Times Colonist from Victoria, British Columbia, Canada • 19

VICTORIA TIMES, SATURDAY, NOVEMU1SR 16, 1971 1 9 75 ir Books For Young Readers maw Reviewed by JUDITH TERRY 1L. iff 3 books C' (ill PETER MURRAY-EDITOR When Robinson Crusoe ran away from home, he was driven by an inner urge to go to sea, and long bemoaned his rashness in itrnorine his fa ther's excellent advice to do no such tiling. These days the necessity to get one's hero on matter-of-fact understatement. It is a notable addition to stories of the Canadian North. Parents are problems again in Barbara Corcoran's The Winds of Time, a tale full of shadows and snowstorms and shivery moments.

Gail's mother suffers a serious mental breakdown, and her father, an artist who occasionally sends fond postcards but not his address, is unreachable. Gail is as ignorant, devious and suspicious a little girl as such circumstances might make her, tough, self-reliant and lonely, her affection rentred on her cat Sylvester. She escapes from her Uncle Chad, whose cruelty may be a fabrication of her own distrust, discovers a rambling and decayed old mansion, and is treated with courtesy and wisdom by the two eccentric and delightful old people who live there. The book has a reflective depth common to this author's work: the title itself signifies the impact of the past, the faded but still potent elegance, beauty and good feeling of the house and its inhabitants, that can work upon a little girl and gradually teach her that the past is not irrelevant. Vera and Rill Cleaver specialize in stories of harsh childhood experience, and they do it jarringly well.

In the road is just as imperative, but rather than fate, fathers are usually blamed. Escaping from parents, cruel or merely dull, is the impetus of the narrative in two West Coast talcs aimed The Week That Was By PAT BARCLAY primarily at: boys. In the Cali fornia version, Where the Road Ends, by Ella Thorp Ellis. Pete Loean runs away from a foster home, works in a dime booth at a travelling fair and achieves his aim of makine it on his own from California to the Virgin Is lands. Elfreida Read's Brothers by Choice has a "British Columbia setting, and Brett eoes after his adopted brother Rocky to persuade him home again.

There is an idyllic pastoral of a co-ooerative community farm (rather unhappily spelled 'coop and an exciting run-in with some drug pushers. While admitting the appeal of such stories of excitement and independence, I wonder whether parents are always as foolish and unfeeling as they are painted. If Rocky really were a superb craftsman, would his father go on saying that "other things" (the intellectual ones) were more im port a and fulfilling? This is the Week That Was. Young Canada's Book Week, which had become something of a national institution over the years, is dead. The demise is permanent, according to Elizabeth English, who is Children's Librarian at the public library in Thunder Bay, Ontario.

Miss English is currently President of the Canadian Association of Children's Librarians, and she surprised me by revealing that she was not sorry to see YCBW go. "It did not achieve its purpose," she slated. "We wanted to reach parents and teachers, to get them to look at kids' books and to look at: library collections, and to understand why we carry some books and why we don't carry certain others." What happened instead, she told me, was that Young Canada's Book Week became a Patronize-Your-Local-Library-in-General week, which did little to promote books for children, or the variety of "book-related services" which most children's departments of our public libraries have to offer. (Film strips, movies, records, cassettes, etc.) Then too, there was a lack of funds, a surplus of apathy, and an ineffective drive for renewed financial support. Young Canada's Book Week simply ran out of steam.

(This at a time when industry is beginning to consider the advisability of converting to coal. It's a. safe bet that one thing the Canadian book scene is never going to run short of is irony.) I hope that our libraries will persist in the attempt to generate interest in "kids' books" through some other means, though, because my own experience has convinced me that a good children's book is the best kind of book there is. When I asked Miss English. "What makes a good children's book?" she had a snappy answer ready-made: "Exactly what makes a good adult's book!" Then a flurry of red-hot sparks bounced from her eyes and threatened to ignite the old envelope I was very unprofcssionally jotting her remarks down on.

Well, I should have known better, hav ing worked for a couple of years as a children's librarian myself. Anyone who wants to get. a rise out of a child's lib. merely has to suggest, that; child's lit. is somehow After that, it's advisable to Me Too, Lydia Birdsong (the names are the only bits of decorative symbolism they allow themselves) takes charge of her retarded sister Lorna for the summer as a result of Father's desertion and Mother's full-time job.

The Dragoos over the road are narrow minded and unpleasant and even Lydia's best friend, Billy Frank Blue, is prevented by his family from playing with her. So there they are, Lydia and Lorna, thrown together for a summer full of days, Lydia thumbing her nose at the world with defiant unmusical blasts on her harmonica, and spending hours trying to teach Lorna to be like she is. There is no. easy ending, and I don't know that self-knowledge is any compensation, as far as children are concerned, for the lack of one, but it is a profound, and in the end optimistic, book. Ruth M.

Arthur's After Candlemas gets rid of parents in a traditional English way; Harriet's parents are abroad, and she has to stay with a boarding -house friend. Harriet narrates tha story in a curiously dated style that is not unpleasing, but the plotting is tacky. The author cheats a little, introducing the topic of witchcraft and strange happenings in the references to the death of Ambrose Biddle "aged 17 vears. drowned here on Feb. 2nd, 1890.

After Candlemas, as it says on his memorial stone, and then allowing this to lapse into the story of a boy run away from reform school. I hankered after some development of Grandma Cobbley's dark stories of ancient rites and witches' covens, but Mrs. Arthur always writes competently, and the developing rela-t'onshiu between Harriet and the boy she helps is well done. There is a very old-fashioned Dad in Hockey Fever at Goganne Falls who makes his son learn fifteen verses of Genesis by heart as punishment. Books about hockey are generally written by authors who plainly have no talent for anything but the game.

This one is much better than its title, or its illustrations, suggest, largely because with an accumulation of characters like Andy's Dad, R. J. Childerhose manages to capture the atmosphere of a small Alberta town very convincingly. The efforts of the Gophers to get themselves a rink, a coach and some good hockey result predictably in a defeat for the bigger, richer, odds-on favorites from Edmonton. The kind of hockey their regenerate coach had taught the Gophers matches the setting and ethics of the book.

The boys are high spirited and get involved in Tom-Savvyer-like adventures, but they never quest for identity. Heroism in the cause of hockey is demanded and received. It is all rather headily courageous, and just what the fans need. II' It THE ROAD ESDS. by Ella Thorp Ellis.

McClelland and Stewart. $11.75. BROTHERS BY CHOICE, by Elfreida Read. Doubleday. $5.95.

JOHN COME DOWN THE IIACKSTA )', by Caroline Tap-ley. McClelland and Stewart. $7.00. THE WINDS OE TIME, by Barbara Corcoran. McClelland and Stewart.

$5.75. ME TOO. by Vera and Bill Cleaver. McClelland and Stewart. $6.75.

AFTER CANDLEMAS, by Ruth M. Arthur. McClelland and Stewart. $5.95. HOCKEY FEVER AT GOGANNE FALLS, by R.

J. Childerhose. Macmillan. $5.95. Parents have frequently to be got rid of in children's books of course, in order that anything exciting can happen at all, but sometimes I wish that someone would run away, out of sheer perversity, from a perfect family.

In John Come Down the Backstay, John is the youngest hand aboard the Fox, gone to sea with his mother's blessing and a box she calls presents dated for Christmases ahead during the two years he will be away in the Arctic, and bits of treasure like the silver florin to remind him of home. This is an account, in the form of John's diary, of a voyage in 1857 undertaken in search of Sir John Franklin and his men, who had been lost: twelve years previously while searching for the Northwest Passage. The substance of the story is fact, based upon the master's account as it was later and the authentic the accidents and adventures, are all the more hair-raising for their 11 IViinis Lee and fans About Poetry And Children By SUSAN MUSGRAVE As child, I loved poetry. I was unaware then of any incongruity between the world of poetry and the world I lived in. Even before I had learned how to read I had memorized all the poems my father read to me at bedtime and would in turn "read" them aloud to my younger brothers and sister.

As soon as I went to school my attitude changed. First of all, poetry was anything that rhymed and rhythmed, so to speak, and was generally about jolly hoys and girls having a wonderful time splashing themselves in mud puddles. It was a dreary experience in most ways about as vacant as the daily Bible reading where, due to school board regulations, nothing "controversial" was allowed to be read. This, of course, didn't leave much scope. Nor did it succeed in capturing either my attention or my imagination.

In short, anything that might have been an enlightening experience at that particularly impressionable age, was ruined for me when it became institutionalized. Later on in school only the "brains" enjoyed poetry. One was almost led to feel ashamed of oneself by the majority of the students for taking anything more than a casual interest in the subject. And the poems that were chosen for us to "learn" had about as much relevance to our early adolescence as the frogs we squeamishly dissected in the lab had to life in the swamp. Perhaps this is more a comment on the methods of teaching than on the actual poems themselves; but I know that Wordsworth's "Daffodils" escaped me altogether somewhere in the process of searching for a 'hidden At the age when my contemporaries were dropping LSD and discovering Ginsberg and Bob Dylan for the first time, having to read Wordsworth was like having to listen to Beethoven's Violin Concerto in Major.

The theory was, I believe, that only after we had read Byron and Keats would we be prepared for e. e. cummings and T. S. Eliot.

In fact it never really worked that way. We needed something to 'identify' with something that we felt was our own discovery, a poet who spoke for us and, most important of all, one that our parents would ultimately disapprove of. To further emphasize the peculiar attitude of some of our educators towards poetry I remember one of the punishments for misbehavior being to memorize a poem, particularly the punctuation. I also remember writing an exam where we had to add up the number of metaphors and similes in Earle Birney's epic narrative "David." It wasn't until I left school that I discovered some of William Wordsworth's finer poems. I discovered," too, that Shakespeare did' not necessarily mean endless hours of footnotes and that poetry in general did not need to be interpreted or taken "literally." Gradually began to respond to it again and found it was by far the most flexible, unrestricted form of expression.

In most ways I have contrived to outgrow my prejudices though even now I find myself at times shrinking back from a deliberate rhyme or a rigid structure. I suspect there are many people who never got beyond the idea that poetry is all daffodils and nightingales. So when it comes to children's literature I can't help but feel they should have some say in the choice of the material made available to them. So much of what is written for children is bad. Those moralizing writers who indulge in adult sentimentality and have little or no idea about what goes on inside a child's imagination, are unfortunately too common.

And still it is the adults who do most of the buying of children's hooks; it is the adults who are responsible for compiling the text books. In early October I heard Dennis Lee reading from his two new books of poetry for children at the University of Victoria. I was part of a warm, enthusiastic audience of students and faculty members: it didn't: take much to see that these were the kinds of poems that would obviously appeal to people of all ages. Later he read to a crowd of young kids at the Victoria Public Library. He was a hit with everyone but.

the librarian in charge of ordering children's books, who was a hard time distinguishing between "poetry" and "doggerel." On the other hand. Sheila Egoff at U.E.C., a leading critic of children's literature, calls Alligator Pie "one of the greatest, gifts that Canadian children hav had for a long time." Extravagantly illustrated by Erank Newfeld, Alligator Pie was written with younger children in mind while Nicholas Knock is for those slightly older. The full-color illustrations are the kind a child will point to and say "Read me that one next!" And in both books Lee has managed to capture that sly, mischievous obstinacy so prevalent in childhood: he does it so olv viously and so directly that every time you turn the page it's like seeing youi'sclf in a mirror you didn't expect to encounter. For instance, the poem called "Tricking" from Alligator Pie: "But sometimes my dad Gets terriffickly mad. And he says, "Don't you drink from that cup!" Rut he can't say it right Cause he's not very bright So I trick him and drink it all up It all began nine years ago when Lee began reading nursery rhymes to his own kids.

"AH we seemed to read about were jolly millers, little pigs and queens. The details of Mother Goose the wassails and Dobbins and pipers and pence had become exotic: children loved them, but they were no longer home ground." Lee does not reject Mother Goose she will always have her place. "But I started to wonder: shouldn't a child also discover the imagination playing on things he lived with every day? Not abolishing Mother Goose, but letting her take up residence among hockey-sticks and high-rises too? I began experimenting The result is an uninhibited, lively, gleeful, extraordinary collection of poems that twist the mind, bump the tongue, that tickle the ear, that stuff the eye: poems that skip and hum and sing and buzz; poems that you can change if you. want to (Lee says these jioems are meant to be "If your child inadvertently rewrites some of these poems, please lake his version more scri than mine and poems that you would never want to change. ALLIGATOR PIE unit NICHOLAS KXOCK.

by Dennis Lee. Illustrated by Frank Ne.wfeld. Mar-millan. $5.95 rarh. "Churchill" The Animals CHILDREN OF THE ARK, by Barbara M.

Sulandl anil Xurman R. Ilatton. University of Toronto Press. $7.95. SQUIRRELS, by Brian Wihlsmith.

Oxford University Press. THE BI CLAN, by Ross E. Hutchins. McClelland and Stewart. $1.95.

ALL UPON A SIDEWALK, by Jean Craighead George. Clarke, Irwin. $8.35. It is not often that a title is so absolutely right as Children of the Ark for Barbara Solandt and Norman Hat-ton's hook about baby animals. If suggests exactly that necessity for conservation in man-made surroundings that the authors wish to emphasize, and they have clearly given the same thoughtfulness to all aspects of their book.

Instead of the text merely serving as an excuse for the photographs, Mrs. Solandt has made it. a delight to read, combining scientific observation with lively prose and humorous anecdote rather like Gerald Durrell. Did you know that gorillas will not breed at all if they don't like their spouse? One sighs that nature limited such potential stabilizing of the family situation to gorillas. nation's full-page photographs are beautiful, and his problems in getting them very entertaining.

Making the baby tiger sit still, for instance, demanded a devious strategy, like Karsh's with Sir Winston, snatching the sucked finger out rather than the cigar at the crucial moment, so that an insulted tiger cub is caught in all his wrath, and called, of course, Churchill. Children of the Ark is full of sensitivity and insight, thoroughly informative and without the explosive sensationalism that so often spoils environmental pleas. Whereas Children of the Ark is a picture bjjk fjr all ages, Brian Wildsmith's Squirrels is intended for the youngest readers. It is a characteristic Wildsmith production, with flamboyant swathes of color that don't represent, what we see, yet seem to capture it nevertheless. I have never met an adult who can resist: Wildsmith's pictures, though I'm told that children can.

In this simple, tactual account, the squirrels, muffling themselves up in their tails or standing alertly still, are so realistically depicted that I think children would find much to enjoy as well as adults. Ross Hutchins' book The Bug Clan testifies to his expertise as an entomologist and photographer. This is like a textbook for older children, nan-fiction as it ought to be. the information presented with enough fascinating detail to convert the most avid bug-hater. It is interesting to set this beside All Upon a Sidewalk, written by Newbery medal winner Jean Craighead George, which is an account of a day in the life of an ant.

Not the most promising material by the sound of it, but Mrs. George, who as close to fact as Dr. Hutchins (even to the point of calling the ant Lasius Flavusi, conveys imaginatively, with the help of Don Bolognese's meticulous illustration, the dimensions and events of the ant world. This isn't dressing up fact as fiction in order to nuike it palatable, but painting out the drama and conflict inherent in apparently dull fact. In that sense it is experimental, and I should like to know what the six or sev en-year-olds, for whom it is obviously intended, make of II.

an adult, it certainly does something towards putting human antics in proportion. Why "different'' has to mean "inferior" is difficult to understand, although heaven knows the sociologists keep trying to explain it to us. (Come to think of it, that's a large part of the problem.) The fact remains, however, that children's librarians are easily put on the defensive even when they know perfectly well that good writing for children is the equal of and harder to do than good writing for adults. No wonder they tried to educate us with Young Canada's book Week, ff everybody understood that, it. would make their job a lot easier.

So now, as part of the continuing Barclay Pro-gram to Propagate Publications for Poppets, I hereby supply a short list of family favorites and beseech my adult readers to scuttle down to the library and borrow at least one of them, not for their kiddies, but for themselves The White Stag, by Kate Seredy. This is the story of Attila the Hun, and it'll take you back to the days when the stories you read were full of wonderful illustrations, as well as gripping prose. I'ippl Longstocking, by Astrid Lindgrai. You must have heard of this one. Pippi is a liberated child, so no wonder the small fry love her.

Indian Two Feet and His Horse Margaret Friskev. Actually, Margaret Friskey is the author, not the horse, but her name is placed so close to the title on the cover of the book that we just naturally got them confused. If this one doesn't grab you on a first, reading, re-read it 50 times or so. That's what little people who en joy artful prose do. The Story of Ferdinand, by Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson.

Ferdinand is a pacifist non-conformisl who wins. Now there's an unusual twist for adult readers. If the World's Shortest Book List (see 'above) leaves you cold, your local children's librarian will be happy to suggest more. If you nuist send a child relative in to borrow such books for you, well alright. But, you won't really have begun to renew your old cynical, world-weai-y self until you've mustered up the nerve to march right in and admit that you're borrowing all these little kids' books for yourself.

Paperback Bargains I like the idea of picture books in paperback. It is true that a much-loved picture book needs a hard back to withstand all that loving, but when there are so many excellent but expensive ones on the market it becomes imperative to have some cheap editions available. Atheneum have brought out: the Aladdin series, including the Caldecott medal winner "Way I Bring a Friend? Written by Beatrice Schenk de Regniers and illustrated by Beni Montresor, a book deservedly popular with many children and parents, and Animals Should Definitely Not Hear Clothing, written and drawn by Judi and Ron Barrett, an inventive and hilarious series of words and pictures, which might well be the inspiration of several games. The story of Horatio by Eleanor Clymer is another in thp seiies. For the older age-group.

McClelland and Stewart are performing a much-needed service in bringing out a paperback series of "Canadian Favourites." including books by L. M. Montgomery, Edith Sharp's Nkwala and Cliff Faulknor's The Smoke Horse. All these are highly recommended to those who will shortly he hunting for slocking fillers. A MIXED BAG FOR THE PRE-SCHOOLERS Mr.

Gumpy won John Burningham a Greenaway award in an earlier book. He turns up again with all his friends to go on another outing, this time in Mr. Gumpy's Motor Car. It is a simple story, but its cumulative folk tale patterns make it more effective than its predecessor. The car takes off, loaded down with human and animal friends who all havp very good reasons for not getting nut to push when it gels stuck in the mud: "Not me." said the pig.

"I've a l)one in my trotter." "Not said the dog. "But I'll drive if you like," and soon down the line. The illustrations, in soft color with fussy cross-hatching, are splendid. A good book for pre-school children. Judith Viorst, wluse rhymes for children are usually such fun, seems to flag in Rosie and Michael, though it is partly because she is not well served by her illustrator, Lorna Tomei.

The theme of the book is friendship, and Viorst's method of humorous exaggeration, which masks a basic sentimentality, has been interpreted as grotesque. The children are ugly but not charming, and the worm in the tuna fish sandwich toj real. The lines "It. wouldn't matter if two billion people said she robbed a bank. If Rosie told me she didn't I'd believe her," are illustrated with a street full of people pointing fingers at the two children that is positively Orwellian.

There is an established style for this kind of drawing of course, and Tomei does it very skilfullv, hut it isn't to my taste. Children brought up on Monty Python might enjoy it. How the Chipmunk Got Its Stripes is a version of an Indian legend by Nancy Cleaver, which tells how a chipmunk's friendship and devotion to man won her marks of courage. the five dark stripes along her back. It is a warm and touching slory, well illustrated, with the strength of a good plot which many picture books lack.

Chris Connor's The Rat King's Daughter, for example, has energetic and colorful pictures, but I doubt whether they compensate for the derivative plot. Again, The Peacock's Wedding, by Alfred Koenner, is prettily decorated in a 19th century style by Klaus Ensikat. but the vain peacock vvlu is so critical of the fo.x's services as master of ceremonies is not, as according to all expectations lie should be, gobbled up, and the story just fizzles. MR. GL'MPY'S MOTOR CAR.

by John Burningham. Clarke, Irwin. $1.65. ROSIE AND MICHAEL, by Judith Yiorst. McClelland and Stewart.

$6.75. HOW THE CHIPMUNK GOT ITS STRIPES, by Nancy Cleaver. Clarke, Irwin. $3.95. THE RAT KING'S DAUGHTER, by Chris Connor.

Clarke, Irwin. $1.65. THE PEACOCK WEDDING, by Alfred Koenner. Clarke, Irwin. $1.65.

Bertons' Og The new edition of Pierre Berton's The Secret World of Og, illustrated by his daughter, is an undoubted improvement upon the original, which was rather dull to look at. Set in the margin or fullpage, black and white or colored. Patsy Berton's numerous drawings, though not always technically satisfactory, are as spirited, lively and warmhearted as the text. There are, unfortunately, errors somebody should have spotted, like the repetition in the margin of an action already seen on the opposite pane. These 8re disappointing because of the careless haste they suggest, but this is, all the same, a very attractive book.

THE SECRET WORLD OF OG. by I'icrrr Berton. Mr-Clrlland anil Stewart. J.5.J.5. Rosie and Michael.