But I have a nagging problem with it. The whole point of the book is that everyone has ten fingers and ten toes, and that while we celebrate each baby’s uniqueness, isn’t it great that they (and, by extension, we) have this particular array of anatomy in common? “And both of these babies, / as everyone knows, / had ten little fingers / and ten little toes.”

Except, of course, when babies don’t. Not everybody does–some are born with fewer (or lose them due to disease or accident), some come with an extra one or two, some people don’t even have two hands, for God’s sake. I know that these people are relatively rare, but there is something that bothers me when a book so determinedly inclusive manages to be so clueless about what it’s actually saying. If this book had a mouth, it would be cramming all ten toes into it right now. You would never (knowingly) read this book to a child who didn‘t have ten fingers and toes, would you? And shouldn’t that give us pause about sharing it with the ones who do?

I don’t usually have much patience for debates about “sensitivity” and have no idea why this book bugs me as much as it does.

The post >I can’t quite put my finger on it. appeared first on The Horn Book.

Coleen Salley died yesterday. Her professional life was spent mostly at the University of New Orleans, where she was a distinguished professor of children’s literature, and that’s the excuse most of us in children’s book publishing used for inviting her out for dinner whenever we were within hailing distance of a bayou. But the real reason was that she was the funniest person ever born. When Colleen began to wrap her smoky southern drawl around a story, we cradled our drinks and prayed that story would never end. In her 70s, she began writing down some of those tales she’d been telling. If you never met Coleen, search for one of the several audio books she recorded over the years, then imagine her sitting across your table. That might give you some sense of the terrible loss so many of her friends are feeling today.

The post >R.I.P. Coleen Salley appeared first on The Horn Book.

That theme of bridging cultures (I know WSS is based on R&J, but making the Montagues and Capulets into Jets and Sharks throws us into contemporary contexts) came to me yesterday when I was editing a Guide review of The Umbrella Queen, a picture book by Shirin Yim Bridges and Taeeun Yoo. Apparently based on the “umbrella village” of Bo Sang in northern Thailand, the story is about a little girl, Noot, who longs to paint umbrellas the way all the women in the village do, but instead of painting the traditional patterns of flowers and butterflies, she paints elephants. The Thai king comes to judge the umbrellas in the annual contest and names Noot the winner, “because she paints from her heart.” It’s a nice enough little story, but has an unacknowledged dynamic that shows up time and again in American books for children about “other cultures,” allegedly honoring different cultural norms but in fact contravening them to celebrate the spirit of individual expression. (Historical fiction does this too, as Anne Scott MacLeod wrote in a brilliant essay for us.) It’s a case where the story’s need for conflict subverts its simultaneous claim on cultural authenticity. There’s no story if Noot happily paints flowers and butterflies, but the fact that she triumphs by painting elephants says, in effect, that the tradition that inspired the story isn’t worth holding on to. Can you have it both ways?

The post >Stick to Your Own Kind? appeared first on The Horn Book.

And now, I can! Doctorow has compiled some how-to’s for such plot points from his book as encrypting Gmail, starting a flash mob, blocking an RFID chip, and getting over a barbed-wire fence. Also included: “What to do when the police stop you.”

The post >Tips for Teens appeared first on The Horn Book.

It was practically Pavlovian. We clapped because it was a beautiful performance, but also because we knew the tune and loved it, and we knew other people knew the tune and loved it–group hug, anyone? “Nessun Dorma” is a high culture artifact that secured a place for itself outside the gates when it was kicked over the wall by Luciano Pavarotti at the 1990 World Cup. Now it shows up everywhere (fabulously by Aretha Franklin at the 1998 Grammys); it has nothing to do with Turandot; and you can get it as a ringtone.

Purists scorn but I love this. Opera buffs are like librarians or anybody in a community of shared aesthetic commitment (although Wayne Kostenbaum writes that putting two opera queens in the same room spells trouble). Everybody likes being an insider to something, whether it’s opera or–I hoped I would get here–children’s books. We saw that in spades here last week, when children’s-book-lovers came together to rail at what they perceived was an attack by me on their affections. But it was also a very in-groupy fight on all sides, one amongst ourselves, the kind of debate that reinforces allegiance to the group because all sides agree that This Matters.

I don’t think we adults who love children’s books do so to be insidery (hmm, children’s books or high fashion. Which will make me cooler?) but our shared love does give us an inside to be in. We like having a cultural vocabulary shared by a few, but we are also aware that the reason we’re few is because children’s books don’t matter to most adults. This cognitive dissonance can cause both anxiety and a pleasant sense of superiority.

So we too like it when one of Ours is kicked over the wall, whether it’s everybody reading Harry Potter or, my favorite example, a country song that can cite Charlotte’s Web (“now I’m the one that’s caught in . . .”) and assume that listeners will know the reference. It reinforces our superiority (we knew Harry Potter before he was Harry Potter) and soothes our anxiety (if Charlotte’s Web is part-of-everything then maybe I am too). Mostly it’s just nice to have your affections confirmed, like when you convince a friend to like a book or a song you like. It makes you like it even more.

The post >That’s Why We Clap appeared first on The Horn Book.

The post >Go flame her appeared first on The Horn Book.

Growing up in Boston added allure, too, as, when the show came to town in 1970, it was promptly shut down and banned for a month until the Supreme Court allowed it to reopen. I remember faking illness to stay home from school one day because the cast was going to perform on some local TV talk show. How ironic that “America’s oldest community theater” (the Footlight Club opened in 1877) would be presenting it thirty-some years later without fuss, obscenities and (discreetly lit) nudity intact.

I didn’t get half of the sex jokes back then, and certainly didn’t recognize just how druggie it was–my exposure to illegal substances was then limited to the “awareness tablets” that a cop had brought into our junior high and lit in front of the classroom to demonstrate what marijuana smelled like so we would know when to blow the whistle on a party, I guess. Last night, at fifty-one, I had little patience with the show’s loosey-goosey free-range dialogue that was supposed to convey the inspiration of drugs and wondered how anyone could have ever heard it as meaningful or even sincere.

But to think of drugs as “mind-expanding” is even more taboo today than in 1968, as is the show’s gleeful employment of racial epithets. Forget getting banned in Boston; can it play in L.A.?

What I mostly thought last night, sentimentally and dolefully, is that now I’m the parents and, really, so is the show. I’m betting the sweet kids on stage were as bemused by the LBJ jokes they were spouting as I had been by “Sodomy.”

The post >Another Phone Call from the Past appeared first on The Horn Book.

The post >Developmentally Delighted appeared first on The Horn Book.