\input zine.sty \lline{\hl It's Story Time} \lline{by Mark Freeman} \vskip\parskip \begindoublecolumns A lot of us found our first friends in books, back when we were eight or so. And stories are still a safe place to go, solo. The subject this time is kids books, my own subjective list, or at least ones I remembered being good back when I read them. Why not write in with your own faves? Or comment on these: they suck, they suck nice, whatever. I'll skip the modern classics -- Maurice Sendak and S.E. Hinton's stuff, Madeleine L'Engle's middle class {\bf Wrinkle In Time} fantasies and Judy Blume's ``problem'' novels, C.S. Lewis' series of Narnia adventures and good old J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy. Let's start with subversive picturebooks. These illustrated and easy to read books are written by authors who understand that kids, like everyone else, prefer to break all rules. {\bf Do Not Open} is by Brinton Turkle: its an old story about a bottle found on the beach, but this version provides fun, gory, explicit pictures of the monster that gets let out -- and it has an old woman hero. Harve and Margot Zemach's {\bf The Judge} features a disgustingly superior authority figure who won't listen to anyone's warnings about a monster and puts them all in jail for lying. Guess who gets his in the end? This is what's called a happy ending. Thacher Hurd wrote and illustrated {\bf Mama Don't Allow}, about a possum kid whose saxaphone playing gets him kicked out of the house, and right into the arms of some high steppin' alligators in the swamp. {\bf Sylvester and the Magic Pebble} is the best example of William Steig's psycho fiction for grade schoolers, but all his books are good. This one is about a donkey who finds a magic wishing rock. Unfortunately, he gets scared and wishes he were a rock. Then there is {\bf DUCKS!} by Daniel Pinkwater (more from him later) which qualifies as the weirdest children's book I've ever seen. A duck bought in a candy store says it is really an angel and asserts that ``mothers and fathers usually lie.'' The narrator's blue collar dad and rock n roller mom are real classics. On the sweeter side is {\bf Rabbit Express} by Michel Gay (that's for sure). This bunny, with the prettiest butt in children's literature, is all alone on his birthday until he gets skates and finds his way into the big city and meets an equally cute cat. What lovely music they make together. Farther along, Mary Jordan has written the first picture book to help kids deal with a loved one dying of AIDS: {\bf Losing Uncle Tim}. It's a bit treacly, and the pic tures are too pastel for kids, but it deals with portraying an obviously gay uncle and with kids' questions like: can I catch it from him? how can he eat breakfast when he's in his coffin? Switching to books written for older kids, but staying on the topic of life and death, there's Natalie Babbitt's {\bf Tuck Everªlasting}. An overprotected girlchild runs away from home and finds a fountain in the woods whose waters provide eternal life. She learns about the danger of that condition from an Okie family, who have all drunk of it. {\bf Far In the Day}, by Julia Cunningham, is a running away to the circus story, about a mute beggar boy and the circus lad with leukemia who becomes his friend. Fun. M.E. Kerr's {\bf Night Kites} was one of the first teen books to deal with AIDS, and I recall some good coming out stuff in it. A few others with gay content include {\bf The Man Without a Face} by Isabelle Holland and {\bf Sticks and Stones} by Lynn Hall, two of those ``troubled teen'' boy stories, and {\bf Happy Endings Are All Alike}, Sandra Scoppettone's girl on girl book. But none of these has the unashamed, totally accepting approach of newer adult gay fiction like, say, Pat Califia's {\bf Doc and Fluff}. So if you'd like to see explicit, joyful gay juvenile fiction, please write it. In the meanwhile, we'll have to settle for the old fashioned way of dealing with our dreams, desires, and ideal self images: fantasies. Here are ten favorite books that provide escape reading for all ages. {\bf The Amazing Voyage of Jackie Grace} (Matt Faulkner) has a mother yelling, ``Get into the bath!'' at this kid who likes to read pirate books. This Raw sized picturebook soon shows double page spreads of his adventures at sea in his bath tub. British writer Lynne Reid Banks' {\bf The Indian In the Cupboard} and its sequel are about a kid who has to deal with nasty skin heads. He does have a secret, though: a toy sized Indian that comes to life. (Librarians consider this book sexist even though it portrays the Indian as a full person, not a stereotype. But nine year olds, who know better than librarians, still love it.) I'll call ``family fantasies'' the stories about who we wish we had in our family. {\bf The Mouse and His Child} by Russell Hoban is a modern Pinocchio fable about wind up toys trying to get real (and it became a Japanese animated film in 1976). Ray Bradbury's {\bf Something Wicked This Way Comes} is a classic in which two young buddies save one of their fathers from the evil Cooger \& Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show and carnival. (It became a 1983 movie.) Along more realistic lines are {\bf The Planet of Junior Brown}, Virginia Hamilton's story of a group of homeless black kids in New York City who are taken care of by a teen, and Laurence Yep's {\bf Child of the Owl}, about a foul mouthed girl in San Francisco's Chinatown and her gambler father. {\bf Dear Mr. Henshaw}, by Beverly Cleary, is about a boy who writes letters to his favorite author, and comes to grips with the not unusual case of an absent dad. Then there's fiction that requires imagining yourself as either the boy or the girl in a fantasy novel. Lloyd Alexander's Prydain series ({\bf The Book of Three} is the first) has a young hero who starts as a lowly pig keeper, and a young heroine braver than he is. Youthful sword and sorcery is also found in {\bf The Beginning} {\bf Place}, Ursula K. LeGuin's great teen novel that even has a mild (hetero) sex scene. Margaret Mahy is a New Zealand writer writer whose romantic {\bf The Changeover} involves a teenage girl who goes through some changes with a warlock in her highschool class. Last, but far from least, is every book from the wicked pen of Daniel Manus Pinkwater, the Kurt Vonnegut of the wide lined notebook paper set, and the fat child's own William Gibson. His cult classics include {\bf I Was a Second Grade Werewolf} and {\bf The Big Orange Splot} for antisocial younger readers, {\bf Lizard Music} or {\bf Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy From Mars} for more mature fans. But his magnum opus has to be {\bf The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death}, about sneaking out of suburbia to meet a punk girl named Rat for all night movie watching in an inner city filled with weirdos. And if that doesn't sound like fun to you, then just forget it -- you're probably too old to get the whole thing, anyway. \enddoublecolumns \bye