Nancy Pearl Book Reviews for 12/29/2008

12/29/2008

A new children's book that melds together all of your favorite fairy tales and imagine 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' set during the Siege of Leningrad as a novel.

Allan Ahlberg's whimsical take on the world comes through clearly in all of his books for young children, but perhaps never more so than in Previously (Candlewick, 2007), where he teams up with artist Bruce Ingram to produce a charming concatenation of some familiar fairy tales. Beginning with Goldilocks arriving home after her adventure with the three bears, author and illustrator tell her story backwards, so to speak, by describing what she had been doing "previously." The final "previously" has her walking in the woods, prior to coming upon the house of the three bears, where she bumped into Jack (of climbing the beanstalk fame). As his story progresses backwards, it turns out that he's the same Jack who tumbled down the hill with his sister Jill, and that the two of them had encountered the Frog Prince, who (before he was turned into a frog) had fallen in love with "a disappearing girl named...Cinderella," who had collided with the Gingerbread Man and his retinue, and so on and so on, until the very satisfying conclusion. Reading this book aloud to 4 to 8 year old children is a delight. Not only will they take great pleasure in repeating "previously" with you each time it appears (nearly 30 times) in the text, but they'll appreciate Ahlberg's word pictures – The Frog, "sitting on the window sill/with a sorrowful look in his eye/and a crown on his head;" or Goldilocks, who "had been humming a tune/and having a little skip by herself in the dark woods." Beginning with the deliberately childlike pencil drawings on the endpapers, Ingram's pictures offer a colorful and clever complement for Ahlberg's quirky text. Just take a look at the picture of the poor Frog Prince watching Jack and Jill arguing at the breakfast table and you'll see what I mean.

Leningrad in 1942 may seem to be a strange setting for a novel that is best described as a lively, good–hearted buddy tale, but there it is, and if you enjoy the elan of movies like "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and "The Sting," here's the novelistic equivalent. (When I told a friend how much I enjoyed reading David Benioff's City of Thieves (Viking, 2008), he replied that he bet there was already a screenplay of it in the hands of the young actor Shia LaBoeuf. I can but hope that it's true, because it would make a most entertaining film.) The novel is introduced by a visit between the author and his grandfather. David Benioff presses his elderly relative for information about what happened to him in World War II; what follows the first chapter is his grandfather's tale. But there's a catch. How reliable is the older man's tale? When David tries to get answers to some of his specific questions, his grandfather tells him that since he's a write, he should just make it up. So how much is truth and how much fiction? Maybe it doesn't matter. Certainly, each reader will answer the question differently after finishing City of Thieves. In 1942, Leningrad was deep into the throes of a 900–day siege by the Germans, who were determined to starve the Russians into submission. Lev Beniov, too young for the army and too old to accompany his mother and sister when they leave the dangers of Leningrad for a hoped–for safety in the countryside, is arrested and imprisoned by the police for ignoring the curfew and looting a dead Nazi paratrooper, a crime punishable by execution. His cellmate is Kolya, who seems to Lev to be the very opposite of himself: Kolya is high–spirited, good looking, knows the ways of the world (and women), is courageous, self–confident, and reckless. His crime is desertion from the army, and he, too, is condemned to death. But the two get an unexpected reprieve: a Russian colonel offers them a chance to escape the firing squad on the condition that within the next five days they bring him a dozen eggs to be used in his daughter's wedding cake. This seemingly impossible task propels the improbable duo into a series of both wacky (meeting up with a pair of urban cannibals) and dangerous (an encounter with a fearless and dedicated group of Russian partisans, one of whose members is a beautiful young woman) adventures, both inside and outside the starving city. This page–turner is not only engrossing, but it has the added value of bringing a particular historical time and a place to life. Make reading and discussing it a third of a book discussion group trifecta: it fits well with Debra Dean's "The Madonnas of Leningrad" and Harrison Salisbury's comprehensive but very readable non–fiction account, "The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad."