Gift Guide 2017 (No.1): For the Skeptic
November 30, 2017 § 2 Comments
The holidays are rapidly approaching (how? why? help!), so it’s time for me to deliver a series of posts with my favorite books of 2017, none of which I’ve mentioned previously. That’s right, I’ve saved the best for last. Posts will come out every few days and will target a range of ages (including a meaty list of new middle-grade reads for your tweens).
We are going to start with Italian-born Beatrice Alemagna’s just-released picture book, On a Magical Do-Nothing Day (Ages 5-9), which might have the dual benefit of captivating your child and getting him or her out of the house. Every time I pick up this book, I want to shout, YES! Yes, yes, yes! In part, because it features some of the most gorgeous, evocative, and visually compelling art to grace children’s books this year. But also, because it gently nudges our children to put down the electronics and reawaken their senses in the wildness of the outdoors.
Thinking about my own children, now seven and ten, there was a time when the lure of the outdoors always beat out the distractions of indoor life. I remember when my (toddler) son would pound on the front door and chant, OUT! OUT! OUT! I remember when my daughter donned her rain boots every single day, on the chance there might be a puddle to jump in.
Get them out in the woods, out to the park, even out in the backyard, and my children are still happy as clams; the problem has become getting them to leave the house. “We’re going hiking today,” I announced at breakfast last Saturday, after a week of travel and eating had left me yearning to recharge. I read my kids the online description for my proposed state park, including bluffs and rocks and winding trails.
“That sound dangerous. That sounds way too hard.”
“I want to stay inside today! I want to read more Harry Potter and work on Christmas presents and lie around in my pajamas! Plus, I’m tired. I’m sooooo tired. Wait, I know, we could watch a movie!”
After much back and forth, resignation finally ensued, albeit through gritted teeth: “FINE. We can go. But let’s make it fast so we can come back home. Also, I’m not scaling any bluffs.” (This from the boy.)
We hadn’t been in the park ten minutes, when my son saw another family traversing an outcropping of rocks across the river and took off on his own down an incredibly steep descent to join them, pausing only to pick up interesting rocks and sticks and call back to us that we could follow “if we wanted.” His sister didn’t have to be asked twice.
We were there for the entire day, and it was pure magic.
In his insightful book for parents and teachers, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, Richard Louv makes a compelling case that what our kids need today, above all, is a giant kick out the door. “For [this] new generation,” he writes, “nature is more abstraction than reality…IT TAKES TIME—loose, unstructured dream time—to experience nature in a meaningful way.”
The hero or heroine of On a Magical Do-Nothing Day—one can make a case for either gender, such is the delightful ambiguity of Alemagna’s drawings—begins the story in the zombified clutches of an electronic gaming device. Bored by the relentlessness of the rain pelting against the window, and resentful that her mother has dragged her to a getaway cabin in the woods so she can write without interruption, our heroine (my daughter insists heroine) lies on the couch, “destroying Martians.” “Actually, I was just pressing the same button over and over.”
Sound familiar? If that doesn’t, then the mother’s response will.
“What about a break from your game?” Mom growled.
“Is this going to be another day of doing nothing?”
The illustrations mirror the way our heroine sees her circumstances: the mom looks disapprovingly over the neck of her fuzzy sweater, her nose a pointed pink line, ready to spring on her prey. Sure enough, she takes the device from the child and hides it. Sure enough, the child finds it and takes it with her outside, where “I held my game tightly. Maybe it would protect me from this boring, wet place.”
From the moment the child dons her neon orange coat (seriously, have you ever seen such enticing use of color?) and heads outside into the dark, drenched world, the Unexpected begins. For starters, the round rocks in the pond look remarkably like Martian heads, perfect for springing on and “crushing.”
The Unexpected also rears its big ugly head, when the girl accidentally drops her device into the icy pond (“This COULD NOT be happening to me!”)—an event which produced an audible gasp from the children in my daughter’s class, with whom I shared the story during a recent “Book in the Woods” block. Losing access to video games may be a first-world problem, but a tragedy for many a modern-day child nonetheless.
Of course, the adult reader knows exactly where this is all headed—and yet, watching our heroine give herself over completely to her surroundings, witnessing her root her mind in the present moment, is even more gratifying than we expect. In the art, the shift is as much literal as it is figurative. Note the way the child’s body begins to take on the lines of the bark as she sits against a tree, mourning the loss of her game.
Like a beacon of light, a parade of snails cross our heroine’s path, their antennae “as soft as Jell-O.” For the first time, she smiles. She parades around dozens of otherworldly mushrooms, red dotted with white. The school children were especially quick to point out that the girl’s orange coat takes on the bell-like shape of the mushrooms beneath it.
Our heroine isn’t just walking with purpose now: she’s also digging, plunging her fingers into the mud, where an “underground world” full of “seeds and pellets, kernels, grains, and berries” brush her fingers. (Can you spot the sinking Martians?)
Running leads to tripping leads to falling leads to lying spent beneath the clearing skies, looking up at the trees in a sort of upside-down world. “The whole world seemed brand-new, as if it had been created right in front of me.”
The skeptic has been won over.
When, at last, the girl returns home, “soaked to my bones,” she not only sees the outside world with new eyes, but she sees herself and her mother differently. Her mother’s face is now drawn with softness, including a more delicate, contoured nose. “I felt like giving her a big hug. I wanted to tell her what I had seen, felt, and tasted outside in the world.”
Instead—and perhaps rightly so, for a child should be able to safeguard her imaginative world—she just sits quietly with her mom in the kitchen, taking in one another across two steaming mugs of hot chocolate.
Someday soon, I hope my children will recommence seeking out adventures in nature without prodding, will hone their own intimate, magical relationship with the earth. The conservationist Rachel Caron once said, “Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.” Let’s keep kicking our kids out of the house, and let’s enjoy a cup of coca together when they return home once more.
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Review copy provided by Harper Collins Children’s Books. All opinions are my own. Amazon.com affiliate links support my book-buying habit and contribute to my being able to share more great books with you–although I prefer that we all shop local when we can!
What to Read to Your Kids 
I just read this book last night and loved it. However, after your post, I’m going to have many more details to look for. I especially appreciate your in-depth descriptions of the illustrations and the relationship to the text. Thanks to you, I have a much better understanding of this wonderful story! – Susan
Thanks, Susan! It took a couple of readings for me to spot some of those things, too–the picture where the orange coat resembles the mushrooms, as I mentioned, I didn’t even notice until the kids in my daughter’s class pointed it out to me. Love a book that inspires so many readings. 🙂 Happy Holidays!