Category Archives: Uncategorized

Dynamic Bibliography: Eight Keys and Relish

by

Every month at the Butler Center, we have an open discussion group in which we consider three books with something in common, called Butler Book Banter. The purpose of this meeting—to discuss books in the context of others—resonates with part of Thom Barthelmess’s mission for the Butler Center: what he calls Dynamic Bibliography.

I personally think Dynamic Bibliography should be added to the Oxford English Dictionary. The concept rests in the idea that while it is important to look at an individual book, the real truth, discovery, beauty, essence, and energy of a work resides in intertextuality. How do books talk to each other? What are common themes, or how do themes resist each other or argue? What is between the lines, between the pages, between the covers of a list of books? How does a book change when you discuss it in context with different books? When we put two, or three, or four books next to each other, they certainly say something different than one that stands alone.

What’s fabulous is that what the books say is all up to the reader.

Today, I am going to attempt this concept of discussion through Dynamic Bibliography with two books, both published within the last two years. They are:

Eight Keys by Suzanne LaFleur. Published by Wendy Lamb Books, 2011.

Relish: My Life in the Kitchen by Lucy Knisley. Published by First Second, 2013.

ImageEight Keys tells the story of middle grader Elise, who is struggling between her childhood self and her impending adolescence. With a best friend who she believes to be childish, a locker partner who smashes her lunch, and two parents who died before she was three, Elise doesn’t have it easy. Then, Elise discovers a key that has her name on it in her uncle’s barn, and she enters a mystery that might finally help her come to terms with her past, her situation, and herself.

Relish: My Life in the Kitchen is a graphic novel that is not just about food, but about finding deliciousness in every aspect of life. In this memoir, Lucy tells her life story through interaction of text and illustration, and she tells it in the context of sautéed garlic mushrooms, sushi, gourmet cheese, and much more. She tells of her life as a child of divorce, her travels abroad, her time in college, and her work life, her artistic core, and her relationships. It is refreshing to read a novel about a young woman who loves food, who enjoys it, and who has a healthy relationship with it.

 

Now, at first glance, these books don’t really have much to do with each other. One is a middle grade piece of fiction, one a graphic novel memoir. One’s focus is on mystery and school life, one is on food. One is written in linear prose, the other through childhood flashbacks and illustration.

 

But, let’s take a deeper look…what do both of these books say? What do they say to each other?

 

1.)    Family. Both of these girls’ lives are connected with their families, and both in unconventional ways. Elise is raised by her aunt and uncle, and Lucy spends time going back and forth between her mom’s house in the country and her dad’s city apartment. Yet, both girls cherish their families, get upset with their families, and forgive their families. And they both need their families.

 

 

 

“I walked over to her, climbed into her lap. I’m much too big for that; hadn’t done it in years and years, couldn’t even remember doing it, really. But I sat sideways with my legs on the couch. I put my arms around her neck and rested by head on her shoulder. She slipped her arms around me and held on.”
–Eight Keys

 

“After almost eight years of living in Chicago, I realized: I’m homesick…And I missed my mom’s cooking.”

 

-Relish

 

2.)    Friends. Elise’s friendship stories play a more significant role in the plot than Lucy’s, but several of Lucy’s vignettes include friendship as a central piece of her own development. Elise’s best friend Franklin is so kind and giving that when Elise ditches his babyish ways, my goes out to him. The antithesis of friendship—bullying—is also present in Eight Keys. Maybe it’s just the bullied kid in me (I have such white skin; kids called me “Albino” and “Alien” because you could see veins in my arms), but I was surprised that bullying wasn’t part of Lucy’s story. What does the absence of bullying say about Lucy’s story? That it didn’t happen, or that it wasn’t significant?

 

“Once we got on the bus, it was totally like usual—just me and Franklin on our own, in our own seat, having our own conversation. That was how the whole school day always used to go. We didn’t really need to get to know the other kids because we had each other.”

 

-Eight Keys

 

 

 

“We ate [sweet corn on a stick] while sitting on the dusty curb, with cold grapefruit soda, making a mess of our clothes and faces.”

 

-Relish

 

3.)    Leaving Childhood behind. Adolescence was a hard, sad time for me, which is probably why coming-of-age novels are always my favorite. I see myself in them. Both of these girls struggle with questions—why is middle school so much harder than elementary? Why am I getting bad grades? Why is my dad so dang hard to get along with? Why doesn’t my family understand me? Lucy tells her story as an adult reflecting back on childhood, so her maturity bleeds through, while Elise is right in the middle of her struggle and doesn’t apologize for it. While each of these girls grow in different ways, they both find their way through the muck and become strong along the way.

 

“No one likes me because I’m friends with that dweebus Franklin. He makes me look like a baby.”

 

-Eight Keys

 

“We fought. The truth is, my dad and I are sometimes too similar—too finicky and stubborn and easily wounded—to get along all the time.”

 

-Relish

 

4.)    Self-Discovery: This is the big one. Through overcoming obstacles, reconciling the past, and facing the future with an open heart, both of these girls discover who they are. Lucy uses food as a way to illustrate her self-discovery, and this makes sense because food is all about the senses—feeling, seeing, smelling, sensing, wanting, touching, tasting. Isn’t that what adolescence is about? Dipping our fingers into adulthood, trying certain dishes and finding out that some are delicious and some are disgusting? Elise discovers herself through a gift from her father, and sees that instead of waiting to live her life until after she grows up, realizes that she’s already living it, and has been her whole life.  

 

“It could be whatever I needed it to be, whatever I wanted it to be. And the truth, I suddenly understood, was that so could I.”

 

-Eight Keys

 

“Like me, still a young woman, learning about what moves me, what I want. What I love. And doing these things with excitement, curiosity, and relish.”

 

-Relish

 

These girls are both lovable, both smart, and both grow into themselves in their respective books. I think if they were to magically appear in front of me, they would be friends. They would argue because they are both strong-headed, and they would both be protective of their own hearts.

 

But I can also see them planting a garden, Elise telling Lucy the way they do it on her farm, and Lucy returning with memories from her mother’s garden in the country.

And they’d share a tomato.

B3 suspended for April 18, 2013

by

rain spoiled my bookDue to the extraordinarily excessive and perpetual rainfall, Dominican has closed campus today and suspended all events. So, our last Butler Book Banter of the season will have to wait for another day. Check back soon for dates and titles for our fall B3 series. And don’t be a stranger!

Love, Thom

Summer and Bird

by

ImageSummer and Bird

by Catherine Catmull

Dutton, 2012

This book is a book to write about.

I first picked it up on Thom Barthelmess’s (curator of The Butler) recommendation, but was also instantly attracted to the beauty of the cover. A cream background contrasted with eerie, sharp bare tree branches echoes the themes of light and dark in the text. A giant swan opens its wings at the top of the cover, inviting you to look at the beautifully embossed, maroon, shiny cursive-like font of the title. The stark white of the back cover seems stripped of feeling, except for the back of two girls walking away, close in physical space but looking in different directions. Ingenious design here.

The text itself is lyrical, insightful, and entirely imaginative. Like Shannon Hale, Catmull pulls you slowly into her world, and in order to follow, you have to surrender your skepticism and let yourself be taken over by the lush phrases and astonishing world building. As with Neil Gaiman or Kathi Appelt, you must relinquish control let the author lead you through a story that will surely be magical, and maybe will even change you.

The plot centers on two very different sisters, Summer and Bird, who wake up one day to find their parents missing in their forest home. Softspoken, warm Summer and the young, spunky, but selfish Bird are overwhelmed with confusion, rejection, and mystery, but decide to follow a cryptic note from their mother and are drawn to the woods in search of their parents. Much like Narnia or The Looking Glass, the sisters enter into the fantasy world of Down, where they take separate, parallel journeys as they try to find their parents. Through their own experiences—Bird falling under the power of The Puppeteer, a manipulative bird who has stolen her mother’s crown, and Summer finding herself stuck in a nest high in the sky with nothing but a small egg—they find that maybe what they were searching for wasn’t necessarily their parents, but themselves. Touching on complex themes of jealousy, desire for power, betrayal, guilt, anger, the dynamic nature of family relationships, courage, inner strength, hope, and freedom, this book is mesmerizing and thought provoking. I admit that as I was reading it, I went through cycles of emotion—anger, fear, irritation, hope, joy, catharsis, and a type of tender sorrow that reaches down deep where I can feel my chest sting a bit with wonder.

Catmull writes in a third-person omniscient perspective, one that is difficult to write in and hard to keep your reader involved in, because the narrator knows every character, and can write from each of their viewpoints. Catmull, however, uses the perspective to add layer and layer upon the story, sometimes jumping in time, sometimes giving the reader secret information that Summer and Bird do not know. Abundant with the mythology of birds and elements of fairy tale, Catmull entwines sections of her story like a skilled weaver, leaving her reader with a one-of-a-kind, extraordinary piece of art.

An eloquent, magical, unsettling, brave debut novel, this is one you want to read.

“All their lives, Bird had been the difficult one, the unmanageable child, and Summer the good girl who could always be relied on. But Summer could see that Bird had always found her own story and chosen to follow it, and Summer envied that. Most of all, she envied the magnetic bird-soul that had told Bird what to do.”

~from the text

Hygiene Hypothesis

by

2

five second ruleLast week my colleague Katie posted about Brave Irene, wondering particularly about situations in the book (neglect, stranger danger) that seemed innocent enough at the time of publication but feel somehow more difficult in a contemporary cultural context. The conversation got me thinking about an article I read recently in the Washington Post about the hygiene hypothesis. Researchers suspect a link between our growing obsession with cleanliness (which we understand as the absence of germs) and a rise in diagnosis for all sorts of immunological problems including everything from allergies to multiple sclerosis. As I understand it, the idea is this: by protecting children from garden variety germs, we remove the opportunity for their bodies to distinguish between everyday irritants and dangerous pathogens. When they are exposed to things (as they inevitably will be) their bodies treat all sorts of microbes as major threats, resulting in an overzealous auto-immune response. It’s an interesting premise, and one that makes common sense to me.

And I wonder if the same could be said for ideas. Are there costs to “protecting” children from exposure to intellectual things they will encounter in their lives? What might those costs be? I have long believed that, collectively, we err on the side of over-protection. If an effort to spare children uncomfortable emotions we fill their environments with primary colors and ebullient music and sunshine and cuddles. And we purge those environments of any references to despairing or struggle. We mean well, of course we do. We don’t want the kids in our lives to be unhappy. But kids despair and they struggle. And should not books be places for kids to make sense of those emotions? Of course they should.

I am not suggesting that we tie kids up and subject them to a literary diet of terror and dismay, any more than I would advocate feeding them decidedly rotten meat. Yuck. But I am suggesting that there is a place in the preschool world for books that acknowledge hurt and sorrow, books that recognize that such emotions exist and tell kids that it’s OK to feel them. Maybe, by inoculating children against the darker shadows the human condition, we prepare them for meeting them head on. And by showing kids that books and stories make really effective tools for managing our emotions, we give them a powerful gift indeed.

image crop from Greg Williams’ WikiWorld.

Brave Irene

by

1

brave-ireneBrave Irene

by William Steig

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986

A childhood favorite of mine, this book is about one girl’s determination to help her mother in the face of trouble. When Irene’s mother, a seamstress, falls sick, there is no one to take a beautiful gown to the duchess on the day of her big ball. Irene takes on the job, and bounds through whirling snow and bitter wind that taunts Irene, telling her to GO HO—WO—WOME!” After the package flies out of Irene’s arms and the dress blows away, Irene becomes buried in snow and almost gives up. But remembering her mother’s face, she leaps out of the snow and races down the hill to the duchess’s house. She sees the beautiful dress her mom made next to a tree, and is greeted by a glowing fire, a warm meal, and cheerful faces when she knocks on the duchess’s door. William Steig’s classic illustration style—with atmospheric color, bold outlining, and sketch-like detail—shines in this heartwarming story. It is notable that the text is longer than the average picture book, and so I would only use this with a well-behaved preschool storytime group. It is also significant that the story deals with some heavy, questionable circumstances. As I child, I never wondered why Irene’s mother let her go out in the freezing snowstorm, but now I do. I never worried about the implications of young Irene staying overnight in a stranger’s home, but now I do. When Irene gets buried in the snow, she asks herself, “Why not freeze to death, and let all these troubles end?” Of course, the beauty is that she finds hope in the image of her mother’s face and keeps going, but it is definitely intense material for storytime. Yet, the theme of this picture book is hope amidst chaos, and determination in a world that wants you to give up. How can we not share a book with such poignant themes with children?

Open This Little Book

by

4

open this little bookOpen This Little Book

written by Jesse Klausmeier

illustrated by Suzy Lee

Chronicle Books, 2013

In a world where meta is everywhere, a book turning in on itself might come across as trendy or superficial. Indeed, many such books do. But the overuse of a particular approach to storytelling does not make such an approach necessarily obsolete. It does, however, raise the storytelling bar. To transcend the dangers of gimmickry, a meta picture book needs to weave together its plot, text and illustration into a tight and cohesive package, in service of a reverberant message. Fixing meta’s self reflection in some meaningful purpose grounds it, rescuing the by-definition disconnectedness of the narrative from flapping in the literary breeze. When done right, this kind of circular storytelling packs a real wallop, and such is the case with Open This Little Book.

The book is literally a number of books inside one another, each smaller than the last, each identified by a different colored cover (purple, red, green, orange, yellow, blue), each “opened” in succession by a different character (reader, ladybug, frog, rabbit, bear, giant), and then consumed and read in reverse order, arriving at the end with a compelling case for more. More books. More reading. More community. The clarity of Klausmeier’s text, clean and simple and exact, and the way she establishes and then breaks the patterned structure, shows more than tells us about the seductive sway of a well-written book. Suzy Lee’s careful illustrations begin in monochrome with the singular color of the little books’ titles. With each successive opening we have more colors in which to delight, and by the time we arrive at the final scene, with all of our friends, plus many more, luxuriating beneath and within a polychrome tree full of books, the remarkably appealing rainbow of variety stands as an immediate, resonant symbol of the endless glories of books and reading.

This is a book you need to find and experience with your own hands and eyes (and spirit). I include the book trailer below to give you a sense of the mechanics and the mood, but there is no substitute for opening this little book yourself.

A Library Lost

by

1

Seattle Public Library

Seattle Public Library

I’ve noticed an apocalyptic atmosphere has permeated the mindset of more than a few library folk pondering the future of libraries and cannot imagine it is entirely related to recent popularity surges in dystopic YA literature. Upon entering one south suburban public library recently, I felt an urge to manually shut my gaping mouth. The foyer (if you will) is stories high, endless in square footage, and enveloped with more glass than the Louvre. Stunning? Absolutely. Overkill? Of course it is; to someone who believes the mass exodus from and therefore subsequent end of the library as we know it is nigh. It seems unreasonable to spend already scarce dollars on fanciful buildings to house ill-fated manuscripts. Surely, there are more important things for society to build. Maybe a new strip mall just inches away from already abandoned ones? Did anyone say coffee shops? While no architectural expert, I would suggest that the increasing number of contemporary library spaces boasting impressive price tags speaks volumes. There’s still an outside chance that libraries are doing alright. On the other hand, to the catastrophe seeker, such spending makes for shameful waste in a time with only one apparent certainty: library mortality is imminent. The party is over.

So be it! Car per diem, or is it carpe diem? Sempre Fi? Siempre fiel? Who can say? Alas, I shall prepare for mine end. Woe to he who dares wish be in a shelf-lined fallout shelter donning a scraggly, Howard Hughes-esque beard and early Roman Empire garb (shiver). I, for one, have chosen not to ignore the copious patron masses that frequent these new library spaces. None need tell my family I love them and am hoarding countless first editions, many of which are self-help volumes to ease my transition into a loathsome, lackluster, library-less shell of a world. Perhaps a day will come when mean-spirited, torch-wielding, cyborgs with melting faux-flesh enter our sanctuaries to destroy all who read have come to champion. Nevertheless, I will not go shhhhingly into those dark stacks. Hear me, faithful library servant, I feign no shame in sharing my last crumb with the likes of Despereaux, in shedding one last tear over the quintessential relationship troubled, in breathing the last collective breath of gallant protagonists lost. No, I shall with constant vigilance continue fighting for freedom of the intellectual kind until that shiny, circuit driven, skeletal hand punches through four stories of plate glass bellowing “You are terminated!”

Image from http://www.spl.org/locations/central-library

Ed Young to visit the Butler Center!

by

Caldecott Medalist Ed Young is coming to the Butler Center in February for two spectacular events.

ed youngOn Friday, February 22 at 6:00pm Mr. Young will deliver the inaugural Butler Lecture “The House Baba Built” in which he will talk about his book of the same name. This beautiful and engaging piece of expressive nonfiction chronicles his childhood in Shanghai and illuminates the monumental home his father built for his family, which was both a playground for Young and his siblings, and a refuge from the dangers of the second world war for friends from around the world. The lecture is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Click here to register.

On Saturday, February 23 Mr. Young headlines The Truth About Expression, the Butler Center’s fourth annual continuing education conference. Every year we look to literature for young people as a means of pursuing and understanding some aspect of our world a little more fully. This year we investigate expression. Joining Mr. Young are Ascha Drake, Amanda Freymann and Joan Sommers, cocreators of Chuck Close: Face Book, the artist’s Boston Globe Horn Book Award winning autobiography; members of the Butler Center community; and local storytellers of international repute. Visit The Truth About Expression  page for more information and click here to register.

Oliver Jeffers

by

I have written before about the glories of This Moose Belongs to Me. Here’s an appealing video wherein author/illustrator Oliver Jeffers talks about his process. It’s fascinating to hear about the integration of text and image from the very beginning, and really cool to see his visual aesthetic (and effervescent sense of humor) manifest all across his life.