The Reading Chair
Isabel Baker and Miriam Baker Schiffer
When we heard Mem Fox present her new book, Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes, at the annual BookExpo America conference in June, we were blown away by it. Just wait until you read it! (We review it below.) We were eager to share the book with educators, parents, and anyone else who reads with babies and young children. Mem gave a fantastic speech before reading the book that day, and it reminded us of how spunky, passionate, and caring she is, qualities reflected in her long list of books, many of them featuring her home country, Australia. The release of her new book is a wonderful occasion to feature her in our column and to review a few of the old favorites from Mem.
Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes, by Mem Fox. Illus.by Helen Oxenbury. 2008. Orlando, FL: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 40 pp. ISBN 9780152060572. Ages birth to 4.
Mem’s newest book, available this fall, is phenomenal! Using rhyme and repetition, she has created a multicultural book about something all different babies have in common: ten little fingers and ten little toes. The same reassuring refrain follows after each pair of babies is introduced, like this first pair that opens the book: “There was one little baby / who was born far away. / And another who was born / on the very next day. / And both of these babies, / as everyone knows, / had ten little fingers / and ten little toes.” Mem includes interesting words and phrases like eiderdown, sneezes and chills, and truly divine. Together, she and Helen Oxenbury—the queen of illustrating babies—capture the feeling shared by adults and babies alike, that there is something particularly captivating about those fingers and toes and something particularly lovable about all babies everywhere.
Possum Magic, by Mem Fox. Illus. by Julie Vivas. 1983. Orlando, FL: Harcourt. 32 pp. ISBN 9780152005726. Ages 4 to 7.
Mem claims that Australia’s possums are “very soft and cute,” which may surprise those familiar with the American ilk. But they’re certainly delightful in Possum Magic, an Australian best seller in which Grandma Poss makes bush magic on the local animals. She turns the kookaburras pink and makes the emus shrink. And she makes her granddaughter Hush invisible to spare her from being eyed by dangerous snakes. But there comes a point when a possum wants to see itself again. At that point, Grandma Poss and Hush travel Australia searching for a gastronomic antidote to invisibility: They eat Anzac biscuits in Adelaide, mornay (a cheese sauce) in Melbourne, and lamington (a popular cake) in the Hobart casino. Vivas’s imaginative illustrations capture their determination and their pleasure as Hush slowly regains her looks. This sweet story provides a culinary and geographic tour of the country, and it’s the book that put Mem on the map.
Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge, by Mem Fox. Illus. by Julie Vivas. 1985. La Jolla, CA: Kane/Miller. 32 pp.
ISBN 9780916291044. Ages 3 to 7.
Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge lives next door to an “old people’s home,” and he has a handful of good friends there. But Miss Nancy Alison Delacourt Cooper is his favorite because she too has four names. One day, Wilfrid Gordon overhears his parents saying that Miss Nancy has lost her memory, and he sets out to find it. Everyone at the home has an explanation for what a memory is—something warm, something from long ago, something precious as gold. When Wilfrid Gordon shows Miss Nancy a collection of trinkets representing each of these things, the trinkets bring back her old memories, just as he had been hoping. Vivas’s watercolor illustrations are full of character and feeling, just right for depicting this thoughtful, slow-moving bunch.
Sophie, by Mem Fox. Illus. by Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson. 1989. Orlando, FL: Harcourt. 32 pp. ISBN 9780152771607. Ages 3 to 7.
In this cycle-of-life book, Mem uses straightforward language to tell a touching story about birth, death, and then birth again. It begins, “Once there was no Sophie. And then there was. Sophie’s hand curled around Grandpa’s finger. Grandpa and little Sophie loved each other.” Robinson’s illustrations are pregnant with emotion. She paints oversized hands to emphasize the way family members hold each other, care for each other, and love each other. By the end of the book, Sophie is grown; her grandfather passes away; and there is “just emptiness and sadness for a while, till a tiny hand held on to Sophie’s and sweetness filled the world once again.”
Tough Boris, by Mem Fox. Illus. by Kathryn Brown. 1994. Orlando, FL: Harcourt. 32 pp. ISBN 9780152896126. Ages 2 to 6.
Boris is a typical tough pirate, but he can’t help crying when his beloved parrot dies. Brown’s colorful and expressive illustrations, paired with Mem’s simple and well-paced text, do a knock-out job of giving readers a book that conveys pirates in all their gritty glory while wrapping the story up with a wallop of compassion for a character who can’t help but reveal his sensitive side.
Reading Magic: Why Reading Aloud to Our Children Will Change Their Lives Forever, by Mem Fox. Illus. by Judy Horacek. Rev. ed. 2008. Orlando, FL: Harcourt. 208 pp. ISBN 9780156035101. Adult.
While Mem Fox is best known as a children’s author, she is also a committed literacy consultant, inspiring teachers and parents to read aloud to children. She is convinced that if a caring adult reads “a minimum of three stories a day to the children in their lives, we could probably wipe out illiteracy within one generation.” Not only does this book offer practical advice about reading aloud at every turn, but Mem’s enthusiasm and humor throughout the book make it a quick read. A great gift for teachers and parents, and convincing too!
Usually, but not this time—
not with this book . . .
Adapted, with permission, from a speech delivered by Mem Fox at BookExpo America on June 1, 2008.
Mem Fox
As a writer for very young children, you’d think I’d sit down and write for very young children and that would be the beginning and end of it. Not at all! As I sit at my desk I usually look sideways to see who is sitting on my shoulder, muttering into my fearful ear.
I usually see publishers, booksellers, and my literary agent waving irritating balance sheets before my eyes, with profits in black and losses in red and dollar signs all over the page.
I usually feel the caress of the best-seller lists and book awards as I wonder whether the story will receive acclaim.
I usually watch as the teachers and librarians, critics and academics all talk at once: “Write like this. Write about that. We need this. We want that. We love the illustrations. We hate the illustrations. Have you considered this topic? Have you considered that?”
I usually take note when the illustrators turn up. So quietly do they arrive, they find it hard to find space on my crowded shoulders. They hate to be too pushy. But they make their demands known nevertheless: “Please don’t write what we can’t show in the pictures, okay?”
And I usually notice the parents. Somehow they make themselves heard above all the din: “Make it short, please make it short, so we don’t have to spend hours reading to the children at night when we’re totally exhausted. And by the way, get rid of all that rhyme, rhythm, and repetition; have you any idea what it’s like to read that stuff 365 nights a year?”
Usually the darling children themselves say only, “Please make us happy.”
I put metaphorical fingers in my ears to try to block out everyone’s chattering and advice, but it’s hard. They all speak so loudly.
This is what usually happens, so I find it is hugely difficult to write for the very young and I usually detest it.
Over the years I have learned how much children love great writing, as opposed to ordinary writing. They’re uplifted by it, enthralled, spellbound—and want it reread many times over. We all recognize ordinary writing when we try to read it to children. They become bored and restless with lack of interest. Ordinary writing, alas, comes all too easily off the pen—off my pen.
I realized a few years ago that I myself had created a supremely ordinary text after drafting and redrafting a moralistic story. I was so dispirited that I phoned both my editor in California and my agent in Australia. Sobbing, I told them I hated writing, that I’d always hated it really, that it’s almost impossible to write well for young children, and that I’d lost the talent for it—if I’d ever had the talent in the first place. This, I said, was my resignation phone call. I was never going to write again.
Both editor and agent were calm and loving. The great advantage of working with people who know you well is that they neither mock you nor tease you when you feel talentless, nor do they attempt to dissuade you from your idiotic path. They offered useful suggestions, and I relaxed immediately and slept the sleep of angels.
The next day I was talking to a large group of parents with many differences: some were black, some white or brown, some well-to-do, some poor, some young, some older. Their children, and in particular their babies, were universally adorable. As the parents bent over the table afterwards to have their books signed, I played with the babies’ fingers, marveling at their exquisite tinyness.
I wasn’t aware that I’d noticed the race or color of these tiny fingers. I grew up on a mission in Africa, a minority White among many Blacks, so usually I don’t notice these things. I have known all my life that color is skin-deep, literally, and has nothing to do with character or capability.
I left that event on a snowy Friday afternoon to begin a very long plane journey home from America via London-Singapore-Sydney-and-Adelaide. On a later leg of the plane journey, in my dreamy state I recalled the similarities of the peoples of the world, the tiny fingers of every single child, and once again wished we could focus on what we have in common instead of the differences and hatreds that divide us and lead us again and again into futile wars. Then I slept.
When I drowsily awoke, a story began to take shape in my addled brain. As soon as I was properly awake, I rushed onto paper the words of Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes, which had appeared as if by miracle overnight. I wrote so fast that when I’d finished, the woman in the seat next to me asked what I’d been writing. “A divine children’s book,” I said, and laughed. “Would you like a copy?” I wrote it out again and gave it to her and signed it.
I don’t even know her name, but she was my first audience, and she cried. I’ve read this manuscript to many audiences since, and some of my listeners have been puzzled by their own reaction: “You know, I really teared up at the end of that Toes book!” As if tears and love and picture books were contradictions in terms.
It usually takes me over two years to write a picture book text of 500 words, yet unusually, suddenly, this story had arrived, unannounced, over 40 hours. At 5:00 a.m. my time, snuggled up in the covers of my hotel bed in Sydney, even before I’d arrived in my home city of Adelaide, I phoned my editor and read it to her. The silence afterwards was thrilling. I could tell she kind of loved it.
She typed it up in San Diego as I dictated it from Sydney, and we worked on it over the phone. The manuscript was finished within a couple of hours, and lo and behold, I was a born-again writer. It was accepted before I was out of my pajamas.
My editor wrote to Helen Oxenbury in London, asking if she’d consider doing the illustrations. She graciously said yes to Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes. When you see Helen’s exquisite and endearing art, you’ll be able to share my excitement and good fortune. It takes audacious lateral thinking and a spark of pure genius for a Californian editor to engage an Australian writer and an English illustrator in such a way as to create the perfect American picture book.
Unusually, as I wrote this book, I was able to still the shrill voices of the publisher and the bookseller, the librarian and the parent, the critic, the academic, and the teacher. I was for once able to write a book all alone: a poem of love for all the babies of the world.
Mem Fox is Australia’s best-loved picture book author. Her first book, Possum Magic, is the best-selling children’s book ever in Australia. Mem has written 30 picture books for children and 5 nonfiction books for adults, including the best-selling Reading Magic, aimed at parents of very young children. She was a professor in literacy studies at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, where she taught teachers for 24 years. She continues to write and travel.
Isabel Baker, MAT, MLS, is president of The Book Vine for Children, a national company dedicated to getting good books into the hands of preschool children and their teachers. Isabel has worked as a children’s librarian and is currently a presenter on early literacy and book selection. Miriam Baker Schiffer, MFA, is a writer.
This article’s content addresses NAEYC Early Childhood Program Standards 2, 3.
Beyond the Journal—Young Children on the Web, September 2008.
Copyright © 2008 by the National Association for the Education
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