Quack!

Here's the duckling story.

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.

Neighborhood watch

This appeared on my street the other night. What's next, flying monkeys?

Update P.S. Go here to see any illusions you had about whimsical public art destroyed.

"Little did he know"

That line is the tipoff, in Stranger than Fiction, to English professor Dustin Hoffman that Will Ferrell might be telling the truth when he says that he can hear someone (Emma Thompson, we know) narrating his life. Hoffman says that he teaches a whole seminar on "little did he know," and while this seems meant to be a joke about the excesses of literary theory, you really could teach a whole lot about "little did he know" and similar reveals of an author's hand. The line also made me remember my days as Zena Sutherland's assistant--Zena hated "little did he know," and the presence of it or its variations ("had she but known," etc.) in a novel meant a mandatory point deduction in a BCCB review.

We missed this movie in the theater, where it must have come and gone in a minute. When we watched it last night, I kept thinking how much I wanted a Queen Latifah in my life--she plays an "author's assistant," hired by Emma Thompson's publisher to do whatever it takes to get Emma to finish her book. Which Emma does, like, three times, while the movie tries to figure out where and how it wants to end. I was happiest with ending number two. But see it if you can; this movie is one of the more satisfying examples of the fourth-wall cracking we've been seeing so much of lately.

Children's literature's defining phrase,

I've decided, is "disguised as a boy." This phrase is necessarily used twice in our May book review section (and don't worry, Mitali, yes, one is yours and, yes, we like it) but the fact that it's such an established trope (a word I never speak aloud because I can never remember how many syllables it has) in children's books must Say Something. But What?