by Nancy Pearl
Boys and girls in Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s neighborhood love to visit her because of her upside-down house, the fresh-baked cookies (always available), and her pet cat, Lightfoot, and dog, Wag. But their parents love her as well, and the reasons for that can be seen in Betty MacDonald’s Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and its sequels, which tell of her ingenious (and very funny) cures for common childhood (mis)behaviors such as refusing to bathe, eating too slowly, never wanting to go to bed, and more. Move over, Dr. Spock.
Helen Cresswell’s books about the eccentric Bagthorpe family include Ordinary Jack, Absolute Zero, and Bagthorpes Unlimited, among others. Reluctant readers, especially boys, tend to devour them. Do read them in order, though.
You always know you’re in for a guffaw or two with the books of Daniel Pinkwater, and The Hoboken Chicken Emergency is no exception—what else can you expect when one of the characters is a 166-pound chicken named Henrietta, who happens to love oatmeal cookies? Try Pinkwater’s Werewolf Club series, as well, beginning with The Magic Pretzel.
Meeting Homer, the hero of Homer Price and Centerburg Tales: More Adventures of Homer Price by Robert McCloskey, is one of the not-to-be-missed experiences of childhood.Whether it’s the tale of a lost diamond bracelet in a donut shop, the one about a bet involving a BIG ball of yarn, or the story of a skunk that proves useful in apprehending some criminals, Homer’s escapades have delighted readers since they were originally published way back in 1943.
Because Philip Pullman’s best-known books are those in the His Dark Materials trilogy (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass), which—though wonderful—are not exactly intended to elicit laughter from readers, it’s sometimes easy to forget that he’s written some certifiable laugh-out-loud books. Don’t miss three of his best, The Scarecrow and His Servant, Spring-Heeled Jack, and I Was a Rat!
One fine day Tiffany Aching is both minding her own business on her parents’ sheep farm and babysitting her little brother, Wentworth, when a group of blue, fierce, and decidedly very small men show up, all shouting what seem to be warnings to her. It turns out there’s a killer witch in the nearby stream who has more than a passing interest in Wentworth, brat or no. What to do? Turn him over to the hag? Or try to vanquish her? The laughs and surprises keep coming in page after page of Terry Pratchett’s The Wee Free Men and its sequels, which serve as a great introduction to this prolific and terrific author.
Poor Mr. Popper: he’s always wished that before he settled into his present pleasant (but boring) life, he’d done something exciting, even heroic, like accompanying Admiral Drake in his journey to the South Pole. Reading about polar expeditions just doesn’t cut it. But when a fan letter to Admiral Drake results in the gift of a penguin—well, life’s about to change at 432 Proudfoot Avenue, in Richard and Florence Atwater’s Mr. Popper’s Penguins.
Other humorous books include Skinnybones by Barbara Park; The Sixth Grade Nickname Game by Gordon Korman;Chancy and the Grand Rascal, a (very) tall tale by Sid Fleischman; Louis Sachar’s Sideways Stories from Wayside School and Wayside School is Falling Down; and Paul Rosenthal’s Yo, Aesop! Get a Load of These Fables.
MELTING POTS AND SALAD BOWLS
Novels about immigrants coming to America in pursuit of the American dream are a favorite choice of many adult readers.The same is true for middle-grade readers. Lucky for them there are many superb novels that deal with what it’s like to come to a new home where you look different and/or talk differently than your schoolmates and neighbors. In a subtle and nondidactic way, the books described here will help readers imagine just what that’s like. All of them are excellent choices for parent/ child book discussion groups; teachers will find that they make fine introductions to lessons on our multicultural society, as well.
In Bette Bao Lord’s autobiographical novel, In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson, the author describes the experiences of Shirley Temple Wong, who moves to Brooklyn with her family in 1947 and finds making friends easier after she becomes a fan of the great infielder Jackie Robinson, star of the Dodgers, the local professional baseball team.
When Jenny’s fourth-grade class is given an assignment to pretend they’re mice and write letters to second-graders, Jenny is assigned to a girl named Sameera, who never answers her letters. Jenny learns that Sameera has recently come to America from Saudi Arabia, and she has to figure out how to communicate with her pen pal, in Ann Whitehead Nagda’s Dear Whiskers.
Donna Jo Napoli’s The King of Mulberry Street is told from the point of view of Beniamino, who comes to America, alone, from Naples, Italy, in the last years of the nineteenth century and makes his way to adulthood on the dangerous streets of New York City.
Other books about immigrants and refugees that will broaden a middle-grade reader’s perspective include Home Is East by Many Ly, the story of a Cambodian immigrant family; The Memory Coat by Elvira Woodruff, about two Jewish cousins who come to America in the first decade of the twentieth century from their home in a small Russian village; the similarly plotted (although for slightly younger readers) When Jessie Came Across the Sea by Amy Hest; How I Became an American by Karen Gündisch, translated from German by James Skofield; Carolyn Marsden’s The Gold-Threaded Dress; and Lensey Namioka’s Yang the Youngest and His Terrible Ear. (How can Yang reconcile his immigrant family’s expectations and at the same time become a regular American boy? There’s more about the family in Yang the Third and Her Impossible Family and Yang the Second and Her Secret Admirers.)
MYTHS, LEGENDS, FOLK AND FAIRY TALES
One of the best ways to give children a sense of the similarities and differences among the people and cultures of our diverse world is to introduce them to the various myths and legends that have come down to us from ages past and countries and societies far away.
Neil Philip arranged The Illustrated Book of Myths: Tales and Legends of the World under topics such as creation accounts, gods and animals, and gods and men, and includes familiar stories from the Greeks and Romans as well as less well-known tales from Polynesia, South America, and Africa.The appealing illustrations, by Nilesh Mistry, make this book a keeper. (The pair also collaborated on The Illustrated Book of Fairy Tales.)
There are thirty-three tales (again, including some quite well known to a western audience—such as the story of Theseus—and less familiar—the Japanese tales about Izanagi and Izanami, for example) in A World Treasury of Myths, Legends, and Folktales: Stories from Six Continents as told by Renata Bini. The style of Mikhail Fiodorov’s pictures changes to reflect the origins of the tale each illustrates, which adds to the pleasure of the reading experience.
Although there are no illustrations in Best-Loved Folktales of the World, as selected (and with an introduction) by children’s author Joanna Cole, this is an excellent one-volume collection of more than two hundred stories from Laos to Ireland, and from Scandinavia to Africa.
Other collections of folk tales include Howard Norman’s Between Heaven and Earth: Bird Tales from Around the World, a group of five stories told by students in the author’s class on folklore, with engaging illustrations by Leo and Diane Dillon; Ingri and Edgar Parrin d’Aulaire’s classic D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, which is often the first book of myths a child encounters (and a good first choice it is), along with their D’Aulaires’ Book of Norse Myths; and Can You Guess My Name? Traditional Tales Around the World, selected and retold by Judy Sierra and illustrated by Stefano Vitale, which takes familiar stories like The Three Little Pigs and Hansel and Gretel and shows their counterparts in stories from other countries.
For the myths and legends of specific areas of the world, take a look at these classics: Roger Lancelyn Greene’s Tales of Ancient Egypt; Kevin Crossley-Holland’s The Norse Myths; American Indian Myths and Legends by Richard Erdoes; Swedish Folktales and Legends by Lone Thygesen Blecher and George Blecher; and Henri Pourrat’s French Folktales.
Way back in the late nineteenth century, Andrew Lang, a novelist, psychic resear
cher, and friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, started collecting fairy tales from around the world that were popular then and remain so today. The series is composed of The Blue Fairy Book, The Brown Fairy Book, The Crimson Fairy Book, The Green Fairy Book, The Grey Fairy Book, The Lilac Fairy Book, The Olive Fairy Book, The Orange Fairy Book, The Pink Fairy Book, The Red Fairy Book, The Violet Fairy Book, and The Yellow Fairy Book.Taken together, this is surely one of the most comprehensive collections we have available, although it’s good to keep in mind that these are heavily bowdlerized and sanitized versions of the original tales by the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen, and others, which tended to be much grimmer and more violent.
When I was a children’s librarian, I relied heavily on The Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library when I was looking for stories to introduce young readers to fairy tales from different countries, time periods, and regions of the world. Some that I found most useful include Aleksandr Afanas’ev’s Russian Fairy Tales; The Victorian Fairy Tale Book by Michael Patrick Hearn; The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales; Chinese Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Moss Roberts; Legends and Tales of the American West by Richard Erdoes; and Angela Carter’s The Old Wives’ Fairy Tale Book.
Michael Hague edited (and illustrated) The Book of Fairies, in which contributors run the gamut from poet Christina Rossetti (“The Goblin Market”) to Hans Christian Andersen. Hague also illustrated The Book of Pirates, in which stories by Rafael Sabatini and J. M. Barrie (among others) make an appearance.
One of my favorite collections of folk tales is Sweet Land of Story: Thirty-Six American Tales to Tell by Pleasant DeSpain, himself a superb storyteller.
NOT A DRY EYE IN THE HOUSE
One of the reasons these books are so popular with middle-grade readers is that it’s usually at this age when the reality of death and loss hits home. Although the cliché is that kids think they’ll live forever, in fact they’re now capable of understanding death in a way they weren’t when they were reading picture books like Judith Viorst’s The Tenth Good Thing About Barney or Tomie dePaola’s Nana Upstairs and Nana Downstairs (see the “Death and Dying” section in Part I). The books described here, with main characters around their own age, help readers sort out their own feelings, as well as offer just plain good (although sad) reading.
The death of a friend is handled with great sensitivity in Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia, which has not lost any of its power to move readers since its original publication in 1977.
After her mother is killed outside the family’s home (the gunmen were really aiming at her father, an outspoken journalist in Lagos), Sade and her brother Femi are sent to England out of concern for their safety, not knowing whether they will ever see their father again. What follows is worthy of Dickens; it’s heart-tugging and in places almost too painful to read. Beverly Naidoo has captured the experience of modern-day displaced refugees in The Other Side of Truth, which won England’s 2000 Carnegie Medal and other major awards. And most unusual for a children’s book, there’s no happy ending here.
It takes a car trip with her grandparents to allow Sal to finally come to terms with the death of her mother, in Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech.
Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes by Eleanor Coerr is a story based on the life and death of a real person, Sadako Sasaki, a young girl dying of radiation poisoning after the bombing of Hiroshima. After a friend tells her that many Japanese believe if a sick person folds one thousand paper cranes, the gods will grant her one wish, Sadako decides that’s what she’ll do. Although this is ostensibly a picture book (with illustrations by Ronald Himler), its subject is really more appropriate to fourth-graders and above.
When May, who’s been Summer’s foster mother for the past six years, dies, both Summer and May’s husband, Ob, are inconsolable. It takes Cletus, one of Summer’s seventh-grade classmates, a visit to a woman who supposedly can contact the dead, and a mysterious owl to finally give Summer (and Ob) the comfort they need to go on, in Cynthia Rylant’s Missing May.
Eleanor Estes has written other books that are happier than The Hundred Dresses, but none has the whopping emotional impact of this tale of fourth-grade cruelty about when Maddie and a group of her friends unmercifully taunt Wanda Petronski for wearing the same ugly, faded blue dress to school every day. It’s a book that brings home a lot of lessons, but does so very subtly.
Other books to cry over include Each Little Bird That Sings by Deborah Wiles; Defiance byValerie Hobbs; Sort of Forever by Sally Warner (which explores the longtime friendship between two twelve-year-olds and what happens when one is diagnosed with an incurable cancer); Audrey Couloumbis’s Getting Near to Baby (the death of her baby sister rocks Willa Jo’s world); Olive’s Ocean by Kevin Henkes (about the death of a classmate); Alfred Slote’s Hang Tough, Paul Mather (a real tearjerker about an eleven-year-old Little Leaguer with leukemia); Gary D. Schmidt’s Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy (based on a true event that took place in Maine in 1912); Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo; and Cynthia Kadohata’s Kira-Kira (in which a young girl tries to understand the death of her beloved older sister).
O PIONEERS!
The pioneer period in American history makes for enthralling reading on many levels; stories about this time are usually relatively fast-moving tales filled with excitement and danger. And many authors have chosen as their main characters young girls who are thrust into events that they find challenging. Many children’s first introduction to pioneer stories are the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Book Crush wouldn’t be complete without including Little House in the Big Woods and its sequels, Little House on the Prairie, Farmer Boy, On the Banks of Plum Creek, By the Shores of Silver Lake, The Long Winter, Little Town on the Prairie, and These Happy Golden Years. These autobiographical stories of pioneer life grow along with the boy or girl reading them: second- and third-graders can probably read the first two on their own, and as they mature they can follow along as Laura grows up, moving from the woods of Wisconsin to, finally, De Smet, South Dakota. (And the illustrations by Garth Williams are perfection themselves.) These books are also wonderful for read-alouds on long car trips. I know families who have visited all of the places Laura writes about, and I once saw a bumper sticker that made me smile: “I am a Laura Ingalls Wilder freak,” it declared. (I recently spent a lovely day in De Smet, South Dakota, where the last four books take place.)
For another view of the same general historical period, try Louise Erdrich’s rich and involving story The Birchbark House, told through the eyes of a seven-year-old Ojibwa girl named Omakayas, or Little Frog, who lives on an island on Lake Superior with her adopted family.All the everyday details of a particular slice of Native American life in 1847 are described in prose that will captivate young readers.
Other enjoyable pioneer stories for this age group include Paul Fleischman’s The Borning Room; Nancy Smiler Levinson’s Prairie Friends, in which she describes both the camaraderie and loneliness of life on the prairie; The Cabin Faced West by Jean Fritz (set back when western Pennsylvania was the frontier); Carol Ryrie Brink’s Caddie Woodlawn and Magical Melons; I Have Heard of a Land by Joyce Carol Thomas (about an African American pioneer in Oklahoma Territory in the late nineteenth century); Elizabeth George Speare’s The Sign of the Beaver; Lois Lenski’s oldie but goodie, Prairie School; Weasel by Cynthia DeFelice; Jennifer Armstrong’s Black-Eyed Susan (the same setting as the Wilder books); and Jennifer L. Holm’s Our Only May Amelia (Washington State at the end of the nineteenth century).
ONE WORD IS WORTH A THOUSAND PICTURES (OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT)
Sometimes you don’t need more than one word as a title to invite readers into a book—and these books are the sort where you absolutely want to accept the invitation.
When he was eleven years old, Sterling North adopted a baby raccoon—and he describes his adventures with his beloved pet (as well as his Saint Bernard, Wowser) in Rascal, a memoir much beloved by
animal lovers young and old.
Nobody writes about really awful adults better than Roald Dahl (which may explain why he tends to be more popular with kids than with their parents and teachers), and few fictional parents are as loathsome as Mr. and Mrs.Wormword in Matilda, not to mention the inexorable Miss Trunchbull, Matilda’s headmistress at school. Only Miss Honey (Matilda’s teacher) and Mrs. Phelps (the librarian who introduces Matilda to the world of literature) make her life worth living. (And don’t forget Spiker and Sponge, James’s truly horrible, really evil aunts in James and the Giant Peach. Of course, James dispatches them, in spades, by having them crushed to death by a rolling piece of guess what fruit.)
Carl Hiaasen’s Hoot and Flush are both entertaining stories combining Hiaasen’s passion for the importance of protecting the environment (played out in his books for adults as well) with fast-moving plots and realistic young male protagonists.
