Mary Engelbreit's Nursery Tales

This collection of 12 classic fairy tales is perfect for children in the primary grades. The stories are ones that we have all heard before, including Hansel and Gretel, The Emperor's New Clothes, Puss in Boots, Jack and the Beanstalk, The Little Red Hen, and more.

The stories are told in a fairly middle of the road fashion, not too scary but bad things do happen. For example, in Hansel and Gretel, Engelbreit kept the detail of Gretel pushing the witch into the hot oven and locking her in. The cat still stalks the mice in The City Mouse and the Country Mouse, and the Three Bears do find Goldilocks still in their house when they get home (although she just got scared and ran away before the bears even said anything to her).

However, some of the portrayals which could possibly scare young imaginations have been sanitized. Instead of the Wolf being cut open by the woodcutter to save Little Red Riding Hood and her Grandmother, the woodcutter gives the Wolf "a big scolding!" The Wolf lets them both out of his tummy and runs away in embarrassment. While this ending means every character lives, it is somewhat unsatisfying to see "evil" just walk away from his bad deeds. I also wonder if kids might worry that the Wolf is still out there.

The pictures in this book are delightful. They are full of bright colors and patterns to draw the eye to details, which abound. The interiors are highly decorated and homey, and all of the characters have beautiful costumes. The royal characters have exquisite fur collars, jewels, crowns and hairstyles (and in the case of the Emperor, fleur-de-lis patterned boxer shorts). The more I look at each picture, the more little details and patterns I find.

One minor complaint I have is that the text contains only enough detail for the stories to make sense. There are very few descriptions or extraneous facts or reasoning, which can make the stories feel rushed. However, the illustrations are so richly detailed and decorated that when really looked at they do provide many of the missing elements. This is probably good for younger children, who may not have the attention span to listen to much extraneous description, but older children who already know the stories may miss some of their favorite details.

All in all, I really like this book because it provides the basic elements of a dozen classic fairy tales while still being short enough that younger kids will not lose focus or forget what is happening in the story. I love the comforting environments shown in the illustrations!

Amelia Bedelia's First Day of School

written by Herman Parish with pictures by Lynne Avril

Who doesn't remember Amelia Bedelia, the maid who took everything literally? The antics that had me in stitches as a kid have been brought into an environment familiar to younger children as we join a younger Amelia on her very first day of school. As always, she follows directions precisely...too precisely.

Her day starts when she takes a running start and JUMPS off the school bus, landing squarely on the gym teacher. At the end of the day, Amelia is the last to leave because she explicitly followed her teacher's directions and glued herself to her seat.

The illustrations do a great job of clarifying what could otherwise be a very confusing book for young children and are detailed enough to have even adults chuckling at Amelia's interpretations. The words and pictures combined could be used to introduce a language arts lesson on words and phrases with multiple meanings.

While I didn't find the same degree of absurdity in this 2007 follow-up to the series begun in 1963, I can imagine young children howling with laughter as Amelia Bedelia turns their familiar world upside-down simply by doing what she is told. I would love to read this to a kindergarten or first grade class and then watch them at recess to see what literal interpretations they could make! Harper-Collins, the publisher, also offers suggested activities for use in the classroom after reading this book.

Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel

Story and Pictures by Virginia Lee Burton

This book (originally published in 1939) was one of my favorites as a child, which may have been influenced by my father's love of stories about large pieces of machinery and engineering...we also frequently read Burton's other books Katy and the Big Snow (about a snow plow) and The Little House (about a house in the country that has a whole city grow up around it, and eventually gets moved back out into the country). We read a lot of books about trying as hard as possible and believing in yourself, a theme that runs through this book.

The detailed illustrations show an old fashioned world complete with a milkman and his horse-drawn wagon and, of course, the steam shovel (also known as Mary Ann). Mike Mulligan and Mary Ann find themselves obsolete in a world powered by gasoline and diesel rather then steam, and set out to prove they still have value in the modern world which seems to have passed them by. They head for the little town of Popperville, where they dig a whole basement for the new city hall in just one day! The more people who come to watch them, the faster and better they dig. Unfortunately, they forgot one crucial step when digging. A little boy who has been watching all day steps in with an unusual solution and saves the day, managing to save the town some money at the same time.

This story does a good job of illustrating that even older people (or technology, as it were) has a value. They may not be the newest, shiniest, youngest team out there but Mike Mulligan and Mary Ann work as hard as they can to show how useful they are, and it pays off. If Mary Ann had been made with a diesel or gasoline engine rather than steam, her intriguing late-in-life career change would not have been possible.

My Rotten Redheaded Older Brother

by Patricia Polacco

Tricia's older brother Richie is horrible. No matter what Tricia does, he does it better. As he tells her, he is "four years older, and always will be!" But then Bubbie, her grandmother, teaches her to wish on a shooting star and the next day she finds something can do better than Richie can. Proving it leads to an accident and to stitches for Tricia, and a revelation about what big brothers are really for.

Anyone with an older sibling has probably felt this way at one time or another...I know I did! My older was taller, faster, smarter, and way more horrible than I was. The expressions on Richie's face throughout the book perfectly capture that annoying knack for always being right and really made me feel like I was looking at my older brother's antics all over again.

The connection that the siblings make on the last few pages of the book really touched a nerve and brought up memories for me of how nobody got to insult my sibling but me! Older and younger siblings alike can relate to this fun and sweet tale.

The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge

by Hildegarde H. Swift and Lynd Ward

The current, restored edition of this classic book features original watercolors initially painted by Lynd Ward for the book in the days right after Pearl Harbor and lost for over a generation. They capture the dark shadows and looming nature of the giant bridge while dark blues and blacks on nearly every page reflect the tight security conditions which led the illustrator to post a lookout while he was sketching the bridge and the national mood of the times.

This classic tale of a proud lighthouse on the Hudson River always makes me think of home. I grew up in New York City, not too far from "the Great Gray Bridge" (the George Washington Bridge). This book tells the story of a red lighthouse whose job it is to guide the boat traffic that plies the mighty Hudson. During the day, the lighthouse is silent and motionless. Every night, it goes "Flash! Flash!" every night to warn boats away from dangerous rocks. When there is a storm, a man comes and winds and winds and winds a clock inside, and a bell begins to ring. "Warn-ing! War-ning!" "'Flash!' said the light." "'War-ning!' said the bell."

One day, men begin to dig next to the lighthouse. Soon, they are dragging cables across the river and raising huge steel towers. One day, the lighthouse stops flashing and ringing, and the light on top of the tower starts to flash instead. The once-proud lighthouse feels sad and useless, until there is a terrible fog and a boat crashes into the rocks in front of the lighthouse. After than, the man comes back and winds up the clock, and the lighthouse begins to ring again. The lighthouse realizes that it still has a job to do and that while the light on top of the big new bridge is useful for some things, the lighthouse is still needed.

I have vivid memories of hearing this story as a child and looking for the little red lighthouse. Sure enough, it still stands! The bridge towers over it, but the tiny old lighthouse has hung on for 130 years. It looks minuscule and humble under the great mass of steel that is the George Washington Bridge, but on foggy days my brothers and sisters and I always swore we could hear the bell ringing.

In A Bad Case of Stripes, author and illustrator David Shannon cleverly addresses the issues of conformity and marching to one's own drum. Young Camilla Cream, who loves lima beans, awakens on the first day of school and, after agonizing over the perfect outfit, discovers she is covered with multicolored stripes! The doctor is summoned, and he can find nothing wrong with her. The next day, she goes to school and "when the class said the Pledge of Allegiance, her stripes turned red, white, and blue, and she broke out in stars!"

The class has a great time discovering what else she can do, and after that she stays home from school while a seemingly endless array of Specialists and Experts rush to try to cure her. Her parents try everything, even having an Environmental Therapist come to try to help Camilla. Unfortunately, with each attempted cure, she just gets worse. Finally, "an old woman who was just as plump and sweet as a strawberry" knocked on the door. She offered Camilla something different than the others, which finally cures her and offers up the explanation for Camilla's pigmentation problems.

The lesson in this story is subtle but effective, and made perfectly clear on the last few pages. The book makes a wonderful point about being yourself, and the brightly colored, almost psychedelic, vivid illustrations stuck with me for several days after reading it for the first time.

I personally found both the text and illustrations delightful and imaginative, but I was surprised to discover several pages of very negative reviews on Amazon.com where parents complained that they or their children had been traumatized by the pictures and/or story. It made me wonder if they had failed to grasp the lesson, and focused solely on the imagery. While a person who is striped certainly is different, I really felt there was nothing scary in the book at all. I wonder if this is a reflection of modern attitudes towards non-conformity?