Check out these literary classics, adapted into board books, at the Wellesley Free Library!



http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/books/a-library-of-classics-edited-for-the-teething-set.html?_r=0

A Library of Classics, Edited for the Teething Set

By JULIE BOSMAN

Published: October 26, 2013

The humble board book, with its cardboard-thick pages, gently rounded corners and simple concepts for babies, was once designed to be chewed as much as read.

But today’s babies and toddlers are treated to board books that are miniature works of literary art: classics like “Romeo and Juliet,” “Sense and Sensibility” and “Les Misérables”; luxuriously produced counting primers with complex graphic elements; and even an “Art for Baby” book featuring images by the contemporary artists Damien Hirst and Paul Morrison. 

Booksellers say that parents are flocking to these books, even if the idea that a 2-year-old could understand “Moby-Dick” seems absurd on the face of it. A toddler might not be expected to follow the plot, but she could learn about harpoons, ships and waves, with quotes alongside (“The waves rolled by like scrolls of silver”). 

Publishers of these books are catering to parents who follow the latest advice by child-development experts to read to babies early and often, and who believe that children can display aesthetic preferences even while they are crawling and eating puréed foods. 

“If we’re going to play classical music to our babies in the womb and teach them foreign languages at an early age, then we’re going to want to expose babies to fine art and literature,” said Linda Bubon, an owner and children’s book buyer at Women & Children First, a bookstore in Chicago. “Now we know there are things we can do to stimulate the mind of a baby.” 

Suzanne Gibbs Taylor, the associate publisher and creative director of Gibbs Smith, a small publisher in Salt Lake City that conceived the popular BabyLit series, said she realized that no one had ever “taken Jane Austen and made it for babies.” 

While the BabyLit books do not try to lay out a complicated narrative of “Wuthering Heights” or “Romeo and Juliet,” they use the stories as a springboard to explain counting, colors or the concept of opposites. The popular “Cozy Classics” line of board books, introduced in 2012 by Simply Read Books, a publisher based in Vancouver, B.C., adapts stories like “Moby-Dick” and “Les Misérables” for infants and toddlers using pictures of needle-felted figures of Captain Ahab and Jean Valjean.

“People are realizing that it’s never too young to start putting things in front of them that are a little more meaningful, that have more levels,” said Ms. Taylor, whose BabyLit series has sold about 300,000 books so far. “It’s not so simple as, ‘Here’s a dog, here’s the number 2.’ ” 

While the publishing industry is still scraping through the digital revolution, children’s books have remained relatively untouched. Most parents are sticking to print for their young children even when there are e-book versions or apps available, and videos like the once ubiquitous “Baby Einstein,” founded in 1997 as a fast-track to infant genius, have fallen out of fashion. 

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that television should be avoided for children younger than 2 years old, and studies have suggested that babies and toddlers receive much greater benefit from real interactions than from experiences involving video screens. 

“There has been a proliferation of focus on early childhood development on the education side,” said John Mendelson, the sales director at Candlewick Press, “as well as on the retail side.” 

Board books, traditionally for newborns to 3-year-olds, have always been a smaller and somewhat neglected category in the publishing business, compared with the larger and more expensive hardcover picture books designed for children of reading age. 

But board books may be catching up. Libraries that used to shun the genre are now buying them from publishers. Bookstores are making more room for board books on their shelves. And while a board book might have once been too insubstantial a gift to bring to a child’s birthday party, the newer, highly stylized versions (that can run up to $15) would easily pass muster. 

“A board book was little more than a teething ring,” said Christopher Franceschelli, who directs Handprint Books, an imprint of Chronicle Books. “I think as picture books have developed in the last 20 years, parents, librarians, teachers have thought, ‘Why should board books be any less than their older siblings?’ ” 

In 2012, Abrams Books, the art-book publisher, created a new imprint, Abrams Appleseed, to focus on books for babies, toddlers and preschoolers. Since then, it has published high-end books like “Pantone: Color Puzzles,” released this month, which uses intricate drawings and puzzle pieces to teach children the differences between colors like peacock blue and nighttime blue. 

“If you look at board books from 15 years ago, it looks like the stuff on there was pulled off the Internet somewhere,” said Cecily Kaiser, the publishing director of Abrams Appleseed. “Now there’s a real embrace of a much more artful style.” 

At Chronicle, a San Francisco-based publisher, sales of board books have been rising for at least two to three years. Editors there have experimented with books that attempt interactivity, such as a line of books with finger puppets. “We’re in this era of mass good design for everybody,” said Ginee Seo, the children’s publishing director at Chronicle. “You’re seeing good design at Target; you can buy Jonathan Adler at Barnes & Noble. You’re not willing to accept the cheesy clip art on a board book.”

Jon Yaged, the president and publisher of Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group, said the demand for board books has driven him to release more of them in recent years. He has also added ornate flourishes: on the cover of a new edition of “The Pout-Pout Fish,” the title reads in a shiny gold foil, a touch that would normally have been reserved for a more expensive picture book. 

Cindy Hudson, a guidebook author and mother of two in Portland, Ore., who runs a Web site suggesting books for parents to read with their children, said she doubted a baby would “benefit intellectually” from being exposed to Tolstoy or the Brontë sisters. 

Still, “anything that encourages that interaction between babies and parents is a good thing,” she said. “That’s where the learning and the bonding comes from.”

Water in the Park and other books for a rainy day from The New York Times

Splish Splash

‘Water in the Park,’ by Emily Jenkins, and More

In "Water in the Park," a storm arrives at the end of a long, hot day.

By CAROLYN JURIS

Published: May 31, 2013   

 

 

“Rain, rain, go away.” Kids have always chanted the familiar refrain — gazing out the window wistfully, chin on fist — as if they had the power to make it happen. But these days, what’s a little precipitation when there are peevish birds to be flung and other indoor, on-screen distractions? In an era in which the directive “Go play” no longer implies “outside,” the idea that rain may affect a child’s fun is perhaps a quaint one. But four new picture books remind us that no matter how cosseted we are by technology, a downpour still holds the power to move us.

RAIN!

By Linda Ashman

Illustrated by Christian Robinson

32 pp. Houghton Mifflin. $16.99. (Picture book; ages 4 to 8)

WATER IN THE PARK

A Book About Water and the Times of the Day

By Emily Jenkins

Illustrated by Stephanie Graegin

40 pp. Schwartz & Wade. $16.99.(Picture book; ages 3 to 6)

THUNDERSTORM

Written and illustrated by Arthur Geisert

32 pp. Enchanted Lion. $17.95. (Picture book; ages 4 to 8)

BOOM!

By Mary Lyn Ray

Illustrated by Steven Salerno

40 pp. Disney-Hyperion. $16.99. (Picture book; ages 3 to 7)

 

 

Two very different attitudes about the weather go head-to-head in Linda Ashman’s buoyant “Rain!” All furrowed brow and put-upon frown, an older, balding man grumps “Rain!” at the drops he sees outside his window. Meanwhile, in another apartment building, a little boy throws his arms up and delights at the “rain!” plinking on the fire escape. As the two go about their respective days — the boy with his green froggy hat and cheery disposition, the man with his pessimistic attitude — their moods are reflected in their environments and in the faces of the people they encounter. Christian Robinson, whose illustrations for “Harlem’s Little Blackbird,” by Renée Watson, made for a winsome debut last year, uses paint and collage to render the man’s home in muddy colors; the boy’s room, by contrast, has buttery yellow walls and circus polka dots. Everyone the man meets is soured by the experience, as shown by a downturned mouth here, an aggrieved expression there. The boy, on the other hand, spreads metaphorical sunshine, prompting enthusiastic waves and indulgent smiles. When the two inevitably cross paths, it’s no surprise the boy’s positive outlook wins over the grouch — eventually — but their interaction still feels fresh and natural. By the time the man returns to his apartment building, the sun is out; but the implication is that, having embraced the boy’s viewpoint, he’d be happy either way.

Unlike Ashman’s story, in which rain drives the plot, “Water in the Park” showcases a sweltering summer day, and the storm arrives only in the final few pages. But water is everywhere: from the pond in which a small fleet of dogs goes splashing, to the hoses volunteers use to nourish thirsty flower beds, to the pails that industrious children fill from sprinklers and pour onto slides. In an author’s note, Emily Jenkins says she was inspired by the various ways she saw people and animals use water during one punishing Brooklyn summer. Her story’s characters are as diverse as their real-life counterparts in Prospect Park: multiracial families headed by straight or gay parents; nannies and their charges; an elderly couple who’ve not only grown to look like each other but who also resemble their stoop-shouldered, geriatric dog. Stephanie Graegin’s pencil-and-ink washes depict more than a hundred individuals (go on, ask your child to count them), and several recur throughout the book, just as you might run into a neighborhood friend. Jenkins taps out the day’s rhythm in clear, unadorned prose, as early-walking dogs give way to midmorning babies, who then make room for adults on lunch break and the after-school crowd, and onward until the skies open up at dusk.

While the average evening storm is rarely more than a nuisance for most city dwellers, farmers, typically, are far more vulnerable to capricious nature. It’s this exposure that drives the story in the wordless “Thunderstorm.” The illustrator Arthur Geisert grew up in Los Angeles, lived for many years in Galena, Ill., and now makes his home in rural Iowa. He may be best known for his anthropomorphized pigs, seen most recently in “Ice” and “The Giant Seed,” but his new work is more in the spirit of 2010’s earthy “Country Road ABC,” in which “E” stood for Erosion and “I” for Inoculate. “Thunderstorm,” too, is grounded in the real world, down to the time stamps that mark a squall’s progress across Midwestern farmland over the course of one Saturday afternoon. The artist’s trademark copperplate etchings, tinged with watercolors, lend a timeless feel to his slice-of-life illustrations, which show how a farm family and various animals weather the storm. Though the story line isn’t always easy to track — Whose fence is being torn up? And where did that tornado come from? — each page’s abundant details invite lingering and repeated visits. Cutaways reveal where foxes have burrowed for shelter, and offer a glimpse into the farmhouse kitchen, where the family warily eyes the leaking ceiling. Geisert allows the storm to do real damage, but he also shows the community getting to work once the skies clear, determined to set things right.

“Boom!” tells a more finite story, and one many children will relate to. Pert-nosed Rosie is a brave little dog. She gamely faces down tigers (well, a stuffed toy one) and house cats, and fears neither sudsy baths nor roaring vacuum cleaners. But the first crack of thunder sends her whimpering for comfort from, as Mary Lyn Ray affectionately describes him, “the boy she knew best.” Though plenty of pups cower under the sofa when a storm rages, Rosie seems to be as much reader (or one-being-read-to) surrogate as pet. While the unnamed boy tries to explain away the noise with fanciful stories — “Thunder was watermelons rolling from a watermelon truck” or “a block fort falling” — the way a parent might, Rosie knows what’s really happening. “It was the big, big sky growling big, big growls,” she determines, and though she tries, she can’t find a place where she feels truly safe. Eventually the boy scoops her up in his arms and they wait it out together; she imagines “the boy may have felt a little frightened, too,” though the serene look that Steven Salerno has drawn on his face belies that notion. At story’s end, the sun shines once more, Rosie yaps happily and the storm is but a memory, except for a few wooden blocks (perhaps from that aforementioned fort) strewn across the floor. In other words, this too shall pass.

Carolyn Juris is associate children’s book editor at Publishers Weekly.

A version of this review appeared in print on June 2, 2013, on page BR32 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Splish Splash.

Red Cat, Blue Cat and Cat Tale --- NY Times

Children's Books

Two or Three Cats

‘Cat Tale’ and ‘Red Cat Blue Cat’

From “Cat Tale”

By PAMELA PAUL

One book features three cat friends. The other is about two cat rivals. One offers inspired nonsense. The other deals with a (relatively) realistic situation. But with eye-poppingly bright and friendly illustrations, winning stories and clever execution, these two new picture books stand apart from the rest of the cat pack.

CAT TALE

Written and illustrated by Michael Hall

40 pp. Greenwillow Books. $16.99. (Picture book; ages 3 to 6)

RED CAT BLUE CAT

Written and illustrated by Jenni Desmond

40 pp. Blue Apple Books. $16.99. (Picture book; ages 4 to 8)

From “Red Cat Blue Cat”

“Cat Tale” is a twisty, imaginative story, told in homonyms, about three cats — Lillian, Tilly and William J. — who, “from word to word” make their way in the world, whether they plane a board or board a train. Some of the wordplay may fly over the heads of younger children and even, possibly, confuse them. (“They shoo a truly naughty gnu” is not likely to be grasped by most 3-year-olds.) But then the cats themselves become confused:

Oh, dear.

The words are jumbled!

They’ve lost their way –

Lillian, Tilly and William J.

But it’s all O.K. because the vividly hued and boxy, collage-style digital illustrations, which recall Eric Carle and recent work by Marc Brown, will engross younger readers while older readers catch on to the double meanings. And children of all ages will appreciate the cats’ attempts to bear some hail and hail a whale. A step up in linguistic difficulty from “Chicka Chicka Boom Boom,” this latest from Hall (“Perfect Square,” “My Heart Is Like a Zoo”) nonetheless captures some of that classic’s tumble-bumble rhythm and “read it again” magic.

Feline foes and rivalries masking secret jealousies are not new subjects. Nonetheless, the warring yet endearing cats in Jenni Desmond’s “Red Cat Blue Cat” are welcome company. Their travails aren’t so different from our human ones. Red Cat, you see, “wished he were as smart as Blue Cat, and . . . Blue Cat wanted to be fast and bouncy like Red Cat.” And so, just like people, “they fought and they hissed and they wished, all day long.”

When Blue Cat decides to be more like Red Cat, he eats a crab, some cherries and rose petals, among other items. “Guess who was spying on him the whole time?” Desmond slyly asks. Red Cat, in turn, is inspired to try “blueberries, bluebells, a blue fish, blue pudding and certain cupcakes.” Thus begins an escalating conflict between the two cats as each tries to imitate, match and outdo the other.

Desmond’s captivating drawings combine intricate pen-and-ink and charcoal lines and childlike splotches of color to depict the best and worst in what will be highly recognizable cat behavior. The story, with its nod to “Little Blue and Little Yellow” and other tales of friendship and differences, hits all the familiar beats. But it does so with a generous dose of humor, adept storytelling and spot-on detail.

New York Times Obituary - Leo Dillon

Leo Dillon, Celebrated Illustrator of Children’s Books, Is Dead at 79

"Mansa Musa"/Harcourt Children's Books

The cover illustration for “Mansa Musa” (2001), illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon. More Photos »

By MARGALIT FOX

Published: May 30, 2012   

Leo Dillon, who with his wife and longtime collaborator, Diane, was one of the world’s pre-eminent illustrators for young people, producing artwork — praised for its vibrancy, ecumenicalism and sheer sumptuous beauty — that was a seamless amalgam of both their hands, died on Saturday in Brooklyn. He was 79.

Multimedia

Slide Show

Pat Cummings More Photos »

 

 

The cause was complications of surgery for lung cancer, according to the Dillons’ publisher, Scholastic, which announced the death.

The Dillons, who met in art school, became instant archrivals and remained together from then on, won two Caldecott Medals, considered the nation’s highest honor for children’s-book illustration.

The first, in 1976, was for “Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears,” a West African folk tale retold by Verna Aardema; the second, in 1977, was for “Ashanti to Zulu: African Traditions,” by Margaret Musgrove.

Mr. Dillon was the first African-American to receive the Caldecott; the couple remain the only illustrators to have won it two years in a row.

The dozens of books for children and adults illustrated by the Dillons include titles by Ray Bradbury, Virginia Hamilton, P. L. Travers and the soprano Leontyne Price, whose 1990 picture-book adaptation of Verdi’s “Aida” was praised for its Egyptian- and African-inspired artwork.

Though artistic teams have long collaborated on illustrated books, it is far more common for one partner to furnish the text and the other the pictures. It is far less common for both to make the art in tandem, as did the Dillons, who began their career jointly illustrating album covers and jackets for adult science-fiction books.

Their modus operandi, honed over time, involved an initial discussion — a negotiation, to hear them tell it — of their visions of the text. When these were more or less reconciled, one of them made preliminary sketches, which were passed to the other for coloring, then passed back for refinement.

After sufficient back-and-forth, and sufficient spirited argument, the resulting image appeared, they often said, to have been the work of an unseen but very much present third party, whom they called “It.”

The Dillons’ work was characterized by stylistic diversity, with influences ranging over African folk art, Japanese woodcuts, old-master paintings and medieval illumination.

It was also noteworthy for the diversity of the people it portrayed. This was especially striking in the 1970s, when the Dillons began illustrating for children: until then, the smiling faces portrayed in picture books had been overwhelmingly white.

Their emphasis on inclusion sprang from their experience as an interracial couple. As they often explained in interviews, after their son, Lee, was born in the 1960s, they surreptitiously colored the skin of characters in the picture books they bought him, recasting them as black, Hispanic and Asian.

The son of parents who had come to the United States from Trinidad, Lionel John Dillon Jr. was born in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn on March 2, 1933.

As a high school student, he was groomed for a career in commercial art. But his gifts were spotted by a teacher who realized, as Mr. Dillon later said, “that I could do more than illustrate Coke bottles” and steered him toward fine art.

He enlisted in the Navy so that he could attend art school afterward on the G.I. Bill. After three years’ service, he enrolled at the Parsons School of Design in New York.

Viewing an exhibition of student work there one day, Mr. Dillon was captivated by a still life of an Eames chair.

“I knew it had to be by a new student because nobody in our class at the time could paint like that,” he told The Horn Book, a magazine about children’s literature. “This artist was a whole lot better than I. I figured I’d better find out who he was.”

“He” turned out to be Diane Claire Sorber, and a crackling competition ensued. “If one got a better place in a show, we wouldn’t speak for three weeks,” Ms. Dillon told The Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1990.

In the end, the only thing for it was marriage, which, she said, “was a survival mechanism to keep us from killing each other.”

The couple, who graduated in 1956, were wed the next year, and “It” was born soon afterward.

Their other books include “Two Pairs of Shoes” (1980), Travers’s retelling of two Middle Eastern folk tales; “The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales” (1985), retold by Ms. Hamilton; “Pish Posh Said Hieronymous Bosch” (1991), by Nancy Willard; “To Every Thing There Is a Season” (1998), drawn from Ecclesiastes; and two titles for which they also wrote the text, “Rap a Tap Tap: Here’s Bojangles — Think of That!” (2002) and “Jazz on a Saturday Night” (2007).

Their work has been the subject of museum exhibitions and a book, “The Art of Leo & Diane Dillon” (1981), edited by Byron Preiss.

A picture book written and illustrated by the Dillons, “If Kids Ran the World,” is scheduled to be published by Blue Sky Press, a Scholastic imprint, in 2014.

Mr. Dillon, who lived in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn, is survived by his son, Lee, a sculptor and studio jeweler.

Also surviving is his wife, Diane Dillon, half of the presence that animates “It.”

A version of this article appeared in print on May 31, 2012, on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: Leo Dillon, Celebrated Illustrator of Children’s Books, Is Dead at 79.

Storybook Ballerina’s True-Life Adventure --- The New York Times

 

By HELENE STAPINSKI

Published: November 17, 2011

IN the fall of 1976 “A Very Young Dancer” leaped into the imaginations of a generation of little girls. This children’s book by the photographer Jill Krementz chronicled the day-to-day life of a 10-year-old student from the School of American Ballet, following her to class and through her starring role as Marie in New York City Ballet’s “Nutcracker,” for which she was handpicked by George Balanchine himself. (“George Balanchine’s Nutcracker,” performed by City Ballet, begins its 57th season on Friday at the Koch Theater.)

 

Lynn Donaldson for The New York Times

Stephanie DePierro was profiled at 10 in Jill Krementz's 1976 photo book “A Very Young Dancer.”

 

Lynn Donaldson for The New York Times

Stephanie DePierro now lives in Wyoming with her husband, John.

 

For a time the book’s subject, Stephanie, was perhaps the most famous and easily recognizable ballerina in the world. Young readers wanted to be her. There were bags of fan mail and appearances on “Today,” “Midday Live With Bill Boggs” and a one-hour “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” Christmas special.
For anyone who’s read the classic book, it’s easy to see why it was a best seller. Stephanie’s intensity — her beauty, her dark eyes and her seriousness — draws the reader in. The stark black and white lends some of the photos a Grimm’s fairy tale quality, with a haunted undertow that appeals to girls. And it offers a rare, behind-the-scenes look at the most prestigious ballet academy in the country, which has an almost mystical quality for aspiring ballerinas. (My own daughter is a student there.)
Wendy Whelan, today a principal with City Ballet, was 9 when she got her own copy that Christmas long ago. “As a girl from Kentucky,” Ms. Whelan said, “this book literally opened the door to my fascination with New York City, ballet and Balanchine.”
Rachel Moore, now the executive director of American Ballet Theater and a former dancer, received her copy the following Christmas, and obsessed over every page. “Not only did the book introduce me to this glamorous world,” said Ms. Moore, who grew up in a small California town, “it actually showed me there was a path.”
Fans of the book might have assumed that Stephanie went on to an adult ballet career as well. But like countless other young dancers in professional children’s schools, Stephanie saw her career end in adolescence, a time of rebellion and discovery. Most move on to other interests. But for Stephanie leaving the school was filled with shame and secrecy. Finding her new place in the world — after the attention that came with the book — was a long and painful journey littered with troubled relationships and financial struggles, with moments of deep darkness and depression.
In an effort to find peace with her past, she is only now talking about why she stopped dancing and the difficult decades that followed. Finding her wasn’t easy. Google searches turned up nothing but female fans wondering whatever happened to that girl in “A Very Young Dancer.” Ms. Krementz did not respond to letters, e-mails or phone calls. But with the help of a relative, the girl in the book was finally located in northern Wyoming. She and several family members agreed to interviews on the condition that Stephanie be identified by her married name, DePierro, in an effort to protect the family’s privacy; her surname did not appear in the book.
Stephanie and her husband, John, live in a modest log house overlooking majestic Carter Mountain, with their dog and three horses. Bales of hay litter the yard, and a buffalo head, left over from a recent butchering, balances on some sawhorses.
At 46 Stephanie looks strikingly similar to the 10-year-old in Ms. Krementz’s images: the same chestnut-brown hair falling past her shoulders; the same dark, focused eyes and furrowed brow. She’s extremely polite, with a gentle disposition, but intense, thinking and waiting a beat every time she speaks. There are worry lines as she discusses how her dancing career came to an abrupt end.
“It’s kind of a sad story,” she says softly.
As fans of “A Very Young Dancer” know, Stephanie lived a life in Manhattan most children only dream about. She was raised with her sister and brother on the Upper East Side, attended the exclusive all-girls Convent of the Sacred Heart school in Manhattan and spent summers riding her pony on her grandmother’s ranch in Wyoming. Her mother, Linn, studied modern dance with Alwin Nikolais. Her father, Fritz, a German-born businessman, is a member of the Explorers Club who lectures on his travels to Nepal and Tibet.
When she was 5, Stephanie saw “The Nutcracker” at Lincoln Center and decided that she wanted to be onstage. She enrolled at the age of 7, and by the time she was 10 Stephanie was auditioning for the lead.
That same year she and her mother were approached by Ms. Krementz, who asked if she could use Stephanie as her subject. Ms. Krementz spent that year documenting Stephanie’s life onstage and off.
On the first page of the book Stephanie is shown pointing her left toe, right hand on the barre, bun firmly in place. “I don’t know if I want to be a dancer when I grow up — or if I want to do something with horses,” her opening quotation reads. “I really like horses.” On the next page she says, “I love ballet too.”
Later in the book she’s shown performing in “The Nutcracker”: sitting behind the stage curtain, lights out, waiting for her cue; running terrified from a giant mouse; then dancing blissfully with her prince.
“There are some parts in life where you say: ‘Step aside. This is my part,’ ” Stephanie says at her home. “I really feel that was my part. I haven’t had that feeling too much in my life, but with that, I did.”
The book did not tell the whole story. Classes at the school were sometimes laborious and unpleasant, with strict, demanding teachers. Her attendance, she says, wasn’t the best. She’d get headaches and miss class. Though she never argued or talked back, she says, she demonstrates how when she was really angry at a particular teacher, she would rise out of a plié, her hand extended outward, her middle finger up.
“I wasn’t the poster child of the most dedicated student in school,” she admits. “But when it came to performing I was 100 percent dedicated.”
The summer before she turned 13 she was staying in a cabin on the family ranch when her mother came in with bad news: The academy wanted Stephanie to consider withdrawing. Though she hadn’t enjoyed classes all that much, the news, she says, was devastating: “I cried my eyes out.”
She wasn’t just a young dancer whose career was ending abruptly but the focus of a beloved, high-profile book. Her failure would be agonizingly public. And so she decided, with her mother’s backing, simply to tell people that she had quit.
“So many people would say, ‘Why’d you stop dancing?’ Just everybody,” Stephanie recalls. She told them that she wanted to go to college, and that a commitment at the school would rule that out. That was her story, and she stuck to it for three decades.
At a cafe on the Upper East Side last spring, Linn remembered being surprised when the school’s associate director at the time told her she should consider withdrawing Stephanie. But as a dancer herself, Linn knew how difficult class could be. “Any mother who is a parent there knows that those Russian teachers were very strong,” Linn said. “You take what they say, and you don’t go against them.”
According to Amy Bordy, the school’s director of public relations, the two Russian women who ran the school and knew the details of Stephanie’s tenure are no longer living: Nathalie Gleboff, the associate director, died in 2007; Natalie Molostwoff, the executive director, in 1994. However, Stephanie’s attendance record shows excessive unexcused absences. Ms. Bordy also added that she had to repeat two consecutive class levels. She stressed that a student’s performance onstage has no relation to a student’s progress in class at the school, and that dancing with City Ballet is a perk.
Stephanie’s father, Fritz, divorced from Linn when the girls were very young, said he doesn’t remember Stephanie’s being so upset about leaving the school. He said he was relieved when his daughters did not become professional dancers. “When it comes to spending a lifetime in the ballet, it’s like being a priest or a nun,” he said. “You have to give yourself totally to the profession.”
Still, for all these years, he thought Stephanie had quit on her own.
Stephanie did enroll in college, at Wesleyan, where she studied religion. In the summer she continued to go to Wyoming, where she worked several seasons as one of few female horse wranglers. After graduating she landed a job as a mounted Urban Park Ranger in New York. While on duty in the Bronx, she collapsed in a park bathroom and experienced a seizure. She remembers saying to herself: “Life’s not really working out too smoothly. I need to step outside of this picture.”
She considered traveling to Tibet, where she could join a monastery. But her mother knew of one closer to home, in Connecticut. For the next 10 years Stephanie lived on and off at that monastery, milking cows, learning Latin, driving a tractor, praying, meditating.
“It was healing. I don’t know if it did the trick, but it was helpful,” she says. In the late ’90s she moved to Cambridge, Mass., where she held several different jobs over the following decade, including working with the homeless.
She shakes her head. “I didn’t know what I was doing, really. I was still kind of lost.”
By then most people had forgotten about “A Very Young Dancer.” But every now and then someone would find out she had been Marie and would ask why she stopped dancing. The question was as painful as it had been 20 years earlier. At one low point she took a stack of the books to the Salvation Army and shoved them down the donation chute. Stephanie acknowledges that she might have had troubles in life regardless of her association with ballet and the book, but says her experience as a child no doubt contributed to her depression later in life.
Four years ago, while Stephanie was living in Cambridge, Linn asked her to oversee a house she was building in Wyoming. Stephanie moved back to the site of those happy childhood summers. Two years later she met her future husband. They got to know each other through a Bible study group and now belong to an evangelical church that meets on Sunday in a red-roofed dining hall that, when not being used for worship, features live cowboy music and a $12 chuck wagon dinner buffet. "Stephanie went through a couple of hard years and realized what’s important to her and what makes her happy," her brother, Christopher, said by phone from his home in Australia.
Her husband, John, is from the Bronx, and moved to Wyoming 25 years ago for the adventure and wide-open spaces. He has worked as a cook, a builder and a taxidermist, and is currently a plumber. Stephanie works in a flower shop. Until he met her, he had no idea what “A Very Young Dancer” even was.
On a snowy day Stephanie flips through the book, telling John about the real people behind the pictures: the woman in wardrobe who pressed too hard with the bobby pins; Balanchine, who never talked down to the kids.
She looks at a picture of herself joyously dancing across a big, dark stage. “It was quite an experience,” she says. “It is hard to top it.” She gazes out the window at snowcapped Carter Mountain. “Out here kind of tops it, in a way.”
 

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A version of this article appeared in print on November 20, 2011, on page AR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Storybook Ballerina’s True-Life Adventure.

Two Short Fables That Revel in Freedom

Two Short Fables That Revel in Freedom

By TERRENCE RAFFERTY

Published: November 11, 2007

ALBERT LAMORISSE’S “White Mane” (1953) and “The Red Balloon” (1956) are among the world’s most famous and most honored films for children. Both were prizewinners at Cannes, and “The Red Balloon,” which is 34 minutes long and contains about half a dozen lines of dialogue, improbably received an Oscar for its screenplay. But kids’ stuff they are not.

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Original New York Times Review: 'The Red Balloon'

Everett Collection

Pascal Lamorisse, the son of the filmmaker Albert Lamorisse, in “The Red Balloon” from 1956.

The stories are simple, fablelike; the heroes are boys; the subject in each case is the purity and power of a child’s imagination; and the tone of both films is that of open-mouthed wonder. Yet these movies are also shot through with a very adult melancholy, an awareness that life tends not to measure up to the glorious pictures in our minds. The young are enchanted by “White Mane” and “The Red Balloon.” Grown-ups, who know too well how fragile this beauty is, are likely to cry.
There has recently been a long overdue surge of interest in Mr. Lamorisse’s two great films, some of it sparked by the estimable Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao Hsien, whose feature-length homage, “Flight of the Red Balloon,” was screened at the New York Film Festival this fall. And starting Friday “White Mane” and “The Red Balloon” will be shown on a double-bill at the Film Forum in Manhattan, in superbly restored prints. “White Mane” also has a new English-language narration by Peter Strauss, which is a more scrupulous translation of the original French than previous versions. (The earliest, written by James Agee, is gorgeous, but — not surprisingly — a good deal more verbose than Mr. Lamorisse’s spare text.)
The most striking benefit of the restorations, though, is the delicate color of “The Red Balloon,” which heightens the contrast between the muted loveliness of Paris streets (it always looks like first light, somehow) and the bold, stunningly incongruous red of the title object. In a less vibrant print “The Red Balloon” would still be touching and ingenious, but it wouldn’t be half as funny.
If you haven’t seen the film since attaining the age of reason, you might have forgotten how dryly brilliant its (mostly) silent comedy is: Mr. Lamorisse times the balloon’s entrances and exits from the frame with the precision of a crack farceur.
At the beginning of the movie a schoolboy (played by Pascal Lamorisse, the filmmaker’s son) happens on a large, fortuitously untethered balloon, and, knowing a good thing when he sees one, grabs the string and claims it as his own, as if it were a stray mutt. (Or — to cite a movie that, 25 years later, took possession of the spirit of “The Red Balloon”— as if it were E. T.) Pascal then discovers, to his delight, that his new toy/pet is eminently trainable. He teaches it to follow him, off string, and to wait faithfully for him when he’s at school, on a bus or in one of the many other places where big balloons are not welcome.
The movie is essentially a series of elegant slapstick routines, in which the balloon — which has its mischievous side — darts or bobs or soars, as the situation requires, and gets laughs from the constant surprise of its appearances and disappearances. The sheer absurdity of giving a balloon the personality of a friendly, frisky dog is, of course, central to every one of Mr. Lamorisse’s gags, and it’s a conceit that could easily have become mighty tiresome. But he knows enough to keep the action brisk and the movie short, and he doesn’t press his luck by treating us, as a lesser artist might, to close-ups of his small hero’s happy face. Everything in “The Red Balloon” happens, as it should in physical comedy, in long and medium shots: no special pleading, no unseemly appeals for the viewer’s approval.
When the film is over, you realize that although you’ve been entirely enveloped in little Pascal’s fantasy world, you’ve learned next to nothing about the boy himself. His parents are not in evidence. He lives with a stout, black-clad, rather fearsome-looking old woman who may or may not be his grandmother. We’re given no idea whether he’s a good, bad or indifferent student, or who his friends are. The intensity of his attachment to the balloon suggests that he’s a lonely, dreamy child, living in his own head, but we can’t be sure; the movie gives us nothing solid to go on.
With such a skimpy back story the film runs the risk of abstraction, but Mr. Lamorisse’s reticence has the odd, bracing effect of making everything he chooses not to show us seem deeply irrelevant. All that matters here are the balloon, the boy (whoever he is) and the steep, narrow streets of Ménilmontant, where they play together.
Just how unnecessary the particulars of the boy’s “real” (i.e. nonballoon) life really are is emphasized, inadvertently, by Mr. Hou’s “Flight of the Red Balloon,” which will be released theatrically in the spring. That movie’s boy, named Simon (Simon Iteanu), has real life to burn, a messy one with a frazzled single mother (played by Juliette Binoche) in a cramped apartment. And when a red balloon enters this boy’s life, courtesy of the young Asian film student (Song Fang) who has been hired as his nanny, the contrast between his imaginative world and the world he actually inhabits feels, with all this extra detail, too pointed; Mr. Hou manages to keep poignancy at bay, but it’s touch and go.
We don’t know much, either, about the boy named Folco (Alain Emery) whose story is told in “White Mane.” He comes from a family of fishermen in the marshy southwestern region of France called the Camargue, where wild horses roam in packs. His household consists of a bushy-bearded, unidentified elderly gent and a little brother (Pascal Lamorisse, a toddler then). The lone important fact about Folco, as far as Mr. Lamorisse is concerned, is his relationship with White Mane, the alpha stallion of the herd, who, the narrator tells us, doesn’t like men but who comes to trust this boy. In a way this 39-minute, black-and-white movie is a draft of “The Red Balloon”: the unrulier, more disturbing story of which the later film is a charming, whimsical variation
“White Mane” is no less carefully composed than its better-known successor: both pictures have the economy, the clarity of purpose and the pleasing symmetry of a sonnet. For Albert Lamorisse, who began and ended his career as a documentary filmmaker, the difference lies in the landscape. A metaphorical balloon would make no more sense (even comic sense) in the Camargue than an untamed stallion would in the streets of Paris; and although both, in their respective films, represent the freedom of the imagination and both, consequently, have enemies, the threat feels much graver in “White Mane.” The envious boys with slingshots who chase down Pascal’s balloon are almost parodies of the fierce-looking riders of the Camargue pursuing White Mane for the worst and commonest reason — for the awful joy of breaking a creature freer than they are.
As Folco rides the horse, bareback, across the marshes, over the dunes and through the strange, sparse, gnarled vegetation of his native region, you sense, as in few other films, the real terrors of nature, its arbitrariness and flat indifference reflected in the very changeability of its beauty. (Compared with this, both the attractions and the dangers of the city seem like child’s play.)
It takes an extraordinary filmmaker to evoke that sort of feeling and then to cap his thrilling climactic chase with an image as ecstatic as it is disquieting, the distant sight of a boy and a horse heading out to sea. “The Red Balloon” ends with a similar flourish of ambiguous release, but it is, appropriately (and literally), a lighter one.
And Lamorisse, these movies show, really was a remarkable artist: one of the cinema’s best poets and a fearless explorer of the scary and exhilarating outbacks of the imagination. He lived for 14 years after “The Red Balloon,” mostly making documentaries. While he was shooting what would be his last picture, “The Lovers’ Wind,” in Tehran in 1970, his helicopter crashed; he was 48. Even he might not have been capable of imagining a more fitting end: He rose to get a clearer, freer view of the world, and fell from the sky.

Wolfish --- New York Times

Wolfish

‘Wolf Won’t Bite!’ and ‘Virginia Wolf’

From “Wolf Won’t Bite!”

By PAMELA PAUL

Published: March 21, 2012

WOLF WON’T BITE!

Written and illustrated by Emily Gravett

32 pp. Simon & Schuster. $16.99. (Picture book; ages 2 to 6)

VIRGINIA WOLF

By Kyo Maclear

Illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault

32 pp. Kids Can Press. $16.95. (Picture book; ages 5 to 1

 

The Big Bad Wolf is a villain of long standing. But in recent picture books, the famed brute has taken a real punishing — belittled, undermined and otherwise made fun of.       

 

 

From “Virginia Wolf”

In “Wolf Won’t Bite!” Emily Gravett (the author of last year’s “Blue Chameleon” and of “The Odd Egg,” a 2009 New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Book) carries the wolf’s torment to its logical (or illogical) limit. With zero explanation, three feisty little pigs, one dressed as a ringmaster, one in a tutu and a third dressed as a carny strongman, coerce a long-suffering gray wolf into performing circus tricks but assure their audience, “Wolf won’t bite.”

“I can make him dance a jig but ... Wolf won’t bite!” the tutu’ed pig declares as her strongman and ringmaster companions sound off on a tuba and an accordion. “I can miss him every time,” the blindfolded strongman brags as he throws knives at the frightened wolf. It is only when the three pigs foist themselves head-first into his gaping jaws that the wolf is unendurably tempted — who can blame him? — to take a bite.

Gravett’s story advances without rhyme or reason, and the pigs, who appear on a wide-open white background, resemble Ian Falconer’s Olivia a pig’s hair too much, but young readers won’t mind. This is a story that upends the established good guys/baddie paradigm, and there’s always fun in that.

Operating on a much deeper and darker level, “Virginia Wolf,” an ambitious story about girlish blues, sisterly differences and the healing power of art, will do wonders for Woolf-besotted former English majors. But the story, about Virginia and her sister, Vanessa, who paints a fantastical world called Bloomsberry, will work equally well for children who hardly know the difference between the United States and the United Kingdom.

Kyo Maclear, a Canadian author, tells the story from Vanessa’s perspective. “One day my sister Virginia woke up feeling wolfish,” she notes. “She made wolf sounds and did strange things.” What follows are Virginia’s endless complaints and Vanessa’s efforts to cheer and assuage her. “The whole house sank. Up became down. Bright became dim,” is how Vanessa describes an imagined episode from Woolf’s depressed youth.

Isabelle Arsenault, who won a Times Best Illustrated award last year for her work on “Migrant,” by Maxine Trottier, imaginatively and deliciously depicts a child’s inner world by altering her outward appearance. Here, Virginia is seen in bed with wolf’s ears peeking out against the pillowcase. Her dark mood is shown in a stream of silhouetted girlish paraphernalia — upended teddy bears, books, a stool and flowers — strewn across a blue page along with topsy-turvy wolf-girl Virginia.

And then, gloriously, Virginia’s dream world of “Bloomsberry” — “a perfect place” with “frosted cakes and beautiful flowers and excellent trees to climb and absolutely no doldrums” — appears as a cornucopia of delicate swirls and imagined treats that emerge from the wolf girl’s heart.

The story blooms in full color when Vanessa decides to paint this Bloomsberry retreat and the two girls enter that artistic realm. Virginia tells stories. “The whole house lifted,” Vanessa says. “Gloom became glad.” And the figure of Virginia finally emerges from her dark silhouette, her wolf ears transformed into a pretty blue bowtie atop her head.

The New York Times - 2 book reviews for spring!

Children's Books

Wishfully Thinking of Spring

‘When Blue Met Egg’ and ‘And Then It’s Spring’

From “When Blue Met Egg”

By PAMELA PAUL

Published: February 15, 2012

As winter slogs on, as it has been known to do exhaustively in New York until April, it is hard to believe that one day spring will come. Especially if you are 4 years old and your calendar years are defined by the inexplicable wastelands between birthdays, Christmas and Halloween.

WHEN BLUE MET EGG

Written and illustrated by Lindsay Ward

32 pp. Dial. $16.99. (Picture book; ages 3 to 5)

AND THEN IT’S SPRING

By Julie Fogliano

Illustrated by Erin E. Stead

32 pp. A Neal Porter Book/Roaring Brook Press. $16.99. (Picture book; ages 4 to 7)

Enlarge This Image

From “And Then It’s Spring”

But a hint of sunshine and sky-blue vistas emerge in two attractive new picture books, “When Blue Met Egg,” written and illustrated by Lindsay Ward, and “And Then It’s Spring,” written by Julie Fogliano and illustrated by Erin E. Stead, who won a Caldecott Medal in 2011 for “A Sick Day for Amos McGee.”

“When Blue Met Egg” is very much a bird-in-New-York story along the lines of Pale Male’s, albeit with far less truth and a lot more whimsy. Blue is a small bird awakened by “something extraordinary flying through the air” that lands in her nest. The observant 4-year-old reader knows this object to be a snowball, though Blue mistakes it for an egg.

What follows is a New York travelogue as Blue searches for Egg’s mother. Together they make their way through the city, from Central Park to the Statue of Liberty, with one foldout spread offering an aerial view of the Brooklyn Bridge in all its glory.

The mission, needless to say, is a flop, but Blue sticks with Egg as the two pass the winter months visiting various attractions, including, rather improbably, the New York City Opera and the Guggenheim Museum. Only when spring comes does Egg meet her inevitable sloshy fate, though Blue, ever optimistic, finds a way to carry on the friendship.

The book is full of good cheer, New Yorkiness and an “I knew it!” ending like that of P.D. Eastman’s “Are You My Mother?” It doesn’t really surprise the reader, but makes him feel wiser nonetheless. Ward’s engaging and imperfectly cut cut-paper illustrations are full of witty urban references. Crossword puzzles shade Central Park’s hills of snow, and maps of Manhattan color the East River. Throughout, Blue, topped with an eccentric cherry-colored hat, flits brightness into the winter landscape.

A child clad in red woolens provides much the same function in “And Then It’s Spring,” which opens with a dreary landscape. “First you have brown, all around you have brown,” observes the bespectacled boy as winter drones unpromisingly into late winter, and finally, glacially, into early spring.

In Erin E. Stead’s delicate, atmospheric illustrations, a melancholic cloud always hangs overhead, lending a pensive tone that meshes nicely with Fogliano’s rambling, meditative text. This is a story about waiting and waiting and waiting, a gloomy subject, unleavened by humor (with the brief exception of some stomping bears) — it may hit rather close to home for young readers. Combined with the muddy browns and the boy’s opaque glasses, the effect could leave small children a little cold, even as it appeals to their world-weary parents.

If only we didn’t have to wait till the very last page for spring.

The 2011 Best Illustrated Children’s Books - The New York Times

November 3, 2011, 12:00 pm

The 2011 Best Illustrated Children’s Books

By PAMELA PAUL

Sophie Blackall

The New York Times Book Review has announced its list of the 10 Best Illustrated Children’s Books of 2011. Artwork from this year’s winners will appear in the special Children’s Book section of the Book Review’s Nov. 13 issue.
The judges this year were Jeanne Lamb, the coordinator of youth collections at The New York Public Library; Lucy Calkins, the Richard Robinson Professor of Children’s Literature at Teachers College of Columbia University; and Sophie Blackall, an author and artist who has illustrated 24 books for children, including one of last year’s Best Illustrated winners, “Big Red Lollipop,” as well as “The Crows of Pearblossom,” “Spinster Goose: Twisted Rhymes for Naughty Children” and “Are You Awake?” — all published this year. They chose from among hundreds of children’s picture books published in 2011.
The Book Review’s 10 Best Illustrated Children’s Books for 2011, in alphabetical order, are: “Along a Long Road,” written and illustrated by Frank Viva (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers); “A Ball for Daisy,” written and illustrated by Chris Raschka (Schwartz & Wade); “Brother Sun, Sister Moon: Saint Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Creatures,” written by Katherine Paterson, illustrated by Pamela Dalton (Chronicle Books); “Grandpa Green,” written and illustrated by Lane Smith (Roaring Brook Press); “Ice,” written and illustrated by Arthur Geisert (Enchanted Lion Books); “I Want My Hat Back,” written and illustrated by Jon Klassen (Candlewick Press); “Me … Jane,” written and illustrated by Patrick McDonnell (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers); “Migrant,” written by Maxine Trottier, illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault (Groundwood Books); “A Nation’s Hope: The Story of Boxing Legend Joe Louis,” written by Matt de la Peña, illustrated by Kadir Nelson (Dial); and “A New Year’s Reunion,” written by Yu Li-Qiong, illustrated by Zhu Cheng-Liang (Candlewick Press). Next year, The New York Times Best Illustrated awards will celebrate its 60th anniversary.