Two points I began considering when my attention wandered: One, the only other Omnimax movie I remember seeing is The Polar Express, awful in more ways than I can say. So I don’t know if it’s my inexperience with the medium that lead to my queasy but delighted disorientation, for, say, the first fifteen minutes of the 45 minute film. I thrilled to the rain, the approaching tornadoes and the zooming-in on the Mad Max-like storm-chasing truck. But after a while, the screen simply looked big, and I felt less like I was experiencing the weather and more like I was watching a movie. (Richard fell asleep.)

My second point might be related to my first. Through most of the movie, we go along with stormchaser-filmmaker Sean Casey as he seeks to plant his truck (which has these cool extensions that grip the ground) right in the middle of a tornado. With aid of radar and other Science, he gets close, closer, but the storms either die down or dance off in another direction. The funnels–gestating, growing, twisting–are awesome to see. But when he does get himself inside, at the end of the movie, it’s a letdown, just a blur of wind and rain and white noise. It turns out tornadoes are a lot less interesting (visually, anyway) from the inside than they are from without. Bill Pullman’s Paxton’s! other tornado movie, Twister, made high drama of the (admittedly ludicrous) moment when he and Helen Hunt are chained at the heart of the storm, watching little silvery cups twirl up into the funnel, their experiment a success and their love renewed. So don’t go see Tornado Alley thinking it’s going to look like this.

My work-related conclusion concerns our now-reflexive expectation that an “insider’s view” is always better, and more “authentic,” than an outsider’s when it comes to a book ‘s cultural context. I know people aren’t weather. I know outsiders looking in can “get stuff wrong.” But I’m guessing that if tornadoes had people living inside them (hey publishers! a new hook!), those folks would have no clue about what their home looked like from the outside–and it’s a spectacular view. Inside, it just looks like rain as usual. Now, it is true that Sean Casey’s journey into the storm promises to give us new knowledge about tornadoes, and who’s not for that? Let’s just not automatically dismiss the view from the outside as one not worth seeing.

The post >In which I possibly overextend my metaphor to dangerous ends appeared first on The Horn Book.

The post >Lions are . . . appeared first on The Horn Book.

I’m all for writers, award committee members, reviewers, teachers, and librarians “trying out” books with kids, but I think we need to be watchful of what they tell us. My colleague Anne Quirk talks about the “Steve and Daphne Show” she witnessed one year at a Best Books for Young Adults committee, where, as dutifully supplied by a committee member, opinions from these two teens from a single high school library seemed to be providing the pivotal swing vote. I myself like to use the fact that the two-year-old from downstairs loves to scream “ROAR ROAR ROAR” as evidence that Bob Shea’s Dinosaur Vs. Bedtime should win the Caldecott Medal.

But talk about experimenter effect! Zena Sutherland used to quote Ursula Nordstrom as saying that kids will enjoy the telephone book if it means they’re getting their mother’s attention, just as politicians know not to say that Harold Robbins is their favorite writer. Everybody wants to make somebody happy. And just because your kids like or don’t like something doesn’t mean that other kids will feel the same way. Proximity does not an expert witness make.

The post >Still, it’s not like a book can give you polio. appeared first on The Horn Book.

Mads seemed content and Julia politely waiting until we got to something with princesses in it.

The post >Practicing for grandchildren appeared first on The Horn Book.