100 books: Bread and Jam for Francis
May. 26th, 2012 11:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerThe Frances books! Bread and Jam for Frances, A Birthday for Frances, Best Friends for Frances...we had all of Russell and Lillian Hoban's Frances books. I LOVED the Frances books: their beautiful four-color illustrations, black, white, pale pink and pale green; and Frances herself, who was just like me, if I were an anthropomorphized badger. She's neither an angel - an uncommon character type in picture books, anyway - nor exaggeratedly naughty, which is very common: Eloise, Olivia, Max, Curious George…
Oh, I loathed Curious George. I wasn't a big fan of any of the picture books about naughty children, but Curious George was the worst. There's one book where he destroys a dinosaur skeleton. A fossil skeleton that paleontologists lovingly, carefully, painstakingly picked out of the rocks in which it had lain for at least 65 million years! And he doesn't get in any trouble at all! Those poor paleontologists. The poor museum. All the museum goers who will never get to see the T-rex skeleton because of Curious George! RAGE.
But Frances is not like that. She's an in-between girl: she usually wants to do right, but even when she tries to be good it's very hard. In one book she generously uses her own allowance to buy her little sister Gloria candy for her birthday, but then eats half of it before Gloria gets a bite. But sometimes she doesn't want to be good at all.
I loved all the Frances books (special mention goes to Best Friends for Frances), but Bread and Jam for Frances was my favorite. So many long, lovingly described scenes all about food - like Albert's description of the lunch he brought to school:
"I have a cream cheese-cucumber-and-tomato sandwich on rye bread," said Albert. "And a pickle to go with it. And a hard-boiled egg and a little cardboard shaker of salt to go with that. And a thermos bottle of milk. And a bunch of grapes and a tangerine. And a cup custard and a spoon to eat it with."
And then there's a whole page devoted to Albert's preparations for eating this enormous lunch, and only then does he actually eat it. I wouldn't have eaten almost anything in Albert's lunch at the time, but nonetheless I found the passage immensely satisfying.
There's often an assumption that descriptions are satisfying because they evoke reality well - that one can feel or see or taste the thing described. But descriptions like the one above are satisfying purely for their own sake. It has a rhythm - I have this...And this...And this - with long and short sentences intermixed; and it keeps going, and going, and going, creating in its length a sense of repleteness. An absolutely satisfying lunch, even if it is just words.
Oh, I loathed Curious George. I wasn't a big fan of any of the picture books about naughty children, but Curious George was the worst. There's one book where he destroys a dinosaur skeleton. A fossil skeleton that paleontologists lovingly, carefully, painstakingly picked out of the rocks in which it had lain for at least 65 million years! And he doesn't get in any trouble at all! Those poor paleontologists. The poor museum. All the museum goers who will never get to see the T-rex skeleton because of Curious George! RAGE.
But Frances is not like that. She's an in-between girl: she usually wants to do right, but even when she tries to be good it's very hard. In one book she generously uses her own allowance to buy her little sister Gloria candy for her birthday, but then eats half of it before Gloria gets a bite. But sometimes she doesn't want to be good at all.
I loved all the Frances books (special mention goes to Best Friends for Frances), but Bread and Jam for Frances was my favorite. So many long, lovingly described scenes all about food - like Albert's description of the lunch he brought to school:
"I have a cream cheese-cucumber-and-tomato sandwich on rye bread," said Albert. "And a pickle to go with it. And a hard-boiled egg and a little cardboard shaker of salt to go with that. And a thermos bottle of milk. And a bunch of grapes and a tangerine. And a cup custard and a spoon to eat it with."
And then there's a whole page devoted to Albert's preparations for eating this enormous lunch, and only then does he actually eat it. I wouldn't have eaten almost anything in Albert's lunch at the time, but nonetheless I found the passage immensely satisfying.
There's often an assumption that descriptions are satisfying because they evoke reality well - that one can feel or see or taste the thing described. But descriptions like the one above are satisfying purely for their own sake. It has a rhythm - I have this...And this...And this - with long and short sentences intermixed; and it keeps going, and going, and going, creating in its length a sense of repleteness. An absolutely satisfying lunch, even if it is just words.
