I will be fascinated for the rest of my life that some of the same things are archetypal and intertextual and deep when written well, but are stale derivatives when written poorly.

My dear friend Kristin has a short and wonderful piece about Moomins in Horn Book Magazine right now: Different Drums: Embracing the Strange.

Call of the Wild: The Connection Between Shakespeare and Maurice Sendak, by Stephen Greenblatt.

Maurice Sendak Reissued, by Julie Danielson.

Megan Frazer Blakemore's new middle grade novel, The Water Castle, is so stunningly good that I barely want to tell you anything about it. Science, history, Henson and Peary, Nikola Tesla, and truly keen intelligence. Also, an assumption that readers are keenly intelligent, which wins me over every time.

New picturebook Chu's Day by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Adam Rex, is an English-language but Chinese-coded piece. The characters are animals, and the book is Chinese-coded via two details: the name of the protagonist and the fact that he's a panda. Rex's oil paintings are complex, deft, and gorgeous; they're dreamy and moody yet cheerful and full of tiny details. The story is funny and silly: Chu sneezes quite hard when he sneezes, so his parents better listen when he says he's about to. Otherwise vast destruction may result. His mother asks, early on, “Are you going to sneeze?” -— “aah-aaah-Aaaah- No, said Chu.”

I'm uncomfortable with a name that seems to be selected because it works expressly well as a sneeze pun. Remove the "No, said" and it's a classic "Ah-choo [chu]," which is the exact way that English speakers translate a sneeze-sound into language. (At least in the USA; I assume in the UK too?) Dominant white culture hasn't ever stopped implying that Asian names sound funny, are funny, and are "other." Given cultural context, I'm not okay with the name choice for the sneeze pun.

After reading the book, I read the following by Neil Gaiman. It's a middle section of his Zena Sutherland Lecture from May 2012, called “What the [Very Bad Swearword] is a Children’s Book Anyway?”, printed in Horn Book Magazine, Nov/Dec 2012 (page 20):

In the last year I’ve written three books.

I wrote a picture book called Chu’s Day about a baby panda who sneezes. It may be the simplest book I’ve ever written, and it’s the only time I’ve written a book expressly to be read to children who cannot yet read it themselves.

It exists because none of my children’s picture books have ever been published in mainland China. They have been published in Hong Kong and in Taiwan, but there has never been a Neil Gaiman-written picture book in China because, I was told, in my books the children do not respect their parents enough, and they do bad things without getting properly punished, and there is anarchy and destruction and insufficient respect for authority. So it became a goal of mine to create a picture book that would contain all of these things and also be published in mainland China.

… I am still waiting to find out if it will be published in China.

It’s a children’s book that I wrote, peculiarly, with an adult audience in mind. I wrote it because I wanted a picture book of mine to be read in China. I wrote it to make children imagine and dream and exult and pretend to be pandas and pretend to sneeze, so I wrote a book that I hoped adults would enjoy reading to children, and, more importantly, enjoy reading the tenth time that week or the third time that night.

I find this troubling on several levels. I'm troubled by his stated goal and his trust in the reasons he "was told" that his picturebooks hadn't gone to mainland China; I'm troubled by the vibe that he feels productively rebellious and extra-useful-to-kids in trying to disrupt China's (supposed) criteria that they (supposedly) use in selecting books to publish. I'm troubled by a vague sense that only such a book could "make" Chinese children imagine and dream and exult. Please tell me if I'm reading this wrong; I'd rather be.

2012 Children’s Lit: The Year in Miscellanea. Great fun.

Every so often, I come across a book in my bookcase I've never seen before. This is because my brother's old books have melted into my own for the present. A few weeks ago, I stumbled onto Boy, Was I Mad! by Kathryn Hitte. It's from 1969. Mercer Mayer did the illustrations, which means they're wonderful in his usual way. But besides the art, I'm going to say something I'm not sure I've quite said before: this book sort of shouldn't exist. Not just because it's racist, which it is, with its cowboys-and-Indians game on a few spreads; but also because it's an empty shadow of something else.

It opens as a little white boy is in his room being punished. "I was mad one day. I mean I was REALLY mad! So I ran away." Illustrations expand from small (framed by white page) to bigger, sometimes full bleed spreads. Boy ventures around his city becoming briefly interested in various things but then remembering his anger and continuing on. Finally he sees the moon even though it's still daylight and accidentally (forgetting his anger) returns home. "Well -- supper was on, and something smelled good -- Boy, did I eat! And it was a funny thing, but I just wasn't mad anymore." We see supper laden on the table (no adults visible on that page). At the end, we see the boy back in his own bed with the moon outside the window.

I'm uncomfortable with my own following opinion: pardon to Mercer Mayer's spirited art, but this book doesn't need to exist in a world that had published Where the Wild Things Are six years earlier. It doesn't add anything, expand anything, particularize anything, distinguish anything, or come anywhere near the elegance, subtlety, brilliance, or depth of Wild Things. I'm fine with ranking the two books and finding this the weaker, but I'm frankly uneasy articulating why -- because one of the literary theories I love and live daily is archetypal theory. As a critic and reader (and human), I don't feel that newness outranks other qualities. As a reviewer, I certainly keep an eye out for originality, but I don't rank it higher than all the other things that also matter. I criticize books on merit, not on whether something has been "done before." I don't care if something's been done before; I care what the new one is like. Here, I don't mind that I find this book boring; I mind that I can't stop thinking, "Why would anyone need this when Wild Things exists?"

Or maybe it's that newness does always matter -- after all, every new book has newness by definition, even if it's very archetypal -- but not the aspects of newness that can be easily explained in plot and description. That could be it. I never do feel that I get any handle on a book by plot summaries and brief descriptions. I often feel quite uncomfortable when a book is quickly tossed into a category. And hmm, that's the same type of personal, very-internal discomfort I feel when gender is referred to as binary, or when social events are divided by gender for the sake of gender division.

Kirkus children's editor Vicky Smith on attending the A Is for Anansi children’s-literature conference mounted by the Institute of African American Affairs at NYU.

My mother, Elaine Spatz-Rabinowitz, is an artist who works in painting and sculpture. Made by my brother and my mother over the last two months, my mother's new website has just launched.

On the front page, clicking on her name will bring you a new image every time. Come in, take a peek. If you squick easily, don't choose the section called Recent Work: War Drawings. I particularly recommend Recent Work: Paintings, Archive: Landscapes, and Archive: Exteriors. There are other fine art sections too, plus installations, stage designs (for opera productions), and some documentation of her creative process. Everything enlarges by clicking. I won't claim objectivity, but she's brilliant, and I am in awe of her.