Dear Pamela Porter,

The Crazy Man – Pamela Porter – 176 pages

It’s 1965 on a small Saskatchewan farm when Emmaline’s dog Prince runs in front of her father’s tractor.  Emmaline leaps in to save him, without thinking, and is caught under the tractor in his stead.  Her father, torn with grief and guilt over his daughter’s crippling injury, shoots Prince and runs away; Emmaline and her mother are left alone on the farm.  Desperate, Emmaline’s mother hires Angus from the local mental hospital to do the heavy field work, and in spite of the wild rumors and prejudices of a small town, Emmaline discovers that Angus may be exactly what their family needs.

I love a good novel in verse, and The Crazy Man is a really good novel in verse.  It was a well-chosen gift from someone who always picks excellent books for me, and I’m glad she found it, because otherwise it might never have crossed my path.  You’ve got the Karen Hesse Out of the Dust vibe going on here, historical fiction in free verse, and I adored it.  You have a really light touch, with a lot of plain language that’s beautiful in its starkness, and a lot of subtlety.  I love the way you use the simplest actions and body language to convey a character’s inner workings–it’s a style I aspire to, but I’m usually just too in love with the sound of my own words to pull it off.    You’ve written a painful yet hopeful book about loss, a gentle statement about prejudice and mental illness, and a great introduction for people who don’t like or “don’t get” poetry, all in one slim volume.  Well done, you get four stars!

Love,

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Books this year: 89

Pages this year: 17,093

Dear Mary Ann Hoberman and Betty Fraser,

Here’s one last review for National Poetry Month:  A House is a House for Me!  This is the kind of poem book that never gets old.  The sing-song, rhythmic, bouncy rhymes and the patterns that change subtly every time they repeat make this a great read-aloud.  I feel sure the out-loud sound of it must have been a factor in your writing process, too, because when you were at Curious George recently, you stressed the importance and fun of memorizing poems and learning to recite them.  This is precisely the kind of poem I like to memorize, too–though I haven’t managed to do so yet!  The illustrations are pretty great, too, bright and busy and in a style that feels nostalgic to me, though it probably was the style of the day back in 1982 (the year I was born, in case you wondered).  The art actually reminds me of one of my favorite books as a very young child, the 1976 edition of The Little Engine That Could illustrated by Ruth Sanderson.  It has the same angelic faces and slightly muted colors, I think.  Anyway, another four-star read to close out the month!

Love,

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Dear Joyce Sidman and Pamela Zagarenski,

In another effort to review more poetry before National Poetry Month is over, I picked up Red Sings from Treetops:  A Year in Colors.  What a lovely, lovely book!  I love the way this ongoing poem personifies each color–it’s not a cardinal singing from the treetop, it’s Red singing, and it’s not snow falling from the sky, but White–and the way rhymes and alliteration sneak in here and there, making the phrases roll off the tongue with a delicious lilting texture to them.  The art is wonderful, too:  the rich, thick colors, the folk-art-y style overlayed with bits of text-filled paper or textile patterns, and especially the little crowns that adorn the heads of just about every living creature on the pages, making the birds and animals look like little saints.  My only gripe with the art is that a cardinal, the titular image, appears in almost every illustration–but not actually every illustration.  There are a few scenes in the middle that I pored over, desperate to find that little speck of red, and was quite disappointed when it didn’t appear.  You can’t have a cardinal in all but four scenes in a 32-page book, it feels unsatisfying, a pattern that didn’t follow through.  It’s those four pages that put this book at four stars for me instead of five–but otherwise, it’s beautiful, quirky, and a delight for the senses.

Love,

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Dear Lee Bennett Hopkins and Marcellus Hall,

Well, National Poetry Month is quickly drawing to an end and I haven’t posted about any poetry!  Silly silly me!  It’s a problem easily remedied with City I Love.  You open spectacularly with “Sing a Song of Cities,” which I love so much I feel the need to post here:

Sing a song of cities.
If you do,
Cities will sing back
to you.

They’ll sing in subway roars and rumbles,
People-laughs, machine-loud grumbles.

Sing a song of cities.
If you do,
Cities will sing back.

Cities will sing back
to you.

This is my favorite poem in the book, and also my favorite illustration–a beautiful spread of New York City, with a blue and purple watercolor skyline background and stark black and white high-contrast skyscrapers in the foreground.  The cute traveling dog and bird who appear in each spread are introduced here, sitting happily on the art-deco gargoyles of the Chrystler Building.  I took immense pleasure in finding the dog and bird in each successive city spread, and took even greater pleasure in the dynamic shapes of the poems, the clever ways you play with placement and spacing.  I love short poems, and visually oriented poems, and poems with very short lines–so this book was great for me.  The art is vibrant and wonderfully stylized, and you both managed to capture the feeling of travel and the feeling of cities vividly.  You’ve made me even more eager than I was before to take another whirlwind travel tour, like I did when I was doing my junior semester abroad in London.  A delightful four stars!

Love,

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Dear Cynthia Rylant,

I loved Missing May, and I read a few other books of yours as a child.  Little did I know that you would blow me away with your awesome poetry in God Went to Beauty School!  Your skill with verse and your views on God combine into one fantastic package that seems meant just for me–definitely five stars!

Love,

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Dear Adam Rex,

I love you!  You’re so crazy clever!  Really good children’s poetry is hard to find, and Frankenstein Takes The Cake is top-notch.  Funny, with astounding illustrations in a variety of styles, perfect for the Halloween season or for any other time.  I can’t wait to get my hands on its predecessor, Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich.  Five stars like whoa.

Love,

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