With the BFG Movie Coming and All

In honor of a very special day, I thought I'd revive this old post about a book I found, um, intriguing, with some interesting asides (see below!).

My first thought as I read this book was Wow! Dahl is on LSD! Which makes sense for a book published in the 80s (is Dahl a child of the 60s/70s?). But no, he wasn't on psychotropic drugs. The book is Freud and Jung with a dash of Platonic forms. That says it all, doesn't it?

Ok, on to at least one real thought: BFG’s fabulous voice of made-up words, rhythm and bizarre syntax that never muddles meaning makes the book vivid and real, and surprisingly easy to read. Logic, however, seems a non-essential factor in this book, and in fantasy for this age in general. Example: the BFG can’t understand the natterbox spiders (he doesn’t know the language), but he can understand the chatbag cattypiddlers. Um. Why? Not that I really care because, hello, natterbox spiders and chatbag cattypiddlers are just too freaking awesome.

Yet I can’t get away from a Freudian reading of this book. Case in point, the giants have these frankfurter lips, right? And we all know what hot dogs represent... And they have this slimy drool, and little Sophie ends up in a giant cucumber-like (phallic much?) vegetable and is then taken into the giant’s mouth ... Yes, yes, I know. A stretch. It’s just creepy to me, like the author is subconsciously working through some latent memories he can't make sense of. Anyway, enough of that. Now for additional disjointed and seemingly random thoughts:

I love how the BFG is so childlike while the giants are rather obviously bullies, though the “message” is a little too heavy-handed for me, and a wee wittle one-sided. There's a line about human beans (yes, beans) being the only ones that kill their own kind, which isn’t true at all. I had enough hamsters as a child to know they often kill one another, and they eat their young (or in the case of Peaches, half of one of her young. The other half she left for me to find). On that note, I was a little annoyed by the social commentary. It seems the book was half parody (jack and the beanstalk references), half fantasy, and half cultural critique (yes, I know my halves don’t add up). Yet even with all the talk of how human beans kill one another, the giants (only doing what comes naturally to themselves, unlike the awful humans) get a pretty severe punishment. 

Moving on: Stephen King wrote somewhere that horror is having people react in expected ways to unexpected events. Here a giant meets real England and a table is made for him of grandfather clocks and a ping pong table. Dahl gives great authenticating details of the butler needing a ladder to set the table, it taking four footmen to carry the clocks, and so on. Such great humor here, and the fart jokes, and by the bellypoppers and portedos. I’m laughing aloud. In public. People are looking at me. 

On the downside, it took to page 118 (Sophie trying to save the school kids) for there to be strong forward motion. The plot was muddled throughout and not tied up too neatly at the end. Maybe because the whole thing is just some Jungian shared dream? It was all Dahl’s dream, obviously, since he is the BFG who, we discover at the end, is writing the story. Obviously, right? RIGHT? 

So although I found the book creepily Freudian/Jungian, and although I did enjoy the wild creativity and fun use of language, I do hope Dahl got himself some good psychotherapy. 

As an aside, I loved the bit about why there are blank pages at the back of an atlas—to draw the places no one has ever been. Isn’t that a metaphor for writing? And for life itself? 

A second aside: Dahl and I share a birthday! Which just so happens to be TODAY! Happy birthday to us!

Third aside: affiliate link up there, yo. 

Witness this!

Witness by Karen Hesse. 2002.

This book was made up of poems from different points of view and usually in differing and discernible voices all telling one story.

The plot, though ... the story seemed to end at the wrong spot. It ended with one of the secondary (even tertiary) characters, with a sort of twilight zone “dun dun dun!” campfire ghost story ending. The whole meaning of the book was lost.

I saw little Esther’s attempt to take the Heaven Train (i.e. kill herself) as the primary focal point of the book—she’s certainly the only character the reader ends up knowing intimately and loving thoroughly. Yet this scene happens mid-way in. The scene seen by the author (I’d guess) as “climax” is her father getting shot. Why is this climactic? We don’t know nor really care about her father, except in how his death might hurt Esther.

So, today's lesson boys and girls, is this: end a book with something directly related to the character we come to love most. And the most emotionally charged moment maybe ought to be the climax? Or that the emotional intensity must escalate to the climax. So if the reader is choking on sobs at the half-way point, she sure better be all-out weeping by the end. Dénouement is allowable, but it really can’t take up half the book (and the “shooting” scene, like I said, wasn’t resolution—it was escalation/climax, except it ended up being anticlimactic related to the Heaven Train in the middle).

A Compass of Gold, off to a Good Start

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman.

The power of a great opening: Pullman’s The Golden Compass begins, “Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen.” We see a bit of each method of creating conflict. We know Lyra only by name, but it’s a lovely name, likeable and not quite ordinary. We sense that Lyra is also a likeable and not quite ordinary girl. The hook in this case involves action—Lyra is sneaking around in the dark—which provides obvious mystery: why is she sneaking? What on earth is a daemon? Pullman makes us wait.

Pullman continues to keep us waiting. He follows his opening line with a smidge of description—Lyra lives in a fancy place—and then provides a glimpse into Lyra’s character when she taps crystal to hear it ring. She’s curious and playful, yet her response to her worrywart daemon of, “They’re making too much noise to hear from the kitchen,” shows Lyra as a sensible, independent girl.

In effect, we are dumped straight into the action in a strange world. Lyra snoops where girls aren’t allowed, but before our curiosity about Lyra and her world can be sated, she must duck into hiding to avoid detection. Yet more questions arise as she overhears a plot to murder her uncle. Lyra’s character has heart, we have ample hook to propel us forward, and Pullman gives us abundant mystery. If we want answers, we must read on.

The end of the book continues with questions. Lyra rescues a group of children, but the story continues into the next book. Of the three, I thought the first two fit together best. The whole world of the dead/souls/something like that in the third was bizarre and hard to follow.

The Gift of Suffering

The Giver by Lois Lowry. 1993.

Lowry opens The Giver with a description of fear and immediately cements the unusualness of the world she’s created as well as giving us insight into the young protagonist, Jonas. She also is so deliciously good at creating a Utopia that seems wonderful, at the start, and only slowly becomes sinister. It’s not at all obvious, unlike, say, Wrinkle in Time, that this Community is full of darkness. Especially chilling is the parallel between Lowry’s Community and that created in Hitler Youth.

• Emotions are real and honest. I think it was Stephen King who wrote that the key to creating fear was to let characters respond in a realistic way to unrealistic situations (something like that). Lowry does exactly that. Jonas has the same doubts and confusions any of us would have given his situation, which makes the story all the more believable.
• Last residency some of us were discussing the ending, some saying that Lowry was shocked that anyone thought Jonas and Gabe died in the snow. They’re riding down to an “Elsewhere that held their future and their past.” Throughout, Elsewhere has been the place people go when they’re released. I.e., when they die. So where else but into death was Jonas headed? I always assumed the boys died. Yet reading the book again, I see the ambiguity. My only point is that clarity would have been far, far more satisfying. I spent 10+ years being disappointed and peeved by the end to the book, while now I’m just bewildered.

How to Build a Mosque

Mosque by David Macaulay. Houghton Mifflin, 2003.

The intro is sort of dry, but the melding of fiction and nonfiction with fascinating detail on construction held my interest to the end. Yet why was there such a need for bathing? (I know it’s ritual bathing, but the text doesn’t tell me this.) There’s a ton of info on engineering, but not much on culture. The how is thorough; the why is underdeveloped.

Babe, Such a Gallant Pig

Babe: The Gallant Pig by Dick King-Smith. 1983.

The style is hysterically understated and plays off stereotypes of the gumpy farmer and meddlesome wife. I found the proper usage of bitch for female dog interesting. I do wonder if dam might have been substituted? (Can dogs be dam and sire or is it just bitch and dog?).

• Charlotte’s Web feel. The animals have personalities. But while Charlotte saves Wilbur, Babe saves himself. And his surviving the holidays isn’t so much of an issue. It’s more about Babe learning to herd sheep.
• The action reads a bit like a screenplay, stripped down to necessity.
• Love the little details like “Shepherding suited Farmer Hogget—there was no waste of words in it” (55).
• In the final challenge, rain stops and a single shaft of sunlight flows down. Fabulous use of atmosphere to add drama.

Exquisite Poetry for Two Voices

Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices by Paul Fleischman. 1988

This is a Charlotte Zolotow book, which is no surprise. Such lovely language, metaphor, all the poetic devices one learns in school. I don’t read music, but this reads like I imagine music to be read—heard in my head, both voices blending, pulling apart, coming together.

Fleischman made use of point of view by getting in the heads of bugs. Most vivid, the differing views of life between worker and queen bee (even if a mite predictable). And on the more unexpected side, the water strider analogy to the biblical walking on water miracle was beautifully done.

Secrets, Platforms, Bizarre Britishisms

The Secret of Platform 13 by Eva Ibbotson. Dutton, 1994.

Rich and fun fantasy. Ibbotson starts off with quaint Brittishisms, ghosts, and secret doors to other worlds. What’s not to love? Loads of fantastical invention and a heavy dose of political correctness. Atmospheric with a distant 3rd person narrator, similar in voice to others like Charlotte’s Web, Tuck Everlasting, a storybook voice that’s lolling and gentle, saying “come along for a story, children.”

• There’s no mad rush to get the action going at the start. Too bad children are so impatient and discriminating that they won’t bother with such a slow beginning (note sarcasm). In my experience, children are far more tolerant of lousy writing/boring books than adults. Not that this is lousy or boring. Much to the contrary.
• Wonderful use of jump cuts/scene breaks and such, and phrases like pancakes “warm as puppies,” make me salivate. 
• A strange, Dursley-like character (Harry Potter). 
• Deft use of POV. Note the selection from pp. 91-92: We were in a rather distant 3rd narration, then a new paragraph, “Raymond was still staring at the little creature. No one at school had anything like that. He’d be able to show it off to everyone. Paul had a tree frog and Derek had a grass snake, but this would beat them all.” Clearly diving into Raymond’s head, then pulling back out again with the voice of another character speaking. 
• Handbags of Harpies. HA! And the various scenes weave together brilliantly. Mrs. T’s perfume down the drain giving away her location, etc. All around fun!

Collection of Poems, linked

Carver: A Life in Poems by Marilyn Nelson. Front Street, 2001.

Would it be admitting ignorance to say I don’t like poems I don’t understand? I mean, I sort of understand “The Perceiving Self,” but I mostly don’t. It makes me wonder if the purpose of poetry is to communicate, to feel smart, to make your reader feels unsmart ...

“[T]ouched our stamens/pleasured us with pollen.” Obviously sexual, but what to do with a lynching? Other images in that one confuse me too. Am I too dense to read poetry? 

I do love the artistry and form of this book: poems from various perspectives all drawing a picture of Carver and the world in which he lived. The sad truth: I had to Google Carver to make sense of the poems (I dimly remembered his name being related to peanuts from some lesson in preschool—my lord, preschool!). Thank God for Wikipedia. 

I wish Nelson had found some way to contextualize the poems for those of us who are a. young (since this is in the junior nonfiction section), b. products of the modern educational system, c. missed a lot of school (literally or metaphorically) even if a and b are not the case, or d. are just plain ignorant. 

Lovely words, lovely poems, but the poems are sort of like single petals of a yellow flower. We don’t know if we have a daisy or a dandelion. And how we understand and appreciate the flower depends upon where we find it: a garden, the lawn, a clogged downspout. “His students/see the light of genius/through the dusky window of his skin”—beautiful petals, but of what? Where? Many stunning poems like, “From an Alabama Farmer.” But the title says it’s a life in poems. Somehow I missed the life, found only poems.

Nelson's other book for this age group however, Fortune's Bones, is among my favorites of all time.

On Homesick

Homesick: My Own Story by Jean Fritz. 1982.

The story of Fritz’s childhood in China. A memoir for children full of fun stories and written in an accessible fairy-tale tone. Rich detail, vivid storytelling, a likable protagonist. There is very little difference between this work of nonfiction and many of the novels I’ve read. Though I’ve yet to read a quote as fun as this one:

“A cat is a cat. There are no foreign cats, no Chinese cats, no capitalist cats, no Communist cats. Just cats.” --Yan Sze-Fu

Love it! Although I'd guess my cat is a Union cat ...

Bizarre and Creepy: Perfect Middle Grade

Skellig by David Almond. 1998.

Chapter 1 thoughts: The protagonist is sort of grouchy, but the toilet in the dining room made me laugh. Now on to the rest of the book:

• Psychological honesty: Michael’s emotions aren’t simple I like this I don’t like that. He can love and hate simultaneously, feel compassion for and horror at the creature in the garage at the same time. So often I’ve had critique partners comment on my work—"But he called the baby stupid and now he’s praying for her to get better? Inconsistent!" they cry. When are we ever, any of us, consistent? 
• Description: “The red sauce below his lips was like congealed blood” (29), or, “I thought of his wings and of the baby’s fluttering heart” (99). It just doesn’t get better than that! 
• The art teacher says you get better at drawing by drawing. The same goes for writing—Michael got braver and bolder, and I think Almond shows incredible bravery and boldness by writing this book that any (most, anyhow) writing teacher would dismiss as too bizarre for words. Owl-angel-men, Persephone, dying infants, and adorable britishism like blinking and bloody and knocky down. 
• Repetition of ideas, phrases, the whole is unpredictable as anything, yet feels choreographed, like a complicated and beautiful dance. 
• Enough of these books that make me cry like a blinking baby!!!!

Classics of Moles and Rats

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. 1908.

So Pooh-like with that quaint voice and silly words and lots of happy adverbs (see, sometimes adverbs can be good!). Mole meanders aimlessly and is bewitched, entranced, fascinated by a bubbling, gurgling, chuckling river. What wonderful words! Never mind that Moles are blind; I could eat it up.

I was more than a little shocked to read Rat’s line, “Stop it, you silly ass!” on page 17, however.

Despite the lovely turns of phrase and the appeal of classic literature, I don’t favor talking animal stories. I’ve started and stopped this one every few months since entering the program (not to mention the times I’ve tried to read it in previous years). I’m just not a child at heart, I suppose. I did glimpse an interesting parallel to some of these characters and Tolkien’s Hobbits—maybe this was a source of inspiration for Tolkien, or just a similarity because of the tone, but the homey little Mole is rather Hobbit-like, and his crusty friends reminiscent of Frodo’s mishmash of companions.

A Book to Cry Over

Morning Girl by Michael Dorris. Hyperion, 1992.

Dorris hooks the reader with voice and woos her with lovely prose: personification like “the day welcomed me, brushed my hair with its breeze, greeted me with its songs” (5). The alternating POV chapters are interesting and risky for this age group. Yet I found the voice of each chapter distinct.

On pg. 27 Star Boy (brother to Morning Girl) is hiding after losing his father’s canoe. He thinks, “I closed my eyes and concentrated on being a rock. I sank so deep into the ground that no digging stick could roll me from my hole. I became so hard that no tree or bush could take root on my surface.” It’s vivid, clear, yet develops setting and character beautifully. He goes on to describe things he can feel as a rock that he can’t as a boy, like shadows moving over him.

And Morning Girl wanting to see her face, and finding “two pretty girls” in her father’s eyes made me cry.

• This is a book to dissect for theme. Names, self-knowing, understanding. 
• The epilogue from Columbus is chilling to my very soul. Ugh. It went from tender family story to horror novel in that final, masterful page.

Long Titles, Short Books

I Thought My Soul Would Rise and Fly: The Diary of Patsy, a Freed Girl by Joyce Hansen. Scholastic, 1997.

Delightful voice and vivid research. The research shows and adds layers to the text. The diary form is highly personal, sort of like a verse novel. I found the premise compelling but the setting just seemed a little claustrophobic. I guess that’s the downfall of a diary novel—you’re stuck in one person’s head, and if that person is a girl who stutters and limps and doesn’t leave the plantation, well, you’re limited to her experience. For a book in a series, however, this one was far and away beyond what I expected. Not formulaic, and with a fabulous historical note at the end with photos and tons of detail.

Rats of NIMH and other Rodent Themed Books

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O'Brien. 1971.

There’s a certain sameness to rodent-themed books, I’ve noticed. Velveteen Rabbit (ok, not quite, but ...), Ralph and the Motorcycle, Borrowers. Most have a lot of “critter skittering about for food” along with lots of scurrying, scraping and scampering. This one is the same, and the anthropomorphism (done well) is the hook here. On page 21 we get a description of Dragon, the cat: “He was enormous, with a huge, broad head and large mouth full of curving fangs, needle sharp.” Vivid, as a cat would be to a mouse, then the monstrous and mythical take over, “He had seven claws on each foot and a thick, furry tail, which lashed angrily from side to side.” Other thoughts—

• Honor and respect are heavy themes. In the first scene with the crow, throughout. The nature of true nobility. And a great quote from p. 32, “All doors are hard to unlock until you have the key.” 
• Little details like the smell of frost melting make the reading delightful. Twists and turns in plot too, like the drugged cat, the backstory, overhearing the family planning to poison the rats. There’s adventure and death/violence on a level that would not be possible for this age group with human characters.

Don't Judge a Book by the Cover

A Single Shard by Linda Sue Park. Clarion, 2001.

Tree-ear’s yearning starts out a little rough—not deftly drawn—but soon I’m sucked into the story. I found this similar to Little House and Birchbark House, but about a boy and a different sort of land. The plot is stronger, more reminiscent of Katherine Paterson’s Sign of the Chrysanthemum. The voice is quite folktale, timeless, and the plot is tight but with a good many twists at the end. A stunning example of Park’s deft writing comes on page 52:

“The gentle curves of the vase, its mysterious green color. The sharp angles of the plum twigs, their blackness stark amid the airy white blossoms. The work of a human, the work of nature; clay from the earth, a branch from the sky. A kind of peace spread through Tree-ear, body and mind, as if while he looked at the vase and its branch, nothing could ever go wrong in the world.” 

Random note: the cover on my copy sucked big time: a scowling androgynous Asian with a wicker backpack against a sickly orange backdrop. Yick.

Twice Read, Nonce Enjoyed

Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell. 1960.

Interesting opening, full of subtle tension. But what is the narrator dying from want of? What’s the promise of the first page? (Hahaha!) Ok, she obviously wants peace for her people and the reader suspects that the visitors will bring calamity (which they do).

The writing is not especially engaging. It rather gets out of the way quickly so the strong plot can take over, though I can’t figure out why the wild dogs only killed Ramo and didn’t eat him.

O’Dell faces the same problem that Tom Hanks faced—how to make scenes interesting and “quick” when there’s only one person? Hanks, in whatever movie that was, turns a volleyball into a god, but O’Dell tries to tap into the cultural rather than survivalist part of the story (unlike say, My Side of the Mountain, Hatchet, others). I bet a formula could be made for these books, something like step 1: isolate the protagonist (plane crash, wild dogs, running away, etc.), step 2: make weapons! Cool!, step 3: give the protagonist something really big to hunt and some wild animal intent on hunting them, step 4: every isolated survivalist needs a volleyball/pet ... and so on.

And in the end, what leads our young protagonist to let down her guard and engage the stranger (the stranger: step 11)? Female vanity. Ah, to be a man writing about women in 1960! She succumbs to a compliment about her skirt, then to a necklace.

Details are rich like Little House and others, and this gives a fascinating glimpse into history and life from an unusual perspective, but I didn’t find the survival story any more compelling now than I did when I read the book (laboriously) in 6th grade. Not my favorite by far.

A Spider and a Pig

Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White. 1952.

Similar in voice to Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting, White’s is written in a pleasantly distant third person with an air of mystery, like the story that is unfolding is Very Important. Some things of note:

• It opens with dialogue, which pulls the reader in immediately. Uncommon for the times, I think?
• It confronts death quite realistically and without squeamishness. Yes, pigs become bacon and Christmas ham. Yet one pig will be spared.
• A strong sense of sentimentality runs throughout. Sort of like Charlotte’s character herself.

Total aside: I played Fern in my fourth grade production of Charlotte's Web. I had to sing to a stuffed pig, and during dress rehearsal I went missing for a few minutes, so the Green-Room-Nazi-Mom kept a strict eye on me. She made me miss an entrance during the performance because she didn't believe me when I said I needed to be on stage. Funny what odd details make an impression.

I also had to kiss Wilbur (John VanDop, who I loved desperately) on his sweet little head at the end. I'm so glad he wasn't turned into bacon!

Aesop Rewrites: So lovely and Gentle

Aesop’s Fables by Jerry Pinkney. 2000.

Compression and storytelling meld with just enough detail to set the stage and uphold the story. I found a mix of familiar and more obscure stories (i.e. “The cat, the Rooster and the Mouse”). All included small details that made the story more vivid, like garlands of flowers around the heifer’s neck. This is a compilation, so there's not much to say on the whole. A few notes on individual stories:

• “Shepherd Boy and the Wolf”: I think the story is more powerful when the boy gets eaten, but hey, it’s Pinkney’s book. 
• But there was a mixed meaning on p. 44. “Those who complain most often suffer least.” Maybe better would be: those who suffer least often complain the most. If it were a story of a squeaky wheel getting oiled, then the moral of “complain to get what you want” could come out of the current phrasing.
• Some are hysterically funny. Like a drowning boy being lectured—“there’s a time and a place for everything.” No kidding! It makes me wonder what Dahl or Edward Lear would do with these tales.

Strange Little Family

The Animal Family by Randall Jarrell. 1965.

What a strange book. Jarrell’s is the story of a hunter and mermaid who fall in love and make a family from a bear cub, a lynx, and an orphaned boy. The story is uncannily realistic for all the lack of realism (a mermaid!). Bears act like bears, lynxes like lynxes, yet they live together in harmony. This strange combination of realism and surrealism makes for an unpredictable, fascinating, slightly unnerving little story.