CDB!
CDC?
The Phantom Tollbooth
The Ink Drinker
Get Real
My Angelica
The Story of the Treasure Seekers
Seven-Day Magic

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T A B L E++T A L K

What's in a name? Readers share favorite baby names and their meanings in the Mothers area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Traumas in adolescent life
By Curtis Sittenfeld
A judge of the Seventeen magazine fiction contest recalls what was endearing about the writers of the 400 stories she read -- even the really bad ones
(02/17/99)

You're a good man, Dr. Smurf
By Martha Beck
Two Harvard degrees taught me to fixate on appearances. My son, born with Down's syndrome, showed me the sweet core of ordinary things
(02/16/99)

Cracks
By Anne Lamott
Despite meeting an intelligent Christian, I was not quite ready to give up a life of shame, failure, X-rated motels and Scotch just yet
(02/12/99)

A sardine's story
By Sallie Tisdale
A picture book that follows the life of a fish, all the way to her death and packaging in a can -- has some grown-ups squirming. Maybe kids need to help them face reality
(02/11/99)

The city of lost children
By Katherine Ellison
Is a Brazilian judge stealing babies for American families?
(02/10/99)

BROWSE THE WILD THINGS ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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Salon Columnists

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-------[  W I L D  T H I N G S  ]

BY POLLY SHULMAN | Once they've mastered the alphabet, children arrive at a star-shaped crossroad bristling with choices. They can become readers, writers, typographers, crossword enthusiasts, spelling champs, editors of the school paper -- the list goes on. These many paths through the garden of literary delight braid together, circling around to meet, perhaps, at a sculpture garden full of mythological figures, or a small folly shaped like a ruined castle or a piece of ornamental water. And for each path the young alphabet master chooses, a genre of children's books waits to guide him down it.

Closest to alphabet books are letter-play books, such as William Steig's ingenious "CDB!" and its sequel, "CDC?" Each page contains a string of letters that yield their meaning when pronounced sequentially. Steig helps out with his goofy cartoon illustrations. The title spread of "CDB!" for example, shows a boy and girl enthusiastically inspecting an insect that's hovering near some flowers. (See the bee -- get it?) "D B," it turns out, "S A BZ B." Girls named MLE and KT and boys named PT will find these books particularly XLN.

The king of the letter-play classics, of course, is "The Phantom Tollbooth." Anyone of any age who hasn't read this profound, witty modern fable should do so immediately. Milo, the hero, sets out on a quest for the twin princesses Rhyme and Reason. On the way he meets a boy who grows down, not up (someday, when he's an adult, the boy's feet will touch the ground), as well as the world's smallest giant, who's also the world's tallest midget, the world's thinnest fat man and the world's fattest thin man. Milo spends time in the Doldrums, where laughter is frowned upon and the inhabitants take a break from doing nothing by going nowhere, and Digitopolis, ruled by a mathemagician. It should come as no surprise that, like Lewis Carroll, Norton Juster, the author of this Wonderland-inspired journey, is a mathematician himself.

Juster sends his hero to Dictionopolis, the dominion of Azaz the Unabridged. There the king's cabinet -- the Duke of Definition, the Minister of Meaning, the Earl of Essence, the Count of Connotation and the Undersecretary of Understanding -- show Milo around a market where people come to buy and sell the world's words, grown in nearby orchards. After finding his first choices -- "quagmire," "flabbergast" and "upholstery" -- way too pricey, Milo settles for an assortment of letters. A is sweet and delicious, I icy and refreshing, C crisp and crunchy, P full of pits. Dry Z, however, disappoints him, and X tastes like a trunkful of stale air. "That's why people hardly ever use them," confides the salesman. A friendly Spelling Bee, a Which (not witch) named Faintly Macabre and a banquet where the guests eat their words (after helping themselves to ragamuffins and synonym buns from the breadbasket) round out the verbal portion of the novel.

One of Milo's virtues as a hero is his ordinariness. Juster presents him as an anti-nerd -- bored, blasé, uninterested in subtracting turnips from turnips or spelling "February." By the end of the novel, however, Milo has become as curious as any teacher could wish. Not so his spiritual heir in "The Ink Drinker," a delightfully iconoclastic new book for children cursed with literary parents. "My father owns a bookstore. He loves books. He devours them like an ogre. All day and long into the night, he reads," complains the narrator, who hates books himself. So when a weird new customer shows up floating a few inches above the floor, sniffs out a book, sticks a straw into it and sucks up the words, leaving the pages blank but for a few scattered letters, the narrator knows he's found a role model. Translated from the French, "The Ink Drinker" retains charming continental touches in its illustrations, which are strewn with appropriately unapproachable text. The sensibility is pure 8-year-old. "Eric Sanvoisin is one bizarre writer," boasts the author in his bio. "Using a straw, he loves to suck the ink from all the fan letters he receives ... If you write to him, he will send you a straw."

N E X T_ P A G E: Bodice-rippers and treasure seekers