Memoir Monday... a Children's book to understand Memorial Day...

 Memorial Day is a day of remembrance. It's a day honoring the men and women who died while serving in the U.S. military. It is a somber day, not a day of celebration. One way to honor these brave men and women is to not forget... Not to forget the ultimate sacrifice they gave and the difficulties they endured. 

In a children's book, The Wall by Eve Bunting we find a way to teach our children the importance of Memorial Day...

The Wall by Eve Bunting, illustrated by Ronald Himler... A young boy and his father visit the Veterans Memorial to find Grandpa's name. What makes "The Wall" so moving is that instead of answering questions it will get children to ask them. A great book to open discussion with the class about war and it's consequences.

 School Library Journal reviews The Wall as: "A sensitive and moving picture book, and a great discussion book as well."

The passing of Anna Dewdney and her reading of Llama Llama Red Pajama

Anna Dewdney, who wrote and illustrated the popular children's Llama Llama series that starred Baby Llama, passed away Saturday. She had fought a 15 month battle with brain cancer...

"Her children’s book career began in earnest with her artwork for The Peppermint Race by Dian Curtis Regan (Henry Holt, 1994). Dewdney went on to illustrate a number of other children’s chapter books in the 1990s. Then, in 2005, Viking published the first picture book she both wrote and illustrated: Llama, Llama Red Pajama. The humorous tale of Baby Llama’s struggles to get to sleep at bedtime received critical praise and became a hit with kids, parents, librarians, teachers, and booksellers. The series now contains more than 10 titles and has sold more than 10 million copies combined. Netflix is producing an animated Llama Llama series that is due out in 2017..." 
                                                                                     ...from Shannon Maughan, PW on tumbler

Llama Llama Red Pajama is adorable, and just hearing the words of the story puts a smile on my face. Here is Anna Dewdney reading Llama Llama Red Pajama... it should put a smile on your face too! Anna will be missed, but what wonderful books she leaves behind.

Anna requested that in lieu of a funeral service that people should read to a child instead. 

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The Sunday Salon and All's "Fair" in Love and Summer... or the annual Bridgewater Country Fair

Welcome to The Sunday Salon and The Sunday Post! It's that day of the week bloggers from all over the internet get together virtually in a large gathering place called The Sunday Salon and talk books!  And at The Sunday Post, which is a weekly meme hosted by The Caffeinated Book Reviewer, in which more bloggers share their bookish news! So, find a comfy chair, grab a cup of joe and relax! Let's talk books... or "End of summer and books..."

August is a special time of year in Connecticut. It's an ending and a beginning. It marks the end of summer here, but also, towards the end of August, it marks the beginning of fall. Just a hint of fall starts to come in the early mornings, when the temperatures start to bring a little chill in the air and we find ourselves turning off the air conditioners and opening the windows at night. I love summer, but really my favorite time of year is fall. When I was young, fall also marked the beginning of school, and I can still feel that anticipation after many years away from a classroom. One of the many traditions around here is the Bridgewater Country Fair. It is an agricultural fair and it's always about 2 weeks before the start of school. And last Sunday, we got in the car and headed towards Bridgewater...

Bridgewater is a beautiful little rural town, well known for a few things... If you are a chocolate lover, it is the home of Bridgwater chocolate (OMG, what great chocolate!). It's also known for some wonderful working farms (where you can buy your meats direct) and it's also known for being the last  "dry town" in Connecticut, which eventually did changed in 2014. And this year, the first year since 1935, you could actually buy beer at The Bridgewater Country Fair. Have you ever been to an agricultural fair? Here's what you'll see...

First thing we had to do was scope out the whole fair, see what vendors were there and see what activities were going on. First thing we watched was the chainsaw sculptor, who made these bears and animals out of huge logs of wood. Next we went to watch the oxen pull. It's amazing what these animals can pull. Two oxen are yoked and brought up to a sled that has been piled with cement squares ranging in weight, beginning at 4500 pounds. The oxen themselves weigh anywhere from 1200 - 3000 pounds themselves and are generally tame. To see the way some of the handlers, some of which are father's and sons, interact with these large beasts is interesting. Ever consider having a 1200 pound pet? Of course there are always some who don't see these animals as pets and I don't like seeing the way they treat them. 

It started to rain during the oxen pull, so we missed part of the competition and raced into the poulty tent. Yup, poultry as in chickens. Do you know how many different species of chicken there are? Plenty! My favorite chickens are the Polish chickens. They have this feathery mop on their head and I think they are adorable. That mop on their head also makes it hard for them to see very well. They are pretty tame too, and make good pets. They do lay eggs, but are more "decorative" then productive. All the chickens in the tent are raised, generally, by the children, and compete for best examples of their "types". Besides the Polish chickens, you'll fnd Silkies, Bantams, Leghorns, Brahmas, Phoenix Bantams and Orpingtons to name just a few. After the rain stopped it was time to move along to see some other "country fair"....

We found some delicious locally made honey from Jim's Honey and Goatboy soap, which is made with all natural ingredients including goat milk and shea butter and is to die for! I have sensitive skin and tried the unscented bar and my skin never felt so soft and actually glowed (not glow in the dark glow, but looks radiant). On to some food, which had to be a roast beef sandwich, a traditional food for the fair, and a birch beer. Then some more wandering, looking at all the blue ribbon cows, eyeing the antique tractor pull and seeing my first Highlander cattle whose origins are from Scotland (also known as the hairy cow), which has this long fringe like coat. I took a photo of Elroy, but this wasn't his best side...


And at the end of one of the tents, lo and behold, something for the book lover in me...Tractor Mac!

Yes, a guy selling his children's books featuring a farm tractor named Mac. And what wonderful books! There are wonderful lessons to be learned living on a working farm, and these can translate beyond the farm too! Maybe it's because my paternal grandparents use to have a farm that there's that love of rural living still in me, but these books are delightful! These books stem from author & illustrator, Billy Steers stories that he told his own children. I bought the first book in the Tractor Mac adventures, Tractor Mac Arrives at the Farm, and simply loved the story of how Mac came to the farm and helped "mechanize" some of the laborous work, and ultimately it's a story of friendship. I'll be reviewing this book later this week, but suffice it to say, I loved it! Beautiful illustrations and a wonderful story.  And there are 12 books in the series so far! And it was nice meeting and talking with author Billy Steers too! He graciously signed my book!

 Enjoy Going to Fairs? Ever been to an Agricultural Fair?

Weekly Wrap-up...

This week was a reading week. I finished quite a few books that I'll be reviewing on Chick with Books in the coming week or two.

• Tractor Mac Arrives at the Farm by Billy Steers (sheer delight in children's book form!)
• In Such Good Company by Carol Burnett (memoir of all those great years on TV)
• Not A Star by Nick Hornsby (tongue in cheek and so funny! in a novelette)
• Lily and the Octopus by Steven Rowley (make sure you have a box of tissues for this one!)

That about does it for this week. Hope you enjoyed your visit! Share your fair memories and all those books you read this week!

Happy reading... Suzanne

Mother Bruce by Ryan T. Higgins... A Review!

I've been meaning to read this book for a while. I loved the premise of a bear who accidentally becomes mother to some baby goslings. I am so glad I finally opened the book and took it all in! It is hilarious! Especially the bear looking up fancy recipes on the internet!

So, here's the gist... Bruce is a grump. He dislikes everything... EXCEPT eggs! He loves eggs and gets eggs anywhere and anytime he can. One day as he is trying to hard boil his eggs, the eggs hatch instead of hard boil. They turn out to be goslings and they decide he's their mother. Bruce, remember he's a grump, isn't happy and tries all sorts of ways to get rid of them, but they won't have any of it and begrudgingly Bruce ends up raising them. When they are old enough, he thinks he's going to get them to fly south like all the other geese in the sky, but they have something else in mind. I won't give it away, but the ending is perfect.

Beautifully illustrated, humorous, and a wonderful story, Mother Bruce by Ryan T. Higgins is a winner! I give it 5 stars!

A Favorite Literary Bunny...

The Easter Bunny has been up to a bit of mischief today... he's hidden all the hard boiled eggs! He can bribe us with all that chocolate we find in that cellophane wrapped basket, but we better find those eggs!

Even though he's not an Easter bunny, one of literature's favorite bunny's is Peter Rabbit. The first Peter Rabbit book, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, was originally written by Beatrix Potter in 1893 as a gift to a little boy she knew who had been ill for a very long time. She went on to self-publish 200 copies of the tale that quickly sold and was finally convinced in 1902 to have the publishing house Frederick Warne & Co. publish her work. They initially printed 8000 copies! And happily the book has never been out of print since. Over the next 28 years Ms. Potter wrote and published 22 more Peter Rabbit tales, so for over 100 years Peter and his sisters Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail have been entertaining children of all ages.

But Beatrix Potter was more than a children's book author & illustrator. At an early age she began to draw the plants and animals around her. Her family spent Holidays in Scotland and The Lake District, a rural area in North West England, where she began to paint the flora and fauna she closely observed. Her Uncle tried to get her admitted as a student to the Royal Botanic Gardens, a botanical research and education institute, but because she was female she was rejected. She persisted in her own studies and became widely respected thru out England as an expert mycologist (one who studies fungi). Her technical papers were never published because of her gender, but in 1997 the Linnean Society (the premier organization for the study of natural history) issued an official apology to Potter for the way she was treated.

Easter is so much more than the Easter Bunny, and for children all over the world there are all kinds of traditions that they enjoy... Peter Rabbit isn't really one of them... but he is an all time favorite literary bunny!

The Sunday Salon and The Gifts of Christmas...

Welcome to The Sunday Salon! It's that time of the week we get together with other bookish people and talk about bookish things. So find a comfy chair, pour yourself some hot cocoa and relax!

It's just a few days before Christmas! Have you finished your Christmas shopping?! We took a drive today to enjoy the unseasonable warm winter weather (it was 67 degrees! in Connecticut) and as we drove through the "city" part of our drive, there were droves of people crowding the stores. This year I did most of my Christmas shopping online. This year is also the first year, and hopefully the last year, that I am in a wheelchair for any trips out to the store. It is definitely not easy being in a wheelchair, and  with aisles stuffed with all sorts of wonderful things to buy, sometimes it is hard to get around, hard to hold more than a few things, hard to hold a basket. I have new found empathy for people who have to use a wheelchair permanently, and look forward to being able to walk again someday. And so, most of my shopping was online. Etsy being one stop… have you ever shopped at Etsy?! It is filled with amazing craftsy people, artists and wonderful objects. I can't reveal what I purchased because I don't want to reveal what I bought for certain people, but suffice it to say there were some beautiful things sent through the mail.

I received an early Christmas present from my Secret Elf! This year I participated in the Goodreads, Books on the Nightstand, Secret Santa gift exchange. It was organized by Ann Kingman of Books on the Nightstand, that great podcast hosted by Ann and Michael Kindness, with the help of 4 other "Elfs" through Elfster.com and was so much fun! Everyone who joined in on the fun randomly got a name of another bookish person, and then the fun began! We were to send something on the person's wish list or thing of some other bookish gift(s) to give with a limit of $25. My Secret Elf was none other than Michael Kindness himself! I'm such a fan that the package from him would have been enough, but inside my package were two wonderful books, both of which were on my wish list. Here they are…

Aimless Love, new and selected poems by Billy Collins… from Booklist: Collins, or the speaker in his poems, watches himself with helpless bemusement as he lives “a life of continual self-expression, / jotting down little things.” Obsessive “noticing” gets him into all sorts of trouble, as recounted so wryly, so tenderly in “Aimless Love,” the poem that gives this vital and shrewdly provocative volume its title and in which the speaker records his sequential ardor for a wren, a mouse, and a bar of soap. In selections from his four most recent collections, from Nine Horses (2002) to Horoscopes for the Dead (2011), and 51 glimmering new poems, former poet laureate and reader favorite Collins, the maestro of the running-brook line and the clever pivot, celebrates the resonance and absurdity of what might be called the poet’s attention-surfeit disorder. He nimbly mixes the timeless––the sun, loneliness—with the fidgety, digital now. Some poems are funny from the opening gambit to the closing flourish. But Collins’ droll wit is often a diversionary tactic, so that when he strikes you with the hard edge of his darker visions, you reel.

I really enjoy Billy Collins' poems. They are not ornamental or filled with curly cues, but down to earth and sparse only to the point of getting his point across. He has a dry wit that is showcased in his poems and they are just simply enjoyable to read. Billy Collins was also the poet laureate for the US for two years. What is a poet laureate? Here's the official word from Wikipedia:

Laureates receive a US$35,000 stipend and are given the responsibility of overseeing an ongoing series of poetry readings and lectures at the library, and a charge to promote poetry. No other duties are specified, and laureates are not required to compose for government events or in praise of government officials. However, after the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001, the then Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, was asked to write a poem to be read in front of a special joint session of Congress. Collins wrote "The Names" which he read on September 6, 2002, which is available in streaming audio and video.

There are voracious readers who never consider reading poetry. I find that poetry can be fun, comforting, inspirational. What do you think? Poetry reader or not? If you are new to poetry and want to try some contemporary poems, I would definitely recommend Billy Collins! And Aimless Love by Billy Collins is a great collection!

The Day the Crayons Quit by Drew Daywalt & illustrated by Oliver Jeffers… Crayons have feelings, too! Poor Duncan just wants to color. But when he opens his box of crayons, he finds only letters, all saying the same thing: His crayons have had enough! They quit! Beige Crayon is tired of playing second fiddle to Brown Crayon. Black wants to be used for more than just outlining. Blue needs a break from coloring all those bodies of water. And Orange and Yellow are no longer speaking—each believes he is the true color of the sun. What can Duncan possibly do to appease all of the crayons and get them back to doing what they do best?

This book is hilarious! Of course Crayons have feelings! Black is happy that he's used quite a bit, but geez, why does he only get to outline everything?! Why do all the other colors get to be used to color in? Can't he have some fun too! And poor Pink! Pink never gets used! Why it's been over a year and that was just because Duncan's Sister used it! And Blue is very happy because it gets used a lot, but it's so short now it can't see over the wall anymore. Each Crayon writes Duncan a letter, and illustrates some of their points. It is fun and would be a great book for children- especially to have them try and use the colors for things they would not ordinarily use them for! (Even my Hubby thought this book was creative).

This week on Chick with Books, stop by Tuesday, Dec. 24th for a reading of Twas The Night Before Christmas on the Blog. It will be available all day and through Christmas, so if you'd like to relax and have someone read to you, this is the spot! Check it out, you won't be disappointed!

And the rest of the week will be quiet and I'll be enjoying time spent with family and friends. Next Sunday, will be close to New Years and the END OF THE YEAR. There have been "Best of Year" book lists for months now, but I like to wait until the end of the year to let all those "late" published books in on the list. So, next Sunday we'll take a look at the best of 2013.

Until then… I want to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas!

Suzanne

Banned Books Week Continues with... Charlotte's Web by E.B. White

Charlotte's Web by E.B. White is a Banned Book!

A beloved children's story, about a little girl Fern, who lives on a farm and falls in love with a runt. And how that runt grows up to be a bashful pig named Wilbur befriended by a spider named Charlotte. A story about friendship & sacrifice, and the cycles of life. A story I loved as a child and last year celebrated it's 60th anniversary!

Charlotte's Web has sold more than 45 million copies and has been translated into 23 languages. And in 2006, was challenged because some parents in Kansas thought that talking animals were blasphemous and unnatural. Challenged also because the passages about the spider dying were "inappropriate subject matter for a children's book." (I still cried when I reread that this week!)

A wonderful writer of children's books including Stuart Little and The Trumpet of the Swan, E.B. White lived on a farm, where the inspiration came for Charlotte's Web. Here is what he had to say about writing the book...

"As for Charlotte's Web, I like animals and my barn is a very pleasant place to be, at all hours. One day when I was on my way to feed the pig, I began feeling sorry for the pig because, like most pigs, he was doomed to die. This made me sad. So I started thinking of ways to save a pig's life. I had been watching a big grey spider at her work and was impressed by how clever she was at weaving. Gradually I worked the spider into the story that you know, a story of friendship and salvation on a farm. Three years after I started writing it, it was published."

Amazing that in the 21st century, Charlotte's Web would be a target for censorship. What do you think?