Transplanting a Seattleite

_She Persisted_ is by Chelsea Clinton. The illustrations are lovely. Many familiar figures are included: Nellie Bly, Claudette Colvin, Sally Ride, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, for example. But there are also many who are less familiar to me: Maria Tallchief, Virginia Apgar, Clara Lemlich.

The pattern is simple: a little story of the woman, her dream, her persistence in fulfilling that dream, then a quote from the woman. In each story, the phrase, _She Persisted_ is incorporated. It is inspiring.

A bit denser, but also enjoyable is Mary Winget's _Eleanor Roosevelt_. A biography starting from Eleanor's birth, detailing her younger years at home, the deaths in her family, her time away at school in England, coming out, marriage to Franklin, the births of their children, early years in politics and out, etc. Then of course 4 terms, and all her work after the war with the United Nations and so forth.

#14 and #15. Technically, my daughter read the first one to me, and we split the second.

ETA: The above two were library books from the school library. This next one, #16, was a Scholastic Book Club selection, which my daughter picked because it came with one of those mermaid blanket tails — and it was almost entirely pink. Which. Pink World. Anyway.

Purr-Maids #2: The Catfish Club, by Sudipta Bardhan-Quallen, is the first book in this series that either of us had read. We think book #1 is lying around somewhere, but there are a _lot_ of purchases in this most recent order (they sent them home in the Book Box, which tells you something). Lest you think she is ordinarily an avid reader, my daughter typically picks her book club selections based on What Comes With. Also, she loves rocks. But really, who doesn’t.

Anyway. Reminded me a lot of Thea Stilton books / Mouseford Academy and some other series that we have sampled that I won’t mention because they were a lot worse. This has purr-maids, mermaids, but the top half is kitty, instead of human. Really. Two groups of three, competing, and there’s a bet putting favorite jewelry at stake. The competition involves producing art for a class project. They ultimately (SPOILERS!) fail miserably at their initial efforts and decide to work together as a group of 6 and produce something really great that is placed in the local art museum (partly out of necessity). Lots of silly pun artist names (Pablo Picatso, Henri Catisse, and let me tell you, spell check in this browser window really wants to fix those names). A. wondered why the girls were being mean to each other (and this author actually had the meanness pretty evenly distributed — in some books, there is a clear “victim / hero” and a clear “mean girl / villain”); I compared them to Zeta in Shimmer and Shine, and said it was basically being really, really competitive. I love it when her current video interests supply a narrative example of some concept she is struggling with elsewhere. I can point to it, and she immediately understands and can expand on it based on the video program. Kidvid today is so amazing compared to what I grew up with. I particularly liked the resolution of the bet.

I had such a ridiculous amount of time before book group last Monday that I went to Willow Books and bought some Halloween themed (and other) children's books, including _Duck & Goose Find a Pumpkin_ by Tad Hills. A. wanted more when we finished it, so I went to order more through Amazon where I discovered there were kindle editions. I was skeptical, so I got a sample delivered to one of the iPads (wow, since I ordered the kFires for my family and my sister's there are a _lot_ of kindles on my drop down list to choose from) where, YES it is indeed in color. Okay then. I ordered a few: Opposites, 1 2 3 and the original. The original is wordy; the rest are not. So I like the rest better than I like the first one, which feels like a thinly disguised metaphor for a couple of people coparenting a new kid and trying to figure out how best to go about that (probably reading that into the book. Probably) and thus more adult-themed than kid-themed. The rest of the books are appropriate to their genre (pairs of pictures involving the characters doing opposite things: near, far, etc.; pictures of the characters with some number of whatever to count; the characters bumbling around trying to find a pumpkin and having adventures until another one points them at the pumpkin patch -- a lot like a Katz book that way but without the flaps).

The art is appealing. Except for the first in the series, they have very few words per page. They have a mild sense of humor.

I like them. A. likes them. They are not interactive, at least in the kindle-for-iPad version, but they are in color. (Arguably they are too expensive.)

Does anyone pay attention to this when they are reading it? Because if you _do_ pay attention to it, it is some creepy. If you love this book, you might want to stop reading now.

First off, I get why it works. It is simple. It is concrete. It is repetitive. It is a catalog. This kind of thing Really Work for People. Like, whoa and like damn. Never, ever, ever underestimate the power of a catalog to bewitch and seduce. And it need only be marginally comprehensible to be effective (in fact, catalogs that are fully understood are much less powerful).

Now that that's out of the way, let's think about what's going on here. This is a _nursery_: a room where that kid probably spends every night and most of every day. That mush on the table makes it into the list with the comb and the brush because that kid eats that mush every day -- maybe more than once a day. The old woman who says hush and who knits? That would be the nanny, and not the nanny in the sense of the person who takes care of the kids while mummy and daddy go to work, but rather the person who takes care of the kid 24 X 6 and quite a few hours on the 7th day as well, and in a wealthy household there's a head nanny and then one nanny per kid.

That page where the kid goes, "good night nobody" that is mostly blank? Notice how the kid isn't thinking of saying good night to mummy and/or daddy and/or siblings. That "nobody" wasn't a philosophical or funny thing for that kid to say. That was a lonely, possibly developing attachment disorders moment that the kid probably experienced every night. It was "good night nobody" because it was too painful to even think of the absent person or persons who should have been central to the catalog of good nights.

_Now_, of course, when parents read this to their kid, the "nobody" is very present. But not so when Brown wrote the book.

Does anyone _notice_ this when they are reading it? Is this all an artifact of reading Gathorne-Hardy's _Unnatural History of the Nanny_?

Some analysis of this book points out that there is no good night to the telephone (rather conspicuously so, actually). Other things one might point out would include, hey, _there's a telephone_, what is that doing there? Well you should ask. The kid sure isn't going to be talking on it. This family may be so detached they issue instructions to the nanny over the phone, rather than risk interacting with the kid by coming all the way up to the attic to issue them in person. I'm not sure, really, one way or the other.

But jeez. That is some seductive catalog. A. is obsessed with this book. When we aren't reading one of the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse number books, or _Quiet, Loud_, or _Jungle Colors_ (a Backyardigans book), or Jez Alborough's _Hug_, or something by Boynton, we're probably reading this one. Altho we did rattle through some Seuss today, there were no requests for repeats.