Book/CD Review: “Sunday in Kyoto”

You may never have heard of Gilles Vigneault, but he’s a cultural icon in Canada, particularly in Quebec, where his music so popular that one of his songs has replaced “Happy Birthday” as the birthday party anthem of choice. One of Vigneault’s fans is Roland Stringer, founder of publishing company The Secret Mountain; he’s referred to Vigneault as “French Canada’s Pete Seeger,” and now, he’s giving Vigneault a chance to raise his profile with American listeners — and readers — with Secret Mountain’s latest beautifully packaged book/CD combo, Sunday in Kyoto.

A collection of 14 Vigneault songs performed by Canadian singers including Patrick Watson, Thomas Hellman, Coral Egan, and Vigneault’s daughter Jessica, Kyoto highlights Gilles’ gentle whimsy; the title track, for instance, is about a Cajun musician who lives in Kyoto with his Japanese wife, where they lead jam sessions and perform for Buddhist monks (“Let me tell you about Yoshi / Fingers dancing on the harp / Has a pond of swimming carp / Just don’t say the word ‘sushi’”). Other songs continue in the same vein, from the sprightly “When the Danse Began” to the mock-operatic “Four Eggs” and effortlessly catchy “The Great Big Kite.” The arrangements are clean and jazzy, with charmingly silly vocal contributions from the singers, and the lyrics manage to be appropriate and educational while also avoiding your typical well-worn kids’ music subjects (one notable exception is “One, Two, Three, ABCD,” which will use copious amounts of Jew’s harp and lyrics about bovine peeing and farting to squeeze gales of laughter out of your children). Read the rest of this entry

Book Review: Wendell Berry, “Whitefoot: A Story from the Center of the World”

Wendell Berry – Whitefoot: A Story from the Center of the World (2009, Counterpoint)
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This is a beautiful little book, and the calmest, gentlest illustrated short story about a mouse fighting for its life against a terrible flood that you are ever likely to read.

That should come as no surprise to longtime fans and followers of Berry’s prolific output, which reflects the pride and commitment to tradition of his agrarian lifestyle. In his nonfiction work, Berry has argued for the merits of a philosophy he calls “solving for pattern,” which is a fancy way of saying that you should try to solve as many problems as possible at once – and do so in such a way as to minimize the likelihood of additional problems.

It’s sort of a mouthful, but it’s a beautifully simple school of thought, and it resonates throughout Whitefoot‘s 60 pages. Berry’s placid text, which meshes wonderfully with Davis Te Selle’s beautiful pencil illustrations, follows the journey of a mouse named Whitefoot as she gathers food, builds a nest, and manages to survive a flood that carries her far beyond her home. She does this by doing as little as possible — in other words, by following her instincts. In a passage about something as simple as Whitefoot building her nest, Berry extols the virtues of simplicity and thrift:

She molded the cup of the next exactly to fit by pressing against it with her body. She made it snug. She did her work according to an ancient, honorable principle: Enough is enough. She worked and lived without extravagance and without waste. Her nest was a neat small cup the size of herself asleep.

He concludes the paragraph with the most beautiful phrase of all: “Her sleep was an act of faith and a giving of thanks.”

As you may be able to tell, Berry’s writing makes few concessions for younger audiences; to some parents, Whitefoot may seem impenetrably…adult. But I read it to my three-year-old, and she loved it — I’m sure she wasn’t able to absorb the subtext of Berry’s message, or perhaps even its broader themes, but she understood what was happening, and she absolutely loved the illustrations, squealing with delight every time we turned to another page with a picture of the adorable little mouse.

It isn’t as eye-catching as the work of Eric Carle or Karma Wilson and Jane Chapman, but it’s no less instructive, and it may very well stay with your young readers much longer — sort of along the lines of The Giving Tree, albeit lacking quite the emotional impact. Like I said: A beautiful little book.

Book Review: Philip Pelletier, “One Night in Frogtown”

Cool picture, huh? It comes from a scene halfway through Philip Pelletier’s One Night in Frogtown, in which our hero, young Tad — that’s him there with the downcast look and the saxophone — is given a tongue-lashing (ha, ha, ha!) by a group of classical music-playing frogs who have no patience for Tad’s love of the blues. Of course, Tad’s already been cast out by the blues-playing frogs for not loving the blues enough — and his journey’s only halfway finished, because all the frogs in Frogtown are pretty stuck up about their favorite kind of music, and they take offense at Tad’s eclectic nature.

In case you hadn’t already guessed, One Night in Frogtown is a book about fitting in, and one that uses love of music (which can be a pretty divisive thing, especially when you’re young) to frame its message of friendship and cultural diversity. Children’s authors do this sort of thing all the time, but Frogtown has the added advantage of Lindner’s wonderful illustrations — and the CD that comes with the book, featuring music to go along with the songs each group of frogs sings (blues, classical, rap, etc.) as well as the tune Tad plays after he’s been exiled for the third time (a ballad titled, naturally, “Alone”). Blues veteran (and, like Pelletier and Lindner, Oregon resident) Curtis Salgado provides the narration.

After the book arrived, I did what I always do: Handed it to my three-year-old daughter and watched her reaction. She was immediately drawn in, to the point that the scene where Tad talks about feeling alone actually made her cry. (She still won’t listen to the song.) We read the book first without the CD, then tried to read along with the music — but getting a toddler to sit and look at one page of a book for three minutes while a song plays is impossible, and she lost interest pretty quickly.

Overall, One Night in Frogtown is a beautifully assembled multimedia package with a moral that any parent should be able to get behind and some perfectly entertaining music to go along with it — and a portion of the proceeds go to the Oregon Cultural Trust, to boot. As final proof, weeks after reading it for the first time, my daughter’s still talking about it; in fact, she just took it into preschool to share it. What else can you ask for in a kids’ book?

Sample pages, hear music, and purchase One Night in Frogtown here.