Pocketful of Posies

Maybe the skill and artistry of Salley Mavor's hand-stitched, sewn, and collaged illustrations for Pocketful of Posies: A Treasury of Nursery Rhymes (Houghton Mifflin, 2010) are best appreciated by other needleworkers, but their appeal is so much greater than that--after all, Pocketful of Posies is a Horn Book Fanfare Best Book of 2010 and an ALA Notable for Younger Readers.  I hope it received serious consideration for the Caldecott, too.  At our house, every page has been pored over and marveled at multiple times, and it's inspired lots of reading and singing, collecting and making.

My favorite are the double-page spreads, which often illustrate several nursery rhymes in a single scene.  The one below includes Humpty Dumpty (an actual egg!), Peter Piper, and Two Little Blackbirds.  It's dfficult to appreciate the richness of the color, the depth and detail of the original in this image; nothing I've found on the internet comes close to the photographic quality of the printed book.

Or, of course, the real thing: the original illustrations from Pocketful of Posies, with new embroidered felt borders and shadowbox frames made by Salley's husband, are being exhibited in a traveling show.  At this point, most of the locations are in New England.  [Charlotte, please go on my behalf.]

Fortunately, there is plenty of information about Mavor's process available online: this interview with Salley at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast is a good place to start.  And if you'd like to make little dolls like these, Mavor's Felt Wee Folk: Enchanting Projects (C&T, 2003) is a great resource.  There's even a section of Projects for Children to Make.  Also for those of us who still struggle with the French knot.

Library party at our house next month--save the date!

The March issue of Family Fun hasn't been in our house for 24 hours and we've already picked a date and time (a Wednesday afternoon in March) for our library-themed party, complete with book-pocket invitations and in-house library cards for all the guests.  The party was designed to celebrate Read Across America Day on March 2, but I hope to be celebrating the Arlington Public Library's brand-new catalog and account system myself.  The library is transitioning to the new system this week, which means the catalog is offline and my holds (all those shiny new books waiting to be reviewed!) are temporarily...on hold.  While the staff is working hard, I need a suitably old-school distraction.  Ssh, it's party time!

Thank you, Greenwillow!

I was the lucky winner of this big box of Greenwillow books last December.  Can you see what's in there?  Everything from Kitten's First Full Moon by Kevin Henkes, winner of the 2005 Caldecott Medal, to The Thief by Meghan Whalen Turner, which won a Newbery Honor in 1997.  I read Turner's Attolia books, of which The Thief is the first, for the first time last year (no, I have no idea why I waited so long), and it was definitely a Peak Reading Experience--sort of a combination of Dorothy Dunnett's House of Niccolo books and C.S. Lewis's Til We Have Faces.  The latest, A Conspiracy of Kings (2010), is my favorite in the series.

But my very favorite Greenwillow book is this one: The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley. It was the first book I bought in hardcover, probably before it won the Newbery in 1985 (my copy, a first edition, doesn't have the gold sticker); and it still sets the standard against which I judge high fantasy for young readers. By now I've read it so many times that I can remember certain passages and fragments of dialogue almost word-for-word: Aerin's centuries-long climb up the spiral staircase to Agsded's chamber; Aerin and Luthe (their final scene together is Martha Mihalick's favorite, too); the lovely last lines. Thank you, Greenwillow!

Black Radishes and Pink Rabbits

There is a moment early in Black Radishes by Susan Lynn Meyer (Delacorte, 2010) when 11-year-old Gustave Becker has to pack his things prior to leaving Paris for the small town of Saint-Georges in advance of the Nazi occupation.  Aside from his clothes, he is allowed to bring only a few books and toys.  He chooses the books easily--his Boy Scout Manual and two favorites, The Three Musketeers and Around the World in Eighty Days--but the toys prove more difficult:

[H]ow could he choose only one?  Gustave picked up his new sailboat and ran a finger over its shiny blue and white paint.  Uncle David had given him and Jean-Paul each a sailboat last summer to sail in the fountains in the parks.  Saint-Georges was near a river, so a boat would be good to have.  But then he saw Monkey, partly hidden under his train set on the bed, and his heart tightened.  He had almost forgotten him.  Monkey's head tilted slightly to one side.  A gold post in his ear and the bright black, beady eyes looking out from his face gave him a mischievous air.

At this point I almost shouted, "Gustave, take Monkey!"  I didn't want him to make the same mistake that Anna does in Judith Kerr's When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (1971); packing, instead of the titular rabbit who had been "her companion ever since she could remember," a newly acquired woolly dog.  Fortunately (spoiler alert), he doesn't, and Monkey goes on to play an important role in the book's climactic scene at the border between occupied and free France.

Black Radishes is a beautifully crafted, impeccably researched novel (and a 2011 Sydney Taylor Honor Award Winner for Older Readers).  Debut author Meyer, an English professor at Wellesley, was inspired by her father's experience in WWII France, although she makes clear (in an informative author's note as well as an interview at BookPage, January 2011) that she's writing historical fiction; and I think Black Radishes is all the stronger for that.  Meyer is also working on a companion novel, tentatively titled Green and Unripe Fruit, which follows Gustave after he and his family emigrate to America in 1942.

And just in case you don't know what black radishes (which also figure in that climactic scene) look like, here they are.