{"id":28298,"date":"2019-01-25T08:00:17","date_gmt":"2019-01-25T13:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=28298"},"modified":"2019-01-25T08:00:17","modified_gmt":"2019-01-25T13:00:17","slug":"every-good-book-is-at-least-a-little-bit-strange","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=28298","title":{"rendered":"“Every Good Book Is at Least a Little Bit Strange”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week I chronicled the fun that our children\u2019s booksellers had with a table full of picture book samples<\/a>, and there were\u00a0so many stand-out picks there that we can’t wait to sell. But as a children’s bookseller, one of the\u00a0titles that particularly stood out was Mac Barnett and Sarah Jacoby\u2019s\u00a0The Important Thing About Margaret Wise Brown<\/em>.
\nAs we dip and weave through Margaret Wise Brown\u2019s life, landing on small but illuminating moments on each page, a woman with pragmatic sensibilities, off-kilter idiosyncrasies, childlike wonder, an uncommon affinity for rabbits, and maybe even a dash of ambition comes into focus. Winningly odd and childlike in scope, it boils the life of this vibrant literary giant down into 42 pages\u2014one for each year of her life\u2014while very specifically not trying too hard to fit the entirety of that life into these pages at all.
\n
\nWhile we are certainly in a wonderful boom time for the children\u2019s biography, they are notoriously hard to do well for the 4-8 audience. The trick lies in somehow situating an adult subject’s life within an authentically childlike scope or field of interest. What are children interested in, you ask? Well, they like to know what kinds of pets famous authors have. They like to think about why adults would do things like swim naked in cold water or buy out a flower cart to throw a party or have tea on the steps of a library. They like to wonder what it would be like to do those things too. And they wonder if those are the important bits about a person, or whether it\u2019s something else entirely. Most importantly, while they think about things like that, they like to be treated seriously as curious humans trying to understand more about their world. Luckily, that\u2019s exactly what this book does and exactly how it manages to get this profile so right.
\nBy acknowledging that the best stories from people’s lives don’t always make sense and that stories don\u2019t need to make sense to be true, it reminds us that children\u2019s books\u2014even (or especially) the ones about \u201cimportant\u201d things\u2014should spark curiosity, wonder, laughter, or even a little bit of ambition in their pint-sized audiences. Well, and that everything’s better with rabbits. It also\u00a0encourages readers of all ages to decide what’s important\u2014whether in books or in life\u2014for ourselves,\u00a0because maybe, just maybe, that’s the only way to make sense of anything at all.
\n\"\"<\/a>Although she makes a small appearance at the end,\u00a0kids won’t know who Ursula Nordstrom was and probably won’t care that much about why she was important. But this book\u2019s experiential, childlike, rabbit-filled\u00a0ode to\u00a0one of that famed editor’s most beloved authors feels worthy of their shared quest to\u00a0make books that reflect and respect what it feels like to be a child in the world. So seeing these two ladies cheerfully taking their tea on the steps of the New York Public Library, defying tradition and stodgy views about what makes a book (or a person) important, is both deeply satisfying and simply delightful on many levels.
\nDoes this all sound a little\u00a0unconventional for a biography on such an important writer? Well, sure. But after all, as Mac Barnett reminds us in these pages, \u201cEvery good book is at least a little bit strange.\u201d And that’s a sentiment with which I heartily agree.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Making room for big ideas in an inspired picture book biography of Margaret Wise Brown.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28298\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}