New Notes

The June issue of Notes from the Horn Book should be in your inbox. I talk to Printz winner Gene Luen Yang, and we recommend some great new YA, middle-grade animal stories, picture books about summer, truck books for preschoolers and audiobooks for those long family drives. Enjoy!

And Claire has a new list of "Folklore Around the World."

I don't need a story tonight, but thanks.

The New York Times has picked up on the story about British mums and dads disdaining fairytales. The Times reporter adds a concern of her own: "My own question about these tales — Brother Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Disney (original and adapted) — has always been: where are the mothers?" I would tell her but am afraid I would swipe my answer completely from an essay forthcoming in the March Horn Book called "The Adventures of Mommy Buzzkill" by Catherine Gilbert Murdock. Look for it.

But the person who scares me more than all the wolves and witches put together is one of the Times commenters:

As much as I love books, I’m making up stories for my four year old niece instead of reading books. It sharpens my imagination, makes bedtime more exciting for both of us and enables me to control content. Often it is interactive too–sometimes I invite my niece to make up new characters or decide on the ending.

I think we need to challenge ourselves to rely less on existing stories in favor of homespun, age-appropriate content for our little ones.

I think I would find it very hard to sleep with that person in my house.

Monday catch-up

--Claire has a new booklist of fairy tales up on our site.

--Cynsations interviews my pal Cathie Mercier, director of the terrific Simmons College Center for the Study of Children's Literature, which includes among its founders Horn Book editors Paul and Ethel Heins, and for which I will be leading a seminar next summer.

--Mother Reader offers sixty-some suggestions for book-allied presents, like pairing a copy of Abe Lincoln Crosses a Creek with a set of Lincoln Logs. If Santa is listening, I'll take a copy of A Little Princess coupled with a secret midnight feast delivered by a dark and handsome stranger.

Princess Delite

"Speed straight to the happy ending, without stopping to think about the story along the way." Boston Globe critic Joanna Weiss has a great piece on the contemporary commodification of fairy tales.

A different movie

Claire is going to be reviewing The Golden Compass for you all, so let me skip my opinions on that for the moment to recommend what we saw as the first half of our Saturday night double-feature: Enchanted. Pretty hilarious if insidious, too, wrapping a Disney-princess-power theme in so many layers of parody and sincerity that your head spins. Blacks and gays provide comic relief.

Nudge nudge wink wink

Equally inspired and deflated by the imminent release of the third Shrek movie, Time's James Poniewozik has an article this week about the fracturing of fairy tales in both movies and books. He's right about how such twisted retellings can appeal to both children and their accompanying adults ("the Shrek movies have a nigh-scientific formula for the ratio of fart jokes to ask-your-mother jokes") and right also to wonder about the disappearance of the original tales:

The strange side effect of today's meta-stories is that kids get exposed to the parodies before, or instead of, the originals. My two sons (ages 2 and 5) love The Three Pigs, a storybook by David Wiesner in which the pigs escape the big bad wolf by physically fleeing their story (they fold a page into a paper airplane to fly off in). It's a gorgeous, fanciful book. It's also a kind of recursive meta-fiction that I didn't encounter before reading John Barth in college. Someday the kids will read the original tale and wonder why the stupid straw-house pig doesn't just hop onto the next bookshelf.

We certainly see relatively few straightforward folk- and fairytale retellings among new picture books, save for a couple of publishers, like North-South and Barefoot Books, who specialize in them. The glitzy '80s saw lots of lavishly illustrated traditional retellings of familiar tales, the '90s brought more cultures into the mix, but the 'aughts are twisting and turning. Northrop Frye told us this would happen.