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TD Summer Reading Club E-Newsletter TD Summer Reading Club E-Newsletter Volume 2. Number 3. April 2012 In this issue: • Artist for the 2012 program • Theme Essay • Booklists • Website • Preschool Activity Booklet • Decima Evaluation Report Highlights • Training Dates Artist for the 2012 Program This year’s artwork is by Dušan Petričić , an award-winning illustrator of more than forty books for children and young adults published in North America and Yugoslavia. Dušan currently lives in Toronto, but was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia and graduated from Belgrade’s Academy of Applied Arts. In Belgrade he taught illustration, book design and animation at the Academy and continued this at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario. Currently he is teaching at the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) and at Max the Mutt Animation School, both in Toronto. Dušan has teamed up to illustrate books for well known Canadian writers such as Sarah Ellis, Margaret Atwood, Cary Fagan, Aubrey Davis and Tim Wynne-Jones to name a few. His illustrations have a cartoon caricature style, with sketch-like drawings that incorporate pen and ink as well as watercolour. Whatever medium he chooses for his work, it is often described as clever, droll and amusing. Dušan is published by Kids Can Press, Annick, Groundwood, Tundra, Red Deer, and Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, among others. Theme Essay Read and imagine! is written by Josiane Polidori, Head, Children’s Literature, Library and Archives Canada. “The imaginary universe is a place of astonishing richness and diversity: here are worlds created to satisfy an urgent desire for perfection…others, like Narnia or Wonderland, were brought to life to find a home for magic.” — Alberto Manguel, Dictionary of Imaginary Places Imagination is the ability to conceive images and ideas, and also to transform or colour reality. Imagining is creating! What a wonderful introduction to Imagine, the theme of the TD Summer Reading Club 2012. As its name suggests, this theme will familiarize young readers with literature of the fantastic. Readers will be charmed by fantasy stories and novels and they will be enthralled by tales of wonder. They will discover the Gothic and steampunk worlds where unusual creatures and strange machines can be found in mysterious locales. Magical! The familiar fairy-tale phrase “once upon a time” immediately leads us through the doors of an imaginary world. We are transported to a time when oral tradition was shared in every social class. Over time, writers have transcribed and revised these stories, adding moral elements and leaving out the coarser and violent aspects of the tales. The fairy tales of Charles Perrault and other writers were written for an audience of courtiers. The brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm compiled and adapted folk tales in their Children’s and Household Tales. These stories have been widely read since they were first published in 1812, and are the inspiration for many literary, theatrical and film adaptations. Today, fairy tales are meant for children. The archetypal characters found in Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Little Red Riding Hood and The Little Mermaid have entered the annals of popular culture. One often forgets that before they were adapted for film, these stories were written respectively by Charles Perrault, Madame d’Aulnoy, the brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. Wonderful! Some of the greatest works of children’s literature fall within the fantasy genre. These include Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings. In these novels, the reader discovers an imaginary world that sometimes exists in parallel with the real world. The protagonists follow their quests aided by objects having magical powers, and may be accompanied by mythical creatures or animals that speak. Kenneth Oppel created Silverwing, a saga about the struggles of several bat colonies; Edo van Belkom portrays a pack of wolves in his series Wolf Pack. Time travel occurs frequently by means of magic portals leading from one reality into another. Corrine de Vailly’s series Celtina, Janet McNaughton’s Dragon Seer, and the novels of Welwyn Wilton Katz explore Celtic legends. Numerous tales of fantasy are inspired by the Arthurian legend or set in imagined versions of the medieval world. In the famous Amos Daragon series by Bryan Perro, the action takes place in a mythical, medieval time where adventure meets magical creatures. We are witnessing a renewed interest in folk stories, fairy tales and fantasy novels in children’s literature. The famous Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling features children attending a magic school, which combines the real world with a fantasy world. The prince in Seán Cullen’s novel The Prince of Neither Here Nor There hides among humans, while the characters in O.R. Melling’s series The Chronicles of Faerie travel between two worlds. This wonderful genre is populated with fairy characters. In his series Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer explores the Irish tradition of the little people “fairies” and their rivalry with humans. In other works, fairies play a more benign role in the daily lives of children such as the traditional tooth fairy, The Sock Fairy, the “Toe” fairy, and even candy fairies. Some fairies wish to live a normal life, such as young Willow Doyle of the Fourth Grade Fairy series, who comes from a long line of fairy godmothers. Fairy tales and folk tales are well represented in picture book collections such as Monstres, sorcières et autres fééries, Contes classiques and Korrigan, where they are brought to life thanks in part to talented illustrators such as Mireille Levert, Marie Lafrance, Marion Arbona, Robin Muller and Dušan Petričić. Frightening! The fantasy novel ventures towards the Gothic genre when the story contains elements of cruelty and strangeness. Gothic novels and comics are populated by ghosts, vampires or zombies placed in typical settings, such as haunted houses, tunnels, and remote castles. The animated films of Tim Burton, television series devoted to vampires, the characters of fiction writers Neil Gaiman and Roald Dahl and a number of books by Stanley Péan and Duncan Thornton are examples of the Gothic genre. The monster is a staple of the Gothic bestiary: when Madame d’Aulnoy wrote Beauty and the Beast, she depicted a character who appears monstrous yet has a sensitive nature. Once tamed, the monster becomes an endearing character. Rogé’s Taming Horrible Harry and the creatures in Loris Lesynski’s Ogre Fun retain their monstrous qualities without scaring young readers. Élise Gravel teaches us to live with monsters in J’élève mon monstre and Bienvenue à la Monstrerie, while Christiane Duchesne sends them on a trip in Mémère et ses cinq monstres. This dichotomy of darkness and fascination is presented humorously in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, in which the Baudelaire orphans continually elude the diabolical schemes of their guardian, the terrible Count Olaf. Readers easily pick up on the exaggerated cruelty and accept it as an element of humour. Phantasmagorical! The steampunk genre will fascinate readers who crave adventure, complex plots and creepy machines. Set in a pseudo-Victorian era, steampunk showcases characters using sophisticated, imaginary machines. Steampunk novels and comic books are full of shape shifting characters, steam-powered or clockwork machines, robots and old-fashioned automata such as the Japanese karakuri, which are commonly featured in manga. Steampunk stories often reflect the worlds created by Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle. In the series, His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman), Les Chroniques de Victor Pelham (Pierre-Olivier Lavoie) and The Hunchback Assignments (Arthur Slade), characters are depicted grappling with futuristic Victorian technology used for nefarious purposes. The protagonist of the graphic novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, which has just recently been adapted for the screen, is the inventor of an automaton. The character of Sherlock was Shane Peacock’s inspiration for The Boy Sherlock Holmes. The steampunk genre occupies a prominent place in youth culture, including music. In the Cirque du Soleil show Totem, Robert Lepage makes reference to steampunk when a scientist is trapped in a pseudo-Victorian machine. Fantastical! The fantasy novel is generally characterized by a sense of ambiguity, where the real world is disrupted by abnormal elements. The reader understands that questioning and doubt will be part of the reading experience. The novels of Daniel Sernine and Daniel Mativat and the Zarya series by JP Goyette might be considered historical fantasy. Since the unexpected events take place in the characters’ daily lives, several fantasy series revolve around school and home, places associated with teenagers. The protagonist of Patrick Loranger’s L’Ordre des Ornyx discovers that a plot is being hatched by a secret society that meets in his school. The line between what is real and what is fantasy becomes blurred. The teen in Jocelyn Boisvert’s Personne ne voit Claire wonders whether she has become transparent, while the main character in Jean-François Somain’s Quelque part entre ici et la mort believes that the people around her have disappeared. Vacations and trips are also ideal situations for exploring the boundaries of sometimes strange other worlds. In her novel Who is Frances Rain? Margaret Buffie uses summer vacation as an opportunity to stage when a character becomes visible through a pair of binoculars. While the protagonist in Camille Bouchard’s novel encounters spirits and beliefs on her journey to Africa. “How to” How does one document imaginary worlds? Using a little imagination, there is an interesting selection of encyclopaedias devoted to imaginary creatures and dictionaries that shed light on ghosts, vampires and the habitats of these unsettling creatures. Arthur Slade provides a list of monsters and meanies in Monsterology and Villainology.
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