One of my favorite parts of having little kids, back when I had little kids, was the whole Madeline series of books, by Ludwig Bemelmans. I’d read the stories (or occasionally watch the first-run series of cartoons on the subject, narrated by Christopher Plummer, which didn’t mangle the stories or art too badly), and they’d both be reeled in. The stories were my favorite kids books; low-key, but magical.
Sheila notes that today is Bemelmans’ birthday:
I always loved the Madeline books, and still do. Madeline: the red-haired feisty rebellious girl in the convent school, the one who always gets in trouble (even if it’s just getting her appendix taken out) – but the one who is also most loved.
I loved how Miss Clavel woke up in the middle of the night, in her cavernous bedroom, sitting up in her cavernous bed with the draperies hanging above it … and she said to herself: “Something is not right!”
She got a candle, and ran down the hallway (the illustrations are so dramatic, so wonderful) and burst into the dormitory, to see Madeline moaning in her bed, all the other little girls sitting up, awake, worried … Madeline is rushed to the hospital to have her appendix taken out. Things might have gone very wrong that night if it weren’t for Miss Clavel’s powers of prophetic thinking. How many problems could be solved if we woke up in the middle of the night, alarmed, and said to ourselves: “Something is not right!”
Sigh.
It’ll be fun having grandkids.
Someday. No hurry on that.
No headline really needed #2?
Hell, some of us can’t get to sleep at all, thanks to suspecting “Something is not right!”
I usually agree with Sheila’s observations, but I never found the illustrations wonderful – they seemed messy and slapdash to me. On the other hand, it’s an interesting look at another world, one in which sending little girls off to boarding school was so common no one had to explain why they were there.
Mitch…there is no hurry for grandkids, but once you have them the world will be a thousand times more wonderful place. It’s a curious thing really….kids are great, but grandkids? Holy moly, are they to love!
But yes, one of the nice things about grandchildren is you can re-read the stories you loved to read to your kids AND you get to act goofy and fun (always a good thing!) all over again (or maybe for the first time). The Sneetches are one popular book around here for the 2nd generation.
Re the Madeline illustrations-I always thought they were fitting-they somehow seemd “French” and chic…or something! I lean toward the Michael Hague school of illustration-but even better-in a homey-lovely way, the Janet and Allan Ahlberg books.
Some day my now nine year old daughter will walk the streets of Paris wondering why the children do not speak English with heavy French accents. She has long known that her father does not have the meter of Christopher Plummer.
Yes Jim, but they were FRENCH! We must condemn them out of hand.