Module 5: Goin' Someplace Special by Patricia McKissack

Book Summary: 'Tricia Ann is a young African American girl living in a segregated town during the era of Jim Crow laws. She wants to go her "Someplace Special" but her journey along the way is one that has her pride and faith hurting. In the end, with the help and love of her friends and family, she reaches her special place: the public library, which is open to all.

APA Citation: McKissack, P. C., & Pinkney, J. (Illustrator). (2001). Goin' someplace special. New York, NY: Atheneum Books for Young Readers.

Impressions: Goin' Someplace Special was a book that I found myself writing down quotes from, which surprised me as it is a children's illustrated book. It was also a book that I wanted to share with others because of the message. I loved how Patricia McKissack brought the segregated south to life from 'Tricia Ann's journey to find a place that was special to her. The characters along the way encouraged her, reminding her that she had love and support and self-worth to help her survive and thrive in a place that continued to try to knock her down.

The author used her own past to depict a childhood of being black and living during the era of Jim Crow laws. 'Tricia Ann is a beautiful, smart, and proud girl that continues to face inequalities--from where she can sit and drink to which buildings she can enter and the way people look at and treat her. The message and artwork is amazing. I loved taking in more of the story with the illustrations than I would have if it was only text.

I also loved that her "someplace special" is the local public library. I agree with 'Tricia Ann in that libraries are open to all and are still one of the last places of democratic equality.

Professional Review: McKissack draws from her childhood in Nashville for this instructive picture book. "I don't know if I'm ready to turn you loose in the world," Mama Frances tells her granddaughter when she asks if she can go by herself to "Someplace Special" (the destination remains unidentified until the end of the story). 'Tricia Ann does obtain permission, and begins a bittersweet journey downtown, her pride battered by the indignities of Jim Crow laws. She's ejected from a hotel lobby and snubbed as she walks by a movie theater ("Colored people can't come in the front door," she hears a girl explaining to her brother. "They got to go 'round back and sit up in the Buzzard's Roost"). She almost gives up, but, buoyed by the encouragement of adult acquaintances ("Carry yo'self proud," one of her grandmother's friends tells her from the Colored section on the bus), she finally arrives at Someplace Special—a place Mama Frances calls "a doorway to freedom"—the public library. An afterword explains McKissack's connection to the tale, and by putting such a personal face on segregation she makes its injustices painfully real for her audience. Pinkney's (previously paired with McKissack for Mirandy and Brother Wind) luminescent watercolors evoke the '50s, from fashions to finned cars, and he captures every ounce of 'Tricia Ann's eagerness, humiliation and quiet triumph at the end. Ages 4-8. (Sept.)

Publisher's Weekly. (2001). [Review of the book Goin' someplace special by P. McKissack]. Publisher's weekly. Retrieved February 23, 2015 from http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-689-81885-1

Library Uses: This would be a great book to read during a story time around Martin Luther King, Jr. day. It could lead to a discussion about the Civil Rights Movement.

Module 5: Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta

Book Summary: Taylor Markham was abandoned at a gas station when she was eleven years old. Since then she has lived and gone to the school on Jellicoe Road. The only adult she trusts is Hannah, who is a caretaker on the school grounds. Every year there is a territory war between the Jellicoe Road school kids, the Townies, and the Cadets. The leader of the Cadets, is Jonah Griggs, the boy that ran away with her when she was fourteen. It's during the territory war this year that Taylor begins to uncover her secrets, as well as Hannah's and Jonah's, and how they all come together in a beautiful, heartbreaking way.

APA Citation: Marchetta, M. (2010). Jellicoe road. New York, NY: HarperTeen.

Impressions: This book is near impossible for me to review because I absolutely love it. As a writer, I found it both inspiring and hard to read because I want to write something this powerful and beautiful while at the same time I kept thinking "I'm never going to write something this amazing".

Let me break down a few of the many things I loved about it:

The setting: Jellicoe Road is set up for the reader from the first page. It's beautiful and wild and contains mysteries and secrets. The school is home to misfits and delinquents, children and teens that are trying to make a home for themselves with people that feel as alone as they do. This little slice of a fictional Australian town is a place that I want to visit but also feel like I have visited before. There are parts of it that are in different places I've lived and visited. For example, the road that led to my grandfather's house was lined with trees and felt wild and like home, just like the Jellicoe Road. And yet at the same time, the town and road feel like places that I will never be able to find because they can't exist without the characters that live in them.

The characters: Taylor Markham, Jonah Griggs, Raffy, Hannah, Webb, Tate, Jude, Fitz, all of them. They all taught me different ways that people show their love and fear. I found parts of myself in Taylor, especially her trust issues and first instinct of putting up a barrier between herself and others. At times it was even uncomfortable reading from her point of view because things about her that friends didn't like while reading it were the same things I saw in myself.

The plot: The beginning was very confusing. I wasn't sure of what was going on or even when it was set. The territory "war" had me questioning if the book was contemporary fiction or dystopian. I loved going into the book not knowing anything, though, because it all made sense. Even the confusion makes sense because of all of the layers of the mysteries and secrets that Taylor uncovers around her. There is mystery, romance, humor, all things I look for in a book. The plot of discovering what Taylor's past was and how the other characters played a part in where she is at, had me unable to put the book down.

The writing: It was almost lyrical at times. I have so many quotations written down that I love and I'll find myself turning to certain scenes just to read them over again. As mentioned earlier, the beginning is confusing, but Melina Marchetta purposely makes each decision and choice for how it is written and why. It's only when you have finished the book that the reader discovers the reasons.

Professional Review: Just when Taylor’s only guardian, Hannah, disappears from the Jellicoe School campus, she must lead her classmates in secret war games against neighboring locals (Townies) and a camp of military kids (Cadets). While the gripping boundary battles among the three factions raise the reader’s pulse, Taylor’s search for Hannah and her relationship with Jonah, the stoic cadet commander, charge the story with unwavering intrigue. Taylor reads Hannah’s autobiographical manuscript for clues and finds surprising links to her own life: Jellicoe students, cadets, war games and even Taylor’s long-absent, drug-addicted mother all surface in the book, which recounts events 22 years old. Marchetta plows into a complicated story line head first, shifting between Hannah’s narrative and Taylor’s trials as Jellicoe School’s war commander. Time flashes forward and back, histories bleed together and two generations of friends bear uncanny resemblances to one another. Readers may feel dizzied and disoriented, but as they puzzle out exactly how Hannah’s narrative connects with Taylor’s current reality, they will find themselves ensnared in the story’s fascinating, intricate structure. A beautifully rendered mystery. (Fiction. 14 & up)

Kirkus Reviews. (2010). [Review of the book Jellicoe road by M. Marchetta]. Kirkus reviews. Retrieved February 23, 2015 from https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/melina-marchetta/jellicoe-road/.

Library Uses: This would be a great book to have as part of a Young Adult Book Club choice. It lends to several discussion points about writing style, mental disorders, abandonment, different forms of love, etc.

Module 4: Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse

Book Summary: Billie Jo is fifteen years old and lives in Oklahoma during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl. Her father is a farmer and her mother is her friend, protector and sometimes, it feels like, warden. After an accident that Billie Jo is somewhat responsible for, her mother dies. Out of the Dust is told in stark, lyrical poetry from Billie Jo's perspective in how she comes to terms with her mother's death, her father's distance, and finding her place in the world.

APA Citation: Hesse, K. (1997). Out of the dust. New York, NY: Scholastic Press.

Impressions: I absolutely loved Out of the Dust. It was powerful, heart-wrenching, and at times horrific. The accident that kills Billie Jo's mother is one that is shocking and terrible and sets up the rest of Billie Jo's life amidst a drought that affects her father's farm and the larger Dust Bowl of the Oklahoma plains.

Billie Jo is a character that felt real to me. She was strong and broken, young and old, courageous and afraid. The writing brings the speech of the time and location to life. It also helps the reader visually see the loneliness that Billie Jo feels. I found myself reading the book aloud, loving the writing that had me hurting for Billie Jo and her family.

I also loved that it was a historical fiction book for children that was accurate and compelling. The Great Depression and Dust Bowl were vividly depicted in very few words, but it never felt as though Karen Hesse was teaching about the setting and time. It was the backdrop that played a large part in the characters' lives but didn't overtake the story.

It's a book that I'll be adding to my personal library as I'll want to read it again and share it with others.

Professional Review: 

This is the story of 14-year-old Billie Jo Kelby, who tells the hardships of living on her family's wheat farm in the Oklahoma Panhandle during the dust bowl years of the Depression. Billie Jo and her parents are barely making a living as the winds and dust continually destroys their wheat crop. One of the small pleasures in her life is when Billie Jo plays her beloved piano; however, a terrible accident deprives Billie Jo of this pleasure. While cooking breakfast one morning, Billie Jo's pregnant mother mistakes a bucket of kerosene for a bucket of water and catches on fire. Billie Jo wanting to help grabs the bucket and ends up splashing her mother with even more kerosene. Her mother and newborn brother die leaving behind Billie Jo, who has badly burned and scared hands, and her embittered father. No longer able to play her piano and growing ever more distant from her father, Billie Jo catches a train headed west, and realizes that there is no getting out of the dust of Oklahoma or her home. 

Written in free verse, Hesse exquisitely crafts a compelling and gut wrenching novel. The story is grim but the writing is so superb that Billie Jo comes to life with such tremendous courage, spirit, strength, and emotion. The book is organized like a diary with dated entries that span one year from the winter of 1934 to the winter of 1935. The choice of free verse is brilliant and enables the reader to experience both the pains and joys in meticulously worded poetic phrases. This book is a great choice for classrooms involved in journal-writing assignments and could easily be performed as readers' theater because of the almost lyric quality of the prose. It is excellent for discussion, and because Hess has the outstanding ability to weave historical facts into fiction, many of the poems could be used as powerful supplements to history lessons on the 1930's, the Depression or the Dust Bowl.

Ritch, K. G. (2005). [Review of the book Out of the dust by K. Hesse]. Books r4 teens. Retrieved February 15, 2015 from http://www.edb.utexas.edu/resources/booksR4teens/book_reviews/book_reviews.php?book_id=86.

Library Uses: Out of the Dust could be used in a couple of different formats. It could be used in a class or event about poetry, where it could be read aloud or listed as an example book. It could also be part of a class or event about the Dust Bowl and/or Great Depression.

Module 4: Rabbit Hill by Robert Lawson

Book Summary: Rabbit Hill is a story about animals that live on and around the land of the Big House. Folks haven't lived in the Big House in awhile until now. The animals are excited about the new Folks but are also unsure of what kind of Folks they will be.

APA Citation: Lawson, R. (2007). Rabbit hill. New York, NY: Puffin Books.

Impressions: Rabbit Hill is a charming book about animals, nature, and humans' interaction with both animals and nature. I was surprised by how quickly I got invested in the story and the adventures that Georgie and his family and the other animals found themselves on. Not a lot happens compared to more modern children's stories, but I loved how the characters interacted with each other.

One issue I did find with the book was that there were very few female characters. The female character that is the closest to a main character was Georgie's mother, who was panic-ridden and constantly nervous.

Even with this, I still found the book to be charming. It was a quaint charming but one that I find myself thinking fondly of after finishing it.

Professional Review: Lawson is difficult to place so far as his juvenile audience is concerned. Frankly, I think he is definitely adult -- even in the stories he presumably writes for juniors. This is a somewhat too whimsical story of the animals on Rabbit Hill and their excitement when they learn that "New Folks" are coming to live in the "Big House". They are thrilled when they find in use an old fashioned uncovered garbage can, no sign of traps, spring guns or other lethal weapons, and only a harmless tiger-striped gray cat as a pet. Then the climax comes when a sign goes up "Please drive carefully on account of small animals" -- and a statue of St. Francis is set up to preside over a ledge where a morning banquet for the little creatures is placed. And the result? The little animals are wholly satisfied and no longer destroy what is not theirs -- and even leave a flourishing garden for the new folks. The Lawson illustrations are sure to capture the hearts of all prospective purchasers -- but as a story, it doesn't quite come off.

Kirkus Review. (2011). [Review of the book Rabbit hill by R. Lawson]. Kirkus review. Retrieved February 14, 2015 from https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/robert-lawson-1/rabbit-hill/

Library Uses: This could be used in a display about anthropomorphic books or even an Easter display, showcasing different books about rabbits and spring.

Module 3: Black and White by David Macaulay

Book Summary:  Four stories are told simultaneously in Black and White. One is of a young boy on a stalled train, one is of a girl and her brother and their parents, one is of people waiting at a train stop for a delayed train, and the last is of cows. Somehow, they all come together to make a unique story.

APA Citation: Macaulay, D. (1990). Black and white. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Impressions: I loved Black and White. I loved how the stories are broken down into four concurrent, different panels and how each of them told a different story with different types of artwork and lettering. I loved how different, postmodern, and charming of a story it was. And I especially loved that I haven't read many stories like it before.

At first, the book is a little confusing. The reader has to decide how they want to read it (all panels at the same time or one panel throughout the story and then flipping back to the beginning to get to read on to the next panel). It is easy to pick up on the different paneled stories quickly, though, and I would love to read it with a child to see how they find the multiple stories taking place simultaneously.

As I haven't had a chance, yet, to read it to or with an early reader I'm not sure how the book would do as a story time read. As an adult reader, though, I found it different and enjoyable. The artwork was beautiful, detailed, modern, and funny: all descriptions of the stories. I'll definitely be picking up Macaulay's other books.

Professional Review: 

At first glance, this is a collection of four unrelated stories, each occupying a quarter of every two-page spread, and each a slight enough tale to seem barely worth a book--a boy on a train, parents in a funny mood, a convict's escape and a late commuter train. The magic of Black and White comes not from each story, however, but from the mysterious interactions between them that creates a fifth story. Several motifs linking the tales are immediately apparent, such as trains--real and toy--and newspapers. A second or third reading reveals suggestions of the title theme: Holstein cows, prison uniform stripes. Eventually, the stories begin to merge into a surrealistic tale spanning several levels of reality, e.g.: Are characters in one story traveling on the toy train in another? Answers are never provided--this is not a mystery or puzzle book. Instead, Black and White challenges the reader to use text and pictures in unexpected ways. Although the novelty will wear off quickly for adults, no other writer for adults or children explores this unusual territory the way Macaulay does. All ages. (Apr.)

Publisher's Weekly. (2005). [Review of the book Black and white by D. Macaulay]. Publisher's weekly. Retrieved February 6, 2015 from http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/black-and-white-david-macaulay/1000310904?ean=9780618636877


Library Uses: Black and White could be used in a creative art lesson with children. The beginning of the lesson would be a read-through of the book followed by giving the kids a prompt of different, simultaneous stories and seeing how they create their own paneled, comic book style art.

Module 3: Golem by David Wisniewski

Book Summary: Set in Prague, 1580, Golem tells the tale of how the Jewish citizens of Prague were forced to live in ghettos and were treated cruelly by the other citizens. Seeing that his people needed help, Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, created Golem, a "giant of living clay, animated by Cabala..." (Wisniewski, 1996). Golem helped the Jewish people by keeping them safe. But he also fell in love with living, and wanted to continue doing so even when the Rabbi turned him back into clay.

APA Citation: Wisniewski, D. (1996). Golem. New York, NY: Clarion Books.

Impressions: This last summer I had the chance to visit Prague. While there, I learned the history of Golem while touring the synagogues and old community in the Jewish ghetto. The story is very much a part of Prague's history; some believing in it while others find it as only a folktale.

This illustrated children's book does a good job of bringing the story to life. Wisniewski uses paper artwork to bring the beautiful, historic city and unique, dark story to life. The artwork is very fitting for the story, although I was at first not sure if I liked it or not. On my second reading I found more of the story that unfolded layer by layer within the artwork.

In the story of Golem that I heard while in Prague, Golem became a dangerous creature that killed people after the Rabbi lost control of it. It was interesting to see how the story has different tellings depending on who and where they are told. I loved seeing a part of another culture's history come to life, especially for children.

Professional Review: 

The much honored cut-paper master (Sundiata, 1992, etc.) turns his attention to a retelling of the story of the Golem, created by a chief rabbi, Judah Loew, to defend the Jews against the ``Blood Lie'' (that Jews were mixing the blood of Christian children with the flour and water of matzoh) of 16th-century Prague. Like Rogasky's book (see review, above), Wisniewski's exposes the slander that was embraced and widely promulgated during the Holocaust years. Loew's Golem--a sort of simple yet powerful giant made of clay with the Hebrew word emet (truth) on his forehead--is named Joseph and charged to ``guard the ghetto at night and catch those planting false evidence of the Blood Lie . . . and bring them unharmed to the authorities.'' In Wisniewski's story, the Golem turns back the rampaging masses who want to destroy the Jews of Prague and is eventually returned to the clay from which he sprang. The cut-paper collages are exquisitely produced and exceedingly dramatic. There is menace and majesty in Wisniewski's use of color, and he finds atmosphere and terror in a scissor's stroke. A fact- filled final note concludes this mesmerizing book. (Picture book/folklore. 6-10)

Kirkus Review. (2010). [Review of the book Golem by D. Wisniewski]. Kirkus review. Retrieved February 4, 2015 from https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/david-wisniewski/golem/

Library Uses: Golem could be used for a Holocaust remembrance display or a display on folktales from around the world.

Module 2: The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

Book Summary: The Wind in the Willows is about Mole, Toad, Ratty, Badger and the friends they have that live along the River and in the Woods. Mole befriends Ratty one day when he leaves the only life he knew--living comfortably below ground and keeping his home organized and clean. Ratty and Mole instantly become close friends and from this friendship comes many adventures and new friendships. One of their friends is Toad from Toad Hall. Toad becomes fascinated with cars and soon finds himself in more trouble than he can handle without his friends' help.

APA Citation: Grahame, K. (2005). The wind in the willows. London: CRW Publishing Limited.

Impressions: I found myself quickly drawn into the story in The Wind in the Willows. I found Mole as an endearing character and loved the friendship between Mole and Ratty, who was my favorite character in the book. I don't usually enjoy animal fantasy books, but the story was endearing and the antics and adventures the characters found themselves in--or better yet put themselves in--were entertaining.

One of my favorites parts about the book was how Grahame brought the world of the animals and creatures to life in human yet natural ways. For example, Ratty's love of his house on the River fit the creature that he is (water rat) while also humanizing him by turning his home into what reads as waterfront property. The characters' personalities also fit with the types of animals they are: Badger being somewhat grumpy while also having a love for order, Ratty and his adventurous tendencies and love of anything that has to do with the River, Mole's naivete and resiliency. It makes sense how these characters have remained in the hearts of generations of readers. They are likable and relatable.

The one thing that did bother me about The Wind in the Willows is that there were no female animal characters and the three female characters that were in the book were not portrayed very positively. One was a fat, ugly barge-woman that Toad thinks very lowly of. The others were the girl and girl's aunt who helped Toad escape from prison. Even though they helped him and were smart enough to come up with the plan for Toad, they are still written as somewhat dim-witted characters. It's hard for me to leave my personal ideals and opinions at the figurative doorstep when reading a book. I view everything from my own personal experiences and perspective, which affects how I read and enjoy books.

I also found myself surprised and taken out of the story with the God-like character that led them to the Otter's baby in the chapter "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn". This character never returned and I couldn't understand how it connected with the rest of the story. It had the story turn in a strange direction and I was left wondering who, how and why with no questions answered.

That being said, I genuinely enjoyed The Wind in the Willows. I never wondered how or why it remains a classic. It is imaginative, funny, and full of adventures that keep the reader invested in the story. The characters, as mentioned earlier, stay with the reader. I did find it to be a book that would be geared more toward mature readers or adults young at heart versus younger children. The edition that I read held very few pictures and book was much longer than most children's stories. I would recommend it to readers of higher reading level and to those who enjoy fantasy books and/or animal stories.

Professional Review: If the Edwardian age is not remembered as a decade of social discontent and growing international tension when the cracks in the British empire began to show, but as an idyllic last summer bathed in golden sunshine, the reason is largely to be found in children's literature. It was the age, if not of innocence, then of Jemima Puddleduck, Peter Pan and Mr Toad. Most of what became the canon of English writing for children appeared in a mere nine years. The Tale of Peter Rabbit, the first of the stories that Beatrix Potter modestly referred to as her "little books", came out in 1902 and was rapidly followed by six more. Peter Pan was first staged in 1904, E Nesbit's The Railway Children was published two years later, and then, in 1908, came Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, soon to become one of the best loved of them all.The riverbank adventures of Mole, Ratty and Badger have now taken their place among the earliest memories of four generations and seem timeless, while the impossible, irrepressible Mr Toad got his own stage show, written by AA Milne, as early as 1929 and is still going strong. Yet Grahame's story and indeed the whole Edwardian renaissance of books for and about children were peculiarly the products of their own uneasy time. If The Wind in the Willows inspires nostalgia now, that is because it is itself saturated in longing for other times and other places.

A year older than JM Barrie and a year younger than E Nesbit, Grahame was, like them, middle-aged when he produced his most enduring work. He was 49 when the book appeared, and described himself, accurately, as a "mid-Victorian". His was the generation that had known no other monarch than Victoria and that felt with her death in 1901 that they had lost "a sustaining symbol", as Henry James put it, adding, "the wild waters are upon us now".
The Wild Wood and the Wide World are the twin menaces that loom over The Wind in the Willows. The sensible Water Rat wants nothing to do with either; it is only the Mole's naivety and Toad's hubris that force him to encounter them from time to time. The Mole soon learns his lesson. He is a creature, as he comes to understand, of the "frequented pasture" and the garden plot. "Nature in the rough" is not for him. The life of the riverbank, of messing about in boats, of ample picnics and long rambles, is essentially the life of suburbia, a rapidly growing but not entirely benign sign of the Edwardian times. The railway, which facilitates Toad's daring escape from prison, had by now brought the branch lines deep into the shires, but with them came the commuters and the red-brick villas that Grahame so disliked. His typically English ambivalence towards suburban life runs like the river through the book. On the one hand, there's the love of comfort and security, on the other, the chafing at its limitations and the sense that the pursuit of rural bliss may destroy the very thing that it desires.
Grahame was himself part of the phenomenon. Having spent the happiest years of his childhood at Cookham Dene in Berkshire, he returned, shortly before he started work on The Wind in the Willows, with his family and took a house there, grumbling, like Ratty, about incomers and over-crowding. In the episode where Toad's caravan is overturned by a speeding motor car, the new Norton edition tells us that Grahame's original version had Ratty shouting after it: "Stockbrokers!" Grahame changed it later to "road hogs". As a recently retired secretary of the Bank of England he may have felt he was on thin ice.
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Other social nuances of home-counties life in the early 20th century are reflected along the river bank. Toad Hall, with its secret passages and Tudor mullions, was given up some time ago by the original family and sold to a Victorian magnate. It is now in the hands, like Britain itself, of a spendthrift, headstrong eldest son who indulges one fad after another and is treated with the respect his pretensions deserve by the older tenantry. Rat points out to Mole the place where they will moor their boat at Toad Hall, next to "That creek on the left, where the notice-board says, 'Private. No landing allowed'". Toad blithely sees his non-ancestral home as a desirable commercial property. He describes it as it might be advertised in the new magazine, Country Life, founded in 1897 in London to cater largely to the aspirations of the stockbroking classes: "an eligible self-contained gentleman's residence ... dating in part from the 14th century but replete with every modern convenience ... Five minutes from church, post-office, and golf-links."
Like Beatrix Potter, Grahame was a keen observer of his characters' domestic arrangements. The opulence of Toad Hall contrasts with Mole End, where the humble collection of prints and popular plaster busts, the outdated Gothic lettering on the house sign and the peculiar garden ornament made of cockle shells, mark Mole out as the Mr Pooter of the riverbank. Badger's arts and crafts interior, complete with English oak settles and plain brick floor, shows a more cultivated taste. Indeed his home, with its central hall surrounded by "stout oaken comfortable-looking doors", is in the old English style of suburban country-house design pioneered by architects such as Norman Shaw and admired by connoisseurs at home and abroad.
The trouble with Edwardian suburbia was that it was, as Grahame knew, an optical illusion. With its need for the golf club and the water closet as well as nature and history, it could best be found in the pages of Country Life where Gertrude Jekyll's artfully planned landscapes dissolved the garden boundaries, while Edwin Lutyens's houses turned newspaper magnates and mill-owners into county gentry. Great gusts of longing for something wilder and wider, whatever the risk, blow through The Wind in the Willows, as they stirred among many of Grahame's contemporaries.
The fantasy of the "open road", which troubles Toad and even sometimes Ratty, found expression in a fashion, which Grahame followed, for long cross-country walks. "Tramping", as it was sometimes called, suggested a possible temporary change of class as well as scene. The poet WH Davies's The Autobiography of a Supertramp was published in the same year as The Wind in the Willows and was also a great success. It told of Davies's travels across thousands of miles of America, living rough and doing menial jobs, as he later recollected them in the tranquillity of Sevenoaks. For the riverbankers, however, there is no such possibility. Their caravan trip ends abruptly when they collide, literally, with modernity in the form of the car. Later, when Ratty is tempted by the sea rat to yield to the call of the Mediterranean, Mole rapidly talks him out of it.
England itself in the early 20th century was suffering from a similar timidity or failure of nerve - what Hermann Muthesius, the shrewd German observer of English life and architecture, called in 1904 "a certain hardening of the arteries". The 1890s had been very different. Then it was possible briefly to belong to both suburbia and bohemia, and Grahame had. While rising smoothly through the ranks at the Bank of England to become its youngest ever secretary, he was also part of the literary set surrounding Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. He had written regularly for The Yellow Book, a magazine devoted to modern decadence in the persons of Max Beerbohm, Walter Sickert and WB Yeats. It was in its second issue that he published the story that made his name, "The Roman Road", a narrative cast as a conversation between a child and an adult, its message that only the artist and the child are imaginatively free.
Reviewing Grahame's collection of stories The Golden Age, which was about, but not for, children, the arch-aesthete Algernon Swinburne found it "too praiseworthy for praise" in its lack of sentimentality about its subject. Then came the arrest of Oscar Wilde, the demise of The Yellow Book and a change of mood. Grahame's Dream Days, another collection of stories published in 1899, was followed by nine years of silence before The Wind in the Willows, which, when it appeared, disconcerted some critics who had admired his earlier work and were not expecting a children's book.
The editors of the latest editions are not the first to detect a comic echo of Wilde's tragedy in the rise and fall of Mr Toad. Grahame's Berkshire home was not far from Reading Gaol, George Gilbert Scott's turreted Gothic revival prison, where Wilde was incarcerated. Reading is undoubtedly where Toad is taken from court, loaded with chains, having been sentenced to 20 years for being rude to a policeman. "Across the hollow-sounding drawbridge, below the spiky portcullis, under the frowning archway" Toad recedes.
He is disappearing, though, not only into prison but into the Victorian fiction of the past that Reading Gaol represents. As he passes them, the prison warders sprout medieval halberds, there is a rack-chamber and a thumbscrew-room, and the police sergeant suddenly starts to talk in impenetrable Walter Scott Gothic: "Oddsbodikins ... and a murrain on both of them!" Toad finds he is immured in the darkest dungeon in "the stoutest castle in all the length and breadth of Merry England". Merry England, Grahame knew, was a fiction, and it was finished. It could no longer offer a resort for the imagination as it had to the writers of the early 19th century who sought respite from their own times in the pious middle ages. The Edwardians knew much more about history and they were much less sure about God.
Those of them who went on searching for the divine often found it enveloped in clouds of pantheism and neo-paganism, spiritualism and theosophy, the faiths of the doubtful. It is this diffuse but potent supernaturalism that appears in The Wind in the Willows in one strange, unsettling chapter, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn". It is a section that abridgers of the book have always been quick to drop, though Grahame himself thought it essential. In it, Rat and Mole, searching for the Otter's lost child, are granted a vision of the great god Pan, a muscular, horned god, "the Friend and Helper", before whom the animals, "crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship".
Whether it is the latent homo-eroticism of the vision or simply the sudden change of tone that makes the scene so uncomfortable, it is certainly a failure. But while artistically it is the weakest part of the book, it is at the same time the key to it. Pan's parting gift to Rat and Mole is "forgetfulness". They will not remember the pure happiness of their vision because if they did the memory would grow until it overshadowed and spoiled the rest of their lives with the knowledge that it could never be regained. The "little animals" would never be "happy and light-hearted" again.
At Edward VII's coronation in 1901 Kipling's great fin-de-siècle poem, "Recessional", was read with its tolling refrain "Lest we forget - lest we forget". But for Grahame and his contemporaries the problem was that they couldn't forget. The enemy without, the stoats and the weasels from the Wild Wood, might be driven from Toad Hall with sticks, but memory, the foe within, haunted them along with all that they had lost or might be about to lose. And so they turned aside, as one view of history has it, from modernism and went back to the nursery. What they found there, though, was not so much a second childhood as the first, the ideal one, which they preserved forever for their readers - childhood as we may all remember it and as it never was.

Hill, R. (2009). Wild waters are upon us [Review of the book The wind in the willows by K. Grahame]. The guardian. Retrieved February 1, 2015 from http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jun/13/wind-in-the-willows-review.

Library Uses: Libraries could use The Wind in the Willows in a collection of pairing books with films. The pair could be checked out together, encouraging usually non-engaged readers to find books that movies they would, or may have already watched, are based on.