This piece ran as an Op-ed in the Bangor Daily News on May 12, 2013.  

When Sandy Hook Elementary was rocked by violence on an otherwise ordinary Friday in December, my mind, like that of millions of other parents, flew to my kids’ school.  I pictured the shooter in their hallways, threatening their classrooms.  And though this was impossibly painful, what was not impossible was imagining their teachers, administrators, even bus drivers, hearing shots and running not away to safety, but toward the shooter to protect the kids–my kids.

That part was easy to imagine, because I see those educators every day.

My kids, 13 and 11, are literate and numerate.  They are accomplished musicians.  They have plenty of friends.  They are resilient, tough, and unafraid of difference.  Since kindergarten they have shared classrooms, recess, field trips, concerts, and gym class with kids who have a wild spectrum of diverse abilities and opportunities.

And while my husband and I supplement their education where we can, our children owe their accomplishments to public school.

Maybe you are not in touch with public schools at the moment.  Maybe you are at a place in life where you only hear about skyrocketing costs, stubborn unions, plummeting test scores.  Maybe you have missed the street-level successes: students who excel in classes, sports, and the arts, thanks to devoted teachers who volunteer their weekends to coach the math team or the honors chorus, who keep track of birthdays and food allergies; who pour their heart and soul into educating other people’s children.

They don’t do it for the money.

I went to private school myself.  And while I got a world-class education, I don’t read a note of music.  I never met someone with any sort of learning difference until I was an adult–none need apply, thank you.

My kids ride a bus to school that stops in front of trailer parks and lakefront estates.  Some of their friends take a Caribbean vacation every winter.  Some have never been on an airplane.  And while this registers with my kids, it registers without judgement.

I believe passionately in this grandiose undertaking that is so wildly American: the U.S. public school system.  We were the first country to say, YES! We will educate EVERYBODY.  Implementation is imperfect, of course, and there is always work to do, but don’t you love the OPTIMISM of this giant, generous experiment?  Americans have a history of aiming for impossibly high goals.  Do we always reach them?  Of course not.  But isn’t it wonderful that we try?

I write today to testify that it is still worth it; that our schools are something every American should be proud of, even while we fight to make them better.

It’s budget season, and though my kids are thriving, their school is in trouble.  Financial turmoil ignited by the Recession and Federal Sequester is rippling through the State of Maine, tearing into programs and services, settling on small towns whose property taxpayers carry the heaviest burden for essential services: fire department, police department, and our little school.  Music, art, enrichment, and wellness programs are threatened, and I can’t stand by.  I am working to find a solution that will preserve the fragile magic in those brick walls.  Cut nothing and the taxpayers reject school funding.  Cut too much and the life-force drains out.

The fight to protect our schools is mostly pretty dull, a war of spreadsheets.  In this writing I am looking up from columns of numbers to keep my eyes on the prize.

Because when I think about challenges facing our world: war, violence, poverty, the destruction of the planet; I see only one possible path out, and that path is education.  And while I am grateful for my own private education at a school where the elite will always be able to pay to play, the solution does not lie there.  It lies in the vast, messy, work-in-progress that is the American Public School System.

I can’t fix the whole system.  But here is what I can do: I can put my treasure there.  I entrust my children to public school. Where they go, so do my time, energy, and resources.  I fight to fund their programs.  I volunteer.  I bring chocolate to their teachers.  I donate books.  I know their friends.

You can’t fix the whole system either, but here is what you can do: when faced with voting choices, remember that in each of a hundred-thousand public schools across this country sit the treasures of a nation, and that our future is in their hands.  Public schools aren’t perfect, but they are our best hope.  We need to trust them, fix them, FUND them so they can tackle the monumental job before them.

Educating children is not for the faint of heart.  Setting out to educate them ALL is an act of breathtaking courage.

Dedicated to the faculty at Great Salt Bay Community School in Damariscotta, Maine, who teach my children with skill, passion, patience, and love.

It has been a long winter here in Maine.

In January my 13-year-old daughter had the flu.  Her fever spiked over 102, and she wouldn’t eat anything.  As I tried futilely to feed her ice chips on the couch, I pleaded, “Is there ANYTHING I can do that would help?”

She looked at me with those glazed eyes and flushed cheeks, and murmured, “Can you get the Harry Potter CDs from the library?”

Really?  Again?

What’s a mother to do?  I went and picked up Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.  I put disc 1 in the CD player, and pushed play.

And with that touch of a button, we are transported.

“Chapter One: The Boy Who Lived…”  

For her remaining convalescence the portable CD player traveled around the house: couch to bed to bath; the familiar voice of Jim Dale a balm to what ailed her.

Now, we have listened to these CDs at least half a dozen times already.  If you count my reading them aloud and the kids each reading the books to themselves, we are getting to the point where we can all practically recite them chapter and verse.

And yet.  I stand transfixed in the kitchen, spatula in my hand, forgetting all about dinner.  My son creeps into the kitchen with his math book to listen too.

I love being read to.  For me it is a great luxury, like having someone massage my feet.  Easy access to audio books has been one of the great leaps forward in my lifetime: CDs, iPods, downloads: there is as much audio at our fingertips as anyone could want.  My children have access to limitless read-aloud possibilities, and what do they choose?  The familiar.  The voice of Jim Dale soothes everything, from the flu to the slings and arrows of middle school social life.

As a child I owned two audio books.  We called them records back then: Charlotte’s Web, and The Trumpet of the Swan, both read by EB White himself.  Each had over a dozen vinyl records and weighted about 5 pounds.  Those records were a huge indulgence, and two of my greatest treasures.  I knew them by heart.

When I was ten and eleven I got terrible headaches after school.  On those afternoons I would take an aspirin, turn on the record player, and slip out Record 1 from the 17-record boxed set of The Trumpet of the Swan.  I would place the needle in the groove and listen to the brief static, then the gravely, comforting voice of E. B. White.  I would lie on the couch with a cool washcloth on my forehead, eating Dannon coffee yogurt.  It was still the height of luxury, even if I did have to get up to flip the record every 23 minutes.

So when my kids return again and again to Jim Dale’s Harry Potter, I get it.  I understand that a familiar voice reading a beloved story is like soup made by your own mother; the most comforting of comfort food.

Jim Dale has read us through another winter: cooking dinner, folding laundry and a few math problem sets.  He has accompanied us on road trips and to the last swim meets of the season.  Now it is April, and we have nearly made it through the entire series.  Before the daffodils bloom we will have solved the mysteries of Hallows and Horcruxes yet again.

But we no longer listen for the mysteries.  We all know how the series ends.  What holds our attention, what brings us up short, laughing and tearing up in turns, is the familiar, fantastical world: the house elves and quiddich matches, the taste of butterbeer, the Weasley twins’ banter, learning to banish a boggart.  Like Wilbur’s barn was for me, Hogwarts is a little haven where my kids escape at will.

What a gift. 

The line between teen and adult fiction has always been blurry.  Hot Young Adult titles like The Hunger Games are as popular with women in their 30s and 40s as they are with actual teens.  And teens certainly devour adult fiction.  Most popular at my library are spy thrillers, mysteries, and science fiction, with occasional classics: Jane Austen, Dickens, Jules Verne, etc. thrown in.

Every year the American Library Association designates the Alex Awards, for adult fiction with high interest to teens.  I can’t help wondering: do teens actually read these books?

I decided to try out a recent Alex Award winner.

I chose Tell the Wolves I’m Home because the blurb said it was about girls growing up in Westchester County in the 1980s.  Hey!  I grew up in Westchester County in the 1980s!  And, in fact, there were descriptions in this book: the smell of the woods in spring, taking the train into New York City, the fabulous popularity of Annie on Broadway, that did take me back to my childhood.

This book is the story of the deep bond between 15-year old June and her Uncle Finn, a well-known New York artist.  Unlike her sister Greta, who is thin and talented and popular, June is awkward and lonely.  Finn is her best friend, and he takes her places: the Cloisters, art galleries, New York restaurants.  He accepts June, understands her eccentricities, makes her feel like a whole person rather than just a lumpy, awkward younger sister.  When Finn dies of AIDS (this isn’t really a spoiler since it happens in the first 20 pages of the book), June is bereft, with a hole in her heart she feels will never be filled.  She longs for a piece of him: to hear his voice, catch a whiff of his scent, drink tea from his favorite Russian teapot.

Then one day, soon after Finn’s funeral, a package arrives for June.  In the package, incredibly, is that very teapot–Finn’s Russian teapot!–and a note from Finn’s partner Toby, the man June’s family blames for Finn’s AIDS.  Even though Toby lives in Finn’s apartment, June has never met him because her family refuses to acknowledge the relationship.  In his note Toby asks June to meet him, and although this is forbidden, June can’t help herself.  Toby has pieces of Finn: his paintings, his clothes, memories and stories June is hungry for.  She agrees to meet him, and June and Toby strike up an unlikely friendship.  It is this friendship–secret meetings, coded correspondence, and June’s duplicity–that is the backbone of this novel.

Tell the Wolves I’m Home is a sad, nostalgic walk through suburban New York in the 1980s.  It’s a good book.  I enjoyed it.

But what I found most interesting is how totally unappealing it would be to actual teens.

I have no scientific confirmation of this: I have not found a teen who would review it for me.  But I do know something about teen readers.  This book has a distant feeling, like a 40-year old remembering her childhood.  Fair enough.  I imagine that I–child of the 80s myself–am the intended demographic, and this book worked for me.

Why wouldn’t it work for teens?

This book lacks the urgency of being a teenager right now: the driving hormones, the chafing against infuriating limitations of adolescence, the overwhelming wanting that is inescapable at that age (I need to take the car!  I’ll never get into college!  My god, he’s a vampire!  Why doesn’t he call?).  It is the difference between being IN the moment, and observing that moment through the wrong end of a telescope.  I think that genuine teen fiction needs to be not only about teens, but told from the shoes–the fashion-conscious, hormone-sweaty shoes–of teens themselves.

I really enjoyed Tell the Wolves I’m Home.  It would make a great Book Group read.  But it is an adult book about a teenager, not an actual teen book.

If I were on the Caldecott Committee,

Lovabye Dragon by Barbara Joosse.

This is the story of a girl who lives in a castle and longs for a dragon, and a dragon who lives outside and longs for a girl.

This lovely book sends shivers up my spine every time I read it, because of language like this:

“I am here!” roared Dragon.

“You’re a dear!” whispered girl.

“I found you!” roared dragon.

“As I wished,” whispered girl.

Now they’ve found each other

and found out about each other

so they marched and they sang

all the live-long day.

This unconventional rhyming echos AA Milne’s poems in Now We Are Six, and is absolutely delicious to read aloud.

I also love it because it is a princess book with dignity.  This is a book about a girl who takes care of her own needs, and isn’t afraid of dragons.

The illustrations by Randy Cecil are dreamy and perfect for young children’s fantasy: the dragon is imposing but not scary, the girl wears a lovely dress suitable for a girl living in a castle, but she has SPUNK in her every posture.   I think I might just go read it again.

Perfect for a gift for kids aged 0-4, especially–but not exclusively–girls.

I read Sleep Like a Tiger

This book transports readers to a peaceful, sleepy place.  It is subtle.  I did not appreciate its brilliance until I read it aloud, slowly, to a group of transfixed young children.

A girl cannot sleep.  Fine, say her parents, but you will need to get your pajamas on and brush your teeth.  But I still can’t sleep, declares the girl.  You can sense the panic in those first few pages.  I remember that panic from my own sleep-deprived years with young children.  But the girl’s parents do not panic.  Instead they describe how various animals sleep: bats, and whales, and finally, the tiger in the jungle.  As the animals drift off to sleep the girl’s panic evaporates into a feeling of deep peace.

It is the magical illustrations by Pamela Zagarenski that set this book apart from other bedtime books.  Her paintings are deeply layered and invoke a dreamy, other-worldly place.   The girl’s toys are appealingly old-fashioned, and reflect the sleeping animals in the text.  An otter and a whale float on the girl’s blue quilt as if it were the ocean.  There is a recurring teapot and cup.  The family wears crowns.  The dreamy quality of these pictures will gently lead the most agitated child to a peaceful place.

What parent of a young child doesn’t long for a magical book to help their child sleep?  Sleep Like a Tiger may be just what you need.

Recommended for boys and girls 2-5, especially the wakeful ones.

I had dangerously high expectations when I picked up this book.

High expectations sometimes set me up for disappointment, but not this time.  Out of Nowhere is a terrific book.

Tom Bouchard is a high school senior in Enniston Maine, and the world is his oyster.  Captain of the soccer team, great student, popular, Tom is ready to coast through senior year.  But then a couple of recently-emigrated Somali refugees join the soccer team, and nothing turns out the way Tom expected.  For starters, the team starts winning games against teams they have never beaten before.  These new guys can play.  But they are also not like American teenagers.  Their English isn’t so great, their sisters wear head scarves, and they fast on Ramadan.  Which happens to fall in the middle of soccer season.

Tom would like to take the winning part, and ignore the other complexities of having African Muslim immigrants on his team, but it turns out to be not so simple.  As penance  for a prank gone awry, Tom winds up tutoring a younger Somali boy at an after school center.  Then he steps in to defend teammate Saeed when an opposing team accuses him of being too old to be eligible for high school soccer.  When the Enniston Mayor writes a letter to the local paper asking that no more Somalis come to town, Tom can no longer stand on the sidelines, and finds himself surprisingly central to events that follow.

The subject of Somali immigration in Maine is complex, and writing about it in a way that does not feel like a sociology paper is no easy task.  Padian accomplishes this with skillful plot development and nuanced writing.

Tom’s voice is authentic and likable.  He cares about girls and being cool, and he doesn’t always make the best choices.  Of course, this makes us root for him all the more when he jumps in as a force for good.

The soccer team is the perfect device to foster cross-cultural harmony.  Why would a popular 18-year old boy get involved with a bunch of destitute Somali refugees in the first place?  Because they sleep, eat, and breathe soccer.  The fact that real friendships develop, that Tom learns to respect his new friends’ religious devotion and care about their future, that comes later.  It all starts with winning.

Tom’s Aunt Maddie, an educated liberal activist, and his Uncle Paul, a blue-collar Rebublican, are particularly effective as a sort of dual Greek chorus, representing opposing political reactions to the Somali influx in Enniston.  Aunt Maddie calls for unity and support for the new neighbors, while Paul believes these immigrants drain resources from long-term, tax-paying, English-speaking Enniston residents.  Tom loves both his uncle and his aunt, and refuses to take sides in the political debate.

Until he no longer has a choice.

Out of Nowhere kept me up reading late into the night.  A lot happens in this effective, compelling book that is as much about becoming a man as it is about cross-cultural friendship.

Highly recommended for teens 13 and up and adults (lots of bad language and a little substance use in this book, but nothing too shocking).

And like in his previous book, the penalty for stealing the hat of a fellow creature is getting eaten.

Now, getting eaten may be funny for older kids, who do eventually develop a macabre sense of humor and a little bit of detachment from cartoon protaganists.  This happens around age 6 and 7, and is especially present in boys.

But how about for the 3-year-old set, whom this book is presumably written for?  Clearly the Caldecott Committee has not spent so much time with them lately, but as a person who runs 3 story hours a week with real, live children, let me send a memo: getting eaten is not so funny when you are three.

I love picture books: I love opening shiny new ones, repairing well-loved old ones with binding tape and glue.  I love reading them aloud, with voices.  I love lingering over them to allow pictures to add as much plot as words.  I love it when kids are so excited about a book that they want to touch the pages, and as soon as we reach the end, call “again again,” pick up the book and put it back in my hands. There are so many wonderful picture books out there.  I just wish some of the kinder, gentler ones would be rewarded with prestigious medals.

Dark, creepy, and sad are not the qualities that I see being demanded, read and re-read by preschoolers.  How come the award committees seem to love them so much?

One for the Murphys is the story of Carley

Carley has been through terrible things.  She has a right to be angry, and angry she is–at everyone and everything: her mother, her stepfather, her new house, her new school, and this new family that seems too perfect to be real.

But real they turn out to be.  The Murphys actually ARE a loving family who manage to keep forgiving Carley for her anger and mistakes, who keep trusting her even though Carley is certain she doesn’t deserve it.  Mrs. Murphy is especially hard to shake.  A stay-at-home mom raising three boys, Mrs. Murphy has a soft spot for her nearly-teenaged foster child.  She buys Carley her first new clothes and cooks her special meals; she treats Carley like the daughter she never had.

Carley wants none of it.  She doesn’t trust this kindness, this generosity of complete strangers.  Why should these people take care of her, something her own mother can’t even seem to do?

The Murphys are undeterred by Carley’s mistrust.  They keep treating her like their own child: they show up on time, get her off to school, stand up for her when things go badly, help her fix her mistakes.

In this inspiring book, love and kindness CAN conquer pain, fear, and suspicion.  Carley thaws: she warms to the little Murphy boys, she helps wash the dishes, she confides in Mrs. Murphy, she makes a friend at school.  Carley has a compelling voice: we can understand her anger, and her conflicted feelings about her mother, and yet we feel relieved when the Murphys begin to win her over.  We WANT Carley to have a family, and we believe in this one.

Then, just when things are going pretty well with the Murphys, Carley’s mother is released from the hospital.

Now what?

I found this book thoroughly engaging.  It was hard to put down, and I rooted for Carley, and for Mrs. Murphy, all the way.  This book is a hymn to motherhood, to the transformational power of cupcakes, clean clothes, and showing up on time.   I was a stay home mom for seven years, and even now I work part time so I can be available for carpool and sick days.  I DO believe in motherhood.  I read this book in a rush, and it made me happy.

And then.

 The next morning something started to tickle my inner feminist.

What about all the kids who don’t have a mom like Mrs. Murphy?  Can they be rescued, too?  I know they can.  I know there are many kinds of families; many paths to raising happy, healthy children.

I hope that young readers come away from this book knowing that loving, stay-at-home moms who stay up late cooking, cleaning, and ironing can raise trusting, strong, capable kids.

I just hope they don’t think those are the ONLY people who can.

Recommended for girls ages 9-13.

After all, great kids’ books are really just great books, and just as enjoyable for adults as they are for children.  I give you Twelve Kinds of Ice, one of my favorite books of 2012: this will give you goosebumps–the good kind–whether you are 8 or 88.

In the words of Madeleine L’Engle, “Provided the story is good, nothing is too difficult for children.”  And yet, so many children’s authors condescend; they write books they imagine children want to hear, instead of great stories that all of us want to hear, but that happen to be about children (or robots, or wizards, or talking animals).  Maybe children’s books have fewer words, more pictures, and younger characters, but they should still compel a reader.  I love to feel that hum of great fiction, of being transported, of deepening empathy as a book progresses.  Those qualities SHOULD be there in great children’s books as well as great adult books.

But it is rarer.  I believe it is harder, since by the time most writers have the wherewithal to publish a book, they have forgotten what it’s like to be a child.

It is harder, but not impossible.  The truly great authors of books for children: C.S. Lewis, Madeleine L’Engle, E.L. Konigsburg, J.K Rowling, to name a few, are great because they never condescend.  Their heroes may be young, but their ideas are ageless.

To recognize great children’s books, to not get lulled into lowering the bar, I turn to great fiction for adults.  It helps me retool and keep sharp.  In that spirit (and after reading a couple of mind-numbing chapter books I don’t even want to talk about) I recently picked up State of Wonder by Ann Patchett.  What a delight.

This book is the story of Marina, a research doctor working on pharmaceutical development in Minnesota.  The large drug company that employs her has an interest in medicine being developed from plants native to the Amazon, and Marina’s colleague, Anders Eckman, travels to Brazil to check on the research and do a little bird watching on the side.  The trip seems innocent enough, if longer than expected, until Marina gets an air-mail letter reporting that Anders has died of a fever.  Marina steps in to offer support to Anders’ wife, and ends up traveling to the Amazon herself to look for answers about how he died.

The trip is nothing like she expects.

There are so may things to love about this book I hardly know where to start.  Characters surprise you, the Amazon surprises you.  Marina, who is plenty appealing, turns out to be not only likable, but STRONG.  We travel from Minnesota to Manaus, a gritty, impenetrable river town in Brazil, to the secret research facility deep in the Amazon, and every place is palpably real.  This novel has a terrific array of personalities, a tight, fast-moving plot, mystery, complexity, AND it transported me from Maine in midwinter to an exotic, tropical place.  What more could you ask for?

State of Wonder hums.  It will transport you like a good book should.

Now, back to the talking animals and robots.

An old friend died unexpectedly this week.

Diane Wolkstein was a world-renowned storyteller and collector of folklore, who traveled the world recording, and performing stories for nearly 50 years.  When she had a sudden heart attack this week she was in Taiwan studying the Chinese legend of The Monkey King.  In thinking about Diane over the last few days it strikes me that though it has been many years since I have seen her, she had a profound influence on my life.  Let me tell you the story; Diane would like it that way.

When I was a young child we sometimes visited Diane’s family in their New York apartment.  Her daughter Rachel is my age, and we would play while our parents talked.  I was a suburban kid, fascinated by Manahattan life: the efficiency of a small apartment, the intimacy of neighbors.  The place seemed warm and fascinating, and smelled vaguely of exotic spices.  At the end of one visit when I was about five, Diane reached under her couch and pulled out a package for me.  It was a bright yellow plastic tape player, with a handle that could be easily carried by a young child.  That tape player was just like that lower Manhattan apartment: colorful, compact, full of possibility.  With the player came a tape of Diane herself performing Mouse Tales by Arnold Lobel.

I was an only child, and lonely.  I hadn’t yet learned to read on my own.  My mother read to me daily, but I always wanted more.  Diane’s gift of the tape recorder, and that tape-eventually worn to ribbons-set me free into a world of story and a lifelong love of storytelling.

I can still hear her voice, so passionate and dynamic that no one would dare doubt that this story–even one about very small mice accomplishing very small tasks–is IMPORTANT.

Diane understood the power of story: to capture the imagination, to influence how people relate to the world.  She never lost faith in that power, and over the decades she shared that magic with thousands of people–including me.

When I became a children’s librarian, most of the people in my life were quite surprised: I am neither quiet nor organized, and librarian seemed an unassuming occupation for a person who has a very hard time keeping opinions to herself.  But I know that there is nothing diminutive or unassuming about the magic of stories; and that the job of unlocking this magic to children, well, that is the best job in the world.  I am no Diane Wolkstein, but when I read stories to children, I read them with conviction–like these stories MATTER.  Because they really and truly do.

Diane taught me that.