And listen to ME (and Martha and Kitty)

. . . as we talk about some of our favorite new summer reads for kids. A list of the books we discuss on the podcast can be found here.

Listen to Grandma

In reading Jill Lepore's New Yorker account of the battle between E. B. White and Anne Carroll Moore, I couldn't help finding my sympathies more with the old lady. Lepore seems to favor E. B. and Katharine White because they're more sophisticated, the cool kids. Moore's the earnest, humorless battle-axe, given to such pronouncements as "reading is an end in itself; its object is lifelong pleasure and profit," "reading should be more commonly treated as a sport of continuous interest in all schools," and "both literature and children stoutly resist grade limitation." What a bore.

Of course she had her limitations and of course she went down fighting, but children's literature and librarianship owe her plenty.

Stick to Your Own Kind?

I'm intrigued by Arthur Laurents's plans to bring West Side Story to Broadway next winter in a "bilingual revival," having the Puerto Rican characters speaking Spanish and otherwise making the show "more realistic." (Here's hoping he doesn't try to set it in the present, though, because that gorgeous, swanky 1950s brass would sound as corny as Kansas in August.)

That theme of bridging cultures (I know WSS is based on R&J, but making the Montagues and Capulets into Jets and Sharks throws us into contemporary contexts) came to me yesterday when I was editing a Guide review of The Umbrella Queen, a picture book by Shirin Yim Bridges and Taeeun Yoo. Apparently based on the "umbrella village" of Bo Sang in northern Thailand, the story is about a little girl, Noot, who longs to paint umbrellas the way all the women in the village do, but instead of painting the traditional patterns of flowers and butterflies, she paints elephants. The Thai king comes to judge the umbrellas in the annual contest and names Noot the winner, "because she paints from her heart." It's a nice enough little story, but has an unacknowledged dynamic that shows up time and again in American books for children about "other cultures," allegedly honoring different cultural norms but in fact contravening them to celebrate the spirit of individual expression. (Historical fiction does this too, as Anne Scott MacLeod wrote in a brilliant essay for us.) It's a case where the story's need for conflict subverts its simultaneous claim on cultural authenticity. There's no story if Noot happily paints flowers and butterflies, but the fact that she triumphs by painting elephants says, in effect, that the tradition that inspired the story isn't worth holding on to. Can you have it both ways?

I'm still no Tim Gunn, but . . .

Here is ALA Runway!

Branded

When Richard and I went to Paris a few years ago, I was intent upon visiting the House of Balmain, where I purchased a beautiful tie from their small men's collection. But I was less interested in shopping than I was in seeing the place where Valentine O'Neill began her career as a fashion designer. Valentine is fictional, a character in Judith Krantz's Scruples, a book that positively sizzles with brand-name-dropping, put there not as paid product placement but as verisimilitude of an especially glamorous kind.

So I'm a little impatient with the argument that we should be worried about brand names in YA fiction. I could certainly get into a fine frothing if the YA series actually whored themselves out to the highest brand-name bidder, which would be both sneaky and lazy: if it doesn't matter if your heroine wears Chanel or Balmain you haven't thought hard enough about her. But that's not what's happening, and I am more scandalized that the Times article pimped this possibility so heavily only to reveal that it had no basis in fact. Yet.

She works hard for the money

Claire has a new book list devoted to careers. (And gosh darn, why didn't I think to show her my treasured copy of Bruce Learns About Life Insurance?)

Trivia question

What novelist for children with more than three or four books to his or her name has never written a sequel? I ask because I'm surveying my books to be be reviewed for the September issue (surveying being far more entertaining than actually, you know, reviewing) and, like, six out of the seven novels are sequels. (And Jen and Martha know to keep the fantasy far, far from me so it's not that.) I thought Katherine Paterson, but then Martha pointed out that Lyddie shows up twice.

If any M.L. S. student is in need of a thesis topic, I think it would be very interesting to examine sequel-publishing over time. We've always had 'em, I know, but do publishers these days routinely encourage writers to follow a successful book with a related one? Or have they always?

New Notes

The new Notes from the Horn Book is hot off the virtual presses. In this issue we recommend some new books about the Olympics and China, make a truck stop for some new toddler tales, listen to some recent audiobooks, and ask R.L. Stine what scares him the most. Read and subscribe (it's free) here.

And to those of you who have already signed up, thank you--the circulation of Notes has doubled since the first issue, which makes us very happy indeed.