children's literature

Beastly Boy

By Lisa Brown

Fall 2019

On the wall of my living room is a drawing by the late artist Tomi Ungerer. It’s of a bearded man in medieval garb clutching a book and an enormous knife. He’s grinning wickedly at a child screaming in a boiling cauldron, heated by a pile of burning books. The piece is for the cover of a children’s-book exhibition catalog from 1965.

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What the Bear Doesn’t Know

By Garret Keizer, Illustrations by Lorraine Nam

Fall 2019

Our daughter talked early and walked late and was a lover of books even before she could talk. So it is not always easy to reconstruct the chronology of her enthusiasms for the stories we read to her and the make-believe they inspired, especially now that she is a few years older than her mother and I were at her birth. The difficulty has not deterred us: “Storytime” has become a story in itself for our family, a mythology all our own, though the telling calls up emotions any aging parent might claim.

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The Abuses of Enchantment

By Shelley Puhak, Illustrations by Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo

Fall 2019

“Once upon a time, in a faraway land across the big sea, there was a very old city,” the old man with the very thick glasses said in his very thick accent. “It bordered on some woods and there, in a little house close to them, many many years ago, a boy was born.”

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