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Book Review — ‘Henry and Mudge in the Sparkle Days’
A boy and his giant dog celebrate the season without commercializing it in a gem for beginning readers
The books known as “easy readers” are paradoxically among the hardest to write. They need to have simple words yet enough depth to captivate children whose thoughts are more complex than the sentences they are able to read.
Strong pictures help, but children’s books begin with good stories. And writing them for 6-to-8-year-olds is difficult enough that even writers as gifted as Kate DiCamillo have come up short in books for that age group.
Cynthia Rylant is a master of the art of the easy reader, and in Suçie Stevenson she found an illustrator whose comic style suits her work the way nutmeg suits eggnog.
Henry and Mudge in the Sparkle Days consists of three short stories, each about a boy and his giant dog, Mudge, enjoying a winter pleasure — the first snowfall, a Christmas Eve dinner, and a family walk at night followed by a quiet time in front of a fireplace. This sort of material reduces lesser writers and artists to utter sappiness.
But Rylant, a Newbery medalist, and Stevenson invest it with high drama, whether Mudge is destroying Henry’s snow angels or crying in a bedroom because…
