Review: "Freedom Trail Pop Up Book," Denise D. Price

By Paul Carrier

With this year's publication of the Freedom Trail Pop Up Book of Boston, Denise D. Price offers a delightful reminder that books with movable parts, those staples of early childhood, aren't just for kids anymore. 

Price has released what appears to be the first three-dimensional book about the famed trail, a 2.5-mile-long brick path through Boston that links 16 buildings, markers, graveyards and one frigate: the USS Constitution, lovingly known as Old Ironsides.

As The Boston Globe noted in a recent article, Price’s book “not only features 16 sites on the trail but is architecturally accurate — down to the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns of Faneuil Hall. The book is for children and adults, history buffs and art enthusiasts, and it pays special attention to the stories behind the five weathervanes atop historic buildings.”

Price, a Cambridge resident who moved to Massachusetts a few years ago, went searching for a pop-up book about Boston as a gift for nieces and nephews after she first walked the Freedom Trail, but without success. So she designed and wrote one (the text is largely based on descriptions provided by the Freedom Trail Foundation), raised money on Kickstarter and hired a printer in Vietnam.

It was a laborious process.

“Before she could even begin the project, Price had to figure out how pop-up books are made,” Publishers Weekly reports. “Next came mastering paper engineering and learning to create digital art. Price then had to find out where pop-ups are printed. She located a handful of companies that can produce 5,000 copies of a pop-up book: two in China and one in Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. Price also had to obtain permissions from the Freedom Trail Foundation, which promotes the 16 historic sites covered in the book.”

The final product made its debut in April.

The book opens with a pop-up of the Massachusetts State House. That two-page spread, which includes three paragraphs of text about the building, is deceptive at first, because there's a lot going on here. Close inspection reveals three smaller pages that unfold from the two main pages of the display, featuring pop-ups of the Freedom Trail’s logo, the Frog Pond on Boston Common and Park Street Church. Each is accompanied by explanatory text.

King’s Chapel emerges from the next two pages, with sidebars on two burial grounds, the Benjamin Franklin statue on School Street and the original site of the Boston Latin School.

Other large pop-ups with double-page layouts focus on the Old State House, Faneuil Hall, the Old North Church and the USS Constitution. Smaller pop-ups and other ancillary displays cover the Old Corner Bookstore, the Old South Meeting House, the Boston Massacre, the Paul Revere House, the Copp’s Hill Burying Ground and the Bunker Hill Monument.

One caveat is in order for anyone thinking about buying the Freedom Trail Pop Up Book of Boston sight unseen. Although the book is both sturdy and well-made, it is, by definition, intricate, and therefore somewhat delicate. I wouldn’t recommend it for kids who “play rough,” unless they read it under supervision.

The Freedom Trail Pop Up Book of Boston may appear to be breaking the mold by catering, in part, to grown-ups, but Wikipedia reports that early movable books were designed for adults, not children. And “early” means just that. “The first known movable in a book was created by Benedictine monk Matthew Paris in his Chronica Majora, which covers a period beginning in 1240,” according to Wikipedia.

Movable parts were “almost always used in scholarly works” until the 18th century, according to a history of the genre on libraries.rutgers.edu. That's when they were first applied to “books designed for entertainment, particularly for children.” Nowadays, such “ingenious mechanical devices” surprise and entertain readers of all ages.

If you value the unique and glorious role that Boston played in the history of America, or if you're a fan of books that spring to life when opened, you’re almost sure to enjoy this intricate, handsome and novel work of art, nestled between two covers. For a closer look, click here.

Review: "The Crimson Cap," Ellen Howard

By Paul Carrier

This endearing coming-of-age tale for young readers is set in a time and place that rarely merit a mention in the annals of American history.

The year is 1687. René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle, the famed but autocratic French explorer, is struggling to save his small settlement in what is now Texas.

Although La Salle sailed the length of the Mississippi River in 1682, he failed to find the river’s mouth during an expedition from France in 1685. In fact, he missed his destination by hundreds of miles. By 1687, he has lost his ships. Most of his supplies have been destroyed. The local Indians are hostile. Starvation and disease are taking their toll on the shrinking French colony. And some of his men harbor mutinous intentions.
 
Beset by such problems, La Salle and a group of settlers set out in search of the Mississippi, hoping to follow it north to New France (Canada), to seek help and supplies. But grown men are not his only companions. Tagging along is a 10-year-old boy, Pierre Talon, who leaves behind his mother, sister and brothers to join La Salle’s relief expedition.

Pierre was a real person, and The Crimson Cap is his story.
 
La Salle is assassinated on that journey, and some of his men, together with Pierre, find their way to a nearby village of Hasinai Indians. Pierre initially concludes that the Indians are savages, but he is adopted into the tribe and comes to view the Indians much more sympathetically over time.
 
Pierre eventually learns that the struggling French settlement has been destroyed by the Clamcoëh Indians and that his mother is dead, but he remains convinced that his siblings are living with the Clamcoëhs. When Spaniards searching for La Salle capture Pierre and another Frenchman, Pierre’s life becomes more complicated. He wrestles with his dual identity as a Frenchman and an Indian, while trying to decide how best to find and rescue his older sister and three younger brothers.

Thoughtful and preternaturally mature, Pierre is a likable protagonist who is forced, despite his youth, to grapple with difficult questions.

Who is more civilized; the Hasinai or the French? How does living with a different culture alter one's religious views? Can a person be torn between his biological family and his adopted family? Are the competing territorial claims of France and Spain of any real consequence to a child who simply wants to survive and find what’s left of his family?

In an afterword, author Ellen Howard notes that there are gaps in the sometimes conflicting historical accounts of Pierre’s life. Pierre is only 14 when The Crimson Cap draws to a close, yet Howard explains that he lived much longer than that. The author summarizes what is known about Pierre’s subsequent adventures, although, as she says, the record is incomplete.

Review: "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," Brian Selznick

By Paul Carrier

The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a book. That much is clear. It has 550 pages sandwiched between two covers, which would seem to meet the definition. But then things get complicated. What species of book is it?

The inspiration for the new Martin Scorsese film Hugo certainly isn’t a conventional novel, because it relies on full-page artwork to tell much of the story. Yet it isn’t a graphic novel either, because the stand-alone drawings, which include no dialogue or captions, are interspersed among pages of text.

This hybrid doesn’t minimalize pictures by using them merely to illustrate text, the way a traditional novel does. Nor does it meld art and words into a cohensive unit, like a graphic novel. Instead it uses written and visual forms of communication separately, to drive its wonderful tale forward.

As author and illustrator Brian Selznick said when his book first came out, The Invention of Hugo Cabret is “not exactly a novel, not quite a picture book, not really a graphic novel, or a flip book or a movie, but a combination of all these things.”

The book tells the story of Hugo Cabret, an orphan who lives in a hidden apartment above a Paris train station in 1931. A mechanically gifted child who learned how to maintain and repair clocks before his father died in a museum fire and his uncle disappeared, Hugo single-handedly keeps the station's gigantic clocks running smoothly by using pathways in the station’s walls to secretly access the clockworks.

When he died, Hugo’s father was trying to rebuild an abandoned mechanical man - an automaton - that had been tucked away in the museum. After the fire, Hugo finds the automaton in the debris and brings it to his room, where he works on restoring it using parts stolen from Georges, an old man who sells toys from a booth in the train station.

Hugo comes to believe that, if he fixes the automaton, which has a pen in its hand, it will write a message to him from his late father.

Through a series of twists and turns, Hugo befriends Georges’ godchild, Isabelle, and together the duo uncover Georges’ hidden but illustrious past. (I won’t spoil it by revealing Georges’ identity; suffice it to say he is based on a real person.)

Thanks in part to its compelling characters and fast-moving plot, The Invention of Hugo Cabret is hard to put down once you crack it open. But it’s Selznick’s detailed, dreamlike drawings that really give the book its unique feel and cinematic quality, as the story unfolds through artwork that propels the action in a film-like fashion.

For example, the first 40-plus pages consist of Selznick’s drawings, without a word of text. In this way, we enter and explore the train station where Hugo lives and Georges works, and meet both characters. This is followed by two pages of text, a two-page drawing that introduces the reader to Isabelle, two more pages of text and then several pages of art.

The results are magical. To describe this as a children's book is true as far as it goes, but that’s nowhere near far enough.

Review: "Lafayette and the American Revolution," Freedman

By Paul Carrier

Books written for young people can sometimes be as rewarding as, and more fun than, those geared toward an adult readership. That’s true even if you happen to be - chronologically speaking, anyway - a grown-up. 

So it is with Russell Freedman’s Lafayette and the American Revolution. 

At 88 pages, this is not an exhaustive look at the life of the French nobleman who embraced the American Revolution, shed his blood for the cause and came to be viewed by George Washington as an adopted son. 

But Freedman offers a thorough overview of the Marquis de Lafayette’s eventful life before, during and (to a lesser extent) after the Revolutionary War, when he returned to France and played a pivotal role in the early stages of the French Revolution. 

The straightforward text is accompanied by numerous illustrations that make the book pleasing to the eye and all the more readable. Freedman clearly appreciates the value of a telling anecdote, as well as the importance of making his subject compelling to young readers. 

In fact, Lafayette’s youth - he arrived in America at 19 and became the youngest general in the Continental Army - will help kids relate to his early awkwardness, and appreciate his later exploits. 

We learn, for example, that before he set sail for America, the boyish Lafayette was laughed at by Marie Antoinette when the clumsy teenager bumbled his way through a dance with the French queen at the royal court.

Later, when Lafayette had to call off a planned American invasion of Canada for lack of troops and supplies, he sounded like a humiliated teenager. “Men will have the right to laugh at me,” he said in a letter to the president of the Continental Congress. 

In an accessible and engaging style, Freedman opens his account by describing Lafayette’s secretive plan to sail to America with other French volunteers in 1777, over the objections of his family and his king. The author then examines Lafayette’s youth, marriage and ambitions; his Atlantic crossing; his first meeting with Washington; and his early military accomplishments during the Revolution. 

Lafayette returned to France in 1779 to secure French aid for the American rebels, and he sailed back to America with the news that a large French force was on its way. He went on to play a key role in the decisive Battle of Yorktown, which ended with the surrender of Lord Cornwallis and his army to a combined American-French force. 

Freedman is no stranger to writing nonfiction for kids. In fact, that is his claim to fame. A former journalist and publicist, he is the award-winning author of more than 40 books, including Lincoln: a Photobiography, Eleanor Roosevelt: A Life of Discovery, and The Wright Brothers: How They Invented the Airplane. 

As Kirkus Reviews put it: “Freedman knows how to distill a lively and focused story from a swamp of information on a much-studied subject, writing with an acute eye for fascinating detail and significant facts,” making him “a master of his craft.”