Issue link: https://h2.relevantize.com/i/468109
/ . / B O O K S ➻ F R I E N D O F D $ A $ L $ S $ Dillweed's Revenge by Florence Parry Heide This one was written a long time ago, and Edward Gorey was supposed to illustrate it, but he pulled a jerk move and died. It's really remarkable, the story of a young man with terrible parents who eventually finds ways to deal with them— through monstrous acts of witchcraft and menace. It was finally illustrated by the amaz- ing Carson Ellis, who's prob- ably best known for the album covers she does for her hus- band's band, The Decemberists. The art has a kind of abstract, Rothko-y, wet quality to it. It's old-fashioned Victorian meets the dark unplummable depths of the human soul. For kids! ➸ You should have seen the look on Phoe- be's face when I told her that Daniel Handler was going to do a book round-up for DALS. It's how I imagine my own face would have looked if, back in 1981, my dad had walked through the door and said, "Hi everyone, yeah, long day at work. I'm just gonna go upstairs and put my bathrobe on. Oh, and Andy: the Rolling Stones are going to play at your birthday party this year." Daniel Han- dler—and how many people, other than close relatives, can you say this about—has had a genuine, rock star-like impact on our oldest daughter's life. The thirteen books he wrote, under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket (see #92), are the books Phoebe might well re- member most when she's old and forty. First of all, she read them all in about two weeks, curled up on the corner of our family room couch, and we basically didn't see or hear from her until she was done. We're talk- I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen I assume this book is for children, but I have yet to find a child who liked it. But I like it a lot. It's about a bear who wants his hat back, and my wife and I sit around and read it together. The thing is, no matter what your favorite book is as an adult, you can never read that book fifty times to see if its greatness sustains. Try that with Anna Karenina. On the other hand, you can read this book fifty times, no problem. And I have. And it sustains. This book taps into the kind of focused anxiety you have when a material posses- sion of yours has gone miss- ing. It just happened to me this morning with a CD—and really, how replacable is a CD Daniel Handler ing serious, deep transportation. Second of all, these books give you faith in the human imagination. They're so beautifully, joyously done. In some ways, they're the books that opened her up to the value of darkness in a story, and of the way good and evil, and life and death, can coexist. "Imagine lemonade," Phoebe said, when I asked her to describe what the books are like. "Only with barely any sugar." Which is exactly how I would have put it, happy as I was to discover these books, too, after so many years of unrelenting cheeriness and pointless plot-iness and over- weening cutesiness and, as Phoebe suggests, way too much sugar. (I'm not naming names.) You can never accuse Daniel Handler of ever using too much sugar. We are huge Dan- iel Handler fans here at DALS, so we were honored that he agreed to get on the phone with us and tell us about his favorite picture books. —Andy these days? All I had to do was go burn another one—but I couldn't rest until I knew that it was in my house. It taps into that anxiety, and all it's comic and tragic possibilites. It ends in death, too. This doesn't automatically make a story bet- ter, of course, but a little death goes a long way. I think chil- dren like death in books for the same reason adults like death in books. For some reason, we've developed diZerent rules about what's appropriate in books for adults versus books for children, and I find that tiresome. Do we do that with nutrition, for example? Then again, my son is frightened of almost everything. He's seven, and he's scared of everything. He asks me once a week what the Lemony Snicket books are Daniel's Picks 15