On Saturday, April 24, the East Bay Children’s Book Project will celebrate our 5th anniversary with a party to thank all our supporters and clients.  To get us in the mood, here are some children’s books about parties and celebrations!

Bear Snores On by Karma Wilson: All the animals are having a party in Bear’s den while Bear is sleeping … or is Bear sleeping?

Happy Birthday, Danny and the Dinosaur! by Syd Hoff: If you already know Danny and the Dinosaur, I don’t need to tell you any more.  If you don’t, what are you waiting for?

A Letter to Amy by Ezra Jack Keats: Peter wants to invite Amy to his birthday party in this wonderful book by the author of The Snowy Day and Peter’s Chair.

Little Bear by Else Holmelund Minarik: Little Bear has a birthday party and other gentle adventures in this most wonderful of classics.

Hippos Go Berserk by Sandra Boynton: Sometimes you just gotta party for the heck of it (especially when you’re Sandra Boynton’s hippos)!

March 2010 saw the release of not one but two new movies based on children’s books: Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland and Diary of a Wimpy Kid, based on Jeff Kinney’s book series of the same name.

Of course, kids’ books have been made into movies for, well, a really long time.  There was The Wizard of Oz in 1939, and that probably wasn’t even the first.  Some adaptations are great and some are terrible, and some are – well, different.  Ian Fleming’s novel Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is not a romance; Mary Poppins the book character bears no resemblance to Julie Andrews; in print, there are no psychologically significant family backstories for Willy Wonka in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or for Max in Where the Wild Things Are.

We adults – especially those of us in the fields of education and literacy – sometimes complain that all the screens in kids’ lives are taking them away from print.  And yet every now and then there’s a ray of hope that it can actually work the other way.  I recently saw a couple of grade-school kids who usually ask me for books about race cars, or mummies, or Star Wars – books with cool pictures and text that, I suspect, they generally blithely ignore.  This time, though, they all wanted Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

Incidentally: I don’t think the recent film version of Alice in Wonderland is going to create a new generation of Lewis Carroll fans.  But Christopher Myers’s altogether original, fabulous version of Jabberwocky just might …

Got spring fever?  I know I do … I’ve had it for weeks!  Here are a few of my favorite children’s books about spring and growing things:

The Carrot Seed by Ruth Krauss, illustrated by Crockett Johnson.  Nobody believes the carrot seed will grow except the little boy who plants it …

The Little Red Hen: There are many versions of this classic  story, and kids still love it.

Growing Vegetable Soup by Lois Ehlert: a father and child grow vegetables together and then make soup in this beautifully illustrated, simple book.  Also available as a board book.

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett: In this classic book, the blooming garden is a metaphor for the reawakening of the spirit and the ability to take joy in life.  Note: this is an old book and its attitudes toward the physically disabled and the colonial subjects of its English protagonists may seem patronizing, at the least, to some current readers.

Seedfolks by Paul Fleischmann: This one’s for older kids.  People of all ages, ethnicities and backgrounds transform a trash-filled lot into an inner-city garden, and the project changes them too in this beautiful set of connected stories.

Seems that a very different Bill Martin – no Jr. and no children’s books to his name – wrote a very different kind of book, called Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation.  The Texas Board of Education understandably felt, as Baggott notes, that there might be “compelling reason not to include Bill Martin’s Ethical Marxism on the curriculum list for elementary school children in Texas.”  And then, just to be sure, they banned all of what they thought were Bill Martin’s other books.  Like – you got it – Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?  Read Baggott’s article for her take on this boneheaded mess; it’s very funny and original, as might be expected from the author of such excellent books as The Prince of Fenway Park and The Ever Breath. 

But there is a serious side to all this.  Brown Bear, Brown Bear isn’t by a Marxist author and isn’t a work of political philosophy.  However, plenty of children’s books do promote political or philosophical viewpoints.  Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax is pro-environmentalist.  Heather Has Two Mommies is, well, obvious.  And some people don’t want their kids exposed to such books.  According to Wikipedia, the picture book And Tango Makes Three, the true story of a male penguin couple raising a chick, was the most challenged book of 2006, 2007, and 2008, and the most banned book of 2009. 

Nor do all objections come from right-wingers.  Some Native American scholars are asking that teachers not use Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books because of their depiction of Native Americans.  My own high school librarian, eons ago, refused to have a copy of Gone With the Wind on her shelves because she felt it demeaned African Americans.  Sometimes politics has nothing to do with it: sex and religion are big button-pushers, too, as reactions to the Harry Potter books, Phillip Pullman’s The Golden Compass and John Green’s Looking for Alaska have shown.  One way or another, dozens of books for children and young adults get challenged and even banned on a regular basis. 

So: where do you stand?  Is it ever OK to ban a book?  Does it matter how old the kids are, or what the “objectionable” content is?  Who gets to decide?  What do you think?