Dumbledore is gay!!!

So, the kidlit threads and blogs are alive with the Gay Dumbledore saga... and in fact, it's fascinating.


One big question is HOW we teach when we have "secret information" from a living author. Information not in the text (though there's nothing in the text to refute).


Another issue is whether Rowling chickened out. Whether she should have/could have been more opaque, more detailed in her exposure of Dumbledore's romantic life.


A third topic is whether this suits the needs of the nasty-minded, since Dumbledore was an older man, a priest-model, and Harry a young orphan in need of love.


A fourth is whether Dumbledore (if he is in fact gay) is the ONLY gay man in the wizarding world.


And my thoughts? I think that Rowling didn't *know* her headmaster was gay in book one, but that by book 6 or 7 she was envisioning him as a gay character. I'm guessing that she made this apparaent in an early draft, and was edited down. If this is all true, I'm glad she outed him at Carnegie Hall (in any case, really) since I think the HP7 audience is exactly the population that needs to be more open to discussions of identity/lifestyle.


What makes me sad is that a heartfelt scene about Dumbledore's struggles against the stigma would totally fit into the book. In book 7, Dumbledore gets unearthed and destroyed in the press, and it would make perfect sense iof he love life came out in that process. It would further make sense for Harry to struggle with this a little, and to then ASK Dumbledore about it in his dream/post death conversation with the headmaster.


And this would have been such a good way for Dumbledore to create a GOOD stereotype as an older gay man. To show the world that because his lifestyle was so hated (like Lupin, actually) in the wizarding world, he was denied a chance to marry and have kids, and so became the headmaster of Hogwarts (instead of minister of magic), where he could put his love of children to good use.


Which ties it all together. Dumbledore pours his love into Harry in such a healthy way NOT because he's a dirty old man, but because he's been denied a family by the closed-minded world around him. This Harry would be able to understand I think, after being hunted/hated himself.


I feel like Rowling missed her shot. But I'm glad she's outing him now.

Young Readers' Guide to Contemporary Poetry...

What would people think of such a thing? A truly contemporary list of poets who might interest young (let's say high school) readers. And tips on how best to teach and best use their work?

Last I checked, ee cummings was still being taught as "wacky new poetry".

My kind of blog...

Okay, so I'm a fan of finding adult themes in kidlit. And (as we all know) I'm a freak for Edward eager. So THIS BLOG is pretty much rocking my little world.

"Collective Farming Experiment" indeed!

I'll be adding Oz and Ends to my daily reads...

Kids and Poetry...

Speaking of poetry... what do people think of it?

Now, stop yawning! That isn't funny!

Okay, that's a leetle funny, but seriously... I was interviewed the other day, and they asked a question about the first poems I can remember loving. And this was, for me, a very easy question. Because poetry, when I was little, when I read formal poetry and loved the sing-song quality of it... poetry was IT!

I loved poetry.

I remember my dad reading me Yeats and Blake. I remember, by heart, most of the Real Mother Goose, A Child's Garden of Verses, When We Were Very Young, and the Oxford Book of Poetry for Children.

I really can still recite pages and pages of these poems to this day, and that has to mean something. That has to be a HUGE part of how my brain got formed, right? If 30 years later, those fairy poems are still embedded in my skull?

Are they embedded in yours? Can you finish these sentences?

We daren't go a hunting, for fear of little...
The silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the...
What immortal hand or eye can tame thy fearful...
It isn't really anywhere, it's somewhere else...
A wonderful view, of geraniums (red) and delphiniums...
My brain is shrunk, I cannot hear, there is a hole inside my...

(Some of these may be imperfect, as I'm typing from memory, and not checking myself, but you get the point. If you know these poems, and loved them as I did, you'll recognize them I think...)

So yeah, I love poems, and I always have, and in fact, my middle grade novel is full of this stuff, now that I think about it. Little singsongy poems. I'd show you one, but I'm afeared that the Random House Copyright Ogre would come for me.

At any rate, poetry was a key part of my childhood, and I wondered if other people felt the same way.

Poetry teaches us so much about sound, and rhyme, and the ambiguous nature of language. In poems, words get used most creatively. They get stretched and pulled and twisted, to fit the form. Poems can be silly and playful and engaging to children learning to read (or speak).

I realized this rencently, recognized the power of rhyme, when my 22 month old son began to sing the alphabet with me... but only the rhyming letters. For real! He knows G, P, V, and Z.

It's kind of amazing how they rhyme like that, with a loose meter...

But really, I ramble. What say you about verse?

Poems!!!

I try not to use this blog to promote my various (and scattered) non-kid-related projects. But I'm just soooooooo excited about this, I can't keep from announcing that ...

MY BOOK OF POEMS IS HERE!

And while it is decidely NOT for kids (there are naughty words) the cover was done by the wildly talented artist who is illustrating my picture book.

So that's something... kiddish.

I know not everyone reads poetry, but maybe you know someone who does? It makes a great Chrismakah present...

It would seem...

It would seem that a revolution began this week, at the first EVER Kidlitosphere Conference. There's all kinds of fun coverage online.

(there's a ton of other folks blogging it, but I'm in need of sleep, so you'll have to play link-link-link to find them!)

I love conferences. I love kidlit. I love bloggers. I love Chicago.

So this pretty much sounds like heaven, and I'm sad I missed it.

But next year... I'm totally going to Portland.

The Dark is Rising...

In the form of a movie...

Dark days ahead for fans of Susan Cooper, I fear...



Yes indeed... if you read this blog... you're into kidlit, and if you're into kidlit... I probably don't have to tell you that Susan Cooper's AMAZING series, The Dark is Rising, has been made into a movie. Out this week! The movie is called called "The Seeker" and I'm not going to blog about it here. Because it is probably really terrible, and it'll get plenty o press without my tiny blog.

BUT...

It does have me thinking about Cooper, and what makes her so good.

Here's the thing about Susan Cooper. She has this great skill in writing books that are a little bit magic. And books with a little bit of magic are my favorite kind of magic books.

I'm not one for high fantasy, wizards and dragons and spells far away from my life. What I like is magic that makes you believe in magic. Either because it begins in the "real" world, our world of regular stuff... or because the characters in the invented magic-land are so human you can't help believing in them.

If a wizard is going to live and breathe, he has to sneeze and stumble. If someone lives in this century and has powers, they likely also have a cell phone. Ommisions of such details are the biggest flaws in a lot of magic books.

If an author wants to write about dragons, I think that author should know what dragons eat, but also where they poop. Magic doesnt let you off the hook. Your world still has to be complete.

The Cooper books do a pretty fabulous job of blending both ways of making magic real. This series threads two families together. One family is a family of regular everyday British folks, who just happen to be friends with an old professor who turns out to be--- (I won't spoil it!) And the other family is an ancient and powerful magical family--- (won't kill that one either!) The families (and in some cases the books in the series) are distinct from one another, but they blend and clash into each other to great effect. The children from both families meet in THIS world, and the LONG AGO world.

And of course there are grails and powers and good and evil colliding in dramatic ways... but there are also everyday meals and whiny kid brothers and cars and parents.

And all of this is executed in a dreamlike way. The magic builds slowly, convinces you of its likelihood. Cooper does not rely on a willing suspension of disbeleif. Rather she creates, cajoles, convinces you of her magic...

I remember reading Over Sea Under Stone as a kid, and wanting to visit England. I wanted to go to Cornwall and look for this world that I was sure existed. There, in 20th century England. As it had in 6th century England. Both of them magical in their different ways...

And for me, that's the sign of good magic writing. Not just that I want to go there, but that I truly think I can... that the world is real. That MY world is magical.

Literacy!!!

SUBMIT a text to the PICTURE BOOK CARNIVAL!

I don't fully understand how this works yet myself, but I'm all for literacy, picture books, mentoring, anf bloggers!

I think the gist is that they're compiling a list of picture books that help promote reading/writingskills in kids, along with ideas for how/why to use the texts...

SUBMIT!

Grumpy Bird...

I've been trying not to write too often about picture books, in part because I figure you don't need me to tell you that Hop of Pop will make your child happy (though it will also resound in your brain like a drill after umpteen consecutive readings), and in part because it seems cheaty to "review" books that're only 800 words long.

But you really need to check out Grumpy Bird, and I've been shocked that I can't even find it at the two bookstores I frequent. It isn't bestselling enough I guess (though why that is I cannot imagine). So run out and request it. Get it on the shelves!

I like Grumpy Bird because:

a. It's not too "nice." Grumpy Bird is grumpy, and that's okay. And when his friendly friends accost him with friendliness, he gets snarky with them, and that's okay too, Go Grumpy Bird! There are far too many nice books in the world.

b. The art is AMAZING. Mixed (and slightly surreal) media, old sepia photos layered underneath vivid cartoon/painting or something. I LOVE innovative design.

c. It doesn't really "make sense". In the real world, beavers can't, (last I checked) fly. And there's no complicated "world building" to explain this flight of the beavers... The beaver just decides to fly, and flies. The book depends on a tone of authority-- that you'll accept the rules of the world (e.g. bird wakes up "too grumpy to fly", though there's no explanation of why grumpiness takes away the bird's flying power). I think the best picture books do this-- operate with confidence and leave the explanation out (though it should be said that the worst books do the same thing. But fail!). But it's still an interesting point-- that the best picture books are good because of what they leave out, rather than what they include.

If I go on any longer I'll have taken up more space than it would require to copy the text of the entire book ten times, but you should check out Grumpy Bird. This is a debut book from a new author/illustrator, and I can't wait to see more from Jeremy Tankard!

The Outsiders...

There's a really wonderful piece of writing today in the New York Times Book Review, a bit about S.E. Hinton and her insanely good book, The Outsiders (and if you've never read it, I think you somehow missed your teen years). I was not (in my own teen years) and am not now, especially interested in YA books. But The Outsiders was different-- more in a club with Catcher in the Rye than the Babysitters Club.

The article goes into all the many references in the book-- to Robert Frost and Shirley Jackson, and in some ways, the list-y story reads like an undergrad English paper called, "Direct literary referneces in the work of S.E. Hinton". But it's illuminating. And timely.

The article ends,

I was reminded of 19-year-old Kaavya Viswanathan, who was flayed last year for borrowing excessively from various sources for her own novel. If some high-minded, plagiarism-wary reader had persuaded S. E. Hinton to remove all references to the books and movies that inspired her, “The Outsiders” probably wouldn’t have slipped past the internal (let alone official) censors that governed ’60s adolescence. Forty years on, we may see the seams of its gilding, but the heart of Hinton’s groundbreaking novel is still, indisputably, gold.

And I think this is gutsy, this statement. And I think I agree.

We're so concerned with plagiarism right now, (and yes, I know plagiarism sucks, but...) because we can be. Because computers make it easy to catch plagiarism, in a way that only an incredibly well-read person with a photographic memory could have done in the past. And because we *can* hunt down every stolen line, we feel we should.

But this article is a reminder that when the work is good enough, it uses its references, and in doing so, it earns them. It becomes part of a tradition, and not derivative.

Certainly not theft.

Ferdinand the Bull...

Tonight I'm thinking about politics. Because I wrote a bad scene today, a scene in my new book, a chunk of clunky dialogue about war, which I could NOT get right. So now I'm wondering whether our political leanings have any place in children's literature. I'm not sure...

I mean, on the one hand, I feel like they absolutely do. Like children's literature is the best place to help educate our young in subtle, serious ways... the best place to teach them that when we talk about "politics" we're really just talking about how to treat people. Justice. Service. Faith. Books are the best way I know to talk about such things.

And yet...

And yet when I hear about an overtly political book I cringe a little. Even if I agree with the politics. Even if the book comes from a press I love and admire. They tend to be message-y, such books-- heavyhanded. A little dumb.

So thinking about this today, I wracked my brain, tried to think of children's books I liked, but that carried political messages. And I thought of Ferdinand!

Remember Ferdinand? The bull who didn't fight, who preferred to smell the flowers?

Written by Muro Leaf and illustrated by Robert Lawson, Ferdinand is a "charming" book, though that's a term much abused (and overused) in reviews of bad (trite, sacharine) children's books today.

But let's think about what "charm" is. Charm is a kind of deception. An understated attraction. And Ferdinand is both deceptive and attracting.

There's a brilliance to the simplicity of Ferdinand. The juxtaposition of a little cork tree and a bullfight in Madrid. The conflict of bee and bull. Size as a misread indication of anger, violence. A fallacy. The myth of our automatic roles in the world. And passive resistance as ultimate power.

We could all stand to think a bit about Ferdinand this year. It is as apt a metaphor now as ever it was in 1938, in Spain. We could all stand to consider how the fact of being a big bull does not require one to snort and stab.

With classic line drawings that match Munro's artful text, Ferdinand should be required reading for those of us (like me) attempting fruitlessly to batter home a message with an iron pen (or keyboard).

The test of whether propaganda is good? Is art?

When you read a political children's books, I think you should feel confused. You should have to ask yourself, "Are they talking about what I think they're talking about?" You should not be sure.

Because if you know for sure what the message is, it'll only serve in preaching to the choir.

And even then, probably only if it's a really dumb choir.

In closing, I want to say that I have high high hopes for this book, the Little Gernal and the Giant Snowflake, but I ahven't read it yet...

Madeleine L'engle...

Read my reflection on the amazing Madeleine L'engle over here, at Salon.com !


L'Engle once said, "You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children." And this line of hers, which has been taped above my desk ever since I decided to try to write for kids, still rings true. It shows such deep respect for children, and for the complicated means through which they approach the world. The difficult language children speak.

She wrote for everyone, but L'Engle's books for children were of a different order. They harnessed the full power of her invention, and created a world we could not have imagined independently. She possessed something beyond ordinary human vision; L'Engle had epiphanies. Her creatures and imaginary worlds were both more imagined and more real than most, in part because of the deft way she blended science and religion into fantasy. She managed to define magic in terms that seemed honest, and in doing so made magic more true.

Narnia in pictures...

(the only cover I've ever known)

Bookslut's Heather Smith takes on Narnia-art, and hits the nail on the head.

Though honestly, I'd loooooove to see Hilary Knight take on "spooky bunny noir Watership Down".

In fact, I'd love to see Hilary Knight take on anything. Edward Gory and Edward Eager too. I'd like to see any of those three illustrate ANYTHING. The Joy of Cooking. The Bible. My mother's will.

Seriously. Some people have just the right touch. Pen and ink... and maybe a little humor.

Jesus Christ and the Deathly Hallows...

Believe it or not, I have managed to hold off this long on HP7. And not only have I managed to hold off on reading the book, I've managed to hold off on reading the press surrounding the book, including all spoilers and reviews. Honest to gosh, I went in with no sense of what I was about to read.

So I don't know whether or not I'm "supposed to" love it or hate it.

But I love it. I totally do.

It's a really good book. Clunky in places, because Rowling sat down to write it with 6 books of world-building behind her, and has to reconcile the past books with this one-- make every little detail match up. So the histories interweave in sometimes awkward ways. But that's how it goes, with a slow-growing series of any complexity. And Rowling's logic is TIGHT. And her characters are real.

Major props, Ms. Rowling.

I'm about 23 pages to the end of the book, and I just shed a few tears (yeah, yeah, go ahead and laugh) but that got me thinking about something...

I couldn't shake how much the scene where Harry goes out to meet Voldemort, accepts his own death, reminded me of something... of something... else.

Couldn't think what.

And then I knew what it was! It was Narnia. It was Aslan. It was Aslan, with Lucy and Susan only walking so far... watching from a distance as the lion let himself be bound and slaughtered by the White Witch. Aslan going those last steps alone. Submitting. Dying to be reborn. Dying so that unknown (deep) magic could be fulfilled and undo the evil at work in humanity.

Hmmm...

The use of submission so critical to both tales, but also other things--the 2 companions held back, too human to accompany... and then the two sets of descriptions... of the evil creatures in the darkness. A hoard of evil creatures in a forest, hungry for the death of goodness. The most evil of all waiting with a weapon, foolish, missing a piece of the story.

So much the same, these scenes. Harry Potter, Aslan, Jesus. The only thing that could overcome death was the willing submission to death. Powerful, heavy, lonely, sad.

"Into your hands..." and all that.

Funny for me, as a Jew, to be reading this now, and shedding tears over it. Since of course, in the original, my people were the giants, the hags, the Death Eaters... waiting in the darkness, too foolish to see what was about to happen.

Huh.

So what I still don't understand is.. why are the fundamentalist Christians so bothered by Harry? Here in Georgia, they're still trying to ban him from the library...

I mean, he's Jesus with a wand, for Chrissake.

Quick bit...

Via Jacketflap... I stumbled accross Jen Robinson's great post on Zilpha Keatly Snyder, who wrote many of my favorite childhood books, most especially The Egypt Game-- which is notable for being a non-magical book that manages to feel magical. A magic-ish book that also addresses "real" issues and carries serious emotional weight.

But now that Jen has written about it, I won't need to!

Thanks, Jen. Great post!

Orphans and England...

What is it about the English orphan that so captures the attention of the American kid-lit reading public?

I'm not sure why, but suddenly this morning I could not stop thinking about the Shoes books, by Noel Stretfield. Remember Ballet Shoes?

(Egads! Amazon-shocker. Could that cover--the one above--be any more different from the cover of my youth?)

Ballet Shoes, the finest of Streatfield's books, is the tale of three little orphan girls-- Pauline, Petrova, and Posy-- collected by an aging explorer/archaelogist (rather than bones) on three different excusions into the wild. When the old man disappears on another such adventure, the girls are left poor (though poor in 1937 fancypants England is not the poor of 2007 Sierra Leone or the South Bronx for that matter), to be cared for by their legal guardian (the explorer's niece)and their utterly devoted Nana (who raised the niece and now loves the family sooooo much that she refuses to take pay once they become "poor" and cannot afford nice clothes or fancy tea cakes any longer).

And what happens to three "poor" orphans in fancypants 1937 England? Why, they become Shakespearean actors and trained ballerinas, to support their hodgepodge family. Of course they do. They hit the stage and become famous movie stars. Why not? What *else* can you do when you don't have the money for new velvet frocks any longer, or Citroen cars...

If you detect a tone of sarcasm in my voice, I should explain... I don't mean to be severly critical by any means... I LOVE this BOOK! I do. But I have a hard time with it now that I'm a grownup, because it is soooooo far from the reality I now see around me. Concerned as it is with tiny comforts and the self-involved search for wealth and fame. This is not a political book. Not at ALL!

But when I was a girl? Back before I knew about genocide and AIDS and nuclear capabilities and national statistics on education and leaching plastics? Back then I didn't know from sarcasm. Back then I wanted to be a ballerina, an orphan. I wanted to have whooping cough in the English countryside, ride the tube, live in a house full of interesting boarders... I loooooved these girls and their lives.

And that's the point of this post I think-- that there is something lovely about the fantasy-life of people who lived before CNN and blogging (and equality I guess). One could--reading the Shoes books-- dream of being a ballerina or an explorer. Dream of eating tea cakes and wearing velvet frocks. Dream of being adopted by another family, a more fascinating family. Because the books were so utterly devoid of any awareness of the world beyond the books. It was a good thing, in 1937, to dream for yourself. To seek comforts. To have a devoted servant or a highfalutin pursuit worth abandoning a family for...

In 1937, talent and intelligence (above a certain strata of society) was a kind of manifest destiny. Gifts were rewarded with further gifts. A passion for life was rewarded with a good life. Or that was the attitude anyway.

I'm not sure I'm doing the book justice here. Not sure I'm getting at what I want to say. that this book far predates any kind of meta-thought, any kind of political imperative for a child. This book is about people who live with an expectation of the world being a comfortable and interesting place. And what they do to insure that the world lives up to its potential is a fabulous and wondrous tale. These girls are perhaps a little selfish, and perhaps they ahve blinders on, as their universe is a little selfish, and also wears blinders-- believes that the sun will never set on the Empire and all that. But guess what? That's what children are all about. Selfishness, and blinders. The sun never setting on the world that is.

That kind of thinking is-- I think-- the kind of fantasy children need to feel safe, conforted, and to seek out interesting lives. There's all the time later for them to "know better". But as kids, they *should* all expect to be president, or a ballerina, or an astronaut. They should *not* settle, at age eight, for the realization that customer-service-representative is more likely the truth.

Me? I wanted desperately to be Pauline. Blond. Beautiful. Tiny. Talented. Desperately I wanted to be Pauline.

Until I wanted to be Noel Streatfield. Which is something I'm still working...

(side note-- this is a GOOD book for showing young girls a range of careers. Waaaaaay ahead of the curve. This book has women role models supporting themselves, educating themselves, living alone, in 1937!!!)

Ladies and Gentlemen... We Have A Winner!!!

The winner of the "Name My Dastardly Villain" Contest is the fabulous Christy Lenzi, who is perhaps a bit dastardly herself!

I'll be using the name she so generously provided, Wichita Grim, in my upcoming novel, Any Which Wall, alongside any other name Christy likes.

Thanks, Christy!!!

(Now, if only folks would enter my "rewrite my crappy 4th chapter" contest. Sigh...)

The "Name My Dastardly Villain" Contest: SHORTLIST...

Well, I've finally found some time to write, and I need to pick a name at last. So I've been culling thought the amazing 200+ names people sent me, and I've narrowed the field a bit. Anyone have an opionion? I'm liking:

Jed Scratchett
Duck Barnes
Horace Noosethrottle
Wichita Grim
Benjamin Blackwater
"Pinkeye"Higgins
Red Killjoy
Ezra Retch
Hannibal Hogswaller
Cecil Dregroot
Ely Darkwater
Cornelius Crake

Want to place your vote?

I'm in Baltimore right now, trying to work on the new book, while my very generous mom babysits Mose. And while I'm here, I'm also pawing through my old picture books down in the basement. Guess what I found?

Rain Makes Applesauce!

Remember this one?

No?

Well perhaps this eloquent Amazon reviewer will refresh your memory:

THIS BOOK IS JUST A BUNCH OF NONSENSE SENTENCES & THE DRAWINGS ARE STRANGE. I DON'T GET IT & THERE PROBABLY IS NOTHING TO GET.

Um, yeah... okay, loser. You also don't seem to *get* that the CAPS LOCK IS FOR SCREAMING!!! Yeesh!

Despite the idiocy of "H. Price", you should run out and get your kid a copy of Julian Scheer's wonderful book. What makes it so appealing to me is that it's dreamlike and nonlinear. Each page is a sort of discrete little nonsense scenario, but then those scenes (all gorgously illustrated by Marvin Bileck) are unified by a few repeating lines,

"Rain Makes Applesauce"

&

"Oh, you're just talking silly talk..."

A little trippy, as one might expect from a sixties era picture book. But the effect is lovely and magical and it draws a child in, with it's simplicity and the odd dialogue created by the repeating lines. A young reader gets to be at once the dreamer/silly talker and also the voice of reason. I remember shouting out the repeating lines when my parents read me this book.

Mom would say, "My house goes walking every day,
and rain makes applesauce."

And I'd laugh and scream, "Oh you're just talking silly talk!!!"

Or Dad would read, "Monkeys eat the chimney smoke..." and wait for just a second, look at me meaningfully, and I'd chortle, "AND RAIN MAKES APPLESAUCE!" (notice appropriate use of the caps lock, Mr. H. Price!)

It always surprises me that more people don't know this book. I guess maybe it feels a little dated, with those acid-flashback pictures and the non-narrative format, but it was, after all a Caldecott Honor book.

In any case, you should check it out of the library now that it's back in print!

Oh, Mrs. Piggle Wiggle!!!

Remember Mrs. Piggle Wiggle? The portly widow with the trim ankles and the box full of magic cures for all the REALLY awful ailments children catch?

I find myself thinking about her lately, as my son heads into the "mines" phase of childhood development. "MINES, NO, MINES!" he screams as he grabs for a toy that is absolutely NOT his and which he has decidedly NOT been playing with. And I think, as I wipe the snot off said toy, "Did Mrs. Piggle Wiggle have any cures for "MINES!"?

She did not, I think.

But then I wonder if any of her cures are actually things I can legally execute myself (bear in mind, when she moved to the farm many of her cures were non magical).

Not likely. You aren't allowed to abandon a child alone on a farm for an afternoon anymore. But in any case, she's on my mind. So I thought (of course) she should be on *your* mind.

If you don't know her, run right out and grab a copy of the first book in the series. You'll love her.

In the 1950s graphic-art town she inhabits, all the kids have ridiculously funny names, stay-at-home-mommies, healthy afterschool snacks, and easily solved problems. And maybe that's the real charm of the Mrs. Piggle Wiggle books. The 1950s ease of her world. Because although we read these books with a sense of Mrs. Piggle Wiggle's insane intelligence (in solving afflictions like talkbackitis) , and even an appreciation for what was surely a meta-mind on the part of Betty McDonald (the author, who was also self-aware enough to write a humorous account of her battle with tuberculosis) since surely nobody could name a character Harbin Quadrangle without having a sense of sarcastic humor about it....

We also, in reading these books, sink into a world in which every problem can be solved. Each book is episodic, a series of linked stories really. And each episode is quickly resolved with a kind of "happily ever after" finality. It's nice. Very nice.

The smartypantsy needs of a reader are met by the language, the tongue in cheek tone. But the desire for a simpler world is met too. Yes, this is world where filthy kids who refuse to take baths learn their lessons in a week. When they are allowed to grow so filthy their mothers can pull radishes from the healthy loam caked behind the kids' ears.

Ah, if only it were so easy.

With pictures by masters like Maurice Sendak and Hilary Knight, these are truly classics.