Category Archives: publishing

Dragons Among Us?

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kent dragon

My friend Teri read the post yesterday about Firmin, and asked about its suitability for her eight-year-old.

Uh, probably not. Firmin has intense, child-unfriendly issues in his whiskered, oversized head. But that did set me thinking about great children’s books, and my friends Nicole (who sells them out in Memphis) and Chris (who gets kids excited about checking them out of the library here). We each have books we recommend over and over, so I’m inviting them to leave their comments on this post, or do a guest blog about favorites.

My most beloved childhood book doesn’t seem to make the “hit parade” very often. In fact, looking up pictures to add to this blog, I found its illustrator celebrated on a “forgotten geniuses” site. Hmmph.

Jack Kent was famed for his cute, plump, round-nosed drawings of people and his startling juxtaposition of odd things against calmness: children followed by lions, dragons having pancakes for breakfast. When I was still too young to be able to read, I had a book called There’s No Such Thing as  a Dragon, with accompanying record.

I “read” (lip-synced) Dragon over and over; in fact, that’s why my dad gave in and taught me to work my children’s record player–so he wouldn’t have to keep restarting the stupid thing. I think that book taught me to read. It’s the kind that, as Nicole says (quoting somebody famous), you can read at 50 as happily as at 5.

The premise: Billy wakes up to find a dragon about the size of a kitten at the foot of his bed. He tells his parents, “I have a dragon!” and his parents say (firmly, throughout the next 10 pages) that there’s no such thing as a dragon. So the dragon gets bigger and bigger until it takes off with the house on its back and finally the parents admit that the dragon is there–whereupon the dragon shrinks back to kitten size. Billy gets to deliver the final kicker: the dragon kept getting bigger until someone believed in it, because it just wanted to be noticed.

As an infant, toting this book about the house, lisping the word “dwagon” and shouting there was one in my bedroom, I might not have gotten all the intricacies, the symbolism, the plot development. But like any child, I knew what it felt like to be ignored sometimes, and that adults didn’t always understand what they couldn’t see–which was a silly way to live.

Growing older, I still couldn’t have explained that the drawings– the dragon’s tongue sticking out of its mouth, Billy’s cheerful aproned mother, the father’s Fedora hat–contributed to the enjoyment of the story. I couldn’t get my tongue or brain wrapped ’round the vocabulary needed to talk about the 1950s neighborhood where Billy and his dragon-that-wasn’t-there-except-it-was lived.

But I took the book with me when I left home as an adult, and now I can analyze the symbolism of a dragon that keeps getting bigger until someone acknowledges it, the sweetness of the story’s simple-yet-wise plot. The record is long-gone, but I can recite the words without looking as I turn the pages, engrossed in Jack Kent’s illustrations.

Sometimes you can go home again, and it’s the books of childhood that take you there.

Firmin

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My agent, Pamela, recommended a book to me awhile back: Firmin, by Sam Savage. The short version is, it’s about a rat who learns to read and lives first in a bookshop, then with a writer.

Pamela, who knows me pretty well, said she thought I’d enjoy the “post-modern ironic opening scene” of a mother rat ripping up an encyclopedia to make a word-lined nest for her infants.

This book is not unlike a rat’s nest: layers inside circles within layers. firmin

Firmin, the rat hero of this tale, grows up literate and confused; self-aware but not all that savvy, he finds out the hard way that humans assume he’s either vermin, or a cute fuzzy thing with pink toes and big eyes. (In a moment of pure speculation, I am assuming that’s how Monsieur Savage came up with his name: adorable fur, nasty critter, Fir-min.)

But deep down Firmin longs to be accepted, to be loved by the bookshop owner in whose place he squats, then appreciated as an intellectual equal by his writer, who gives him a home as his pet. The scene where Jerry (the writer) takes Firmin to see Old Yeller–or was it The Yearling?–is hysterical, but like all good humor it stems from pain, because Firmin’s been watching porn at that theatre all his life. Yet he mugs for Jerry, pretending to be frightened of the animals onscreen in a way that makes his “owner” laugh, while internally writing a scathing review of the film’s oversentimentality and other shortcomings.

This is on the one hand a complicated book, and on the other a simple one, depending on which layer one pays more attention to at any given moment. A neighborhood is being destroyed, its small shops giving way to urban planning (ironically enough, to get rid of the “vermin” among other civic-spun reasons). The bookseller who–in frustration at losing his shop– gives away his books one step ahead of the bulldozers is based on someone Sam Savage actually knew.

I don’t know that I can write–that I have written here–a review of Firmin; what I can tell you is that I loved it, and enjoyed it (two different things) and learned from it.

And I can tell you that one of the women who now works at Malaprop’s (the grandmother of Southern independent bookstores) was an intern at the publishing house where Firmin came as a submission, and that her desk was one wall over from the acquisitions editor who read it. She remembers hearing “laughing and crying and ‘Oh s^^^’s coming through the wall, as the editor read it.”

I can see why.