A children's book editor looks back on some career highlights

In a power-point presentation before his 2005 Arbuthnot Lecture, delivered at Drexel University on April 9th, retiring editor Richard Jackson displayed the jackets of his 80 favorite titles over five decades of publishing, one each from many of his favorite writers and illustrators. From this presentation he culled 17 titles for special notation. They became “Dick's Picks,” for which he has provided the commentary.

---

Judy Blume's Tiger Eyes. (Bradbury, 1982).

As always, Blume gives readers people who are immediately recognizable but then surprising, too.

And with this book she widens her view to take in the world; mindless violence propels the plot in the beginning, and the violence of history (and shadow of the Atomic Bomb in Los Alamos, NM) underscores action, mood, and resonance throughout Davey's struggles to accept the inexplicable murder of her father. Swallowing her fright, she becomes a candystriper, befriends Mr. Ortiz, and is befriended by one of the great “dates” in teen literature, his son Wolf.

As always (again), Blume deftly, almost invisibly, tells her story, and moves her plot, principally through dialogue. She leaves the story to her characters, hearing them as much as writing them (one reason, I feel, for her popularity).

Other favorite Blume titles:
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
Then Again, Maybe I Won’t
Deenie
Blubber
Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself

---

Paula Fox's One-Eyed Cat. (Bradbury, 1984).

For sustained tone and urgency, I know of no story like Ned's. Even a four-line précis sends shivers through me: A boy, given a Daisy air rifle on his birthday but forbidden by his father to shoot it, disobeys that very night and is, he feels sure, witnessed from a window. Next morning, a one-eyed cat appears by the woodshed, looking, looking crookedly…for Ned?

Few novels for children dramatize a moral dilemma so tautly, yet keep so purely to a child's point of view. The writing is exquisite—meaning not only beautiful, but appropriate for 11-year-old Ned's fine-tuned sensibility. The others in his moonlit world, Mr. Scully, his mother, his father, the Reverend Wallis, the irksome housekeeper, Mrs. Scallop, even the mysterious cat herself—all potential witnesses—breathe fully in Fox's compassionate prose. Our better natures is her subject and forgiveness her gift.

Other Fox favorites:
A Likely Place
How Many Miles to Babylon?
The Stone-Faced Boy
Portrait of Ivan
The Slave Dancer
The Village by the Sea
The Moonlight Man
Monkey Island
The Eagle Kite

---

Cynthia Rylant's The Relatives Came. illus. by Stephen Gammell. (Bradbury, 1985).

When Gammell finished his art he called to say delightedly he'd bring it to New York; he wanted to watch me react—for this giddy, colored-pencilled book marked a departure for him. For Rylant, a poet foremost, the large cast was the departure (note “all that new breathing in the house”—my favorite line) but the celebration of family was familiar.

The appeal of the combination lies in its blend of over-the-top visual humor, sense of place, and down-to-earth human connection. Can you find the narrator? She's shown once only.

Other Rylant favorites:
Night in the Country (illus. by Mary Szilagyi)
The Blue-Eyed Daisy
A Fine White Dust
Every Living Thing
An Angel for Solomon Singer (illus. by Peter Catalanotto)
Waiting to Waltz (illus. by Stephen Gammell)
Missing May
The “Henry and Mudge” Books (illus. by Sucie Stevenson)

---

Theresa Nelson's And One For All. (Orchard, 1989).

I knew the house, in Katonah, NY, which became the setting for Geraldine's love story about Wing, her brother, before and after he is killed in Vietnam. All these years later, I still weep for him and the great peace march scene in Washington. Few characters have touched me as Wing does, bumbling and gallant and, in his bravery, beyond rescue.

Certainly Geraldine tries, tries to save him in a story of its time, yes, but of deepest relevance for siblings any-where. Nelson's books pulse with life—and very often humor—glowing at the center of families. She uses her Texas voice distinctively, and in story after story, leads readers into unforeseen aspects of the heart.

Other favorite titles:
The 25-Cent Miracle
The Beggars’ Ride
Earthshine
Ruby Electric

---

Frances Temple's Taste of Salt. (Orchard, 1992).

Temple died young in her writing career after five novels and a picture book, which she illustrated—all published within five years. She was unusual in her choice of situation (in three titles, the political destinies of children in Haiti and El Salvador), but her subject was always the survival of hope and justice.

Djo and Jeri in this first novel tell the truth of their shocking slum life in La Saline, of their growing love, and of their hope that Aristide might (as he briefly did) relieve the misery of their country post-Duvalier. Their voices, like bells distinct but harmonious, ring out from a life experience most U.S. children would never dream about, but one they'll never forget once they read Temple's gravely poised sentences, and live alongside her people, old as well as young.

Other favorites by the writer:
Grab Hands and Run
The Ramsay Scallop
Tonight, by Sea

---

Angela Johnson's Toning the Sweep. (Orchard, 1993).

Johnson writes with a modesty that's almost reluctance about three generations of women in one family: Emmie, Mama, and Ola. She knows each intimately, but wants not to intrude with her knowledge.

The scene of mother and daughter at the end of the novel—the moment of “toning the sweep”—was the last piece written. I recall begging to have it. For the writer, this scene was difficult, particularly because all her work thus far had been picture book texts. Here, in this novel, a deft glint, a single line, wouldn't do. Here, she needed not to encapsulate, but to surrender.

One aspect of Johnson's work (her picture book experience perhaps) is its intense visual suggestiveness. To savor all that yellow in her opening few paragraphs is to enter a world in which seeing is feeling.

Other favorite Johnson titles:
Tell Me a Story, Mama (illus. by David Soman)
When I Am Old with You (illus. by David Soman
Humming Whispers
Gone from Home

---

Jo Carson's The Great Shaking. illus. by Robert Andrew Parker. (Orchard, 1994).

How do bears sound as storytellers? Like the speaker here, I assume. The words are an adaptation of a monologue from a play; they were meant to be spoken. And from the start, they spoke to me.

Parker's first dummy showed two bears, the references to “Mother” having suggested to him that this is a young bear talking, relating the terror of surviving literal and figurative upheaval. I loved the dummy and told him so, but then had a flash: “Mother” in the bear's view is the Earth; it is she who's giving the cub this scare. The aptness of the voice just astonishes me, and inspired some of Parker's most mysterious etchings, colored as if by air, fire, and water. Not a book for every child, but for those it speaks to, a profound transport into the immensity of nature.

Other Carson favorites:
You Hold Me and I’ll Hold You (illus. by Annie Cannon)
Stories I Ain’t Told Nobody Yet

---

Peter Catalanotto's The Painter. (Orchard, 1996).

The feeling between father and child is almost palpable: serious and merry at the same time. A partnership. I believe, as does the author/illustrator, that the artist in each of us wants recognition, from family, faculty, world—and that taking joy in the process is one of life's best perks.

So this is a book about process—an interest, I see, which has engaged me for years. I like books in which kids do something, try something, and are encouraged. It's a bonus, here, that the paintings are literally grounded in the family's house (the artist's own), but given extra light in his watercolors: a delight, if you will.

Other favorites:
Emily’s Art
Matthew’s ABC
And (as illustrator):
An Angel for Solomon Singer (written by Cynthia Rylant)
Cecil’s Story
Who Came Down That Road?
Book
Mother to Tigers (written by George Ella Lyon)

---

Mindy Warshaw Skolsky's Love from Your Friend, Hannah. (DK Ink, 1998).

A comic novel that's part history, part memoir, and all kids' love story. Hannah is a pen pal for the ages, a first-rank reporter, but a social critic as well—and not without a strong streak of self-deprecation. Her nerve is naïve, for sure—I mean, it's not every kid who seeks to engage the president's wife in correspondence. But maybe it could inspire those kids who have important matters on their minds. Hannah is the perfect role model for all the classroom letter-writers who don't put their hearts into it, but might be encouraged to do so.

And look at Edward, her pal in far-off Kansas—at first so gruff, so boyish, yet finally won over by Hannah's high-energy self. Edward, salt-of-the-earth, is the perfect life-mate.

E. R. Frank's Life Is Funny. (DK Ink, 2000).

Jean Karl once said that we go to books to meet people. In this tender, sometimes shocking novel, we meet many—and some of them meet each other because of the book's intricate structure—quite a feat for a first novel. Most readers will find aspects of their teen lives in Frank's pages, though its urban setting(s) may be foreign to many. Its language—alarming to some grown-ups—won't be foreign to anyone who's walked a school hall.

Honoring several points of view, and narrated in several voices, this was a thrilling book to work on. I read many sections of it aloud while editing; the words read beautifully—always a selling point with me. The phone call to God is heartbreaking, the hymn to love among the library shelves the very opposite in its giddiness.

Other Frank favorites:
America
Friction
Wrecked (Fall 2005)

---

Janet Taylor Lisle's The Art of Keeping Cool. (Atheneum, 2000).

Fathers and sons, art and artists, World War II (of which I have potent childhood memories)—all these subjects in one novel: a real congruence for me. Lisle's writing is poised yet passionate. There's always more to learn beneath her dialogue, for she appreciates that words conceal as much as they show. The mysterious relationships between Robert and his missing father, Robert and his cousin, Elliot, and then both the boys' acquaintance with the outcast painter, strike me as unusually rich.

My elder son, who has a house near Tiverton, RI, was bowled over by the aptness of the landscape as Lisle captures it—pastoral, yet oddly ominous, given the threat of those submarines, the sight of those fierce cannons trundling down that country road. All true to history.

Others among my favorites:
Sirens and Spies
The Great Dimple Oak
Afternoon of the Elves
The Lampfish of Twill
Forest
A Message from the Match Girl
The Crying Rocks

---

George Ella Lyon's Sonny's House of Spies. (Atheneum, 2004).

Two of the funniest scenes I've edited (that is, enjoyed)—the sex-education conversation between the older and younger brother, and Uncle Marty's funeral—grace a complex story in which accent and attitude are pitch perfect for the 1950s South. The complexity springs from Sonny's character as storyteller, and we feel his need to be talking, to be pondering, throughout. He'd like to make sense of a world which has offered up to him a missing father, a racist culture that he's just beginning to sense, the onslaught of puberty. A lot for a lad.

Add to that, his sister, Loretta. She's one of those girls who walks off with any scene she's in. And why is that? She's a hoot, to be sure. But she's more appealingly fearless, a truth-teller. Young readers recognize the refreshment in such characters who cannot be denied; in life they rarely get the liberty themselves.

Other favorites by the writer:
Book (illus. by Peter Catalanotto)
Who Came Down that Road? (illus. by Peter Catalanotto)
Come a Tide (illus. by Stephen Gammell)
Together (illus. by Vera Rosenberry)
Borrowed Children
With a Hammer for My Heart

---

Lisa Wheeler's Seadogs. illus. by Mark Siegel. (Atheneum, 2004).

Yes, I realize that this “Epic Ocean Operetta” doesn't work easily for story hours; the pictures won't travel distances. But watch a kid with it up close and you'll see magic in action. And the verses do work in public performance; some have been set to music by friends of the illustrator.

When the text arrived, subtitle attached, it was in rather a different order; Wheeler had imagined it without any enclosing story (the little girl dog attending a performance or the suggestion of onstage and off). Siegel, in his first book, devised the framing structure, producing my favorite picture as climax: the back-view curtain call at the end. He and I shuffled verses and came up with a different dramatic arc. The author was happy, and we took off, tossing ideas about like two musical impresarios before an out-of-town opening. The sets, costumes, the cast itself are pure Siegel.

Other Wheeler favorites:
Old Cricket (illus. by Ponder Goembel)
Uncles and Antlers (illus. by Brian Floca)

---

Nancy Farmer's The Sea of Trolls. (Atheneum, 2004).

This is the only book I've ever had on the New York Times Bestseller List. I'm delighted it's a worthy one!

Unlike Farmer's Africa-inspired work, this novel owes its inspiration to the familiar literature of Norse mythology. The writer, of course, gives her ancient sources her own mischievous spin, and all her characters a refreshing three-dimensionality. No one is all-powerful or all-good, and only one character (the half-troll Frith, given to “snits”) is deliciously all-bad. Humor dances through the tale; language is lofty where need be, but seasoned with modernisms. When I get to the nearly final chapter entitled “Jack and Jill,” when I, as an adult, see again what Farmer's done with an old nursery rhyme, I gasp with pleasure. What a mind! And such a heart!

Other Farmer favorites:
Do You Know Me
The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm
A Girl Named Disaster
The House of the Scorpion

---

Chris Raschka's New York Is English, Chattanooga Is Creek. (Atheneum, 2005).

Who but Raschka would see the personalities of cities—he's seen many since he's been illustrating books and visiting schools—in so decorous and witty a way? And what an original (always) approach to inviting children into history.

As in his other work, the eloquence of gesture is captured deftly (see Yo! Yes? for another example) in the tilt of a head, a flick of a wrist. And, of course, there's the language, which says “Speak me” as clear as day. Raschka, a musician, has always brought his “ear” to bookmaking. I see here terrific classroom pageant possibilities. More useful still is the suggestion—subtly done—that in America names and languages blend and buoy up the dream of “one nation, indivisible.”

Others of my favorites:
Charlie Parker Played Be Bop
Yo! Yes?
Can’t Sleep
Mysterious Thelonious
John Coltrane’s Giant Steps

---

Megan McDonald's When the Library Lights Go Out. illus. by Katherine Tillotson. (Atheneum, 2005).

This behind-the-scenes adventure was born as a three-book beginning-reader series. But the puppets in charge (very much in charge!) demanded a broader canvas—and one of them, Hermit Crab, would have had to sit out the first volume entirely and maybe the second as well had we pursued the original route. So we have chapters, instead; and a wide-screen picture book.

We also have nods to the ideas of teamwork, ingenuity, bravery, and play. These creatures exist, by the way, because the artist made each one as a model for sketching. Beyond that challenge was another: how to dramatize darkness. Nicely solved, I think.

Whether we ever said it to each other or not, writer (a librarian for many years), illustrator, and editor tacitly agreed that a tribute to library magic was germane: something we all hoped to contribute to and honor in a big (9'' x 12”) way.

Other favorites by the writer:
Is This a House for Hermit Crab? (illus. by S. D. Schindler)
Baya, Baya, Lulla-by-a (illus. by Vera Rosenberry)

---

Polly Kanevsky's Sleepy Boy. illus. by Stephanie Anderson (Atheneum, Spring 2006).

For the young writer (also the Atheneum Art Director) the book is about saying goodnight to the senses, as one by one, smell, taste, sound, feeling, and sight close down for sleep; all are summoned in the apparently “plain” text. It's one that's lasted for me for more than two years.

And during that span of time, the artist's paintings have come in, one by one, in version after version because the possibilities for her seemed endless. The lion licking her cub is, I believe, the only original of all the spreads.

How thrilling for me, near the end, to see two professionals at the starts of their careers working with devotion and energy to fulfill a vision—not mine, not even theirs in a sense (no egos at work), but the book's itself!

Another favorite by the illustrator:
Weaving the Rainbow (written by George Ella Lyon)

---

The lists Richard Jackson's other favorite titles by these authors is only contained in the electronic version of this article.