Elizabeth Bird – “Seven Little Ones Instead”
Luann Toth – “Word Girl”
Deborah Stevenson – “Horrible and Beautiful”
Kristin Cashore – “Embracing the Strange”
Susan Marston – “New and Strange, Once”
Elizabeth Law – “How Can a Fire Be Naughty?”
Christine Taylor-Butler – “Something Wicked”
Mitali Perkins – “Border Crossing”
Vaunda Micheaux Nelson – “Wiggiling”

What’s the strangest children’s book you’ve ever enjoyed? Let us know in the comments!

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When I was in nursery school, my favorite bedtime books were two my mother stole from the Unitarian Sunday School library, Martin and Judy, volumes II and III, by Verna Hills Bayley. I loved these books, about two friends who lived next door to each other, because each chapter contained a mildly dramatic story on a subject I could relate to, and each one ended with a lesson. (That’s right, a lesson—the same thing that makes me leery when I see one in a picture book manuscript today. But that’s because I don’t like instruction that tries to pass itself off as something else.) Judy and her brother get distracted while popping corn in the fireplace and forget to replace the screen, causing a fire. A tiny fire that burns a hole in the rug, but it seems scary at first. Judy and her mother sensibly discuss, “How can a fire be naughty? It has to burn the things that are in its way.” Another time, Judy gets her tonsils out in a story that ends with Judy remembering her father’s wise words, “Hospitals may not be much fun, but they are good when you need them.” So satisfying!

When I came across these books again in my twenties, I rolled my eyes at their all-white cast, their overstated prose style, and their obvious didacticism. But now I recognize what they did well. There’s real plot in each story, yet they are short and come to rewarding conclusions. They build a world and characters. Finally, each tale, from the rained-out picnic to the nickel that gets lost under the porch, is one a preschooler can relate to. And don’t many of our very best picture books today explore or celebrate the tiny things that loom so large in a child’s universe?

From the March/April 2013 special issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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A freak tent, a dust witch, a quote from Macbeth, and a villain named Mr. Dark. Such was the stuff of Something Wicked This Way Comes. I’d always been fascinated by carnivals. They seemed to spring out of vacant parking lots overnight. So it made sense that I’d be drawn to Ray Bradbury’s novel as a young girl.

In this tale of good versus evil, the mood is bleak. Danger is foreshadowed by the arrival of a man selling lightning rods covered in strange symbols. The bustle of the small town ends abruptly once the clock strikes nine. Posters announcing Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show appear, hung by a creepy man whistling Christmas carols in October. And when the carnival finally arrives, the descriptions are ominous. The slithering train’s grieving sounds, a wailing calliope, and the skeletal poles of the tent drew me into the weird landscape and held me captive.

The young protagonists, Jim Nightshade and William Halloway, are relentlessly pursued by Mr. Dark after witnessing the devastating consequences faced by townspeople whose deepest desires are fulfilled by carnival attractions: a carousel that makes someone younger or older, a hall of mirrors that reveals an inner truth, and a block of ice containing a beautiful woman. Jim falls victim to temptation but in the end is saved by William and his father, Charles. Evil is conquered by a smile. The carnival is destroyed by a warm embrace and laughter.

The book was odd, and not what my friends were reading, but I was hooked. Every now and then, when the wind is particularly fierce and the forecast predicts an impending storm, I still wonder what it would be like to sit astride a painted carousel horse and turn back the clock for one last glimpse of youth.

From the March/April 2013 special issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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In a field that celebrates the works of Maurice Sendak, William Steig, and Jon Scieszka, and in which anthropomorphic animals are regularly clothed only from the waist up, “weird” is difficult to define.

In 1994, I had worked at Junior Library Guild for three years, helping to decide whether the K–5 titles I read seemed fresh simply because they were different or if they were in fact good. When our company was sold and longtime editorial director Marjorie Jones retired, suddenly that assessment was up to me.

On a train to Connecticut to meet with my new supervisors, I read proofs of Dinner at Magritte’s by Michael Garland. It is a fictional story about historical figures, something I’d been taught to be skeptical of — and it wasn’t perfect. Both the dialogue and paintings were a little stiff. But I loved how Garland turned the ordinary happenings described in the text — a boy named Pierre and his neighbors René and Georgette Magritte walk, play croquet, and dine together — into homages to the surrealist’s dreamlike works. For example, as Pierre and friends walk through the woods, their arms and legs weave in and out of the background (as in Magritte’s Carte Blanche), and Magritte attends dinner in a bowler hat, with an apple suspended in front of his face (à la The Son of Man). I felt sure kids would enjoy these weird images, but as a whole was the book better than all the ones I hadn’t yet seen or read that season?

After the fact, when books that cause me anxiety during the decision-making process (kids in a televised fight to the death, bears that eat hat-stealing rabbits) have become established on our list, their innovations become familiar, their existence seems inevitable, and it’s hard to remember that once, like Dinner at Magritte’s, they were new and strange.

From the March/April 2013 special issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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This ended up being a challenging assignment, because much literature for youth is pretty weird when coldly explained (kids travel through space and time to duel a giant brain!), and we don’t think twice about it. Saying that I adore Polly Horvath’s wonderful combination of bizarre, perhaps magical, realism and petulant domesticity, which I absolutely do, is just going to elicit yawns: yeah, me and the award committees.

I’m therefore going with a book by an author whose reputation has never really taken off in the U.S. despite her significance in her home country of Australia. Sonya Hartnett’s Sleeping Dogs (1995) is still one of the most horrible, beautiful, shocking books I’ve ever read, pushing not just the envelope but the entire mailbox of young adult literature. The Willows, a hardscrabble, dysfunctional family that runs a trailer park, are so isolated by their abusive patriarch’s cultish control that they have only the vaguest, most unconvincing inklings, from their poorly transmitting TV and from books, that their life isn’t the same as everybody else’s. Commencing with a clearly incestuous dawn cuddle between a brother and sister and moving swiftly into a lovingly detailed scene of sheep slaughter, the book marks its bitter territory right up front. Yet this is no Neanderthal enclave, and there are heartbreaking flares of possibility beyond the family’s strictured life: one son creates delicate nature drawings; another longs to go to college; and the family prizes its monthly reading assignment (currently, portentously enough, Crime and Punishment). Into this mix comes a brash young artist intrigued by the family’s strangeness (and gratified by how superior it makes him feel). The ways in which this does not, to put it mildly, go well would have made Flannery O’Connor blanch and William Faulkner sober up, and it is a savage, traumatic exploration of the way tragedy can lie like kindling in people, just waiting for something to set it alight.

From the March/April 2013 special issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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I have to confess upfront to being a word girl.

Don’t get me wrong: I love art, especially when the interplay of a book’s words and images click to form the perfect vehicle for the storytelling, but it is usually a character’s voice and the author’s prose that give me a sense of where I am and how to navigate the landscape. Having never really read comics as a kid, I was slow to warm to the graphic novel format and had rather awkwardly embraced the potential of visual narratives.

Then came Shaun Tan’s The Arrival. The traditional look and feel of a timeworn family album, with its sepia cover image, grounds readers in an easily relatable reality. But wait, what else is going on here? Who or what is that bizarre creature? It is immediately clear that this unassuming man with suitcase in hand is entering a place that is at once strange and marvelous, and we are irresistibly drawn to follow him. This juxtaposition of the real and the surreal, the familiar and the foreign, is at the heart of a brilliant, wordless exploration of the immigrant experience. Tan opens with domestic scenes of home, heart, and family, and the suitcase, into which the man packs up all that is known and comforting. A page turn shows readers all that they need to know about the ominous threat that looms over his homeland and why he must leave in search of a safe haven for his loved ones. The alienation and dispirited confusion of being a stranger in a strange land becomes palpable in the sequential art. The man is as helpless as a child as he needs to relearn basic life functions in a bustling industrial city. Yet despite the hardships and displacement, he slowly makes friends and begins to forge a new life. The haunting beauty of Tan’s artwork and the sheer audaciousness of his imagination gave the story its emotional resonance and made this word girl a true believer in the power and reach of visual storytelling.

From the March/April 2013 special issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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My mother introduced me and my siblings to the wonderful weirdness in Howard R. Garis’s Uncle Wiggily tales. Garis gave us old Uncle Wiggily Longears and his adventures with Sammie and Susie Littletail, Johnnie and Billie Bushytail, the Wibblewobbles, Nurse Jane Fuzzy Wuzzy, and others. His stories clearly are meant for reading aloud, at which our mother excelled. Garis’s talky way of telling put him right there at my bedside. “Now, if you’ll get nice and comfortable in your chair, and don’t wiggle too much, I’ll begin. You see, when you wiggle, it gives me the craw-craws, and I can’t think straight…One day, oh, I guess it was just before the Fourth of July, or, maybe, around Decoration Day, Jackie and Peetie…”

Of Garis’s many books, Uncle Wiggily and Jackie and Peetie Bow Wow was my favorite. The Bow Wow boys were always tripping and falling. I was a clumsy 
child (and still have my moments), so those puppies were kindreds.

But it was Garis’s story endings that kindled my taste for the strange and 
marvelous—

If the radio doesn’t talk in its sleep and wake up the alarm clock before it’s time for breakfast, in the next story I’ll tell you about Jackie in a boot.

Now, if I’m not bitten by a grasshopper with pink wings, purple eyes and a gold ring in his nose, riding in a plane, I’m going to tell you next about…

And…if a big, red ant doesn’t crawl upon our porch and carry away the hammock…

I’d lie in bed thinking, “What?…Wait…say that again?” conjuring the bizarre images Garis described. I’d smile at the silliness, then settle under the covers, secure in the knowledge that tomorrow would bring another story — for radios don’t talk when they sleep, I’d never been bitten by a grasshopper, and ants have no use for hammocks.

Now if the honey doesn’t skip tea time and leave Roger Sutton to dance with the crumpet instead…

From the March/April 2013 special issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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At first glance, there’s absolutely no compelling reason why a young immigrant from India would choose Hans Brinker, or, The Silver Skates: A Story of Life in Holland by Mary Mapes Dodge as a favorite read.

And yet I did.

Writing in 1865, Dodge made blunders we still see today when authors attempt to cross borders: 1) She was overly reverential about the Dutch, portraying them as collectively hardworking, thrifty, patriotic, and sacrificial. 2) She introduced an otherwise fairly useless foreign character (Ben Dobbs) through whose eyes equally foreign readers were supposed to see this “exotic” culture. 3) She relied exclusively on secondhand sources (John L. Motley’s The Rise of the Dutch Republic and The History of the United Netherlands and conversations with one family of immigrant Dutch neighbors in the United States), never visiting the Netherlands until after the novel was published. 4) Thanks to these sources, half the book reads like a sightseeing guide, with museums, art, and history described in excruciating detail that threatens to choke the flow of the story.

And yet it doesn’t.

I loved the book and still do. Dodge wove together three storytelling strands: a compelling Rip Van Winkle–esque mysterious plot in which two family’s lives are intertwined; teen characters whose voices still ring true thanks to Dodge’s mastery of humor and understanding of young romance and friendship; a sense of place so strong I feel ice gliding under a pair of imaginary skates from the first page.

Plot, place, people: braid the three well and you’ve got a timeless story. I’m loaning the book to a Dutch friend to see if inauthenticity makes this novel completely unreadable for her, because my joy in the story is a bit unsettling: if the storytelling is good, are cultural blunders more forgivable or more dangerous?

From the March/April 2013 special issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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The Horn Book Magazine asked Elizabeth Bird, “What’s the strangest children’s book you’ve ever enjoyed?”

“No answers are provided, no hints are given. This lack of resolution makes for an ultimately unsatisfying story.” So said SLJ of the early 1990s Swedish import Else-Marie and Her Seven Little Daddies by Pija Lindenbaum (and adapted by Gabrielle Charbonnet). Like that reviewer, I too encountered this book as an adult. Unlike that reviewer, I found it so strange and so unlike any of the American picture books I knew that I fell deeply and unrepentantly in love. The plot is simple. Rather than one big daddy, Else-Marie has seven little ones. No explanation for this is given (hence SLJ’s cries of pain). Our heroine is just a normal little girl with universal fears. She’s embarrassed by her parents’ singing, worried about the impression they’ll make on her friends at school, etc. In the event that the reader is a child, the internal logic of the book is airtight. Kids of the younger ages are simply not going to ponder the sticky details of how, exactly, one girl comes from seven little men (though a wedding shot of the mother in her white dress with her tiny bridegrooms collected around her ankles was enough to get my imagination spinning).

The temptation, of course, is to consider this book (now out of print in the United States) ahead of its time. It thumbs its nose so thoroughly at standard conventions and the normality of so-called “traditional” families that as a parent I find myself wanting to draw some sort of lesson from its good-natured, nontraditional attitude. However, I cannot help but think that that would be as much a mistake as it would be to apply Freudian interpretations to the admittedly ripe situation. In the end, I think we just have to accept that sometimes seven vertically challenged fathers are just seven vertically challenged fathers.

From the March/April 2013 special issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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The Horn Book Magazine asked Kristin Cashore, “What’s the strangest children’s book you’ve ever enjoyed?”

“So very annoying, this volcano,” says Moominmamma with a sigh, flicking soot from her (substantial) nose and thinking of the nice new washing she’s hung out. And it is annoying, as are the associated earthquakes and the flood wave that in Tove Jansson’s Moomin-summer Madness finally inundates Moominvalley and leaves an entire society of Moomins and other odd creatures bereft and homeless.

Strange, eerie, frightening things happen regularly in Moominvalley. Children are separated from parents, innocents are thrown into jail, families lose their homes to floods; the world is populated with malicious and unhappy people. But the Moomins move calmly along, implicitly trusting in one another’s (questionable) competence, feeding and comforting the malicious and unhappy, loving each other, embracing the strange. Says Moominmamma while admiring her golden bracelet, glimmering at the bottom of a pool, “We’ll always keep our bangles in brown pond water in the future. They’re so much more beautiful that way.”

There is the most beautiful, and beautifully restrained, joy in this odd little book, constantly about to tip over into something too strange and frightening. Just when the water is about to cover the last bit of roof on which sit the Moomins and the outcasts they’ve collected, a theater floats by. Everyone clambers aboard, not knowing what a theater is, thinking they’ve found their new home. What a scary and delightful home it is! The floor spins around like a carousel. Bright colored lights illuminate the sitting room at random intervals. Doors stand alone with no rooms behind them, staircases end in mid-air, and the open ceiling area is filled with pictures you can pull down and put back up again. And of course, the entire structure floats along unpredictably, pushed to and fro by the flood waves, landing in a rowan forest, becoming unmoored again. “‘I like it here,’ said the Mymble’s daughter. ‘It’s just as if nothing really mattered here.’”

There is a sense, in this book, that nothing really matters; that in this most terrifying world, there is no point in fear. The lost will be found, or they won’t; the floodwaters will recede, or they won’t; the Misabel who is always overcome with tearful histrionics will discover that all along, she’s been meant to be acting tragedies on stage, and after that, she’ll be happy — or she won’t. Most importantly, within the steady, stable, oddball Moomin family, there exists a paradox. “‘Flee!’ cried Moominmamma,” when the police come looking for her son. “She didn’t know what her Moomintroll had done, but she was convinced that she approved of it.” The paradox? There is no such thing as safety; in our (abundant) ignorance, we’ll make mistakes, we’ll lose each other, we’ll never completely understand what’s happening; yet we are safe here, you are safe here, because I love you and you are mine.

From the March/April 2013 special issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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