Pullman himself is a woodworker, artist and calligrapher; his tradecraft aligns him with another important strand in the sensibility of Victorian Oxford and American transcendentalism: the independent-minded, visionary Henry David Thoreaubuilding his cabin, William Morris with his ideals of beautiful handmade things, and John Ruskin, who shared those dreams. Pullman has come to resemble the Ancient Mariner, shaking hoary locks, demanding we pay attention to the calamities gathering on all sides. The radiant devices and other wishful dreams of alternative futures have rather faded from view in this new book, and the child heroes are beleaguered and alone in their valiant struggle against huge, massed forces of harm.

The tension in Pullman between deep attraction to magic and fierce atheistic pragmatism resolves itself into a commitment to art – especially shipshapeliness; this is a properly Romantic attitude. Just as his concept of daemons owes a lot to Coleridge’s ideas about inspiration, and his absolute trust in imagination rings with the hopes and beliefs of Keats and Shelley, so the commitment to the making of things as well as possible in the here and now expresses his faith that a well-made story, like the small, well-trimmed boat that carries the children on their long, dangerous journey, will offer shelter in any storm.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/oct/18/the-book-of-dust-vol-1-la-belle-sauvage-by-philip-pullman-review

Philip Womack on La Belle Sauvage:

Pullman’s imagination is so enticing that any new window into it is welcome; and to connect once more with a fictional universe of such great power is a delight. Though La Belle Sauvage does not quite attain the fiery, magnificent heights of its predecessors, I’m certainly eager for the next two parts of this new trilogy; there are, after all, many more worlds to conquer.

https://www.ft.com/content/bc5117a8-b3ef-11e7-8007-554f9eaa90ba

WILD THINGS
The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult
By Bruce Handy
Illustrated. 278 pp. Simon & Schuster. $26.

In “Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult,” Bruce Handy does as his title promises, proceeding through children’s literature like someone determined to cook every Julia Child recipe. But since, of course, the number of children’s books out there far exceeds the number of Child’s soufflé and marbled steak dishes, Handy selects a few titles to represent each age, from babydom on up to whatever it is children become before they become us. Some of these are from his own childhood, some are books he read to his (still growing) children, and some seem chosen to answer a curiosity about what so-called girl books really are. This not-quite-method leaves the book occasionally feeling dutiful — but mostly not. “Wild Things” doesn’t have much of an argument to make other than its premise that we should take children’s literature seriously, which I think many people already do, and yet the book succeeds wonderfully, not so much as an argument but as an eccentric essay, and an emanation of spirit.

The trivia alone offers quite a bit of joy. Maurice Sendak altered his original plan for “Where the Wild Horses Are” because he lacked proficiency in equine anatomy. Also: L. Frank Baum’s first publication was a guide to breeding Hamburg chickens. Margaret Wise Brown of “Goodnight Moon” fame gave just one piece of visual instruction to her illustrator, Clement Hurd — a photograph of Goya’s “Red Boy.” And Theodor Geisel (a.k.a. Dr. Seuss) not only worked on the screenplay for “Rebel Without a Cause,” but also tried, early on, to make his fortune with an invention called the Infantograph — a machine that used images of prospective parents to predict what their offspring would look like.

full review via A Grown-Up’s Travels Down the Rabbit Hole of Children’s Literature – The New York Times.

Every Hidden Thing by Kenneth Oppel, reviewed by Imogen Russell Williams

This breakneck palaeontological western is perhaps best not judged by its cover. A jigsaw dinosaur skeleton seems to welcome younger readers, despite the tagline’s warning that “Love lies buried”; this makes the appearance of sexual attraction (“I felt myself stiffening between my legs”)on page nine slightly disconcerting. But for a reader mature enough to handle the pungent, realistic detail of 19th-century life, it’s a fascinating, fast-paced, rich and provocative novel.

via Every Hidden Thing by Kenneth Oppel review – heat, dust and dinosaur bones | Books | The Guardian.

The Pomegranate Tree by Vanessa Altin, reviewed by Piers Torday

There is no denying that this is a tough read. Former journalist Vanessa Altin was inspired by her interviews with Kurdish children in a refugee camp on the Syrian-Turkish border; she has an eye for a hard story, and there are not many harder than those she has told here. A teenager is taught how to fire an assault rifle, to gruesome effect. Children must pick paths through minefields, or hide under piles of bodies to survive.

There is a powerful precedent for this, of course. It was through the diary of another teenage girl, Anne Frank, that countless children first encountered the Holocaust. Apparently some bookshops sell The Pomegranate Tree with a “health warning”, out of concern for parents’ reactions. The instinct to protect childhood is always understandably strong. But Dilly and thousands like her have enjoyed no such protection. At the very least, we should hear their story.

via The Pomegranate Tree by Vanessa Altin – a child's-eye view of war-torn Syria | Books | The Guardian.