Monday, October 12, 2015

Lewis Carroll Shelf Award Book List

The Lewis Carroll Shelf Award was given annually from 1958 to 1979 to books deemed to possess enough of the qualities of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll to enable them to sit on the same book shelf.

Check out these books...




1) "The Enormous Egg" by Oliver Butterworth

Nate Twitchell, who is about ten and who lives in Freedom, N. H. where his father edits the Freedom Se describes the great changes that come into his life when a dinosaur is born in one of their chicken coops. The account is necessarily pointed too, for the dinosaur's presence provokes national consequences that don't speak too well for the narrower minded elements in the government. Uncle Beazley, the dinosaur, is gentle as he grows and becomes Nate's dear pet. He naturally rouses the interest of scientists, but more than that, creates a political furor among certain senators who think the public support of something so un-American as a dinosaur is a drag on the economy. They introduce a bill to do away with Uncle Beazley. Though Nate will probably be able to prevent it through a commercialized appeal to popular sympathy, the real triumph comes when he does it through a call to reason and scientific advancement instead. Some very funny pictures by Louis Darling decorate the narrative.






2) "M.C. Higgins, the Great" by Virginia Hamilton

Virginia Hamilton goes home again to the hill country, where Sarah's mountain has belonged to M.C.'s family ("and them to it") ever since an ancestor fleeing slavery settled there with her infant. Now M.C., thirteen, worries about the spoil pile left from strip mining that seems destined to come sliding down on their house, and when "the Dude," an outsider with a tape recorder, arrives to "take" Mama's voice, M.C. imagines that he will also take Mama away to make records -- affording them all a chance to escape the spoil heap despite his Daddy's stubborn refusal to move or to acknowledge the danger. Also arriving with (but not traveling with) the Dude, however, is a lonely but independent girl named Lurhetta, who shakes up M.C.'s confidence, indirectly needles him to rethink his connection with the land and the coming disaster, and shames him into venturing onto the mound of the shunned, "witchy" Killburns, an extended family of red-haired and six-fingered vegetarians. (Significantly, where M.C. proudly surveys the countryside from atop a gleaming 40-foot pole that is exclusively his, the numberless, communally cared for Killburn children toss and climb on a giant web of rope and vine.) Hamilton is at her best here; the soaring but firmly anchored imagery, the slant and music of everyday speech, the rich and engaging characters and warm, tough, wary family relationships, the pervasive awareness of both threat and support connected with the mountain -- all mesh beautifully in theme and structure to create a sense of organic belonging.






3) "Sailing to Cythera" by Nancy Willard

When Anatole finally gets to see the Sun's mother (get it?) he produces for her amusement a Van Houten's cocoa advertisement that unfolds into a magnificent, fairy-tale tea party setting for forty. This sort of breathtaking triumph is managed now and again in the course of three short fantasy voyages that are, for the most part, disturbingly vague. In the first, Anatole and his cat ride a magic train to visit another cat, Pitterpat, who may or may not be residing in animal heaven (she's just gotten her ""ninth skin"" which lasts ""forever""). The second story concerns a Norwegian soldier who has ""lost"" thirty years, but when he does get his memory back the tale ends without our learning what he did all that time. Only the third Anatole adventure really makes sense -- with all the articles his grandmother has lost turning up in the possession of the agreeable Blimlin monster and the French masqueraders on their way to Cytherea later found decorating grandmother's fancy wallpaper. This third chapter alone may make Anatole a worthwhile acquaintance -- but parents who lack the imagination to fill all the gaps Willard leaves open might just think he's more trouble than he's worth.



4) "Abel's Island" by William Steig

Early in August of 1907 newlywed mice Abel and Amanda are enjoying a genteel picnic when "it" is so inconsiderate as to storm. Abel, who leaves their shelter to retrieve his wife's blown-away scarf, doesn't return for a year, as he is swept off to an uninhabited island where, for the first time in his life, survival requires hard work and straggle. Though preoccupied at first with efforts to escape, Abel eventually settles in on the island: rediscovering his teeth as a primitive tool (but, disarmingly, using his pen knife to escape an owl's homy clutches), making clay statues of his loved ones, holing up in a hollow log during the wretched winter, passing better times with a large book he finds on the shore (though, by spring, he's glad to finish it because "what was happening around him was a lot more exciting"), and visiting for a while with a passing frog of abstracted mentality and crude ways which both impress and disgust the wellbred mouse. It is the frog who suggests that in his statues Abel has "found your vocation"--a remark that nicely focuses the trying experience's value for Abel. Steig, almost insidiously, wins you at once to this pampered, untried mouse, and then you grow along with him as he makes himself fit for the world.





5) "Slake's Limbo: 121 Days" by Felice Holman

Aremis Slake is a poor, picked on, beaten-down, beat-up motherless child. When he's squeezed off the streets of his neighborhood by boys tougher than he, Slake takes refuge in a cavelike storage room that opens onto the subway tracks and, having reached the bottom, begins, for the first time, to build a life. Slake's strategems for sustaining life -- in his case there's not much to sustain -- are simple: he resells abandoned newspapers, earns daily breakfast at the luncheonette because he can ""sweep good,"" and furnishes his hole in the wall with the rewards of diligent scavanging. Unknown to Slake, his survival has a larger meaning: it gives subway motorman Willis Joe Whinny, who dreams as he drives that he is herding sheep in Australia, a chance to rejoin humanity by carrying a ragged Slake out of the subway tunnel. And Slake, by losing his first real home, finds a common bond with the rest of the world -- ""But was the soul of Aremis Slake in the tomb? Slake thought not. . . . Life everlasting, thought Slake as he fell asleep above ground."" Holman peers down at Slake with a kind of canny, reverential omniscience that will be perhaps more impressive to those who haven't read Vonnegut (and presumably at this age level there are still some who haven't). Comparisons aside, Slake's grubby litany, ""To run; to sweep; to see! What else!"" is still different enough to be bracing. All he needs is a chance -- what else?



6) "Tuck Everlasting" by Natalie Babbitt

At a time when death has become an acceptable, even voguish subject in children's fiction, Natalie Babbitt comes through with a stylistic gem about living forever. Protected Winnie, the ten-year-old heroine, is not immortal, but when she comes upon young Jesse Tuck drinking from a secret spring in her parents' woods, she finds herself involved with a family who, having innocently drunk the same water some 87 years earlier, haven't aged a moment since. Though the mood is delicate, there is no lack of action, with the Tucks (previously suspected of witchcraft) now pursued for kidnapping Winnie; Mae Tuck, the middle aged mother, striking and killing a stranger who is onto their secret and would sell the water; and Winnie taking Mae's place in prison so that the Tucks can get away before she is hanged from the neck until....? Though Babbitt makes the family a sad one, most of their reasons for discontent are circumstantial and there isn't a great deal of wisdom to be gleaned from their fate or Winnie's decision not to share it. However the compelling fitness of theme and event and the apt but unexpected imagery (the opening sentences compare the first week in August when this takes place to "the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning") help to justify the extravagant early assertion that had the secret about to be revealed been known at the time of the action, the very earth "would have trembled on its axis like a beetle on a pin."









7) "The Island of the Grass King" by Nancy Willard

Anatole, the little hero of Sailing to Cythera (1975), now rides a winged horse to the island of Sycorax, seeking fennel from the crown of the King of the Grass to treat his grandmother's asthma. The quest turns into a rather arbitrary treasure hunt, as Anatole is aided by the Keeper of the Roads, imprisoned in the Kingdom of the Dogs, directed to Mother Weather-sky's garden, and then, before he gets there, sent instead and in turn to the Four Winds and The Mender and the wild boar who can read the book of invisible spells. Accompanying Anatole on his adventure are his cat Plumpet and--another whimsical touch--his grandmother's coffeepot Quicksilver, which runs along on its little legs; and they pick up two companions en route: a seven-foot rabbit with a wooden leg who is really an enchanted pirate, and a glass girl with a whistle for a heart who turns out to be the enchanted daughter of the King and Queen of the Grass. Willard conjures up some effective images: a field full of ships' figureheads standing in the sand with their eyes raised to heaven; the Mender herself, a young woman in a robe of dried leaves who sorts and stitches claws, horns, birds' wings, and skins to the light of candles held by snakes. But her wonders are mere fanciful imaginings, fine decorations that fit no scheme, and thus grow tiresome.



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