Brief thoughts on the 2013 National Book Award finalists for Fiction, Poetry, and Young People's Literature

I had every intention of reviewing each of the 20 finalists in the Fiction, Non-Fiction, Poetry, and Young People's Literature categories of the 2013 National Book Awards in advance of the November 20 awards banquet.  But due to having very little energy the past few weeks (I have been battling a nascent bronchitis infection since Thursday, one that I fear might worsen with the fluctuating weather here), in large part due to my two jobs, I have only reviewed 1 of the Fiction finalists (and that was actually reviewed back in January, right after George Saunder's Tenth of December was released), 1 of the Non-Fiction (Wendy Lower's Hitler's Furies, also reviewed before the shortlist was announced), 2 of the Young People's Literature finalists (Gene Luen Yang's Boxers/Saints graphic novel duology and Meg Rosoff's Picture Me Gone), and none of the Poetry finalists.

This is not to say that I haven't been reading the finalists.  I have only 120 pages remaining in James McBride's The Good Lord Bird to finish off reading the Fiction finalists; I have read all of the Poetry and Young People's Literature finalists.  True, I haven't even purchased any of the other Non-Fiction finalists yet due to minor things like making a large student loan payment, but outside of that, I have read enough to have informed opinions on the other three categories.  While I do plan on writing reviews whenever I can later this week/month on those finalists, even though many will be after the awards are announced, the least I can do is provide a personal ranking of the finalists for those who place more weight on such things than any substantive words that I might have to say about each individual work:

Young People's Literature:

This was a very strong group of finalists (and having read two others from the longlist, Kate DiCamillo's Flora & Ulysses and Alaya Dawn Johnson's The Summer Prince, I cannot think of one of the five that I would replace with one of those two, no matter how much I enjoyed DiCamillo's work - Johnson's was a bit more problematic for me).  None of them resembled the others much in structure, plot, or tone; the wide-ranging category of "YA" certainly can be seen in the diversity of the authors and their tales.  With very little separating one from another in terms of quality or enjoyment, this is the ranking that I would do at the moment, with the caveat that a re-read could change my opinions slightly:

1.  Gene Luen Yang, Boxers/Saints
2.  Cynthia Kadohata, The Thing About Luck (review forthcoming)
3.  Tom McNeal, Far Far Away (review forthcoming)
4.  Kathi Appelt, The Blue Scouts of Sugar Moss Swamp (review forthcoming)
5.  Meg Rosoff, Picture Me Gone

Poetry:

These finalists as a whole took more chances with theme and structure.  Adrian Matejka's The Big Smoke is devoted to a singular man and theme, that of early 20th century African American heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson.  Matt Rasmussen's Black Aperture views the author's brother's suicide through a variety of angles.  The other three were a bit more diverse in the material covered, but there were certain themes that were revisited even then, especially in Mary Szybist's Incarnadine.  As a whole, these finalists were more of a joy to read and consider than those of the previous two years.  Will try to write more in-depth reviews of each of these later in the year:

1.  Matt Rasmussen, Black Aperture
2.  Mary Szybist, Incarnadine
3.  Adrian Matejka, The Big Smoke
4.  Lucie Brock-Broido, Stay, Illusion
5.  Frank Bidart, Metaphysical Dog

Fiction:

Compared to the other categories that I mentioned above, the Fiction finalists left me feeling lukewarm.  There were some truly excellent works (Saunders and McBride come to mind), but the others either covered a topic/theme that didn't interest me as much as I wished it would (Rachel Kushner's otherwise very good The Flamethrowers) or were works by authors whose previous works I had enjoyed more (Thomas Pynchon, Jhumpa Lahiri).  While none of these were precisely mediocre, there was just a sense that most of these established writers had produced better work in the past and that these were just merely very good but not necessarily excellent later fictions.

1.  George Saunders, Tenth of December
2.  James McBride, The Good Lord Bird (review forthcoming)
3.  Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland (also a 2013 Booker Prize finalist; review forthcoming)
4.  Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers (review forthcoming)
5.  Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge (review forthcoming)


Of course, as what seems to be the case these days, any of these forthcoming reviews might take upward of a month to write.  I have a long queue as it stands and am weeks behind due to having to devote over half of my weekends to just sleeping in order to recover just enough energy to make it through the grueling 13-14 hours of work/travel that I do each weekday/night.  Hopefully things will change in the future, but until it does, reviewing and other blogging will have to take a backseat to rest/recovery/work.

Meg Rosoff, Picture Me Gone

“Translating books is an odd way to make a living. It is customary to translate from your second language into your first, but among my father’s many friends and colleagues, every possible combination of language and direction is represented.

Gil translates from Portuguese into English. Most translators grow up speaking two or three languages but some speak a ridiculous number; the most I’ve heard is twelve. They say it gets easier after the first three or four.

The people I find disturbing are those with no native language at all. Gil’s friend Nicholas had a French mother and a Dutch father. At home he spoke French, Dutch and English but he grew up in Switzerland speaking Italian and German at school. When I ask him which language he thinks in, he says: Depends what I’m thinking about.

The idea of having no native language worries me. Would you feel like a nomad inside your own head? I can’t imagine having no words that are home. A language orphan.” (pp. 45-46, iBooks on Mac edition, beginning of Ch. 9)

Meg Rosoff's most recent novel, Picture Me Gone, is hard to summarize succinctly.  Perhaps those hoary old descriptors, "coming of age" and "Bildungsroman," might capture a small facet of the story of young Mila, but the wry observations and wide-ranging perspectives of the narrator are not typically those one might expect to find in a work written for a teen audience.  No, there are certain exceptionalities within this book that defeat attempts to place it squarely within a singular category.  Certainly Picture Me Gone is not a work that should be read in a rush, as there are layers to the narrative that make a slower contemplation of the characters and their developments a rewarding exercise.

Picture Me Gone first struck me as an introspective novel about how we, especially those of us who are still developing their world-views, try to position ourselves within the larger picture(s) of life around us.  The passage quoted above, which is part of a larger series of musings on language and identity, is representative of Rosoff's excellent characterization.  Here Mila struggles to comprehend the possible rootlessness of those who possess multiple loci – in this particular case, "native" language(s) – and for whom life is less a linear journey along a personal timeline and more a series of bifurcating paths that weave in and out of others' own walks of life.  Such an observation does not come from one wedded intimately to one's own surroundings, but instead seems to belong more properly to those who question the world around them.  Another example of this occurs late in the novel, after the English-born Mila has lived some time in the US:

 “There are hundreds of channels on American TV and I flick through without paying much attention to anything on the screen. It is mostly commercials. I come to the high numbers, where a topless woman rubs her breasts and starts to ask if I want to get to know her better before I click past. I pause on a nature show where a quiet-voiced man admires a beautiful stag in a clearing, saying, Isn’t he a magnificent creature? and then raises his rifle and shoots him through the heart. The animal staggers and falls to his knees. I want to throw up.

A week ago America felt like the friendliest place in the world but I am starting to see darkness everywhere I look. The worst thing is, I don’t think it is America. I think it is me.” (Ch. 28, pp. 248-249 iBooks for Mac edition)

For someone such as myself who was born and raised in the US, the tawdry mixture of scantily-clad women and casual (hunting) violence may not cause as much consternation as it would for someone for whom such scenes are not typical late-night fare.  Mila's observation that it is not as much America but herself goes straight to the heart of the book:  the seemingly quotidian elements of contemporary life, from new schoolmates to divorces to other changes in personal milieu, seem more profound and important as one enters into a more abstract and less concrete understanding of the lives and situations around them.  Younger children may interpret shifts in relationships through concrete means:  mommy and daddy aren't in the same bed anymore and there are fewer hug times or toys for Christmas.  A preteen or a teenager, however, might conceptualize things such as divorce or death through how each relates to that person's understanding of the world and matters such as faith, justice, or a sense of fairness.  In Picture Me Gone, Rosoff captures that shift in perspective vividly.  Mila tries to puzzle out everything around her; it is all new to her.  Sometimes this can be frightening, but other times it is exhilarating. 





If there is a flaw to Picture Me Gone, it may be that Rosoff is sometimes too subtle.  The events that spark reactions from Mila sometimes lack a sense of urgency that can drive readers to move quickly to the next chapter.  The external forces that shape Mila's development are sometimes not as clearly defined as they could have been and this serves to rob the novel of some of its power.  Yet despite this, there are many interesting elements developing quietly under the narrative surface that by novel's end they emerge to provide the story a fitting conclusion.  Picture Me Gone may not contain a singularly powerful scene or element that will make an indelible impression upon the reader, but the cumulative effect of Mila's piercing introspective thoughts is that of a slowly moving narrative river whose silty character deposits build a fertile delta upon which a careful and inquisitive reader can harvest a wealth of impressions.  Worthy nominee for the 2013 National Book Award for Young People's Literature.

 

Gene Luen Yang, Boxers/Saints

I remember an old, but very pointed, witticism from my days studying at the University of Tennessee that went something like this:  In studying history, we mostly were getting only one side of the story, because her story was too often ignored by those writing down events.  There is, of course, much truth to this.  History is written by the winners, written records are privileged (until recently) over oral tales.  The deeds of men were valued over those of women.  Elite culture trumped that of plebeian culture.  In each of these cases, however, there were still preserved elements, if not whole-cloth, of the "other" histories.  They might be mere whispers, barely audible even those who strain to hear them, but the voices of the downtrodden are beginning to emerge more and more in histories and historical fictions over the past generation or so.

One recent example of this is Chinese-American graphic novelist Gene Luen Yang's rendering of the 1899-1901 Boxer Rebellion in China.  A century later, this popular uprising mystifies and fascinates those who look for parallels with our own times.  There certainly are many such elements:  resistance to imperialism, both political and cultural alike; varying amounts of personal/cultural adaptation to foreign influences; infighting over what is to be preserved from one's culture and which is to be adopted from elsewhere; questions of identity and how the past and present can shape a person.  Multiple perspectives are necessary in order to understand the tumult of events such as the Boxer Rebellion.  How did it start?  Who were its targets?  In what ways did rebellion manifest itself in the people infected with a desire to purge the land of new influences?  Who resisted the call to rebellion?  Who were the victims of these purges?  How can one determine a "right" or "wrong" when it comes to what one believes and how one expresses those beliefs?

These are the questions that Yang addresses throughout the course of his two intertwined graphic novels, Boxers and Saints.  Multiple sides are presented here, with matters of "right" and "wrong" deliberately left open for interpretation.  Although the main protagonists of each book, Bao (Boxers) and Vibiana (Saints), present compelling reasons as to why their point-of-view should be most sympathetic to readers, Yang carefully illustrates, both in his drawings and in his scripts, the limits and foibles of each young protagonist.  In Boxers, we see Bao's struggle to find respect and dignity in 1890s rural China, with vivid scenes such as his father's brutal beating and maiming serving as an impetus for him to turn toward the preaching of itinerant traditionalists such as Red Lantern who urge the countryside to revolt against China's foreign oppressors and to remove the shame that has visited the country.  Inflamed with a passion to restore the glory of China's past and its "opera" gods and goddesses, Bao seeks (and at first is rebuffed due to his young age) training in the mystical ways of the Righteous Fists, where he learns how to embrace the spirits of the Chinese gods and heroes.

In contrast, Vibiana has rejected tradition and embraced Christianity after being maltreated by her family and cast out.  She, like Bao, seeks something greater than herself to anchor herself to, but instead of accepting a menial role demanded of village women at that time, she begins to explore the new faith that has been introduced in the region.  Through her views, we see some of the myriad reasons why many Chinese converted to Christianity, not all of which were noble in intent, purpose, or action.  Yang has created in these two characters interesting parallels, not all of which are immediately visible upon a first reading.  If anything, by having the two books be bound separately, the parallels are slightly obscured as the reader encounters mostly the views of one of the two protagonists (with minor appearances of the other through the eyes of each other).  This, however, does not weaken the power of the dual narratives but instead strengthens both, as the understanding one might derive in reading one book first (if it were up to me, I would read Boxers first, as it is the longer of the two and Yang scripted it first) can be deepened (and in some cases, challenged) by a quick reading of the other.  Indeed, one could even read the "chapters" in alternating fashion to create an even more composite view, although this would reveal a few narrative surprises in the process.

Bao and Vibiana are flawed young individuals, each seeking justification for his or her actions.  Things that one blithely accepts are seen by the other as atrocities.  The external forces that drive each can be seen as self-destructive when viewed through the perspective of the other narrator.  Yet taken as a whole, their twin narratives tell a powerful story that leads the reader to ask many of the questions I laid out above.  The result is a wonderfully realized retelling of an important moment in Chinese history that will engage readers from the early pages of Boxers all the way to the ending of Saints.  These two books, when read as a whole, certainly are deserving of their dual nomination for the 2013 National Book Award for Young People's Literature and they are among my favorite 2013 releases to date.  Highly, highly recommended.

Wendy Lower, Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields

In Holocaust studies, one type of perpetrator, fashioned after Adolf Eichmann and others who organized deportations of Jews from Berlin headquarters, is the male bureaucratic killer, or desk murderer.  He commits genocide through giving or passing along written orders; thus his pen or typewriter keys become his weapon.  This type of modern genocidaire assumes that the paper, like its administrator, remains clean and bloodless.  The desk murderer does his official duty.  He convinces himself as he orders the deaths of tens of thousands that he has remained decent, civilized, and even innocent of the crime.  What about the women who staffed those offices, the female assistants whose agile fingers pressed the keys on the typewriters, and whose clean hands distributed the orders to kill? (pp. 98-99)

Nearly seventy years after the last death camps were liberated, the mechanics of the Endlösung still trouble readers and historians alike.  Who was involved or at least complicit in the genocide of Jews and other undesirable ethno-social groups?  To what extent, if any, were these mass killings planned?  Did the Holocaust arise from a Sonderweg, or "special path," that the Germans followed as a response to industrialization and modernity done at a faster pace than those of Western Europe?  Is the Shoah the horrific consequence of the earlier Ostland neo-colonial view of "space and race"?  How does one reconcile the machinery of the gas chambers and desk murderers with images of street violence in the occupied East, as mobs of Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, Belarussians, and Ukrainians beat tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Jews, often to death?

To this litany of questions has recently been added another:  what roles did women play in the Holocaust?  For decades, outside of a few memorable cases such as that of the infamous "Bitch of Buchenwald," Ilse Koch, not much attention has been paid to the roles that women played in carrying out the so-called "Final Solution."  In landmark studies such as Christopher Browning's 1993 book, Ordinary Men:  Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solutionin Poland, the "ground level" focus has almost invariably been on men.  Soldiers, Einsatzgruppen, functionaries, and guards, these were the main perpetrators of the killings at their most intimate, face-to-face, level.  But who did the paperwork processing, the nursing, and other tasks both domestic and industrial alike that were a vital component of the concentration camp social societies?  Who helped tend the vast farms on which several thousand Jews and other concentration camp prisoners were forced to work as slaves to supply food for the German armies?  Yet women have often taken a back seat to men in discussions of the Holocaust.

In her National Book Award-nominated history, Hitler's Furies:  German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields, Wendy Lower begins to explore the matter of those women (mostly) behind the scenes whose actions (or non-actions) aided and abetted genocide.  Utilizing an impressive number of interviews that she conducted with the now-elderly women who were the farmers, the secretaries, and in some cases the murderesses, Lower has pieced together a history that promises to be a significant study.  Yet that word, "promises," is a damning one, as Hitler's Furies fails to become the authoritative or landmark book that it could have become.  It hints at matters, yet does not place them adequately within the framework of current historiographical discussion, leaving the work in that nebulous halfway house between being an oral history of those who were reticent at best to talk of their past lives and a study that places these women and their actions within a larger conceptualization of the Holocaust and its origins and characteristics.

Lower begins her book by introducing several issues that she intends to address.  Among these are institutional power (ranging from direct corporate-style hierarchies to less indirect ones such as the terminology employed in the Third Reich regarding cultures and nations and their degrees of worthiness) and its ability to shape women into the roles desired of them.  Yet, as Lower argues, these women were not passive objects to be set in place but instead were in many cases active agents who themselves engaged in atrocities (and not always then just to please their male companions). This, however, does not mean that the women such as Erna Petri or Liselotte Meier, to name two of the women Lower discusses at length, display a great deal of independence in their actions.  No, their actions, whether they be shooting Jewish fugitives on Petri's manor or Meier's torturing of those rounded up as the German army advanced eastward, are placed within the context of what their male lover/husband did:  Petri following the lead of her abusive husband and Meier that of her officer boyfriend.  While Lower does a good job fleshing out the personalities she discusses, there curiously is a relative lack of discussion of motives beyond the coercive factors of society and ideology.  It is as though Petri, Meier, and the others discussed in the book had lives, dreams, and ambitions of their own, but when it comes to the flashpoint of their roles in the Holocaust, those divergent characteristics fade suddenly into the backdrop of those caught up in the competing whirlwinds of loyalty to male-centric power structures and a sadistic joy in inflicting suffering.  More could have been done to discuss this, but Lower's explanation late in the book felt inadequate in that she relies too heavily on Theodor Adorno's work on authoritarian personality to explain these women's actions.  While certainly there is something to Adorno's view, it does little to account for the complexities of the actions undertaken during this time by both men and women (ranging from outright sedition down through implicit resistance to complicity and then ultimately a surpassing of the authority's desires, as if by doing so, the perpetrator could assert her own stamp on matters); there is much more to the matter.

Of greater interest, yet barely fleshed out, is the idea that neo-colonialist attitudes toward the East and its denizens might explain the actions of Petri and her compatriots:

Petri's testimony is rare.  There are few wartime and postwar records of ordinary German women expounding on their views of Jews and the Holocaust.  More common was a colonist discourse about how stupid, dirty, and lazy "the locals" were, referring to Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews, or veiled references to the dark terrain infested with "Bolsheviks," "criminals," and "partisans," or to the infantilized native who is clever but inferior, and thus dispensable. (p. 156)

This is where I suspect more and more studies of the Holocaust will go, away from focusing strictly on the mechanics of the Final Solution and toward a broader cultural analysis of the times and in particular the World War I era of Ostland and how the Ostland's governmental practices, so reminiscent of late 19th century European neo-colonialism in Africa and Asia, helped shape German attitudes toward Ostland and its natives in a much more insidious fashion than the Nazi ideology on "space" and "race."  Yet despite there being hints of this colonialist attitude in many of the women Lower profiles, she does not give as much credence to this as perhaps she should have.

The sources included in the endnotes is impressive.  Although I haven't kept up with the literature since late 1997, there are a wealth of studies on the issues of women in the Third Reich and roles of women in the Holocaust that appear to be promising reads.  Yet within the body of her study, Lower rarely mentions any of these other historians and their contributions to the field.  Perhaps this is due to Hitler's Furies being marketed more to a general audience than toward an academic one, but ultimately this leads to the sense that Lower's narrative is detached too much from the debates that historians have had on this subject over the past six decades.  While it may be understandable that Lower wants to avoid the old Intentionalist/Functionalist debate regarding the level of intent that the decision-makers had in beginning the Final Solution, the book suffers because there is insufficient grounding of her arguments within the context of larger discussions of the Holocaust's beginning, mechanics, and how its perpetrators justified their actions.  Even the women involved seem at times acting within a narrative vacuum; there is not enough explanation to cover their myriad actions.

Yet despite these serious issues that I have with Hitler's Furies, it is a book that at the very least presents vividly-described actresses and whose discussions at least point the way to possible future paths of exploration within the field.  It is a flawed work, but for non-historian readers curious about the time period, it certainly is a work that will appeal to them.  For many historians of the period, however, Lower's work may be frustrating in the sense that it seems that with just more focus on placing her work within the context of current historiography, her work could have been as important as those of Ian Kershaw and Browning in discussing the mindsets of those involved in the Shoah.  The arguments on complicity and the forms in which it took here will continue to rage on.

Kate DiCamillo, Flora & Ulysses

Not much goes on in the mind of a squirrel.

Huge portions of what is loosely termed "the squirrel brain" are given over to one thought:  food.

The average squirrel cogitation goes something like this:  I wonder what there is to eat.  This "thought" is then repeated with small variations (e.g. Where's the food?  Man, I sure am hungry.  Is that a piece of food? and Are there more pieces of food?) some six or seven thousand times a day.

All of this is to say that when the squirrel in the Tickhams' backyard got swallowed up by the Ulysses 2000X, there weren't a lot of terribly profound thoughts going through his head.

As the vacuum cleaner roared toward him, he did not (for instance), think, Here, at last, is my fate come to meet me! 

 He did not think, Oh, please give me one more chance and I will be good. 

What he thought was Man, I sure am hungry. (p. 10)

There is something magical that occurs when a child is around nine or ten years old.  The flights of fancy that inspired green skies and blue blades of grass with elongated, misshapen stick-humans populating perilously-leaning houses begins to transform into something more self-aware, something both universal and uniquely personal.  Looking back on my elementary school years in the early 1980s, 4th through 6th grade were wondrous years.  They were the years that I was introduced to Beverly Cleary's Ramona and Ralph S. Mouse, to Old Dan and Little Ann in Where the Red Fern Grows, to all the ways that one could eat worms to fulfill a bet.  Thirty years later, those stories linger like an old TV afterimage, influencing still how I decide which stories are worthy of joining my juvenile pantheon of great books.

It is tricky to write stories that speak directly to what is now termed "middle grades" (ages 8-12) readers while still maintaining a freshness of imagination.  Too often the works feel stilted, insincere, as if the adults composing them are uncertain of how to address their readers.  Perhaps the problem lies with "addressing" in the first place.  After all, few people like having someone address their opinions to them without at least some intimate connection.  Judy Blume was one of the rare few authors who could pull this off with aplomb; Margaret and Peter are vastly different characters on the surface, yet there is something about them that speaks to young boys and girls alike even decades after her most famous works were published.  Often writers settle for one of two extremes:  young, developing readers or the "young adults" of 13-21.  There is nothing wrong with writing for those audiences and several marvelous works have emerged in recent years that speak to these audiences.  However, it is a different matter when it comes to readers who are beyond basic reading but who have yet to experience the weird shifts that hormonal changes bring to the adolescent body.

Therefore, I was curious to see how Kate DiCamillo, who twice was either a finalist or winner for the Newberry Award, would tell the story of a bookish ten-year old girl, Flora, who was the only child of divorced parents.  Certainly the premise held great promise:  the introverted, comics-loving girl who discovers that a squirrel she rescues from an out-of-control vacuum cleaner has somehow gained superpowers in the process of surviving the suctioning force of the vacuum.  This is the sort of tale that I enjoyed in 4th or 5th grade, that of the inexplicable granting of anthropomorphic superpowers to an animal.  But would it ring true, or would the premise be all that is appealing about Flora & Ulysses?

For virtually the entire story, I found myself reading the story as if I were ten years old again.  Leaving aside the numerous in-jokes I have made over the years about squirrels, Ulysses (such a fitting name, that, although DiCamillo never directly references The Odyssey) is such a fascinating character in his own right.  DiCamillo has her characters make wry, sometimes witty observations without ever appearing to break the tone of the narrative.  Flora may be more of a shy violet than Cleary's Ramona ever was, but like Cleary's lovable rascal, Flora's views on her life, comics, and her parents' post-divorce lives contains a strong ring of truth to them because she never feels as though the author were talking at the target audience.  Instead, Flora's experiences, madcap as they often were in the novel (especially toward the end), are realistic even though the narrative is anything but quotidian life.  DiCamillo's slightly-skewed suburban setting (romance novel-writing mother, sadistic neighborhood cat, antique lamp shaped like a figurine) allows readers to laugh at the absurdities and to imagine themselves in such improbable events while still empathizing with the emotional aspects of the story.

Flora & Ulysses contains very few flaws.  The writing is engaging, with a sly wit that rewards those readers who have perhaps read a bit more than their peers without ever feeling as though a joke were being played outside their comprehension.  Flora and Ulysses are well-drawn characters (literally as well as figuratively, as there are some comics-like scenes where Ulysses' new superpowers are on display), but even the secondary characters (such as Flora's parents, a neighbor, and the neighbor's troubled great-nephew) shine in the limited time that they appear in the narrative.  Perhaps the story could have been even better with a more tense, drawn-out conclusion, but this is quibbling over a minor flaw.  Flora & Ulysses was recently longlisted for the National Book Award for Young Peoples' Literature and it certainly merits it, as it is one of the rare few middle grades fiction that reminds me of the voracious 9-10 year-old reader that I once was and the stories that most captivated the younger me.  Yet despite being nearly 30 years older than that reader, Flora & Ulysses contains a charm that belies its target audience.  Perhaps it will be a book that my nearly one-year-old niece will love when she is older.  I plan on finding out, as I will give this book to her when she is older.  If that is not a testament to how well-written this book this, then my words above will not serve any better to underscore this.