Swan Sister edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri WindlingDatlow and Windling are the queens of fairy tales retold, often for adults, though I found this shelved not too inappropriately in children’s. Here are mostly-familiar tales retold by authors such as Jane Yolen, Kathe Koje, and Neil Gaiman (though I must admit that his contribution was disappointingly short.) Bluebeard, a story that gave me nightmares as a child, is told from the point of view of a survivor. The Old Man and the Fish is told from the other side of the lake, with very different characters. There’s a beautiful retelling of Cruel Sister, and two very different versions of Little Red Riding Hood. In the title story, one which seemed to intersect ’s worlds of medicine and magic, a young girl sees her prematurely born sister’s arm as a swan wing. As always, lovers of fairy tales old and new will not be disappointed.
Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins by Eric Kimmel. Illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman I’m not anywhere close to Jewish, and I know that Hanukkah is a pretty minor Jewish holiday as such things goes. Still, I’ve always loved both the holiday and this cracking good story, which I first read when it was published in Cricket magazine in the early 80s, with small black-and-white illustrations by Trina Schart Hyman. Her full-color, full-size illustrations here are a delight (as well as winning a Caldecott Honor). Though I brought Mr. FP all sorts of holiday books home from the library, my copy of this is the one that he wanted to read every day. 
The Return of the Light by Carolyn McVickar Edwards I’m a little late writing this book up, as the winter solstice has now been and gone. However, here is a nice little collection of folk tales from around the world for the winter solstice. Most of them don’t talk about the solstice per se, but about the sun. The introduction talks about historical solstice practices (including some of the saltier ones), but the stories are well suited both for adults and for telling to children of varying ages. Edwards helpfully provides a paragraph about the ethnic group that first told the story for each, so the stories aren’t as out-of-context as they often are in such international collections. It concludes with games and songs for people wishing to have family solstice celebrations. Read how the sun started as the wedding earring of a young Indian bride, how Loki killed Balder, the sun god, and how a young African girl married the sun.
The Good Neighbors. Volume 1: Kin by Holly Black. Illustrated by Ted Naifeh Rue Silver is sixteen years old. She has a boyfriend and a group of friends who like to break into abandoned buildings and take photographs. Her mother has been quietly missing for three weeks and her father is suddenly involved in a murder case. And she’s starting to see things that she can’t tell anyone about, because they’ll think she’s crazy. They are the faeries of the old tales, the ones called Kindly and Good in hopes of preventing unwanted attentions. Rue learns that her vanished mother was a faery herself. A battle is beginning, and Rue must decide whose side she is on, and how much she can tell her friends. This is the first volume of what’s obviously planned as a much longer series. It’s a very solid start. The story strikes just the right balance between realistic and spooky, and the shaded paintings bring this out perfectly. I got a strong Buffy vibe off of it, not in a copy-cat kind of way, but in the circle of high school friends with a snarky sense of humor and a smart, tough girl going it with some help, but mostly alone. Black is the author of The Spiderwick Chronicles, which I read only the first one or two of. This does feel like it’s coming from the same imagination, but more from real older legend, and definitely more sophisticated and for an older audience. I’m really looking forward to the next one.
The Splendid Table’s How to Eat Supper by Lynne Rosetto Kasper and Sally Swift There is this thing that happens with supper, which is that it’s easy to get into a rut. And the rut will either be cooking the same few dishes over and over again or else giving up cooking altogether for microwaving boxes or “fixing food” (as a former roommate used to call it. Here we have a noble offering by NPR’s The Splendid Table’s host and producer to make supper both interesting and easy. That means a lot of dishes that are either quick or long-simmering but low effort. Cooking is a lot of technique plus flavor, they say, so they offer many very different flavor variations on a basic recipe to help things taste different but still have the ease of a familiar recipe. There are discussions on things like what kinds of tomatoes to use where, how to improve store-bought broth, and which pots should be the expensive ones (the ones that are always dirty in your sink). There are both veggie and meat recipes, for those who care about such things. There are lots of glossy, full-color photos, making this a book to drool over. Alongside recipes of different cuisines, there are sidebars of seminal cookbooks exploring those cuisines, along with an excellent idea for a New Year’s resolution: pick a good cookbook and cook your way through it. We’ve renewed this cookbook to give us a little more time to play with it ourselves. Go ye and do likewise.
The Arrival by Shaun Tan A man leaves his wife and daughter, traveling along streets shadowed with the wings and tails of giant monsters. He sails across the sea in a huge boat, arriving in a strange land to try to find work and save enough to bring his family over. The setting is mostly early twentieth century but with strong elements of the bizarre. The drawing style looks like a series of old sepia photographs. It’s told entirely without words – even the signs on the buildings are in a script that neither we nor our immigrant understands. This was all over the comics blogs Best of 2007 lists (it took me a while to get to it.) Somebody in one of the blogs I read then – I wish I could remember who – pointed out the nifty way Tan notes the passage of time. On one page, all we see is one little square after another of clouds, as we watch out the window of the steamer with the immigrant. I loved reading books about immigrants as a child, but there’s a level of being in the experience that this has that a book where I can understand the language just can’t.
The Alabama Stitch Book by Natalie Chanin This is a craft book for a kind of craft that isn’t one of the ones I regularly do. But I picked it up and it was so beautiful that I brought it home and now I will tell you about it. This book is written about an ongoing fashion project, meant to revive the dying textile industry and retain the fading knowledge of traditional techniques to make “contemporary sustainable style.” These are beautiful, appealing projects made from cotton jersey, mostly recycled t-shirts. They are decorated with stencils, appliqué, reverse appliqué and embroidery. There are decorated t-shirts, bandanas, skirts, tablecloths and even a couple of corsets – which she claims are comfortably supportive and universally flattering. That I wish I could try before making. The basic technique for appliqué or reverse appliqué involves stenciling the design on both fabrics, hand-embroidering them together, and cutting away the fabric – the order of the last two steps depending on whether you’re doing regular or reverse appliqué. Because it’s done with cotton jersey and she’s going for a home-made look, she doesn’t finish or turn under the edges. I’d wondered about stabilization, since cotton jersey is tough to machine sew in my experience. It turns out that everything is just done by hand. Patterns and stencils are included for all the projects in the book, but the craft store is also full of stencils and the technique could as happily be used for putting skulls and crossbones on Mr. FP’s shirts as roses on mine.-
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