I received a scrumptious parcel through the post this week – some gifts and goodies from Corinne and Aline’s time at the Asian Festival of Children’s Content (AFCC) in Singapore. I’m going to unpack them slowly and with relish here on the blog so that you can enjoy them too.

First up is picture book The Book that was Handed Down, which won the inaugural Hedwig Anuar Children’s Book Award, announced at the AFCC. Written by Yixian Quek, illustrated by Grace Duan Ying and designed by Goh Caili, it was published in Singapore by Straits Times Press in 2008. We can certainly be grateful to the Award for raising the profile of this extraordinary book.

On the surface it’s the simple story of a little girl Ping, our narrator, who is pretty disgusted about how she always has to have hand-me-downs… The book is no different: it used to belong to her brother, and certainly carries the imprint of its previous owner. But, of course, this is a book we’re talking about here – not clothes that are grown out of and forgotten. When Ming sees his sister with the book, he remembers how much he loved it and starts reading it aloud. Ping is then captivated in her turn, and together they share the adventures held between the book’s covers.

Complimenting the text perfectly are the illustrations, which cleverly blend the actual “Book that was Handed Down” with a depiction of the narrative. Ping is so serious and earnest and cross at the beginning, you can’t help feeling for her – but, as is so often the case, once she gets beyond superficial appearances, she finds her life is enriched both by the actual story contained within the book, and by the opportunity it affords for her to connect with her brother. The uncluttered effect of the strongly delineated illustrations also belies the number of details that will delight children as they make unspoken connections while listening to the story.

The simplicity of The Book that was Handed Down makes it immediately appealing; its complexity means that it will endure. Now I wonder whom I can hand it down to? I’ll just have to muss it up a bit first…

As one of the books in our PaperTigers Reading the World Challenge (and I’ll be bringing you a full update on that later on in the week), Younger Brother and I have read together Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie (Granta Books, 1990). My brother gave a first edition to my boys several years ago but this is the first time we’ve read it – and I see that it is now available in many editions, with a lovely array of book covers, which I can’t resist including here (and see this project book cover/splash page from Art Slug).

But back to the story. We both adored it. I was practically tied down at bedtimes and made to read on. For any child (or adult) who loves words and playing with language and ideas, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Haroun’s father, the Shah of Blah, has lost his story-telling Gift of the Gab because his wife has left him. Haroun, who has become a little jaded with his father’s focus on fiction himself, soon finds himself in possession of Iff, a Water Genie’s Disconnector and spinning into a spiral of adventures. He discovers that stories are physically real and that the balance of human happiness is being threatened because the menacing land of Chup, where it is always night, is poisoning the Sea of Stories, despite all the attempts to keep it clean by the happy land of Gup across the water, where it is always light…

Haroun meets a wonderful array of characters – as well as Iff, there is Butt, the oxymoronically magical mechanical hoopoe depicted on the book’s cover; Bagha and Goopy, two of the plentimaw fishes who swim in the sea (don’t you just love it?!), Mali the Head Floating Gardener, and many more – and of course, there are also the often shadowy baddies, led by the terrifying Khattam-Shud. Despite all the P2C2E, Processes Too Complicated To Explain (I told you you’d love it!), Haroun finds a way to help his new friends, and in so doing restores the balance of happiness to his own life.

Yes, this is definitely one of the most wonderful readalouds we’ve shared. The prose is like poetry – you almost chew the words. We relished the huge, unanswerable questions that the book explores – what is Reality? What is Story? Who is that character, that person… who am I? – as well as the allegories of light and darkness (which make this so relevant to an adult as well as a young audience), environmental responsibility and empathy. And we revelled in each little bit of wordplay, from character names to gleeful patter.

If your child enjoys stories of worlds within worlds, like Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, or the Harry Potter series, they will love Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

Barefoot Books can always be depended on for their wonderful anthologies of stories from all over the world, and Grandmothers’ Stories: Wise Woman Tales from Many Cultures (Barefoot Books, 1999/2006) is no exception. The eight stories included are retold by Burleigh Mutén in wonderful prose that just begs to be read aloud, and vividly illustrated by Siân Bailey. They are framed by an introduction in which three grandchildren ask their grandmother to tell them a story, and a conclusion in which (it will be no surprise) the two older children have fallen asleep but the little one is wide awake, asking to hear them all again.

And no wonder! From the first story from Senegal about “The Midwife and the Djinn” we are captivated. In fact, when we listened to the story recently, Little Brother was in stitches of laughter, anticipating the next stage of the story while disbelieving that it could possibly be so. We were listening to Olympia Dukakis reading on one of the two accompanying CDs. I have to say, at first I thought it was going to be a terribly labored narration, she begins so slowly – but in fact, it was perfect: as the pace of the story picked up, so did the reading; and I realised that if she hadn’t read it slowly at the beginning, she wouldn’t have been able to get the words out by the end!

The other stories are just as engaging – “The Old Woman Who Was Not Afraid” introduces us to the grotesque and greedy little Onis from Japan; there is a cross between Baba Yaga and the well-known “Hansel and Gretel” from Russia (“Grandmother’s Basket”); the beautiful Hawaiian legend of old Heena, “The Woman in the Moon”; the bewitching story of La Bruha, “The Beautiful Crone of Córdoba” in Mexico; an Irish Wise Woman who helps a widow and her daughter get a band of “small spirit people” out of their house; the magical Mother Holle from Germany; and “The Old Woman Who Was right” from Sweden.

All the stories have that timeless quality of the traditional story that is sure to make them popular for being read and listened to again and again – and they have the added appeal of resonating with stories from other cultures too. Mutén’s retellings here hold firm to their oral origins, which makes them such a joy to share.

There is something special about grandparents sharing stories with their grandchildren, especially when those stories come from their own lives (though young children can be disconcerting in their definition of the olden days and their grandparents place in them…). Over the next few weeks, I will be highlighting books that draw young children into that special bond through stories narrated by grandmothers from around the world.

Whereas many anthologies of traditional stories can be dipped into and individual stories extracted at random, I recommend several bedtimes in a row be spent immersed in Frances Carpenter’s Tales of a Korean Grandmother and Tales of a Chinese Grandmother (both published by Tuttle). Although subtitled as 30 and 32 Traditional Tales respectively, they are much more than that. The stories emerge from the daily lives of the Ling family in China and the Kim family in Korea as the two grandmothers tell their grandchildren stories arising out of events and traditions or objects around them. Black and white vignettes and full-page illustrations are scattered through the books, with Malthe Hasselriis as the named illustrator of Tales of a Chinese Grandmother.

In Korea, we join the Kim family and become friends especially with Ok Cha and her brother Yung Tu; in China we meet Ah Shung and his sister Yu Lang, and the rest of the Ling household. Both grandmothers are deeply loved and respected, and have a wealth of stories to tell and retell – and the time to tell them. Young readers/listeners will be just as interested in the children’s antics as in the stories themselves.

The books were first published some 70 years ago and have lost none of their appeal in the intervening years – indeed, much of their attraction to today’s audience, whether younger children sharing the stories as a readaloud or older children reading the book alone, must be the blend of historical detail combined with the magic and fantasy contained within the stories themselves. Through the device of telling stories within a narrative, today’s readers/listeners are more readily drawn into their cultural contexts and the warmth of the bond between the grandmother and her grandchildren is the thread which brings all these stories together.

When I was about eight, I wrote a poem about Silly Billy, well more of a ditty really – but it has stayed with me. I therefore knew I had to read UK Children’s Laureate Anthony Browne’s picture book Silly Billy (Walker Books, 2006) as soon as I saw it… It is, as my children will tell you, so much better than my juvenile work; Little Brother and I have really enjoyed sharing it together.

Billy is a worrier – or, as it says at the beginning of the story, “Billy used to be a worrier.” The story takes us through some of the things Billy worried about, and his parents’ attempts to reassure him – but it is only when he goes to stay with his grandma that a solution is found. She presents him with a set of tiny Guatemalan worry dolls, who will “do all the worrying for you while you sleep.” And so all is well, until Billy starts to worry about the effect of all those worries (in extra large letters) on the poor dolls… but then he comes up with the perfect solution.

Anthony Browne’s story is narrated simply and eloquently, with words emphasised in larger font all the way through. This format calls out for the words to be shared and since this is one of those books that is likely to be in demand again and again, small people will love shouting out those larger words, which they will soon know by heart. Browne’s illustrations are as virtuoso as one would expect – from the (not too nightmarish) worries to the larger-than-life image of grandma’s hand holding out the brightly colored worry dolls. The reassuring past tense at the beginning means that young readers/listeners experience the story from a secure perspective – and any small worriers might be tempted to follow Billy’s idea for themselves too. There’s also a well-pitched description of worry dolls and their Guatemalan origins at the end of the book. Read what the judges of the CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal had to say about Silly Billy here.

Take a look at Sally’s recent Books at Bedtime post for other books by Anthony Browne, as well as Aline’s comment about her daughter’s love of The Shape Game on this post.

Master story-teller Laurence Yep took his inspiration for his magical version of the Beauty and the Beast fairy-tale from a traditional Chinese tale with a Southern Chinese setting. His The Dragon Prince (HarperCollins, 1997) has some satisfying twists and turns in the narrative and an impressive dragon in the role parallel to the Beast: visually too, thanks to Kam Mak’s powerful illustrations. We just love the noble, enormous, golden dragon, and completely empathised with Beauty/Seven’s inherent trust in the beauty she finds in him, that goes deeper than the fear – even when the Dragon insists, “But you really should be afraid” – yes, Little Brother especially loved that line!

Seven is set apart from her older sisters from the start: while they work in the fields, she does beautiful embroidery, which is then sold at the market, thereby providing the family with the sustenance the rocky ground cannot. The symbolism of this carries the narrative through to its conclusion (it’s a fairy tale so it’s irrelevant to question the point of the other sister’s activities, farming land on which nothing will grow). Three is jealous of Seven – and never more so than when, instead of suffering a terrible fate after agreeing to marry a firece dragon in return for her father’s life, Seven arrives on a visit to her family on a ‘chair of gold and coral’ and with all her maids behind her, descending from the sky in a ‘glittering procession’.

Three therefore tricks Seven and takes her place, preparing the Dragon Prince for a change in his wife’s appearance by saying she’s been ill – which makes for an interesting take on Beauty and the Beast: the Prince “didn’t care. In that short time, Seven had come to mean everything to him, not for her beauty but for her kindness.”

So do they live happily ever after? Well, I highly recommend you get hold of this great story and find out for yourself, and enjoy some cultural nuances along the way. For example, one bit that made me chuckle and served to show the Dragon Prince’s state of mind as he searches deperately for Seven: he buys at a market “without bargaining”!

Gathering Books also featured The Dragon Prince earlier this year, as part of a wonderful series of in-depth posts about Chinese fairy-tales – in case you missed them, here are the other links; they’re definitely worth a read: Lon Po Po: A Red-Riding Hood Story from China (which Little Brother read for our Reading the World Challenge in 2008) and Yeh-Shen: A Cinderella Story from China (which I have also featured as a Book at Bedtime in the past)…

An absolutely gorgeous book, Scaly-tailed Possum and Echidna (Magabala Books, 2010) makes for a perfect bedtime story – the story itself is short and to the point; the art-work is wonderful with vibrant colors and adorable depictions of the two eponymous animals; and the factual notes at the end are pitched just right for young listeners/readers. I learned a thing or two, too – did you know that a baby echidna is called a puggle?

The story has been handed down through generations of the “Kandiwal mob”, one of the tribes of the Wunambal people in the north-west of Western Australia, and the book’s author Cathy Goonack inherited it from her grandfather. She tells how “Long long ago in the Dreamtime”, naughty Echidna tried to steal Possum’s food: in the ensuing fight, Possum lost the fur from his tail and Echidna fell into ‘the spiky thorns of the pandanus leaf’. So the scaly-tailed possum, which is only found around Wunambal country, got its scaly tail, and the echidna was punished by Wandjina, the Great Spirit, with having to carry the heavy spikes around for ever, no longer able to climb trees but having to grub around for food.

The beautiful illustrations by Marlene, Myron and Katrina Goonack, with support and technical assistance from Janie Andrews, were painted on silk with outlines made using a gutta pen, creating an effective contrast between the colorful foliage and background and the animals. I have always had a soft spot for the improbable-looking echidna and I love the way he is drawn here both with and without his spines.

The simplicity of the story belies its depth of meaning, and with its size being just right for small people to get hold of, it’s just the kind of book that will be in demand again and again, both as a readaloud and for young children to read by themselves. Magabala Books have produced yet another little gem.

Suho’s White Horse: A Mongolian Legend is the retelling of one of the legends that explains the origins of Mongolia’s national musical instrument, the morin khuur, or horse hair fiddle, which always has a carved horse’s head at the top of its pegbox.

Suho, a young Mongolian shepherd boy, rescues and rears a white foal. A few years later he is persuaded to enter a horse-race with the governor’s daughter’s hand in marriage as the prize. With his beautiful white horse, of course Suho wins the race – but when the governor finds out that Suho is a shepherd he not only goes back on his word, but has his soldiers beat Suho up and steals the horse.

Suho manages to get home and is nursed back to health. Meanwhile, the white horse escapes. Incensed, the governor orders his men to catch the white horse – and if they can’t catch it, to kill it. The white horse does manage to return to Suho but is so badly injured that it dies. Suho is heartbroken but the horse comes to him in a dream and tells him to use different parts of his body to create a musical instrument – and so the morin khuur is born.

This retelling of Suho’s White Horse by Yuzo Otsuka, and translated by Richard McNamara and Peter Howlett (RIC Publications, 2006) is great for reading aloud, with plenty of detail. Both Older Brother and Little Brother became emotionally involved in the story very quickly, reacting to the different stages with outrage, horror and sadness. Hans Christian Andersen Award winner (1980) Suekichi Akaba‘s illustrations are beautiful, conveying the vastness of the steppe as well as the story’s emotive narrative.

And a real bonus with this edition is the accompanying CD that contains a musical retelling of the legend played on the morin khuur itself by “the horse-head fiddle’s finest player” Li Bo (scroll down this page to read an interview with him). We were all captivated by the haunting music and the boys had quite a deep discussion of which bit of music referred to which bit of the story.

I’m excited to have found this recording of Suho’s White Horse on You Tube with Lai Haslo playing the morin khuur and Zhang Lin on the Chinese dulcimer. I hope you enjoy it as much as we have – listen out for the horse galloping.

Anthony Browne is the UK’s Children’s Laureate for 2009-2011.    A friend recently brought his work to my attention through a Guardian article containing a gallery of Browne’s artwork.  As I was going to the library that day, I decided to take out some of Browne’s books.   Well, what a delight!  I took out a stack and on arriving home, devoured them all with my daughter that very afternoon after she got home from school.   She was already familiar with a few of the titles like Willy the Dreamer and Little Beauty because they were in her classroom, but a few other ones were new to her like the deliciously funny and parodic Piggybook.  In fact, I read the latter, snickering aloud in the library.  The story although funny enough isn’t the half of it,  — with Browne’s work, it is really also all about the pictures.  It was my daughter who pointed out to me how — as the Piggot family slowly turned into pigs — everything else in the house began to resemble pigs as well, right down to the wallpaper and the paintings on the wall, and gulp, even the moon!   Clearly, my daughter was already better-versed  on how to ‘read’ this man’s books!   She was especially fond of Willy the Dreamer in which William (a gorilla) dreams of what he might become.  The pleasure in the reading of this book for her was finding all the bananas in each picture — all very cleverly disguised.  Two books of Browne’s that I was particularly taken by were The Tunnel and Through the Magic Mirror.   Using two very symbolic items, Browne explores’ a siblings relationship in The Tunnel, while Through the Magic Mirror is about a boy who discovers through the mirror, an alternate and absurd world on a day when he is particularly fed up with everyone (including himself, my daughter added.)   Browne’s books are a true visual delight and anyone familiar with painting will get a kick at all his pointed references to famous artists like Dali and Magritte in some of his books.   You’d do well to seek out Browne’s books like I did and enjoy an evening or afternoon’s reading pleasure with your child.

In celebration of Black History Month, I have had a chance to read some fine children’s books like Viola Desmond Won’t be Budged, as well as participate in local events like Mondo Clarke! which has been showcasing the works of African Canadian writer, George Elliot Clarke.  It’s been a time of real discovery for me, and I have been enjoying every minute of it!  Today for Books at Bedtime, I’m doing another post on a children’s book about Black Canadian history.  Working for Freedom by Rona Arato (Napoleon Publishing, 2008) is the story of Josiah Henson, a former slave, born in Maryland in about 1789.  Josiah’s family stays together on a Maryland plantation until Josiah is five.  When his father witnesses his wife being attacked by the white overseer, he tears him off of her and throws him to the ground.   For touching a white man, Josiah’s father is punished with a severe whipping of a hundred lashes and has his right ear cut off.  Thereafter, he is sold to a cotton plantation in Alabama.  This is the young Josiah’s introduction to the cruelty and injustice of his lot in life as a slave.  Josiah’s mother, however, imparts him with a gift that would carry him through all the difficult circumstances of his life — the gift of faith.   It is while under the rough ownership of Isaac Riley — a man Josiah describes as “vulgar in his habits, unprincipled and cruel in his general deportment and immoral”  — that Josiah becomes a Christian and begins preaching to other slaves.  After many trials, Josiah eventually leaves the  heartless Riley and escapes to Canada, where he builds a new society for black refugees like himself in a community he helped found in southern Ontario called appropriately enough, Dawn.

Reading this book (based in part on Josiah Henson’s autobiography) to my daughter was an interesting experience.  She was completely fascinated and taken in by the story — but she was also horrified.  This book pulls no punches when describing the cruel and torturous lives of slaves in the southern U.S.   There are illustrations and pictures of slaves being beaten and in bondage.  Hearing Josiah’s story clearly left an impact — occasionally a very troubling one — on my daughter.  Despite this, however, she continued wanting to hear the story night after night.  I too, was engrossed in the tale.  Josiah Henson was a truly inspiring figure and is rightly celebrated as such; Working for Freedom was a book well worth discovering this month!