Book Club

Book Club: Why Richard Scarry’s Busytown Has the Worst City Government Ever

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 4 Comments

Book Club – quirky critical and social justice takes on children’s literature. Otherwise known as what happens when someone interested in pop culture and political analysis has read the same bedtime story for the 100th time.

Richard Scarry’s Busytown has the most incompetent municipal government I’ve ever seen, despite the fact that I live very close to Washington D.C. The urban planning is an utter disaster, the roads make Beijing’s highways look orderly, and the safety standards and training are non-existant. Urban designers take note – except for its astonishingly resilient citizens, Busytown is everything you don’t want your city to be.

To start with, the city’s traffic patterns and the resulting crashes are atrocious. We have two Busytown books (Cars and Trucks and Things that Go and Lowly Worm’s Applecar), both of which feature multiple car crashes or near-misses. For example, one accident involves at least 17 different vehicles, including a squirting mustard truck, a chinaware truck, a flour truck, a whipped cream truck, a tomato juice truck, and an egg truck. While thankfully, “no one was badly hurt” but it will “probably take a Million Years” for the mechanic to fix everything.

Scan from Cars and Trucks and Things that Go of a huge crash

The roads all appear to be multi-lane with no actual stripes to distinguish between them. There are few or no traffic lights or stop signs, with individual police officers directing traffic at overcrowded intersections. There are multiple turn-offs with no merge lanes, like drive through hamburger stands on busy highways. The roads appear to be constantly under construction, with minimal markings and barriers. The roads themselves go through dangerous areas with a lack of supporting infrastructure, as “shortcuts through the mountains” result in dangerous falling rocks. (The roads also appear to cut right across ski trails, which can’t be safe for the skiers.)

Beyond the physical infrastructure, there is clearly little municipal support for regulation. Enforcement of traffic rules is minimal, with one clearly dangerous driver being pursued by a single (but very determined) bike cop in one book and another completely ignored in another. Vehicles vary in size from tiny pencil cars driven by mice to huge multi-story tourist buses. Many of them appear to not pass modern safety or emissions standards, including pickle and banana cars. One even transforms into a helicopter and balloon, while having no obvious method of propulsion.

Scan from Cars and Trucks and Things that Go of a tractor that's fallen in a pond

The complete disregard for safety extends to the municipal staff, who clearly need better training and performance standards. They make the beleaguered Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority look staggeringly competent. A crane driver steers straight into a lake. (That wasn’t very smart, indeed.)

A steamroll driver loses control of his truck, which runs over several cars. A car carrier operator drops a car into the ocean. Six different dump trucks in one area dump their loads at the same time because of vague misheard directions from a citizen.

Scan from Cars and Trucks and Things that Go of cars run over

Lastly, the city is extremely auto-centric. While it’s not safe for drivers, it’s disastrous for bicyclists and pedestrians. There are sidewalks, but cars veer onto them on a regular basis, knocking over parking meters. There are no bike lanes or separated paths. There is a police officer on a bicycle, but even she rides on sidewalks to avoid the multiple crashes. Instead of bicycles, even the children are gifted toy cars that they’re allowed to drive on the road!

While Busytown looks pro-urban upon first glance, it is a classic example of a poorly planned, shoddily managed semi-suburban area. It is certainly a product of the time. Parents interested in finding good neighborhoods for their children and city planners alike can learn from this disastrous mess.

The Little Engine that Could: An Underappreciated Feminist Icon

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 5 Comments

The Little Engine that Could: An Underappreciated Feminist Icon (Photo: The cover of The Little Engine that Could)

Reading the Little Engine that Could to my toddler for the first time, I stopped short about halfway through. I stared at the book and thought, “The Little Engine that Could is female? Huh.”

Personally, the only thing I remembered before reading it with my kid was that the Little Engine said, “I think I can” a lot. (It was actually a lot less than I remembered.)

As it turns out, the core of the story is a groundbreaking feminist fable. While The Paper Bag Princess rightly gets great feminist cred for flipping the princess story on its head in 1980, the Little Engine that Could was a story about women helping each other and overcoming barriers together 50 years earlier than that. It’s a great little feminist fable for your train lovers of either gender.

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Book Club: Goodnight Moon – Absurdism for Toddlers

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 2 Comments

My Book Club – quirky critical takes on children’s literature. Otherwise known as what happens when someone interested pop culture analysis has read the same bedtime story for the 100th time.

As anyone who has met a toddler knows, they have a very different, warped perspective on the world, at least in comparison to adults. Which is why absurdism is such a perfect match for them. So it makes sense that Goodnight Moon is a beloved favorite of that age group – it’s a master class in absurdism in only a few hundred words.

Wikipedia actually provides a surprisingly good, concise definition of absurdism: “Absurdism focuses on the experiences of characters in a situation where they cannot find any inherent purpose in life, most often represented by ultimately meaningless actions and events that call into question certainties such as truth or value.” Common elements include dark humor, nonsensical elements, irrationality, and situations that have little or no meaning. They generally have no moral conclusion and make no judgment on the character’s actions.

Goodnight Moon has many of these elements in abundance. There are hardly any characters, much less those who have an inherent purpose. The little bunny and “old lady whispering hush” appear to be the only things with any decision making ability, and even as they gradually change positions, there’s no clear explanation as to why. The best guess that can be made is that the little bunny is the nameless narrator, saying goodnight to all of the things in his room before going to sleep. As anyone who has ever tried to put a toddler to bed knows, this process will certainly bring certainties of truth, value and sanity into question.

The absurdity is further heightened by the number of times the narrator says goodnight and what they are saying goodnight to. More than half of the book consists of the narrator saying goodnight to some object or another. While a child saying goodnight to stuffed animals and perhaps the moon makes sense, saying goodnight to “nothing,” “air,” and “noises everywhere” indicates either a disturbing personification of ubiquitous objects or an endless echo of goodbyes that have no endpoint. Either is enough to force a grown adult to confront the irrationality of living with a small child in the first place.

The narrative further serves to disorient the reader and warp their perception of reality by having a slightly shifting visual perspective. At first, it appears that the book switches back and forth between showing the bunny’s bedroom and highlighting various objects in the bedroom, from a picture of the three bears to “a comb and a brush and a bowl full of mush.” However, the bedroom setting changes slightly over time, showing the old lady saying “hush” there and then randomly not, the room getting dark, and the little bunny (finally) settling down to sleep. In addition to the changes over time, there are also slight changes in the framing of space. The frame of the page subtly zooms in and out of the room, creating an unsettling effect where you aren’t quite sure if what you are seeing is what you saw before. The pages that highlight objects often leave out key details that are in the larger picture. For example, the page focused on the mittens shows only the mittens on the drying rack, even though the larger picture shows the socks also on the rack. The Ugly Volvo hilariously deconstructs all of the other disturbing elements of the “great green room.”

Credit:Burbanked tumblr, Goodnight Moon photobomb Prince

Goodnight Moon even shows hints of postmodernism. As Jed at My Little Po-Mo says (yes, it is a critical analysis blog focused on My Little Pony): “Most of the time, we are unaware of the constructs that shape our reality, so postmodern works try to draw attention to the constructs in play, usually by subverting them.” Goodnight Moon touches on the construct of “what a classic piece of children’s literature is.” It does so by explicitly referring to three different children’s stories in the text and pictures. The first, the “three little bears sitting on chairs,” obviously refers to Goldilocks and the Three Bears, a story that most children in English speaking countries know. The second is the picture on the wall of a mother bunny “fishing” for a baby bunny. Unlike almost all of the other decorations, this is not called out in the text and may not be something that many readers recognize. It is actually a picture from a different book by the same Writer/Artist team, The Runaway Bunny. The third reference is to Goodnight Moon itself, a copy of which is tucked away on the nightstand. These last two references are in clear comparison to the first, suggesting that the authors’ own works are comparable to Goldilocks. As Goodnight Moon has sold millions of copies, it certainly seems like their textual playfulness was prescient.

What makes Goodnight Moon brilliant is it’s use of absurdism to illustrate the toddler mindset. While the book can baffle parents, the utter ridiculousness of the repetition and overall approach seems perfectly normal to them. After all, they’re used to falling asleep in one place and waking up in another, an experience that would be terrifying for an ordinary adult. The world in general is radically weird for little ones; Goodnight Moon helps us enter their very strange perspective for just a little while.

Book Club: Ten Nine Eight and Diversity

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 7 Comments

Children’s literature is often not meant to represent reality – I love fantastical, imaginative works. But one place it really falls down is its failure to represent the vast diversity of children, in both the world and America. Considering half the population is female and there were more non-white babies born in the U.S. in 2011 than white babies, children’s literature (especially classic books like Dr. Seuss) is awfully male and white. Unfortunately, this lack of representation means that when female or minority kids read, they don’t see anyone like them. Similarly, when white, male kids read, they only see people like them as protagonists. Then, when books do have diverse characters, they often make a big deal about it, focusing on the ethnicity of the characters rather than allowing them to be characters in their own right. All of which is to say that Ten Nine Eight is refreshing to read.

Cover of Ten Nine Eight

Ten Nine Eight is a bedtime book, a simple genre that basically follows a character going to bed, who is meant to be a stand-in for the child being read to. The quintessential bedtime book is Goodnight Moon, but there’s also Night Night Little Pookie, Bedtime for Chickies, and the geographically based series Count to Sleep [City Name]. Ten Nine Eight follows a dad putting his little girl to bed. It counts the different things in her room, ranging from her “10 washed and warm little toes” to her fuzzy stuffed animals. The illustrations have just the right combination of realism and nostalgic childhood softness. The counting down is a gentle, quiet game perfect for helping little ones fall asleep. The little girl’s room is full of telling, relatable details, from the “7 shoes in a row” (the cat has the missing one) to the seashells making up a homemade mobile. The book earned a Caldecott Honor award, which it totally earned for its simple artistry.

What’s particularly unique is that story is not only about a dad with his daughter (who are usually absent, mean or at best incompetent in children’s entertainment) and they are both black. The story doesn’t mention either of these facts; they’re just presented as a part of everyday life, which they are for millions of families. But when a big deal is still made about a photo of a black dad braiding one daughter’s hair while holding another in a baby carrier in 2014, this book must have been radical in 1983.

So if you want a lovely bedtime story with some unassuming, welcome diversity, Ten Nine Eight is for you.

Book Club: Little Pookie

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 1 Comment

Book Club is a semi-regular feature on the blog where I reflect on a children’s book (or series) and my personal experiences with it. (Just a note on this one – this is based on three of the five Little Pookie books, but they’re simple enough that I’m guessing the three are fairly representative.)

Sandra Boyton is known for her silly, cute children’s books featuring wide-eyed animals. Although most her books lack a plot or consistent characters, her Little Pookie books dig a bit deeper, presenting a rare portrait of a present, competent modern mom, even if she isn’t human.

The Little Pookie books focus on the relationship between Little Pookie, a young pig, and his mom. (Little Pookie’s gender is never specified, but the clothes are stereotypically male.) In most children’s books, the parents are either absent or ignorant of their children’s goings-on. In contrast, Little Pookie’s mom is present and engaged with the story. In fact, she’s the narrator. The books consist of her conversations with Little Pookie, where she invites him to do something – go to bed, dance, think about who he is – and he responds.

Through these conversations, we see a mom who is a good role model for parents reading the books to their kids. She talks to Little Pookie at his level, with relatively simple language, without talking down to him. She is playful, pretending she doesn’t recognize him when he’s sporting giant sunglasses or knowing where he is when he’s hiding under the sheets. She trusts him to be independent, offering guidance without nagging: “Now you brush your fine teeth and wash your fine nose.” However, she does set limits, illustrated by her counting to three when she wants him to get ready for bed. She encourages creativity and movement, with an entire book of her inviting him to do a silly dance, including a part in “his very own style.” She offers choices and is flexible when he doesn’t quite pick either one. For example, when given two sets of pajamas to choose from, he mixes the top from one with the bottom from the other. She encourages reading, illustrated on the last page of Little Pookie, which shows them reading the very same book together in a clever bit of recursiveness for a board book.

But most importantly, Little Pookie’s mom tells him how much she loves him, sincerely and often. Because parents are often disconnected from the events in children’s books, this message usually isn’t communicated at all. On the other end of the spectrum, some children’s books focus on that message to the exclusion of everything else. As a result, it comes off as forced and saccharine. But the mom’s expressions of love in Little Pookie flow naturally from the rest of the story and relationship.

While I don’t think most parents would look to a pig as a role model, the Little Pookie books offer a surprising amount of insight into a good parent / child relationship. I know I’d enjoy having Sprout and I hang out with her and her adorable piglet.