Tag: William Shakespeare

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Tundra Telegram: Dream Books for your “Endless” TBR Pile

Hello, and thanks for joining us at Tundra Telegram, the column where we reflect on the topics that are currently running through our minds, and kindly recommend some books we think might mesmerize you.

After years of false starts and dashed hopes, fans of Neil Gaiman’s beloved and acclaimed The Sandman comic series finally got the chance to see the television adaptation when it premiered on Netflix this past weekend. Starring Tom Sturridge as Dream / Morpheus, Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Death, Gwendoline Christie as Lucifer, and partially adapted by Gaiman himself, the series follows the king of dreams, as he escapes from captivity and attempts to restore order to his realm, called The Dreaming.

Of course, the best thing to do is to check out the collected editions of The Sandman, particularly the first two collections – Preludes and Nocturnes and The Doll’s House – that the series roughly adapts. But if you want more suggestions for books of all ages about sleeping and dream worlds, we’ve got some nighttime reading material for you!

PICTURE BOOKS

Though the Sandman television series demonstrates there are a few reasons to be afraid of the dark, A Bedtime Yarn by Nicola Winstanley and Olivia Chin-Mueller has an answer to that. Little bear Frankie is given a ball of yarn to hold when he goes to bed, and his mother will hold onto the other end in the next room, working it into a surprise for him. The yarn’s colors affect the dreams he has, and eventually he learns he’s always connected to the people he loves – even while asleep!

Basically the Neil Gaiman of picture books, Nicola Winstanley also penned The Pirate’s Bed, illustrated by Matt James, which gives young readers a view into the world of pirate dreams. That is, it does before the bed (who is wide awake while the pirate on top sleeps) is cast out to sea on his own during a shipwreck. Will a bed without a sleeper find happiness? Or will it feel somehow not whole?

If vivid dreams are what you want, you need Dream Animals by Emily Winfield Martin. Discover what your dream animal might be – a bear who invites you to make baked goods or some tea-partying mermaids? Dreams haven’t seemed this fun since Van Halen recorded 5150.

In the same vein, Sean Taylor and Anuska Allepuz’s The Dream Train features thirty lushly illustrated bedtime poems for and about sleepyheads of all kinds. The Sandman rarely delved into the dreams of ducks or bats like The Dream Train does, but maybe it should have?

If there’s one question the Sandman knows the answer to, it’s What Will You Dream of Tonight?, which is also a picture book by Frances Stickley and Anuska Allepuz (who must love dreams!). A parent wonders what their child will dream of: Deserts? Waterfalls? Dragon-filled caves? This is a creative tale of dreamtime adventures.

Keeping to the comic book roots of The Sandman, check out the Little Golden Book Trouble in the Dream Dimension by Dave Croatto and Shane Clester, featuring rival comic company character Doctor Strange as he protects the dream world from the villain Nightmare, devoted to spooking kids (and adults) as they snooze.

In You Byun’s Dream Friends, a young girl Melody has the most wonderful friend in her dreams, and they do a bunch of fantastical things together. But when Melody wakes up, she’s back in the real world where she has no friends. This all changes when her dream friend inspires her to take some actions to change her friend status in the real world. (But her dream friend also happens to be a massive sort of flying cat, which will be tough for her first real friend to live up to, IMHO.)

Though the series has not yet adapted the Sandman collection Dream Country, readers of the comic know that the issue “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” introduces Morpheus’s collab with William Shakespeare, and became the only comic book in history to win a World Fantasy Award. Accordingly, we recommend the new picture book,  William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, adapted by Georghia Ellinas and illustrated by Jane Ray, for the youngest audiences.

And like some sort of Australian Morpheus, the titular character in Robert Ingpen’s The Dream Keeper lives in the realm between being asleep and awake, and uses a number of tricks and traps to ensnare the wild creatures of our dreams before they can escape into reality.

CHAPTER BOOKS & MIDDLE GRADE

Though he doesn’t quite have the powers of Morpheus, the protagonist of Julian, Dream Doctor by Ann Cameron and Ann Strugnell does his best to enter his father’s dreams to get him the perfect birthday gift. Julian wants to get his dad a birthday gift that he’s “always dreamed of.” So he creates a brainwave machine, communicates through the TV antenna’s signals, interrogates his father while asleep, and does whatever he can to secretly learn what his father’s dream is, even if it happens to be a nightmare!

The Dollhouse by Charis Cotter is not only just a space, an apostrophe, and an “s” away from the title of one of the Sandman books adapted for the show, it’s also a spooky, atmospheric story that weaves the dream world with the waking one. Alice’s parents split up and she moves with her mom when she becomes a live-in nurse for an older woman. Alice finds a dollhouse in the attic that’s a replica of the house they live in, and before she knows it, she wakes up to find a girl asleep next to her in her bed – a girl who exactly like one of the dolls from the dollhouse (I may never sleep again!).

The Bookshop of Dust and Dreams by Mindy Thompson mirrors the Sandman books in its belief in the (literal magic) power of art and literature. Poppy’s family owns the magic bookshop Rhyme and Reason, which is situated in WWII New York, but caters to customers from around the world and from the past and future. When her older brother threatens to break the most important rule among magic Booksellers, Poppy is caught in an impossible situation.

And, of course, a perfect companion to the Sandman series is Jason Segel and Kirsten Miller’s Nightmares! trilogy (illustrated by Karl Kwasny), and not just because the books have often been compared to another Gaiman creation, Coraline. Charlie Laird has a major problem: not only does he have trouble sleeping because of terrible nightmare, but his nightmares have started slipping out of his dreams and into the waking world of Cypress Creek. Charlie and his friends – in the original book, as well as The Sleepwalker Tonic and The Lost Lullaby – must face their fears and save their town.

YOUNG ADULT

You can’t even start to mention YA about dreams without talking about Cherie Dimaline’s Hunting by Stars. The follow-up to The Marrow Thieves, in which Indigenous people are being hunted across North America and placed residential schools to harvest their bone marrow. The reason: Indigenous people are still able to dream, an ability lost by everyone else, and this dreaming ability is believed to be housed in the marrow (something overlooked in Sandman!). This book follows seventeen-year-old French, who survived the first book, as he heads north with a group of other dreamers who try to build a new community – until the school Recruiters hunt him down.

It’s an older title, but Dream Girl by Lauren Mechling, is all about Claire Voyante, a fifteen-year-old girl whose dream visions become a lot clearer when she’s given a cameo necklace by her grandmother Kiki. What can she do next but solve madcap mysteries with her psychic sleeping powers?

And the techno-futuristic take on Sleeping Beauty, A Long, Long Sleep by Anna Sheehan, follows Rosalinda Fitzroy, in a chemically induced slumber in a stasis tube for 62 years until she is kissed awake. But the world Rose wakes to is the aftermath of an apocalyptic era that killed millions in which she’s seen as the long-lost heir to an interplanetary empire (that old story!).

Sweet dreams and happy reading!

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Tundra Telegram: Books to Break Your Souls

Hello, and thanks for joining us at Tundra Telegram, the column where we listen in on topics that are currently running the (social media) world, and count down some books we think are irreplaceable.

You don’t need to be a member of the BeyHive to know that after nearly a decade of surprise drops and visual albums, Beyoncé’s seventh full-length album, Renaissance, was unveiled this past Friday. The immediate response has been overwhelmingly positive for this massive sixteen-track opus that manages to both honor Black musical artists throughout history and contain enough dance-floor bangers destined to instill a wild rumpus in the club. We thought we’d use it – or rather its title – to create this week’s reading list.

So, take that plastic off the sofa and get cozy. Don’t get heated, because we’re about to get all up in your mind and recommend some books for young readers – both about the European Renaissance (of the 15th and 16th centuries) and the later Harlem Renaissance (of the early 20th century) – that might impel you to move your self to the closest bookstore.

PICTURE BOOKS

Langston Hughes was an author who was also one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance. That Is My Dream! is a picture book in which illustrator Daniel Miyares adapts his poem, “Dream Variation,” in which a young Black boy in confronted by the harsh reality of segregation and racism over this day, but he dreams of a different life – one full of freedom, hope, and so many possibilities!

Harlem’s Little Blackbird is a picture book biography by Renee Watson and Christian Robinson about Florence Mills, one of the most popular Black performers of the Jazz Age. The book tells her rise to fame on the stages of 1920s Broadway, and how she dedicated herself to supporting and promoting works by fellow Black performers – not unlike Beyoncé herself!

Schomburg: The Man Who Built a Library by Carole Boston Weatherford and Eric Velasquez tells the story of an Afro-Puerto Rican law clerk who collected letters, music, and art from Africa and Black American creators. When his collection began to overtake his house, he brought it to the New York Public Library, where he created and curated a collection now known as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, one of the greatest primary source repositories of the output of the Harlem Renaissance! The book is also available en español.

Bonnie Christensen lets Galileo Galilei tell his side of the story in I, Galileo. Galileo’s contributions to science and the Renaissance were numerous and his ideas world-changing, but in his own time he was branded a heretic and put under house arrest. This is a great kids’ introduction to possibly the most important scientist of the Renaissance!

Few artists had a bigger impact on the Renaissance than Michelangelo, and Stone Giant: Michelangelo’s David and How He Came to Be by Jane Sutcliffe and John Shelley, describes how the artist turned a neglected hunk of marble into one of the world’s most famous hunk sculptures.

And while Dr. Seuss’s Horse Museum, illustrated by Andrew Joyner, doesn’t focus only on the Renaissance (and, in fact, explores different methods and movements of visual art through depictions of horses), it does include Renaissance artist Raphael’s Saint George Fighting the Dragon, and the accompanying horse.

CHAPTER BOOKS & MIDDLE GRADE

To get started in this age range, it’s best to begin with What Was the Harlem Renaissance? by Sherrie L. Smith and Tim Foley to get some background. Young readers learn how the vibrant Black neighborhood in upper Manhattan became home to the leading Black writers, artists, and musicians of the 1920s and 1930s – including profiles of Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, Augusta Savage, and Zora Neale Hurston.

Did someone say “Zora Neale Hurston”? The influential Black author of Their Eyes Were Watching God is the protagonist of the Zora and Me trilogy by Victoria Bond and T. R. Simon, which fictionalize the youth of Zora Neale Hurston, and look at systemic racism and the power of storytelling in a Black community in the American south at the turn of the century. They serve as coming-of-age tales and great introductions to Hurston as an author.

Though the Magic Treehouse siblings never travelled through time to the Harlem Renaissance (hmmm), Jack and Annie did go back to encounter the artist, inventor, and visionary, Leonardo Da Vinci in Magic Treehouse: Monday with a Mad Genius by Mary Pope Osborne and Sal Murdocca. And, as we know, Bey and Jay are fans of Leo’s work.

Need a little more Da Vinci? The graphic novel The History of Western Art in Comics, Part Two by Marion Augustin and Bruno Heitz begins in the Renaissance, and two kids and their grandpa continue their guided tour of art kicking off with such hits as The Last Supper, The Mona Lisa, and the Sistine Chapel. The book only covers up to Modern Art, so the Lemonade visual album doesn’t make an appearance.

And while historians disagree on if we should categorize ol’ William Shakespeare in the Renaissance, we’re going to include him here. Tales from Shakespeare is an excellent introduction for young readers to Shakespeare’s greatest plays, as siblings Charles and Mary Lamb vividly bring to life Hamlet, Othello, As You Like It, Pericles, and more, but modified and retold in a manner sensitive to the needs of young children, without resorting to any actual censoring. Makes sense, as many have argued Beyoncé is our Shakespeare.

YOUNG ADULT

Inspired by their class unit on the Harlem Renaissance, Bronx Masquerade by Nikki Grimes (who was born in Harlem herself) follows the eighteen students of a Mr. Ward’s eleventh grade English class who begin having weekly poetry sharing sessions, revealing their most intimate thoughts about themselves and each another.

Blood Water Paint by Joy McCullough takes readers to Rome in 1610 and introduces them to seventeen-year-old nun Artemisia Gentileschi, the real-life painter who also participated in one of the world’s first high-profile trials of sexual assault. The book looks both at the highs of creative inspiration and the devastating lows of a system rigged against women. (Technically, she was a Baroque painter, not a Renaissance painter, but are you here for book recommendations or art history lessons?)

The European Renaissance is usually associated with cities in what is now known as Italy, but several historical websites claim the reign of Henry VIII marked the real beginning of the Renaissance in England. So, we can also recommend Fatal Throne: The Wives of Henry VIII Tell All, a collaborative work by seven authors (M.T. Anderson, Candace Fleming, Stephanie Hemphill, Lisa Ann Sandell, Jennifer Donnelly, Linda Sue Park, and Deborah Hopkinson), each telling the story of one of the king’s six wives – and Henry himself, who liked it, and put a ring on it a full six times.

Now let’s get back to business.