Nonfiction: Grit, by Angela Duckworth

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
Angela Duckworth
ISBN: 9781501111105
Half cheerleading coach and half business mentor; Duckworth explains what "grit" really is.

Interesting, but a little depressing.  "Gritty" people are those who thrive on challenge, who have found what they love doing and found ways to continue to excel at doing it. Grit is also based on both heritage and nurture: you've got to teach kids to be gritty - to teach them that they're succeeding because they're TRYING, not because they're smart/natural/gifted/genius.  Unfortunately, that means that those of us who were taught other things (or even worse, taught by tragedy that nothing we do matters in the face of an uncaring universe) are pretty much SoL - unless you can find a way to persuade your insurance company to cover cognitive-behavior therapy techniques to teach you to change your ingrained thought patterns.

The book is supposed to be encouraging and positive and inspirational, with lots of places to take little checklists and to compare yourself with gritty individuals and their accomplishments - but for someone who DOES suffer from depression and anxiety, her only advice is therapy (which she does kindly admit is profoundly disappointing and not particularly helpful, so at least she realizes it.)  I enjoyed reading it anyway, and perhaps someday when this country (or our health system) prioritizes mental health, those of us who faced setbacks on our childhood road to grit can forge a way to become stronger and more happy too.

New Arrival: Picture Book: The Very Inappropriate Word, Jim Tobin & Dave Coverly

The Very Inappropriate Word
Jim Tobin, illustrated by Dave Coverly
ISBN: 9780805094749
Cartoon-art, thesaurus, concepts presented as concrete objects.

Hooo boy.  I will probably never ever ever use this in a storytime, but it's a really fun and funny book, and I'm glad to have run across it.

Michael is our protagonist for this morality tale (because that's exactly what it is) and he loves words.  He collects them even (shades of Max's Words and Max's Dragon by Kate Banks) and loves to store them safely away under his bed.  Until he is on the bus one morning and hears a new word.  He tries it out on his sister, and quickly learns that this is a very inappropriate word.  So now what to do?  Of course, now that he knows it, he hears it everywhere; at the park, on the radio, even from a parent!  (His parents make me exceedingly happy, on a complete tangent.)  So he tries it out himself, and shares it with his friends, and of course gets in trouble with the teacher, who (and this is the best part of the book) realizes what has happened, and asks Michael for help collecting new and interesting words for some upcoming spelling tests she needs to create.  The time spent (and the new words learned) searching for good enough words just shoves the inappropriate word off out of mind, which is the best way for dealing with those sorts of words anyway.

So very cool, so not appropriate for storytime.  :)
  

Nonfiction: The Opposite of Spoiled, Ron Lieber

The Opposite of Spoiled

Ron Lieber

ISBN: 9780062247018

Read February 14, 2015

Lieber is the personal finance columnist for the New York Times, and he's fielded a lot of questions from parents worried about how to talk to their kids about money and finances.  

He does a very good job staying clear of the minefields represented by "are we poor" and "are we rich" respectively, and tackles money talks mainly from the perspective of providing moral grounding ;"here's WHY this is something we buy/don't buy" and from a financial preparedness perspective; "if you get $5 in allowance every week, and you get 25% interest if you keep the money longer than six months, how much money will you have to spend on that enormous LEGO set you want?" and he also addresses obvious charitable giving (and other acts of charity) as well as the social awareness and responsibility that comes with being part of a country where wealth is so unevenly divided.

Excellent book, and a good resource for parents or teachers who want to make sure that kids are aware of how money works, and how to make it work for you, and how to be aware of the social and moral entanglements money and spending involves.

Picture Book: The King and the Seed, Eric Maddern & Paul Hess

The King and the Seed
Eric Maddern, illustrated by Paul Hess
ISBN: 9781845079260
Read Feb 24, 2014

I'll start off by saying that I wasn't REALLY fond of the illustrations, which is usually a kiss of death for me.  If I don't feel inspired or connected or touched by the art, it takes a lot of oomph in the story department to get past that.  So, first off:  Sorry, Mr Hess!

Since I AM recommending this, that means that indeed, the storyline and the telling are pretty fantastic.  Once again, personal history means that I am fond of the idea of stories that teach or appeal to a moral foundation, but there's a lot of very religious offerings that I simply cannot in good conscience recommend, and frankly, that leave a bad taste in my mouth when reading them.

So here we have a nice fairy-tale story of a young farmer who is roped into competing for the eventual kingship with a bunch of knights and nobles.  The contest?  Grow a seed.  Of course the knights fail and the farm boy prevails, but in an interesting sort of way, and one that I think makes the whole story work really well for me.

First, we have the obvious moral - the boy who works for a living up against all of these men who either make war (the knights) or laze around all day (the nobles).  That's a good obvious contrast to draw, and a lot of books would stop there and say, obviously the boy grows the seed best because he's a farmer!

But he doesn't!  He tries and tries and finally realizes he has to come back and admit that he failed.  Which is interesting, because at this point, that's actually a lot like life - you think you're good at something, or you want to succeed at something, and you just can't do it.  Lots of books deal with this by magically making the failure into a success (fairy godmothers, anyone?), or by having the character realize what they were stressing out and travailing with wasn't actually important (hate that trope) or they develop a sour grapes attitude.  None of these are particularly helpful in learning to deal with the real world.

So now, this young farmer with his pot of dead dirt is standing in line with all these nobles and knights with their various beautiful and outrageous plantlife, and he's thinking "what the heck?" until  he gets to the king who lets him in on a little secret - all of the seeds he gave out were boiled!  All those plants the knights and nobles are proudly parading around are bright showy proclamations of their guilt - for whatever various personal reasons (left unspoken, but most likely because their higher class status made accepting failure a much harder decision to face than it was for the farmer boy) they decided it was better to fake a success than admit failure.

And here's where I really like it, because in real life, there are a lot of people that fake success.  And while the King chose the farmer boy to be his successor, all those nobles and knights are STILL nobles and knights, with their titles and their money and their power.  And that too is an important lesson to learn.


This book was recommended by The Read-Aloud Handbook

Picture Book Bonanza 3/3: Kevin Henkes' Penny and Her Marble, Mo Willems' A Big Guy Took My Ball!

Penny and Her Marble
Kevin Henkes
ISBN: 9780062082039
Read February 3, 2014

Small-format picture book

Penny is a mouse (as are most of Henkes' characters) and she fights a great moral battle here, and comes off victorious in the end.  While taking a walk, Penny happens upon a marble in the grassy verge of the sidewalk, in front of a neighbor's house.  Penny covets the marble, and takes it.  Afterwards, she suffers very noticeable pangs of guilt about having done so, culminating in a set of nightmares.  In the morning, Penny (without intervention or advice from any adults or other characters at all, which I LOVE) heads back to her neighbor's yard to return the marble to whence it came.  At this point, reality and picture book plots diverge, as the neighbor informs Penny that she had placed the marble there for someone to find, and Penny gets to keep the marble with a clear conscience.  Adorable, and with a nice gently delivered message, as are all of Henkes' stories.


A Big Guy Took My Ball!
Mo Willems
ISBN: 9781423174912
Read February 3, 2014

An observant or devious reader will notice the catch slipping right on by at the beginning, but Piggy has a problem because a BIG GUY came and took "his" ball.  Elephant is ready to leap to the rescue, until he realizes just HOW BIG this guy really is.  Their avenging fury is averted when the big guy sweetly thanks Piggy for finding his ball for him, and all is well again.  This one is not nearly as epic as Should I Share My Ice Cream (which should be required reading for everyone ever) but it's worth it to see Elephant (normally so unflappable) waxing dramatic about the size differential between him and the big guy in question.

Thematic Battle: Understood Betsy vs Eight Cousins

Understood Betsy, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, illus Kimberly Bulken Root.
ISBN: 0805060731
Read October 9, 2013

Eight Cousins, Louisa May Alcott, illus Ruth Ives.

ISBN: Nelson-Doubleday Hardcover 1958 (MCMLVIII).

Re-read October 9, 2013

I never thought I'd say this, but I actually like Fisher's book better than Alcott's. Weird.

To be clear, Eight Cousins is a long-time favorite, and I've read it at least 5 times, maybe as many as 10 times over.  (I don't like Rose in Bloom, the sequel, as well as I do Eight Cousins, but that's another post.)

In contrast, this is the first time I have read Understood Betsy.  

I really like it.  I don't know if it's the deft touch with the moralizing, or the very carefully developed tongue-firmly-in-cheek descriptions of the "delicate" little child creating more trauma to satisfy the delicate aunt's fearmongering, or the only somewhat obviously shoehorned-in Montessori principles, but it really is a very clever, very well-written, very straightforward read.  

Sadly, the more I read Alcott, the more it starts to feel Elsie Dinsmore-ish, or (horrors) Uncle Arthur's Bedtime Stories-ish.  She's just so moralistic, and the preaching tone is starting to grate on me as I get older (and to be perfectly honest, less interested in having God show up in everything just as a matter of course or culture).

So in a total shock to myself as much as anyone else, I found Understood Betsy to be more readable and more modern, where Eight Cousins is more melodramatic and ostentatious.  On the other hand, they both are better than a lot of what's out there.  I would be interested to read them both in sequence (it works well because Betsy is around 8 to 10, and then Rose is a pre-teen) and see how it goes.  I do have to admit that the action is more present and prevalent in Eight Cousins, where Understood Betsy is fairly straightforward and only has a few discrete adventures.

I think for an upcoming post I'll compare and contrast Rose in Bloom (which I read immediately following Eight Cousins, and it grated me something fierce) and Jo's Boys.  Both are roughly the same book, but for some reason, Jo's Boys always struck me as being much more progressive and modern (read less sexist and less preachy) than Rose in Bloom.  I find that interesting.