Do You Love Books? Then So Will Your Kids

A mother’s preschool child is sitting on her lap. She’s reading him a story. The words are gliding and hissing and floating off her tongue. She loves Maira Kalman’s “Max in Love” at least as much as her child does. She must have read it 50 times, but she keeps finding new wit in the pictures, fresh meaning in the characters.

Her appreciation is infectious. Last night her son wanted it explained that the confectionery “Napoleon” was named for the man in the funny hat who was sitting at the table eating one. Tonight the boy insists on a second reading after he wonders aloud about the strange Hunchback of Notre Dame--a monster with feelings? His mother delights in the conversation, for since she was a girl she has been fascinated by the mixture of pity and fear that character stirs in her.

Her son is not a genius, this mother knows. He would as happily listen to “Spot’s First Walk,” but she would talk down to him if he asked her why the snail says, “Hello” to the pooch. The boy’s language skills may be in early development but he knows when his mother really cares.

This book, and her pleasure, may do as much for her son’s literacy as any school he will attend.

Once upon a time, there was no such thing as a children’s story. Everybody listened to the same tales about Jesus or King Arthur; the battles, the romances, the morality and the lack of it were all spoken aloud for the group. And then came the printing press. When we were taught to read and were offered books cheap enough to buy, we decided that some of our fables, fairy tales and nursery rhymes were more suitable for children. No sooner had we taken this high ground than we began to squabble about whether knights were appropriate role models and whether Shakespeare wasn’t immodest. We banned some books, we rewrote others and hesitated over the idea of children reading at all.

These arguments began sometime in the 16th Century, and they vex us to this day. Now we think our fairy tales are sexist and racist. We even worry that the picture books written for audiences of all ages will daunt or bore our children.

In a lecture given to promote his new cross-over nursery rhyme, WE ARE ALL IN THE DUMPS WITH JACK AND GUY (Harper Collins: $20; 50 pp.), Maurice Sendak asked parents to back off as the “sentries at the gates of childhood.” Everything in life isn’t “sweet,” he said. That is merely a wish that parents project, but children know the truth anyway.

This winter there are many wonderful new titles of the kind that parents might read again for themselves after their children are in bed. Here are six of the best. Sendak’s, to begin with, for it is a perfect example. It’s a stirring rhyme (made by joining two of Mother Goose’s) that anyone else might have thought nonsense. But the literary lion saw a vision of homeless city life, and created an orphan who is kidnaped by rats, and then looked after by a couple of older street urchins. The pictures are dense and terrifying. But that’s how the world looks to a toddler. The rats are bigger than the baby, just like his fears. And the urchins who vow to “bring him up as other folk do” are not sad because they live on the street but heroic and reassuring figures. That’s how my 4-year-old son saw it. He taught me how to look at this complex narrative.

The antidote to a story about grown-ups who won’t let children be children is a book about grown-ups who all look like children. In Maira Kalman’s CHICKEN SOUP, BOOTS (Viking: $15; 33 pp.), each character is given a page to grow up and take on a profession on the pretext that a child will have to do the same one day. In the course of the read Kalman herself grows up and becomes a writer and a painter of children’s books. This is a sweet and affecting ending to a zany and exuberant collection of caricatures. As in Kalman’s best books there is an echo of “Eloise,” Kay Thompson’s book for “precocious grown-ups about a little girl who lives at the Plaza Hotel,” which is still popular now with its third generation of readers.

A darker, more frightening character is the sadistic dentist in Chris Van Allsburg’s THE SWEETEST FIG (Houghton Mifflin: $17.95; 28 pp.). The tooth man is cruelest of all to his dog. In a typically elusive ending for this author, the dog eats a magic fig and changes places with his bullying master whose punishments we are left to imagine. At last Van Allsburg has released us from the tourist’s Paris so often depicted in picture books. Here the bully’s dreams turn against him so that cafe sitters are shocked by his appearance in underwear and he is sent running from an Eiffel Tower that “droops” like “soft rubber” in a hazy, gray sky. Van Allsburg so often creates that paradigm of literary virtue, books that are deeply imaginative and realistic at the same time.

There is a point to be made about all of these new books. Each of them is illustrated and written by a single person. Children’s books are, in the main, written first and then assigned an illustrator. Lane Smith is a celebrated painter who has been most appreciated for his work with the writer Jon Scieszka. They made “The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs.” Earlier this year, Smith won a Caldecott Honor for illustrating “The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales.” Now comes the first book he has written and illustrated himself. THE HAPPY HOCKY FAMILY (Viking: $13.99; 61 pp.) is a 1950s throwback, visually. The cartoon family have uncomplicated faces and collaged clothes. What is sophisticated here are the vignettes that come together as chaotically as an average day in the life of any family. There is a takeoff on “The Little Engine That Could” called “Holly’s Boat.” Holly encourages the boat to float. Until it cries “I can do it. . . . I can do it. . . .” Holly’s boat then floats away and she buys a new one. There’s a wry humor with a dash of the meanness, the stupidity and the perseverance in all of us that makes for laughing out loud.

Our little boy has finally fallen asleep in his mother’s arms. She slides her son under the covers and considers doing the dishes. Maybe pick up the living room. She aches with tiredness but can’t relax. She runs a bath. She goes to the back of the tool drawer and retrieves those two bonbons she hid for herself. She takes the paper to the bathroom. She takes a novel, too. Then she wanders over to the Christmas closet where she flips through Allen Say’s new book, GRANDFATHER’S JOURNEY (Houghton Mifflin: $16.95; 32 pp.). She has bought it for her son for Christmas. She loves the idea of immigrants who want to be in their old country as much as the new. Suddenly the bath is overflowing and the chocolates are found melting on the newspaper.

I can be so forgetful.