Can we read? No. 52

Table for 1 at the Bluebird Café 🐦

Hi people. How are you?

Yesterday, in Notes from the Reading Nook, I answered a reader question about whether or not my husband and I have different approaches to raising readers. If you’d like to check out my answer, click on the link below:

Notes from the Reading Nook: Sept 21

Also, ICYMI (or you’re new here — welcome!), there’s still plenty of time to check out my special edition on fall, which is free for all subscribers:

Can we read? Special edition: Fall 🍁

Okay! Let’s do this.

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Kitchen Dance by Maurie Manning (2009)

Every year there are a handful of books that make it into what I think of as our most-read list: Kitchen Dance will be a shoo-in for 2021 thanks to my 4yo, who fell in love with this title to such a degree that the only way she’d let me return it to the library was to promise I’d buy her a copy for herself (I did).

This story captures a magical moment of childhood: when you’re little and in bed but can hear the sounds of your grownups around the house. In our home this is most often the clatter of a dishwasher being loaded (both of us), or the shower being turned on (my husband), or footsteps wandering the house looking for a book (me), but here the mysterious sound is of soft singing, compelling enough to drive a little girl up the ladder of her bunk bed to get her brother, and send both of them down the stairs to peek through a crack in the kitchen door.

What they find is their parents flying around the room, dancing together while cleaning up from dinner. The two children are captivated by this kitchen dance and its various rhythms — which come through in Manning’s text as well as her creamy, evocative digital illustrations — and they’re thrilled, when their parents spot them behind the door, to join in.

Repeatedly they sing together, “¡Cómo te quiero! Oh, how I love you!” and you can absolutely feel the love, joy, comfort, and safety radiating from this family and out from the pages of this incandescent book. It’s a love song to family, literally and figuratively, and one I highly recommend.

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Boy Soup by Loris Lesynski (1996)

Shout out to my dear friend Jen Lucas, whose handed down this book to us, as she has done with so many (literally boxes) of others

Boy Soup is another title my 4yo has loved this year, though not with the same passion for Kitchen Dance, but with a reoccurring request nonetheless — “Mama, will you read this to me?” Yes.

Here we meet a giant — a sick giant — who reads in a cookbook that the cure for his cold is Boy Soup. He looks for boys to cook up but doesn’t reckon on coming face-to-face with one clever girl amongst the boys named Kate. Kate tries to convince the giant that rather than a soup made of boys, the cookbook means he should eat a soup made by boys. He buys this ruse, and the children proceed to concoct a wild and utterly disgusting soup (complete with ingredients like “thick yellow glue” and “a generous dollop of dandruff shampoo,” just to name a few), the consumption of which not only teaches the giant a lesson about trying to eat people but leads the children to opening a restaurant (“Kate’s”) of their own.

In an interview with Canadian Review of Materials about her life and work, Loris said of Boy Soup,

I hoped to do books that worked on several levels — stories clear enough for four-year-olds to understand and enjoy from the pictures, with plots and aspects that even eleven-year-olds could get a kick out of. I also really wanted to write rhyming verse where the ‘performingness’ was innate, where I had done the work necessary to indicate emphasis and intonation, loudness and softness, humour, exaggeration. Then whoever picked it up — a kid, an adult, a baby-sitter, a granddad — would become a good performer automatically, no rehearsal or drama degree required. 

It was her first book — its execution is so pitch-perfect, the rhyming text so fun to read aloud, her wacky cartoonish illustrations so entertaining, it’s kind of hard to believe — but she achieved exactly what she set out to do. If you are looking for a fun, crowd-pleasing read, get this one.

(Note: this book was reissued in 2008 with illustrations by Michael Martchenko, which is the only edition that appears on Amazon. You can find the original at Thriftbooks or possibly through your local library.)

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Flossie & the Fox by Patricia McKissick, illustrated by Rachel Isadora (1986)

You might know Flossie and the Fox (in fact, I hope you do!) but in the event that it has been sitting untouched on the shelf for a long time, or this is an entirely new title for you, consider this your nudge to pull out — or seek out — this oldie-but-very-goodie and enjoy it for the stellar tale it is.

One day, Flossie’s grandmother asks her to take a basket of eggs to a neighbor who has been troubled by a fox. Flossie agrees, and though she is a little worried about whether or not she’ll come across a fox herself, she remembers Big Mama’s words of reassurance — “A fox be just a fox” — and sets out on her way.

The fox appears almost immediately, of course — that is what foxes in stories, if not in real life, always do — giving Flossie what it quite possibly the most magnificent side eye ever depicted in a children’s book, but Flossie, never having actually seen a fox before, doesn’t recognize him for what he is. They exchange polite greetings and the fox does not try to hide his identity — he tells her straight out that he’s a fox — but Flossie thinks for a minute and says, “I just purely don’t believe it… I don’t believe you a fox.”

This dance continues for pages’ worth of hilarious back-and-forth conversation and behavior, with the fox becoming increasingly agitated as he tries harder and harder to prove he is who has says he, while Flossie never once loses her cool. Eventually the fox receives his comeuppance and the reader realizes, with delight, that Flossie — sly as a fox! — recognized the fox from the very first minute.

This story is not only a celebration of one quick-witted, spunky little girl’s triumph over the king of woodland smarts but also a deeply enjoyable and humorous lesson in how to face down an aggressor (there is a bit of “brain over brawn” here, even though the fox is not technically bigger than Flossie). Isadora’s glowing oil paintings vividly capture every gesture, every facial expression of the characters — they are a pure pleasure.

Which is, truly, an excellent descriptor of this whole book.

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Today at the Bluebird Café: A Branchful of Birds by Deborah Ruddell, illustrated by Joan Rankin (2007)

I discovered this book by accident in the catalog of my library system (don’t think too deeply about what that says about how much time I spend in said catalog) and immediately put it on hold because I would very much like a table at the Bluebird Café, and I wasn’t disappointed: somehow this delightful book managed to reserve one for me.

We read a lot about birds in our house, whether it’s fiction, nonfiction, or poetry. My kids have loved birdwatching since they were old enough to pull themselves up on the ledge in front of our floor-to-ceiling windows, and we’ve done our best to create a welcoming (and food-filled) habitat for our local birds as well as the ones that simply pass through, especially in the winter, so they liked this one for all the birds familiar to them (blue jay, cardinal, hummingbird, eagle) as well as the ones that are far more exotic (toucan, puffin, penguin). There is something very satisfying about reading poetry — full stop — but especially poetry about something known to you. It’s as if that knowledge brings the poem closer to you, and you closer to the poem.

Ruddell has done an excellent job of creating just the right conditions for this to occur, and Rankin’s watercolors complement that beautifully, full of detail and personality, perfectly matching the humor in the text — and there is a lot of it. See the poem, “The Woodpecker,” in its entirety:

If you think that his life is a picnic,
A seesawing day at the park,
I ask you just once to consider
the aftertaste
of bark.

The birds aren’t gone yet here in Southern Wisconsin — some will start leaving soon and some will stay over (it’s those that I worry about, trudging out in thigh-deep snow to our feeders as often as need be, knowing full well I am also providing a snack station for the deer that trek through our yard nightly, sticking their long tongues into the small holes meant for small birds, not big greedy antlered folk, but, all God’s critters got a place in the choir, right? I digress.)

I recommend this book for any season, at any time, for any reason, because it’s enjoyable and accessible and every day is…

…all-you-can-eat at the Bluebird Café
a grasshoppper-katydid-cricket-buffet
with berries and snails and a bluebottle fly
a sip of the lake and a bite of the sky.

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Thanks for reading today and always. I’m grateful for you!
Sarah