Ink, blackberries, mashed rose hips, smushed fuchsia flowers, splotched rowan berries and dirt tempera on watercolour paper. (People who are subscribed to my email list got to see how I did it. They’re super lucky.)

I like stories where stuff happens – sci-fi, children’s book, comics. The Lord of the Rings is great, except for the part where Frodo and Sam are moping around outside Mordor for half a book. All the tension drains into a puddle of tedium into which I shout that the hobbit boys seriously need to have a good long kiss and then hurl themselves up Mount Doom with a fervour fuelled by reckless loving ecstasy.

I’m not saying I must have nonstop action. I love Bill Murray films. He spends half his films doing nothing, but somehow he makes nothing feel big and important.

Last summer I read Patrick Ness’ Chaos Walking trilogy pretty much without stopping, but this year I couldn’t get through Ness’ The Crane Wife. The writing was superb, but nothing that happened felt big enough to keep my attention. When I was a teenager I read the first quarter of Great Expectations, during which No Discernible Action Took Place, so I stopped reading. I haven’t tried anything Dickens since then, but I’ve read a ton of Terry Pratchett.

It’s probably because I’m immature.

I like big feels. I love Kitten because all Chaidez’s songs – even the quiet ones – manage to seem bigger than life but without slipping into pastiche. That’s what my favourite kinds of books do too. Right now I’m reading A Monster Calls, another book by Patrick Ness. It’s got a yew tree turning into a huge monster right at the beginning and a mum dying of cancer and conflict with a best friend and a bully that totally has the upper hand and an absent father who’s back on the scene and a difficult grandmother. Stuff happens in every chapter, and it all feels big. It’s wonderful.

It’s also stuffed full of great lines like these:

The illustrations are superb.

I’ll finish with a question. Do you get excited about Dickens and small actions that feel small and lots of description? I’d honestly be grateful if you could explain to me how that works, because I’m missing that part of my brain. Only can you be sure your explanation has good pacing and feels kind of epic?

I want to show you the story of Mr Brown (p.42–51). Mr Brown is living in an amiable but chaste marriage to Mrs Brown. Then some event turns his life upside down. We assume it is somehow precipitated by a manic pixie dream girl in the form of Pup.

Pup then facilitates Mr Brown leaving his life and wife behind for a journey of self-discovery.

We don’t know what happens out of town, but Mr Brown returns from his journey arm-in-arm with someone new.

And if we’re in any doubt about the nature of their relationship, we need only have a look at their snack.

While I’m pleased to see Mr Brown to accept his true identity, This story has some serious problems.

• I can’t help but feel sorry for Mrs Brown. She is the victim of Mr Brown’s gender lies/confusion. Thankfully, it’s 2014 and not 1963 when Hop on Pop was published, so people are not under as much cultural pressure to conform to heterosexual norms and are less likely to live a lie like Mr Brown did.
• Pup is just happy she could help and has no significance outside of Mr Brown’s story.
• Suess totally fails the Bechedel Test. Mrs Brown and pup never even meet.

‘How silly!’ you say, ‘My young reader will never notice.’ That’s okay. Dr Seuss was all about silly. He also knew how to slip in some serious without becoming overbearing.

Someone else wrote about this before, but I came to most of my conclusions before I read it.

Part of Mother, Daughter and Son Book Reviews’ Kid Lit Blog Hop 45.

steal their apples and milk, trash the house,

then, in the process of fleeing justice, assault the youngest bear THREE times. (For the sake of my more sensitive readers, I have not shown the third assault.)

The story continues with more theft, a lynch mob and wholesale destruction of a farmer’s crop and vehicle. Do not be fooled by the happy ending; this book wholeheartedly endorses antisocial and illegal behaviour. But that’s not the only thing that makes it brilliant. Dr Seuss (as Theo. LeSieg) works the limited vocabulary for all its worth and the language sparkles. McKie’s seemingly simple brush and ink illustrations convey a remarkable range of emotion and action.

The copy of book is my personal copy with the original colouring, not the stupid updated brightly coloured version. My kids are not allowed to look at it without my permission.

*

Quentin Blake’s Mister Magnolia (affiliate link) seems to be the story of an eccentric bachelor who befriends young children so that they will buy him footwear. But it is secretly a counting book. It’s so secretly a counting book that we had it for a few years before I realised it was a counting book.

Five owls:

Six children:

If these two examples have caused you to raise your eyebrows, wait until next week when I write about the real meaning of Hop On Pop.

Part of Mother, Daughter and Son Book Reviews’ Kid Lit Blog Hop 44.

The story is about a middle child making lots of noise and mess in order to get her family’s attention. But for all the noise of the story, it is a quiet book. The text is all one font set tidily across the bottom of the page. Wells used a fine pen line to draw the pictures. It is printed in only three colours, black, yellow and peach. The quietest thing about the book is the action. There is a lot, but it is all drawn without action lines or blurring. Nora is trashing the house, but the illustrations are understated and calm. I think this makes the book funnier. It’s very funny.

Another excellent thing about Noisy Nora is that no one learns any Important Life Lessons. It’s just an evening at home with an ordinary mouse family.

Part of Mother, Daughter and Son Book Reviews’ Kid Lit Blog Hop 44.

But the thing about Blake’s badly drawn hands is that he obviously understands hands and how they work. Every one of these hand drawings communicates exactly what it needs to. They have handness, especially when seen as part of the whole picture:

I have a long way to go before I can make terrible drawings of hands with anywhere near the brilliance of Blake.

The images in this post were taken from Mister Magnolia, Simpkin and All Join In.

Put 1 and 2 together and the result is that all I knew from Amos was

3:7 Surely the Sovereign Lord does nothing without revealing his plan to his servants the prophets.

and

8:11–12 “The days are coming,” declares the Sovereign Lord, “when I will send a famine through the land – not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord. People will stagger from sea to sea and wander from north to east, searching for the word of the Lord, but they will not find it.

and

9:13–15 which you used to tell give people Words that their life was about to get awesome.

To review, my ‘knowledge’ of Amos, which can mostly be credited to prophet-type guest speakers was:

• Prophets are the best.
• Totes get a Word from God.
• The Word is: your life’s about to get awesome.

I had no idea that the whole message of the book is that the ancient northern kingdom of Israel is done for because God is majorly cheesed off at way the rich are badly oppressing the poor. I had no idea. I was a pastor’s kid who was jump-up-and-downiningly ready to take the nations for God. But I had no clue what Amos said was important to God in a nation.

Read your bibles, kids.