With all the media hype surrounding the fourth Harry Potter book, I have found myself wishing that the little snot would finally run out of steam, graduate from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and move into a boring corporate life with all the other muggles.

 

The Invisible Hunters Photo: Lynley Rappaport

Such a nasty thought for a children's librarian! It is almost blasphemy to wish ill for Harry Potter, but there are many wonderful children's books in danger of being overlooked in the midst of the market-driven mania surrounding J.K. Rowling's clever but formulaic fantasies. Here are a few books my students, 4th, 5th, and 6th graders in Newton, Massachusetts, rank as highly or higher than those about good old Harry of Potter.

Philip Pullman is another great fantasy writer from England, and in the tradition of C.S. Lewis, L. Frank Baum, Susan Cooper, Madeleine L'Engle, and J. R.R. Tolkien his books tell stories of complex characters who travel in realms both familiar and strange. The Golden Compass (DelRey Ballantine Books, 1995, $6.99) and the sequel, The Subtle Knife (DelRey Ballantine Books, 1997, $5.99) will soon be joined by Book Three of His Dark Materials series, The Amber Spyglass (due in October, 2000, Random House). One of the more intriguing concepts introduced in these fantasies is that of daemons. These small creatures, who take the form of various animals, are the physical embodiments of the souls of their human owners. It is in accepting the final form of the mature daemon that a human comes to self acceptance. In The Golden Compass there is an evil experiment taking place in which the bonds between daemons and humans are being severed. Once this activity is discovered by the young, feisty protagonist, Lyra Belacqua, the forces of Good are joined to prevent this and other destructive plans. These are epic tales told on multiple levels. They are more demanding than the Harry Potter books, but for this reason I believe they are more deeply satisfying.

Moving to another genre entirely, I highly recommend the historical fiction books of a new writer, Christopher Paul Curtis, who is the author of The Watsons Go to Birmingham - 1963 (Dell Yearling, 1995, $5.50), and Bud, Not Buddy (Delacorte Press, 1999, $15.95). In The Watsons, Momma and Dad of the "Weird Watsons" live in Flint, Michigan, and decide during the summer of 1963 that it is time to take the family South for a visit. Ten-year-old Kenny narrates the story and explains that big brother, Byron, is on the road to becoming a juvenile delinquent and needs some time with Grandma who is bound to straighten him out. As this funny, warm family piles into their 1948 Plymouth, dubbed the Brown Bomber, and heads to Birmingham, Alabama they are also heading toward an important and tragic moment in America's recent past. Although the Watsons are a fictional family, the bombing of the Sixteenth Avenue Baptist Church which killed four young girls was real and took place at the time of the story. The Watsons witness this awful event, and Byron sobers up to the facts of life and what it means to be African American. In the end he is the one who most helps Kenny deal with the trauma.

"Kenny, things ain't ever going to be fair. How's it fair that two grown men could hate Negroes so much that they'd kill some kids just to stop them from going to school? How's it fair that even though the cops down there might know who did it, nothing will probably ever happen to those men? It ain't. But you just gotta understand that that's the way it is and keep on steppin'."

With the success of his first book,The Watsons... Curtis quit working on the assembly line at a Ford Motor plant in Michigan and became a full time writer producing last year's Newbery Award winner. In Bud, Not Buddy Curtis tells the story of Bud, a motherless boy, growing up in Michigan during the Great Depression. Bud escapes from an abusive foster home and goes in search of the man he believes to be his father -- a renowned band leader in Grand Rapids. He soon finds that "Being on the lam was a whole lot of fun...for about five minutes," but along the way he does encounter some fine folks including the homeless of Hooverville. We learn along with Bud that shantytowns named after President Hoover and his social policies are being built all over the US. "Mr Hoover worked so hard at making sure every city has got one that it seems like it would be criminal to call them anything else."

Told with humor and warmth, these books by Curtis present stories of American history from a point of view long missing from children's literature. While I was not surprised that these books were well received by "enlightened" adult critics, I was delighted that my students find them engaging and demand many copies of them.

Bud's story would be an interesting companion to another great new book, Dave At Night by Gail Carson Levine (Harper Collins, 1999, $15.95). Dave is orphaned like Bud, and is sent away to the Hebrew Home for Boys (HHB or Hell Hole for Brats) where he is also mistreated. Sneaking out at night, Dave stumbles into Solly Gruber, an old Yiddish speaking gonif, who in turn introduces Dave to the music and culture of the Harlem Renaissance. Spurned by much of his poor extended Jewish family, Dave is befriended by "colored" people as well as by Solly, and he loves "Irma Lee. Jazz. Mrs. Packer. Irma Lee. Rent parties. People having fun together. Aaron Douglas. Langston Hughes. A painting of Noah's ark. Irma Lee..." In these two books the reader meets two resilient boys, both orphaned, who find their ways into the rich worlds of jazz and art and literature.

They are helped by sympathetic adult advocates who seek to mitigate the harshness of their young lives. The bonds the boys make with other children adrift and abandoned by the larger society ring true and add hope and meaning to their situations.

Levine, like writer Christopher Paul Curtis, wrote an earlier book for children which also met with glowing reviews. Ella Enchanted (Harper Trophy, 1997, $5.95) is delightful in its playful, irreverent look at the Cinderella story. At birth, Ella of Frell was "given" the impossible gift of obedience. When ordered directly to do something, Ella is powerless. At the same time, Ella is strong-willed and chooses to resist her fate. Like the original Cinderella, Ella mourns when her mother dies young and can no longer protect her as she contends with princes, ogres, giants, wicked stepsisters, fairy godmothers, and an uninterested father. It is Ella's quest to break her curse, and, not surprisingly, girls especially love this gentle, comical and feminist book.

I encourage readers of all ages to break the curse of bestseller lists, and to move beyond Harry Potterism to the infinite number of outstanding children's books waiting on the shelves for youthful and not-so-youthful readers. Children's books are not easy to write, as some might think, but they are a pleasure to read. It would be lovely if adults read along with children some of the fine stories being told about American history as well as the high fantasy which they may have forgotten about.

Lani Gerson is a school librarian in Newton, MA who frequently writes about children's literature