Findings

Becky made an interesting comment on this post that has prompted some thinking. What’s the difference between the imaginative faith we practice in our reading of stories, and other kinds of faith?

Becky spoke of the “willing suspension of disbelief” we extend when we enter the imaginative world of a story. It’s a phrase from Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, and it’s been used in other contexts than his original application to literature — even this year’s political campaigns (more’s the pity!). Originally it was part of Coleridge’s discussion of the origin of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads. Coleridge was to be responsible for the “imaginative” subjects (his view of the imagination being somewhat complex and exalted) and Wordsworth for the everyday subjects, giving them “the charm of novelty” by filtering them through the imagination. About his part, Coleridge writes: 

It was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.

Poetic faith, procured for shadows of imagination. Coleridge in general gives imagination a religious role of penetrating to the heart of things. But my sense is that he’s referring to a very specific subcategory of faith in this passage, not applicable to every situation. Key to his conception of poetic faith are two qualities:

1. It’s a temporary dispensation, “for the moment”
2. It’s entered into willingly with the knowledge that the poem or story isn’t purporting to be “true” in the realistic sense. It may reflect aspects of truth in experience, but it’s not making any claim to have actually happened.

The faith of the Bible, on the other hand, is pithily summed up in Hebrews 11 as “being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” It’s a requirement for spiritual regeneration and the means of salvation. I despair of listing all its many aspects and references here. Suffice it to say that it’s not poetic faith… For one thing, as Hebrews 11 makes plain, it’s not mere suspension of disbelief, but active belief — belief that often requires great endurance and determination. “Suspension of disbelief” is the initial gateway in. For another, it refers to belief in something that makes real-world truth claims.

C.S. Lewis says that in the case of Christ, “the myth became real” — and this is a total reversal of Coleridge’s idea of taking actual “reality” and transforming it into an imaginative, mythic “reality” through an artistic process. It follows that the faith of the reader is an opposite kind of faith, too. Poetic faith is temporary; biblical faith is tough and lasting. Poetic faith is granted with the prior knowledge that the poetic vision isn’t claiming to have taken place in the daylight world of matter; biblical faith believes Christ marks the supernatural intervening in human history. It’s a different animal, not just because it has a different object of faith, but in its character.

I think imagination still plays a role in religious faith, though. It can be a function of memory that keeps the object of faith before you when times are dark. There are lots of admonitions to remember in the Bible. There’s also a great respect for artistic imagination. Why else do we have the symbolic, prophetic works, so dense in their imagery they make the most sophisticated symbolist poet look like small potatoes? Why else does the Bible have so many different literary genres? Why so much poetry? Why so many of the pleasing aspects of literature reflected in its formal features? We need to summon all the imagination we have to appreciate this expression of the ultimate creator and poet.

I’m not exactly an expert on Chris Van Allsburg. My first acquaintance with him was The Polar Express, long before it became Hollywood fare. I think it was my mother, then a kindergarten teacher, who introduced me to the book when I was in college, and I thought it was great. After my daughter experienced it in her kindergarten class last year, though, I formed a different impression. It was read to the kids, then they made bells, then they watched the movie in class.

It bothered me then. First, my husband and I had watched the movie and decided to wait to let our daughter watch it. The whole business of the tramp ghost on the train roof seemed potentially scary, and really the movie took so many liberties with the plot as to be its own entity. Then she went to school and was shown the movie anyway. Second, when the kindergarten class worked with the story, it became an overt lesson in the nature of faith, one in which faith was simply “belief” without regard to whether the particular object of faith was a worthy one or not. We’re Christians, and we teach our children that Jesus rose from the dead, and that God hears our prayers. Here was the kindergarten teacher using this book to teach that Santa, too, was worthy of “faith.”

No, I’m not advocating book-burning. It gave rise to some good discussions (though sooner than I would have chosen if circumstances hadn’t forced it). On the whole it was an exercise in the power of stories — Van Allsburg’s stories in this case, and his wonderful visualizations — and their malleability in the hands of their readers. I still like The Polar Express; the reality that seeing isn’t believing, but rather believing is seeing, is an important one. But all objects of faith certainly aren’t equal. It’s a multifaceted book that lends itself to different philosophies.   

That multifacetedness is evidence that it’s legitimate art, not simply a screen for a single didactic agenda. All the Van Allsburg stories I’ve seen are similarly suggestive. Another one I like is The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. It contains a set of unrelated pictures, all done in black-and-white, and all with Van Allsburg’s trademark suggestiveness. Each picture contains a story title, and one line of a story. The reader’s job is to supply the rest of the story. (Follow the title link to see the pictures.) It’s really a wonderful imaginative exercise that takes students a step beyond picture narration, and into story creation. I’ve had the book since I was in college and (I admit it) I’ve pored over the pictures many times with admiration for Van Allsburg’s detail, inventiveness, and skill at depicting mood and atmosphere. These qualities explain why he’s the author I picked for the June Celebrate the Author Challenge. I learned from this book that he never learned to draw as a child, and felt he was no good at it. I’m glad he knows better now.

Curious about what kinds of comparisons might emerge among the many horse books I’ve read to my 7-year-old daughter, I’ve started keeping track. I want to do one more post about them, then wait till a few more accumulate before doing another. One qualification: we also read books on other topics! These are ones that relate to a particular interest of hers, but she has other interests too, as does my 4-year-old daughter.

Kathy Wilmore’s Horses! has been a great resource for my older daughter to learn about different breeds of horses. It’s loaded with beautiful photos, and it’s been perfect for her to read in the evening during her designated “read in bed time.” It’s a factual book, not a storybook, great for young sponges who want to absorb as much as they can about horses. She gave a presentation on her horse collection for a hobby exhibition with her Brownie troop, and I was caught by surprise at how many breeds and their distinctives she was able to name. I’m sure this book is a big reason why. 

This book is a source of information about the different types of horses and their respective roles and talents. Each chapter is narrated by a different girl who tells the reader about her horse and the work they do together. The table of contents is here. It contains a collection of tear-out trading cards in the back, and my daughter has learned a ton about the different breeds this way.

I Wonder Why Horses Wear Shoes is another favorite informational book. It’s a slim paperback with lots of illustrations, organized according to questions. It accompanies us many places because it’s easy to carry and useful for young information hounds.

Flip, and Flip and the Cows, are paperbacks that survived my own childhood. Flip is a young colt learning about life as a horse, and he was my first acquaintance with Wesley Dennis as an illustrator. Later I would discover his illustrations in many Marguerite Henry books. The stories are simple and good for young children. My 7-year-old has outgrown the stories, but not the illustrations.

Sometimes I Dream Horses, written by Jeanne Whitehouse Peterson and illustrated with beautiful pencil drawings by Eleanor Schick, is about a young girl who dreams of horses on her grandmother’s farm in the Southwest. We found it at the library. It’s a nice story about horse-lovers in two generations.

Winter Pony is Jean Slaughter Doty’s sequel to Summer Pony. This story follows Ginny through a winter with her pony Mokey, who learns how to pull a sleigh and then is discovered to be in foal. There’s more of Pam and Ginny’s developing friendship as well as lots of description of this exciting new chapter of life for Mokey. The story culminates in the foal’s birth, with Ginny supervising. It’s very readable and enjoyable, and we finished it in under a week.

This one was given to us by my friend JW. It’s about a Native American girl who prefers horses to human companions, and eventually gets her wish to live with them, with the blessing of her family. The illustrations are lovely, simple and stylized. Our other book about a Native American child who longs for a horse is Indian Two-Feet and His Horse, a book saved since my own childhood. It’s written by Margaret Friskey and illustrated by Ezra Jack Keats, and tells the tale of a boy who longs for a horse, finds a wounded one, and builds a lasting friendship by caring for it. Both these tales offer an alternative to the conquering notion of ownership, and present instead a vision of friendship with the natural world.

One other book we found at the library is about a Native American boy with a love for a horse: Black Kettle: King of the Wild Horses by Justin Denzel. Though the initial picture of Native Americans isn’t flattering — Little Bear, a 9-year-old, is part of a raid on settlers, and he steals the black colt — the relationship between Native Americans and settlers quickly fades into the background. However the theme of the Native American valuing wildness and freedom more than the white man remains at the forefront of the story; Little Bear frees the colt, who becomes famous as “king of the wild horses” and is targeted for capture more than once by a shopkeeper named Lockard. I have to believe this is a main source of the story in Disney’s movie Spirit. It’s interesting that none of these three stories identify their main characters as belonging to a particular tribe.

Now for some more oldies: Little Black, A Pony by Walter Farley is about a boy whose small black pony is relegated to semi-retirement when the boy learns to ride a larger horse, only to rise to heroism when the boy falls through the ice later in the story, and Little Black pulls him out. This one is good for an early reader. There’s some tension, but also a subtheme about importance and friendship not being determined by visible things. Both the boy and the pony learn this; the boy learns that riding a big horse doesn’t make him independent or all-powerful after all, and the pony learns that there are some things his small size enables him and him alone to do.

Last but not least, there have been a number of C.W. Anderson books that offer adventure and mild tension, equestrian knowledge, and great drawings. It’s been nice to follow Billy and his pony Blaze through a series of picture books. Stories like The Rumble Seat Pony, A Pony for Three, and The Lonesome Colt round out the collection, building on the winning theme of children and their horses. My daughter knows which shelf these are on at the library, so we’ve brought them home more than once — well-worn pieces of history that have been loved by many before us.

Helen Kay’s A Pony for the Winter tells the tale of a pony who gives rides at an amusement park boarded to a young girl for the winter. Deborah, who’s 8 years old, learns the ropes of pony care and wrestles with the moral choice of whether to hide the pony from its owner when he returns in the spring. It’s not a picture book; text outweighs pictures. But there are still plenty of illustrations, and though the reading level is perhaps 3rd grade, younger children can read it with no problems.

Cowardly Clyde has been a real favorite this week. Clyde, a “cowardly” horse belonging to a bravado-filled knight, ends up saving the day (and the knight) from a rampaging ogre. When I came back from my morning walk yesterday, both girls were lying on their stomachs in my 7-year-old’s bed, reading and discussing, admiring Clyde, pointing out their favorite features of the pictures, dreaming what they would do in such a situation: “I’d bite him in the tail, then run around and around till he got dizzy and fell down!” was the best solution I heard.

The Mare on the Hill is a beautifully illustrated book about a white mare who fears people (kind of like Ginger in Black Beauty) who eventually comes to trust the young boys who long to befriend her. The text and paintings are by Thomas Locker, an acclaimed Hudson River painter. Gorgeous book.

Leah’s Pony is about a young girl living in the Dust Bowl during the great Depression. Her family’s farm is about to be auctioned off “the year the corn grew no higher than a man’s thumb,” and Leah makes a decision to sell her pony so she can bid on her father’s truck. (I’m tearing up just writing about it, actually.) It’s a wonderful story that inspires young children with a vision of the power their choices can have. (Good site here.)

Last but not least, Robert the Rose Horse… I’m very tired of this book, but my girls never seem to weary of it. We’ve checked it out of the library several times now. My older daughter read it through earlier in the year, and it was one of the first books she was curious enough about to push through as an early reader. It’s about a horse with an allergy to roses whose itchy nose ends up saving the day during a bank robbery. He’s a lovable equine, albeit one who walks around on his hind legs at will….

This morning I ventured into the attic, nagged by the sense that I’d seen copies of some of the books of my youth semi-recently. Lo and behold, there was a box of treasures! For starters, here are the horse books:

1. Helen Kay’s A Pony for the Winter
2. Rutherford Montgomery’s El Blanco — The Legend of the White Stallion
3. Stephen Holt’s The Phantom Roan
4. Dorothy Brenner Francis’ The Flint Hills Foal
5. Sam Savitt’s Vicki and the Black Horse
6. Glen Rounds’ The Blind Colt
7. Lynn Hall’s Wild Mustang
8. Walter Farley’s The Black Stallion and The Black Stallion Returns
9. Doris Gates’ Little Vic
10. Margaret Goff Clark’s Mystery Horse
11. Anita Feagles’ Casey: The Utterly Impossible Horse

(Gee, I wonder where my daughter’s horse-passion comes from…)

And besides these, there were a few others like Little Women, Encyclopedia Brown, Pippi Longstocking, a few Beverly Cleary books, children’s biographies of Helen Keller and Louisa May Alcott, etc.

Most or all of these would be available at the library, of course. But there’s something about finding my own old copies that’s hard to describe. These are chunks of myself. How can inanimate objects be so significant?

I also wonder how much my own attachment to these books is influencing my daughters. A lot, I’m sure. But that’s not something I’m going to get analytical about. I love that when I plopped the box down at the foot of the attic stairs, they were on it in a heartbeat, raking through the books on the floor, exclaiming, carrying them off to pore over on their own.

The Light Princess is a book of about 110 pages that I unearthed in the library’s juvenile section. There are a few etexts available (listed here), but this is the version I read.

I’ve read a few other MacDonald stories: Phantastes (years ago), Lilith,  and The Princess and the Goblin.  C.S. Lewis felt his imagination was “baptised” by Phantastes; me, not so much. Nor Lilith.

But I’ve enjoyed both his tales for children immensely. The authorial voice of this one is less grandfatherly than in The Princess and the Goblin, leaving the reader undistracted from the story as it unfolds. I liked this, for this story is like a diamond: it leaves some strong pictures in the mind, multifaceted and mythic, and it’s a treat to be able to retain them vividly, undistorted by an overbearing narrator.

The basic plot involves a princess who, because her aunt (a witch) was inadvertantly forgotten at her christening, is cursed with weightlessness. Gravity — of any kind — has no hold on her. Her body floats; her mind flits; her heart drifts, failing to attach to anyone. She never cries. She’s a mere shell.

Eventually a prince falls in love with her, just about the time her evil aunt begins to drain the lake where the princess loves to swim. She begins to fade away herself. The only way to restore the lake is for someone to willingly give his life for the princess. What will happen? This is the tale MacDonald spins, playing with the symbolic suggestiveness of light(ness), gravitation, and water.

If the princess is the quintessential picture of empty loveliness, her aunt is the picture of hatred. At one point she casts a spell that involves a long walk during which she mutters, coiled lovingly by a huge snake, locking a seemingly endless string of doors. I enjoyed the strength of these characterizations.

I also developed an appreciation for Sendak’s illustrations. I’m as much of a Where the Wild Things Are fan as anyone else, but I wasn’t sure about these drawings till I got a ways into the story. They have an eeriness that seems, I decided, well suited to this fantasy tale, reminding me of Chris Van Allsburg’s Mysteries of Harris Burdick illustrations. (You can see them here.) Sometimes a careful scrutiny of them brings unexpected rewards… In one, a table beside the king holds a copy of Phantastes. This was a well-told story that will probably stay in mind for awhile.

I must have been about 11 when I read Cheaper by the Dozen. I really don’t remember much about it, though I retain a haze of good feeling. The one thing I remember clearly is that the father of that large family put a record player in the bathroom and insisted that his children listen to foreign language records whenever they were in there. Eventually they all became fluent in a second language.

The book must have influenced me more than I realized, because in my first year as a homeschooler, I find myself using audiobooks quite a bit as a way of making books a main course in our lives. We check them out of the library, give them for birthdays, listen while they’re busy with other activities during free time instead of watching television. My daughters, ages 7 and 4, have responded positively, and though I usually have no problem seeing the downside of things, I really can think of no criticism of the use of audiobooks. Used not as a substitute, but as a supplement, to parental read-alouds, they can be an incredible resource for a homeschooler.

This site contains a rundown of a number of the potential benefits, including increased listening skills, vocabulary, pronunciation, and use of the imagination. My oldest just turned 7, and I’m pleased with her reading skills. But she could never sit down and read through the Narnia books on her own, and for me to read them would take much longer. I’m reading various Marguerite Henry stories to her now (she’s horse crazy), and it takes maybe a week, sometimes two, to get through one of them, reading a little each day. But King of the Wind was available on cassette at the library, and we listened to the whole story in an afternoon. Then of course, she listened several more times before we took it back to the library. Audiobooks allow much more time for literature than my parental availability can, providing some great material for an eager, absorbent mind.

Children will listen to works that are beyond their level when they’re read orally, challenging them in vocabulary and conceptualization. The Little House books have been enriching for my daughter, and we’ve listened through On the Banks of Plum Creek. There’s a great deal of practical knowledge to be gained from the young heroine of these novels, and I’ve often been surprised by the level of insight accessible to a 7-year-old. Similarly, we’re using Susan Wise Bauer’s Story of the World series for ancient history, and because my daughter loves history so much I bought her the audiobook. She’s free to listen as often as she wants to the chapters we’ve already studied together. It amazes me to hear the commentary she offers on life, seen through a historical lens. Yesterday as she listened to the story of Shamshi Adad, she commented that he wasn’t a good ruler because of his brutal tactics. “He should rule through being truthful and fair, like Jesus and Asoka,” she volunteered while building a lego stable. And today at the lunch table, when I overheard her little sister whisper, “I’m on your team!” when she was about to be disciplined, I said, “So, you’re banding together, huh?” My 7-year-old laughed and said, “Just like the Greeks. They fought with each other except when they had to fight Persia.” (I’m Persia in this scenario. Oh goody.)

Sheer repetition is another virtue of audiobooks. Maybe this point is made already. We all know that children love to hear the same stories over and over, and I comply when I’m reading to them. I see the value of this. But I certainly don’t mind when someone else is available to take the rereading reins, particularly if it’s something I don’t really enjoy. (Curious George and Mother Goose, for instance.)

Last but not least, the quality of materials is often superb. Cherry Jones, who reads the Little House stories, has a wonderfully warm and expressive voice, and the fiddle music punctuating her reading is something I couldn’t supply. Similarly, the Dr. Seuss audiobook we own is read by a cast of actors who bring all their dramatic skills to the table in the service of young readers, and the results are enjoyable for “children” of all ages. The Frog and Toad stories are read by Arnold Lobel himself, and his friendly voice makes the concept of the author much more than a name on the cover. Ditto for E.B. White’s readings. Last but not least, the Narnia stories read with a British accent have spoiled me forever.

So this is a rave, nothing less. The only potential downside I see is that audiobooks might foster in children an impatience with the slower and more skill-dependent process of reading for themselves. So far, I don’t see that happening. Nor do I see them losing their desire to hear me read to them, even though I’m not nearly as dramatic a reader as some of the cd’s I’ve cited. I have a vague anxiety at times that I’m “programming” them, but the medium doesn’t really permit that. For encouraging a love of language in all its rhythms and possibilities, for challenging their imaginations and their vocabularies, for insisting on active thinking rather than passive absorption, audiobooks are difficult to unseat. Am I missing something? If so, I hope one of my readers will clue me in.

It’s Dr. Seuss’s birthday today. I chose him for the Celebrate the Author Challenge because his stories are woven into the texture of our family life in a big way: my daughters choose his books from the library; they listen to Seuss audiobooks; they invent Seussian improvisations as part of their play. What’s so appealing about Dr. Seuss? Here are the five things that come first to mind:

1. The smallest actions can produce the biggest results. Small is beautiful; small matters. In short, you matter. The smallest Who of all turns the tide in Horton Hears a Who, adding his tiny bit to the cacophony of a Whoville desperate to escape being boiled in hot beezlenut oil. The bright moment of hope at the end of The Lorax comes when the Onceler tosses out a truffula seed and tells his young audience, “You might be the one to restore Paradise.” Mack the insignificant turtle upsets the despotic Yertle’s empire. Young Cindy Lou Who (who is no more than two) puts a human face on the Grinch’s enemies, and begins his awakening. It’s the actions performed by the least of us that redistribute the forces of the universe. So stay in the game, and do your small part.
2. Genuineness matters. It’s the whole theme of How the Grinch Stole Christmas. The Grinch has no argument with Christmas, but with the loss of Christmas when it degenerates into crass materialism and greed. His salvation comes when he realizes the Whos in Whoville are the real thing. In Bartholomew and the Oobleck, the horrible green stuff dissipates only when the king delivers a genuine apology. Horton’s true blue faithfulness produces a whole new species in Horton Hatches the Egg. And my favorite treatment of the subject of genuineness, a new discovery for me, is Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are? It’s a satire on the logic of, “Eat your vegetables because there are people starving somewhere in the world.” In this story that reasoning is expounded to the enth degree of absurdity, until it becomes, “You ought to be thankful a whole heaping lot for the people and places you’re lucky you’re NOT!” It ends up looking more like a mixture of self-righteousness and cruelty than true compassion.  
3. Dreams matter. So many child dreamers emerge from the pages: the narrator of McElligott’s Pool; young Morris McGurk, with his grand vision for the vacant lot behind Sneelock’s store in If I Ran the Circus; Gerald McGrew, the amazing, entrepreneurial boy who imagines life as a zookeeper in If I Ran the Zoo. Keep that imagination oiled and purring, because it’s a valuable asset to rich living for children of all ages.
4. There’s good in this world, but Seuss stories contain their share of evil as well. Yertle the Turtle is a megalomaniac, as is the Onceler driven by greed and a conquesting attitude in The Lorax. Horton’s mistreatment at the hands of the Wickersham brothers, the nasty kangaroo, and the bird who drops the Whos into oblivion shows some unequivocal badness at work. Maisie, the mother who abandons her egg, confirms that even a mother can be terribly selfish. In a strange way, the Grinch, who looks so ugly and mean-spirited, is really a subversive hero because he fights greed and a mercantile spirit. So don’t be afraid to look past appearances and discern what’s in people’s hearts. There’s good and evil, and it’s going to be a battle.
5. 5. Last but not least: the sheer joy of language. Words! More words! New words! Meanings turned inside out, endings appended and altered, fantasy language that ends up suggesting fantasy creatures and meanings. What on earth is a thromdimbulator? What’s a hippo-no-hungus or a dippo-no-dungus? It’s fun to hear, fun to read, fun to learn to read with these tales. My daughters listen to this audiobook, in which the likes of Kelsey Grammar, John Cleese, Dustin Hoffman, Walter Matthau, Billy Crystal, and John Lithgow read classic Seuss stories with their impeccable timing and inflection. It’s great fun, and highly recommended. I’ve come to appreciate the linguistic adventure of reading Dr. Seuss even more, and so have my (already quite verbal) children.  

There’s plenty more that could be said, but these are the first five things that came to mind to celebrate about Dr. Seuss. It’s not as spectacular as what the Birthday Bird could serve up in Happy Birthday to You! But if genuineness matters, then perhaps my gratitude for the gift of his books counts as much as JoJo Who’s tiny voice.

We came across The Light of the World at the library. Written by Katherine Paterson (Bridge to Terabithia), this book is unique among those I’ve seen that tell the New Testament story to children. I recommend it, and wonder if there are other books out there that belong in the same category.

As a parent, I’ve struggled to find a children’s version of the Bible that neither cartoonizes the grandeur of the story, nor attempts language and concepts children are too young to understand. (Mine are 6 and 4.) This book is not a Bible, but an attempt to gather some of the important strands of Jesus’s life and ministry around the motif of light from Genesis to Redemption. It’s the first book I’ve come upon that’s organized poetically like this. I find it effective and beautiful.

I’ve noticed in reading the Bible to my children that the New Testament isn’t as interesting to them. There’s so much drama in the Old Testament stories, so much action, that they want to hear those stories over and over. But the New Testament, which is the climax of the story, contains a very different concept of heroism than giant-killing. People don’t march across parted seas, or get cast into fiery furnaces, or survive in the belly of a giant fish.

This story engaged them. Instead of proceeding through a list of individual incidents and miracles, it connects a few biblical examples of God sending light into a dark world, with Jesus as the culmination. I love the book’s respect for children, who readily pick up on the symbolic aspects of light, and can grasp abstractions that are not weighed down by excessive information or dogma. ”When Jesus died,” the book explains simply, “darkness covered the earth. The light of the world had gone out.” My daughter turned to me and said, her eyes animated, “It was like a cord snapped.” She closed her eyes and laid her head back, thinking about it. The emphasis isn’t on the brutality of the physical death, but on its significance, and it provides an imaginative category for thinking about it. Light is used in several senses in the story, the most compelling one being Jesus as the light that cannot be overcome.

The pictures by French illustrator Francois Roca have a certain charm of light and color, but they’re stylized vignettes, a bit iconographic for my taste. The angel at the door of the empty tomb, for instance, doesn’t look happy. That’s my least favorite feature! But it’s still a beautiful book with full page illustrations, and text on the facing pages bordered with delicate artwork.

I didn’t know Katherine Paterson was a missionary in Japan for several years before beginning her work as a writer. ”The challenge for those of us who care about our faith and about a hurting world,” she writes, “is to tell stories which will carry the words of grace and hope in their bones and sinews and not wear them like fancy dress.” This book is an artistic effort that rises to the challenge. And when we’re a bit further down the road, this one, which I just discovered at her website, looks promising, too. 

It’s Russell Hoban’s birthday this month, and this post is a birthday tribute. His writing is much more extensive than I realized till I stumbled upon this site. I know him as the author of the Frances stories, which were a staple of my own childhood and now of my children’s as well. In fact, they listen to this audiobook of several of the stories, read by Glynis Johns. (I like my way of singing Frances’s songs better, though! :-)) This collection includes Bread and Jam for Frances, Bedtime for Frances, A Birthday for Frances, and A Baby Sister for Frances, all good ones. They deal with some typical family situations and conflicts in the context of a very loving and civilized family of badgers.

When I was little, though, my favorite, far and away, was A Bargain for Frances.  I had a slightly mean friend much like Frances’s friend Gloria, and I liked the way Frances gets revenge when Gloria cheats her out of a tea set she’s been saving up for. As an adult I still like the story, but now it’s because it opens up opportunities to talk with my daughters, ages 6 and 4, about saving up your money, what to do when people are mean to you, and whether Frances’s response is fair or not. (Okay, true confession: I still always chuckle when Frances calls Gloria and tricks her into thinking she’s left a small fortune in the sugar bowl!) Frances and Gloria end up deciding that “being friends is better than being careful” - a fact I as an adult often need to be reminded of. In the long run, it is better not to take refuge from people in hyper-carefulness. Thanks, badger child, for keeping me straight on that point.

Another I liked was Harvey’s Hideout. Harvey and his sister Mildred are muskrats who have very cool secret burrows and fake each other out about how many friends they have coming to cookouts and parties there. It turns out that the burrows are back to back, a fact Harvey discovers by eavesdropping through the wall, and in the end they work out their sibling squabbles and mutual deceptions and are able to enjoy each other’s company. I loved it as a kid. The dugouts were neat, and they got to actually COOK even though they were kids. As an adult, I wonder what the Hobans were thinking; the name-calling between brother and sister is hard to read aloud, and sometimes the parental interventions are real head scratchers. For instance, when Harvey calls Mildred, “loud-mouthed, bossy, mean and rotten,” their father insists that she’s loud-mouthed and bossy, but not mean and rotten. ??? Can’t really imagine mediating a sibling spat that way with my kids. So they’re missing out on this one.

It’s interesting to remember that it never phased me as a kid, though. I accepted Harvey and Mildred Muskrat, meanness included, because I knew kids could be that way. The strength of all these stories is their gentle treatment of some of the real difficulties of being young: mean friends, sharing things, sharing parents, getting along with siblings, allowances, bedtimes, finicky tastes and other matters. There was enough reality to Frances to keep me coming back for more. As an adult, there’s enough reality to her parents - and enough wisdom - to bring me back again.

The Celebrate the Author Challenge for February is here.