owlectomy

First Maurice Sendak, and now Jean Craighead George -- it's a sad time to be a children's literature person.

Since I heard about Maurice Sendak I have been trying to think of what I could say. He was a person with an aesthetic sense that didn't seem to have anything to do with what lessons children ought to learn, or how children ought to behave. A sense that was generally not concerned with Problems in the way they're usually deployed in children's books -- something the Where The Wild Things Are movie deeply misunderstood when it tried to make Max's anger about his mother's divorce and dating. And yet he always respected the seriousness of childhood, and it sadness and weirdness.

There are not many people who always seem to know where their own north star is, and I think he was one of them.

Jean Craighead George is one of those authors who meant a lot more to me at ten or eleven than they do now. I know Julie Of the Wolves wouldn't hold up as well for me now that I've become aware of some of the cultural issues involved. But as a sucker for animal books, I was glad that hers were rarely twee or sentimental, and always grounded in love and respect and knowledge of the natural world. I loved Who Really Killed Cock Robin, which worked equally well as a mystery and a book about ecology, but perhaps more than anything I remember the independence of the boy in My Side of the Mountain -- I think an infatuation with solitude and self-sufficiency was one of my big influences in writing Love Story, and My Side of the Mountain was a window into a time and place where that was, perhaps, a little more believable.

I still want a falcon.