How to use this Page

The Princess and the Pig
By Jonathan Emmett
Illustrated by Poly Bernatene
Walker & Co. (a division of Bloomsbury)
$16.99
ISBN: 978-0-8027-2334-5
Ages 4-8
On shelves now

The princess craze is a relatively new phenomenon. I’m sure that little girls have pretended to be princesses for as long as the occupation has existed, but the current concentrated capitalization on that desire has taken the obsession to a whole other level. You can’t enter a toy department these days without being bombarded with the idea that every little girl should wear pink, frilly, sparkly costumes and woe betide the child that might prefer a good unadorned set of overalls instead. Naturally, all this sank into the world of picture books after a while. Stories like The Paper Bag Princess were now being ignored while the latest pink monstrosity would suck up all the attention. So you can probably understand why I was a little reluctant to pick up The Princess and the Pig at first. My first instinct was to just throw it on the pile with the rest of the princessey fare. Fortunately, I heard some low-key buzz about the book, making it clear that there might be something worthwhile going on here. Thank goodness I did too. Ladies and gentlemen, two men have come together and somehow produced a book that thumbs its nose at the notion of a little girl wanting to be a princess. In fact, when it comes right down to it, this is a tale about how sometimes it’s difficult to tell the royalty from the swine. Now that’s a lesson I can get behind!

The day the queen didn’t notice that she dropped her baby daughter off of the castle’s battlements could have been horrific. Instead, it led to a case of switched identities. When a kindly farmer parks his cart beneath a castle so as to take a break, he doesn’t notice when a flying baby lands in the cart and launches upward the cart’s former inhabitant, baby piglet. The piglet lands in the baby’s bassinet and the queen, seeing a change in her daughter, is convinced that an evil fairy must be to blame. Meanwhile the baby, dubbed Pigmella, is promptly adopted by the kindly farmer and his wife. She grows up to love her life while Princess Priscilla, a particularly porcine royal, pretty much just acts like a pig. Years later the farmer and his wife figure out the switcheroo but when they attempt to right a great wrong they are rebuffed by the haughty royals. So it is that Pigmella gets to marry a peasant and avoid the chains of royalty while Priscilla has a wedding of her own . . . poor handsome prince.

Normally I exhibit a strong aversion to self-referential fairy tales. You know the ones I mean. The kinds of stories that act like the Shrek movies, winking broadly at the parents every other minute whether it serves the story or not. And certainly “The Princess and the Pig” never forgets for a second that it is operating in a fairytale land. The king in the queen in this book have a way of using fairytales to justify their already existing expectations and prejudices, constantly holding them up as the solution to their every problem. Rather than feel forced, the royals’ silliness is utterly consistent with their characters. It was only after I reread the book that I realized that while they are under the distinct impression that every problem beg

I just searched my archives to see if I ever made a “monted eggs” joke in conjunction with Egmont USA.  To my chagrin, I did that very thing during the last Egmont preview.  Gah.  I hate being so predictable that even I can figure out what old jokes I’ll be pulling out at a given moment.

In any case, Egmont recently hosted the Summer/Fall preview of all their upcoming titles for the librarian hoards of New York.  And while their children’s offerings pale in the face of the YA fare, they provide me with cheese and so I go.  On this particular day the temperature was swelling well into the 90s in New York, giving me a brief glimpse of what pregnant women must normally endure in August.  An unpleasant sensation.

Picture Books

Just as it was at the last preview, Egmont has all of one picture book to their name per season.  And this year, that would be Little Lost Cowboy by Simon Puttock, illustrated by Caroline Jayne Church.  The book was introduced with the joking caveat, “We only want to do animals that you can cuddle and are cute.”  Crayfish, you are outta luck.  In this book a rolly-poly coyote cub is separated from his mommy.  He manages to indulge in a couple key “Aroooo”s, which reminded me of the Aroooos of one of my favorite picture book readalouds Katie Loves the Kittens.  A well placed Aroooo is worth its weight in gold.  Trust me.

And that polished off the picture books right there.  No time lost, eh?

Middle Grade

Y’know, for a supervillain Vordak the Incomprehensible sure seems to align himself with some pretty up-and-up causes.  Our attention at this point in the preview was directed to a nearby Reading Rules poster, as created by ALA.  There you may see Vordak tearing up just a little over The Velveteen Rabbit.

For fans of Vordak, a sequel was announced at this time.  I can count on one hand the number of children’s books written with adult protagonists that are human.  The general rule when it comes to making adults your heroes in books with kids is that they have to be a furry animal or no ten-year-old will be interested (call it The Redwall Conundrum).  Vordak flips that theory neatly on its ear . . . or at least he did until the book Vordak the Incomprehensible: Rule the School was announced.  Voluntarily

I’d been feeling a bit guilty about Penguin recently.  If my calculations are correct (and I think that they are) I haven’t been to a Penguin preview since April of 2010.  The timing just never worked out!  I do hold down a 9-5 job in the library, after all, so angling my free days to be on preview days doesn’t always work out for me.  Fortunately I was able to make up for my missing mug at the most recent librarian preview so as to see the goodies and not be caught in the cold when something like A Tale Dark & Grimm comes down the pike (one of the books I missed hearing about last year).

Preparations this time around included:

1. A promise to myself not to eat ALL the desserts on the dessert table at lunch.
2. A orange concoction placed in my purse that I would have to drink at precisely 1:30 for my doctor’s appointment.  It’s a pregnant thing.  There’s a test they do where they make you chug what essentially amounts to a drink that has more in common with that horrid orange pop McDonalds used to serve when I was a kid (not quite juice, not quite good) only warm and flat.

But enough of that!  You want to hear about books, and I want to tell you about what’s on the roster.  To the previewing!

Dutton Children’s Books

Lauren Myracle.  Is there a nicer gal in the business?  Place your bets now, but I’m telling you that I have the inside track on this one.  Lauren’s the sweetest, hands down.  There are some authors out there you just feel grateful to the universe for properly appreciating (“properly appreciating” = “allows them to make a living at writing”).  Lauren is one such person.  I say all this in preparation of the glorious news that she has a new book out in her Winnie Perry series.  Ten will be a prequel to the books Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen, and Thirteen Plus One.  Think of it as the thing Phyllis Reynolds Naylor did with her Alice series.  Actually this particular series is now being rebranded “The Winnie Years”, so be warned librarians.  When desperate ten-year-olds cling to your leg demanding a particular book in “that Winnie series” know now what that will actually mean.  By the way, any idea who the cover artist is on these books?  Seems to me that this person deserves some of the credit for the popularity of the series.  Or at the very least, the look.

You’re not gonna get a whole lot of young adult books out of me this time around, but I feel obligated to mention Nova Ren Suma’s upcoming novel Imaginary Girls, in part because her de

“I’m feeling very refreshed because I just washed my hands with the mouthwash in the bathroom.”

When one finds oneself invited to a librarian preview at the Yale Club for the Little Brown Spring/Summer 2011 season, it is useful to remember the following:

- Do not appear in jeans. I know it is your day off. They make you feel more relaxed, sure. But you will find that you are, in fact, quite scruffy when the fellow at the front desk calls you on them and you have to explain that you are a guest of Little Brown, thereby possibly casting aspersions on that venerable institution. I confess, I got a small thrill out of it anyway. Jeans in the Yale Club! Woo-hoo!

- Do not mistake the mouthwash in the ladies room (yes, it really is mouthwash) for the hand soap. Fortunately, the Yale Club does not outfit that room with an attendant. Otherwise you might have some ’splaining to do.

Instead, Megan Tingley, the Senior Vice President and Publisher of Little Brown Books explained how she had herself mistaken one item for another, thereby allowing her guests the opportunity to avoid the same mistake (which, in the past, I too have made). And as we were feted with brie/ham/apple sandwiches and coffee baked desserts, we got to hear about a new season with a real twist on the expected.

By the way, rather than end this round-up with the usual info, I’m going to play with fire and tell you right off the bat that if you would like a galley of anything you see here today, you need only contact Victoria Stapleton at [email protected] with the title(s) you desire.  Be sure to include your full contact info.  Sadly, if you have a P.O. Box you are out of the running.  Little Brown isn’t allowed to ship to them.

Now the first, and maybe most unexpected, book of the day comes to us via Patrick McDonnell. See, I’ve always like McDonnell’s look. I like how his artistic style (the one he uses to make that Mutts comic strip) mimics that of Krazy Kat. However, I’ve never taken to his picture books. They tend to be pet-centric, or the kinds of books that go for the warm fuzzy feeling crowd. I am not a member of the fuzzy feeling crowd. That said, McDonnell has made a recent departure with his book Me…Jane that will interest non-Mutts reading folks like myself as well as his stalwart fans. The book is based on the childhood of Jane Goodall, and adapts rather beautifully to the old 40-page picture book format. As a child, Jane was given a stuffed chimpanzee (not a real one) as a toy. She kept extensive notes about the great outdoors (which are reproduced in the book). Mostly, though, the story just shows Jane climbing trees and hanging out in nature. The fact that she read Tarzan as a child is almost too perfect for words. And when you get to the end . . . I’m not a member of the fuzzy feeling crowd at all, but even just looking at the galley for this book for the first time, I admit . . . I welled up a little. I won’t spoil it for you. You’ll just have to find this little biography for yourself. And apparently a significant portion of the proceeds of this book goes to Jane’s foundation. Nicely done.

10 Comments on Librarian Preview: Little Brown and Company (Spring 2011), last added: 12/1/2010