Tag Archives: Ian Falconer

Ruby Reads 22:

Posted on 30 January 2021 | 5 comments

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted about books read with my granddaughter. Here’s a beginning catch-up.

Dinner with Olivia (Simon & Schuster 2009, based on the TV series, adapted by Emily Sollinger, illustrated by Guy Wolek)

Neither Ruby nor her grandparents knew there was a TV series featuring Olivia, and at first I was wary of this knock-off of Ian Falconer’s wonderful books: as befits children’s TV, the illustration style is a lot cruder than Falconer’s New Yorkish elegance. But it turns out the book is lovely. Olivia goes to her posh friend Francine’s place for dinner. At first she is in awe, and mildly ashamed of the messiness of her own family, especially her little brothers. But once she has experienced the rule-bound life of Francine’s family, not to mention the Brussels sprouts, she – and Francine – realise how excellent it is to slurp spaghetti sauce and occasionally have a meatball bounce to the floor.

Alison Lester, Hello Little Babies (OUP 1985)

Like Alison Lester’s Clive Eats Alligators, this follows a number of children in different activities. This time the children are babies, of a range of ethnicities. Ruby is besotted with her little brother, and with babies in general – at the museum, the exhibit that held her attention was the diorama of baby dinosaurs hatching from their eggs. An added attraction in this book is that one of the babies is named Ruby.

Sally Lloyd-Jones and Sue Heap, How to Be a Baby, by Me, The Big Sister (Schwartz & Wade Books 2007)

Much loved by Ruby, this mocks the narrator’s baby brother for his comparative helplessness. At least, we assume the baby is male, because that’s what Ruby’s baby brother Charlie is. We first read this before he was born. It has become much more popular since he became a reality. I’m not entirely comfortable with the book’s rampant condescension, but I think Ruby can tell it’s joking, and she particularly likes the last pages, where the big sister looks forward to the time when the baby will be as tall as her and able to play with her.

Maurice Sendak, In the Night Kitchen (©1970, HarperCollins Publishers 1988)

Ruby’s not so fond of this. I think there’s too much that she doesn’t quite recognise: the cooks in the kitchen, dough rising, New York skysline, naked boy … And the story line is weird. However, we were driving in the car the other day and she started chanting, ‘Milk in the batter! Milk in the Batter!’ So the magic of Sendak is percolating.

Margaret Mahy (writer) and Jenny Williams (illustrator), A Lion in the Meadow (©1969, re-illustrated edition ©1986, Picture Puffins 1989)

We picked this up at the Addison Road markets. Margaret Mahy is one of the great children’s writers, and Ruby has responded to this book appropriately. Like Sendak’s The Sign on Rosie’s Door, it has a brilliant mother who responds intelligently to her child’s fantasies. The difference is that is this case the child’s fantasy, of ‘a big, roaring, yellow, whiskery lion in the meadow’, turns out to be real, and so does the mother’s counter-fantasy of a dragon in a matchbox who will chase the lion away. Not a word out of place, this is irresistible, and – like the Sendak books – a pleasure to read aloud.

Libby Gleeson (writer) and Freya Blackwood (illustrator), Banjo and Ruby Red (Little Hare 2013)

A dog and a chook overcome initial relationship difficulties to become good friends. What’s not to love? We used to visit some urban chickens when Ruby was much smaller (her word for chicken as ‘babook’, but she eventually decided to go with the consensus). She still talks about the family dog who died some time ago – ‘It’s very sad.’ And relationship difficulties seem to be an issue as she spends more time in childcare. Plus, the chook’s name is Ruby Red. I don’t imagine the Australian farm setting is any more familiar to our inner-city girl than Sendak’s New York skyline, but in this case that doesn’t seem to matter.

This book is also a pleasure to read aloud, for the pathos of a scene where Ruby Red is apparently lifeless as much as for the pages where Banjo does a lot of barking and for the way movement can be traced in great arc across the pages in Freya Blackwood’s illustrations

Hello Little Babies and Banjo and Ruby Red are the first two books I’ve read for the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2021.

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Ruby Reads 21: Books lent by a blog reader

Posted on 23 May 2020 | 2 comments

I’m doing proportionally more posts about children’s books just now because this Covid lockdown is giving me more time than ever with granddaughter Ruby, and concomitantly less time for other reading.

After my last post about books I’ve read with Ruby, a lovely friend/blog reader lent me a swag of books she thought we’d enjoy. This is that swag:

Ian Falconer, Olivia Saves the Circus (Atheneum 2001)

The original Olivia has been a big success. Ruby talks about Olivia’s little brother Ian quite a lot and doesn’t want to go pink at the beach ‘like Olivia’. So this book, in which Olivia tells her class at school how she stepped into the breach when the circus performers were all sick, was very welcome. Although Ruby is a long way from getting the classroom jokes – the teacher is sceptical of Olivia’s tall tales and forces a near-admission of untruthfulness – she asks for the book on repeat. Olivia’s bold inventiveness is pretty irresistible.

Alison Lester, Clive Eats Alligators (OUP 1985)

The first spread of this gives us six children eating breakfast, all different. Turn to the next spread: the text on the left-hand page reads ‘But Clive eats alligators,’ and the image on the right shows Clive, perhaps disappointingly, eating a cereal called Alligator Pops. The book continues with Getting Dressed, Playing, Lunch, Shopping, Pets, Treats and Bedtime. Each of the seven children has a turn at having a spread to her or himself. The fun is in tracing any one of them through the book and seeing how their interests play out in the different contexts: the girl who loves horses, the bookish boy, and so on.

Shirley Hughes, Chatting (Walker Books 1994)

Shirley Hughes is one of the great children’s illustrators of the 20th century. The endpapers of this book are 18 wonderful, warm cameos of active small children, each with a present participle beneath it: laughing, aching, pushing, pouring, and so on. The body of the book picks up on one of these cameos, ‘chatting’. and rings variations on it. The first person narrator is a little girl who likes to chat, who is bored when adults chat for too long, whose mother calls her a chatterbox, whose best chats of all are with her dad when he comes to say goodnight. The illustrations are great, but not very enticing to Ruby, and the theme is a bit lost on her too, I think. (For my part, I rankled vicariously at the ‘chatterbox’ criticism.)

Vera B Williams, “More More More,” Said the Baby (Greenwillow Books 1990)

Subtitled ‘Three Love Stories’, this is exactly that. In three separate stories a small child – a toddler rather than a baby – has a great time with an adult and cries out, ‘More. More. More.’ Except , that is, for the third one, because she’s asleep and just says, ‘Mmm. Mmmm. Mmmm.’ Done in consciously arty gouache, and with attention to diversity, this is very sweet. It doesn’t have the dramatic hold of Olivia or Rosie (see below), but it’s terrific.

Ruth Krauss (writer) and Maurice Sendak (Illustrator), A Hole Is to Dig (Harper Collins 1952)

Subtitled ‘A first book of first definitions’, this is just that – a collection of definitions, mostly in the form ‘X is to y’: ‘A watch is to hear it tick,’ ‘A mountain is to go to the top,’ ‘A mountain is to go to the bottom,’ ‘A package is to look inside.’ The text is witty and charming, but what makes the book brilliant are the pen-drawing illustrations by Maurice Sendak, then 24 years old. It’s a book to treasure. Ruby doesn’t care for it at all.

Maurice Sendak, The Sign on Rosie’s Door (1960)

Stung by Ruby’s indifference to the 1952 Sendak, I retrieved this chapter book from our bookshelves, expecting it to sail right past her. The book has been on high rotation ever since.

You can see Meryl Streep reading the first half of the book at Maurice Sendak’s 80th birthday party, complete with slides of Sendak’s drawings, at this link. In that half, Rosie becomes Alinda the Lovely Lady Singer. In the second half, which is even better, she becomes Alinda the Lost Girl (‘Who lost you?’ ‘I lost myself.’) and a giant firecracker, and finally (spoiler alert) a sleepy cat. So many lines in this book make my heart sing. It was inspired by children Sendak saw playing in the street outside his window in Brooklyn, in particular the little girl who ran the show. Like Ruby, Rosie creates a lot of fun, and takes on a range of identities as she goes. I love them both.

Clive Eats Alligators is the ninth book I’ve read for the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2020.

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Ruby reads 20: Lockdown?

Posted on 13 May 2020 | 9 comments

In the mainstream narrative grandparents everywhere are pining for their socially distanced grandchildren. The Emerging Artist and I have meanwhile been quietly sailing against the current, with more contact than ever, pending our little one being rid of flu-like symptoms. She comes to our place three days a week, and our small collection of children’s books has been much called on. When Gleebooks at Dulwich Hill reopened recently, we fell on its non-virtual shelves with cries of joy and came away with arms full.

Here are some of the old and some of the new.

Libby Gleeson (writer) and Jedda Robaard (Illustrator), Soon (Little Hare 2020)

This is brand new and has already been requested/demanded many times. It may be a mistake to give a toddler who is obsessed with babies a book about waiting for a new baby to be born, but if so it’s a mistake that’s hard to resist. We wait, wait, wait. We clean, clean, clean. We paint, paint, paint. And just about all the mother mouse has to say on the subject is, ‘Soon.’ You don’t need me to tell you the ending, but I will say that it is emotionally very satisfying. Libby Gleeson’s incantatory text and Jedda Robaard’s calm, charged images make this a joy to read together. (The birth itself, like the devouring of the apple in Grug and the Big Red Apple, happens offstage.)

Ian Falconer, Olivia (Simon & Schuster 2000)

Olivia is a great artist and dancer trapped in the body of an anthropomorphised pig and the persona of a six year old girl. The back-cover praise from dame Joan Sutherland, Mikhail Baryshnikov and David Hockney, at least one of them written posthumously, are just one of the delights for adult readers. A 2 and a half year old seems to be delighted as well. Olivia argues, paints, dances, fusses about her clothes (which I’m glad to report are all bright red, no pink in sight), and is generally fabulous on pages with acres of white space.

Julia Donaldson (writer) and David Roberts (illustrator), Jack and the Flumflum Tree (Macmillan Children’s Books 2011)

We may have gleaned this from a street library a while back. In it the enormously prolific Julia Donaldson teams up with illustrator David Roberts for a quest story. Jack’s granny has spots and the only cure is the fruit of the faraway flumflum tree. Jack and friends sail away, face many challenges in which the contents of a patchwork sack come in handy. It bounces along, and ends with a terrible pun. I think Ruby likes it because it’s got sharks in it, and they’re almost as interesting as the big bad wolf or a bear.

Cressida Cowell (writer) and Neal Layton (illustrator), Emily Brown and the Thing (Hodder CHildren’s Books 2007)

Cressida Cowell wrote How to Train Your Dragon, which I haven’t had the pleasure of reading yet. She has also created a whole series of Emily Brown books: in this one, Emily Brown and her old rag rabbit Stanley keep trying to go to sleep but are kept awake by a weird creature, a ‘Thing’, who demands that they perform great feats to help him. They perform the feats – retrieving his cuddly (we say ‘blanky’) from the Dark and Scary Wood, fetching a glass of milk from the Wild and whirling Wastes, and so on. In the end Emily refuses to pander any more, and everyone gets a good sleep. We love this one.

And now a couple more Julia Donaldson titles. Is anyone else finding that her books are multiplying like mice? Nice mice, of course.

Julia Donaldson (writer) and Axel Scheffler (illustrator), The Smartest Giant in Town (Macmillan Children’s Books 2002)

Here Julia Donaldson is teamed up with Axel Scheffler, the co-creator of her most famous book, The Gruffalo.

This is a tale told in prose that allows the reader-aloud to burst into song at the end of each of its episodes. A scruffy giant wanders into town and buys a smart new outfit. Then, in fairytale rhythms, he gives one item of flash clothing after another away to animals in distress. In the end, he retrieves his scruffy old clothes from the garbage outside the clothes shop, and is reconciled to his scruffy status. But them the animals he has helped turn up and celebrate his kindness. This is amiable and charming. The text is beautifully honed, and the illustrations are full of unexpected joys – other giants can be seen among the rooftops and characters from fairytales pass the giant on the road without comment.

Meanwhile, the parents had felt the need for variation and bought a number of books online, among them:

Julia Donaldson (writer) and Axel Scheffler (illustrator), Zog (Scholastic 2016)

Told in the bouncing rhyme that I think of as Julia Donaldson’s typical mode, and which is a lot harder to do than it looks, this one plays sweet variations on the dragon theme. As young Zog learns all the basic dragon skills he is helped out by a girl who happens to turn up just as he gets into trouble. When he has to capture a princess, well, guess who turns out to be one? And when a knight comes to rescue the princess, I don’t think you’ll guess what happens, but it’s a most satisfactory ending with a most satisfactory variation on the tale’s recurring refrain.

Besides the books, there’s the scooter, the dolls, the trampoline, the cooking, the painting, the songs and the athletic challenges – all making worthwhile the weariness come 6 o’clock

Soon is the eight book I’ve read for the 2020 Australian Women Writers Challenge.

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