As I sit on my back porch reading, I often look up to watch the world flutter by at a languid pace. I’m surrounded by a border of overgrown abelia bushes that arch and bloom, luring silent hummingbirds and graceful Eastern Tiger Swallowtails. I stretch in the blessed shade and marvel at the strong wings that come this way each summer.

Aston, Dianna Hutts. A Butterfly Is Patient. Illus. by Sylvia Long. Chronicle, 2011.

Poetic text and bright, detailed watercolors lift this informative nonfiction book to lofty heights. Employing the same accessible format of their two previous winners, An Egg Is Quiet and A Seed Is Sleepy, this talented duo trace the insects’ development from egg to flight. Along the way, readers will learn how butterflies and moths differ, as well as facts about metamorphosis, pollination, camouflage, and migration. Young and old will succumb to the temptation to pore over Long’s lifelike close-ups of dozens of caterpillars and butterflies, clearly labeled without detracting from the beauty of each winged creature. “A butterfly is creative,” the author notes. So is this lovely book, fine as wing scales “stacked like shingles on a roof.” Recommended for ages 7-10.

Engle, Margarita. Summer Birds: The Butterflies of Maria Merian. illus. by Julie Paschkis. Holt, 2010.

“Each year, the sky fills with summer birds. Many people call them butterflies. Everyone believes that these insects come from mud, as if by magic. I disagree.” In the Middle Ages, people believed insects were evil. Maria Merian, a brave German girl born in 1647, defied her culture’s conception of nature and its expectations for women. Intrigued by butterflies, she observed their life cycle and carefully painted the insects and their habitats. The illustrator’s vivid jewel tones and profusion of vines and imaginary creatures evoke the passionate nature of this remarkable woman, copies of whose prints now live in the world’s art museums. Engle’s concluding note provides additional details on Maria Merian, who went on to become a scientist, artist and world explorer. Educators can use this fine picture-book biography for a bevy of cross-curricular activities and discussions. For ages 7-10.

Kroll, Virginia L. Butterfly Boy. illus. by Gerardo Suzan. Boyds Mills, 2003. This tender story features young Emilio and his invalid grandfather, who find delight in a flock of red admiral butterflies. The boy senses his abuelo is “smiling inside, even though his mouth could no longer show it.” Emilio is able to get near the bright insects, inspiring his neighbor to call him “Butterfly Boy.” During the winter, he reads in a book that the butterflies are attracted to white surfaces, such as their garage wall. Emilio’s excitement upon their return in the spring turns to dismay as he sees his father is painting the garage blue. What can he do? Emilio snatches his white shirt from the clothesline and puts it on — and the red butterflies flock to him. Like Abuelo and his family, readers will find reason to smile when reading this sensitive story enlivened by Suzan’s bright, playful watercolors. Ages 5-8.

Sierra, Judy. The Beautiful Butterfly: A Folktale from Spain. illus. by Victoria Chess. Clarion, 2000. Make room for laughter with Sierra’s lilting variant of a Spanish folktale that features a lady butterfly courted by a motley procession of suitors. A cricket arrives first, wanting to marry her. The butterfly poses this crucial question: “And if I do marry you, how will you sing to our babies?”  The cricket’s annoying click fails the test. Next, the frog comes to woo. His ugly “Croo-AH!” just won’t do. Finally, a mouse, with a soothing “ee-ee-ee-ee-ee,” is the perfect choice. Unexpectedly, though, Mouse falls into a pond and is eaten by a fish. Sierra comes to the rescue here; realizing this conclusion saddened children, she researched the story’s variants and discovered some endings that involved underwear. Butterfly and everyone who hears the news mourns, some in outlandish ways. The turning point comes when the king runs around in his royal underwear. Even the fish laughs — and out pops the mouse. Don’t miss this one! Ages 6-8.

Fables You Shouldn’t Pay Any Attention To, by Florence Parry Heide, Sylvia Worth Van Clief and Victoria Chess

From Story-Lovers.com: “You certainly wouldn’t want your kid to pay attention to the seven fables found in this book! In them, greediness, laziness, discontent, selfishness, carelessness, and lying are rewarded, while gracious, kind, and thoughtful children end up getting spanked. It’s the ultimate in evil turnabout, and one of the funniest books I’ve ever read.”  If you can manage to track down a copy, do yourself a favor and pick it up if only for the brutally honest (yet valuable) life lessons offered.

Sitting Ducks, By Michael Bedard

Inspired by a lithograph the author created some twenty years earlier -

- the book focuses on the denizens of Ducktown who live seemingly idyllic lives.  They are hatched in the alligator-run Duck Factory, then sent off to to relax, enjoy life and, most importantly, fatten up, oblivious to further consequences.  But changes are afoot when a hungry alligator factory worker happens to strike up a friendship with an innocent young duckling…

Rotten Ralph, By Jack Gantos and Nicole Rubel

Ralph is the rottenest cat in the world – meanspirited, rude, and disruptive – yet, still, he is loved by his young owner, Sarah.  But when he crosses the line during a visit to the circus, Ralph suddenly finds himself homeless.  His dire circumstances lead him to a journey of self-discovery and the understanding that it’s far better to be nice than it is to be rotten.  Just kidding.  Ralph’s rotten adventures continue in other books in this wonderful series.

The Dumb Bunnies, by Dav Pilkey

No doubt inspired by The Stupids (see below), the adventures of the dumb bunnies are a hoot.

Miss Nelson is Missing!, by Harry Allard and James Marshall

The kids in Miss Nelson’s class are out of control – until the day Miss Viola Swamp, the meanest substitute in the school district, takes over.  The kids are flummoxed.  What happened to their lovable (and infinitely more pliable) Miss Nelson?  The answer may surprise.  Followed up by two equally terrific books: Miss Nelson is Back and Miss Nelson Has a Field Day.  Best supporting character shout out to Principal Blandsworth.

The Stinky Cheese Man and other Fairly Stupid Tales, by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith

This book contains ten terrifically skewed takes on established fairtytales with titles like: “The Princess and the Bowling Ball”, “Little Red Running Shorts”, and “Jack’s Bean Problem”.  In the titular story, the Stinky Cheese Man can run away as fast as he can because, yes, he’s made of stinky cheese and no one is all that inclined to chase him.  Still, his end is no less tragic than that of his more delicious cousin’s.

Dr. Xargle’s Book of Earthlets, by Jeanne Willis and Tony Ross.

Dr. Xargle is the resident alien expert on all things Earth-related.  In the first book of this great series, Xargle educates his students on the finer points of child-rearing covering everything from bath time to diaper-changing – and gets it all erroneously and comically wrong.  Not that his class would know any different.

I worked on the television series way back when.  The finished product fell short but the scripts, written by author Jeanne Willis, were brilliant.

The Stupids Step Out, by Harry G. Allard Jr. and James Marshall

The series apparently holds the #26 spot in The American Library Association’s list of 1oo Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000.  That should be reason enough to pick them up.  Politically correct, they aint.

Amphigorey, by Edward Gorey

How could I forget the master of moppet macabre, Edward Gorey.  This book offers up a delightful collection of his ghoulishly gothic triumphs, among them “The Gashlycrumb Tinies” which recounts the tragic demises of 26 different children (each of who’s name begins with a different letter of the alphabet) in rhyming couplets.  We used to have  a poster of the Tinies in our office, back when we used to work on Student Bodies.  I remember studying it one day, then pointing at one unfortunate and informing my gin-loving writing partner: “Hey, this is you!”

Annoyed, he marched over, scanned the poster, picked out the one most appropriate to my predilections and countered: “And this is you!”

Touché

A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning, by Lemony Snicket

Although the ninth book in the series, The Carnivorous Carnival, ranks as my favorite, The Bad Beginning was (appropriately enough) the one that started it all for me and, thus, merits this spot in the countdown.  Tracing the tragic misadventures of the Baudelaire orphans, the series is darkly humorous, exceedingly clever, and just incredibly enthralling.  I remember being drawn to the cover at a bookstore and, while checking it out, had a complete stranger warn me off it as wholly inappropriate book for children. Sold!  P.S. Hated the movie which didn’t even come close to capturing the wit of the series.

Lizzy’s Lion, by Dennis Lee and Mary-Louise Gay

The rhyming tale of Lizzy and her pet lion – and the robber unfortunate enough to cross their path – is not for the squeamish.  My sister and I so loved this book that, to this day, we can recite it by heart in its entirety.

George and Martha: The Complete Stories of Two Best Friends, by James Marshall

Funny, sweet, and utterly charming, this collection of stories detailing the adventures of two lovable, beady-eyed hippos ranks as one of my most treasured books.  They have adventures, they get into trouble, they argue, but, in the end, George and Martha ARE best of friends.

I loved these books so much that when I heard that HBO was going to produce a series, I dispatched my agent to get me onboard.  I ended up writing a few episodes and was very impressed with the production.  Nathan Lane provided the voice for George while Andrea Martin did the honors for Martha.  The scripts and direction did a very nice job of capturing the spirit of the late James Marshall’s work.  Still, nothing beats the books!

There’s a way of talking about children’s literature as if it’s a genre, like detective stories or police procedurals or thrillers or vampire stories or fantasy novels. I think this is quite wrong. A genre has acknowledged conventions, that can be followed flexibly or even violated in any particular specimen of the genre. The conventions change and grow with time. But they still rule. It’s not a vampire movie if no one sucks blood. It’s not a detective story if there’s no major crime in the first quarter of the book. Children’s literature isn’t like that. It’s defined entirely by the imagined readership. I like Margaret Mahy’s definition, which I remember as: Children’s literature is literature that you can start enjoying while a child. The two books I’ve just read illustrate my point.

I read Slugs for the first time in years the other night. My five year old great-niece was staying with her father. At bedtime, having scoured our bookshelves, she emerged with this unpleasant little book and asked me in her sweet, shy way to read it to her. Evidently she’d fallen in love with the book earlier in the year when they stayed here in our absence. I complied with as much gusto as I could muster. I find the book profoundly unattractive. It has rudimentary rhymes, describing a huge variety of slugs, many being subjected to would-be comic indignities, tortured and murdered in hideous ways, all with images showing the brown creatures impassively accepting their fates, until in the last pages they come and wreak a horrible revenge on a child (known in the book as ‘you’), ending:

And after how you’ve treated Slugs
It surely serves you right!

My great-niece seemed to enjoy having this horror read to her, and when I’d finished she sat for maybe half an hour studying the pages intently.

Clearly she is the reader the creators had in mind – she and my sons twenty or so years ago. I am not that reader.

The Book of Everything is definitely a children’s book, but it couldn’t be more different. It has more in common with J M Coetzee’s Boyhood (which I’ll blog about during the week), in subject matter, point of view, even tone, than it does with Slugs. A lonely boy, helped by apparitions of Jesus and an old woman who is almost certainly a witch, finds a way to free himself and his family from the dominion of his harsh, violent, religiously extreme father. It speaks in particular to literate children. The hero,Thomas, finds inspiration in Emil and the Detectives, Joanna Spyri’s All Alone in the World and the Book of Genesis. The narrative assumes familiarity with literary conventions (OK, there are some conventions!), particularly those about witches in children’s literature. I found my adult-reader self wanting explanations of Thomas’s visions: ‘Please be clear about this. Is the poor child hallucinating from terror, or is this a world where such things really happen?’ Such questions are just plain irrelevant to the book’s imagined reader, and once I moved over to occupy that position the book opened up to me – or I opened up to it.

It occurred to me that just as Pixar animations, among other children’s movies, tend to wink knowingly over the heads of the children in their audience, both these books are winking at the children – ‘Don’t tell the adults.’ If we have to talk genre, the first is something like Perversely Cautionary Verse (which may be a genre found only in children’s literature), the second Domestic Magic Realism (and I doubt if that is limited to any age readers).

I read The Book of Everything on Richard Tulloch‘s recommendation. His dramatisation of it will be playing at Belvoir Street at the end of the year. It seems to me that one of his challenges is to take the story away from the children and give it to the adults who will presumably make up the bulk of the Belvoir audience.