Rilla and I were quite surprised to find ourselves and Huck in the opening pages of this book. I mean, really, it’s like Matt Phelan was peeking in the window. A charming story, quite appealing to the four-year-old big sister in this household. (She wouldn’t let Huck blow away either.) Flora is frustrated when baby brother Crispin gets into the paints and ruins Flora’s picture. Their frazzled mama sends them outside to play, despite Flora’s protests that the wind is too strong and will blow them away. Sure enough, a hearty gust scoops Crispin into the sky, and Flora must abandon her boots and go rescue him. Seems every high-flying creature in the big blue and beyond wants to claim Crispin—who is, admittedly, utterly irresistible in that long-tasseled hat—for a helper. Dragonfly, sparrow, eagle, rainbow, cloud, even the moon! Flora’s exchanges with these entities quite enchanted my Rilla. And my goodness, Matt Phelan’s art just blew me away.
Flora & Crispin will join Max & Ruby and Maggie B. & James in the company of great big sister-little brother pairs in children’s literature.
Serendipitously, we picked up this book for the first time on the very day that Rilla discovered two pairs of rainboots in the hall closet. Pink and blue, not red and purple, but still.
One of my own childhood favorites. Now a Rilla fave, requested every couple of weeks. (I’ve mentioned it before, here and here.) (I’m back this morning to add another little bit of squee over this book. The art especially, which has just as much hold over my heart now as it did when I was small. The expressions on Christina’s face, and her mother’s! The magic of her bright imagination, which rebounds from every disaster! The ball in the summer mansion was always my favorite bit.
Number books may be the delight of the toddler, but they can be dull business for the parent forced to flip their pages infinity times. Not so with Fleming’s Count. The bold, bright paintstrokes of the art bring to life a menagerie of mischievous animals whose questionable manners delight my children and amuse their mother. The (4) crocodiles bite each other’s tails. The instruction on the toucan page may be “Share” but you just know the bird with the berry ain’t gonna. It takes a master to pull off a simple concept book with this much energy and appeal.
• Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type by Doreen Cronin, pictures by Betsy Lewin
Me: “Honey, what would you say about Click, Clack, Moo?”
Scott: “What would you say about Click, Clack, Moo?! Sheer storybook perfection! Sheesh!”
This little gem has a pub date of 1996, the year after Jane was born, so I’m betting it was a present to us from one of our publishing-world pals, and a very fine gift it was indeed. Another gathering of impish critters—ape, lion, snake, and more—wreak delightful havoc on a gentle home through the course of a day. Sort of. Our guide is a young boy who describes the beasts in galloping rhyme, and his insider’s understanding of their antics begins to look mighty suspicious….My little people, who (like the narrator) spend much of their time as cats and other creatures, consider this kid a kindred spirit. I think this book is out of print, but maybe you’ll luck out and find it in the library.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
February 21, 2011 @ 7:46 am | Filed under: Books, Links
Because a couple of people were hunting for it this morning, here’s my Presidents Day Dessert post. (I’m now wishing I’d made it yesterday. I could really go for some cherry cobbler for breakfast today.)
A peek at the stat counter showed a hit for this post—someone was looking for Miss Rumphius—and I was interested to see that that post about the arrival of San Diego County’s beautiful grape-soda lupines is dated March 24. Here it is only Feb. 21 and we’re already seeing the lupines around town. Which reminds me: Rilla doesn’t know Miss Rumphius yet. (Shocking!) Must remedy that.
Beside the usual flurry of searches for the order of the Little House books and how to teach a toddler to blow her nose, there have been, in the past 24 hours, twelve queries having to do with Lark Rise to Candleford—most of them wondering, as I did, what happened to Nan. This tally is about typical. After my own name, my books, and Little House-related searches, the most common search topics in my stats are Lark Rise (and lately, Downton Abbey) and, interestingly, Vivian Vande Velde’s Stolen, an extremely gripping and mysterious middle-grade novel that, as far as I can tell, is showing up in the homework of a horde of sixth-graders across the nation. They’re all looking for plot summary of and I hope that after the frantic homework googling is done they’ll actually pick up the book and read it, because it’s well worth their time. Not homeworky at all, if you know what I mean, O Ye 6th-graders of America.
Scott just read the draft of this post and said, “But what about the one you read me this morning? You have to include that.” And so, dear person who searching for the answer to the timeless question, “Can I put the current weather as my Facebook status,” I’m sorry you didn’t find the answer on this blog. Okay, I’m not that sorry. (But I can tell you from experience, if you live in a climate that allows unexpected tomatoes to appear in the neglected back corner of your garden in January, your snowbound East Coast friends will not appreciate your crowing about it. I’m just saying.)
We’re in the backyard cleaning up the patio flowerbed. This has inspired a game of Pixie Hollow fairies, and I’m informed that I am Rosy, a “garden talent” fairy, and Rilla is my helper, Posy. (She has a deceptively cherubic baby-brother fairy named Cozy, who seems to have a rock-throwing talent.)
Talent notwithstanding, before any gardening can be done it is imperative (so I’m told) that I assume the correct accent for Rosy. “Sort of like Paula Deen,” Rose (not Rosy) coaches me. “Say darlin‘ a lot.”
All right, I can do that. Rose runs off to suck lemons with Beanie and Wonderboy on the sunny side-yard wall, leaving “Posy” and me to cut back the parsley and uproot tiny shoots of clover from the flowerbed. Posy is very nearly as sparkly as a real fairy, so delighted is she to have me all to herself, in the sun, with flowers, for a little while—young master Cozy having been hauled away for a nap by his father, whose talent is toddler-wrangling.
It was every bit as delightful as it sounds—despite the itchysneezy misery I’m grappling with this allergy season (I know, it sounds crazy to call February allergy season, but southern California is a crazy, crazy place). For some inexplicable reason, Claritin (and Zyrtec and Sudafed and everything else I’ve tried) make me unbearably drowsy. This is a new thing, just this year. The whole point of Claritin is it’s supposed to NOT make you drowsy, but it totally knocks me out. I mean, it might as well be Benadryl. So anyway, I’m muddling through without allergy meds and it’s made yard work a bit of a challenge this year. But, you know, burning eyes are a small price to pay for sunshine and flowers in the dead of winter. I only mention it because of the sneezing. Tending the posies with Posy, I got very sneezy and asked her to run into the house for a tissue for me.
While she was gone I sneezed four more times in rapid succession. Things were getting a little desperate when, thank goodness, Posy reappeared.
Rose is showing me a series of pictures she has colored in a Dover book of dragons. She flips to one particularly fearsome-looking creature with deadly claws and an evil glare.
“This one is Rilla’s,” she tells me.
“Hi, Sugar,” says Rilla, leaning close to kiss the beast tenderly upon its snarling, dagger-toothed snout. “My little sweetie.”
He watched this movie with me because it jumped back into my mind, full force, every single lyric intact, my entire being once more suffused with a yearning to wear ribbon barrettes and flowing skirts while dancing on roller skates, and I couldn’t live another night without having all that synthesizery goodbadness etched into his brain too.
He endured every terrible, terrible line of dialogue and crater-sized plot hole, and he even found the “Whenever You’re Away from Me” number as charming as I do.
This clip is NOT that number. “Charming” is not the word for it. A Giant Glittering Mess of Audio-Visual Cheesepuffery is what this is.
Worth noting: we realized that the same summer I watched Xanadu on an endless loop, Scott watched Kramer vs. Kramer 37 times. This may explain a lot about the way each of us turned out.
• Flora’s Very Windy Day by Jeanne Birdsall—that’s right, the Penderwicks author has written a picture book!
• Count! by Denise Fleming
• Daisy Thinks She Is a Baby by Lisa Kopper (I posted about it here)
