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Something Different Every Day

September 1, 2007

Help! Mom! There are Liberals Under My Bed!

Sometimes you just have to hold your nose and purchase something putrid. If you as a librarian live by the oft-quoted phrase “A good library should have something to offend everyone,” then sometimes you have to buy things that you find offensive. We purchased Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed! at a patron’s request, and I’d like to heartily encourage other libraries to feel very free to ILL it rather than purchasing another copy. I couldn’t find any reviews of it in the major journals, so I thought at least I would do the public service of reviewing it now.

DeBrecht, Katharine. Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed! Illustrated by Jim Hummel. Kids Ahead/World Ahead Publishing, 2005.

A pair of brothers long for a swing set, but their parents insist that “having everything given to them would not make them feel good about themselves, and that earning things on their own would make them feel proud and become better people.” Since in a happy coincidence they have a lemon tree growing in their yard, Tommy and Lou get the great idea of selling lemonade. They then fall asleep and dream that they live in a nightmarish world called “Liberaland”. Their lemonade stand is initially a huge success, and they even begin putting money aside for kids with no shoes, but then a liberal comes along and takes half of their earnings in taxes and uses the money to buy dustpans for the children who need shoes. The boys are also forced to take down their picture of Jesus and replace it with a picture of a big toe, and after many other unreasonable changes are made to the stand, the liberals take it over altogether.

DeBrecht’s clumsy writing style (”‘Well,’ the liberal’s red cheeks smiled”) reads like someone who hasn’t read children’s books thinks children’s books sound. Hummel’s cartoon illustrations, while better-executed, fall into the same trap with such clunky cliches as all of the children’s signs using backward letter E’s. Any witty moments are thoroughly mired in nastiness, and none of it makes sense anyway–who paid for the sugar in the lemonade? Who paid for the glasses? How could a lemon tree have “hundreds of lemons on each outstretched branch”? Dustpans? Sometimes random things aren’t funny, they are just dumb.

But to be fair, the book is exactly what it attempts to be: A satire on liberals. It is unintentionally satirical at times as well, as in the portrait of Ronald Reagan in the boys’ living room with his eyes gazing upward just like in many home portraits of Jesus. But make no mistake, this satire on liberals is very pointed, with many references to recognizable politicians such as Hilary Clinton (seen teetering on her high heels in a pink pantsuit) and Jimmy Carter. The author and illustrator apparently so despise Teddy Kennedy that they have put him in twice, physically as Mayor Leach but also as the senator from Taxachusetts. Adults of a conservative mindset will get several chuckles from this picture book, but they are its only likely audience.

posted by Susan at 9:04 am | Comments (1)

August 10, 2007

It’s time for weeding!

I have hit upon a great metaphor for weeding a collection–the parallels are amazing. Are you ready? It’s….like weeding your garden! Okay, that wasn’t exactly my idea, but it did hit me full force today as I was doing battle in my backyard with the weeds that have gotten out of control while we were on vacation.

Of course there are your obvious things that should be weeded–your field bindweed, your deadly nightshade, your book from 1987 on new dinosaur discoveries. Those are no-brainers, and you yank them. But sometimes time gets away from you, and you don’t quite get around to doing the necessary pulling, and then your bindweed is strangling your rosebush, and your science and social studies books are sadly out of date. This is the time of year (between Summer Reading and the beginning of school) to get in their and yank those weeds out of there!

The more interesting parallel, though, is with the plants that aren’t weeds, exactly. Maybe they are nice plants–marjoram, or sage, or buttercups. So as you are planting your nice new spring plants/books, you go ahead and leave them there, because really, there’s nothing wrong with them. If your shelves are a little overstuffed or your garden looks a little crowded, that’s okay, isn’t it? Well, if I hadn’t already gotten in there and done some serious weeding in my garden this morning, I’d show you a picture of what a bad idea that is. Let’s just say that the sage and the marjoram won and the pretty little carnations? Not so pretty anymore.

My point is if you don’t go ahead and pull the “I know this book never circulates but it has some good information in it and the cover is just a little shabby” books then before you know it, your beautiful new books are lost in a sea of books that clearly your patrons don’t want or they would be checking them out!

Of course you have to make case-by-case distinctions. We have certain authors we love so much that we don’t ever throw their books out even when they don’t circulate in our particular library–Virginia Hamilton comes to mind. I guess that would be the rosebush that isn’t really suited to your garden’s climate or soil but you love it and you keep nurturing it. That’s not so bad. But sometimes in gardening and in weeding, you have to make some hard decisions, and eventually maybe it’s time to pull out that fragile rosebush and put in the new variety so it has room to grow.

But let me just reiterate that we need to all be aware that there is no central repository for children’s literature, and I hope everyone in this age of computer catalogs makes sure they aren’t throwing out the last rosebush of its kind.

I could go on with the gardening metaphors–poetry is like the perennial that only blooms once a year during National Poetry Month but you keep it around because it is SO beautiful when it does bloom…but I will spare you. After all, you need to get in there and do some weeding!

posted by Susan at 3:14 pm | Comments (0)