On Monday morning, I had finished my previous book and was “stranded” on the plane without anything else to read, I raided the boy’s backpack for one of his new birthday gifts: The Twenty-One Balloons.
What a fun tale. Written in 1947 by William Pène du Bois, Twenty-One Balloons won a Newberry Medal the following year for “Excellence In Children’s Literature.” (The boy is six now, so I wasn’t going to pull Dickens or even Clancy from his backpack.) I never came across this one in any of my other reading: child, youth, or adult.
The matter-of-fact style for a work of fiction, the effort to ground its few “sparkling” (you’re groaning if you know the story or read the links above) central fictions in the real world… all are appreciated. The illustrations, from the author, are not special, but fit the earnest, interested tone throughout. This is only an hour or two of your reading life, and it would be well spent.
Earlier in the weekend, I flew through the other additions to the boy’s library. My excuses were that I wanted to be ready to answer questions about what he was reading, to make sure he wasn’t headed down some inconvenient paths a bit early, and to gauge his reading skills. But those are just excuses!
Both The Fantastic Mr. Fox and James and the Giant Peach are from Roald Dahl, a favorite author for almost his entire range of writings. I don’t know when I read these two as a child, but these are certainly short. In fact, each is much shorter in reality than in memory. I wasn’t as disappointed with a re-read as I was with the first in the Narnia series, but I’ll have to honor my fears about Danny, Champion of the World.