The Heritage Month Project: "Monster, She Wrote" by Lisa Kroger and Melanie R. Anderson

At last, I am writing about Women's History Month reading! I am beginning with Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction by Lisa Kroger and Melanie R. Anderson. This is another book from my To Be Read stash on my Kindle app. I'm not much of a fan of horror and only dabble in speculative fiction. However, the women's history aspect grabbed me on this one.

Monster, She Wrote is what might be described as a popular history. There's a section for each author covered, and within that section is an overview/critique, a list of the author's best works, and a list of similar authors. That last section I particularly liked.

The authors begin with women writers of Gothic novels in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, since, they say, "There's a strong argument that horror as it exists in the twenty-first century evolved from the Gothic novel..." They cover six women in this section, the two best known (because I've heard of them) being Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Ann Radcliffe. Now six is not a statistically significant number. But I was still surprised there were that many, in part because conventional wisdom tells us that women in the past just could not and did not work. 

Later sections of the book tie time periods to subjects such as ghost stories, the occult, pulps, and paperback horror. I was particularly interested in women writing in various fields in the twentieth century. These writers moved around with work, some writing for television as well as paperbacks. Or, like Shirley Jackson, writing horror as well as domestic stories for women's magazines. I like the idea of not allowing yourself to be tied to one thing. 

The last section, The Future of Horror and Speculative Fiction, included interesting people whose work I'm now interested in reading. In fact, I've already read a short story by Helen Oyeyemi.

The Housewife Writer

For some time, I've been interested in women who self-identify as housewife writers. There aren't a lot of them, but I am trying to focus my Women's History Month reading on that. I'm not talking about homemaking as women's God-given role, what they are born to do. I am talking about homemaking as life maintenance, eating and putting clothes on backs and who does that for themselves and others? Why is that not considered as significant as roping a steer or running a store? I have a theory. 

In their section of Monster, She Wrote called Haunting the Home Kroger and Anderson say, "Historically, women have been consigned to the domestic realm, running the household and caring for children." "Many of the women profiled in this book struggled with that dichotomy: the pressure to care for home and family, and the need to tend their writing career. Haunted house fictions play upon the complex fears and concerns about domestic issues that woman have long grappled with."

They include Shirley Jackson in that section. I consider her to be the ultimate housewife writer. More on that before the end of the month.

 

Getting Serious About Humor: I'm Done With Wurst For A Long Time

The Thurber Prize folks have announced their semi-finalists for this year's, yes, Thurber Prize for American Humor. It turns out that I've already read one of them, Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson, which I liked, and admired, a great deal. Now I've read another one, Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs by Jamie Loftus. The book combines two of my interests...humor and eating nonprestige food. I've been a little bit obsessed with it.

Raw dog. An expression with a number of meanings, related to some of kind of risk. Doing something unprepared. I didn't look it up until after I finished reading the book (actually, just now), and now I'm thinking the title...Wow. This could be profound. 

I've read a number of Thurber Prize finalists over the last couple of years, and I'm sure that I've mentioned here before that I find them witty, certainly, but not hugely, wildly funny. I guess this makes a lot of sense, because, as I probably have also mentioned before, I have actually read James Thurber, and, you know, he wasn't hugely, wildly funny. I like the Thurber Prize finalists I've read, which I can't say for a lot of prize books (I'm thinking of you, Booker Prize, which I now avoid). But I don't understand how funny you have to be to be a humor prize winner.

Jamie Loftus is a comedian, writer, and podcaster, and she has a distinctive sense of humor. Raw Dog definitely is a contender for the prize. But the book is a lot. Reading it was an experience.

Superficially, it is about Loftus's hot dog summer, traveling across the U.S. with a boyfriend, a dog, and, I think, a cat in rental cars as she samples hot dogs in various regions of the country. I no longer eat traditional hot dogs, because I avoid smoked meat. But I do eat the occasional bratwurst. When I started reading this book, I went into the freezer where I had a leftover grilled wurst. I heated that puppy up and found a gluten free roll to sort of wrap around it and ate it naked. By the time I was in a grocery store sometime later, while still reading Raw Dog, I just shot by the wurst counter. No, we are not doing that for some time to come. I'm done with dogs for a while.

Loftus went to so many hot dog stands, shops, and wagons and ate so very many hot dogs. This woman ate so much chili on those dogs. And described all those chilis in so much detail. I think that if chili was available, she ate it. And the onions! Good heavens! And relish. Evidently, she'll eat any kind of relish. My digestive system is fragile, and I could feel it failing just reading about what Jamie Loftus ate. It was too much for her digestive system sometimes, too. I know, because she writes about it.

Here's the thing, though, this book isn't just a food and travel story that should be one of those TV shows my husband watches. No, there is a great deal of social commentary here. Real commentary. In a New Yorker article about Loftus, Cat Zhang says that her first job out of college was at the Boston Globe (she was fired) but that she "retains a reporter's allegiance to fact." What she has to say in Raw Dog about things like how the meat industry treats both animals and human workers, gentrification, the pandemic, and Oscar Mayer Wiener Mobile drivers (no joke, they've got some worries) come across as serious and well thought out. And then she gets back to the freaking chili! 

A little digression: Loftus comes from Brockton, Massachusetts where my aunt Esther has lived all my life. I've been to cousin weddings there and a funeral. Honest to God, I had no idea about the city's reputation until another family member went to college in Waltham and tipped me off. Brockton seemed fine to us Gauthiers.

Anyway, I'm feeling about the Thurber Prize the way other people feel about the Oscars and Emmys. I hope one of the two books I've read wins.

A Lovely Surprise About Light

Copy provided by NetGalley

Publication Date: April 18, 2023

Christine Layton followed me on Twitter earlier this year. Before following her back, I checked her out and saw that she is a writer with a book publishing in a few months. Wouldn't you know it, Netgalley was offering an ARC. As I have said before, sometimes social media interactions work.

Light Speaks, by Christine Layton and illustrated by Luciana Navarro Powell is a beautiful book, both visually and in its short, poetic text. It deals with the many ways humans experience light, beginning with the light that comes from the sun to wake us in the morning. It covers both natural light and humanmade. It would make a terrific read-aloud, both for a group but also one-to-one, with an adult who can talk about things like the satellites, lightening, and fireworks that appear in the book. 

Light Speaks may end up being a gift for a child in the Gauthier family. 

A New Publication For Gail: Julie Powell And A Mini Blogging History

Kenny Eliason @ Unsplash

I spent a lot of time earlier this week reading articles about Julie Powell who died on October 26 at forty-nine-years-old. That's just forty-nine, folks. She was a blogger, back in the day, but her blog went seriously big time, turning into the book Julie & Julia and then the movie with the same name.

I wrote what I like to call a flash essay about how Powell is representative of the arc blogging has followed over the last twenty years since the two of us became bloggers. Julie Powell and the World of Blogging was published today at Feedium.

The Young Readers Edition Of A "Scary but True Story of the Poison that Made People Glow in the Dark"

Years ago, The Horn Book did a special issue on history books for children, describing how in days of old, such books were often children's versions of adult books while these days original historical
research and writing is being done for the children's audience. I can find neither my blog post on the subject nor links to The Horn Book articles I recall. Hey, but it happened.

My recollection of that Horn Book material lead me to pick up The Radium Girls: Young Readers' Edition, The Scary But True Story of the Poison that Made People Glow in the Dark by Kate Moore. It's the 'young readers' edition of her book, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women. Both books might be described as horror history about the horrendous illnesses and early deaths among women painting clock faces with radium so their numbers would glow in the dark. They died or lived, some of them, seriously compromised lives so people could read a clock without turning on a light.

This is an important story not just because of the misery endured, but because of the impact these women's experience had on labor law. And because many of these women were, indeed, adolescent girls when they began working in the factory that's practices killed them, you can definitely see why this story would be of interest to younger readers.

I read the YA version and skimmed sections of the adult version, trying to determine how the two books are different. 

• I had trouble keeping the different women covered in this work apart. The things that happened to them were terrible, but they tended to be a blur of terribleness for this reader. In skimming the adult version, I think there was more detail, something that would have helped with my reading problem.
• Some of these women had children over the course of the period covered. A couple of times I did briefly wonder when that happened or how, given their illnesses. While skimming the adult version I came upon a woman suffering severe gynecological problems. It came up in another area, as well. I don't believe any of that made it into the young readers' version. So could we say sex was cut for the young?
• In the adult version, a major player's wake and funeral are covered quite extensively, including a painful scene involving her young children. That doesn't appear in the young readers' version. Death certainly isn't left out of this book, as one woman after another dies. But what might be described as the survivors' experience of death was.
• The young readers' version had photographs. I didn't see any in the adult version. 
• The title change is interesting. The adult book is called  The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women, suggesting the women involved will be the focus of the story. The young readers' version is called The Radium Girls: Young Readers' Edition, The Scary But True Story of the Poison that Made People Glow in the Dark, suggesting the radium will be the focus of the story. I didn't notice the subtitle until after I read the book. I definitely didn't feel it had been about radium, and my skimming of the adult book suggests that the major difference between the two is material that was dropped, not a shift in subject matter. What was the purpose of the title switch? To try to make the book less threatening by trying to put the burden of the story on the radium rather than the women whose lives it destroyed?

The writing style isn't difficult, so if I were a teacher, I'd recommend teenagers just go ahead and read the adult book. I don't know at what point even younger readers start reading material like this, though I saw a couple of reviews at Amazon that said children as young as 8 and 9 have read the young readers' version.

While reading The Radium Girls, I began to wonder if it was history or a journalistic treatment of an event that occurred in the past. Sadly, I am not knowledgeable enough to answer the question.

Environmental Book Club

Earlier this month, Publishers Weekly ran a column on Environmental Kids Books for 2021. In her introduction, compiler Cady Zeng writes "These varied, informative books for young readers provide introductions to the Earth’s environment, its history, and its inhabitants, while offering guidance on how to live sustainably for a better and enduring future." "Informative books" that offer "guidance on how to live sustainably for a better and enduring future" sound like nonfiction, and that is what we see on this list.

There's nothing wrong with this being a list of nonfiction. I'm just wondering what's being published in the area of environmental fiction for children. I've done a quick Internet search and can't find anything. Environmental books for children seem to focus on teaching them something. There doesn't seem to be many books out there with fictional worlds built around characters living an environmental lifestyle as a sort of setting or background, as a norm instead of something someone must learn to do because of a looming crisis. Or many books with fictional worlds about living within nature as a given.

Also, I don't see any YA on this list. Nor have I been able to find a list anywhere of environmental books specifically for that age group.  Eco-fiction Books Coming in 2021 at dragonfly.eco includes a couple of titles described as YA. 

Book Shopping For Easter

I was almost into the third week of March when I realized that Easter is the first weekend of April this year. I still haven't gotten over the shock. Fortunately, I can't have guests, so I don't have to deal with a holiday meal, though I am overwhelmed with cupcakes I've been making to take to a member of our pod.

The thing I really needed to hustle for was ordering Easter presents for the littlies. Easter presents chez Gauthier are books. I had titles in mind for a couple of the kids, though I forgot them. Then I remembered them. Then that left just two more books to find. 

In the end, River Bend Bookshop ordered two of the books and mailed them to the appropriate family members and already had the other two there in the store for me to pick up. 

Gauthier Easter Gift Books

From Here to There: Inventions That Changed the Way the World Moves by Vivian Kirkfield with illustrations by Gilbert Ford. The 8-year-old I got this for may be on the young side of the age-range for this book. However, it looks as if the pages offer a variety of reading options for him to pick and choose from. Additionally, he's being home schooled this year, and I'm hopeful this will fit into history or social studies for him.

 

 

The Bear Went Over The Mountain by Jane Cabrera  I liked the repetition in this classic story as well as what was, for me, a surprise at the end. I found out about this book while watching a virtual library story hour with the three-year-old in our pod and bought it for his three-year-old cousin. I mention this, because it's an example of a library generating a book sale.

Hike by Pete Oswald. I got this book for a three-year-old who walks/hikes with us. I stumbled upon the ebook edition through my library, so this is another example of a library generating a book sale. It's a wordless book with a strong visual story line. 

Up Cat Down Cat by Steve Light  I needed a board book for a one-year-old and just searched on-line until I found this one about opposites with art work I loved. Well, it turns out I've met Steve Light. We walked out to the parking lot together after his appearance at a Connecticut Children's Book Fair a couple of years ago. (I can think of a few other authors I met in parking lots or hallways before or after appearances. Hmm.) At that time, I was so taken with his book Builders & Breakers that I bought a couple of copies for gifts. One of them was for the older brother of the little girl for whom I bought Up Cat Down Cat. You can't make this stuff up! Well, you can, but I didn't.

You never know how gifts will go over, especially books. But at this moment, I'm very happy with my Easter selections.

Me And Mother Jones, We've Got A Thing Going On

Until this spring, all I knew about Mother Jones was that it was the name of a magazine I'd never read and didn't know anything about, though I can tell you now that it does investigative journalism. Then this spring,  I was reading A People's History of the United States, and the author, Howard Zinn, starts in about "Mother Mary Jones, a seventy-five-year-old white-haired woman who was organizer for the United Mine Workers of America," I thought, Aha! That can't be a coincidence. And it wasn't. The magazine was, indeed, named for Mary Jones, known as "Mother" during her later activist years.

Stick With Me, Folks. There's A Mother Jones Childlit Connection Coming

A couple of months after reading A People's History, I'm reading the March/April issue of The Horn Book and what do I see but a review of Mother Jones and Her Army of Mill Children by Jonah Winter with illustrations by Nancy Carpenter! The book deals with an incident that appears in both the AFL-CIO bio of Jones and the Mother Jones magazine material about her in which Mother Jones organized child workers in a march from Philadephia to President Theodore Roosevelt's home in Oyster Bay, New York.

Two Points

• I love it when something new to me repeats in my life, the way Mother Jones did in the Zinn book and this picture book review. I'm sure I've written about this before here. And I'm guessing there is a word to describe this experience. Not deja vu, since that deals with the experience of feeling you've been somewhere before or lived an experience before. Perhaps the Germans have a word for this, since they are quite good at coming up with words for odd experiences.
• Though I have not read Mother Jones and Her Army of Mill Children, the set up for this book sounds like a classic way of introducing children to a historical figure we wouldn't necessarily expect them to connect with. The author finds something about the subject children should be attracted to, in this case, other children. That aspect of the book reminds me of Susanna Reich's Minette's Feast, in which child readers are introduced to Julia Child by way of her cat. 

 

Oh, And Since We're Discussing Introducing The Young To Adult Subjects...

 

A family member who is a middle school librarian brought  A Young People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn with Rebecca Stetoff  to my attention. It's a young adult edition of Zinn's original book. I would not say that this is the only history of the United States a young person, or anyone else, should read, but it certainly will give someone who already knows something about American history something to consider.

Coronavirus Cancellations In Childlit

Over the coming weeks I will be covering book launches within the children's literature world and other childlit-related events that are cancelled due to the coronavirus outbreak in this country. You can help out these authors by spreading the word about their new books, following them on social media, recommending their books to your libraries, and, of course, purchasing them when you can. I'm collecting this information on a catch-as-catch-can basis. Many more authors and illustrators will be affected who you won't see here.

Today's author info relates to events that appeared on the March Connecticut Children's Literature Calendar and includes nonbook launch appearances. These are followed by some Massachusetts news.

Amphibian Acrobats

R. J. Julia Bookseller's (Madison, Ct.) Event Calendar has been cleared until the end of the month. Leslie Bulion was to have appeared there on Saturday, March 21. Her March 22 Byrd's Books (Bethel, Ct.) appearance has been rescheduled to June 5, 5:30 to 7:30
Both dates supported her book, Amphibian Acrobats.

Amphibian Acrobats, published by Peachtree Publishing Company and illustrated by Robert Meganck, is a nonfiction book dealing with amphibians around the world.

Leslie Bulion is the author of six other books for children, which have been named to lists sponsored by such organizations as the NCTE, Bank Street College, and Book Sense.

A Galaxy of Sea Stars 

 

The Barnes and Noble in West Hartford, Ct. has no events listed for the rest of the month. Jeanne Zulick Ferruolo was to have appeared there on Saturday, March 21 in support of her latest book, A Galaxy of Sea Stars.

A Galaxy of Sea Stars, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux,  involves an eleven-year-old American girl whose family sponsors a family from Afghanistan that includes a girl her own age.

Jeanne Zulick Ferruolo is also the author of Ruby in the Sky, which won a number of awards before publication.

Welcoming Elijah: A Passover Tale With A Tail

Leslea Newman's March 29 appearance at the River Bend Bookshop in Glastonbury has been cancelled. She was to have read her new book, Welcoming Elijah: A Passover Tale With A Tail.

Welcoming Elijah, published in January by Charlesbridge and illustrated by Susan Gal, is the story of a young boy celebrating Passover with his family while a kitten observes from outside the house.

Newman is the author of numerous books that have won multiple awards. More importantly, she was at the University of Vermont around the same time I was. Seriously, we overlapped on campus two years. Additionally, she was at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference as a participant the year after I finished my three summers there as the pastry assistant in the kitchen! This is amazing! (I feel that I may have noted this info sometime over the years in a post about Newman, though I can't find it. Well, if I have told people about this before, all I can say is that it is well worth repeating.)

Other Cancellations

The Public Library of New London, Ct. is closed as of last Friday, March 13. Katie L. Carroll and Patrick Scalisi were to have appeared at the library's Local Author Fest on Sat., March 28.


The Storytellers' Cottage in Simsbury, Ct.  is closed for the rest of the month. Joyce Lapin was to have appeared there on March 21st.

The New England Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators spring conference on May 1   through May 3 has been cancelled.

The New England SCBWI art show, Art From the Heart, at the Wedeman Gallery, Lasell College, from May 8-30, has been cancelled.

Coronavirus Cancellations In Childlit

Over the coming month (or more) I will be covering book launches within the children's literature world and other childlit-related events that are cancelled due to the coronavirus outbreak in this country. You can help out these authors by spreading the word about their new books, following them on social media, recommending their books to your libraries, and, of course, purchasing them when you can.


KidLitCon

The thirteenth annual KidLitCon, which was to have been held on March 26 and 27 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, announced on Twitter yesterday that it has been cancelled. The Ann Arbor District Library, where it was to have been held, has cancelled all its programs and events indefinitely.

KidLitCon is described as a Cybils Award Event, and is connected to the same childlit blogging community. My recollection is that it was originally specifically about blogging and bloggers, though now it is an "...annual gathering of people who care about, and/or blog (or Tweet or Instagram or Facebook or make Videos) about children’s and young adult books..." It involves a wider group these days.

Check out the bloggers and authors who were scheduled to attend.

You're Invited To A Moth Ball

You're Invited to a Moth Ball by Loree Griffin Burns was supposed to launch at the National Science Teaching Association conference in Boston in April. The conference has been cancelled.
Burns said yesterday on Facebook that other spring launch events are up in the air.

You're Invited to a Moth Ball, illustrated by Ellen Harasimowicz and published by Charlesbridge, describes how child readers can observe night time insects at their own homes.

Loree Griffin Burns is the author of numerous nonfiction books for children, some of which have been named ALA Notable Books, Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor Books, and have won IRA Children's Book and Green Earth Book awards.

Numbers in Motion

The book launch for Numbers in Motion: Sophie Kowalevski, Mathematician by Laurie Wallmark, at The Book Garden in Frenchtown, New Jersey on March 15 (this Sunday), has been cancelled.

Numbers in Motion, illustrated by Yevgenia Nayberg and published by Creston Books, deals with Sophie Kowalevski, a nineteenth century Russian mathematician, who was the first woman to receive a doctorate in mathematics that required original research and to hold a university chair in mathematics. (Hmm. A women's history month title, perhaps?)

Laurie Wallmark is the author of three other picture book biographies on women in technology, one of which was named Outstanding Science Trade Book and Cook Prize Honor Book.

Laurie was also scheduled to appear at the National Science Teaching Association conference next month. 

I have at least two more cancellations to cover, and I suspect I'll be hearing about more.

Black History Month: "March"

I finally read March Book One by John Lewis, Andrew Ayden, and Nate Powell. I've been hearing about it for years. This is definitely a case of a book being worth the buzz.

March is a graphic memoir of John Lewis, the long-time U.S. Representative from Georgia's fifth congressional district who has also been part of the civil rights movement for decades. Lewis has a compelling story, but it's a story that is also extremely well told in this book. The frame used--Lewis is telling his story to children on Barack Obama's Inauguration Day--is marvelous. And Lewis's influences are carefully established, all the way back into childhood. The illustrations tell a lot of the story, as they should in a graphic work. And when there is narrative in the boxes, it's in Lewis's voice. He's the narrator telling the story.

The book is well done and informative. It's a book for young readers, but also a quick read for adults, including not-very-well-informed ones like myself, about the mid-twentieth century civil rights movement. Hmm. An adult I know may get this for his birthday.

March is the first of three volumes about John Lewis. Oh, this won the Coretta Scott King Book Award, which I mentioned here a few weeks ago.  The third book in the series was the first graphic work to win the National Book Award for Young People's Literature. Just sayin'.

Be sure to read about Andrew Ayden, who wrote March with Lewis. How the two of them came up with the idea for a graphic memoir is interesting, too.

An Illness Memoir For Kids

Guts, by Raina Telgemeier, is a graphic memoir that deals with the author's childhood experience with anxiety and what she describes in a back note as digestive problems. Yes, that second part is a subject that in kids' books could lead to a lot of distasteful humor. It doesn't here. Guts does what the best illness memoirs do. It has a mystery/thriller aspect. What is wrong with Raina? How much worse will things get for her? What is she going to do?

I can't say enough about how great It hink it is that memoirs are being written and published for middle grade readers. When my children were that age, all they read in school was novels. Which was fine, but that's not what they were learning to write. They were learning to write essays. They were often asked to write from their life experiences. But they never read examples of essays or anyone else writing of their life experience.

Guts would have been a great read for them, engaging and a mentorish text.

A Science Book About The Ocean For Younger Readers

You want to know a great rainy day activity? Visiting a bookstore when it's hosting an author. You may run into a friend. You may meet an author from your general area who you have not met before. You may get exposed to a lovely picture book.

All that happened yesterday, when I heard Jenna Grodzicki read from her new picture book, I See Sea Food, Sea Creatures That Look Like Food at the River Bend Book Shop. This is a nonfiction work with a great premise. There are ocean animals that look like food we eat. Food that's not, you know, seafood.

In addition to the clever premise--illustrating, by the way, that nonfiction can be clever and not just...nonfiction--the book is written with material simple enough to be read aloud to younger preschool readers. Then there are the blocks of facts for the older self-readers who like that kind of thing. And they are out there.

The book is illustrated with lovely photographs, not drawings. Not that there's anything wrong with drawings. But the photographs give readers a feeling that this is science, and this stuff is real. Because it is.

I was hopeful that I Sea Sea Food would make a good gift for a young family member who has has an interest in the ocean. Because of the way the content is directed at two reading levels, it should be a hit. I'm happy with my purchase already.

An Early Twentieth Century Woman Educator For Women's History Month

It's the last day of Women's History Month, and I just have time to do one more post on the old books piled on the floor in my living room. Well, I'm going to do more than one, but I mean one more about women that fit into a Women's History Month theme.

What I'm telling you about today is The Children's First Reader by Ellen M. Cyr. My edition was published in 1893 by Ginn & Publishers, Boston. You can find a variety of her readers for different levels and in different editions all over the Internet.

In Mysteries Revealed about a Reading Instruction Pioneer in the Winter/Spring 2006 The Jayhawk Educator (page 8) Arlene Barry, Associate Professor at the University of Kansas School of Education, says that Ellen Cyr was "the first woman in America to have a widely sold reading series marketed under her own name." Her books were translated into Spanish, Japanese, and Braille.

Barry provides an analysis of the books and why they were successful. But the First Reader has a note To the Teachers that includes some interesting information about what motivated Cyr to write her books. She said that the reading program for the first year of school was in the first half of the books used for instruction. "...the larger share of the first-year books are too difficult to be completed by the class, and therefore a part of the book is left unread." She writes that children were overwhelmed by the vocabulary in the second half of the books, would start another book and become overwhelmed after the halfway point again.  "...vocabulary is introduced too rapidly for the struggling brain."

"In this series, it has been my purpose to have a complete primary course..."

And she was successful. Her first primer, published by Lothrop, did so well that Ginn & Company offered her a contract. I can't find precise information about how long they remained in print or in use, but books available for sale indicate they were still being published in 1906.

Now, of course, Ellen is gone, another successful woman who became obscure.

Environmental Book Club

I discovered April Pulley Sayre last winter. She uses photography to illustrate her writing. Or maybe it's the other way around. Maybe her photography inspires her writing.

Full of Fall  combines stunning photography with spare, expressive, poetic writing.


This spring I became interested...just a bit, to be truthful...in nature poetry. That's what Sayre's Best in Snow is. Nature poetry for children with some more fantastic nature photography. I wouldn't have thought I would like the photography as much as I did.

Environmental Book Club

Compost Stew: An A to Z Recipe for the Earth by Mary McKenna Siddals with illustrations by Ashley Wolff is, as the title suggests, an alphabet book. I don't read a lot of these. I know they're often on a particular subject, but this one is really informational. All the letters connect with items that can go into compost piles.

From "Organic Life"*

Now, I didn't pick up this book just because compost is an environmentalish subject. No, I have a compost pile. I was going to take a picture of it for this post, but I forgot and now it's dark. So I'll just say it's one of these three-bin systems like the one to your right. I'm not an expert or anything. I will confess that in the winter I am often too lazy to go out to the bins with my compost. And I don't know if you're supposed to use compost bins in the winter. What I don't know about compost would fill a book.

But not Compost Stew.

Filled With Surprises

The point I'm getting around to is that though I am not a composting neophyte, there were items in this book I hadn't heard of. I had heard of putting hair clippings in a compost pile, for instance, but not oatmeal. Egg shells, but not lint. So I'm sitting there reading this with a young child going, "What?" "Whoa, there."

Note about the illustrations: They are collage-like and have a recycled look that fits the theme of the book. Very neat.



*How to Build a Three-bin Compost System Because you know you want one.

Environmental Book Club

I am back on-line in time to get this Environmental Book Club post on reality-based picture books up for Earth Day.

I haven't been doing many environmental book club posts this past year because I find so few "environmental" books, particularly in fiction, that I want to read. Forgive me, if I've said this here before, but too often I find novels about the environment pedantic and predictable. They tend to be about saving an animal or piece of land from an evil business (middle grade) or a post-apocalyptic world that exists because of an environmental disaster caused by humans (YA). I find myself drawn, instead, to picture book stories based on true environmental situations. Reality is actually more interesting and less predictable than fiction.

The Water Princess by Susan Verde with illustrations by Peter H. Reynolds is about an African village whose women must travel for miles each day to get water. This isn't an entirely new-type of narrative. We've heard of water problems in Africa before. But the fact that this story is based on someone's experience gives it a sense of reality a totally fictional account wouldn't have. This was one of my ReFoReMo reads. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I'll just repeat what I've already said about it. "...what makes this book so workable is the main character, who fantasizes about being an African princess. Also, she recognizes the struggle she and the women she knows deal with, making a lengthy round-trip each day to get water, but she doesn't lecture the readers about it. The author trusts us to recognize that this is a tough subject."

I also liked One Plastic Bag by Miranda Paul with illustrations by Elizabeth Zunon, another ReFoReMo title.  This book is based on a group of Ghambian women who handled a solid waste problem caused by plastic bags piling up and up around them by crocheting them into purses. I thought the author used repetition well, giving the book a "creative nonfiction vibe."  One Plastic Bag reminded me of Ada's Violin, a book about a group in Paraguay recycling solid waste in a creative way. Ada's author, Susan Hood, also uses creative nonfiction techniques well.

The Environmental Book Club

Ada's Violin by Susan Hood with illustrations by Sally Wern Comport is one of the best environmental books for kids that I've run across. It's also a great example of creative nonfiction. Seriously, I thought I was reading a novel for a while, the storytelling aspect of the book is that good. (Clearly I missed the subtitle on the cover, The Story of the Recycled Orchestra of Paraguay.) I've seen Ada's Violin mentioned this past year, but I had no idea what it was about. Then I saw it on The Green Earth Book Award short list. An example of an award bringing readers to a book. In my humble opinion, that's a major function of awards. The whole awarding part...eh.

Okay, so what is Ada's Violin about? "Ada Rios grew up in a town made of trash." Her family works for the landfill where recyclers pick through the garbage, looking for cardboard and plastic they can sell for five or ten cents a pound. Not a bright and cheery situation, but this isn't a grim story. Ada and her grandmother are interested in music, and grandma signs her up for music lessons. Ada decides she'll learn the violin, but there aren't enough instruments for all the kids who want to play.

So the music teacher gets together with a carpenter and a few other guys who find some stuff in the landfill and tinker with it and create a recycled orchestra. For real.

What's terrific about this story is that there is no artificial conflict between child characters and environmental bad guys. Ada lives within an unusual environment and that environment is used as the setting for this story. In reality, it was the setting for this story. Environment as setting, and setting as a major factor in action.

Hmm. I need to remember to use this book as an example in a workshop I do.

Bill Finger--The Documentary "A Big Superhero Secret"

Nearly two years ago, I heard Marc Tyler Nobleman speak about his book Bill the Boy Wonder, the story of Bill Finger, who was instrumental in creating Batman but never received credit for his work. This is the only book on Finger.

Now Hulu has made its first original documentary, Batman & Bill. It's also the first documentary based on a nonfiction book for young readers, Bill the Boy Wonder. Nobleman figures prominently in the terrific trailer.

The film was just released last weekend and has received a lot of media attention. Check out SyfyWire's interview with the film makers for information on children's author Nobleman's connection with the project.

Strange Fruit

I'm giving away another nonfiction picture book this month, this one Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday and the Power of a Protest Song by Gary Golio with illustrations by Charlotte Riley-Webb. You'll find details at the end of this post about how to enter for a chance at my copy.

Strange Fruit

The "strange fruit" in the title refers to the bodies of black men left in trees after having been lynched. It's the name and subject matter of a song singer Billie Holiday first performed in 1939. "Southern trees bear a strange fruit...Black body swinging in the Southern breeze." Grim subject matter for a book its publisher is marketing for ages 8 to 12?

Check out the title of the book again. "Billie Holiday and the Power of a Protest Song." The book really is about Holiday and the song, Strange Fruit. Lynching is mentioned very briefly in the text and at greater length in material at the back of the book. But Strange Fruit the picture book is about Holiday's life up to the point at which she is offered the opportunity to sing Strange Fruit the song, a piece she wasn't all that taken with at first. A song that ended up having great significance.

A song, by the way, that I'd never heard of until I saw this book. I don't know how I missed it. Holiday's version is in the Grammy Hall of Fame and the Recording Industry of America and the National Endowment for the Arts named it a Song of the Century. Today you can still listen to Billie Holiday, herself, sing it. You can hear an extensive number of cover versions. I listened to these before I read the picture book  and enjoyed imagining white patrons in a club slowly recognizing what the song is about. (Strange Fruit: The First Great Protest Song in The Guardian deals with that very situation.)  I've recently learned that the composer of the song, Abel Meeropol, became the adoptive father to Ethel and Julius Rosenberg's sons after their parents were executed. That has nothing to do with Strange Fruit, of course, but it totally blew me away.

I won't go so far as to say that this is a song that young people should know about or need to know about. Instead I will say that this is a song that is very worthy of being known. This book is an opportunity to show kids one of the many ways that art matters.

By the way, author Gary Golio has a little bit to say about jazz and jazz singers in this book. Very helpful for those of us who aren't terribly knowledgeable about that subject.

The #bookgiveaway

We're going to do something different this month. You can enter to win Strange Fruit two ways:

1. Comment below
2. Follow me on Twitter

At the end of May, I'll collect all the comments and new follows, assign everyone a number, and draw a winner.

Remember, if when you comment here your name in the comment doesn't link back to an e-mail so I can contact you, I won't be able to let you know you won. (I should be able to reach you if you enter by following me on Twitter.) So check Original Content the beginning of next month to see what happened. If I can't contact the winner, and don't her from him/her in a week, I'll draw another name.

Also, Comment Moderation kicks in after a few days. I'll see your comment, and post it.

Coming Wednesday: More on Strange Fruit and protest.

FTC Transparency Info: I received a copy of this book from the publisher.