How to use this Page

Jake at Gymnastics
by Rachel Isadora; illus. by the author
Preschool    Paulsen/Penguin    32 pp.
6/14    978-0-399-16048-6    $14.99    g

As she did with Bea at Ballet (rev. 7/12), Isadora shows a group of roly-poly toddlers enjoying a beginning class, this time in gymnastics, with an Asian American boy as the focus. Teachers Dave and Toshi lead five girls and four boys through activities such as stretching, tumbling, walking on a low balance beam, and hanging on a parallel bar for as long as they can. The text is minimal (“We all take turns doing somersaults”), but the real joy comes through Isadora’s sprightly illustrations that combine pencil and ink line drawings with swathes of oil paint to delineate clothing and some of the equipment. Few other picture book artists have as good an understanding of the toddler’s center of gravity as Isadora, and when she uses her expertise to show them hopping, tumbling, balancing, and pretending to fly like birds, you can’t help but enjoy the show. Best of all is the page of young gymnasts on the bouncing balls. Each one appears to be enjoying his or her own moment of zen — a bit of private happiness in the midst of a busy class.

From the May/June 2014 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

The post Review of Jake at Gymnastics appeared first on The Horn Book.

Fiendish
by Brenna Yovanoff
High School    Razorbill/Penguin    341 pp.
6/14    978-1-59514-638-0    $17.99    g

Yovanoff (The Space Between, rev. 1/12; Paper Valentine, rev. 3/13) here weaves a haunting tale of old magic in a changing world. When Clementine was a child, a torch-bearing mob burned out her family; Clementine escaped by virtue of a magical coma that left her hidden, semi-conscious, in her cellar for years. When she’s found and awakened, the eerie happenings (grotesquely mutated animals, animated plants, uncanny weather) that led to the mob attack in the first place begin to resurge. As Clementine reacquaints herself with the townsfolk and her remaining “crafty” relatives, she tries to sift through the mysteries of her childhood to figure out what is causing the wild magic. Meanwhile, Clementine’s romantic attachment to Fisher, the boy who woke her, shines a spotlight on the divide between the crafty and non-crafty elements of the town, in whose gray spaces Fisher uneasily exists. Yovanoff’s world-building is sophisticated and precise, incorporating both the physical presence of the town and its dangers and the conceptual underpinnings of the supernatural in Clementine’s universe. Powerful, evocative prose brings to life a world close to overflowing with wild magic, seething prejudice, and base fear. For readers who like their fantasies unsettling and morally tangled; hand this to fans of Laini Taylor and Frances Hardinge.

From the May/June 2014 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

The post Review of Fiendish appeared first on The Horn Book.

On this day in 1865 — more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued — abolition was finally announced in Texas, the last stronghold of slavery. In the May/June 2014 Horn Book Magazine, reviewer Robin Smith asked author Angela Johnson about the closing words and image of All Different Now: Juneteenth, the First Day of Freedom. Read the starred review here.

Robin L. Smith: The last spread shows the family packing up and leaving, an image I loved. The text simply says, “all different now.” Who made the decision that this family would leave when the text gives no hint of it?

Angela Johnson: The heart of All Different Now is truly the essence of change. Change might seem to come slowly but at the same time appear to come out of nowhere, swiftly. With that said, though, I played no part in the decision to show the family packing to leave at the end of the book. But I have always believed the measure of a good working text is that the artist can go beyond and interpret the emotions of a manuscript. E. B. [Lewis] has done this wonderfully.

From the May/June 2014 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

The post Angela Johnson on All Different Now appeared first on The Horn Book.

A Pond Full of Ink
by Annie M. G. Schmidt; trans. 
from the Dutch by David Colmer; illus. by Sieb Posthuma
Intermediate    Eerdmans    40 pp.
3/14    978-0-8028-5433-9    $16.00    g

A skinny, long-nosed poet fills his pen from the ink pond in his garden and offers the reader a selection of story poems featuring personalities old and young, human and animal, animate and inanimate. There’s a cautionary tale of Belinda who refused to wash. There’s gentle satire as village gossip escalates a small domestic incident into a major disaster. There’s the love story of Aunty Jo and the reindeer who dropped by. In a couple of cases, a poem leaves us with a question (how do you manage a baby stroller when you live in a tree?) that is answered on the wordless double-page spread (in pen-and-ink and collage) that follows it. The wordplay is energetic; healthy handfuls of enjambment mitigate against dreary dum-di-dum, and the micronarratives celebrate lateral thinking, community, and kindness. “Three elderly otters longed to go boating / out on the river, / out on the moat. / For years, they had wished they could be out there floating, / but, being otters, they couldn’t help noting / signs on the seats of every last boat. / Written by renters, the miserable rotters, / they said… / FORBIDDEN FOR OTTERS.” It ends happily.

From the May/June 2014 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

The post Review of A Pond Full of Ink appeared first on The Horn Book.

Gaston
by Kelly DiPucchio; 
illus. by Christian Robinson
Preschool, Primary    Atheneum    40 pp.
6/14    978-1-4424-5102-5    $16.99    g
e-book ed.  978-1-4424-5103-2    $12.99

Bumptious Gaston looms over his elegant poodle sisters Fi-Fi, Foo-Foo, and Ooh-La-La; they’re “no bigger than teacups,” but he’s “the size of a teapot.” Like a good twenty-first-century parent, Mrs. Poodle praises her well-mannered daughters (“Good.” Well done.” “Very nice”), while Gaston gets an encouraging “Nice try” for his sloppy slurping. Out in the park, they meet a family like theirs but in reverse: bulldogs Rocky, Ricky, and Bruno and their petite sister Antoinette. Were Gaston and Antoinette switched at birth? Should they trade families? It seems like the right thing to do until they try it, only to discover that what looks right doesn’t always feel right. So they trade back, to general contentment. DiPucchio’s lively, occasionally direct-address text was made to be read aloud (“And they were taught to walk with grace. Never race! Tip. Toe. Tippy-toe. WHOA!”). In Robinson’s elegant illustrations, the dogs’ basic white forms — on saturated acrylic painted backgrounds of cheery sky blues and grass greens — have minimal yet wonderfully expressive facial details; with the simplest of settings, all eyes will be on the action. Excellent messages about family, differences, and friendship are implicit. But first, just share and enjoy.

From the May/June 2014 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

The post Review of Gaston appeared first on The Horn Book.

The Pilot and the Little Prince:
The Life of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
by Peter Sís; illus. by the author
Primary, Intermediate    Foster/Farrar    48 pp.
5/14    978-0-374-38069-4    $18.99    g

On glorious blue endpapers, an airplane loops across a map of the world, its contrail made of words that seem to dissolve on the page. The pointillist style of the map’s outline suggests both stargazing and looking through a microscope. So Sís foreshadows the scope of this picture book biography, simultaneously grand and intimate, and its tone: subtle, playful, and mysterious. The narrative includes a history of airplanes and pilots, the beginnings of air mail, two world wars, scenes on four continents, and an extraordinary number of plane crashes, all augmenting the central story of Antoine, the golden-haired boy who never stopped exploring and adventuring, in the air and on the page. The main text, a fairly clear line through Saint-Exupéry’s life, is supplemented with myriad facts about his world, arranged in delicate circles around the edges of Sís’s signature illustrated medallions. Here you can find information on Saint-Exupéry’s family tree or the perfume inspired by his book Night Flight or pithy anecdotes about his writing life. Visually stunning, this impressive accumulation of words, pictures, and design takes you to The Little Prince (rev. 5/43), or back to it, with fresh understanding and admiration.

The post Review of The Pilot and the Little Prince appeared first on The Horn Book.

Rules of Summer
by Shaun Tan; illus. by the author
Primary     Levine/Scholastic     56 pp.
5/14     978-0-545-63912-5     $18.99     g

“This is what I learned last summer: Never leave a red sock on the clothesline. Never eat the last olive at a party. Never drop your jar.” The narrator enumerates a dozen other rules, which are printed on left-hand pages that are marked by stains and wrinkles, smudged fingerprints, and streaks of colored-pencil scribbles. The right-hand pages depict, in thickly textured paintings, a young boy (presumably the narrator) and an older boy (perhaps his brother) in a variety of enigmatically surreal situations. The frenemy quality that characterizes many sibling relationships gradually reveals itself here, as the rules seem to be dictated by the older boy, and the younger one never seems to do anything right. They fight, and the younger boy finds himself confined to a prison-like train moving through a dreary subterranean gray landscape for several wordless spreads before the older boy rescues him, restoring peace and harmony. Rules of Summer delivers what Tan’s fans have come to expect: superb artwork that elicits both a cerebral and emotional response and that, when coupled with the text, invites readers to plumb the mysterious depths of the human experience.

The post Review of Rules of Summer appeared first on The Horn Book.

Mysterious Patterns:
Finding Fractals in Nature
by Sarah C. Campbell; photos 
by Sarah C. Campbell and 
Richard P. Campbell
Primary    Boyds Mills    32 pp.
4/14    978-1-62091-627-8    $16.95

Bring up the math term fractals in a roomful of adults, and it’s likely quite a few eyes will glaze over. Yet wife-and-husband team Sarah and Richard Campbell (Growing Patterns: Fibonacci Numbers in Nature, rev. 5/10) succeeds in making fractals accessible and engaging to — get this — the elementary-school crowd. Sarah Campbell’s writing is clear, fluid, and concise, effortlessly so. She starts off with familiar examples of man-made shapes, such as spheres, cones, and cylinders, as well as items in nature that approximate these perfect shapes (spherical tomatoes, conical icicles, cylindrical cucumbers). She then moves on to nature’s “rough, bristly, and bumpy” shapes — complex shapes ignored by scientists until Benoit Mandelbrot arrived on the scene, coining the word fractals in 1975. Mandelbrot noticed that the shapes of trees, broccoli, and ferns all share a common pattern: each has “smaller parts that look like the whole shape.” Take broccoli, for example: as parts of a head of broccoli are lopped off, the smaller pieces look like the original whole head. Glossy, well-designed pages feature crisp, up-close photographs, which pair perfectly with the text — making this the go-to choice for introducing fractals to children (and grownups). Included are a brief glossary, a “Make Your Own Fractal” activity, and an afterword by a Mandelbrot colleague.

From the May/June 2014 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

The post Review of Mysterious Patterns appeared first on The Horn Book.

Dust of Eden
by Mariko Nagai
Intermediate, Middle School    Whitman    122 pp.
3/14    978-0-8075-1739-0    $16.99

In this verse novel, we first meet Mina Tagawa and her Seattle-based family just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Shortly after, her father is imprisoned, and the rest of the family — Mina, her mother, grandfather, and older brother Nick — are sent to the Minidoka Relocation Center in Idaho, where they live in poor conditions for three years. Over the course of that time, Mina’s beloved grandfather dies, and Nick enlists and is sent to the European front. Interspersed throughout the main text are letters Mina writes to her father, to her best friend from home, and to Nick; Mina’s school assignments; and, most poignantly, honest letters about the war that Nick writes from Europe but can never send. The sheer volume of issues raised in the slim novel (racism, tensions between immigrant generations, the nature of American identity and patriotism, the liberation of Dachau, the Hiroshima bombing) can overwhelm the personal story, leaving readers somewhat disconnected from Mina. However, Nagai’s writing is spare and rhythmic — it’s real poetry.

From the May/June 2014 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

The post Review of Dust of Eden appeared first on The Horn Book.

The Tree House that Jack Built
by Bonnie Verburg; 
illus. by Mark Teague
Primary    Orchard/Scholastic    32 pp.
5/14    978-0-439-85338-5    $17.99    g

This version of the old cumulative rhyme “The House that Jack Built” grabs kids right from the start: the cover shows a small boy waving from one of many balconies in a multilevel structure built in a colossal tree. The book begins with “the fly / that buzzes by / the tree house / that Jack built”; on the next page, a sleepy lizard “snaps at the fly / that buzzes by.” Children will be on the lookout for the next animal, as they each appear in the previous picture, and they will also want a chance to pore over the acrylic paintings that fill every page. Jack has indeed created “marvelous things” in his tree house, from a rabbit-powered fan for the hammock, where a monkey lounges, to an ingenious Rube Goldberg device with pulleys and a waterwheel. The animals stop chasing and pecking and swatting at one another when Jack rings the bell signaling the beginning of storytime, at which he reads them…The Tree House that Jack Built. Both text and pictures expand out beyond the tree to the whales in the sea before Jack and his cat settle down to sleep in a peaceful ending. A great storytime book with its bouncy rhymes and big pages, it is also a good book to share one-on-one, rewarding repeated porings-over of the pictures.

From the May/June 2014 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

The post Review of The Tree House that Jack Built appeared first on The Horn Book.

Treasury of Egyptian 
Mythology:
Classic Stories of Gods, 
Goddesses, Monsters & Mortals
by Donna Jo Napoli; 
illus. by Christina Balit
Intermediate, Middle School    National Geographic    192 pp.    10/13    978-1-4263-1380-6    $24.95
Library ed.  978-1-4263-1381-3    $33.90

As she did for her Treasury of Greek Mythology (rev. 1/12), Napoli brings a storyteller’s art and a scholar’s diligence to the myriad “slippery, entangled” deities of ancient Egypt, a pantheon generated over millennia, its gods multiplying or merging in response to an evolving civilization. Skillfully structuring her narrative from early creation stories to the Third Dynasty scholar Imhotep (deified two thousand years after his death), she weaves a well-chosen sample of myths into a disarmingly informal narrative spiced with plausible dynamics (“Set wasn’t in his right mind. The maiden was luscious; he was hot-blooded. Blind to the trap”). A scrupulous care for words, for language, and for the ideas they reflect all shine here. Illustrator Balit gathers ancient Egyptian forms and motifs into dynamic compositions, animating postures and perspectives for double-page-spread portraits and action-filled vignettes and enriching her illustrations with the colors of river and desert, pots and stones — carnelian, turquoise, topaz, lapis lazuli. Excellent front and back matter includes annotated lists of gods, bibliographies of sources and recommended reading, an index, sources for photos of artifacts, and — best of all — Napoli’s cogent rationale for her narrative choices, including using Egyptian names (Aset, Usir) rather than the more familiar Greek (Isis, Osiris). Beautiful and indispensable.

The post Review of Treasury of Egyptian 
Mythology appeared first on The Horn Book.

In his article “I Spy: Harriet and I,” Jack Gantos discusses “the thrill of being sneaky” (“I just liked knowing I had discovered something that was supposed to be a secret”). It’s a universal fascination — one that Harriet the Spy tapped into — which is why the ever-popular spy-novel genre continues to entice readers. This selection of recent Horn Book Guide–recommended novels for middle graders and teens — with contemporary, historical, and sci-fi settings — speaks to the allure of stories about espionage, intrigue, and general sneaking-around.

—Katrina Hedeen
Assistant Editor, The Horn Book Guide

Bradley, F. T.  Double Vision: Code Name 711
246 pp. HarperCollins/Harper 2013 ISBN 978-0-06-210440-3

Gr. 4–6  In this sequel to Double Vision, super-secret agency Pandora unexpectedly approaches former operative Lincoln Baker, claiming to need his help. Linc must face his hated double, Pandora junior agent Ben Green; find a legendary historical artifact; and save the president and protect the first daughter. Bradley combines history, familiar Washington DC landmarks, dangerous obstacles, and a witty voice in this brisk, satisfying novel.

Carter, Ally  United We Spy
296 pp. Hyperion 2013 ISBN 978-1-4231-6599-6

YA  Gallagher Girls series. Cammie and her fellow spies are ready for a final showdown with the nefarious Circle of Cavan. When they uncover the Circle’s plan to start World War III, they take matters into their own hands, trying to stop the wheels already set in motion. Assassinations, manhunts, and prison breaks keep the pace moving quickly in this exciting Gallagher Girls finale.

Cross, Julie  Vortex
360 pp. St. Martin’s Griffin/Dunne 2013 ISBN 978-0-312-56890-0

YA  Jackson Meyer is a teen agent for Tempest, the CIA’s time-travel division. Eyewall, another shadowy CIA group, begins attacking the agents of Tempest, and Jackson finds his life once again entwined with Holly’s, the girl for whom he changed history in Tempest. Cross allows readers to closely connect with her characters in this fast-paced sequel.

McGowan, Jennifer  Maid of Secrets
406 pp. Simon 2013 ISBN 978-1-4424-4138-5

YA  Meg’s life is transformed after her skills as a pickpocket catch the eye of Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster. Trained with four others to operate as a secret cadre of spies hidden among the queen’s “Maids of Honor,” Meg begins to question her own identity. Smartly researched (though populated by anachronistically modern-acting young women), McGowan’s novel is full of inviting court intrigue, both political and romantic.

Norris, Elizabeth  Unbreakable
481 pp. HarperCollins/Balzer + Bray 2013 ISBN 978-0-06-210376-5

YA  Several months after the Wave Function Collapse destroyed her Earth, Janelle must team up with her former enemy, FBI agent Taylor Barclay, to stop a group of inter-dimensional slave traders and save Janelle’s missing boyfriend, who, suspected of leading the ring, has been sentenced to death. This gripping sequel will satisfy fans of Unraveling and any reader who enjoys futuristic espionage tales.

Smith, Roland and Michael P. Spradlin  The Alamo
256 pp. Sleeping Bear 2013 ISBN 978-1-58536-822-8 PE ISBN 978-1-58536-821-1

Gr. 4–6  I, Q series. Q and Angela are united not only as step-siblings but also as covert agents working for the president of the United States. Here intrigue follows them to San Antonio, Texas, where they once again encounter a dangerous terrorist cell. A list of characters and a preface bring readers up to speed for this suspenseful and thrilling fourth book in the series.

Vance, Talia  Spies and Prejudice
298 pp. Egmont 2013 ISBN 978-1-60684-260-7

YA  Berry Fields is too busy working for her father as a private investigator to think about love. Then, as she’s looking into clues surrounding her mother’s death, she meets gorgeous Tanner Halston, who seems to have an interest in her investigations. Should she trust him? This modern Pride and Prejudice take-off works well as a Veronica Mars–esque teen detective story.

Zettel, Sarah  Palace of Spies
362 pp. Harcourt 2013 ISBN 978-0-544-07411-8

YA  Palace of Spies series. In eighteenth-century London, destitute orphan Peggy Fitzroy agrees to impersonate the recently deceased spy Lady Francesca as maid of honor to Princess Caroline. With a war of succession, jilted love, and religious turmoil in the mix, Peggy must navigate intrigue and shady liaisons to uncover the truth behind her predecessor’s death. The feisty narrator and lush period details will garner fans for this new series.

From the May/June 2014 issue of The Horn Book Magazine. These reviews are from The Horn Book Guide and The Horn Book Guide Online. For information about subscribing to the Guide and the Guide Online, please click here.

The post From The Guide: Spy Novels appeared first on The Horn Book.

Sugar Hill:
Harlem’s Historic Neighborhood
by Carole Boston Weatherford; 
illus. by R. Gregory Christie
Primary    Whitman    32 pp.
2/14    978-0-8075-7650-2    $16.99

“Sugar Hill, Sugar Hill where life is sweet” repeats throughout this rhymed tribute to Harlem’s storied neighborhood, the home of many well-to-do African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century. Although we are told about the “doctors and lawyers [who] live next door / to the owners of a corner store,” most of the book focuses on some of Sugar Hill’s most famous residents, particularly those who lived there during the Harlem Renaissance, such as Paul Robeson, Aaron Douglas, Lena Horne, Thurgood Marshall, and W. E. B. Du Bois. We also see Faith Ringgold as a child, with a visual reference to Tar Beach that many children will recognize. Some of Christie’s pastel-hued illustrations show us street views of the neighborhood and, through windows, offer glimpses into people’s lives (e.g., one picture shows Count Basie and Duke Ellington making music together while across the street we see Zora Neale Hurston working at her typewriter). The paintings and Weatherford’s poetry give a strong sense of vibrant simultaneous action, and neither slides into nostalgia. An author’s note provides some additional background on Sugar Hill, as well as a few lines about each of the famous people mentioned in the book.

The post Review of Sugar Hill appeared first on The Horn Book.

West of the Moon
by Margi Preus
Intermediate, Middle School    Amulet/Abrams    216 pp.
4/14    978-1-4197-0896-1    $16.95

Preus, whose Shadow on the Mountain (rev. 11/12) was set in Nazi-occupied Norway, here takes readers to mid-nineteenth-century Norway in a tale strongly infused with myth. Fourteen-year-old Astri is determined to go to America to find her widowed father. But first she must escape the brutish goat herder to whom her greedy aunt and uncle have sold her, free the other young captive he’s been hiding, and rescue her little sister Greta from their aunt and uncle. Astri tells her story in three parts: her time slaving away for smelly Svaalberd the goatman, her discovery of the mysterious girl hidden in the storehouse, and her daring retrieval of Greta; the girls’ frantic flight through the countryside; and, finally, the ocean voyage to America, which ends on a heartbreaking yet hopeful note. Several Norwegian folktales are seamlessly integrated into the fast-paced, lyrically narrated story, which features a protagonist as stalwart and fearless as any fairy-tale hero. A glossary and select bibliography are appended along with an author’s note listing the folktales referenced and quoting the 1851 diary entry (by Preus’s great-great-grandmother) that inspired the novel.

The post Review of West of the Moon appeared first on The Horn Book.

Often, when I mention that I have five children, people ask, “How do you do it all?” I sometimes quote a response I’ve heard from Donna Jo Napoli, fellow writer, professor, and mother of five:

“How do I do it all? Badly. You could eat off my kitchen floor…for weeks.”

How I do it all is that I don’t do it all at once. As I sit down to write, my kitchen is a mess, and my kids are at their other house with their other mom (my ex-wife). I miss my children, but I’m also grateful to be able to work like hell on the days they’re gone and really focus on them when they’re here. Or at least that’s what I try to do.

Shared reading enables us to slow down and enjoy one another’s company in the midst of our busy, transition-laden routines. I’m currently reading Kate DiCamillo’s 2014 Newbery Medal winner Flora & Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures with my four youngest children. I read the ARC by myself and knew my kids would be pulled in by the exact elements that made me initially skeptical. A superhero squirrel? Quasi-comic-book art? Not my cup of tea. But I also felt myself yearning to deliver the message of unconditional love that’s at the heart of the book: “Nothing / would be / easier without / you.”

Sometimes I worry my kids might think I feel differently. There are days when I am snappish or grouchy or just plain overwhelmed by balancing work and motherhood. DiCamillo’s novel has me thinking about depictions in children’s literature of less-than-ideal parents and what they communicate about family life to child and adult readers alike. I don’t mean Roald Dahl-ian parents like poor Matilda Wormwood’s dreadful mother and father, but more like Flora’s divorced parents or her friend William Spiver’s mother and “her new husband.” These secondary, or even offstage, adult characters are believable in all their flawed humanity. Their failings help define Flora’s story as she grapples with the shortcomings of the adults in her life, but DiCamillo paints her characters with such subtlety that the lesson doesn’t overwhelm the text.

On the flip side, many books have the mommy or daddy endlessly reassuring their little Stinky Faces and Nutbrown Hares about their love-you-forever love. Such constructions of adulthood don’t reflect the times we parents fail, as Flora’s mother does. They instead present us with visions of what we might be on our best days.

It’s the rare person who rises to the level of idealized parenting achieved, for example, by the father in Mo Willems’s picture book Knuffle Bunny Too. When daughter Trixie realizes, in the middle of the night, that she mistakenly took home the wrong Knuffle, Daddy agrees to an on-the-spot stuffed-bunny exchange. Would I do such a thing? Not a chance. Faced with such a scenario, I’d tell my kid that we’d sort things out in the morning. If I were feeling very generous, I’d tuck her back in with another stuffed animal. And I wouldn’t go back and forth in some reverie about “and if the moon could talk” or whatever. Good. Night.

And yet, even if I can’t pretend to aspire to Trixie’s daddy’s selflessness, I absolutely see a reflection of myself in how plain exhausted he looks when Trixie rouses him from a deep sleep. Indeed, some of the most rounded portraits of parents in picture books come in stories about them trying to get their little ones to “go the f*ck to sleep.” Amy Schwartz’s Some Babies, David Ezra Stein’s Interrupting Chicken, and Janet S. Wong’s Grump (illustrated by John Wallace) are just a few that conclude with beleaguered, fatigued parents nodding off while trying (and failing) to put their little ones to bed.

And why are they so tired? Well, because the days leading up to those fraught bedtimes can be…long. I have a soft spot in my heart for Marla Frazee’s not-so-flattering but oh-so-familiar depictions of parents at the mercy of their Boss Baby; a mother driven nuts by her little girl (Harriet, You’ll Drive Me Wild! by Mem Fox); and an exasperated Mrs. Peters who can’t satisfy everyone’s tastes (The Seven Silly Eaters by Mary Ann Hoberman). And high on my list of picture book illustrations that capture not the drama of difficult moments but the tedium of daily routines is a vignette from Amy Schwartz’s slice-of-life picture book A Glorious Day. The droll text reads: “At home Henry and his mother play trains. Henry is the big train and his mother is the small train. All morning long.” I can practically hear Henry’s mother meditating on a refrain from another train book — “I think I can, I think I can” — as she puts in quality floor time with her kid.

And yet, she’s hanging in there. The same cannot be said of Flora’s mother. Until book’s end, she’s so wrapped up in herself and her career as a romance novelist that she is blind to her daughter’s needs. She might find kinship with the mother of another Flora, the star of Jeanne Birdsall and Matt Phelan’s picture book Flora’s Very Windy Day. I’ve read it with my children and have recognized myself in its depiction of a mother driven not wild but to weary despair as, instead of helping her quarreling kids solve their dispute, she shoos them outside while trying to get some work done. Is she writing a romance novel on that laptop? I don’t know. But I do know that she, like the other Flora’s mother, and like me sometimes, is not having a terribly glorious day of attentive mothering.

Phelan’s art deftly and powerfully conveys the emotions underlying the conflict. In the first double-page spread Flora, on the verso, is Eloise-like in her rage, with red emanata surrounding her. Little brother Crispin sits, posture alert, at a safe distance by a messy art table (as we saw on the dedication page, he spilled his sister’s paints — again!), his sidelong gaze directed at Flora. He’s clearly seen her blow her top before. Their mother is far to the right of the composition, turning away from her computer screen with a wan, defeated expression. While Flora is unquestionably the focus—the other characters’ eyes are on her, and her erect, outraged depiction demands attention—I can’t help but home in on this mother. I know her. I’ve been her. I want to give her a hug.

Do my children notice this mom? Not really. And who can blame them? Flora is a force to be reckoned with, and my kids are much more interested in the sibling conflict. When they once did shift their attention to the mother, it was to remark, “It’s not fair!” when she insists Flora take Crispin outside with her. “Give her a break!” I said in a mothers-of-the-world-unite sort of way.

The wind carries Crispin away, and Flora resolves to retrieve him: “My mother wouldn’t like it if I lost him.” My then-nine-year-old daughter Emilia empathetically piped up, “And Flora would miss him, too, even if he spills her paints.” On the penultimate spread, Flora and Crispin return home, and their mother, channeling Max’s mom and his “still hot” dinner, has chocolate chip cookies waiting. The story could end there — the text does — but Phelan delivers a heartwarming visual coda on the final page-turn that shifts attention away from the mother’s act of apology and back, where it belongs, to the sibling dynamic. The couplet of pictures first shows Flora and Crispin sitting apart and eating their cookies, then leaning into each other, not making eye contact or smiling, but with the closeness between their little bodies communicating forgiveness. The scene is familiar to me as both an older sister and as a mother of children who bicker and make up, who love one another through and despite times when they fail or hurt or disappoint one another. “Nothing would be easier without you” these pictures seem to say. “Even if you spill my paints.”

I appreciate how this wordless closing eschews a mama’s mea culpa as resolution to the story. After all, children’s book readers aren’t terribly interested in a mother’s emotional story arc. I recall with chagrin one time when I was sick with the flu — and also sick and tired of kids bickering before bedtime — that instead of letting my children choose our shared reading material, I dramatically pulled William Steig’s Brave Irene off the shelf, self-indulgently recalling how its intrepid child protagonist lavishes her ill mother with affection and support. “Oh Mom-Mom,” Emilia said, after I’d read a few pages. “We have not been so nice as Irene.”

And did that make me feel any better? Of course not. I felt like a jerk. Guilt-tripping one’s children into compliance or sympathy through passive-aggressive bedtime reading selections isn’t a terrific parenting strategy. I can report, however, that my other kids weren’t so moved. “You’re not really that sick,” Stevie said. “Can I choose the next book?” Caroline asked. And on we went.

I know my kids won’t recall their childhoods — even filled as they are with books, and play, and each other, and parents in two houses who adore them — as devoid of parenting failures, lacking in conflict or hurt, and overflowing only with wonder and whimsy. And I know that my own faults contribute to some of the less-than-ideal moments they’ll recall. That’s a hard pill to swallow, and as I (re)read DiCamillo’s book and anticipate Flora’s reconciliation with her mother, I’ve come to think that although this resolution may be a comfort to child readers who see the child protagonist’s wish fulfilled in confirming her mother’s love, it also gently guides them toward acceptance of flawed adults. Forgive us, children, books with such parents say; we know precisely what we do, and we feel like crap about it. DiCamillo’s novel avoids having the final words be delivered in a parental voice begging filial pardon. Instead, the closing poem is a superhero squirrel’s affirmation of his devotion to the girl who saved him.

Adoptive parents like me frequently encounter well-intentioned but misguided comments implying that we saved our kids. “They’re so lucky to have you” is the refrain. The truism that their other mom and I often resort to is that we are the lucky ones. To stretch and invert Ulysses’s line to Flora, nothing would be harder to imagine than life without them. Paraphrasing DiCamillo: “It’s a miracle. Or something.”

And if I lose sight of the miracle of this modern family of mine, there’s nothing like settling in with a book to redirect our attention away from the tumult of our own foibles and failings toward the common ground of others’ stories. Book bonding, you might call it. We put aside quarrels over who had more time on the Xbox, why it’s so hard to just bring the freaking laundry downstairs, and whatever is “not fair!” at any given moment, to read about everything from very windy days, to bunny-exchanging daddies, to mothers driven wild, to superhero squirrels. And, holy bagumba, as Flora might say, I’ll love those times forever — to the moon and back! The kitchen floor can wait.

From the May/June 2014 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

The post Words for Flora’s Mother (and Other Imperfect Parents) appeared first on The Horn Book.

Josephine:
The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker
by Patricia Hruby Powell; 
illus. by Christian Robinson
Intermediate, Middle School    Chronicle    104 pp.
2/14    978-1-4521-0314-3    $17.99

To describe Josephine Baker’s life as “dazzling” is not an exaggeration. In this incomparable biography both Powell and Robinson convey the passion, exuberance, dignity, and eccentricity of their subject through words and pictures that nearly jump off the page. There is a surprise at every turn as we learn how Baker, at fifteen, hid inside a costume trunk to stow away with a dance troupe. We see how she managed to stand out in a chorus line by crossing her eyes and acting goofy to win over audiences. We find her walking down the Champs-Élysées with her pet leopard, Chiquita, who wore a diamond choker. You think her life couldn’t get any more interesting? Wait until you hear about her years as a spy for the French Resistance. Or about the twelve children she adopted from all over the world (her “rainbow tribe”), to prove that people of different races could live together. Matter-of-factly introducing the racism her subject encountered throughout her life, Powell doesn’t shy away from the challenges Baker faced, but she makes clear that Baker never let them overwhelm the joy she got from performing and living life to its fullest. Robinson’s highly stylized illustrations, using bold colors and a flat perspective, are at once sophisticated and inviting to young readers. Even the few pages without pictures are made visually interesting by the broad strokes of acrylic paint in the background and by the clean typeface that judiciously uses uppercase to accentuate important words or lines in the text. Direct quotes from Baker — translated from the French, of course — are interspersed throughout. C’est magnifique!

The post Review of Josephine appeared first on The Horn Book.

In the May/June 2014 Horn Book Magazine, our editors asked author E. Lockhart about writing the shocking ending of We Were Liars. Read the starred review here.

Horn Book editors: Did you write the end of the book first or last?

E. Lockhart: I knew the ending when I wrote the beginning, and I wrote the book out of order. I used the Scrivener software, which allowed me to very easily rearrange chunks of manuscript. Liars has a five-act structure, but the pieces of the story that went into each act moved around. There are a lot of flashbacks, and the placement of those changed. There are also interstitials, for lack of a better word — segments in which I tell the story of my protagonist and her old-money family through famous fairy tales. Author John Green read the book in manuscript and wrote me a fascinating e-mail that caused me to slice up the ending seconds before the ARC went to print. Thanks, John.

From the May/June 2014 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

The post E. Lockhart on We Were Liars appeared first on The Horn Book.

We Were Liars
by E. Lockhart
High School    Delacorte    228 pp.
5/14    978-0-385-74126-2    $17.99
Library ed.  978-0-375-98994-0    $20.99    g
e-book ed.  978-0-375-98440-2    $10.99

Cadence Sinclair Eastman, eldest grandchild in a Kennedy-esque clan, narrates this story about her wealthy family, one that’s rife with secrets and is broken under the hood. Cady begins the book by divulging an unspecified accident that happened during her fifteenth summer on the family’s private island — where the heart of this novel takes place — that left her with debilitating migraines and memory loss. Although her mother demands perpetual stoicism (“Be normal…Right now…Because you are. Because you can be”), Cady takes comfort from her close relationships with her cousins Johnny and Mirren and from her sweet, tentative romance with family friend Gat. As the intriguing, atmospheric story goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that the protagonist, beautiful and emotionally fragile, is also an unreliable narrator, and what follows is a taut psychological mystery marked by an air of uneasy disorientation. And this angst snowballs, even (especially) as pieces of that fifteenth summer begin to fit together. The ultimate reveal is shocking both for its tragedy and for the how-could-I-have-not-suspected-that? feeling it leaves us with. But we didn’t, which is Lockhart’s commendable triumph.

The post Review of We Were Liars appeared first on The Horn Book.

From There to Here
by Laurel Croza; illus. by Matt James
Primary, Intermediate    Groundwood    32 pp.
5/14    978-1-55498-365-0    $18.95
e-book ed.  978-1-55498-366-7    $16.95

In the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award-winning I Know Here (rev. 5/10), the young narrator knows she and her family will soon be leaving their home in the glorious wilderness of Saskatchewan, and in this sequel, so they do. The Toronto of the book’s era (early 1960s) might look positively quaint to us, but to the girl it is completely exotic. “There” she lived on a gravel road without a name; “Here” she lives on the well-paved Birch Street. “There”: the aurora borealis; “Here”: “street lamps in a straight row.” But just when you think the book is a paean to the forest primeval, in comes new neighbor Anne, “eight, almost nine” just like the girl, who back in the bush had no friend her own age. The palette of the Toronto scenes is predominately blue-sky sunny, reflecting the story’s ultimate optimism, although the wild dark colors of the forest continue their hold on the girl’s memories and in James’s paintings, where images of moose and pine trees rest matter-of-factly within the confines of the girl’s new house on Birch Street (birchless, by the way). While the bike helmets on Anne and our girl are more than a touch anachronistic, we know that the ride begun at the close of the book promises both amity and adventure.

The post Review of From There to Here appeared first on The Horn Book.

Table of Contents

Features

Harriet at 50
We mark the golden anniversary of Louise Fitzhugh’s immortal Harriet the Spy.

“Spying on Louise Fitzhugh” by K. T. Horning

“Fifty Years of Novel Exploits” by Betsy Hearne

“I Spy: Harriet and I” by Jack Gantos

“Becoming a Book Detective” by Cathryn M. Mercier

“Writer, Wrestler, Stutterer, Spy” by Megan McDonald

“Harriet and Me” by Ginee Seo

Columns

Editorial
“The Man with the Purple Socks” by Roger Sutton

Borderlands
“An Interview with Elizabeth Wein” by Deirdre F. Baker
The author talks about Rose Under Fire, the nature of bravery, flight as metaphor, and the value of poetry.

Books in the Home
“Words for Flora’s Mother (and Other Imperfect Parents)” by Megan Lambert
Flawed adults and the children’s book characters who love them.

Foreign Correspondence
“There’s Something About Islands” by Marcus Sedgwick
Visiting schools in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides.

From The Guide
Spy Novels
A selection of reviews from The Horn Book Guide.

Cadenza
“Harriet Off the Beaten Path” by Kathleen T. Horning
What would Harriet think of some of her fellow New Yorkers?

Reviews

Book Reviews

Departments

On the Web
May/June Starred Books
Impromptu
Index to Advertisers
Index to Books Reviewed

Cover art used by permission of Delacorte Press. Copyright © 1964 by Louise Fitzhugh, copyright renewed 1992 by Laura Morehead.

Page 1 art from Harriet the Spy. © 1964 by 
Louise Fitzhugh.

The post The Horn Book Magazine — May/June 2014 appeared first on The Horn Book.

She doesn’t look a day over eleven, but this year Harriet the Spy, first published in 1964, is turning 50. To celebrate, The Horn Book Magazine‘s May/June issue features thoughts, musings, riffs, and remembrances about the girl spy. Click on the tag Harriet at 50 to see what Jack Gantos, K. T. Horning, Megan McDonald, and more are saying about Harriet.

The post Harriet at 50 appeared first on The Horn Book.

When I was a boy, I knew I was sneaky, but I didn’t think of myself as a “lowlife sneak” until my mother called me one with such disgust in her voice I actually did feel ashamed.

I was babysitting at the next-door neighbor’s house when my mother looked out her own bedroom window and spotted me, twenty feet away, in Mrs. Hanley’s bedroom. I was sitting on the edge of her bed and reading her Last Will and Testament, which I had found in a bottom dresser drawer. It was not interesting. But the thrill of being sneaky was addictive. I had done a lot of babysitting in the neighborhood. I read Mrs. Hogan’s diary and might have known she was leaving Mr. Hogan before he did. I knew where the smutty magazines were kept—and all their compatible products. I didn’t do anything with what I found — I just liked knowing I had discovered something that was supposed to be a secret.

I was carefully returning Mrs. Hanley’s will back into the dresser drawer when the doorbell rang. I ran to answer the door, and my mother was on the other side. Her first biting sentence was well chosen. “You are nothing but a lowlife sneak!” she hissed.

She had me there. But I was only a sneak of casual opportunity. Besides my babysitting sneakiness, I listened in on other people’s phone conversations, read mail that wasn’t mine, used binoculars to watch people from safe distances, and basically amused myself by ferreting out secrets that were none of my business. But I wasn’t an organized, literary sneak — that is, until I read Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh.

I came to Harriet the Spy a little late in my reading life. Harriet was in sixth grade and I was in seventh when I first read it, and I wouldn’t have discovered the book at all except that my older sister, Betsy, had it. She didn’t care for the book, but she did say, “You’ll like it. You are a sneak, too.” My mother always confided in my sister, which only allowed my sister to loathe me more than what came naturally to her.

So I read the book. It was an odd read. Harriet creeped me out because I was as emotionally awkward as she was, and it repulsed me to see myself defined through the mirror of that text. Still, the book connected me to one particular activity: Harriet kept a notebook and wrote down secret observations she made while out walking on her “spy route.”

I had a journal (the boy name for a diary), and the idea of an organized “spy route” got under my skin. For the first time I began to draw maps of my neighborhood, and maps of my school, and maps of the inside of people’s homes I would visit or babysit for — and maps of my own home, too. I would annotate the maps and then write short bits about certain characters, objects, or events. I was a stamp collector and coin collector, and so discovering secrets about people and putting them into a book was right up my alley.

See, for example, the map of my home [printed in the May/June 2014 Horn Book Magazine].

Look inside the house and you will see “My Room” (with a picture of my journal). Across the hall was my sister’s room. I once read her diary and she caught me and hurt me badly, but for some reason I didn’t draw that moment. We had one bathroom and I was not allowed to lock the door because my mother caught me taking fake, waterless baths. The “Cool Air Chair” in the kitchen is pure genius — we had no air conditioning in South Florida, and the moment my parents would leave the house I would open the refrigerator, pull up a dining-room chair, get a book, and sit on the chair and stick my feet in the refrigerator and prop them up on a shelf. Now that was great reading! (My mother caught on to me one day because I had gotten too comfortable and kicked my sneakers off in the refrigerator and forgotten to take them out.) “Jack’s Stain” is where I threw up on the wall — it was spaghetti, and we never could get the faint, greasy orange stain off the wall. “Zippy the Roach” was one of my roach pals. I wrote his name on his back with nail polish and Scotch-taped him to a Hot Wheels car, and then made a leash out of thread and pulled him down the sidewalk. Once, when my sister was sleeping with her mouth open on the couch, I dropped him down her throat. She threatened to tell my mom unless I took off all my clothes and ran naked around the house. I opted for the naked punishment. But while I was running, she locked all the doors and windows, and I had to hide in the front bushes all day until my dad came home. “Wart Trouble” is when I ripped a wart off my foot with pliers and lost a lot of blood and it got infected and my foot swelled up to the size of a canned ham and then I broke out in boils. My mother told our family doctor that I was the “stupidest kid in the world.” I broke my little brother Pete’s arm in the backyard. Our cat fell out of a tree and did not land on its feet. An alligator ate our dog. I could go on and on…and if I had more room I’d write about the Pagoda family next door. My mother called them the “low supervision” family, and they taught me a lot of dangerous stunts.

Harriet the Spy started all this business, which resulted in maps and journals full of stories, which eventually turned into five volumes of Jack Henry stories. I’m forever grateful to Louise Fitzhugh for the inspiration. I love Harriet, and now when I read the book I get very upset when anyone is mean to her.

From the May/June 2014 Horn Book Magazine. Part of a special section commemorating the 50th anniversary of Harriet the Spy.

The post I Spy: Harriet and I appeared first on The Horn Book.

This is the story of how I came to read and know and love Harriet the Spy. It is also a harrowing account of my brush with danger, in which my ten-year-old self stared fear in the face.

When I was nine or so, I started having trouble with words. I grew up with four older sisters. My bridge-builder dad got home every night after dark, but Mom would hold dinner and we’d all eat together at our big round kitchen table with a lazy Susan in the middle. Dinnertime was our time to talk and tell about our day. But as the youngest kid, I could never seem to get a word in edgewise.

I began to stutter.

My mother was concerned about the stuttering. Every night, she would tap on a glass with a spoon and announce that it was my time to talk. Just me. Nobody else. The kitchen fell funeral-quiet. Forks stopped clattering and sisters stopped chattering. Of course, as soon as it was my turn, I became even more tongue-tied.

Then my mother had an idea. One day, she ventured into downtown Pittsburgh to the book department at Kaufmann’s department store, where she talked to a knowledgeable salesperson about a book that might speak to her ten-year-old daughter who stuttered.

She brought home a brand-new, shiny hardcover. Cleverly, it was not a book about a girl who stuttered, or the heroic story of how such a girl overcame stuttering. It was a book about writing. A book about wanting to be a writer. A book I would go on to read over and over. The book was Harriet the Spy, written and illustrated by Louise Fitzhugh.

And with it, my mother handed me a lined spiral notebook, in hopes that I’d write down all those things that I wasn’t able to say.

I read the book in gulps, lying on my stomach under the piano by the cozy heating vent. I read myself to sleep at night, just like Harriet. I still have my original hardback copy; it creaks with age. It smells of childhood and secrets and the underneaths of pianos and beds.

I soon began eating tomato sandwiches, pestering my mother for spy-approved dance classes, and conducting science experiments with my friend in the basement. I wore dress-up glasses with no lenses and adopted my own spy route. Pocket notebook in hand, that’s when I first began writing everything down. And spying.

Spying is bound to get you into trouble, as it did with Harriet. My own spying venture landed me in a world of trouble. I grew up in the suburbs, where, alas, nobody had a dumbwaiter for spying on rich folks like Mrs. Agatha K. Plumber. But dumbwaiter or not, I, too, wanted to spy on somebody interesting. Somebody other. Somebody famous.

I knew of only one famous person in our neighborhood: Bruno Sammartino. Bruno Sammartino was a famous wrestler. We watched him on Channel 11 on Saturday evenings, on the popular Studio Wrestling program hosted by Chilly Billy Cardille. Dad told us tales of Bruno’s historic match with Gorilla Monsoon.

Who wouldn’t want to spy on a famous wrestler? My plan was to sneak up to his house in an attempt to capture a glimpse of his exciting secret life. Then, à la Harriet, I would dutifully write down, for time and posterity, all the amazing things I uncovered.

I hopped on my red Schwinn Stingray Slik Chick bicycle and pedaled, fast and furious, over to Bruno’s street. WWHD? What Would Harriet Do? Ditch the bike at the corner, hidden in the bushes, of course. Then proceed to Bruno Sammartino’s house on foot. Glancing left and right, I made certain nobody was watching — no one even peering from behind a neighbor’s curtain. Crouching low to the ground, I crossed the yard and hid in the spiky bush outside his window.

I tried to quash the fear, the mixture of thrill and tomato sandwich rising up from my belly.

I took deep breaths to tame my heartbeat. Just as I was about to peek into the house, just as I was about to get a window into Famous-Studio-Wrestler-Bruno-Sammartino’s world, I froze.

Because what I hadn’t known was that Bruno Sammartino had a very large, very scary guard dog. A German shepherd with pointed black-tipped ears and the teeth of a wolf.

I remember the giant sound of a snarl.

I remember running.

I forgot I’d been told that dogs smell fear. I forgot to freeze in place. I forgot to think about what Harriet would do.

I ran. But not before I got bitten by Bruno Sammartino’s dog.

I ran all the way home. But as soon as I got to my front door, I realized I couldn’t tell my mother what really happened. If I did, I’d have to admit I’d been sneaking around and trespassing and spying on Bruno Sammartino.

So I told my older sisters. I showed them the gash on my arm where I’d been bitten. The bite was ugly and discolored, complete with what I was sure were tooth marks.

Their immediate reaction: “You have rabies!”

I could not believe my ears. Rabies!? “What does that mean?” I wailed.

My sisters, who liked to tease me, soon had me convinced that I’d be rushed to the hospital, foaming at the mouth, where the doctor would strap me down and give me a shot with a needle the size of a baseball bat—right in my belly button.

Sisters.

I ran across the street to tell my best friend. Judy was to me as Sport was to Harriet. I showed her the dog bite. I asked her if she thought I had rabies.

“How do I know?” she shrugged. “But I know how we can find out.”

She rushed into another room and came back armed with Volume Q–R of the World Book Encyclopedia. She looked up “Rabies” and began reading aloud.

By this time, my arm was swollen at the site of the wound. It was turning black and blue. My arm felt numb and tingly, like when one of your limbs falls asleep.

As my friend read to me, we learned that there were three ways a person might detect if she has rabies.

1. At the site of the wound, it will begin to swell and turn black and blue.

I held up my arm as proof. “I have it!” I cried.

2. You will feel a sensation of numbness and tingling.

Bingo! My arm already felt as if it was asleep. I was going to have to get the big, giant needle in my belly button!

3. You will experience difficulty swallowing.

I did not have that symptom. Not until my friend read it to me from the encyclopedia. But the power of suggestion is strong, and I started to feel my throat closing up.

Judy dragged me by the shirtsleeve into her kitchen. There, she lined up glass after glass of water. I must have downed ten glasses of water! Twelve. Twenty. I’m certain I drank half of Lake Erie. We reasoned that as long as I could drink water—i.e., swallow—I did not have rabies.

In the end, my mother found out and took me to the doctor. Luckily, I was spared the baseball bat–sized needle; I did not have rabies after all. But they called the dog’s owner (yes, the famous Bruno Sammartino!) to find out when the dog had last had its shots.

I, and my Harriet-the-Spy top-secret spy mission, was discovered.

To this day, I still shrink down in my seat when we drive by the Sammartino house in our old neighborhood.

But that’s how my life as a writer began. As a spy. It was with that tiny Harriet-the-Spy notebook that I started to write. I stopped stuttering. I started to find my own voice.

Just as Ole Golly tells Harriet, if you’re going to be a writer, you’d better write everything down, and find your truth.

From the May/June 2014 Horn Book Magazine. Part of a special section commemorating the 50th anniversary of Harriet the Spy.

The post Writer, Wrestler, Stutterer, Spy appeared first on The Horn Book.

Where to begin with how important Harriet the Spy has been in my life? I guess I’ll have to start with my childhood. I was in fourth grade, at a school book fair. I’d forgotten to bring money that day, which was a problem because there was one book I was desperate to have. It had a bright orange cover with bold yellow type and a girl wearing glasses climbing all over it. And somehow I knew I was going to love it and I had to read it. AND IT WAS THE ONLY COPY AT THE FAIR. So I did what any right-thinking person would do under the circumstances: I hid it. Specifically, I put it at the bottom of a pile of very drippy-looking books (I’m guessing they were Winnie-the-Pooh; I detested Winnie-the-Pooh back then) and kept my fingers crossed that no one would find it and I could buy it the next day. Which I did. And Harriet has been a part of my life ever since.

It occurs to me now that this is probably the sort of thing Harriet herself would have done in a similar situation. And that in turn tells you why she’s a character who has endured for so long. She’s resourceful, quick, a little unscrupulous, and entirely recognizable. A real person, in other words. You might not like her (and I’m still not sure I do), but you know this girl.

That school book fair was the first time I remember Harriet being important to me. The second time came much later. I was a young assistant editor, starting out in children’s books. I’d been promoted and assigned a mass market series to edit. It was a steady-selling series for the publisher, and I was excited to be working on something so substantial. Needless to say, I took my responsibilities very seriously. This manuscript was going to be IN PRINT, after all. It was going to be a book! It had to be good! The future of the nation’s youth and the success of the series were resting on my shoulders alone! (I’m exaggerating just a bit, but I really did feel this way.) Unfortunately, the manuscript was about the worst thing I’d ever read. I couldn’t even articulate why it was so awful, but it was complete dreck, and I had to fix it. Or at least make it readable and enjoyable enough to sell ten thousand copies. And I had absolutely no idea how to do this.

Okay, I said to myself. Think about some other books, books you love. What makes them so great? That’s when I remembered Harriet. And I went back and read it — really read it, this time. I took it apart, technically. I began to understand how good it is. And even though the manuscript I was working on was a YA book and Harriet was a middle-grade novel, I learned things from Harriet about dialogue, structure, character, action, and pacing that I was able to apply, in a different way, to the problematic manuscript I had to edit. Harriet saved my bacon that time, and also made me think about books and reading and writing in a new way. It’s actually ironic that Harriet helped me edit a conventional YA romance, because Harriet is the complete opposite of that; it is in fact a wildly subversive novel. Which of course only makes me love it more.

What’s so revolutionary about it? Let’s start with the fact that Harriet is not a nice little girl. She does illegal things when she spies. If she doesn’t actually break into Mrs. Agatha K. Plumber’s house, for instance, she comes pretty close. She writes terrible things about people — not just the people she spies on, but also her best friends. The thing is, she’s not doing it because she’s mean (although she certainly has her mean moments). She’s doing it because she’s honest and because she’s compelled to do it. The note-taking is part of who she is, what she is training herself to be: a writer and observer. It’s work, and she takes it very seriously. And her friends accept this about her, even after she hurts them with her brutally honest observations. They know she can’t change. Even when she’s forced to apologize, she does it out of practical necessity, because she wants to keep her friends, not because she really means it. And then she goes back to doing exactly what she was doing before. She hasn’t changed one bit, and her friends know it.

Just think about all of this! It’s a giant raspberry to the school of thought that says, A-character-in-a-children’s-book-must-change-and-grow-throughout-the-course-of-the-story. Or to the school that says, A-character-must-be-essentially-good-and-lovable. In fact, any rules or precepts or cutesy-poo ideas you might have had about children’s books fly right out the window when you read Harriet the Spy. There is no great moral lesson to be learned, no transformative change that happens to the protagonist. Above all, there is no tidiness. Harriet is real life in all its messiness and ambiguity, populated by real people who are also messy and ambiguous.

There is yet another reason to love Harriet, and it’s another editorial story, this one about its origin. In the book Dear Genius, the great Ursula Nordstrom, the visionary editor at Harper & Row during its golden era, writes about how Harriet the Spy came to be published. It all started with a reader’s report from Charlotte Zolotow, who was then a senior editor, urging Ursula to read the manuscript. “You have to get this writer to come in and talk. This isn’t a book, but it could be,” she wrote enthusiastically. And on what did she base her enthusiasm? Pages of Louise Fitzhugh’s drawings and disconnected narrative, which seemed to consist mostly of Harriet’s spy entries. Somehow Charlotte was able to see past this jumble of words and envision a book. She and Ursula worked with the author and helped her find the characters and story that became Harriet.

In this age of acquiring manuscripts from debut authors that have to be perfect or nearly perfect to be signed on, I find this story to be an inspiration, and most of all a reminder: you have to keep an open mind about the creative process. It’s messy and unpredictable and risky. But the rewards of taking that leap of faith are boundless.

Just read Harriet again and see.

From the May/June 2014 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

The post Harriet and Me appeared first on The Horn Book.