tavie.com

I was lucky enough to receive a copy of the first two chapters of Lyle the Elephant, a children's novel by up-and-comer Goose Frank. (Shut up, all of you, I'm enjoying this.)

I devoured it on the subway ride home. It captured everything I want a children's novel to capture, particularly attention to detail. My favourite books as a kid were the ones that were bursting with detail. This one is:

Some rest. Some rest. The words cycled through Lyle's head. He did not need some rest. He was lying. What he needed was something inscrutable, unknown-- his mother, mustard, a black pentagon-shaped tile-- anything but rest.

We need lists like these. The mustard is crucial-- without it, the emotions behind Lyle's thought processes wouldn't ring as true. Ms. Frank has skillfully portrayed the classic modern children's-novel archetype, that of the Creative Dreamer. This book is consciously and reverently reminiscent of Lousie Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy, the favourite novel of our young protagonist. But Lyle is not Harriet: he is, in his way, wiser and more self-aware than Harriet was, yet naive enough to foster self-identification of the reader.

When asked by his parents where he disappears to for hours at a time, our young hero, who has been squirrelled away with a stack of books, replies, "a foreign land." As I, myself, have been spending a great deal of time in Middle Earth and Fantastica lately, I appreciated his inner journeys all the more:

His parents (who were always tellikng him to stand up straight and to look people in the eye, not down at the ground, when he was speaking to them) wanted nothing more than to understand exactly what went on in Lyle's head, how it was that his boy did not seem to mind that he was no good at kickball, where it was that he went when he holed up in the hall closet. "Narnia," his mother guessed. "Never-Neverland?" his father replied. "Middle Earth." "Wonderland." "Oz."

I am Lyle.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 12:16 AM | shower me with attention