Mad Money

I much enjoyed Book Moot's report from the front lines of the school book fair:

My favorite money is "kid money" because it comes from under the bed, from the piggy bank, or from down in the sofa cushions. This is wadded-up, folded-up, scrunched-up and twisted-up currency in bills, quarters, dimes and pennies. It comes through the door in ziplock bags or from inside their shoes.

You haven't lived until you've watched a child shake money out of the toe of their Nikes which they then hand you to count.

The mere mention of money gives me an excuse to quote what The Emerald City of Oz (1910) says about the economic system of L. Frank Baum's magical country:

There were no poor people in the Land of Oz, because there was no such thing as money, and all property of every sort belonged to the Ruler. The people were her children, and she cared for them.

Each person was given freely by his neighbors whatever he required for his use, which is as much as any one may reasonably desire. Some tilled the lands and raised great crops of grain, which was divided equally among the entire population, so that all had enough. There were many tailors and dressmakers and shoemakers and the like, who made things that any who desired them might wear. Likewise there were jewelers who made ornaments for the person, which pleased and beautified the people, and these ornaments also were free to those who asked for them.

Each man and woman, no matter what he or she produced for the good of the community, was supplied by the neighbors with food and clothing and a house and furniture and ornaments and games. If by chance the supply ever ran short, more was taken from the great storehouses of the Ruler, which were afterward filled up again when there was more of any article than the people needed.

Every one worked half the time and played half the time, and the people enjoyed the work as much as they did the play, because it is good to be occupied and to have something to do. There were no cruel overseers set to watch them, and no one to rebuke them or to find fault with them. So each one was proud to do all he could for his friends and neighbors, and was glad when they would accept the things he produced.

You will know by what I have here told you, that the Land of Oz was a remarkable country. I do not suppose such an arrangement would be practical with us, but Dorothy assures me that it works finely with the Oz people.

Gallons of ink (and now millions of pixels) have been spilled trying vainly to wrest a coherent politico-economic allegory out of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, yet critics pay little heed to what Baum went on to write about how a utopian society works.

What Not to Write

Author Darcy Pattison went to an Arkansas SCBWI meeting and took helpful notes on Dial editor Liz Waniewski's most-often-received picture book topics. They should look familiar to anyone who's handled the slush pile at other children's publishers, or newcomers' submissions at an SCBWI conference. To whit:

• First Day at School
• Cleaning up your room
• Tooth fairy
• Christmas/Halloween
• Wanting a pet
• Dealing with a disability
  
• "Hi! My name is. . . and I am seven years old!"
• Visiting Grandma and Grandpa
• New baby
• Barnyard stories
• Bedtime stories
• Personal hygiene

Darcy responded cheekily by naming classic picture books on each of those topics. But the fact that there are classics out there just raises the question of whether we need more. If every American family already owns a copy of Goodnight Moon and every Canadian family a copy of Love You Forever, don't we have a lifetime supply?

What I find most striking about this list is how boring most of the topics seem, not simply from the perspective of a junior editor shoveling away the slush, but also from the likely perspective of a preschooler. "Daddy, why can't I read about personal hygiene? All we have are princess and pirate books." "Trucks are boring, Mama! I want a story about cleaning my room!" "I don't care about talking to Grandma on the phone. I want you to read to me about visiting someone else's Grandma!"

Of course, there are still plenty of good, entertaining stories that would fall under Waniewski's topics. Darcy's own Nineteen Girls and Me happens to be about starting kindergarten--but it's an exaggerated, imaginative tale, and the hero has an unusual reason to be anxious that stands for more common kindergarten anxieties. It's not "what exactly will happen and how much fun you'll have when you start school next week."

Even such dramatic topics as wanting a pet or not wanting a new baby (never seems to be the other way around, does it?), which hold great interest for kids at particular times, seem to stem from the lessons that adults want to impart. And the appearance of barnyard stories on a list created by a largely urban society hints that people are submitting stories based on what they think children's books should be about.

Honestly, grown-ups, when was the last time you enjoyed a book on dental care, the first day at a new job, or turning thirty-five? How often do you browse the Animal Husbandry section at Borders?

Poppies...Poppies...

Even experts in concocting fantasies can go too far and come up with magical devices that no one would believe in but themselves. Take this dispatch today from the Associated Press:

An odd-looking Canadian quarter with a bright red flower was the culprit behind a false espionage warning from the Defense Department about mysterious coins with radio frequency transmitters, The Associated Press has learned.

The harmless "poppy quarter" was so unfamiliar to suspicious U.S. Army contractors traveling in Canada that they filed confidential espionage accounts about them. The worried contractors described the coins as "filled with something man-made that looked like nano-technology," according to once-classified U.S. government reports and e-mails obtained by the AP.

The silver-colored 25-cent piece features the red image of a poppy--Canada's flower of remembrance--inlaid over a maple leaf. The unorthodox quarter is identical to the coins pictured and described as suspicious in the contractors' accounts.

The supposed nano-technology on the coin actually was a protective coating the Royal Canadian Mint applied to prevent the poppy's red color from rubbing off. The mint produced nearly 30 million such quarters in 2004 commemorating Canada's 117,000 war dead.

"It did not appear to be electronic (analog) in nature or have a power source," wrote one U.S. contractor, who discovered the coin in the cup holder of a rental car. "Under high power microscope, it appeared to be complex consisting of several layers of clear, but different material, with a wire-like mesh suspended on top."

The confidential accounts led to a sensational warning from the Defense Security Service, an agency of the Defense Department, that mysterious coins with radio frequency transmitters were found planted on U.S. contractors with classified security clearances on at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006 as the contractors traveled through Canada.

And the poppy was presumably a sly saboteur's reference to the first President Bush's nickname.

New Way to Read The Wizard of Oz

Looking for Oz content, I'm taking a tip from Blair Frodelius's Ozmapolitan update and highlighting this unusual version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

It's a hand-drawn artwork depicting the main characters of the MGM movie on their way to the Emerald City, composed entirely of the letters of chapters 1-11. At the right is a blurry thumbnail of the upper left corner, where the book begins. The artist cleverly avoids the discrepancy of the book's silver shoes and the movie's ruby slippers by not showing Dorothy's footwear at all.

Most of the other posters created in this format address adult concerns, but there is a page of nursery rhymes.

Kidlitting the Blogosphere

Elizabeth Bird's article "Blogging the Kidlitosphere" appears in the May 2007 issue of The Horn Book and, most appropriately, online. She includes remarks from many fellow bloggers, some of whom know how to be succinct and some of whom, well, don't.

Legion of Frankensteins—but no Peter Boyle

David Lee Ingersoll offers a step-by-step look at how he created his Legion of Frankensteins drawing. Blogs working as they do, you can start at the top and work backward in time, or focus your eyes somewhere else, scroll down to the bottom, and catch his thoughts on Mary Shelley's novel before moving upwards to the art.

Writing for Youth Isn't All Pretty, Either

From the local newspaper, here's an article about Karen Day (the pretty part of this photo by Mark Thompson) and our writing-critique group.

Karen's first novel, Tall Tales, comes out next week. Among other members of the group, Mitali Perkins has a new picture book, Rickshaw Girl, and the first of a new series of novels, First Daughter. Steve Smith's working on a junior version of his fun board game, Word Sweep. Laya Steinberg is trying novels after her picture books Thesaurus Rex and All Around Me I See. And there will be more to come!

Alice Doesn't Live There Anymore

In The King in the Window, Adam Gopnik appropriates Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass. I don't mean he alludes to the earlier book, or brings in some details in homage the way Cornelia Funke's Inkheart makes use of Tinkerbell, or even creates a sequel like the several about Peter Pan.

Rather, this fantasy purports to tell us the truth behind Carroll's Alice stories. That seem superfluous, but could be entertaining if executed gracefully. Alas, the Carroll connection is just another ingredient that seems tossed clumsily into an overly flavored stew.

On page 165 we discover that young hero Oliver goes to sleep to the sound of Lewis Carroll's Alice books because he's an insomniac. On page 22, Oliver does have trouble falling asleep. That would be a perfect place to establish his insomnia and listening habit, but Gopnik skips the opportunity, leaving the impression that his protagonist is unusually sleepless because of the magical events he's just experienced. Oliver falls asleep with no problem on page 99 and page 134.

On page 131 Oliver notices that his elderly friend Mrs. Lucy Pearson has a spoon with the initials "LL" engraved on it. She also reads Through the Looking-Glass in French. After many episodes, on page 269, he guesses that her name was originally Lucy Liddell, and she confirms, "Yes, I am Alice's granddaughter."

This opens the door to revealing, supposedly, what the playing cards and Tweedledum and Tweedledee and Humpty Dumpty actually were. Naturally, Gopnik tells us that the "truth" is darker than the books that Charles Dodgson wrote in an attempt to soften Alice's traumatized memories. As in The Looking-Glass Wars, the unsettling power of nonsense isn't allowed to exist on its own; there must be malevolence behind it.

But that's not all. In Chapter 12 Mrs. Pearson returns to the small house near Oxford where Alice Liddell and she had both grown up. By going through the mirror there, she actually meets her grandmother, returned to a catatonic girlhood.

As long as we're talking about what actually happened, Alice Liddell and her sisters grew up in the deanery of Christ Church College, Oxford. (She spent summers at a house in northern Wales.) I've had the honor of staying overnight in that deanery. It's not a house; it's part of a massive stone building with its own crenellated towers. Check out this virtual tour of the college.

But for the purposes of this novel, I can accept that Gopnik's fictionalized Alice is different from the real Alice, just as the girl John Tenniel drew doesn't look like young Alice Liddell. As long as The King in the Window has an internal logic, then it can stand on its own as entertaining fiction.

But the story doesn't have an internal logic. If Lucy Liddell changed her last name to Pearson when she married, then her grandmother Alice and her mother would have changed their names, too. Mrs. Pearson would never have had the last name Liddell, and Oliver would not be able to deduce that she had. Dodgson was an expert in both logic and nonsense, and he would never have stood for such a mix.

Cracks in The King in the Window

In his dedication of The King in the Window, Adam Gopnik thanks his son for giving "the author the finest piece of editorial advice he has ever been given: 'Just bring the cool bits closer together.'"

That is fine advice, but I wish Gopnik had received a couple of other types of editorial support. First, for a high-profile book from an established house (Miramax), The King in the Window has a dismaying number of typographical errors, especially in punctuation (pages 42, 166, 252, 272, 280, 311, 394).

Second, Gopnik should have pruned his ideas; many imaginative and energetic authors need editors who say, "This is interesting, but save it for your next book." The King in the Window has much too much to keep track of. Its details don't fit together, and in a fantasy that supposedly reveals the unseen way the world works, in the end all the details should fit together with a satisfying click.

Instead, on page 332 our young hero Oliver sees past the villainous Master of Mirrors's disguise because "He couldn't use a metaphor. He couldn't even understand one." But back on page 226, that same Master of Mirrors told his followers:

"The terrible burden of wanting that sat inside you, burning like a coal in your brain--it is gone! . . . You have been released from this parasite, this tumor, that filled your life with the pain of longing and wanting. . . . Feel the lightness of your liberty!"

I count three metaphors and one simile in those sentences.

Oliver himself suffers from inconsistent or unrealistic characterization. Born twelve years before in America, he's lived with his parents in Paris since he was three, going to French schools. Yet his "best friend" is Charlie Gronek from New Jersey. How many real children sustain a close relationship with a preschool playmate into adolescence--when they're separated by three thousand miles of ocean? (There's no hint the boys are cousins or the like, regularly thrown together.) And even after nine years in France, Oliver feels so alienated that he's made no friends at school--how troubled is he?

Well, he is a weird kid. On page 6, Gopnik says Oliver wished he "walked home every day arm in arm with a chain of very fashionable people." Twelve-year-old boys don't care about "fashionable." They care about "cool," which is determined by a much smaller, closer set of people. (Unless, perhaps, Oliver has truly turned French.)

On page 99, Oliver sends Charlie an email that says, in passing, "The chess move is QXE4. I think that's checkmate." That's the first mention of chess, and it comes a bit late for a new theme (even in a 400-page book). Chess periodically pops up again in the book, and on page 314 the narrator tells us Oliver "had always been bad at chess." So Oliver chooses to play an older, savvier boy at chess, and beats him, but has "always been bad"? How bad must Charlie be?

On page 191 Charlie from New Jersey is surprised and upset that Parisians don't serve Coca-Cola with ice cubes. That's a perfectly fine observation about the backwardness of Europeans in general, but since Gopnik has told us that Charlie had visited just the year before, he really should have noticed that custom already.

There's a strange moment on pages 168-70 when Oliver has been told off to find "the mirror of Luc Gauric," and he doesn't even know what it is. He's surprised to learn hear Neige, the daughter of his building's superintendent, say:

"It's in my room. . . . You seem surprised. Why? Because I'm a girl? Because I'm the gardienne's daughter? . . . I am a crystallomancer. I see into glass, and use my crystal to fight the master. . . . But you looked right past us. . . . We were poor and servile and you never guessed."

And Gopnik tells us, "Oliver sighed again at his own stupidity."

But it isn't stupidity, or class prejudice, or sexism, to be surprised that the magical thing you must find but can't even identify happens to be in the building where you live. After all, that sort of fortunate coincidence only happens in fantasies or badly plotted novels. And since Oliver's never heard of a crystallomancer, there's no logical reason why he should have figured out Neige was one.

Oliver certainly doesn't need to learn valuable lessons about respecting a girl with less money. Through the whole book so far, he's been moping about being in love with Neige and not being able to talk as they used to. Nothing he's said or thought has hinted at prejudice. Yet here he must sigh "at his own stupidity."

This little lesson on the danger of class prejudice is even stranger given the scene that immediately follows. It tells us that all the clochards of Paris ("old men, with long beards and matted hair, who live on the streets. They drink a lot.") are part of a mystical order of guardians who deliberately keep themselves dirty and stinky. So not to worry about them--they like it!

And when we reach the point where everything should click together, page 405 brings us this summation from Oliver:

"I think I figured out why everyone involved--you know, the Watchful, and the Witty, and the Wise--why they all begin with a 'W.' . . . It's Double-U. Double you. It's what you see when you look into a mirror or a window. A double you: the part that's really there plus this other you that lies beyond. . . ."

That would seem more meaningful if this story hadn't taken place in Paris, based on French monarchical history, with most of the conversations conducted in French. Not only do the words Watchful, Witty, and Wise not begin with W in French, but the rare French letter "double-vais" doesn't lend itself to the pretentious pun.

As I said, someone should have sat down with Gopnik and said, "Save some of this for your next book."

TOMORROW: Alice doesn't live there anymore.

Little Griffin

I read Saving the Griffin, by Kristin Wolden Nitz, because for several years I've been working and reworking a novel (originally a cycle of stories, hence the reworking) that would share two of its three Library of Congress cataloguing-in-publication subjects:

1. Griffins--Fiction.
2. Brothers and sisters--Fiction.
3. Italy--Fiction.

Nitz's website discusses her inspiration for the book during a stay in Italy (also the setting for her first novel, Defending Irene). Although she doesn't say it, I suspect that observations of her siblings and/or kids were also crucial. The psychological dance among sister and brothers of different ages is nicely observed, and the strongest part of the book.

On the fantasy side, there's almost no magic besides the baby griffin. We see a portal to the griffins' world, but don't enter it or learned why it opened. The plot about what kids do when they find a strange creature is straight from E.T., but those kids are never in real danger and never have to sacrifice much. What Ellen Howard has called "the price of fantasy" is very low in this tale.

At one point protagonist Kate critiques her little brother Michael's choice to name the little griffin "Grifonino"; she says that's like calling a young cat "Kitty," a generic term. That's also an apt metaphor for Saving the Griffin. It's an undemanding tale, pretty much exactly what one would expect.