Wanted: An Australian Philanthropist For Kids' Literature
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday June 2, 1995
MAYBE some local philanthropist with an interest in words - Mr Murdoch or Mr Packer, perhaps? - would care to set up a children's book prize along the lines of the US and UK models: the Whitbread Children's Novel awards, the Newbery, Caldecott, Carnegie and Greenaway medals. This would be a fine augmentation of our Children's Book of the Year awards; besides, no readers can refrain from running their hands over the make-believe yet authoritative medals that adorn the prize-winning covers on which the originator's name appears embossed in gold.
The Newbery Medal, which appears in handsome replica on the cover of Sharon Creech's Walk Two Moons (HarperCollins US*, 280pp, $32) is the highest annual award for American children's literature. (John Newbery was an 18th-century English publisher but many of his books were enthusiastically pirated in America.) Walk Two Moons is an American on-the-road story but Gramps, not Kerouac or Dennis Hopper, has "a holt" of the wheel and the air is full of "huzza, huzza", "chickabiddy", and "gol-dangs", "gol-durns", "jing-bangs" and "wing-dings" - a little overblown, perhaps, but very engaging. In this story, told by a 13-year-old part American Indian, Salamanca Hiddle, being "on the road" from Kentucky to Idaho is (aside from taking in weird sights such as Mount Rushmore, obscured by the heads of dead white men) really a retracing of the last steps of her lost mother. There are stories hidden behind other stories, including the tale of another defecting mother told by Sal as the road unfolds. Sharon Creech is, fortunately, no run-of-the-mill heavy-handed children's bibliotherapist with Jung-ish petticoats showing. In fact, there's an outburst against symbols from one of Sal's schoolmates when the class is forced by the English teacher to write journals for his inspection:
I hate journals (writes Beth, in her journal). I especially hate English where teachers only talk about idiot symbols. I hate that idiot poem about the snowy woods, and I hate it when people say the woods symbolize death or beauty or sex or any old thing you want ... Maybe the woods are just woods.
The teacher (suspected by Sal and one of her friends of having buried a body in someone's garden) makes a good case for symbols, but there is no authorial meddling or fiddling about, and the story flows on with the energy inherent in its characters.
THE great illustrator Randolph Caldecott, also an Englishman, lends his name to the prize given to the artist of the best American children's picture book each year. Somehow Smoky Night, the present winner, illustrated by David Diaz with words by Eve Bunting (Harcourt Brace, $25.95 hb), seems to stay cool despite the smoke, fire and fear of the Los Angeles riots as experienced by Daniel, his Mama, Jasmine their cat, the Ramirez family and the hitherto-alien Mrs Kim. The text is ordinary (with lots of obvious symbols) but the people in Diaz's paintings have the anonymous nobility that Diego Rivera bestowed on his crowds of fighters and toilers and the mood of the pictures swings through wary calm, panic and chaos to a final stained-glass-window celebration of humanity. The illustrations are technically remarkable, for Diaz did the lot himself: not just the paintings but their collage accompaniments, incorporating matches, broken glass, boot soles, bits of food ...
In England, Lesley Howarth's second novel, MapHead (Walker, 160pp, $7.95 pb), has just won The Guardian prize (presented by that newspaper) and is shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal (named for Andrew Carnegie, who emigrated from Scotland to the US and became a wealthy benefactor of libraries, maintaining that "he who dies rich dies disgraced"). The material details in MapHead are very strange: a boy half human, half outer-space alien, obsessed with Ancient Rome; a lost mother struck by lightning; meals of Danish pastries washed down with French dressing, not to mention the catshakes; a world of ghosts parading in full colours ... The integrity of Howarth's imagination unifies the story and her prose is as distinctive as the sound of a speaking voice:
... he swam to the bank, feeling the river rush over and under and through him. He dried himself with his sweater and sat in the rusty leaves. There was more than a bite of autumn in the air. Quietly, like a closing book, the summer was slipping away. At least, thought MapHead, he had the weekly bath under his belt. He might've skipped school for once, but he hadn't been entirely wasteful with the morning.
* There is no Oz edition of Walk Two Moons; you'll have to get your bookshop to order the American edition for you.
© 1995 Sydney Morning Herald
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