J. K. Rowling's Coattails

Hatching Magic is this week's pick for the Washington Post's KidsPost Summer of Magical Reading Book Club.

It's a weird ride, here on the long coattails of J. K. Rowling. On the one hand, it has to feel good to see fantasy books on so many "What to read next" lists. And I personally get a huge lift just being on the same list as such greats as Lloyd Alexander, Ursula LeGuin, Susan Cooper, and Diana Wynne Jones. It's great company to keep. But its discouraging and depressing to read about research that shows that just because a young reader is wild about Harry, it doesn't follow they'll tackle another fantasy writer, or even another book at all.

So I think I'm not alone in wondering how bumpy the landing is going to be.

If you haven't read it, check out Ron Charles's editorial on the Post website, "Harry Potter and the Death of Reading."

I'm looking forward to exploring a used bookstore in Maine, where I can put my hand on a battered paperback, and make my own small, personal rediscovery. Maybe it will be a literary novel, a mystery, some great nature writing...maybe even a fantasy.

Down the Rabbit Hole with Alice

Well, Oxford is under water, so they have their own Pool of Tears right now. But assuming you have a nice summer's day near a river that is not overflowing its banks, and a tree to doze under, you could spend some time with Alice down the rabbit hole with this collection of retold stories set in Wonderland.
Gargoyle Magazine and Paycock Press are the brainchildren of Rick Peabody, who's published previous anthologies featuring Marilyn Monroe, Barbie, and Elvis, among others. Now It's Alice's turn to be reimagined by the likes of

Donya Currie Arias, Beth Bachmann, Bruce Bauman, Jeffrey M. Bockman, Angela Carter, Robert Coover, myself, Kevin Downs, Rikki Ducornet, CM Dupre, Alison Habens, Susan Hankla, Ann Harries, Dorothy Hickson, Alice Johnson, Steven Millhauser, Miles David Moore, Dave Morice, Jeff Noon, Lance Olsen, Victoria Popdan, Doug Rice, Katie Roiphe, Lorraine Schein, Martin Seay, Aurelie Sheehan, Suzan Sherman, David R. Slavitt, MaryAnn Suehle, Ross Taylor, Tom Whalen, and photos by Nancy Taylor.

My own story, "Bread-and-Butterflies," imagines Alice Liddell in India on a train.

Other Alice-y reads for summer: I can heartily recommend Lynne Truss's novel from a while back, Tennyson's Gift, in which Lewis Carroll, Ellen Terry, and some stray American phrenologists descend on Tennyson's summer home on the Isle of Wight, with hysterical consequences. Lewis Carroll + phrenology: it could hardly go wrong.

Also The Looking Glass Wars, by Frank Beddor, not to be confused with John Le Carre's Looking Glass War from a number of years ago. I've not read it, but it's certainly got my attention. I gather there's soon to be a movie, and already a graphic novel, so maybe that's my own rabbit-hole reading for August.

Tree Houses, Snail Houses, Summer Living

Got thinking this morning about the wonderful collaboration between Allan Ahlberg (Each Peach Pear Plum, The Jolly Postman) and Gillian Tyler, called THE SNAIL HOUSE (Candlewick 2000). A grandmother is sitting on the porch of a rural house as summer dusk falls, telling a story to two older grandchildren while minding the third, a baby. In a story within the story, the grandma shrinks the children down so they can crawl under the crack under the door, like Alice, into the garden wonderland, where they take up housekeeping inside a very well appointed snail. The drawings are wonderful, and float my boat in all kinds of ways: I always wanted to move in to Badger's house in WIND IN THE WILLOWS, the BOXCAR CHILDREN's boxcar, Bilbo Baggins's HOBBIT hole, and eat a fry-up of sausages in DR. DOLITTLE's kitchen. When we lived in Manila, we had a little nipa hut playhouse, but it was too mosquito-ridden to be much fun. The huge trees over at my friend Eleanor's house were much better quarters for various games.

And speaking of snails, THE VOYAGES OF DR. DOLITTLE by Hugh Lofting (1922) was a huge favorite of mine when it was re-released in the late 1960s as a paperback movie tie-in to the Rex Harrison Dr. Dolittle movie. In it, Dr. Dolittle voyages with a young boy and a lot of animals to Spidermonkey Island and rides across the bottom of the ocean under the shell of a Great Sea Snail. So living in and traveling by snail is a longtime fascination of mine, I suppose.

Another wonderful book while we're on this theme of outdoor and alternative housing.

WE WERE TIRED OF LIVING IN A HOUSE by Liesel Moak Skorpen, in which some children decamp to a tree, then a cave, then a castle on the beach, and finally home again.

Stage magic, The Illusionist, and Levitation

[Originally posted on www.MySpace.com/anndowner on June 30]

Went to see Paprika for the second time and at dinner afterwards talk turned to how much we'd liked the recent flurry of movies about stage magic (as opposed to the Harry Potter kind): The Illusionist and The Prestige. I mentioned how much I had liked the novel Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gould, and how sorry I was it had been optioned by Tom Cruise, because if he's in it, well, I might have to give it a skip.

But I'm very, very excited about a new graphic novel release coming from the fine folks at GT Labs (www.gt-labs.com). I first read their comix about the late 19th century "Bone Wars" between fossil hunters Cope and Marsh, Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards. So I'm really looking forward to this one, called Levitation, about the connections between physics and psychics and stage magic.
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Hatching Magic named to WaPo KidsPost Summer Reading List

[Originally posted on www.MySpace.com/anndowner on June 25, 2007]

Hatching Magic has been selected for the Washington Post's 2007 summer reading club.

http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/kidspost/pdf/kidspost_20070619.pdf

This summer's theme is magic in all its forms, and HM has been selected as the book for Week 7. I think that should be in Sunday's Post for July 29.

For all you librarians and bookstore owners in the metro DC area, there are free printable bookmarks, etc, and book group guides available at anndowner.com.

Rabbit Hill, Watership Down...Usagi Yojimbo??

[Originally posted on www.MySpace.com/anndowner on Thursday, June 21, 2007]

I love rabbits. I had two as pets growing up, a chocolate brown Havana Rex named Hershey and a little black and white Dutch called Tucker. And I loved books about rabbits: Robert Lawson's Rabbit Hill, Richard Adams's Watership Down. I'm especially looking forward to reading the former to my son. It was a book of many quiet charms that I was drawn to over and over as a child--though I never went on to read any of Lawson's other books.

Today I took my son to Comicaze in Davis Square to get a comic for his summer reading pleasure, and ended up getting a copy of the rabbit samurai comic Usagi Yojimbo for myself. Samurai movies meet Maus. It will keep me occupied until I succeed in getting a copy of the graphic novel The Sandwalk Adventures by Jay Hosler (Clan Apis, published by Active Synapse), in which Darwin explains evolution to two creationist mites living in the follicles of his eyebrows.

Winged Cats, Google, and Serendipity

[originally posted on www.MySpace.com/anndowner on June 16, 2007]

The large marmalade cat mentioned in the back-flap bio on my books has gone to the Big Sink in the Sky (catsinsinks.com). Calvin, also known as Bunny, came to me as a kitten in 1991, graciously adopted the man who would become my husband, and later our son, who turned out to be allergic to cats. With heavy hearts, we re-homed Calvin with friends who weren't intimidated by his age (14) or his health (diabetes) and having to give him insulin injections twice a day and pony up for prescription cat food, insulin,
syringes, and extra vet visits.

So it was something of a miracle that Calvin lived to be 16, and the grief of his two families at his passing is hard to express. I wanted to give his new family a winged balinese cat like the one I'd long had hanging over the kitchen sink. The spitting image of Calvin, orange tigery stripes and green eyes, and wings.

Google returned a lot of fascinating stuff about winged cats, but no wooden winged cat from Bali like the one I had. But it did return news of this collection of three novellas by British writer John Barlow. In one of the novellas, "The Possession of Thomas-Bessie," a winged cat wreaks havoc on a Victorian workhouse. I ordered the book from Porter Square Books, and look forward to the dip into Victoriana tinged with magical realism...one of my favorite things. It feels like a final gift from the Big Red One who gave me so much.

So here's to large marmalade cats, winged or not, and serendipity.

Eating Mammals: 3 Novells
John Barlow