And another thing that really pisses me off about the whole Madonna/motherhood insanity is that apparently she writes children’s books because “There were no good children’s books out there.”

Excuse me, crazy lady? We can hardly turn around in this house without tripping over a stack of good children’s books: picture books with words, picture books without words, board books, tiny books, I Can Read books, chapter books, short stories, poetry and books of the worst knock knock jokes you ever heard in your life. And I can no longer visit the Chinaberry website because I start filling up my cart with amazing books that I can’t afford. Also, I then read children’s books instead of something worthy, or something for my bookclub and then I have to read my bookclub book in 14 hours and try not to reveal that I spent the whole month rereading Narnia or reading these really good books by Ethel Cook Eliot that I never read as a child but should have. Or something by Enid Blyton. Or The Railway Children, my that was good. I also read a whole saga of Merlin as a boy books that weren’t in fact that great but still kept me reading. Also I just finished Gone Away Lake by Elizabeth Enright who wrote the whole Melendy family series which I loved so.

But I digress. The point is that the world is full up of wonderful books for children with pictures that make you long for the world to be that beautiful (like Trina Schart Hyman). Not that we don’t need more beautiful books – we do, without question. But not, oh falsely-accented one, from you. I only recently let Jamie Lee Curtis get away with it and that’s because she wrote a book called It’s Hard to Be Five that has captured the tormented soul of my son. He feels, he told me, understood at last.

One of the reasons I read so many children’s books is that I’m prescreening books for Daniel (5) who is, well, to say that he’s a precocious reader would be an understatement. Last night in bed he read James and the Giant Peach AND The Enchanted Wood, both cover to cover. He was a little glassy eyed this morning, which always happens when he reads too much and talked right through breakfast about how he might live in a peach stone or where we would most likely find a Faraway Tree in Philadelphia. We discussed this and that for a while and we decided he might like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory next and I said that we could go to the library this week to find it.

This evening, a copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was pushed through our letter box. Daniel found it. We don’t know who might have dropped it off and why they didn’t ring the doorbell or how they had such uncanny timing. We’re simply accepting it as a gift from the Book Fairy. Who, let me tell you, doesn’t stock Madonna.

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