CET Writes

Image from amazon.com Transitioning gracefully from fact to myth and back again, Kellogg’s take on the remarkable life and Johnny Appleseed legend which grew up around John Chapman is an attractive introduction to one of America’s first folk heroes. Hewing close to reality with a linear but episodic narrative, the tale of the most famous nurseryman in the United States is simplified for young audiences and presents as fact not only verifiable details of Chapman’s life but also a handful of digressions into possible but improbable occurrences. Among these is his victory in an impromptu tree-chopping contest which reaches into nigh-surreality when aided by the wordless full-bleed opening showing a legion of woodsmen in an axe-wielding frenzy. Beyond such direct embellishment of the tale, Kellogg’s densely textured art creates a frontier that, if not quite Disney-fied, certainly contains vastly more smiling woodland creatures in picturesque vistas and far fewer instances of hardship...

Image from amazon.com In three parallel strands, Yolen’s near-poetic prose relates the tall tale, the history, and the bare facts of the life of John Chapman, who even in his lifetime was better known as Johnny Appleseed. Simply and rigidly organized, each opening presents a full-bleed, double-page spread, a new verse to a continuing song, a dramatized portion of Chapman’s history, and a briefly stated fact. The five-line song stanzas each end with the refrain “Johnny, Johnny Appleseed,” and serve as the conduit for the traditional tale, albeit in a soft-focus, generalized style without any mention of the specific outlandish acts of derring-do that make the Johnny Appleseed stories so compelling to many. Grouped in a apple-bordered, ragged-edged cartouche with each verse is an entry titled “The History,” which together comprise the bulk of the text, telling the story of Chapman’s life in a narrative which is factual but embellished with unknowable details to round out the tale. D...

The second of four children in a Ojibwa family on the shores of Lake Superior, eight-year-old Omakayas--Little Frog--despises her obnoxious little brother, idolizes her older sister, and adores the new baby. As the family progresses from their birchbark-clad shoreline summer wigwam to their winter village cabin, camping with cousins to make sugar and gather rice along the way, Erdrich primarily follows the protagonist’s struggles and adventures, both internal and external. The text, which is liberally peppered with Ojibwa words and phrases even going so far as to reintroduce the familiar moccasins as  makazins , thoughtfully includes a glossary with pronunciation guide after the last chapter as well as a map of the family’s travels printed on the endpages. The daily work of carving a living from the land is central to the action, including anecdotal descriptions of the tasks necessary to keep Omakayas’ family and clan going such as hide tanning, icefishing, maize farming, an...

Wilder’s  Little House in the Big Woods  is the first book of her series that has come to be known as the “Little House books.”  The story, which is a year in the life of the author who is four years old at the book’s opening, is set in 1871 and mainly occurs in a little log cabin on the edge of the Big Woods of Wisconsin where the protagonist lives with Ma, Pa, her older sister Mary, and her baby sister Carrie.  The intricate black and white line art of Garth Williams and  the green and white gingham endpages compliment the image of the simple beauty and dignity of pioneer life that the text works so hard to cultivate.  Nonetheless, the story is rather oddly told from a third person limited point of view that focuses on Laura.  Consequently, Wilder serves as both the narrator and main character yet she scrupulously avoids referring to her experiences in the first person, choosing to instead effect a childish sense of awe and wonder that an adu...

The House on Mango Street  is a fictional account of the coming-of-age of Esperanza Cordero which is loosely based on Cisneros’ own childhood in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago.  According to Cisneros in an interview that appeared in the Holt, Rinehart, and Winston’s textbook  Elements of Literature , “all my fiction stories are based on nonfiction, but I add and cut and paste and change the details to make them ‘more real’—to make the story more interesting....  I’m doing what every good fiction writer does.  I’m taking ‘real’ people and ‘real’ events and rearranging them so as to  create  a better story, because ‘real’ life doesn’t have shape.  But real stories do.”  Reminiscent of Gloria Naylor’s  Women of Brewster Place  (1982), the first person point of view of this “real story” encourages the audience to intimately connect with the vignettes that have been stitched together to depict Esperanza’s burgeoning maturation in the...

In her preface to this edition of  Forever... , Blume, in addition to cautioning readers to take more precautions than her pre-HIV/AIDS characters do, expresses gratitude that “some things, like  feelings , never change.” The timelessness of teenage drama and awkwardness at the dawn of adulthood contributes to the evergreen quality of a work which references such 1970s staples as fondue parties and vinyl records. The realistic treatment in both word and action of Katherine and her peers as they haltingly progress beyond adolescence appeals to modern readers at the same stage of life with its immediacy and matter-of-fact manner, while providing audiences who have passed through this baptism by fire with a familiar set of tropes which ring true even if the details differ from their own experiences. Temporal affairs and technologies have changed the venues, communications, and risks, but the character-driven interactions remain recognizable from generation to generation. Among...

Image from amazon.com Self-aware from the opening endpages to its closing endpages, Rex’s second volume of Frankensteinian verse is simultaneously the gift and the curse--a paean to the horror fiction of the past two centuries as well as a lyrical skewering of it. Because of the rather broad body of work to which it alludes, younger readers may enjoy and understand the poetry only superficially, while an older audience with exposure to Godzilla, King Kong, the Wizard of Oz, vampires, werewolves, E.T., Alfred Hitchcock, and Edgar Allen Poe will have a much richer experience. While the overarching narrative is that of preparations for the nuptials of the creation and his made-to-order bride, in the tradition of Monty Python’s Flying Circus many digressions are made, some of which are returned to repeatedly. Each segment, no matter its initial appearance, is a poem. These verses come disguised as a letter, sequential art, blog posts, a post card, and even as an advertisement with it...