I have a friend.  Not just any friend; I hope we all have a fair few friends.  But I hope everyone also has a friend like my friend: when I was pregnant, this friend brought me a baby present.  This present was a book, which is already a good start.  The book was called Extra Yarn, by Mac Barnett, illustrated by Jon Klassen.  What this demonstrates is that my friend Knows Me, with those uppercase letters used consciously.  It’s wonderful when people provide you with good and useful things before you have a baby– soft blankets, sturdy burp cloths, pretty clothes.  It’s lovely, and I’m touched and grateful.  But when someone looks around and says, “Deborah would not want to bring her baby into a house without a charming new book about yarn and knitting for that child,” then?  Then you know that you should make that person the executor of your will (thanks, lady!).

Have you ever knit something?  Let me tell you: there’s nothing quite so terrifying as the moment when you’ve been knitting merrily along, feel your ball of yarn, and get an “uh oh…” feeling, as in, “That feels a bit… small?”  Maybe you weigh it to see if you have enough left.  Maybe you knit faster, trying to outrun the yarn.  Maybe you knit more slowly, on the basis that “haste makes waste.”  But there’s nothing like the sinking feeling when you’re sure, oh so sure, your yarn is going to run out!  But way on the other side of the spectrum is the placid security that comes with an assurance that you’ve got Extra Yarn.  Maybe enough for a matching hat?  Or matching socks for your baby?  You feel peaceful, at ease, even a little smug.  And that’s the peace we see in Annabelle, one of the most confident protagonists I’ve ever had the good fortune to meet in a book.  Let me tell you: I want to be Annabelle when I grow up.

The story is one of the most engaging I’ve written about here: Annabelle lives in a colourless town, but one day she finds a box filled with yarn of every colour.  She knits herself a sweater, but has extra yarn.  So she ends up knitting sweaters for everyone she knows.  Then for the animals, then for buildings and cars, and, through it all, she never runs out of yarn, she just carries on placidly knitting.  It’s a knitter’s fantasy.  Then an evil Archduke comes and steals the box!  Only, when he gets to his castle, he opens the box… and it’s empty.  He throws it out the window with a curse, but the box ignores the curse and goes back where it was always meant to be– with Annabelle.

I think this marks the first time I’ve written here about a book where the plot and character were the driving force in what made me fall in love.  (OK, yes, and the yarn.)  Annabelle, throughout the book, runs into mild to forceful opposition.  And yet she never talks back.  She never whines.  She never raises her voice.  She never caves.  She just carries on knitting.  You can see in Jon Klassen’s wonderful drawings: her face maintains a slight smile, and perfect repose.  To put it in a somewhat more blunt fashion, she shares John Scalzi’s Christmas gift from this year (I promise you want to click the link).  When her friend Nate laughs at her sweater, she says, “You’re just jealous,” and knits him one, too.  That shuts him up.  At school, her teacher scolds her for distracting the other students with her colourful sweater, so she just knits them all sweaters, too (and, I hope, teaches Mr. Norman a lesson– dude, don’t tell your students “You can’t.”).  And when the Archduke tries to buy her beloved yarn, she just calmly turns him down, over and over again, and sends him away.  As my sister would have said when she was little, Annabelle is a “big strong girl.”  More than that, she’s tough.  She’s resilient.

And that’s where I truly love this book.  Annabelle is the model here.  The adults don’t teach her; she teaches them, if they care to learn.  Some of the adults she meets are fun and give you a good chuckle (“Mr. Crabtree […] never wore sweaters or even long pants, and […] would stand in his shorts with the snow up to his knees.  ‘No sweater for me, thanks,’ said Mr. Crabtree.  So she made Mr. Crabtree a hat.”), but more often they’re minor obstacles.  I’ve mentioned Mr. Norman, the teacher who tells her off for distracting the class by quietly wearing her sweater, and who, when she proposes to rectify the situation by knitting everyone sweaters, expostulates, “Impossible!  […]  You can’t.”  Annabelle doesn’t answer back; she just does it.  And as for the spoiled, petulant, domineering Archduke?  Annabelle quietly carries on doing her own thing, sticking up for herself, and the yarn chooses her in the end.  He throws a temper tantrum, but she just carries on carrying on, and is happy.

This is just a story about a girl doing her knitting.  From Annabelle’s perspective, I think the world around her is just full of big opportunities and minor nuisances.  I picture her, if the book were turned into a movie (Oh my God, Mac and Jon?  Can you make that happen???  This would be such a good animated short!), occasionally sighing, or flashing that slight smile at Mr. Norman as she casts on a new sweater.  Perhaps the Archduke would elicit so much as a little shrug, as thought to say, “Dude, just leave me alone, OK?”  But her focus is on what makes life fun for her, not on the nuisances, and, in the end, she gets more of what she pays attention to: knitting.

The Changeling took to this book immediately.  “Read me Extra Yarn,” she’ll beg.  Or she’ll add it to the pile of books to take with us when we travel.  One of my very favourite moments was when she took it over to my friend, now her friend, too, and clambered onto her lap.  “Read it to me, please?”  And, as they went through the book, the Changeling did what she always does: “And she knit a sweater for the doggie!  And that’s a cat!  I see a bunny, and a bird, and is that the birdie’s house?  They all have sweaters!”  It’s enthralling.

I love seeing her admire Annabelle’s handiwork.  I hope, as she grows up with Annabelle, she’ll also learn just to do, and keep on doing, awesome things, no matter who tries to persuade her that she can’t or shouldn’t.  Just go for it, kiddo!

Do you ever get something in your head and end up chanting or singing and dancing your way around your empty house, possibly scooping up your poor, defenseless kitty in the process?  Don’t worry, I won’t make you answer that.  But I will reveal the full depths of my own embarrassment: for me, this morning, it was Jamberry, written and illustrated by Bruce Degen (I link to Porter Square Books, the marvellous, well-curated store where I bought my copy).  After reading it to the Changeling a few times this weekend, I couldn’t get it out of my head and spent the morning dancing around the living room, stumbling over Calico Critters, and swinging my patient cat through the air while chanting: “One berry/ Two Berry/ Pick me a blueberry!”

This was when I had a “click” moment.  I should know by now never to doubt my mother when she makes a remark about a children’s book, but when she compared Here Babies, There Babies to Jamberry I confess that my thought was, “Really?  I mean, they’re both rhyming stories, but so is Jillian Jiggs, for example, and, well, I just don’t see it.”  But after I read Here Babies, There Babies to the Changeling last week we spent a few days, as usual, chanting about babies in the most random places.  “I see a baby!” the Changeling would call from her stroller.  “Here babies, there babies…” and off she’d go.  That’s when Jamberry ever so gently started to nudge my brain again.

Then the Changeling started to play “going under the bridge” as she ducked under her stroller handlebar.  “And over the dam,” I went on, “Looking for berries, berries for jam!”  Next thing you know, we’re in full-on Jamberry mode: we read it a few times, and our natural mode of discourse seamlessly moved from Here Babies, There Babies to Jamberry.  We speak in berry rhymes (Merry rhymes, fairy rhymes, prattle in berry rhymes!  Sorry, folks, that one wasn’t even any good, was it?), we sing strawberries, we dance in meadows of strawberry jam… um, I mean in the living room.  It’s jubilantly moved in and taken over.

What is it about these books?  Why do they take over in a way that other charmingly rhyming books don’t?  There are lovely rhyming books, such as Each, Peach, Pear, Plum or Jillian Jiggs, books I desperately want to write about here.  They entertain when you read them, and then nestle nicely back onto the shelf when you’re through.  They don’t take over your tongue and make you dance in your sheepy pyjamas for the next day.

Partly, of course, it may be a question of metre: Jamberry‘s initial dactyls (“One berry/ Two berry/ Pick me a blueberry.”) rumble along like a folk dance to a drum, but then swap out for longer lines, most of which end with a bouncy stressed syllable: “Under the bridge/ And over the dam/ Looking for berries/ Berries for jam.”  This slight shift sweeps you along with the canoe in the picture, and if you don’t find yourself swinging your child on your knees?  Well, that probably means you decided to swing your child in your arms instead, right?  Right?  You’ve gotta move with this one, you really have.

And that’s because this little story here isn’t about the story.  Like Here Babies, There Babies where the emphasis is on the babies around you, not on a specific tale, Jamberry does have characters and a plot of sorts, but the emphasis is elsewhere: on jammy jubilation.  I don’t think I’ve ever read it without laughing at least a little at one point or another.  The beat and the song of it, the increasingly zany pictures, the berry-stained fingers and mouths, and the sudden urge to grab a pail and find some berries… well, that’s what this is about.  You read it and feel celebratory.  You read it and feel warm sun and sweet berries.  You read it and sing.  You read it and dance.

Oh, and there’s also a boy in there, and he meets a bear and they pick some berries.  Not really sure about how the bear has a hat, but he seems like a nice bear.  And I think that maybe CPS should check on the kid’s family because he seems to be seeing elephants skating on raspberry jam, which is, in my experience, unusual.

You see?  This is not a book where you should, as it were, focus on the story.  Sing it, move to it, dance your kid around to it– but, for the love of God, check your logic at the door.  (Which is, of course, where it differs from Here Babies, There Babies, initially leading me to doubt the wisdom of my mother.  That book feels intensely real, leading its own singsong verses to blend into the world around it.)

I’d add one last note here: Jamberry‘s fantastical celebration of berries is so very zany, so ebullient, and so jubilant that it really has a tendency to break through barriers and take over.  As I said, it takes over language and makes you hum it over and over.  It makes you use words like “ebullient.”  It also takes over seasons.  It might be February (albeit a very warm February), but it feels like June when you read Jamberry.  It’s really the polar opposite of Moominland Midwinter, which, as I noted feels like the epitome of winter.  Moominland Midwinter I only ever feel like reading when it’s starkly, icily, snowily cold.  Jamberry?  It makes February into June and has me wondering where I can get strawberries that taste like something.

What does the Changeling think?  “Berries for jam!” she cries, flinging her hands up.  Does she eat jam?  No, absolutely not.  Never, ever, ever.  (She won’t touch ice cream or candy, either.  I’m thinking of asking the doctor if she’s OK, and what else we can use as bribery.)  But she does love the pictures, and she does love the words, and the animals, and berries.

So, what can I say?  Even if you don’t have a kid handy, get out your copy, and start dancing at your own Jamberry bacchanal!

Do you hate Itsy Bitsy Spider as much as I do?  The boring, slightly droning, melody, the pointless story, and, well, not to put too fine a point on it… the protagonist, an eight-legged beastie?  Not that I’m particularly scared of spiders.  My sister always was, but I was the one who killed the spiders: Deborah Spider-Slayer, you might call me.  In point of fact, I’d say that I have more cause to be afraid of spiders than she does, because if there were a conference of spiders (ick), then they’d probably look at me, with the blood of countless innocent spiders on my hands, and instantly slap a price on my head, while they’d never give her a second glance.  But the point is: no, I’m not really scared of spiders, I just don’t like them, and if you make me sing songs about them over and over again I may want to throttle you.  The YouTube videos are the worst– watching these stupid cartoon spiders which are supposed to be cute (nice try, people) scuttle around… they make me itch.  Itch to plant my fist in the computer screen and stop that tinny music, that stupid spider, that… pardon me.  I hate those videos.

Which is why I completely and totally adore Itsy Bitsy Spider by Richard Egielski.

This book takes a boring song about a freaking spider and, to my frank astonishment, makes it charming.  What differentiates it from all of those trying-and-failing YouTube videos?  Oh, and believe me, believe me, I have done the research here.  I have sobbed my way silently and patiently through “the purple itsy bitsy spider,” “the pink itsy bitsy spider,” and even, God help me, “the blue itsy bitsy spider.”  They are not cute.  I’m sorry, Changeling, I know you like them, and you somehow even like the song without the aid of any additional media, but on that point our taste differs– sharply.

But Richard Egielski takes what I consider to be unpromising ingredients in the extreme and comes up with something frankly beautiful.  What does he do?  He makes a pop-up book.  I know, I know: I don’t like the song, I don’t like spiders, so why would I want it in a touchable, moving, 3D form?  Well, there’s the one major advantage of the book: you don’t have to hear the melody at all… until your kid learns to sing it by herself, that is, but at least even then it will be more pleasant to hear her than a tinny electronic rendition on YouTube.  Even so, I wouldn’t have expected to like a 3D spider wriggling out of a book, but it turns out that I was delighted to be surprised.

It’s not easy to define exactly how Richard Egielski’s Itsy Bitsy Spider works but the YouTube videos (in my view) fail, because it all comes down to illustration; the text and melody, of course, remain the same, and they are, again of course, a dead loss.  Illustration is the only real variable at play, and one easy way out is to say it’s all a matter of taste.  The Changeling likes the videos, right?  So maybe they’re actually OK and it’s just that they’re not to my taste.  OK, sure, that’s a valid point.  A totally valid cop-out if you want to take it, I say cheekily.  But I think there’s a real difference between the two types of illustration at play here, and not just of quality (the difference between a Caldecott Medalist who’s paid to do good work and whichever poor uncredited artist animated those videos), but of conception.  Egielski put immense powers of imagination into developing a whole world for this little song, and the videos really just want to, as it were, make it cute.

Shall I illustrate the point, as it were?  Well, take a pen.  Draw a circle with a smiley face on it.  Add eight straight lines around it, and one straight line going up.  Colour it your favourite colour.  Congratulations!  You’ve made your very own Cute [Insert Colour Here] Itsy Bitsy Spider!  Richard Egielski, by contrast, clearly sat down and thought out a world as nuanced as Tolkien’s Middle Earth.  (Perhaps I exaggerate slightly.)  The spider is a little creature who lives in a world which is much larger than he is (a toddler can relate), and his friends are the other little creatures of his itsy bitsy world: beetles and dragonflies and so on.  Ordinary objects to us (cans, tea pots, and salt shakers, for example) are large to an itsy bitsy spider, so they become schools and shops and homes.  The creatures are dressed charmingly for their peregrinations around the town: top hats, canes, and bowties on an elderly beetle, and caps and overalls for our little protagonist.  One charming fellow gets a waistcoat: I approve.  The detail lends character and substance to an otherwise vapid story.  And the sturdy pop-ups?  Dear Lord, they’re charming.  Our little innocent climbs up the waterspout to “peek-a-boo!” (the Changeling says) from the top.  His mother is knitting a web behind the window to the side.  The rain unfolds downward, showing clouds above, each face on each rain drop individual in character, and then the itsy bits spider truly cascades out of the spout on the next page.  It’s almost dramatic in feeling, and the setting is, again, vivid in detail and texture.

I can’t say that the book has made me like the song, but it has made singing it with the Changeling much more pleasurable.  Of course, she has to sing the whole song for each page (Dear God: please let her learn to sing it verse by verse with each page speedily in our days, Amen.), but at least there’s plenty to look at and a world to learn as we slowly leaf through.  Compared to the lackluster dramatizations on YouTube, the genuine drama of learning a small creature’s life, world, and story is charming and almost exciting.

I still don’t like spiders, itsy bitsy or otherwise, and I’d still rather hear the Changeling sing almost anything else (well, maybe not “The Wheels on the Bus”), but I consider this little spider a buddy, and he has nothing to fear from Deborah Spider-Slayer.

Dear Reader, do you ever get the feeling that you couldn’t recognize a hint from the universe even if it sent all the birds of the worlds to crap it straight onto your head?

First thing this morning the Changeling reminded me of my promise to take her to the museum today: “To see the snowy owl!”  I wrangled her into her clothes (the owl dress) and tried to think about a book to write about when we got back home.  After the museum (she begged for a sheet of bird stickers at the shop) we met her daddy for a snack at the lab: “And I saw the cardinal and the puffins and Great! Blue! Heron!  It eats fish!”   (And what was I going to write about?)  As an extra treat, the Changeling and I went to paint pottery!  She wanted to paint an owl.  (But what to write about?)  At home from our packed day, we had a nice supper, then story and bedtime.  The Changeling wanted A Bird Is a Bird, and as we snuggled before bed she listed all the birds she’d seen that day: owls, cardinals, tanagers, buntings (she asked me to sing “Bye, baby bunting”), herons, pelicans, puffins…

I left her room, slumped in a chair, and my husband rubbed my shoulder.  “I just can’t settle on a book to write about today, for some reason,” I complained.  “Write about A Bird Is a Bird,” he said promptly.

Oh.

Birds have really become part of the fabric of our days, and have been for so long at this point that it’s small wonder I didn’t really think of A Bird Is a Bird, text and illustrations by Lizzy Rockwell, in the same way that I don’t often think about my dearly beloved bathtub. Let’s see: I knew this was a book as essential to the Changeling as The Joy of Cooking is to my kitchen from the first moment the Changeling jubilantly snatched it straight from the hands of our brilliant children’s librarian (God bless all children’s librarians) who was saying, “Oh, if she likes birds…”   It just fit.  I’d bought our own copy before the book was due back to the library.  That was nearly a year ago (the Changeling wasn’t yet two years old), and it’s been rare that a week has gone by since then when we haven’t read this book at least once.

The same question comes to mind with this one as with Mr. Postmouse’s Rounds: is this a natural history book, and, if so, what makes this different from all other natural history books?  In this case, the clear answer is, yes, it’s a natural history book.  It doesn’t have a fictional narrative arc; its purpose is evidently to educate the young reader about birds; it’s plain, straightforward natural history.  There’s no whimsy here, not even a hint of the fantastic.  What distinguishes it from others is the more interesting question.

In this case, I think it’s a rather subtle point: the sheer, quiet pleasure the book takes in talking to you.  This book could have been written for my Changeling.  She’s a quiet, passionate sort, and takes her interests very seriously.  A Bird Is a Bird loves birds, and really, really wants to tell you about them in a careful, logical and very precise way.  The Changeling likewise loves birds, and sits (wriggles?) as a disciple to receive the book’s teachings.  We start with a general framework (“A bird may be tall.  A bird may be small.” p.5.), and build to more specific points: birds have beaks, wings, and start out in eggs.  But then what about the platypus, or flies, or snakes?  What is it that’s truly specific to birds?  Feathers!  (Bounce! goes the disciple.)  As I said, there’s no fictional narrative arc to carry you through this book, but the arc is there, nonetheless, and it builds slowly and steadily to its logical climax: Feathers!  It’s remarkably clear, satisfying, and, the word I keep coming back to, precise.  This is a book which will teach you that delightful feeling of satisfaction in fact-based research.  If you like building blocks of discovery, and think it can be beautiful, this is the book for you and your child.

The logic and precision are exactly why this book has lasted so well: even a year ago, the Changeling was able to keep up with the limited prose, and the exquisite, clear illustrations (Audubon, eat your heart out!).  These past few months she’s been able to see the link between the birds she sees at the museum and the birds she sees in the book.  In fact, she associates the two so strongly that she asked why they didn’t have A Bird Is a Bird at the gift shop (excellent question, oh Harvard Museum of Natural History!).  I expect that in another year, if she remains interested in birds, she’ll be able to pick up on some more complex details, perhaps the differences between males and females, since she was already pretty excited to see “Mr. and Mrs. Mallard” in here.  I don’t see this being a book for a particularly limited range of ages.  The publisher recommends it for ages 3-7.  Well, as we’ve seen you can go younger (we started reading it at 18 months, for the record).  I’m no expert at the older range there, but I’d say 7 sounds about the upper limit I’d expect.  (Caveat: I’m terrible at thinking about age limits for books.  Maybe I’ll write more about that another time.)

There’s one more thing I want to emphasize here: I’ve come back a few times to dwelling on how lovely this book is, and how serious it is.  I’ve seen a number of natural history books out there for children which either have illustrations which could belong in Nature, Science, Cell, or Scientific American.  They’re, well, scientific.  Often they’re photographs or photo-realism.  There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, of course– it’s science!  The books are often excellent and the illustrations suit them perfectly.  But I can’t say they speak to me, and the Changeling doesn’t seem to find them so stimulating either.  Others, often pitched towards younger children, have cartoon-like pictures.  They’re also fine, even if they aren’t particularly precise.  They can be very cute.  They don’t do much for me, either, and none have had staying power with the Changeling.  This one, though, is simply beautiful.  The illustrations are lovely, accurate, and take the reader seriously.  The reader, here represented by the Changeling, responds by taking the book and the subject seriously.  I plead, falling on my knees, for more children’s science or natural science books to take both the subject and the audience seriously, and to try to convey the natural beauty of the topic with both sensitivity and accuracy.  In short: why the hell can’t more science books be pretty to look at, dammit?