Our Library

Bunting, Eve. 2008. Our Library.

Typically I love almost everything Eve Bunting writes. She's a prolific writer, and last year some of her books were among my favorites. But I must say that my impression of Our Library was...well, let's just say all aboard for dinkyville. I hope that doesn't sound too harsh. I do think *some* readers will read it and appreciate it for what it is...an enthusiastic message-oriented book exclaiming the praises of books, reading, and libraries. And community activism. I do think, however, that there will be a few critics that think it crosses the line into both didacticism and dinkiness.

I love reading. I love books. I love libraries. So what's the problem? It's a bit silly, a bit unrealistic, a bit too gung-ho maybe.

Here's how it starts off,

Miss Goose stamped my library book. She leaned across her desk. "Our library is going to close forever," she whispered.
"Oh, no!" I said. "Why?"
"It's too old. It needs a new roof. And new paint," Miss Goose said sadly.
"Hmm," I said.

We turn the page...

We checked out two books. [How to Lay A Perfect Roof. Library Painting for Beginners.]
We read by day, and we read by night.

Turn the page...

The next morning, we got started.
We laid a perfect roof.
We painted the library buttercup-yellow, with sky-blue trim and a grass-green door.

But the library's problems don't end there. For each and every problem, there is a book that fixes it in no time at all. It takes complex issues--real-life problems--and simplifies them too much. It gives cutesy answers to actual problems. It's all about wish-fulfillment.

The library needs money to operate? Read "How To Make Money Fast." The land the library is built on is owned by a mean old goat who wants it back so he can do something else with it... Read "How to Move From One Place To Another." Find the perfect place for the library's new home...only it's owned by a grumpy beaver who just became a grandpa? Read "Read to Your Grandkids" and "How To Speak Wisely and Well To Grumpy Old Beavers."

The message of this one is that for every problem, you can read your way to a solution. And furthermore, not only will reading provide you with the answers and solutions...it will guarantee success. Guaranteeing success and solving all of life's problem by picking up a book or two may be just fine in this fictional world where animals wear clothes, but it doesn't translate well into the real world. Life isn't that simple.

Not that I'm one of those party-poopers that demands realism in all books, I can suspend my disbelief a good bit of the time.

But it seemed a bit too sweet, too cute, too simple, too dinky for my own tastes. The book has its own logic. And it's cute enough. I'll admit some of the book titles the library has are cute and a bit funny. And some people earnestly do like simple and sweet and cute and good. So it's not that the book is badly written. It just didn't work for me personally. Though as I said earlier, her previous books often do. And the strange thing is that they some of them use cute clothes-wearing animals being sweet and lovey-dovey too. So I don't know why this one didn't work for me.

I did enjoy the illustrations by Maggie Smith. I thought they complimented the text well. And they were very charmingly done.

© Becky Laney of Young Readers

When God Created My Toes

Mackall, Dandi Daley. 2008. When God Created My Toes. Illustrated by David Hohn. Waterbrook Press.

When God Created My Toes is a sad attempt at a picture book. The problem? It suffers from forced rhyming. First of all, because it follows the rule that everything must rhyme no matter what, the rhymes lack both sense and naturalness. Second, the text lacks rhythm. There is no natural beauty, no natural flow; nothing poetic about it. Lest you think I'm picking on it because it is a Christian book, let me say this. The mistake of When God Created My Toes can happen in Christian publishing or mainstream publishing. I've picked on quite a few other picture books that suffer from this malady that were published by traditional, mainstream publishers. If I could, I would release this book from the shackles of its rhymes and set it free. It's not that the concept is a bad one. It's just a somewhat stunted concept.

Here are a few examples,

When God
created
my toes
Did he make them wiggle?
Did he know I'd giggle?
Did he have to hold his nose
when God created my toes?

Not a bad start really. Toes wiggle. Tickles cause giggles. Toes can sometimes stink. Nothing "zah?" yet.

When God
created
my knees
Did he put bones in'em?
Did he know I'd skin'em?
Did we sing our ABCs
when God created my knees?

It's beginning to lose me at this point. I'm not completely checked out yet. But what do ABC's have to do with knees? And there's just something off about the whole thing.

When God created my hip,
Did I hear him say,
"Hip, hip, horray!"?
Did we do a double flip
when God created my hip?

See here is when I knew that this one just wasn't going to work for me. There are some better verses up ahead. But nothing that personally redeems it (for me) from its mediocrity.

The illustrations. I would say that I thought the illustrations were better than the text. I actually preferred the "kid-drawn" sketches that appear on the left side of some of the spreads to the other more polished illustrations. The kid-drawn art has a certain charm that I enjoyed. The other illustrations weren't bad, but they had a cartoon-feel to them. Not bad. Very adequate. My least favorite part of the illustrations were the white cat. There was just something that bugged me about how that cat was drawn. I don't know why. And I'm sure it's just me.