Caldecott Monday: Mirette on the High Wire
Sep. 4th, 2017 05:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWe bought Emily Arnold McCully's Mirette on the High Wire at a Scholastic Book Fair when I was in first grade (does anyone else remember the glory of going to the book fair? Books, books, an entire room in the school suddenly filled with shiny new books), and I dug out my old copy to read it for the Caldecott project.
The illustrations still delight me: the flaming red of Mirette's red hair, the deep blue of her dress and the white froth of her petticoats, the impressionist feel to it all - so appropriate for a book set in fin de siecle Paris. And the loveliness of Paris in these illustrations! No wonder I always had the idea of Paris as an enchanted city.
This is one of those books that has a moral point that is quite clear to an adult - learning an art, any art, not just walking the high wire - requires work, and more work, and many mistakes. You'll fall down and pick yourself back up and get overconfident and fall again. But it's not blunt - obvious - obtrusive about it - I never felt I was being preached at when I read this book as a child, only enchanted by the illustrations, the city, Mirette's slowly mounting competence, the way that her courage and determination inspire her teacher who thought his own days as a high wire walker were done.
***
I haven't posted recently not because I have nothing to say but because I am quite, quite behind on things I've meant to post about: the first season of Sailor Moon Crystal, books I read on Netgalley (Ta-Nehisi Coates' We Were Eight Years in Power; a series of historical sketches by Stefan Zweig), and all the movies I saw in August, some of which I liked and some of which I didn't but most of which inspired lots of thought and feeling and therefore an intimidating number of things to say.
I'll start here with one of the less thought-provoking ones: I finally saw The Lego Movie, which I found moderately amusing but did not like nearly as much as Lego Batman (which had a surprising amount of emotional heft and perhaps set my bar for The Lego Movie too high). And I wasn't particularly impressed by the twist, when it turns out that the whole story is a game that a kid is playing with his dad's basement Lego set! And then the story's conflict is resolved not in story, by the characters we've been following for the past hour and a half, but by the kid and the dad we just met two minutes ago coming to an agreement that, fine, the kid can play with Dad's giant Lego edifice.
I might have been more amenable if this had been established as the frame story from the beginning, but bringing it up practically at the end of the movie felt like cheating.
And, perhaps because I was feeling cranky about that, I also felt curmudgeonly about the poor dad being browbeaten by the movie into sharing his Lego hobby with his disobedient child. If the dad's hobby is putting together Lego sets exactly the way it says on the package, what's so bad about that? Get the kid his own Legos to play with and teach him an important lesson about not messing with other people's stuff. Just because he wants to play with his dad's things doesn't mean their his by right!
The illustrations still delight me: the flaming red of Mirette's red hair, the deep blue of her dress and the white froth of her petticoats, the impressionist feel to it all - so appropriate for a book set in fin de siecle Paris. And the loveliness of Paris in these illustrations! No wonder I always had the idea of Paris as an enchanted city.
This is one of those books that has a moral point that is quite clear to an adult - learning an art, any art, not just walking the high wire - requires work, and more work, and many mistakes. You'll fall down and pick yourself back up and get overconfident and fall again. But it's not blunt - obvious - obtrusive about it - I never felt I was being preached at when I read this book as a child, only enchanted by the illustrations, the city, Mirette's slowly mounting competence, the way that her courage and determination inspire her teacher who thought his own days as a high wire walker were done.
***
I haven't posted recently not because I have nothing to say but because I am quite, quite behind on things I've meant to post about: the first season of Sailor Moon Crystal, books I read on Netgalley (Ta-Nehisi Coates' We Were Eight Years in Power; a series of historical sketches by Stefan Zweig), and all the movies I saw in August, some of which I liked and some of which I didn't but most of which inspired lots of thought and feeling and therefore an intimidating number of things to say.
I'll start here with one of the less thought-provoking ones: I finally saw The Lego Movie, which I found moderately amusing but did not like nearly as much as Lego Batman (which had a surprising amount of emotional heft and perhaps set my bar for The Lego Movie too high). And I wasn't particularly impressed by the twist, when it turns out that the whole story is a game that a kid is playing with his dad's basement Lego set! And then the story's conflict is resolved not in story, by the characters we've been following for the past hour and a half, but by the kid and the dad we just met two minutes ago coming to an agreement that, fine, the kid can play with Dad's giant Lego edifice.
I might have been more amenable if this had been established as the frame story from the beginning, but bringing it up practically at the end of the movie felt like cheating.
And, perhaps because I was feeling cranky about that, I also felt curmudgeonly about the poor dad being browbeaten by the movie into sharing his Lego hobby with his disobedient child. If the dad's hobby is putting together Lego sets exactly the way it says on the package, what's so bad about that? Get the kid his own Legos to play with and teach him an important lesson about not messing with other people's stuff. Just because he wants to play with his dad's things doesn't mean their his by right!
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Date: 2017-09-05 07:49 am (UTC)Yes, indeed. I remember us having a couple of book fairs at primary school. (I bought my first Chalet School book there, and also a 2p copy of Charlotte's Web.)
Like most of the Caldicott winners, I hadn't heard of this one, but Googling the images is also pretty delightful - I can see why it won, and it sounds like a lovely picture book to have had amongst your collection. There's some really beautiful and effective work in there.
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Date: 2017-09-05 04:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-09-05 10:45 am (UTC)100 percent with you on the Lego stuff. It wouldn't be considered A-OK for a kid to take apart and reform another kid's freeform Lego creation, so why should it be okay for the kid to wreck the dad's project, just because the dad liked to do it by-the-books? What if someone likes doing jigsaw puzzles and someone else is like, "Heyyyy, but you know what's even better??? I'm going to spray-paint the pieces black and use them in an art installation!!! And everyone should love this because it's [Spongebob style handwave] ~ creativity ~" Uhh, No. Plus, yeah, way to make the main story characters and their conflicts irrelevant!
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Date: 2017-09-05 04:52 pm (UTC)Expectations for parents are so ludicrously high these days. They're supposed to be infinitely loving and accepting and have no expectations at all for their children, and if that means letting their child ruin the Lego basement installation that the parent spent painstaking months putting together, well, clearly only an ogre would insist on enjoying his own hobby in peace.
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Date: 2017-09-05 04:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-09-05 04:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-09-11 12:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-09-11 04:43 pm (UTC)