dictionary, Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Mrs Beeton's Household Management; Freud and Cosi Fan Tutti also rate a mention. In a nice allusion to Poe's Raven, except for 'Kaark' the only word Mortimer says is 'Nevermore'.

Aiken fills her text with puns and spoonerisms, which some children get and others may glide over. An adult reading aloud may choose to stop and elucidate, or may choose simply to read with no interruptions. All the stories – and there are about fifteen of them – are rippers and can be read on several levels.

Although Aiken writes for children, she is not afraid to use metaphors and other sophisticated techniques to tell her story. The result is a text which is not only very lively and great fun, but paves the way to other writers; a four to ten year old child reading Joan Aiken and the like won't be afraid to tackle other playful intelligent writers – say Lewis Carroll, JRR Tolkien, Mark Twain and Charles Dickens – in later years.

And from books like these, real books written not for a corporate production line but because a story burned to be told, our children will be equipped for the big questions, and the mingled sorrows and joys of adulthood. Kaark.

PS The first book is Arabel's Raven.

An Advent List (reprise)

Last year I wrote an Advent list: the books my family will especially enjoy during December. In case you missed it, here it is again!

I love a good list. Elsewhere, I commented on developing rituals for Christmas; and I'm thinking that they will include a lot of good stories. So what follows is a dozen stories that my family will read aloud between December 1 and 24. Most of them are not Christmassy per se. Instead, they are about hope, joy, bravery, generosity, vocation, sacrifice, community, and love.

'The Singing Bus Queue' (Margaret Mahy, in The Chewing-gum Rescue and Other Stories (London: JM Dent, 1982)) sings rain or shine in seven-part harmony. No matter how hard the town grumps try to silence them, they continue to warble joyfully. Eventually, they are imprisoned for creating a public disturbance - yet even there they sing so sweetly, in such high and pure tones that the prison crumbles. They walk out through the ruins to sing through the night with the moon and stars.

Continuing the singing theme, in 'Four Angels to my Bed' (Joan Aiken, in Past Eight O'Clock: Goodnight Stories (London: Puffin, 1990)) Little John sees four angels carved on wooden bedposts. As he falls asleep, the angels sing him a fugue, and he joins his voice in a new tune that dances with, through and around the heavenly music. Downstairs, his mother smiles at the sound of her little John Sebastian singing as she realises he has discovered his calling.

'Brother Ninian's Blot' is also about calling (Robin Klein, in Ratbags and Rascals (Ferntree Gully, Victoria: Houghton Mifflin Australia, 1989)). Brother Ninian, a messy medieval copyist, spills ink across a nearly completed piece of parchment. In his horror, he tries to disguise the blot with doodles of leaves, flowers, birds, butterflies, and even a jolly abbot. He becomes completely absorbed, and in his absorption creates something wonderful, beautiful and entirely new: the illustrated manuscript.

The illustrated manuscript recalls Jane Ray's lavish illustrations in The Happy Prince: From the Fairy Tale by Oscar Wilde (London: Orchard, 1994). She retells Oscar Wilde's fairy tale in which the statue of a prince gives all it has to the city's poor - its ruby eyes, its gold leaf - via an obliging swallow.

On the theme of gifts, in 'The Gift Giving' (Joan Aiken, in Up the Chimney Down and Other Stories (New York: Harper & Row, 1984)) a blind grandmother can, with the help of a special tune played by her adult son, Mark, see and describe gifts and vistas in rich language. When Mark dies, the gift fades until Mark's nephew and namesake and Mark's daughter together make a new pipe and work out the tune that recalls Grandmother's gift.

Tomie dePaola has also written about gift giving between young and old. In Now One Foot, Now the Other (New York: Puffin, 2005), Bob teaches his grandson to stack blocks, tell stories and walk. When Bob has a stroke, it is the little boy who patiently teaches his grandfather to stack blocks, tell stories and walk again, using the same loving words his grandfather once used with him.

In a similar vein, Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge lives next door to an old people’s home. He is particular friends with Miss Nancy Alison Delacourt Cooper, who has four names, just like him. Miss Nancy has lost her memory, and Wilfrid Gordon sets out to find it for her (Mem Fox and Julie Vivas (Gosford, NSW: Scholastic, 1984)).

Thinking about neighbours recalls Rose Meets Mr.Wintergarten (Bob Graham (London: Walker Books, 1992)). In this lovely book, a young girl moves into a new neighbourhood. When she loses her ball over the fence, her openness and fairy cakes disarm the miserly neighbour who has terrified the area’s children for decades.

Other misers are persuaded to share in Nail Soup (Eric Maddern and Paul Hess, (London: Frances Lincoln, 2007). A traveller, denied all but the meanest of shelter and sustenance, convinces his host that he will make soup out of a nail. As the 'soup' bubbles away, the host is gradually persuaded to add ingredients that turn it into a generous meal they can eat together.

The Mousehole Cat is also about sharing food. When a Cornish fishing villages faces starvation, Old Tom and his cat Mowser brave the winter storms to catch fish for the town. On their safe return, the town celebrates with a feast of morgy-broth and stargazy pie (Antonia Barber and Nicola Bayley (Aladdin, 1996)).

One of the most lively renditions of the Christmas story is by Julie Vivas (The Nativity (Gosford, NSW: Scholastic, 1986)). She illustrates the story in her singular style: the angel Gabriel is a ragged punk and shares a cuppa with Mary; we see the newborn baby, hands outstretched, still attached to the umbilical cord; the shepherds loom, peering into the cot; and in the final scene, Mary pegs out nappies. In Vivas's interpretation, the Christmas story is not a far-off super-spiritual event, but something immediate, physical, real, that happens even now. I particularly love that Mary is enormously pregnant, pendulous breasts and all, rather than resembling some medieval nymph.

Finally, what would an Australian Christmas be without a reading of Wombat Divine (Mem Fox and Kerry Argent (Scholastic, 2009))? Wombat desperately wants to be in the Christmas play, but he is too short, too clumsy, and too heavy for any of the parts. But Emu finds him the perfect role, and Wombat is, quite simply, divine.

As are all these stories. Read, prepare, enjoy.

PS For out of print books, try here.

Baby’s Own Adventure

I could tell you all about A Lion in the Night by Pamela Allen. But let my daughter, who is almost two, do it instead:

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"Baby crying. Baby in cot."

"Wake up!" to the queen, "Oook! Lion taking baby!"

"Puppy! Helmet! Hat! Crown! Bikle! [bicycle]" as the great chase, featuring queen, king, admiral, captain, general, sergeant and little dog begins.

"Moon!" as they race through the forest.

"Boat!" as they chase over the sea.

"Where bikle?" as it's squashed against the sergeant on the boat. "Where puppy?"

The Lion stops. Her face is quiet, bursting with expectation as Mummy and the Lion say GrrrrrrRRRAAAAAAH... [chuckle chuckle] then "GraaaaaahHhhhh!"

"king castle dirr rascal" as the Lion taunts the chasers, then invites them in for...

"befast" [breakfast], then "nana, toast, bottle, egg, strawbees"...

"Bye-bye Lion! Lion in cot! My cot!" and she closes the book and toddles off to her bedroom to take a look.

***

Now if that isn't a recommendation for a book for a two year old, I don't know what is.

And thanks to Nuradin, who read it to her first.

Stories for all the lovely people*

About this time last year I found myself hunting down books for young African refugees. Now it's time to do it again. I'm looking for books for all the lovely people in the class, and I'm delighted to report that I have found a few more excellent titles to add to last year's list.

Fire on the Mountain, by Jane Kurtz and EB Lewis, is a re-telling of a traditional Ethiopian tale. Alemayu is a young cowherd. Circumstances force him to become the servant of a boastful rich man who claims to be the only one able to spend a night on the cold mountain with nothing but a shemma for warmth. But Alemayu has done so many times. The rich man forces him to prove it, but when he finds out Alemayu stayed warm by looking at someone's fire on another mountain, denies him his reward. So Alemayu's sister cooks up a great feast for the rich man. As he sits and enjoys the cooking smells wafting in from another room, the rich man is served... nothing. 'What kind of person thinks that smells of food can fill a man's stomach?' demands the rich man. 'The same kind of person who believes that looking at a fire can keep a boy warm,' answers the sister. Check mate!

Fire on the Mountain is gently illustrated in the soft muted colours of the desert. The characters are beautifully depicted, especially Alemayu and his sister; and I very much hope some of the Ethiopian kids in the class recognise the story and enjoy this re-telling. But I must admit I am looking forward to reading this with one particular boy for another reason. The rich man's feast features injera, the Ethiopian bread; and this boy has a passion for it. When I first asked this boy if he ate injera, he was so astonished that I knew about injera that he actually fell over backwards. I look forward to seeing his reaction when he finds injera mentioned in a book!

Jane Kurtz also wrote In the Small, Small Night (illustrated by Rachel Isadora). It's the story of two refugee children trying to get to sleep; but Kofi is afraid that he will forget his family in Ghana now that he is in America. So his sister Abena, remembering the village storyteller, recounts traditional stories from home: Anansi and the pot of wisdom; and the turtle and the vulture. Between their stories and the conversation, Kofi is soothed back to sleep.

The story is told without a hint of mawkishness; yet it is very touching as these two young children, so far from home, talk about their fears and what they have left behind. But what is just as moving is the way Abena has brought the gift of storytelling with her from Ghana. The wisdom contained in those stories will sustain them as they start at a new school, in a new culture, where everything is different.

One small difference is the hair! The girls in my class and I wonder at each other's. 'Why you cut it like a boy?' they demand when my hair is freshly cropped; but they like to stroke it all the same, and play with my daughter's bunches, admiring its softness. I adore their hair right back, whether it's braided down their backs, or plaited in wild directions, or tipped with beads. Thus I was delighted to find the book I Love My Hair, by Natasha Anastasia Tarpley and also illustrated by EB Lewis, a celebration of African hair. In this story, a little girl is having her hair done. As her mother combs and tugs, the little girl's eyes fill with tears. So her mother stops, and tells her stories about her beautiful hair: it can be woven like yarn into a 'puffy little bun'; it can be parted into rows and planted with braids like a garden; it can cloud around her head like the world; it can stick out in ponytails like wings. And the little girl, thinking of all these things, imagines she can fly.

The illustrations dreamily illustrate the metaphors for the girl's hair; and the image of the girl sitting between her mother's thighs having her hair combed is so intimate, you can feel the weight of the bodies leaning into each other. A wonderful book.

*which is what I call the kids as a group, and what they now call their class to me.

Waiting for Mummy

When I was a child, my mother worked. She was a minister, and juggled working from home with working from a church office; we kids juggled playing at home with cooling our heels in the church hall. During the week, she made phone calls while stirring pasta sauce, held meetings in the lounge room, and ran around frantically Getting Things Done. But Sundays were the worst. While other kids fooled around and went out for lunch, we hung around after church while she had just one more, and one more, and one more conversation. If we had the temerity to stand near her or, god forbid, tug her skirt, we'd be resolutely ignored; then later we'd have The Conversation about how this was mummy's work and we had to let her be. All very well, but my sister and I were stuck there too, just waiting, waiting for mummy.

A more gentle sort of waiting is encapsulated in the beautifully understated book, Waiting for Mummy by Tae-Jun Lee and Dong-Sung Kim. In this story, a little boy waits at a tram stop, 'nose flaming red', for the tram which will bring his mother home. As tram after tram goes by with no mummy, the boy exchanges a few words with each driver, leans on a pole, drags a stick along the ground, or just squats. The resolution, when it comes, is wordless and requires the reader to examine closely a picture of a town blanketed in falling snow; this restraint lends the story great strength.

The illustrations are exquisite. They remind me of the gentler forms of manga, or perhaps the rich imagery in Miyazaki's brilliant film, Spirited Away: trams swoop dreamily out of the sky, the sea, and the trees. Just as I saw the world as a child, here the landscape looms in mysterious form and reality is far richer and more layered than adults comprehend. Trams and adults and steps are enormous, snow falls out of a yellow sky, and a little boy's hands go red with cold. In the background are soft images of a traditional Korean town: many-storied shops, men hauling goods on bicycles, and women with baskets on their heads.

My sister bought the book for us to read, but as I, like my mother, juggle other commitments along with child-rearing, my children find no small resonance with the story. After all, they too wait for mummy, and no doubt will do so until they are mummies themselves.

Waiting for Mummy is a pearl, but especially for the child whose mother works out of the home. It gives dignity and beauty to the experience of waiting – and reminds the parent just how patient our children can be.

> Tae-Jun Lee and Dong-Sung Kim Waiting for Mummy (Elwood, Vic: Wilkins Farago, 2006).

An Advent list

I love a good list. Elsewhere, I commented on developing rituals for Christmas; and I'm thinking that they will include a lot of good stories. So what follows is a dozen stories that my family will read aloud between December 1 and 24. Most of them are not Christmassy per se. Instead, they are about hope, joy, bravery, generosity, vocation, sacrifice, community, and love.

'The Singing Bus Queue' (Margaret Mahy, in The Chewing-gum Rescue and Other Stories (London: JM Dent, 1982)) sings rain or shine in seven-part harmony. No matter how hard the town grumps try to silence them, they continue to warble joyfully. Eventually, they are imprisoned for creating a public disturbance - yet even there they sing so sweetly, in such high and pure tones that the prison crumbles. They walk out through the ruins to sing through the night with the moon and stars.

Continuing the singing theme, in 'Four Angels to my Bed' (Joan Aiken, in Past Eight O'Clock: Goodnight Stories (London: Puffin, 1990)) Little John sees four angels carved on wooden bedposts. As he falls asleep, the angels sing him a fugue, and he joins his voice in a new tune that dances with, through and around the heavenly music. Downstairs, his mother smiles at the sound of her little John Sebastian singing as she realises he has discovered his calling.

'Brother Ninian's Blot' is also about calling (Robin Klein, in Ratbags and Rascals (Ferntree Gully, Victoria: Houghton Mifflin Australia, 1989)). Brother Ninian, a messy medieval copyist, spills ink across a nearly completed piece of parchment. In his horror, he tries to disguise the blot with doodles of leaves, flowers, birds, butterflies, and even a jolly abbot. He becomes completely absorbed, and in his absorption creates something wonderful, beautiful and entirely new: the illustrated manuscript.

The illustrated manuscript recalls Jane Ray's lavish illustrations in The Happy Prince: From the Fairy Tale by Oscar Wilde (London: Orchard, 1994). She retells Oscar Wilde's fairy tale in which the statue of a prince gives all it has to the city's poor - its ruby eyes, its gold leaf - via an obliging swallow.

On the theme of gifts, in 'The Gift Giving' (Joan Aiken, in Up the Chimney Down and Other Stories (New York: Harper & Row, 1984)) a blind grandmother can, with the help of a special tune played by her adult son, Mark, see and describe gifts and vistas in rich language. When Mark dies, the gift fades until Mark's nephew and namesake and Mark's daughter together make a new pipe and work out the tune that recalls Grandmother's gift.

Tomie dePaola has also written about gift giving between young and old. In Now One Foot, Now the Other (New York: Puffin, 2005), Bob teaches his grandson to stack blocks, tell stories and walk. When Bob has a stroke, it is the little boy who patiently teaches his grandfather to stack blocks, tell stories and walk again, using the same loving words his grandfather once used with him.

In a similar vein, Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge lives next door to an old people’s home. He is particular friends with Miss Nancy Alison Delacourt Cooper, who has four names, just like him. Miss Nancy has lost her memory, and Wilfrid Gordon sets out to find it for her (Mem Fox and Julie Vivas (Gosford, NSW: Scholastic, 1984)).

Thinking about neighbours recalls Rose Meets Mr.Wintergarten (Bob Graham (London: Walker Books, 1992)). In this lovely book, a young girl moves into a new neighbourhood. When she loses her ball over the fence, her openness and fairy cakes disarm the miserly neighbour who has terrified the area’s children for decades.

Other misers are persuaded to share in Nail Soup (Eric Maddern and Paul Hess, (London: Frances Lincoln, 2007). A traveller, denied all but the meanest of shelter and sustenance, convinces his host that he will make soup out of a nail. As the 'soup' bubbles away, the host is gradually persuaded to add ingredients that turn it into a generous meal they can eat together.

The Mousehole Cat is also about sharing food. When a Cornish fishing villages faces starvation, Old Tom and his cat Mowser brave the winter storms to catch fish for the town. On their safe return, the town celebrates with a feast of morgy-broth and stargazy pie (Antonia Barber and Nicola Bayley (Aladdin, 1996)).

One of the most lively renditions of the Christmas story is by Julie Vivas (The Nativity (Gosford, NSW: Scholastic, 1986)). She illustrates the story in her singular style: the angel Gabriel is a ragged punk and shares a cuppa with Mary; we see the newborn baby, hands outstretched, still attached to the umbilical cord; the shepherds loom, peering into the cot; and in the final scene, Mary pegs out nappies. In Vivas's interpretation, the Christmas story is not a far-off super-spiritual event, but something immediate, physical, real, that happens even now. I particularly love that Mary is enormously pregnant, pendulous breasts and all, rather than resembling some medieval nymph.

Finally, what would an Australian Christmas be without a reading of Wombat Divine (Mem Fox and Kerry Argent (Scholastic, 2009))? Wombat desperately wants to be in the Christmas play, but he is too short, too clumsy, and too heavy for any of the parts. But Emu finds him the perfect role, and Wombat is, quite simply, divine.

As are all these stories. Read, prepare, enjoy.

PS For out of print books, try here.

Bedtime

A few nights ago, my husband was working late. In the mad scramble to wash and feed and settle three young children by myself, I let everyone get too tired. My one year old fell over a few times and began to grizzle, so I popped her into the cot. Usually, she'd go straight to sleep, but this night she was overtired. So perversely she stood in her cot and shrieked. I tried to settle her again, and again, to no effect. But I couldn't see the point of having her up and crying, so I left her to scream.

And it was story time. And my five year old was in a snit. So there I was reading one of our all time favourite bedtime books, with the baby carrying on in the next room and the five year old flouncing and huffing all over the bed - and then the three year old accidentally elbowed me in the breast. Hard.

Between the crying and the huffing and the elbowing, I was so razzed up that I could feel my heart race. I wanted to slam the book shut and shout at everyone and storm off - and yet I couldn't settle the baby; I couldn't improve my five year old's mood; I couldn't make my three year old more gentle. So I took a deep breath and decided to let the story fix it.

We were reading Jane Yolen's Owl Moon. It tells of a little child who is taken out, late at night, by her father through the snow to look for a Great Horned Owl. They walk through the cold and the shadows in silence, until they come to a clearing in the woods. And there, as her father imitates the call of an owl, an owl hoots in reply and sweeps into the clearing. They watch the owl for 'one minute, three minutes, maybe even a hundred minutes' before it flies away. And in silence, they walk home.

It is a simple story, written in the most elegant prose. A train whistle blows 'like a sad sad song'; otherwise 'it was as quiet as a dream'. The rhythm of the words demands the reader slow down and settle into the telling; it is not a story to race through. Yolen's use of metaphor brings the comfortingly familiar into the strangeness of being out at night - 'the snow... was whiter than the milk in a cereal bowl' - such that the story successfully negotiates the fine line between fear and mystery. The child knows that strange things may 'hide behind black trees in the middle of the night' - but 'when you go owling, you have to be brave.' It alludes to managing fear and trusting a loved one without a whiff of didacticism.

The illustrations are spare and gentle. The eerieness of the woods is balanced by moonbeams shining through the trees and the safety of the father's presence.

Witness the power of story: at the end of the reading, my heart had stopped pounding and my five year old was snuggling close. In the next room, the baby had settled into a cross grizzle and was slowly winding down. And everyone was ready for sleep.

Owl Moon is a pleasure to read aloud. Further, it has the power to soothe a frazzled mum and settle a couple of fractious kids! As a bedtime book, it's hard to beat.

> Jane Yolen Owl Moon.

Beautiful as pearls

If you've been reading this blog, by now you can probably guess what sort of child I was. Lost in a story. Nose stuck in a book, and rude to my mother when she called me to dinner - after all, she interrupted. Tucked away behind the shelves at the back of the school library during lunchtime. And always reading. Nothing ever felt as immediate or interesting or understandable as the life I lived in stories. Real life - negotiating my mother's moods, schoolyard politics and factions, pop culture - was bewildering. I never quite got the hang of it all. But books - now that's where I belonged.

And yet, trying to find a good book is hazardous for a child. You troll through the library, fingers running along the spines. A title catches your eye. You pull it out, and examine the cover, and read the blurb, the first page. And then, holding your breath, you plunge in.

If you're lucky, you'll find a good one. But so many kids' books are awful. Violent books, providing the material for terrifying nightmares. Sentimental books that stick and cloy. Dull books, devoid of interesting words or language play. Books completely lacking in humour or grace. You waded through an awful lot of muck before you found a gem. Yet given how much muck I waded through, I still missed lots of good books, even authors. It startles me. How could I, always on the alert for something interesting or funny or beautiful, have missed Alan Garner or Margaret Mahy as a child?

I stumbled across Margaret Mahy only this year. We were away at Easter, and my daughter needed something else to read. I picked up The Chewing-gum Rescue and Other Stories for a dollar at a grotty book exchange, and we instantly fell in love. This intoxicating collection combines the suburban with the magical. All the stories are delightful, but two particularly stand out. 'The Midnight Story on Griffin Hill' tells the tale of a cross and alienated writer who ends up reading his stories to a midnight audience of griffins. The tears they weep as they listen roll down the hill and fill an old quarry, which becomes a swimming pool for his sons. 'The Singing Bus Queue' sings gloriously as they wait for their bus. Gradually, the whole town comes to listen, so the killjoys have them thrown into prison for creating a disturbance. There, at midnight, they begin to sing in separate cells a song so clear and high that the prison crumbles, and they walk out of the ruins to sing the night away with the whole city, the moon and the stars. These are stories I would want my children to internalise - I would want myself to internalise, in fact. Stories about ages past and suburban bathrooms; stories tinged with sorrow and beauty; stories about exuberant adventures and unfurling secrets; stories marked always by good humour and delight.

The Downhill Crocodile Whizz and Other Stories, also by Mahy, is overall less moving but more action-packed. My three year old daughter loves the book, and carries it around the house with her. She is particularly attached to 'Don't Cut the Lawn', about a man who tries to mow but is continually stopped by mothers whose babies are nesting in the 'tussocks and tangles' of the long grass: a lark, a cat, a hare and a dragon. She also loves 'The Downhill Crocodile Whizz', about a small crocodile who lives at the top of a very long steep hill, and whose grandmother gives him rollerskates for his birthday. Of course, he straps them on and immediately whizzes down the hill, chased by a growing collection of dogs, children, an old man in a wheelchair, a big brass band in a bus, and the army before he rolls to a stop in the park at the bottom. It's cheerfully chaotic, just the thing for a young child.

The title of Mahy's book The Great Piratical Rumbustification: AND The Librarian and the Robbers is enough to make me laugh, even before one gets to the tale of three little boys, a peg-legged babysitter with an eyepatch, a hook and a bottle of rum, and the illicit party they hold for all the retired pirates in town. The story about pirates rumbustificating is paired with The Librarian and the Robbers, in which a calmly beautiful librarian, kidnapped by robbers, introduces them to the world of books before engineering her escape and inspiring them to mend their wicked ways. Both stories are joyfully ridiculous, beautifully written, and hilarious.

Mahy loves exuberant words and the way they can rumble and roll; she revels in alliteration and metaphor ("The forest sighed and swayed... and the sea murmured as if a crowd of people were turning over in their sleep" ('The Giant's Bath' in Chewing-Gum). Her writing is rhythmic and strong, and some of the more catchy phrases have passed into our household language. Like the Frisbee sisters, we now brush so that we can have "teeth as strong as tigers' teeth and as beautiful as pearls" ('The Chewing-Gum Rescue').

Her writing is strongest when she links the thrilling mainstays of childhood imagination - tree climbing, pirates, robbers and dragons - to everyday experience (brushing teeth, bus queues, bathrooms, grumpy neighbours). Unlike so many stories of adventure or mystical beasts, these stories aren't about 'somewhere else'. Instead, they suggest that a world of possibility awaits the reader in her very own street, bathtub or veggie patch.

The books are wonderful to read aloud. My three year old loves some of the stories, but it is my five year old who is really absorbed. And they will read and re-read these books for years to come. Children of twelve or so will still enjoy the many layers; and even I, at the ancient age of 34, often re-read a story or two before my bedtime with great delight. Mahy is a prolific writer, and you are sure to find some of her books in the Junior section of your local library.

> Margaret Mahy The Chewing-gum Rescue and Other Stories (London: Dent, 1982); The Downhill Crocodile Whizz and Other Stories (London: Dent, 1986); The Great Piratical Rumbustification: AND The Librarian and the Robbers (David R Godine, 2001 (1978)).