Book Summary
In the nineteenth century, a man builds the Little House in the country for his family and says, "This little house shall never be sold for gold or silver and she will live to see our great-great-grandchildren's great-great-grandchildren living in her." The Little House is happy in the country with lots of sunshine, grass, trees. When progress invades the area, Little House begins to wonder what life is like in the city. She wants to know what people see and do. When industrialization surrounds her, the Little House is dismayed and misses her days in the country. As she falls into disrepair, Little House becomes depressed. Until--one day a young woman finds the house and sees the possibilities in her. The woman was none other than the great-great granddaughter of the man who built the Little House. The woman has Little House moved into a country setting where once again she is surrounded by sunshine, grass and trees.
My Impression
I love this book and loved it even more when I researched Virginia Lee Burton. She was a sculptor, an artist, a wife, and a mother. She seemed to be able to allow each attribute flow into another. According to my research, she wrote The Little House as a statement on industrialization and its invasion of rural. Before her time, Burton recognized that the environment was not compatible with "progress." The book depicts smokestacks and cars which belch pollution into the air. In the same way the Little House suffered in the city, so people suffer from the same environment.
The art is beautiful, bright pencil colors. The strokes are round while Little House is in the country, but vertical when she is in the city. The rhyme is restful and sweet. Best of all, there is a happy ending.
Professional Review
The Little House review. (1942). Kirkus Review.
From what is available, this promises to be another beguiling book in the series which includes Choo Choo and Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. Children have an instinctive personal feeling about houses, and the idea of the friendly little house that found itself forgotten when the city moved in on it will catch their imaginations. The pictures are in full color and on every page. Virginia Burton has a sense of pattern that makes her pictures almost like a tapestry.
1. Create a little house in the library for children to get cozy and read.
2. Use the book to celebrate Earth Day. Imagine the school as the Little House, and ask students what they can do to make it a happier atmosphere, ie. plant a tree, clean up trash, build a pond.
Selznick, B. (2007). The invention of Hugo Cabret. NY: Scholastic.
Book Summary
An orphan, Hugo Cabret, survives in a Paris railway station by winding the clocks and stealing food to eat. He invests time on an automaton on which his father worked before his death. With the help of a new friend, he manages to make the machine work. Through a series of events, Hugo meets the great filmmaker George Melies. Melies is no longer the happy man who created fantastical settings that took people away from reality into the imaginary world of film. Melies is finally remembered for pioneer work in film and Hugo grows up to be magician.
My Impressions
While this book is easy to read, I took extra time because the drawings fascinated me. Selznick is a genius at pencil drawing and hiding pictures within the pictures. George Melies tells Hugo of his celluloid films being melted and turned into heels for shoes; with each click of a shoe there is a ghost. Selznick hides the ghosts in his pictures. I enjoyed the "orphan" aspect, too. Being fatherless is a tragedy, but Hugo, like many great characters before him, overcomes the tragedy and becomes a success. The automaton fascinated me because I have never seen one. I didn't realize that an automaton was more like a clock than a robot, running on springs and screws. Researching automatons yielded more information. There is an automaton at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. It is called the Draughtsman-Writer" and was built by Henri Maillardet around 1810. Selznick visited the institute when he began writing Hugo's story. I think children will be just as fascinated as I am with the pure joy that is The Invention of Hugo Cabret.
Professional Review
R. S. (2007). The invention of Hubo Cabret. Horn Book Magazine, 83(2), 173-175.
Here's a dilemma for the Newbery committee...and the Caldecott: what do you do with an illustrated novel in which neither text nor pictures can tell the story alone? Not to mention to the drama to be found in the page turns themselves. A brief introductions sets the time (1931) and the place (Paris) and invites readers to imagine they're at the movies. And with a turn of the page, they are, as, over a sequence of twenty-one double-page wordless spreads, a story begins. A picture of Paris; day breaks as the "camera" moves into a shot of a strain station, where a boy makes his way to a secret passage from which, through a peephole, he watches an old man sitting at a stall selling toys. Finally, the text begins: "From his perch behind the clock, Hugo could see everything." The story that follows in breathtaking counterpoint is a lively one, involving the dogged Hugo, his touch little ally Isabelle, an automaton that can draw pictures and a state magician turned filmmaker, the real-life Georges Melies, most famously the directer of A Trip to the Moon (1902). There is a bounty of mystery and incident here, along with several excellent chase scenes expertly rendered in the atmospheric, dramatically crosshatched black-and-white (naturally) pencil drawings that make up at least a third of the book. (According to the final chapter, and putting a metafictional spin on things there are 158 pictures and 26,159 words in the book.) The interplay between the illustrations (including several stills from Melies's frequently surreal films and others from the era) and text is complete genius, especially the way Selznick moves from one to the other, depending on whether words or images are the better choice for the moment. And as in silent films, it's always just one or the other, wordless double-spread pictures or unillustrated text, both framed in the enticing black of the silent screen. While the bookmaking is spectacular, and the binding secure but generous enough to allow the pictures to flow easily across the gutter, The Invention of Hugo Cabret is foremost good storytelling, with the sincerity and verbal ease reminiscent of Andrew Clements (a frequent Selznick collaborator) and themes of secrets, dreams, and invention that play lightly but resonantly throughout. At one point, Hugo watches in awe as Isabelle blithely picks the lock on a door. "How did you learn to do that?" he asks. "Books," she answers. Exactly so.
Library Uses
1. Invite a film professor from a nearby university to discuss George Melies's contribution to film. Students may write questions to ask the expert.
2. Do a book talk for students and then ask if they can create a book that is a mixture of pencil drawings and words. Collaborate with the language arts teacher and the art teacher to produce a final product. Display them and present them during Parent Teacher Night.
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