Naughty children's books. (Books).

One day in 1990, my mom called me up, very excited, and said she was sending me a gift. When a book from her arrived in the mail, I was surprised at the title: Don't Tell the Grown-ups: Subversive Children's Literature, by Alison Lurie. To say the least, it seemed like an odd present to get from your mother.

In the foreword to this excellent book, Lurie describes her discovery during childhood that there were two types of kid's literature.

"The first kind, the great majority, told me what grown-ups had decided I ought to know or believe about the world," writes Lurie, observing that such books teach kids "to be more like respectable grown-ups."

The second kind, however, "were the sacred texts of childhood, whose authors had not forgotten what it was like to be a child." Books of that sort, says Lurie, "recommended--even celebrated--daydreaming, disobedience, answering back, running away from home, and concealing one's private thoughts and feelings from unsympathetic grown-ups. They overturned adult pretentions and made fun of adult institutions, including school and family."

My mom, a self-effacing, polite woman, helped raise two independent daughters by:

1) Informing my sister and me that, statistically speaking, we were likely to be future divorcees, so we must have careers and be capable of taking care of our lives;

2) Encouraging my very athletic sister to be very athletic;

3) Helping me to read everything I could get my hands on, including "naughty" or "dangerous" books.

In the spirit of Alison Lurie and my mom, I'd like to recommend a picture book featuring a pig named Olivia, who "always blossoms in front of an audience." In Olivia Saves the Circus, by Ian Falconer (Atheneum, 32 pages), the little pig is supposed to give a class talk about her summer vacation, Olivia provides a detailed narrative about the day she went to the circus. "When we got there, all the circus people were out sick with ear infections," she reports. Happily for the circus performers and the audience, Olivia, an extremely capable pig, takes over the whole show. "I was Olivia the Tattooed Lady," she says. "Then I was Olivia the Lion Tamer and Olivia the Tight-rope Walker and I walked on stilts and juggled and was Olivia the Clown and rode a unicycle. I was the Flying Olivia, and Olivia, Queen of the Trampoline...."

Olivia is not what you would call obedient. When her teacher insinuates that she is telling a lie, she resists him, even though he scowls at her. When her mother asks about her day at school, she gives one-word answers.

One of the keys to this young female pig who knows how to do everything is the picture that hangs above Olivia's bed. It shows Eleanor Roosevelt with her arms raised.

Like Olivia, there are many recent children s books with political or subversive themes.

Goin' Someplace Special (Atheneum, 32 pages), illustrated by Jerry Pinkney, won the 2002 Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award. I was entranced by the pictures, which never lose their focus on the young black girl in a bright blue dress as she travels through the city crowds.

In the semi-autobiographical narrative, 'Tricia Ann takes her first trip alone to "Someplace Special" during the time of Jim Crow laws. When she boards the bus and heads to the back, she remembers the words of her grandmother, Mama Frances: "Those signs can tell us where to sit, but they can't tell us what to think."

Her quest is not clear until the end of the book: "At the corner, 'Tricia Ann saw a building rising above all that surrounded it, looking proud in the summer sun," writes McKissack. "It was much more than bricks and stone. It was an idea. Mama Frances called it a doorway to freedom. When she looked at it, she didn't feel angry or hurt or embarrassed. `At last,' she whispered, `I've made it to Someplace Special.'"

'Tricia Ann has just arrived at the city public library.

An author's note explains the importance of the public library for black people in Nashville, the town of McKissack's childhood. "Nashville, like most Southern towns in the 1950s, was segregated," she writes. "But in the late 1950s, Nashville's public library board of directors quietly voted to integrate all their facilities. The downtown branch was one of the few places where there were no Jim Crow signs and blacks were treated with some respect."

(The author, by the way, happens to be the mother of Fred McKissack Jr., who is on our editorial staff.)

Sports-loving girls will find exhilaration in Girls Got Game: Sports Stories and Poems (Henry Holt and Co., 152 pages), edited by Sue Macy. As someone who, as a girl, didn't take much pleasure in sports, I have to say that even I ended up identifying with the passion for the game in these stories, which are also about growing up female in America.

An editor's note pays homage to Title IX, which has dramatically opened access to sports for young women. Fiction, however, "is just starting to reflect the new role of sports in girls' lives," she notes.

These stories concern everything from the girl who loses her new boyfriend because she plays tetherball too well to another who comes to understand her grandmother because of their shared love of synchronized swimming. My favorite story, by Jacqueline Woodson, is explicitly about stickball, implicitly about the protagonist's budding recognition that she is not straight.

Bean is an ace hurler. When Brooklyn starts a baseball league, girls aren't allowed to play. The boy who tried to kiss Bean, and whom she handily rejected, tells her with delight that she won't be able to play stickball anymore. Shortly afterwards, her girlfriend Dee moves to Mexico and gets a boyfriend. The mixture of constriction, grief, and rage saturates the story's last paragraphs:

"The memories of me and Dee come and go. Come and go. Liquid. Solid. Vivid. Vague.

"Some evenings I take my Spalding to the handball courts and throw and throw until my arm throbs with the power of throwing. Aches with the power and promise of some other bigger thing to come. More powerful than those moments on the pitcher's mound when the ball soared from my hand and cried, Freedom! through the air. More perfect.

"More lasting.

"The handball court's a cement wall. Some evenings I believe I can send that ball screaming straight on through its stone.

"And me not far behind."

Another disobedient, angry, and entirely compelling character is Paul Edward of The Land (Penguin Putnam, 375 pages), by Mildred D. Taylor. This novel for young adults, a Coretta Scott King Author Award-winner, is the prequel to Taylor's famous book Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, the Newbery Award-winner that is newly back in print.

Paul was born a slave and was emancipated during the Civil War. His white father and former owner has always recognized him as a son, has included him and his sister, Cassie, in family meals, and has seen to it that both children receive an education.

However, this "equal" treatment is inconsistent, as Paul's mother never gets to sit at the table. "People hearing that Edward Logan's children of color sat at his table was one thing," Paul observes. "A colored woman with her children sitting at his table would have been another; that would have been too bold."

The unequal treatment accelerates when Paul enters adolescence. One day, his father informs him that he wants to send Paul away to apprentice as a carpenter. But he plans to send Robert, one of Paul's white brothers, to a boarding school in a different town. Paul is "bewildered" and asks his father why he must be separated from Robert.

"Robert's white and you're a boy of color," his father answers. "I can't educate you in the same school--you know that. I can't educate you in the same way, either. I need to look out for what I think is best for each of you."

The brothers leave home. When they visit together on holidays, Paul finds Robert changed. He is hanging around with the Waverly boys, neighbors who have always been hostile to Paul and who, Robert confides to his brother, are telling stories about lynchings. Soon Robert is apologizing for the Waverlys' behavior. It is not long before Paul comes to blows with Robert and the Waverly boys. In response, his father strips him naked in front of the Waverlys and whips him. He then beats Robert, but he does so in private and he leaves the clothes on his white son.

"I know you're hating me right now, and I don't blame you for that," Paul's father tells him. "But I'm not apologizing for what I did. It's past time you learned these things, and I'd whip you again, twice as hard, if it meant saving your life." Paul's father explains that he was afraid Paul would be lynched if he did not beat his son publicly.

Shortly after this event, Paul leaves his father's land, which he has loved dearly and which he once thought would be his home for his entire life.

Beverley Naidoo's The Other Side of Truth (HarperCollins, 252 pages) is set in Nigeria during the Abacha regime shortly after the death of Ogoni playwright and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa.

The main character is named Sade. One day, as Sade is packing her bags for school, she hears squealing tires and gunshots. Her mother has been assassinated, and it appears the target was her father, an outspoken journalist.

In front of the children, Sade's uncle warns her father to leave the country. "For goodness sake, Folarin, look at what they've done to Ken? her uncle says. "Look, if you get out of here ... at least you can go on writing. Let the outside world know what's happening to Nigeria. What good is the truth on the lips of a dead journalist?"

As for craft, this novel, which won the 2000 Carnegie medal, is a feat. It's impossible not to get caught up in the plot, the suspense, and the emotional lives of these kids. Many of the metaphors are startling in their depth. Sade and her brother Femi escape Nigeria but end up lost on the streets of London. When the police find them, the two children know they can't trust anyone but themselves with the truth about who they are. Naidoo captures Sade's psychological state this way: "Sade felt as if her brain had crashed. Like Papa's computer. When that happened, you could tap in as many commands as you liked but nothing would come out."

By the novel's end, the two children save their father's life.

The author's first book for children, the 1985 Journey to Jo'Burg: A South African Story, was banned in South Africa until 1991, though it was popular in other parts of the world.

While the novels yield rewards, so does much nonfiction for children now, which displays extensive, detailed, and careful research.

Tell All the Children Our Story: Memories and Mementos of Being Young and Black in America, by Tanya Bolden (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 128 pages), had so much power in its brief narratives that for much of it, I was as rapt as I am in the presence of a great novel.

Another book that captured my attention was Nobody Particular: One Woman's Fight to Save the Bays, by Molly Bang (Henry Holt and Co., 46 pages). The star of the book is a strong-minded shrimper, who fights some very large corporations to save the bays she loves. Told in comic-book style, the book is a fun read, and it manages to discuss dumping, salination, and chemical pollution while never becoming less than entertaining (the protagonist's lively Texas vernacular helps.) The book also gives some good, basic information on civil disobedience.

As a victim of many sloppy and treacly Thanksgiving books (which I loathed as a child), I was grateful to read 1621: A New Look at Thanksgiving, by Catherine O'Neill Grace and Margaret M. Bruchac, with photographs by Sisse Brimberg and Cotton Coulson.

One central fact of the book is that the word "Thanksgiving" has had different meanings since 1621: "In later years the colonists proclaimed days of thanksgiving for military victories over Native people. One came after the burning of the Pequot in 1637. Another celebrated the death of Massasoit's son, and the end of `King Philip's War' in 1676." Massasoit, as you may remember, was a guest at the first Thanksgiving.

I have never had a stronger sense of what it feels like to live in a country ruptured by violence than I had reading Out of War: True Stories from the Front Lines of the Children's Movement for Peace in Colombia, by Sara Cameron in cooperation with UNICEF (Scholastic, 186 pages).

Juan Elias loses his father (who was publicly active in the peace movement) and his nineteen-year-old cousin when gunmen break into his father's dentist office. "I was supposed to have been with them as well," he says. "He left without me. That is why I am alive."

He is frank about the temptation of revenge. "When my father was murdered, I was shattered not just by grief, but because then I understood the war," he says. "I realized that no matter how much you want peace, you take a step towards war when the war hits you personally."

Children's books are an important, delightful, powerful part of our culture. They deserve the attention of adults, as well as kids. Some of this year's batch are naughty, some may even be dangerous--if kids thinking for themselves is dangerous. Kids will relish them. So will adults. I happen to be one of those.

Anne-Marie Cusac is Managing Editor of The Progressive. She would like to thank the Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for the wonderful guidance provided by their librarians. Cusac helped edit the publication "CCBC Choices, 2002," which inspired some of these reviews. For more information, check out the CCBC web site at http://www.soemadison.wisc.edu/ccbc/.