Children and the future of the fictive dream

Theoretical ebooks for kids are becoming actual ebooks for kids. Elizabeth Bird at Fuse #8 channels Stanley Kubrik in a post about a small press doing some interesting things with books for the iPhone. And here's an announcement about the Flip, an ebook reader for children. Finally, Andrew Karre of Lerner Books speaks to the subject of how children will read in the future.

Once again I find myself apologizing for being a curmudgeon. What Winged Chariot Press is doing sounds great. A perfect use of the technology to present literature, teach literacy and engage children. It makes me think of a hyped up "read-along" text, but with out the bulky tape player and the lost tapes.

The Flip article, though, gets all jumpy over the possibilities of animations, quizzes and puzzle-solving in the midst of story reading. Hmmm. Lots of commentators shrug and say "if it gets kids into reading . . . "

I have nothing against this sort of thing, in and of itself. These "interactive texts" are just the electronic version of an activity book, a long trusted educational aid/distraction for the kids. For some types of reading, like reading for simple information, the quizzes and animations and puzzles may help motivate students, I suppose.

But there is a type of reading, both a pleasure and a skill, that all the flashy images and intrusive puzzles inhibit. It's that fully absorbing type of reading, sometimes called entering into the "fictive dream." While for many avid readers, reading in this fashion is second nature and is the reason why we read, it is, nonetheless, a learned skill. A reader must learn to fully engage the text, to offer up his or her imagination to the writing, engage in the collaboration of creating the fictive dream.

I often fear that gizmo reading, especially for children, ignores and devalues this kind of reading. Gizmo promoters talk about making books interactive, as if they weren't. As if the kind of reading that leads to the fictive dream were not a much more profound kind of interaction than any animation or video game or quiz or puzzle.

But maybe I should stop worrying as Ms. Bird suggests. Before the gizmos, children moved from touch and feel books to picture books to readers to chapter books to novels, the multimedia interruptions (mostly illustrations) to the fictive dream growing fewer and fewer with each graduation. Perhaps fictive dream type reading should be waded into slowly.

But, then again, so many of the proposed ebooks and ebook readers for kids seem to be aimed at that older set and seem to kowtow to their video-game-oriented minds. Maybe we're in danger of creating more and more distracted readers, rather than less.

Anatomy Jumble

The title of Martin Chatterton's novel, The Brain Finds a Leg, evokes disturbing images, the kind of thing you encounter in nightmares or the fine details of a Hieronymus Bosch painting of the depths of Hell: a brain liberated from its skull hopping about spasmodically on a leg that sprouts from its hypothalamus, the knee flexing as gelatinous gray matter jiggles. (The title doesn't suggest it, but in my my mind the leg is also wearing a high-heeled shoe.)

The Brain Finds a Leg isn't actually anything like that. The Brain isn't an actual brain, but a guy by the name of Brain, Theophilus Brain. And the leg is lifeless, having been severed from the corpse of a murdered surfer. And the story doesn't take place in Hell but in an Australian town called Farrago Bay which includes characters nearly as strange as those imagined by Hieronymus Bosch. If you ask Sheldon McGlone, fatherless, bullied by teachers and fellow students alike, living in Farrago Bay is pretty much like living in Hell.

So, while The Brain Finds a Leg doesn't include a brain bounding about on a high-heel-shod gam, such a thing would probably find a nice home in this story.

Let me start again.

Sheldon McGlone is fatherless because his father, the captain of the whale-watching vessel The Coreal, was "lost at sea" in an unexplained and unlikely accident involving killer humpback whales, although those tormenting Sheldon have suggested that his father's incompetence was the real cause of the mishap. Sheldon's mother has taken to dating Sargeant Snook of the Farrago Bay police force who Sheldon considers a less-than-stellar paternal replacement. At school Sheldon finds himself the preferred spitball target of bully Fergus Feebly and the favorite humiliation target of the evil Mrs. Fleming. To deal with the stress, Sheldon has adopted a sugar binging habit.

Into Sheldon's depressing life walks Theophilus Brain, a new kid so nerdy--oversized head, oversized glasses, oversized intellect, etc.--Sheldon has hopes that some of the pressure will be taken off of him. But The Brain (no he's not Wellesian mouse) shows himself more than capable of standing up to both Feebly and Fleming. What's more, the evening of his sudden appearance in Farrago Bay, The Brain knocks on the McGlone's door and makes Sheldon a proposition: The Brain declares himself to be The World's Greatest Detective and asks Sheldon to play the role of his trusty sidekick, the Watson to The Brain's Holmes. Sheldon's outlook is so gloomy that The Brain's offer actually looks like an attractive option.

The two immediately have a case to solve: the murder of champion surfer and Dent-O toothpaste spokesperson Bif Manly who's body was recently discovered, minus a leg. It's not spoiling anything to announce that The Brain's first clue is the surfer's leg which The Brain finds.

In the meantime, not only the humpback whales are acting strangely. So are the koalas, the lorikeets, an out-of-place crocodile, and one particular classroom teacher. And nothing about The Brain, including hi story of being the victim of his mad scientist parents' experimental mishap, quite adds up either.

The Brain Finds a Leg starts with the absurd. Then each page tries to outdo the last. Chatterton has a Pynchonesque gift for quirky character names (Infinity Override and Carefree O'Toole are my favorites) and for slipping hyperbole into even his most offhand phrases. In short, The Brain Finds a Leg is a lot of fun, what you might get if Daniel Pinkwater channelled both Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Chuck Jones then told a story with an Australian accent while standing in one of those Bosch details.

The Brain Finds a Leg made it's US debut this year and is a Cybils award nominee.

Crossposted at Guys Lit Wire

Random thoughts of a Cybils panelist #1

If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
--Obi Wan Kenobi, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope

The Harry Potter series culminates in a story about the most powerful of magical items: the Elder Wand. The Lord of the Rings centers around an immensely powerful ring. Magical swords, potions, crystals, gems, mirrors are all things to quest for, or covet, or fight entire-world-on-the-brink battles over.

The Cybils nominees in the Middle Grade Sci-Fi Fantasy category sometimes draw on these old tropes, but have also introduced a few surprising and unique Items of Power. Two otherwise unrelated novels agree that dandelions have immense magically power. Didn't see that coming, but I can't argue with it either.

But there is a general consensus among the nominees that the most powerful of magical items are books. Books as portals, books as secret codes, books simply emanating power, books offering either narrative or knowledge. This idea isn't new, but its omnipresence does seem a little, I dunno, prophetic? I struggle over what this elevation of the printed word means. Is it sign that books are growing in importance? Or that they are becoming rarer, less read, less comprehensible and therefore more dangerous. Perhaps it's a "we-can-play-that-game-too" reaction to Biblical literalists. Or perhaps it's a kind of preemptive nostalgia for a form everyone assures us is breathing its last.

When you . . . something something something

The worst thing about When You Reach Me is its title. Not that it misrepresents the book or anything. In that respect it’s perfect. But I have trouble recalling it. When I think about the book, the first thing that comes to my mind is “Wish You Were Here” and then my brain says to me “That’s a Pink Floyd album” and with haunting guitar chords now echoing through my brain’s cavernous file room, I have to rifle through the ‘W’s’ until I come up with “When You Reach Me.” If your brain uses a more efficient filing system you may not have this problem.

But once you get past the title (and, really, it’s just four words) you come upon a beautifully written narrative under a thin sci-fi veneer that captures the odd “tweener” world of the older elementary school student, the odder world of the 1970s, the stresses of single parenthood, and the poetry of both hope and regret.

When her best friend, Sal, stops speaking to her after he gets arbitrarily punched by a neighborhood bully, Miranda finds herself falling in with a whole different group of friends, among them, weirdly, the bully, who turns out not to be a bully at all. At the same time, Miranda needs to negotiate her mother’s relationship with her boyfriend, also known as Mr. Perfect, who, though he seems to live up to his name, is not being granted a key of his own to the apartment. Mr. Perfect and Miranda are helping Miranda’s mom prepare for an appearance on 20,000 Pyramid (if you were around in the seventies and for some reason, like perhaps a brain filing problem, you don’t remember that show-- should it go under ‘t’ or with the numbers, before ‘a’?-- this book will bring it all rushing back). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Miranda begins to receive notes from someone. The notes appear in weird places. They predict things in the future which inevitably come true, and they ask Miranda for something in return: to write the sender, whoever he or she may be, a story, a true story.

That’s a lot to handle in such a short book. In order to get all the elements quickly in order, the book seems a bit directionless in the first few pages. For many readers this won’t be a problem, it might even be intriguing, but it is not typical of middle grade science fiction or fantasy. In fact, my oldest child, aka Mini-Chomp, who is a SFF addict, tried reading it and gave up after the first few pages. Not only was she discouraged, she was actually angry. “It’s not even a story!” she declared, thrusting a fist into the air.

But, tyrannical nine year-olds aside, this book does tell a story and a little patience with the opening pays off when all the elements gel together and the narrative glides forward seamlessly, becoming more intriguing by the page. Despite all the mystery driving the plot, what Stead is best at is portraying her characters through quirky, peculiar details, the kind we recognize in our friends. (Discovering these little gems is part of the pleasure of reading this book, so I won’t spoil any of them here.) Because of them, you’ll soon befriend these characters and start to care almost as much about them as they care about each other.

This book will eventually be placed on Mini-Chomp’s required reading list, right there beside A Wrinkle in Time (which she also refuses to read and which just happens to be Miranda’s favorite book). Mark my words. Eventually Mini-Chomp too will grow to appreciate Rebecca Stead’s When You Wish You Were Reaching Me Here. Is that right?

When You Reach Me is a Cybil Book Awards nominee.

FTC disclosure: The publisher provided me with a copy of this book in order to evaluate it for the Cybil awards. The image at the top and any side bar images are linked to the Amazon Associates program. I get a small commission if you buy anything after following these links.

A new favorite blog

School Library Journal's Elizabeth Bird linked to Bookie Woogie in her latest post. It's new favorite. The "reviews" are discussions about books between a dad and his three kids. The discussions are free-spirited and each review ends with some fan art. Very fine fan art, if you ask me.

Graphic Metamorphosis

From my post this month on GuysLitWire:


The opening of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, in which Gregor Samsa awakes to discover he has been transformed into a man-sized cockroach, stands as one of the most recognizable moments in all of the Twentieth Century literature. If you've never read the story, Peter Kuper's graphic novel adaptation can serve as a fine introduction, and if you have, it will make you see the story in a whole new horrifyingly funny way.

Because, when the novel opens, being turned into a bug is not Gregor's biggest problem. No, weighing much more heavily on Gregor’s mind is that he is late for work. He has to figure out how to get out of bed, how to collect his salesman's samples, how to get dressed and how to catch the morning train. Gregor has been so terrorized by his bosses and is so obsessed with making money to pay off his family's debts that being stuck on his beetle-shell back with six spindly legs waving in the air pales in comparison.

And while Gregor recognizes the horror of becoming a vermin, the difficulty it might present, he is only devastated when his condition results in losing his traveling salesman job.

This is horrifying, agonizingly sad, and . . . well . . . kinda funny. For us, nearly 100 years later, The Metamorphosis can serve as something of a morality tale for our "uncertain economic times."

Peter Kuper's graphic novel adaptation fits perfectly into this landscape of eerie, comical horror. The use of a white on black background puts everything into comic-book negative, creating an appropriately nightmarish aura. Most of the characters are drawn broadly, as they are written: Gregor's sister Grete is a cute cartoon figure with a terrified expression pasted on her face, what might have happened if Blondie Bumstead had posed for Edvard Munch's The Scream; Gregor's father is a puffed out man with an over-sized angry head taken from an Otto Dix painting; and his mother looks quite simply like a corpse. Gregor is the most grotesque of all but is given the most emotional breadth: he is depicted as a beetle with a head still vaguely recognizable as a human. Kuper uses all of Gregor's attributes, from both man and insect, to convey his perpetually conflicting emotions. Graphic elements like off-kilter frames and jaggedly outlined dialog balloons contribute more to the edgy aura.

Not everything translates perfectly. The novel gets some of its horror from the visceral elements of being a bug--the ooze, the stench, the sticky and rotting stuff. Kuper's stark graphics can't really portray this kind of thing, and he doesn't really try, focusing on the story's other horrifying elements instead.

One of these is that Gregor never stops being human. He never loses the ability to hear others talking about him, although they assume he has and thus are not at all careful free in what they say. He never loses the ability to feel love, rejection, humiliation, and, finally, betrayal. What remains of his humanity Kuper expresses in his large terrified eyes, revealing an inner horror more terrifying than his invertebrate exterior.

As countless other commentators have pointed out, The Metamorphosis can be read in a number of ways, as a religious allegory, as social commentary, or as an expressionistic expose of a tortured human soul. Still, what struck me upon rereading it this time, both because of Kuper's adaptation and because of current events, is how much the story is about employment, about jobs. Even after the opening scene, Gregor continues to obsess about his lost employment as much as about being a bug. He recalls how he counted down the days until he could tell off his bosses. He swells with pride when he thinks about how he rescued his family from certain doom, working his way up from stock clerk to traveling salesman, after his father's business collapsed in an economic downturn. And he shrinks with shame when he considers all they have to go through now that he can no longer work. His retirement-age father must return to work as a bank messenger. His mother brings in sewing and his teenage sister becomes a salesgirl. The family also brings in three demanding borders who discover the family's secret shame, Gregor.

In the end, the conflict between Gregor's point of view and his family's creates the deepest irony. To Gregor, work has been mostly torture and humiliation, a life metaphorically like the one he adopts as a bug, but his family has come to find that work means something different to them. The story ends with the family, minus Gregor, riding a train together, and the three remaining members deciding that they each actually like their jobs. It seems mundane, but in this story it's the equivalent of Jason popping up out of the lake to terrify the audience one last time. Everything Gregor was about, all of his sacrifice, was for naught. All along, his family would have been happy, happier even, going to work! SKREET SKREET SKREET SKREET!

Is there a moral? I don't know. But if it's about jobs, I'd get a good one if I were you. Stay in school. Find something you love and work like hell at it. Don't let what happened to Gregor Samsa happen to you . . .

Check out the book's website. The opening movie is well worth a visit and provides and excellent preview of the book.

Ebook versions of the original, translated by David Wyllie, are available free at Project Gutenberg.

Elephants from the Sky

An orphan, Peter Augustus Duchene, wants to know where his sister is. His caretaker, the retired soldier Vilna Lutz claims that she died shortly after being born, but Peter has his nagging doubts. At the market one day he hands over Vilna Lutz's grocery money to a fortune teller who reveals two irreconcilable pieces of information: one, his sister is alive; two, an elephant will lead him to her.

Given the utter absence of elephants in his city of Baltese, Peter doesn't know whether to be filled with hope or ashamed of his foolishness until an elephant does arrive, conjured, half-accidentally, out of the sky, by a desperate stage magician.

Like the phenomenally successful Tale of Desperaux, Kate DiCamillo's latest book is a fairy tale told with simple poetic language from multiple points of view. In The Magician's Elephant a character which seems to merely add atmosphere to one scene will take over the story in the next. Each part of the tale is constructed perfectly to fit with the others. I'd say the story works like gears meshing together, but the narrative is so much more elegant than that. It's more like an elaborate folk dance.

While Peter remains at the center of the story the reader's sympathies connect with the wishes of so many other characters (including the elephant's) that the story relates the regrets and hopes of a whole fairy tale community. In the end it's a story of love of every kind except the romantic kind, and in that it is truly refreshing.

My only question is whether this really is a kids' book. It has a child as its protagonist and it's written using language that is fairly simple on the surface. And it is a fairy tale. But really Peter Augustus Duchene is more an adult-idealized child (damaged, innocent, unswervingly moral, and absolutely determined) than a child that real kids can relate to. Peter is the anti-Wimpy Kid.

So The Magician's Elephant might be described as a "crossover" book. But, if I am right that children will read this book only to indulge the adults in their lives, it just might step over the kid/adult line with all four elephant feet.

The Magician's Nephew is a Cybil Book Awards nominee.

Disclosure to please the FTC: My copy of The Magician's Nephew was borrowed from the Cleveland Heights Public Library with no strings attached. The image of The Magician's Elephant above, and in the side bar, is linked to the Amazon Affiliate program. I get a small commission from Amazon for books purchased on Amazon that were accessed through this link.