Richie's Picks: Great Books for Children and Young Adults

Problems?
Ideas?
Suggestions?
Please email BudNotBuddy@aol.com

Thank You!

"Their mother, frowning, opened the door at the end of the long hall. She emerged from the kitchen. 'Whatever is that noise?' she asked. 'I am trying to remember the ingredients for meat loaf and I cannot hear myself think.'
"'Oh, someone has left a beastly baby on our front steps,' Tim told her.
"'My goodness, we don't want a baby!' their mother said, coming forward to take a look. 'I don't like the feel of this at all.'
"'I'd like to keep it,' Jane said in a small voice. 'I think it's cute.'
"'No, it's not cute,' Barnaby A said, looking down at it.
"'Not cute at all,' Barnaby B agreed.
"'It has curls,' Jane pointed out.
"Their mother peered at the baby and then reached toward the basket of beige knitting that she kept on a hall table. She removed a small pair of gold-plated scissors and snipped them open and closed several times, thoughtfully. Then she leaned over the basket and used the scissors.
"'Now it doesn't have curls,' she pointed out, and put the scissors away.
"Jane stared at the baby. Suddenly it stopped crying and stared back at her with wide eyes. 'Oh dear, it isn't cute without curls,' Jane said. 'I guess I don't want it anymore.'"

At the conclusion of THE WILLOUGHBYS, author Lois Lowry provides an annotated bibliography of thirteen "books of the past that are heavy on piteous but appealing orphans, ill-tempered and stingy relatives, magnanimous benefactors, and transformations wrought by winsome children." These thirteen books possess an average publication date of 1913. Lowry aludes to and parodies them to great effect in this mischievous tale of four parentally-challenged siblings who seek to become orphans and end up in the care of a nanny when they succeed in their scheme to hook up their parents with an extended and danger-filled itinerary from the Reprehensible Travel Agency. A second story line that repeatedly merges with the first involves the wealthy benefactor on whose rotted front porch the four Willoughby children have deposited the basket containing that now curl-less baby who had been first dumped on their own front steps:

"Squalor has nothing to do with money. Squalor happens when people are sad. And Commander Melanoff was very sad.
"He had made a vast fortune by manufacturing candy bars. His factory still existed, and the money kept coming in because people bought his hugely successful confections by the millions. But Commander Melanoff never went to his office anymore. He stayed in his squalorous mansion, where he moped and sulked.
"He scowled as he ate his stale toast each morning, and he whimpered into his unheated canned soup at lunch. Each evening he dropped tears onto the pizza that was delivered to his porch by prearrangement, and each night he went to bed between his unwashed sheets and sobbed into his stained pillow. His mustache, once bristly and important-looking, was now dingy from grime and stiff from dried-up nose drippings."

After finishing THE WILLOUGHBYS, I found myself contemplating why it might be that I was not in the least bit hampered in thoroughly enjoying Lowry's twisted and darkly comedic send-up of classic children's orphan/pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps/big 'ol mansion literature, by the fact that I had only ever read two of the thirteen books included in Lowry's annotated bibliography.

The answer became clearer for me when I began thinking about the Firesign Theater. Lowry's use of a pun at the conclusion of the first chapter had me recalling one of the troupe's memorable radio plays which I was turned on to back in high school. It begins like this:

ANNOUNCER: Los Angeles...He walks again by night.
NICK: (whistles)
ANNOUNCER: Out of the fog, into the smog...
NICK: (cough, cough)
ANNOUNCER: Relentlessly...ruthlessly
NICK: I wonder where Ruth is.

The reality is that just as I did not grow up reading classic children's literature, I similarly did not grow up listening to radio serials, and yet I took utter and lasting delight in hearing that genre being lampooned by the Firesign Theater on the record albums that had evolved from their Sixties radio shows in LA. (As a matter of fact, the recordings still hold up quite well -- you younger folk can check out Firesign Theater's Nick Danger on YouTube.)

Affable, auspicious, bilious, diabolical, ignominious, odious... Lowry also provides an entertaining and enlightening glossary filled with the wonderful words she uses in her tale.

"'Oh,' said Jane in an imploring voice, 'do let's wish for a helicopter-and-volcano disaster!'"

THE WILLOUGHBYS is a total blast: an exceptionally fun and quirky yarn that wildly succeeds in its parodying of children's old-fashioned literary characters from a century ago.

Richie Partington, MLIS
Richie's Picks http://richiespicks.com
Moderator, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/middle_school_lit/
BudNotBuddy@aol.com
http://www.myspace.com/richiespicks