the neighbours, eight-year-old Cassie Louise Lightfoot rises up into the sky. The only witness to the girl’s magical flight is her baby brother, Be Be, ‘lying real still on the mattress, just like I told him to’. The simple, bold illustrations, reminiscent of Chagall, draw us into Cassie’s imagination as she soars over the George Washington Bridge, beyond the skyscrapers and up to the stars. Up here, she feels like everything she can see belongs to her – including the new Union building, which her father is helping to build but can’t belong to because he’s ‘colored, or a half-breed Indian, like they say’ – and in a way it does. Along the bottom of each page we see the stitched-together squares of the original quilt made to tell this story, a craft handed down to Ringgold from her southern ancestors.
With its legacy of slavery and discrimination, the metaphor of flying from one’s constraints packs a mighty punch. Cassie tells Be Be that he can do it, too – but first he has to want to go somewhere: ‘I have told him it’s very easy, anyone can fly. All you need is somewhere to go that you can’t get to any other way.’ Encourage an unconfident child to imagine doing whatever it is they wish they could do. Believing they can do it is the first step. Once they believe that they can, they will.
SEE ALSO: body image
constipation
There’s something immediately appealing about comic strips, with their eye-catchingly large faces, speech bubbles, undemanding storylines and private asides shared with the reader. Keep a stack of them in the loo for occupying sluggish moments.
THE TEN BEST COMIC-STRIP BOOKS TO KEEP IN THE LOO
SEE ALSO: tummy ache
contrary, being
As perfectly proportioned for little hands as this book is – one of the four books in Sendak’s diminutive Nutshell Library box set9 – so is its impact perfectly disproportional. ‘I don’t care!’ says Pierre to everything his parents say until they decide, understandably enough, that they’ve had enough of this contrary little boy and go to town without him. So when a lion comes along and wonders how Pierre would feel about being eaten, and gets the same response, no one is there to protect him.10 We’re not suggesting that children will be convinced by the moral of this cautionary tale and never utter the words ‘I don’t care’ again,11 but it may convince those on the small side that if they want to make an impact disproportionate to their size, the best way to do so is not by being contrary but by being amusing, like this book.
SEE ALSO: arguments, always getting into • beastly, being
cook, reluctance to learn to
Turning children into capable cooks is an essential part of parenting. But a busy grown-up who finds it a grind putting food on the table seven nights a week is, frankly, not the best advert for it. A far better role model is Zeralda. The daughter of a peasant farmer, Zeralda loves to cook, and knows how to ‘bake and braise and simmer and stew’ by the time she’s six. She and her father have never heard of the ogre who terrorises the nearby town, looking for children to eat. So when her father is too sick to take their produce to market one day and sends Zeralda instead, she has no idea that the ogre she finds on the side of the road, starving and with a sprained ankle, had been aiming to eat her. The tender-hearted girl cooks up a great feast12 there and then, using all the ingredients she was supposed to sell at the market. It’s the best meal the ogre’s ever eaten, and he invites Zeralda to come and be his personal chef, swearing off children for ever. Ungerer’s large-scale pen-and-wash illustrations, showing Zeralda looking fondly at her cookery book and sticking out her tongue as she bastes the suckling pig, are full of the generous spirit of this book, and the limited palette of black, white, taupe and orangey-red make the package as mouth-watering as Zeralda’s food. If anybody can plant a love of cooking in a child, it’s Zeralda.
Children of chapter-book age who are showing no signs of expanding their repertoire beyond toast and a fried egg will find inspiration in The Star of Kazan. When three eccentric professors agree to bring up a foundling called Annika, they do so on the proviso that she make herself useful. This she does, learning to cook, clean and indeed take care of all the domestic duties involved in running a large Viennese house in 1908. When, at twelve, she’s given the responsibility of cooking the Christmas carp – a dish she must prepare following the recipe passed down to Ellie, one of the maids who found her – the stuffing alone requires a whole morning to prepare. Annika is hollow-eyed with worrying about it all. She knows she must add nothing to the recipe, and leave nothing out, but at the last moment she daringly adds a dash of nutmeg to the dish.
Her three professorial ‘uncles’ (one of whom is, in fact, an aunt, but that’s another story) all pronounce the carp delicious. Only Ellie puckers up her mouth. ‘What have you done?’ she cries. ‘Mother would turn in her grave!’ But in the silence that follows, Ellie realises that Annika has in fact improved upon the recipe and her pucker turns into a smile. In her best handwriting, Annika adds ‘a pinch of nutmeg will enhance the sauce’ to the sacred recipe – and thus a cook is born.
SEE ALSO: chores, having to do • fussy eater, being a • granted, taking your parent for • spoilt,
