Llama Llama…

1.What did your own children teach you about creating books for preschoolers?

My own children taught me several things about the reality of picture books.  First, that a book has to have compelling relevance to a child’s inner world to get picked up more than once or twice.  Second, that a picture book should be fun for everyone in the room (if it isn’t fun for the parent, then it is likely not fun for the child).  And third, that sometimes kids like seemingly unappealing books simply because those kinds of books address some developmental need; in other words, sometimes a parent will have to read Disney’s version of Cinderella every night for weeks…no matter how painful that is.  Most importantly, reading with my children taught me that “reading time” is often the most intimate moment of the day, and that its power in a child’s (or caregiver’s) world cannot be underestimated.

2.I enjoyed playing the Llama Llama game on your website. What are your thoughts about toddlers and iPhones?

I think that iPhones, iPads, Nooks, Droids, and all those gizmos are simply toys.  Whether or not a caregiver chooses to give that type of toy to a child is a personal decision.  As a parent, I can understand the use of a toy that has educational and entertainment value…after all, there are only so many car games a person can play on a six hour trip to Grandma’s house, and sometimes everyone (including a parent) needs down time.  I can also see value in a child learning some autonomous play skills, if they have a toy that teaches manual dexterity and/or reading.  However, if the toy is constantly being used as a substitute for the important stuff (creative play, interpersonal relationships, reading, and a sense of living on the real planet with living, breathing creatures), then I think it is no longer a toy for a child – it is a crutch for a parent, much like driving through McDonald’s instead of cooking real food.  I like a Big Mac as much as the next person, but I know it isn’t giving me real nourishment.

3.Why do you think young children accept the concept of animals dressed in clothing so easily?

What?  Are you implying that animals DON’T wear clothes? You haven’t met my bulldog!  (Just kidding.)

That’s a great question.  I think the answer may be that children can relate to animals.  Children know that animals are “people” too…they live, breathe, and exist on the planet, just as we do.  I don’t think children give a hoot about clothes until they start to see clothes as costumes that define them, and those costumes tend to be just that: costumes.  Why can’t dogs and cats (and llamas) wear costumes, too?  To children, animals aren’t the “other.”  After all, it is easier for a toddler to look right into the face of a lab than an adult; they can be eye to eye.

I think children are far more like animals than they are like adults.  In other words, I think that what differentiates an adult from a child is that an adult is often motivated from and controlled by things outside themselves, or by what Freud would call a strong ego and super-ego.  Small children are “unadulterated” beings.  They experience and recognize feelings in themselves and others much like animals do, without all that other stuff on top.

4.How does a picture book keep the reader-aloud and the read-to equally engaged?

A good picture book has to be engaging to the reader as well as the read-to, as I mentioned before.   It should allow the reader to become part of the action, to make the book a performance piece.   The reading of a picture book should be a special moment of mutual understanding that the reader, readee, and author all share.

5.Do kids ever ask you why llama has two ls?

Never.

Join us on Thursday, April 25, 2013, for a big day focused on the littlest people.

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1. You were a book reviewer before you were a parent. How has the first job helped with the second?

Two words: review copies. After umpteen years of working at the Horn Book, I’ve amassed a pretty good and varied collection of children’s books. We’re never at a loss for something to read, and thankfully both kids love books (coincidence? Maybe, but having tons of books all over the house doesn’t hurt). There have been more than a few times that I’ve come upon one or both kids sitting (quietly!) and looking at a book—and that’s just the kind of help I need.

2. And how has the second job helped with the first?

Being a parent has and hasn’t informed my job as a book reviewer. What each of my kids likes is not an indicator of what other kids will like or of what makes an outstanding book. For example, Chloe can’t get enough of Blue’s [as in Clues] Sleepover Party, but that doesn’t mean I would recommend it to anyone else (unless that person deserves it).

I do like having my own captive audience to test drive reading books aloud, which helps a lot with reviewing picture books. And when they were infants, I even read some novels aloud to them—working and bonding at the same time!

Living with young children has allowed me to see childhood from a different angle. I recently reviewed Ole Konnecke’s Anton and the Battle, which I think captures perfectly how a four-year-old (boy, especially) thinks and plays. At one point in their proverbial pissing match, Anton and his frenemy, Luke, pretend to throw bombs at each other. I would have liked this book BC (before children), but I wouldn’t have had a clue how completely on-target the cartoony pretend-violent play is.

3. You have two preschoolers, a girl and a boy. Do you see any gender stereotyping in their book preferences?

My first reaction to this is that their preferences have more to do with their interests and temperaments than with their gender, but who knows? Jakob likes information and has a lot of patience; he’ll listen to a 128 page book about space if someone is willing to read it to him. He also likes fiction and nonfiction books about dinosaurs, construction, knights, firefighters, and other typical little boy topics, but he doesn’t limit himself to those things. If someone is reading a book, he’ll usually sit and listen, no matter what it’s about.

Chloe isn’t girly at all—she won’t look at a dress; her favorite color is black—but she does gravitate toward fiction rather than her big brother’s information books. She loves Curious George (like any self-respecting three-year-old), Leslie Patricelli’s board books, and any book with Humpty Dumpty in it. She likes folktales; Feodor Rojankovsky’s The Tall Book of Nursery Tales has been at the top of her morning story time pile for a few months now.

4. What are their current favorites?

Chloe and Jakob

Their favorites change from day to day, week to week. I asked this morning and they both said, “That superheroes book with Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman [a.k.a. DC Super Heroes Storybook Collection].” Last week the answer would have been, “Traction Man!” (that’s Traction Man Is Here by Mini Grey). They were obsessed with that book for a few days. We read it over and over; we acted out the story (with improvised Traction Man outfits and a pet scrubbing brush); we made a special trip to the library to borrow the other two TM books. But this week Traction Man is off the radar. Jakob has been studying The Usborne Official Knight’s Handbook. Chloe wants us to read “Puss in Boots” (and only “Puss in Boots”) from Anne Rockwell’s collection, Puss in Boots and Other Tales.

Oh, and I probably shouldn’t admit this, but for the last year (or maybe it just feels like a year), Jakob’s #1 favorite? The thirty-two page 2012 Playmobil toy catalog.

 5. What, in your opinion, is the most misguided choice for a baby shower book?

Along with a Playmobil catalog, any book that speaks more to new parents and their experiences/wishes/hopes than to a baby or a child…that is if the gift giver’s intention is really and truly to give the baby a gift. I’m sure many parents would like those books’ sentiments (in fact, I know many parents do like them), but kids themselves won’t give a poopy diaper about them.

Join us on Thursday, April 25, 2013, for a big day focused on the littlest people.

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SLJ’s Kathy Ishizuka links to a recent study

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Has anyone seen Tomorrow, When the War Began? I don’t know if it got a theatrical release here but it’s on PPV. Should I watch?

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1. Why does the author have to reach back FORTY YEARS to talk about “dark YA” when our last big go-round on the topic was just fifteen years ago? The generation of Sarah T., Go Ask Alice, and Je Suis le Fromage is not the parents of today, it’s the grandparents. If I’m recalling right, the WSJ made this same argument back in 1997, when such books as When She Was Good, The Facts Speak for Themselves, and pretty much anything by Chris Lynch were the New Thing in YA and equally decried by worried adults. This article is missing a lot of history, as well as any sense of the breadth of YA today, citing Lauren Myracle for an atypical book, ignoring Ellen Hopkins (queen of the kind of book Gurdon is appalled by), and recommending A Tree Grows in Brooklyn as a “Book for Young Women” while not seeming aware of, say, the best-selling Sarah Dessen, whose books exemplify all that the article wants to find good.

2. Gurdon’s argument about why gritty YA books are published is classic straw-man stuff:

The argument in favor of such novels is that they validate the teen experience, giving voice to tortured adolescents who would otherwise be voiceless. If a teen has been abused, the logic follows, reading about another teen in the same straits will be comforting. If a girl cuts her flesh with a razor to relieve surging feelings of self-loathing, she will find succor in reading about another girl who cuts, mops up the blood with towels and eventually learns to manage her emotional turbulence without a knife.

Who actually believes this is how reading works?  It was Sheila Egoff who pointed out that the audience for Go Ask Alice was not drug-crazed runaways but nice little middle-class junior high girls with a taste for melodrama. People like reading about people like themselves whose problems are more interesting than their own. Unfortunately, the Twitterati are buying into Gurdon’s thinking from the other way around, claiming that “YA saves,” and that YA writers are brave and heroic and helpful, none of which qualities being particularly useful for a writer. Give me an author who is truthful and talented; spare me an author who writes to save lives.

3. If you’re a teen who is running your reading choices by your parents, grow up. If you’re a parent who feels compelled to approve your child’s reading, shut up. The books and the kids are all right.

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Yes, I do feel better, thanks for asking.

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One thing Chua is right about is piano practice. I’ve just read Jane Breskin Zalben’s new middle-school novel Four Seasons (Knopf), about Ally, a gifted kid who studies piano at The Julliard School (only amateurs, she tells us, refer to it as just plain Julliard). I can’t remember a book so honest about the demands made upon young serious musicians–by their teachers, their parents, themselves.  Ally’s parents have an interestingly complex job of raising her: her father is an active professional musician and her mom, well, her mom has a story of her own. On the one hand, they want Ally to be happy and have a “normal” life, etc., but on the other, they know how hard she is going to have to work if she wants to make the piano her life. Whether she does want to do that provides the novel with its theme, and it’s a truly engrossing exposition. Highly recommended to all those forced through “Lightly Row” and “The Spinning Song.”

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As far as parents pushing kids out of picture books goes, that is neither new nor news. As Robin Smith and Dean Schneider told us in “Unlucky Arithmetic,” “throw out the picture books” is one of thirteen time-tested ways to raise a non-reader. When I was a children’s librarian, which was probably before the Times reporter was even born, I was regularly told by parents that such-and-such book for Junior was “too easy.” People who think reading is supposed to be difficult most often–surprise!–don’t like to read themselves and, in a perfect world, would have their interference met by a friendly but firm “you don’t know what you are talking about.”

And, as many in the blogosphere have been pointing out, anecdotal evidence of bookstore behavior is not going to give us the complete picture. It was the wise Jane Botham of the Milwaukee Public Library who told me that the book to buy in the bookstore was the one the child had already checked out of the library over and over again. Start there.

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