One of my favorite children’s authors, Sara Pennypacker, stopped by the store this week, and while she was signing stock, my coworker Mack and I had a wonderful chat with her. We were talking about the absence of parents in so many book for kids ages 7 and above. Pennypacker said she quite deliberately made a very different decision in her much-loved Clementine series. She believed that the only way that the character Clementine could be the strong, confident, bold (and might we even say reckless—but isn’t that was childhood is for?) girl she is, she had to have the solidity of a loving, functional family supporting her. Pennypacker believes that nothing else would have made sense logically.
As she explained, when one or both parents are dead, you are always worrying about the character a bit, and that fear is the start of a very strong bond between the reader and the character. Giving Clementine two interesting, functional (albeit human) parents, the challenge for Pennypacker was to create a strong bond between the reader and Clementine without resorting to the easy answer of making us fearful on her behalf. And she achieves it brilliantly—but now I’ll have to go back and reread the series and figure out how!
Of course, Pennypacker made a different choice in her new book, Summer of the Gypsy Moths—she did “kill off” a parental figure or two. (If you haven’t read Gypsy Moths yet, you really must!) And during our conversation, Pennypacker also made reference to what she had done in Stuart’s Cape. I kept smiling and nodding (now nervously), while I madly racked my brain to figure out if I’d ever heard of Stuart’s Cape, or had I misheard, or perhaps it was a book by another writer??? You probably know that panicked feeling that embarrassment and mortification are just around the corner (not that Sara Pennypacker would have put me on the spot in any way—I assure you she was absolutely gracious and lovely). But as soon as we’d seen her on her way and put away the books and pens and stickers, I dashed to the computer and Googled "Stuart’s Cape"!
It turns out that before Clementine and Summer of the Gypsy Moths, Pennypacker wrote a series of books about character named Stuart: The Amazing World of Stuart, Stuart Goes to School, and Stuart’s Cape. Right away I got hold of a copy of Stuart’s Cape, and I enjoyed it very much. It’s about a boy who is about to start at a new school, and he’s bored and badly in need of distraction to take his mind off his worries. He realizes that people with capes have lives full of adventure, so he makes a cape out of old ties and a purple sock, and immediately things get more interesting. He discovers he can fly after eating some angel food cake; he is visited by a talking dinosaur, horse, and gorilla; and he grows toast from a seed (my favorite part!). In the end he makes an unlikely friend, which is what he really needed all along. It’s imaginative and fun, and there’s not a parent in sight!
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One last thing regarding children and reading, from the Persephone Letter, October 22, 2012:
“The Guardian ran a piece telling us that scientists have found ‘that the more mental stimulation a child gets around the age of four, the more developed the parts of their brains dedicated to language and cognition will be in the decades ahead’ ie. that four is a simply crucial age. No surprises there, most parents sense this intuitively, but it’s fascinating to read the scientific proof.”
See the original Persephone Letter at http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/persephoneletter/22-october-2012/, and scroll down to the bottom.
Lynn
Women & Children First
Chicago
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