My three all time favorite girl heroines in children’s books come from the classics. I named my first daughter Lucy after the brave, honest queen of Narnia from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; my second daughter is named after Alice from Alice in Wonderland fame. (I don’t like the name Dorothy much so I stuck with the classic trend and named my third daughter Rose. Anyone know a story about a Rose? If not, I may have to write one.) My girls don’t appreciate their names YET. The two older kids always have aliases they liked to be called or at least insist on being called in any stories I make up about them– right now Arania and Magnolia. I am super excited for the new Alice in Wonderland film. I hope it’s great. With Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, you can’t really go wrong, though I hope JD lets Alice remain the star and that the movie isn’t too scary for kids. I LOVED Burton’s Coraline but had to walk out b/c the kids were so freaked out.

So back to the girl triumverate: I remember as a sophomore in highschool learning about the phallic symbol in literature. My teacher was Miss Minton, and we were reading Rip van Winkle– he has a gun that didn’t go off (or something) and she explained the term, the class giggled, and after that, pointing out the symbology was was an easy A all through high school. Back then, I asked Miss Minton if there was a female equivalent in literature and she said no, there was no a literary term. Lucy’s wardrobe, Alice’s rabbit hole, and Dorothy’s funnel cloud all lead to magical worlds. I wonder if students today– highschool, college, and beyond–  learn anything different about female symbols and literature. Is there a term yet?

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Alice in Wonderland, and The Wizard of Oz all get ***GGG***

A few days back, I posted what I tell my kids about Santa, asking if it’s Ok to lie to your kids– the gist of the post being “Now I believe that all these myths serve a brilliant purpose: a gentle way for kids to learn well-intended parents are not always reliable sources of truth.”

I didn’t write anything about Heaven, just put it in the title of my post, but got a lot of comments on the blog, email etc.

My six year old starting freaking out about death when she was three. She was crying in the night, “I don’t want to die!” Maybe because I had my second daughter around this time. I asked my doctor what to do and she asked me what I believed in and that just confused me further. My daughter was only three, I figured the most important thing was for her to feel safe and loved and that everything was okay. So I told her about Heaven, I told her about reincarnation, I named all the people who loved her, put their names into a song, stroked her hair until she fell asleep.

I guess what I feel about Heaven is essentially the same message I was trying to get across about Santa; kids are going to have to figure out stuff on their own eventually. No one knows for certain what happens after you die. Mortality is something all humans will grapple with as they get older but kids are not small adults; three years old is too young to grapple.

I heard there is a book by Maria Shriver for kids about death and also I know there are a couple about pets who die, one Bernestain bears about a dead fish. I’ll read them and rate them.

What do you tell your kids about heaven?

This comment on the earlier post from Kim:

What confuses me more is what to do about heaven. For some reason I feel stranger about perpetuating that story than Santa’s– I wonder if it’s because I’m less 100% sure heaven is a fairytale. Or because the context of confronting mortality (“But I don’t want to die!” my daughter said– yikes, I was totally unprepared to deal with that from a four year old, though I should have been) is so much more serious. But after telling my kid in a kind of wobbly way “Well, many people believe that when you die you go to a place called Heaven, where you get to be with everyone you love,” I felt much more conflicted and unsure about how to handle the conversation or whether I was doing teh right thing than I ever have felt about leaving milk, cookies, and raisins for Santa. Go figure…

I highly recommend two books ***GGG rating***  empowering for girls: Goddesses: the World of Myth and Magic and Princess Hyacinth (the Surprising Tale of a Girl who Floated)

Goddesses: the World of Myth and Magic– the illustrations are beautiful, the text for each goddess is concise and fascinatng. There are many goddesses featured that I had never heard of: young and old, short hair, long hair, all ethnicities, good and bad. They are all described in cool and original ways, even ones I was familar with I learned new things about. Both my daughters sat turning the pages, interested enough to give me an hour time to make dinner without disturbance (I’m talking TV/Sponge Bob absorption level.) Here’s the Amazon link if you want to learn more (I need to learn how to do these links)

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_0_17?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=goddesses+a+world+of+myth+and+magic&sprefix=Goddesses+a+world

Second recommedation, newly published: Princess Hyacinth (the Surprising Tale of a Girl who Floated)

Yes, she is a princess but this book is a great example of successfully appropriating classic female imagery and narrative, making it wonderful and powerful.

Princesss Hyacinth has a flowery name but not a flowery look. As a brown haired, brown eyed girl myself, I always appreciate when the star of a kids book has my (and my middle daughter) not so typically princessy coloring. This story is also great to explain narrative style to kids because it begins: “Princess Hyacinth had a problem.” (I tell my kids every story has a problem because creating that problem helps them focus when they tell their own stories, which otherwise tend to go on and on and on.) Hyacinth has a magical power– her problem is she floats, so her parents keep her inside and weigh her down with a heavy crown (which shows kids being a princess isn’t so great after all.) She has a crush on a boy who flies a kite, but she’s not sure if he likes her or not. One day, she’s outside and sees a bunch of baloons. She takes off her clothes, except for her royal underwear, and the baloon guy lets her float up, holding on to her with a string. He loses his grip, and she is off– somersaulting and flying about, having a great time. But her parenst are very worried, no one can find her or get her down. Suddenly, she is tangled up in the boy’s kite, and he reels her in. After that, every day she goes out and floats and every evening, the boy she loves reels her in; then they go to the palace together and have tea and popcorn. I look at this as a perfect fantasy/ metaphor for love and marriage (and one that men have written about in various ways in grown up books and actually created in the real world for ages); Hyacinth gets to go out on her own, flying and having adventures, but knows the boy she loves truly understands and appreciates her unique magical power; will always be able to find her and bring her safely home.  Here’s the link to more info on Amazon.

When my six year old brought this book home today, I got chills. I have a vivid memory of reading it, actually learning to love to read with this book. I lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma then. I was in first grade, just as my daughter is now. My teacher’s name was Miss Foote. She had very short hair which was radical for Oklahoma in the seventies. She was reading The Boxcar Children to the class but at a chapter a day, moving way to slow for me, so my mom bought me my own copy.

I only read the first two chapters with my daughters tonight, but I remember the illustrations so well: they are all in silouette. I can’t remember the story yet, but the pacing is perfect; my kids were riveted. I have no idea what my rating will be, but I hope high. Do you remember this book?

Update on this series: Today Lucy brought home Maya, the Harp Fairy. She’s a fairy of color as are three other fairies in this mini-series of 7 music fairies. As I wrote earlier in my post below, in all the fairy books I’ve read (in this seemingly endless series– feels like I’ve read millions, but probably just about 50) I’d only came across just one non-white fairy: Inky. She’s the Indigo fairy. After legions of magical white girls, it seems pretty sterotyping that four more fairies of color suddenly appear in the music series. Can they play sports too?

Here’s what I wrote about a month ago:

The Rainbow Magic series documents the adventures of  two human girls, Rachel Walker and Kirsty Tate and their travels into the fairy world. At the start of every book, they are summoned to help their flying friends escape terrible danger.

The good points:

(1) Female friendship: Rachel and Kirsty are great friends. They are loyal, help each other, and are the stars of each book.

(2) Every book also has a girl fairy in the title and pictured on the cover. There are Rainbow Fairies, Weather Fairies; Jewel Fairies, Days of the Week Fairies, Petal Fairies, and Special Edition Fairies– 7 of each.

(3) Kirsty and Rachel are brave, smart and heroic. They have magical powers when in fairy world, and rescue the fairies every time, usually helping to restore their magic to them.

(4) Both my 6 year old and my 3 year old LOVE this series.

Not so good:

(1) The numerous faries are so sterotypically female looking, I cannot imagine a boy reading these books with covers like this, when in fact these are action/ adventure books and what boy doesn’t want to fly? If these fairies just looked less frilly and hovering, and were actually shown doing some of the cool action moves they act out in the stories, they  could have more universal appeal both to boys and to that side of girls that, so often, gets repressed instead experessed.

(If you read film critic Glen Kenny’s unoriginal rebuttal to my critique of the movie, Ratatouille, he writes that it’s just a fact: girls will see movies starring boys, little boys refuse to see movies starring girls. We’re talking about 3 year olds here! Even if this were true, which it’s not, it’s just fine in this case to let your little kid refuse to do something? Aren’t parents supposed to challenge kids out of comfort zone? With movies and toys, it’s so often becomes a case of parents enthusiastically reinforcing gender sterotypes and being comforted when they see their kids fall neatly into them.)

The Rainbow Series covers always emphasize how the fairies look, not what they can do. Fairies are usually pictured just hovering, motion-stopped, wings spread against a background of sparkles, looking more like pinned butterflies then super-action fairies; long flowing hair, mini skirt flared, knee high boots; always smiling and almost always caucasian, except for one brown skinned one  (out of 50!) called Inky (???) the Indigo Fairy. (I admit we don’t have all the books so let me know if there some other fairies of color in this series.)

(2) Same damn plot in every story. Wicked Jack Frost does something to the fairies– steals their jewels, their magic, maybe kidnaps one; then Kirsty and Rachel are called from the human world to win over Jack Frost, his possy of goblins, and save the fairies. Could they make Jack Frost turn good one time? Or some other villian besides him? His even more evil older brother? Or sister? Hmmm…how much do these writers get paid?

The Rainbow Magic Series gets a GG/S rating.

I love this guy. He has written one of my all time favorite kids books: Amos and Boris. There are no girls in this story (and girls don’t feature prominently in many of his wonderful books).

I am updating the rest of my post. Kim comments Steig has a book called Brave Irene (LOVE the title) about a girl who brings a dress through a snowstorm (OK, it’s a dress, probably being delivered to a princess for a ball or something, but still, this is good news and I will read the book.)

Kim also mentions The Amazing Bone, about a girl pig who discovers a magic bone who helps her escape a hungry wolf. I do know this story, and certainly a girl is featured prominently, though I do beleive the bone is the star. Pearl, the pig is pretty smart and cool, and loving, and thanks to Kim’s comments, Steig gets upgraded to one G, maybe more after I read Brave Irene.

I orinially blogged about Steig just because he is such a beautiful writer; his books are poetry, Amos and Boris especially. I do teach my kids about narrative, language, and story telling when I read to them (or when we make up stories) I tell theam “Every story needs a problem and a resolution. In a story, the problem is called the plot.” I use Steig to teach them about great writing though they just want me to shut up and read so mostly I do, they get bored when I’m talking– they are 3 and 6, after all

A female in the title of a book series is not always a sign of girl empowerment. The Little Miss books are some of the worst ever. Just the title phrase, “Little Miss,” is irritating, and the personalities of these girl characters are even more annoying. Following the Little Miss moniker, there is often a sterotypical “female” negative characteristic, for example charcaters include Little Miss Bossy (Do people ever call boys bossy? Or would it be “Little Mr. Assertive”?) There is Little Miss Chatterbox, Little Miss Tidy, Little Miss Scatterbrain etc.Usually, the Little Miss is the only girl up against five or six innocent males she is causing trouble for with names like Mr. Clever (Not little Mr. Clever) and Doctor Makeyouwell.

Ivy and Bean is a book series that earns a GGG rating. Highly recommmended. It’s my current favorite: two mischevious girls who are best friends always going off on adventures. The series is realy about a friendship between two girls, they are competitive but also kind; the girls names are in the tile of every book, and the stories are entertaining and fun to read, the perfect level got my first grader to read on her own.