Book Review: Nancy Pearl's "Book Crush"

Sasquatch Books recently sent us a copy of Nancy Pearl's Book Crush, a compendium of recommended reading from infancy through the teen years, and we picked our way greedily through the book's "Youngest Readers" section, which covers ground from toddlerhood through age seven. The section fills about 80 pages of this nearly 300-page book, and recommends roughly 600 titles.

We are big fans for all that Pearl has done for libraries and for contemporary literature (How can you not be a fan of a librarian who inspired an action figure?) and we enjoyed reading through her recommendations for young children, both for the titles we recalled fondly and thrilled to think of reading again with our daughter, and for the four truly new suggestions that sounded promising for a three-year-old bookworm.

But truth be told, Pearl seems increasingly in her element as the books get more plotted and more linguistically complex. Despite the volume's stated goal of serving children from birth through the teen years, there is not much that is clearly intended for the very young.

An unfortunate aspect of this bias is that highly visual works, a class of children's books which span a broad age range but speak through pictures rather than words, get such short shrift as to be virtually invisible. In Book Crush, there is Russell Hoban, but not Tana Hoban; Goodnight Moon, but not Goodnight, Gorilla; The Snowy Day, but not Snow Sounds: An Onomatopoeic Story. Granted, most of these distinctions pit older books against more recent ones, and it is the privilege of librarians everywhere to prejudicially favor books that have stood the test of time. But Pearl's passion for language is rarely accompanied by any sensitivity to the nuances of illustration that can make good stories sing. To my mind, Maurice Sendak's illustrations make the Little Bear books great works of toddler literature, however sweet Elsa Holmelund Minarek's stories might be, and it is the string of experimental illustrator-collaborators which make Margaret Wise Brown's corpus so compelling, however odd and ringing the author's off-kilter rhythms, rhymes, and repetitions. Toddlers may not discriminate explicitly between good illustrations and bad ones, merely demanding pictures to look at; but it is fine illustration that guides us adults, their earliest guides to the magical world of books, to speak archly, or in hushed tones, or with mounting horror, where a stripped-down vocabulary so often fails to render the full meaning of what an author wishes to say.

For Pearl, however, such considerations rarely merit mention, let alone drive any of her recommendations. The net result is that the older children are, the more comprehensive and authoritative Pearl's perspective becomes. But this imbalance weakens the book's utility for parents looking for books for the young readers Book Crush claims, in part, to serve, given how young children perceive and experience books, even when reading themselves, and how great authors and illustrators seem to riff off each other on the printed page, setting up each other's jokes, undercutting generalizations with a touch of irony - Margret and H.A. Rey, Dr. Seuss and himself. Reading literature for toddlers without this sensitivity is like attending the opera and evaluating it as though you had been to the symphony.

That said, Book Crush is clearly useful for parents of children ages 3 or 4 and up who lack a community of people around them whose kids are at the same age or reading level. For a quick trip to the library with toddler in tow, a single good suggestions can be the difference between coming home with an armload of perfect books or a handful of lousy ones, and we suspect the book is even better when it comes to recommending middle-grade and teen reading, which is where Pearl's heart truly seems to lie.

But parents looking for a few good suggestions for toddlers would do as well, or perhaps even better, to check in with notable book prize lists (the Caldecott Medal is one place to start) or read a good children's book blogger or two to get current and historical recommendations of books for the very young (I'm still thinking about these two masterful posts on Jerry Pinkney's Little Red Riding Hood, two days after reading them).

Tomorrow: Some of our favorite rediscoveries we owe to the recommendations in Book Crush. (Done!)