Summary: Shelley Frankenstein is inspired by her famous ancestor, Dr. Frankenstein, and the monsters he created that still live with the family. Pairing up with her little brother Iggy, she takes apart toys and sews them back together. But her cronkey (crocodile-donkey) and shark kitty are failures, with the kids at school falling in love with what they consider adorable new animals. Finally, the Frankensteins make CowPiggy. When he’s deemed the cutest of all, Shelley gets the monsters to train him to be scary. Their work pays off, but CowPiggy ends up scaring himself and running away. When Shelley goes after them, they discover a community of bunnies who teach them a thing or two about being scary–and about being scared. Returning home, CowPiggy embraces his adorable nature, and Shelley learns to love him exactly how he is. 168 pages; grades 3-6.
Pros: Kids who enjoy a creepy atmosphere that has more laughs than screams will get a kick out of this graphic novel that features a cast of cute critters and pays homage to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Cons: Those expecting something scarier may be disappointed.
Summary: Stickler, an eight-eyed creature who appeared in Lane Smith’s 2022 book A Gift for Nana, loves sticks. And everything else he sees around him. “Oh, to see it all anew!” He gets that chance when he finds a space alien that’s just arrived to Earth (or so Stickler thinks; readers will realize it’s actually a bird with a can stuck on its head). Stickler gives the creature a tour of all the things he loves: flowers, the ocean, the wind, rocks. The can finally comes off to reveal Stickler’s friend Crow, who thanks Stickler for opening up her eyes to the wonders of the world. 40 pages; ages 4-8.
Pros: Lane Smith’s textured illustrations gorgeously celebrate the natural world, and Stickler and Crow humorously present a message of mindfulness and appreciating the beauty all around them.
Cons: Adults may appreciate the message more than younger readers.
Back to School, Backpack! by Simon Rich, illustrated by Tom Toro
Published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
How to Get Your Octopus to School by Becky Scharnhorst, illustrated by Jaclyn Sinquett
Published by Flamingo Books
Summary: An octopus and a backpack are both dealing with first-day-of-school jitters. The octopus lives with a girl who’s trying to convince him that school is fun. Octopuses are shy, though, and also good at hiding. Once he’s been discovered, the two work together to find him a perfect outfit, a process that’s disrupted when the octopus’s nerves cause him to shoot a cloud of ink. They finally make it to school, and the octopus is excited to be with new friends. When it comes time to say goodbye, it’s the girl who has some trouble letting go. Includes ten facts about octopuses.
The backpack of the second book also has a case of nerves. It has spent the summer chilling in the closet with Hamper and Winter Coat and isn’t excited to have books jammed down its throat and to head off to school backwards, not able to see where it’s going. The backpack feels like it doesn’t fit in, and the illustrations suggest that its girl is having the same experience. A hallway collision leads to a friendship between the humans and their backpacks, and the first day of school suddenly gets a lot better for everyone. Octopus is 32 pages; Backpack is 40 pages; ages 4-8 for both.
Pros: If you’re on the same schedule as I am, you may be looking for books like these tomorrow morning. Each provides a short, funny read with great visuals (I loved the picture of the octopus classroom with all the students camouflaging against various backgrounds). Backpack is a little more laugh-out-loud funny, while Octopus has more of a If You Give a Mouse a Cookie vibe. Both could provide excellent writing prompts, writing from the point of view of your backpack of some other back-to-school object, or a how-to for getting your pet to school.
Summary: Mary shares her earliest happy memories growing up surrounded by a loving family. When she’s four, though, a priest and nun come to her grandparents’ home and suggest that she start attending their residential school with her older brother and sister. Lejac is far away, and there’s never enough food to eat. An older girl shows Mary how to eat toothpaste to make her hunger go away. The kids go home for summer break, where they learn traditional skills from their parents. Eventually, the girls use their sewing skill to add secret pockets to their uniforms so that they can sneak food from the kitchen. This small act of rebellion makes the girls feel like geniuses and gives them back some power over their difficult circumstances. Includes an author’s note about her mother, Mary, who shared this story near the end of her life, and how a secret pocket with her story is still sewn into the graduation robes at the University of Fraser Valley in Canada. 32 pages; grades 2-5.
Pros: An important story that celebrates ingenuity and teamwork in overcoming some extremely dark circumstances and shows readers the truth about indigenous boarding schools.
Cons: This story is pretty horrifying; the girls’ major victory was just getting enough food to eat.
The final leg of my trip took me back to Tennessee, first to Memphis and then to Nashville. I had a few issues with my accommodations in Memphis (let’s just say that I ended up repairing my Airbnb’s toilet with a piece of dental floss), so I only stayed one night instead of two.
I kicked off the morning with a visit to the National Civil Rights Museum. The website said to allow 1.5 hours, so I was there when the doors opened at 9:00, because I was meeting a friend for lunch at 11:00. I wished I had allowed more time, as I was hurrying through the last exhibit and didn’t get to visit the other buildings. Of all the museums I visited, this one had the most comprehensive history of the civil rights movement, and I would recommend putting aside at least two hours if you go.
I walked down Beale Street in Memphis and had plans to visit Sun Studio and Stax Records that afternoon, but honestly, I just wasn’t in the mood. Next time. I did take in some music history in Nashville, where I met up with my daughter Katherine. I benefited from her encyclopedic knowledge of music at the Country Music Hall of Fameand the National Museum of African American Music, and we both enjoyed our night at the Grand Ole Opry.
I’m going to briefly return to the beginning of the week to mention one other Nashville site I visited. It was July 4th, I had just realized that most places were closed, and I was trying to figure out how to spend the day. As I looked for a place to eat breakfast, I realized that I was near The Hermitage, home of U.S. President Andrew Jackson. I’m not a fan, but keeping in mind what I’ve been reading about public history in How the Word Is Passed (mentioned in yesterday’s Mississippi post), I decided to go to see how Jackson was portrayed at his homestead.
Unlike most places I went (except the Museum of the Mississippi Delta and the Grand Ole Opry), there was pretty much an all-white crowd, many dressed in red, white, and blue for the Fourth. I took the guided tour of the house, then walked around the grounds to the slave quarters. Compared to what I saw the next day at the Legacy Museum, slavery was portrayed in a pretty benign light, with Jackson represented as a man who tried to provide well for the enslaved people on his property. Interestingly, a sign describing slave life was half-hidden by an open door, and another one called “Determined Resistance” was covered by plastic so dirty and scratched it was difficult to read.
I include this, because as I traveled through the South for a week, I kept thinking about how history is the stories we tell, whether we are telling them to our children, to our students, or to ourselves. The stories can shine a light on certain people and events and keep others hidden away in the dark. They inform the way we move forward into the future, helping us decide who we want as leaders and which groups of people we want to lift up or to oppress.
One night in Alabama, looking for some comfort food after a long day, I stopped at an Applebee’s for dinner. My waitress was a young Black woman, cheerful but exhausted at 8 1/2 months pregnant. She told me that she was having a girl, and I asked her if she had a name picked out. Sincere, she said, a name she had chosen with her girlfriends years ago when they were back in school.
I’m sure Sincere has arrived by now, and I think of her, a Black girl growing up in Alabama, her mom full of hopes and dreams, working hard to support her. I hope Sincere can grow up learning the truth about her history, but also knowing the pride in her heritage, and with the confidence to pursue her dreams. And I know that if she does, it will be because of people like those Mississippi legislators who fought for more than a decade to get their civil rights museum, or the workers who replaced Emmett Till’s bullet-ridden sign for the fourth time, or the people (maybe you?) who write and promote books and fight to keep them in schools and libraries so that they can tell the truth about the past and offer hope for the future.
Thursday, July 6, and I was on the road from Newbern, Alabama to Jackson, Mississippi. Along the way, I stopped for lunch in Meridian, Mississippi, where I felt very Southern eating collard greens, summer squash, fried green tomatoes, cornbread, and the best macaroni and cheese I have ever tasted. The restaurant staff and clientele, like almost everywhere I went in the South, were far more racially integrated than anywhere I can think of in Massachusetts.
In Jackson, I spent most of the afternoon at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. Like the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, this museum is less than a decade old, opening on December 9, 2017, after years of stalling by the Mississippi government (you can read the tortured history here). The $15.00 admission ticket gets you into both this museum and the adjacentMuseum of Mississippi History, but even I have a limited museum capacity and decided that one was enough for me. I spent about two hours learning about Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, Emmett Till, and a host of other Mississippi people and events that shaped the civil rights movement.
I spent the night in Jackson then drove to the Museum of the Mississippi Delta in Greenwood, which was quite different from the other museums I’d been visiting. With a mission to “to collect, preserve, interpret and exhibit tangible artifacts which enable the Museum to educate the public about the art, history and natural history of the Mississippi Delta and its surrounding regions,” there was much less focus on civil rights.
Another family was visiting at the same time, two young white boys and their grandparents, and I overheard them in the military history room, the grandparents telling them about their ancestors who fought in the Civil War. There was a children’s area next door where kids could dress up as Confederate soldiers and pretend to be aboard the Star of the West, a Union-turned-Confederate ship that ultimately sank in the Tallahatchie River near Greenwood.
Over 600,000 people died in the Civil War, approximately 2% of the population, which would translate to roughly six million Americans today. We’re taught in history that wars have winners and losers, but who in America “won” in the Civil War? I thought about this as I listened to the family in the Mississippi Delta museum talk about their ancestors who fought in a war for a cause that now seems abhorrent and inhumane to many of us.
I was reading a book on my trip called How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning of the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith (Little, Brown, and Company, 2021). Smith writes about his visits to historic sites around the country and his observations about how the history of slavery is told. Here’s a quote that captures some of my thoughts that day in the museum (page 142).
What would it take–what does it take–for you to confront a false history even if it means shattering the stories you have been told throughout your life? Even if it means having to fundamentally reexamine who you are and who your family has been? Just because something is difficult to accept doesn’t mean you should refuse to accept it. Just because someone tells you a story doesn’t make that story true.
It was a short trip from Greenwood to Money, the town where Emmett Till was brutally beaten and lynched by two white men in August of 1955, his body dumped in the same Tallahatchie River I read about earlier that day. His mother, Mamie Till, was another one of the unsung heroines of the civil rights movement, insisting that her son’s body be returned to Chicago, where his open casket funeral allowed people all over the world to bear witness to his savage murder. Overcoming unimaginable grief, she went on to graduate from college and worked for civil rights for the rest of her life, something I didn’t know until I read about it last year in the book Choosing Brave by Angela Joy.
Emmett was murdered for “flirting” with Carolyn Bryant, the 21-year-old white woman working in her family’s grocery store, an accusation Carolyn would deny later in life. I went looking for the ruins of the Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market, which supposedly is still standing, but I couldn’t find them, although I did find the sign commemorating the event. Before I went on my trip, I read about another sign, marking the spot where Emmett’s body was found, that’s on its fourth version, the other three having been thrown into the river or shot full of bullet holes.
I felt a bit spooked when I turned off the highway in search of the store, and it felt like the landscape hadn’t changed much since 1955. There were acres of crops in all directions, and I realized from the puffy white stuff blowing around the sides of the road that these were cotton fields. The road turned to a mix of gravel and red dirt shortly before I spotted the sign, and I got out to take pictures and walk around a bit in my fruitless attempt to find the store. Like so many times during the week, it seemed almost unreal that I was standing in a place where history had been made–the Freedom Riders stepping off a bus at the Montgomery Greyhound Station where the Freedom Rides Museum now stands, people being put up for sale at slave markets on the same land the Legacy Museum is built on, and 14-year-old Emmett Till walking up the dirt path to buy candy at Bryant’s Grocery Store in the spot where I now stood across from endless cotton fields.
Books about Mississippi
Greenwood
That Flag by Tameka Fryer Brown (HarperCollins, 2023)
This summer I decided to travel to the Deep South. I flew to Nashville, rented a car, and drove to Alabama, Mississippi, and back to Tennessee, where I visited Memphis before returning to Nashville. Aside from a marching band trip to the Mardi Gras when I was 15, I’ve never traveled in this part of the country, and I was curious to experience it for many reasons.
Thanks in large part to books that I’ve read and reviewed here over the years, I have learned far more about Black history than I ever did in school, and I wanted to see some of the places that I’ve learned about. The history of the South continues to have an enormous impact on the United States today, and I wanted to experience for myself what this part of the country is like and to witness the ways that its history is told. I’ll be writing three posts to cover the eight days I spent on this trip.
I arrived in Nashville on July 3, with a plan to start in Birmingham on July 4. Yes, July 4. Not the best planning on my part, as both the 16th Street Baptist Church and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute were closed for the holiday. I made a quick stop so that I could at least see the outside of the church, then drove on to Montgomery.
I started my tour of Montgomery the next day with a trip to the Rosa Parks Museum and Library. The museum does a great job of bringing Rosa Parks’s contributions to life with a re-enactment of her bus ride and arrest, and plenty of artifacts and information about the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
One recurring theme for me on this trip was the marginalization of women in the civil rights movement, and it started at this museum. I learned that Rosa Parks and her husband lost their jobs and received death threats due to her activism, leading them to move to Detroit. There, Parks continued to work for civil rights, often embracing a more militant philosophy than Martin Luther King, Jr. She was included to the 1963 March on Washington, but only introduced and recognized, not invited to speak.
From there, I headed for the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum. These are both part of the Equal Justice Initiative, have a total admission fee of $5.00, and are about a five-minute drive from each other. I started at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a memorial for the victims of lynching. It’s a 600-acre open-air space on top of a hill: a roof with slab after slab suspended from it, arranged by state and county, each one listing the victims of lynching in that county with each person’s name if its known, race, gender, and reason for and date of their murder.
The Legacy Museum’s full name is The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, and it explores the legacy of racism in America, beginning with the African slave trade and continuing through slavery, Jim Crow, chain gangs, and the mass incarceration of the Black population that continues today. There are lots of interactive exhibits, and it would be easy to spend most of the day at these two institutions.
They are hard places to visit, and probably best for middle school kids and older, but I wish every American could see them. I would suggest starting with the Legacy Museum. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice is described as a “sacred space for truth-telling and reflection about racial terrorism and its legacy,” and serves as a place to reflect on what is shown in the museum. I saw a man weeping in the middle of the Legacy Museum; you may want to plan on some breaks along the way.
I finished up in Montgomery at the Freedom Rides Museum, which provides an engaging history of the 1961 Freedom Rides, but after my other museum visits, I couldn’t help feeling discouraged by what I learned there. The Supreme Court ruled in 1946 that segregation on interstate buses was unconstitutional, but southern states ignored the ruling. The Freedom Riders endured a bus fire, arrests, and lengthy imprisonments in inhumane conditions just to finally get this 15-year-old ruling enforced.
I asked the tour guide about Diane Nash, whom I recently learned about from the book Love Is Loud by Sandra Neil Wallace. A leader in desegregating Nashville’s lunch counters and organizing the Freedom Rides, Diane is another woman who was key to the success of the civil rights movement, but whose name is not as well-known as many of the men. She continues her activism to this day, and I learned that, while Representative John Lewis agreed to record some of the narration heard in the museum, Diane Nash refused. The museum is run by the state of Alabama, and she didn’t want to support the state government in any way.
I had an AirBnB reserved in Newbern, Alabama, and drove through Selma on my way there. I saw a bridge ahead and realized it was the Edmund Pettus Bridge made famous by the brutal beatings of demonstrators on Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, and by the Selma-to-Montgomery march. I stopped for a photo and walked around the interpretive center there. I had plans to visit the National Voting RightsMuseum and Institute but felt too fried by my day to do much more.
A Black man approached me as I was heading for my car and told me that he had two uncles who were in the 1965 march. They were never bitter, he said, and believed that we are all “99.5% the same.” He and his wife are teachers, and he was selling a newspaper about their work mentoring local kids. He shook his head at the amount of gun violence in his community and the lack of political will to do anything to stop it. I found myself tearing up from all that I had seen that day, and after I bought a paper from him, we hugged at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Summary: Stray dog GoGo follows his nose to a night market in Taipei, filled with stands and carts selling all kinds of delicacies. He eats what he can find, following a rolling watermelon that takes him to a lost young girl sitting under a tree. GoGo encourages the girl to share the fun of the market with him, and there she finds her parents, who greet her with tearful hugs. As GoGo turns to leave, the family calls him back, and just like that, he has a new home. 32 pages; ages 4-8.
Pros: A heartwarming story told with a bouncy rhyme and colorful illustrations that capture the magic of the Taiwanese night market.
Cons: The illustrations feel a little too precise to fully convey the market’s energy.
If you have even a passing interest in children’s literature, sooner or later you’re going to end up in western Massachusetts. A disproportionate number of children’s book authors and illustrators have made their homes here: Micha Archer, Holly Black, Eric Carle, Mike Curato, Tony DiTerlizzi, Mordicai Gerstein, Hollie Hobbie, Norton Juster, Jarrett Krosoczka, Julius Lester, Patricia MacLachlan, Dr. Seuss, Mo Willems, Jane Yolen, and a bunch more. If you want to cross paths with movie stars, go to L.A., but if you want to run into your kid lit favorites, you need go no further west than Amherst.
Start your day at the epicenter, the Eric Carle Museum in Amherst. The film Eric Carle, Picture Writer, shown daily at 11:30, gives a good introduction to the artist’s life and work. From there, you can take in the exhibits, currently featuring Claire A. Nivola, Christian Robinson, Eric Carle in Japan, and the connection between picture books and letter writing. If you’re lucky enough to have some kids with you, enjoy a story time and/or art project, and be sure to visit the bookstore and library. To learn about Carle’s life and art before you go, read The Art of Eric Carle (The World of Eric Carle, 2021).
Inside the Center – no weeding allowed.
The Yiddish Book Center
A logical next step is the Yiddish Book Center, just half a mile away. I learned about the center when I read The Book Rescuer: How a Mensch from Massachusetts Saved Yiddish Literature for Generations to Come by Sue Macy (Paula Wiseman Books, 2019), which gives a history of the center and its founder, Aaron Lansky. It’s a fascinating story, and if you have any interest in Judaism, Yiddish, preserving languages, or archives, you will undoubtedly find much to enjoy here. As a librarian, I tend to weed any collection with ruthless abandon, so this visit made me (briefly) reconsider my minimalist tendencies.
Emily Dickinson Museum
Drive a few miles up the road, and you’ll be in downtown Amherst, home to the main campus of the University of Massachusetts as well as the Emily Dickinson Museum. If you want a guided tour, buy your tickets online in advance (or call to get the teacher discount). You can also wander through the house on your own. If your impression of Emily Dickinson is (as mine was) the reclusive woman dressed all in white, I recommend the guided tour to get a more fleshed-out picture of the poet.
I’d read a few children’s books about Dickinson: On Wings of Words by Jennifer Berne (Chronicle, 2020), a biography that weaves in a lot of Emily’s poetry; Emily and Carlo by Marty Rhodes Figley (Charlesbridge, 2012) about Emily’s relationship with her beloved dog Carlo, and Emily by Michael Bedard (Doubleday, 1992), a historical fiction story told by one of Emily’s young neighbors, and beautifully illustrated by Barbara Cooney. A visit to the museum gift shop led me to discover a few more: Emily Writesby Jane Yolen (Henry Holt, 2020), recounts scenes from Emily’s early childhood and her first attempts at writing and Becoming Emily by Krystyna Poray Goddu (Chicago Review Press, 2019), is a longer biography for older elementary kids and young adults. For child-friendly poetry collections, try Poetry for Young People: Emily Dickinson edited by Frances Schoonmaker Bolin (Sterling, 1994) and Poetry for Kids: Emily Dickinson edited by Susan Snively (MoonDance, 2016).
Friendly fossils
Mammoth discoveries
A two-minute drive or eight-minute walk will get you to the Beneski Museum of Natural History at the University of Massachusetts. You may want to keep your car in downtown Amherst and walk, as campus parking can be a bit of a dicey proposition, especially on weekdays. Museum admission is free. This is a university museum, so kids should be old enough to treat the exhibits with respect, but anyone with an interest in paleontology or geology will find plenty to keep them interested. I’m sure all paleontology fans have their favorite books, so I’ll just mention a few of mine here: Prehistoric Actual Size by Steve Jenkins (Clarion, 2015), Mammoths on the Move by Lisa Wheeler (Clarion, 2006), and the Science Comics entry Dinosaurs: Fossils and Feathers by MK Reed (First Second, 2016)
By the time you’re through the Beneski, you’ll undoubtedly be ready for lunch, dinner, or a snack, so get back in the car and head to Northampton. The E.J. Gare parking garage is centrally located and cheap (the sign at the entrance says it all: “Where the coffee is strong and so are the women…and the first hour in this garage is always free!”). There are plenty of cafes and restaurants in downtown Northampton: Jake’s, Woodstar, and Haymarket are three of my favorites. You’ll exit the garage through Thorne’s which has some good shopping, including coffee and a bookstore.
Right next door to Thorne’s, you’ll find R. Michelson Galleries, which, in my opinion, gives the Eric Carle Museum a run for its money if you want to see original artwork from children’s literature. There’s an abundance of it on display and for sale by such luminaries as Mo Willems, Jason Chin, Carson Ellis, Mark Teague, Emily Arnold McCully, Dr. Seuss, Grace Lin, Brian Pinkney, and Maurice Sendak. It’s an art gallery, so no charge, and be sure to allow yourself plenty of time to take it all in.
Finally, Dr. Seuss fans can drive 25 minutes south to Springfield, where they can visit The Amazing World of Dr. Seuss Museum. With its mix of Seuss-inspired exhibits for kids and Ted Geisel memorabilia, there’s something for everyone. Adult admission is $25, which covers all five of the Springfield museums, featuring art, history, and science. A ten-minute drive gets you to the Zoo in Forest Park, where Ted Geisel’s father worked as Superintendent, which may have inspired Dr. Seuss’s zany animal creations. En route, you can drive past 74 Fairfield Street where young Ted lived. You might recognize the address from the picture book biography, The Boy on Fairfield Street: How Ted Geisel Grew Up to Become Dr. Seuss by Kathleen Krull (Random House, 2004). Be sure to have some actual cash on hand, as the cash-only admission to the park is $3.00 for Massachusetts residents and $5.00 for out-of-staters. There’s an additional fee for the zoo.
A Kids Book A Day 