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Multicultural Children’s Book Day – part 2.
There are over a hundred bloggers participating with Multicultural Children’s Book Day – head on over and take a look at all the beautiful, rainbow books!

I’ve had this book on my radar since it first came out in the US – both because of my ongoing search for multicultural children’s books, and because I so loved McKay’s middle grade series that starts with Saffy’s Angel. But the chances of my son picking up a realistic fiction book with a bright pink cover were pretty slim, and I don’t so often read early chapter books for my own entertainment. I took this one home recently in the hopes that it might make a good introduction to chapter books for my four-year-old, animal-loving girl.

Lulu and the Duck in the Park by Hilary McKay. Illustrated by Priscilla Lamont. First published in the UK by Scholastic Children’s Books, 2011. Published in the US by Albert Whitman & Co., 2012.

Lulu loves animals. Even more than being famous for jumping off swings at the highest point, Lulu is famous for all the animals she keeps at home.

Her teacher, on the other hand, does not like animals at all, and Lulu’s attempt to convert her by having her dog follow her to school backfires spectacularly: Mrs. Holiday threatens to give away the class guinea pig if any more animals are brought to school.

But when Lulu sees her favorite duck-from-the-park’s egg rolling into the path, about to crack, just as the class is walking back to school – she can’t help but scoop it up. And an egg isn’t an animal – right?

My own little girl seems not quite ready for this yet – she fell asleep partway through the first chapter, and seems quite attached to reading picture books at bedtime still. I won’t rush the chapter books, then – and my son was ready to listen to them when stuck driving in the car much sooner than he was ready to sit and listen to books without pictures at home – but I was so charmed with the start of this that I had to finish it for myself.

Wow, is it ever charming! It is short and simple, with lots of pictures, so it’s clearly aimed at the typical second- or third-grade reader. But McKay succeeds admirably at fleshing out Lulu and her best friend Mellie, as well as Mrs. Holiday – much more than I’ve typically seen in early chapter books. Lulu’s clearly led by her love for animals, which leads to some serious but age-appropriate thoughts about animals and when to adopt them.

“Just in case,” said Lulu, worrying, “I should quack to this egg. So it doesn’t get lonely.”

I still found myself laughing out loud at multiple scenes in the book. In this one, near the end, Mrs. Holiday is trying to convince another student, absorbed in pretending to be a vampire, to really work at stopping his nosebleed:

“Anyway, all good things come to an end. Bloodletting is over. This is now math.”

This might actually be an early chapter book series that I would read for myself. But my daughter will be old enough for it soon, and in the meantime, I’ve put the copy we’re currently reading on hold for another little girl who came into the library looking for early chapter books about animals.

Monday, January 27 is Multicultural Children’s Book Day.
I was looking for shiny new multicultural books to review, and I have some at home.
This, though, is an old book. I read some of the stories from this book in Cricket Magazine as a child, and they stuck with me. Enough that I brought this home for my son and convinced him to read it even though realistic fiction is about the last thing he’d be likely to pick for himself.

The Stories Julian Tells by Ann Cameron. Pantheon Books, 1981
This is a collection of short stories, all told from the point of view of young Julian. Julian is about 8, I think, and lives with his parents and his younger brother Huey. His father makes lemon pudding for their mother, but the boys eat it all before she gets home; he orders a catalog so they can plan their garden, and Julian makes up stories about what’s really in catalogs to tell Huey. Julian is a quirky kid who gets himself into scrapes with his story-telling imagination – classic fodder for children’s books – but what made this book stand out so strongly in my memory is the beautiful, poetic language. At the beginning of the first story, Julian describes his father:

“My father is a big man with wild black hair. When he laughs, the sun laughs in the windowpanes. When he thinks, you can almost see his thoughts sitting on all the tables and chairs. When he is angry, me and my little brother Huey shiver to the bottom of our shoes.”

Still in the first story, Julian’s father describes the pudding he will make:

“A wonderful pudding… it will taste like a whole raft of lemons. It will taste like a night on the sea.”

Friends, this line is so vivid that I remembered it from reading it more than 30 years ago. I remembered the cats that Julian tells Huey come out of the catalog to do the gardening, different colored cats to do all the different gardening jobs.

Even though my boy read it himself (and enjoyed it), I had to go back and reread it before I turned it back in. It’s even better than I’d remembered. Now I notice (on the happy side) that Julian’s dad is a really great dad. The beating and the whipping that he promises the boys when they eat all of their mother’s lemon pudding are not at all what they feared – but they do teach them, hands-on, the cost of that pudding. He even finds a way to save the day when Huey is completely crushed that live cats do not come out of their garden catalog.

There are several more books about Julian and Huey, which I plan to bring home one at a time now. It makes me sad is that this kind of book, a short chapter book featuring a loving middle class African-American family, is still so rare. (My son would here be lobbying for more multicultural epic fantasies.) I see this one pop up on lists of classics from time to time, but not nearly often enough. And yet – they are still in print, still so good that even my boy who prefers epic fantasy adventures or nonfiction read it all the way through and enjoyed it.

Here are some other multicultural favorites for a variety of ages:
Cinnamon Baby (picture book)
Alvin Ho (early chapter book series)
Astronaut Academy (middle grade graphic novel)
Jinx (middle grade fantasy)
The Girl of Fire and Thorns (teen fantasy)