Two bad habits.

I have the bad habit, as a reader, of sometimes dismissing a book by its cover. Literally. And of making sweeping generalizations.

For instance: I don't like fantasy, because all fantasy is cheesy and has sworcerers and all the women in fantasy novels are dressed up in outfits like Princess Leia's slave girl bikini and sometimes there are magic crystals and all the made-up lands have weird languages and unpronounceable names. This particular sweeping generalization kept me from giving many decent, relevant fantasy novels a try for the longest time. I didn't read Lord of the Rings until I was in college, for Pete's sake!

During the five years in high school and college that I worked in a bookstore, these beliefs were both supported and eventually broken down. I was always fascinated, when shelving in the fantasy section, by how similar so many of the books looked and sounded, and by how truly terrible the cover art was on so many of them. One such book I always noticed and puzzled over was Arrows of the Queen, by Mercedes Lackey.



Arrows was the first book in a trilogy set in a kingdom called Valdemar. I loved the idea of the heroine being a small, scared girl with curly brown hair and brown eyes. But my brows went up at the cover art (pastels, I noticed with horror), and they nearly reached my hairline when the back cover informed me there were sentient horses.

Now, I'm a horse-crazy girl. I was when I was six and I remain one today. But I've never gotten into talking, thinking horses as an entertainment source---no Mr. Ed, no Artax* or Fledge** or Shadowfax***. Even Black Beauty never resonated with me the way The Black**** did. So the idea of sentient horses had me pretty leery, and for the longest time, whenever I shelved a new copy of Arrows, I would give it a lingering glance and then put it away.

Once I realized my time in the bookstore was coming to an end, I went on a bit of a book-buying spree. I bought a tall stack of books using my precious, long-lamented employee discount, and one of those was Arrows of the Queen. I know, crazy, right? But I just couldn't dismiss it from my mind--something about it stuck with me, in spite of the pastels and talking horses. I sat down with it one night and pretty much did not move from the spot until I finished it.

Okay, it's a WONDERFUL series. I reread all three books (second is Arrow's Flight, third is Arrow's Fall) at least two to three times a year--there's something about the world Mercedes Lackey has created and the people she fills it with that really resonate with me. Additionally, she writes incredibly strong female characters and these are badly needed in fantasy literature (there are much more of them today than there were 25 years ago, when Arrows first came out). Talia, the heroine, becomes one of the most important people in the kingdom, which is ruled by a just, capable queen. No shrinking violets, they.

The plot is as thus: Talia is a 13 year old girl from one of Valdemar's remote, puritanical border sectors. Her people are strict, joyless, and think girls should be uneducated and restricted to marrying and birthing children. Talia dreams of a life beyond that, but can't see how it will ever happen. More than anything, she wants to be a Herald, a messenger of the Queen. Then, circumstances force her to run away from home, and while on the road, she's met by a Companion (the sentient horses). Companions are the mounts of Heralds--they are intelligent beings, and while they don't literally speak out loud, their bond with their riders is such that they can speak mentally to each other. Companions, in effect, choose their riders, and only people with a selfless sense of duty and desire to serve will be Chosen, because being a Herald is a thankless, dangerous job. In return, Heralds and their Companions share incredible bonds---to have a Companion is to have a lifelong, built-in best friend who loves and trusts you no matter what.

Talia is Chosen by Rolan, who bears her away to the capital city of Haven. There, Talia discovers that she is to become the Queen's Own Herald, the highest ranked Herald of all---one who will serve as the Queen's most trusted counselor. She spends the rest of the book in school and training, learning to grow into her responsibility and position, overcoming adversity, and learning for the first time what it's like to be a part of a community that loves and supports her. Truly, beyond the relative thinness of the plot in this first book, the characters are what keep me rereading it. I LOVE the community of Heralds, I miss them when I'm not reading it, and I wish I could be friends with them myself.

Another book that I'd rolled my eyes at numerous times and yet somehow ended up purchasing in that last, frenzied year of employment was Alanna: The First Adventure, by Tamora Pierce.



While Arrows was more geared towards adults, Alanna was solidly young-adult. I was kind of turned off by the book's mention of magic, by the implied inclusion of a talking cat (sigh), and by the staggering realization that there were (at the time) twelve books in the series. So I spent four years not giving it a chance and one month frantically reading the twelve books as quickly as I could. Humble Pie, table one.

The twelve books can actually be divided into three separate series. In chronological order, they follow the adventures of Alanna (The Song of the Lioness quartet, books 1-4), Daine (The Immortals quartet, books 5-8), and Keladry (The Protector of the Small quartet, books 9-12), three girls who live in the kingdom of Tortall. I actually read Alanna's first, then Keladry's, and Daine's last--and while it didn't confuse me to read them somewhat out of order, I'm sorry I did because it kind of spoiled a particular romance for me.

Alanna of Trebond is a young 11 year old girl being sent to learn magic, while her twin brother Thom is being sent to learn knighthood. The only thing is, Alanna would rather be a knight and Thom would rather be a mage. They switch places, and Alanna, disguised as a boy, travels to the capital. There, she spends three years as a page learning the art of warfare---everything from weapons, to history, to law, to equitation, to courtly graces. It's not until the end of her time as a page that it's discovered she's a girl, and chaos erupts. Girls can't be knights, naturally, it's unthinkable. She must prove that she has every right to be there, and that she's just as capable as a boy of protecting her kingdom. She must endure incredible hardship and prejudice to do so, but of course she's triumphant.

Daine's series is connected to Alanna's, but definitely separate. She's a young girl with the gift of communicating with animals, and her series follows her education in building and utilizing this gift, and how she uses it to serve the kingdom. The characters from Alanna's series show up periodically in it--Alanna is a full-blown knight by now, as well as married and with children--but the primary emphasis of the series is on Daine and her gift.

Kel's series is my favorite of the three. After Alanna's success in completing her training, and her near-mythological status as a fearsome warrior, the laws of the kingdom are changed so that girls can become knights as well. Keladry is the first girl to take advantage of it, but she finds out that in spite of Alanna's success, the feelings and prejudices of the kingdom are still against her, and she has to fight even harder than Alanna to prove herself. I found Kel to be the most personable of the three heroines (though all are enjoyable), but I think I liked her series the best of all because of the wonderful relationships she has with those around her---her family are supportive, the knight she serves as squire was one of my favorite characters from the Alanna series, and there's a heartwarming reversal of sentiment in one of the more virulently unfriendly characters (warning: have kleenex handy).

Anyway, this long-winded post is really just my way of saying: Don't judge a book by it's cover, or assume all fantasy novels are the same. Sometimes you just need to give them a chance.


*The Neverending Story, by Michael Ende
**The Magician's Nephew, by C. S. Lewis
***Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien
****The Black Stallion, by Walter Farley

What I'm reading right now.

One of the nice things about having as extensive a library as I have is that there's never a lack of things to read. Even with the sheer amount of books I own that I haven't read yet, I can't get through more than a handful of them before I want to go back and reread an old favorite.

Right now I'm reading an odd mixture of old and new books, along with a library book thrown in for good measure.

Fire and Hemlock, by Dianne Wynne Jones.
I mentioned this in my last post. Writing about it then made me realize how long it'd been since I'd read it, so I pulled it off my shelf and dove in. I forgot how enjoyable and tantalizing all the name-dropping of books is in it. It's also a truly enjoyable, very mysterious retelling of Tam Lin, as I mentioned before, and I'm falling in love with the love story all over again.

Meet the Austins, by Madeleine L'Engle.
I've been a fan of Madeleine L'Engle's books for years. I'm more familiar with her fantasy books, starting with A Wrinkle in Time, but I've read a few of her Austin family Chronicles as well (of which this is the first, which I haven't read before). I picked this up at a small independent bookstore in Cannon Beach last week. I like to buy something from independent bookstores whenever I visit one, just to do my part in helping them survive.

The Lost Prince, by Francis Hodgson Burnett.
I've read and absolutely love FHB's most famous works for children: A Little Princess, Little Lord Fauntleroy, and The Secret Garden (one of my all-time favorite books). This work is much less well-known, but I've found I'm enjoying it very much. It's a very exciting story about a father and son working to restore the long-lost prince to the throne of Samavia (a generic, Ruritania-like, small European country), and takes place in London and Europe just after the turn of the century.

A Civil Contract, by Georgette Heyer.
This one has been a little difficult for me to get through. I normally love Georgette Heyer's books, but this one is fairly non-traditional. In typical romance novels, arranged marriages usually end up with the hero and heroine falling desperately in love after all. I'm not sure that's going to be the case in this one. It's a very realistic portrayal of the type of arranged marriages popular in British aristocratic society during the Regency period, and I appreciate it in that regard, but I live for happily-ever-after endings. I hope this one has it.

The Golden Bough, by Sir James George Frazer.
According to Wikipedia, The Golden Bough is s "wide-ranging comparative study of mythology and religion," focusing particularly on the primitive methods of early pagan cults throughout civilization. I haven't read much of this yet, but it's one of the books cited in Fire and Hemlock, and is considered one of the most influential books of the past hundred years.

A Short History of the Honey Bee, by E. Readicker-Henderson.
This book is pretty much what the title suggests, a history of honeybees. I came across this while doing the ToC for it at work, and immediately requested a copy from my local library. It's a very new release and my library only finally got their copy in a week ago. I may end up having to take this to Hawaii in order to finish it before it has to go back to the library. It's a very satisfying way of assuaging the curiosity about bees that Laurie R. King's Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes books have stirred up in me.

The Box of Delights, by John Masefield.
This is a recent addition to my library, and, incidentally, another book referenced in Fire and Hemlock. I've been waiting for a used copy for some time now and finally Powells got one. I haven't read it yet, but I'm very excited. This is one of The New York Review Children's Collection. They took a number of high-quality children's books by English and American authors, most published before 1950, and printed them in gorgeous hardcover volumes with heavy paper and beautiful artwork and covers. These are books built to last, and meant to be handed down, and make me long for the days (which ended before I was born) in which children's books were worth reading. Most of the stuff coming out today (if you'll pardon my crankiness) is cheap rubbish written hastily to make money, rather than stories that will continute to have an impact on children long after they've been read. In fact, the books in the NYR Children's Collection are the kind of books I would love to carry in my hypothetical children's bookstore (which looks a lot like The Shop Around the Corner in You've Got Mail).

Here's the cover, just so you can see how pretty it is:



John Masefield just so happens to be the author of "Sea Fever", one of the poems I posted during Poetry Month. I will never, ever get tired of the line, "All I need is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by."

Besides the stack of books I'm in the middle of right now, I have a stack of books to read. These are all books I haven't read before. I'm trying to go through them all so that I can clear room off my bookshelves for all the books Mom and Dad are bringing me that I left behind in Iowa.

Out of the Ordinary, by Annie Dalton.
One of the Tam Lin retellings. It should be a quick read.

A Dark Horn Blowing, by Dahlov Ipcar.
A fantasy for young adults that references Irish mythology: a young human woman is stolen away to be nursemaid to the princely son of the king of Erland (elfland).

A Game of Thrones, by George R. R. Martin.
A well-regarded work of High Fantasy that parallels the medieval world of The Wars of the Roses. I'm excited to read this; HBO and the BBC are producing a mini-series based on this book that is sure to be absolutely gorgeous, and two of my favorite actors (Sean Bean and Jennifer Ehle) have been cast. If it does well, they'll turn the later books into mini-series as well.

The Little White Horse, by Elizabeth Goudge.
Another British fantasy work for children. This was J. K. Rowling's favorite book as a child, and she credits it with inspiring her to write. This is being turned into a movie as well, and the pictures I've seen of it are breathtaking.

Emma Brown, by Clare Boylan.
This book was written out of fragments that Charlotte Bronte left behind when she died. Supposedly, it is very true to her style and authorial voice, and should be a very interesting read.

The Sherwood Ring, by Eliabeth Marie Pope.
Since I love, love, loved The Perilous Gard, I'm excited to read this. I may bump it up to the top of the To-Read list. It's about a young, modern girl sent to live at her family's ancestral estate, only to find that it's full of Colonial-era ghosts that lead her to mysteries, romance, and historical battles.

The Summer Tree, by Guy Gavriel Kay.
The first book in The Fionavar Tapestry trilogy. It's about five university students who end up in this fantastical world of wizards, goblins, and mythological characters. Sounds right up my alley!

"Oh, I forbid ye maidens all / that wear gold in your hair..."

"Oh I forbid ye maidens all
That wear gold in your hair--
Do not go by Carterhaugh,
For young Tam Lin is there!"

Until the age of eleven or twelve, I had only a passing interest and fondness for fairy tales. I enjoyed reading them, but they weren't a driving passion for me. That all changed when my older sister came home for a visit from college and made my family watch the marvelous film Labyrinth. Suddenly, I was obsessed.

Since that moment, I've actively sought out folk and fairy tale adaptations, both those that are still in their classic form, and those that have crossed into the genre of fantasy and sci-fi. If they at all have anything to do with fairy tales, folk tales, old ballads, and so on, I usually love them.

My three favorite tales/ballads are Beauty and the Beast (French), East o' the Sun, West o' the Moon (Norse), and Tam Lin (Scottish). Tam Lin is a Scottish ballad that dates back to the 1600s. The earliest extant recording of it is from the 1800s, and has been studied in depth at this website, which offers the following summary:

The woods of Carterhaugh are guarded by Tam Lin, a man who demands payment of all maidens who pass through, in the form of a belonging or their virginity. A maiden named Janet travels to Carterhaugh and picks a rose, causing Tam Lin to appear. He questions her presence, to which she relies that Carterhaugh is rightfully hers. She then travels to her father's house where she exhibits the early signs of pregnancy, much to the concern of the household. She states that her lover is elven, and then returns to Carterhaugh, once again encountering Tam Lin. He reveals he is not elven, but a mortal captured by the queen of Faeries, and that he may be sacrificied to hell as part of the faerie tithe. He then details how she can save him to be her mate, if she will undergo a trial on Halloween night. She must pull him from his horse as the faeries process through the woods, and hold onto him as he is transformed into various beasts, then plunge him into a well when he turns into a brand of fire. When he regains his own naked shape she must cover him with her green mantle and he will be free. She does all of this, much to the anger of the watching Queen of faeries.

That's a rough summary---the ballad in its entirety is much more complex and subtle, but most adaptations of this story follow it to some extent.

One day in 12th grade, while I was waiting at the local library for my ride home, I browsed through the children's picture books and came across Jane Yolen's Tam Lin:



It's a charming enough picture book and the illustrations are beautiful, so a copy made its eventual way into my permanent collection. However, by dint of being a picture book meant for small children, the essence of the story was dumbed down quite a bit and what was left wasn't much at all. I enjoy that picture book, but there's not much to it. I gradually forgot the story.

At the age of 21 I was living in Honolulu and attending the University of Hawaii, and since I hadn't been able to bring many of my own books to school, I was visiting the local library fairly often. One of the books I checked out was An Earthly Knight, by Janet McNaughton:



As I began to read this story, first with cautious interest and later with rapt absorption, elements of the tale started to ring with familiarity. I had a "Zut alors!" moment and realized this was a retelling of Tam Lin, and as I finished it up, I realized I wanted to learn more about it. That started off a fascinating few months of researching the ballad and finding out about other retellings, and there was a wealth of information and recommendations online.

The next version I read was Pamela Dean's seminal Tam Lin, part of DAW Fantasy's Fairy Tale Series, in which popular modern Sci-Fi and Fantasy authors retold their favorite fairy tales:



This version is my favorite. It sets the story in the 1970s at a small private college in Minnesota. The characters are all students or professors studying English and the classics, and the book is enjoyably chock-full of literary references, quotations, and allusions (Shakespeare! Milton! Homer! Keats!). The author wrote the story as a love letter of sorts to her time at college and intertwined it with the ballad to great effect.

By the time I finished reading it, I had a list a mile long of books to look up and find, thanks to the name dropping of the characters and Pamela Dean's list of Recommended Reading at the end of the novel (I LOVE THOSE). In the process of tracking those books down, I came across Dianne Wynne Jones's Fire and Hemlock:



Fire and Hemlock is a less literal interpetation of the story, but one that is also full of literary references and allusions. The young heroine, Polly, discovers she has two sets of memories about the same time period of her life, and the only thing in common between them is the mysterious Tom Lynne. Using her knowledge of the ballads of Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer, as well as that of comparative religon, Polly must figure out the truth of her memories and rescue Tom.

The most recent adaptation I've read is Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Perilous Gard, which I picked up last week while Amanda and Rachel were visiting:



This is a book I'd heard about for many years but never gotten around to reading, and halfway through it I began calling myself every kind of idiot. It was WONDERFUL! The author very skillfully wove the basic story of the ballad into a detail-rich plot set in the Elizabethan period. The heroine, Katherine Sutton, is banished from Queen Mary's court and sent into exile in the countryside, where she discovers a mystery surrounding her guardian's deceased daughter, and his silent, haunted brother.

I have two books left to read in my Tam Lin reading questm and then I'll have run out:



Patricia A. McKillip is a very highly regarded author of young adult fantasy--her An Alphabet of Thorn pretty much blew my mind and left me wandering around like a dazed idiot afterwards. She's doing an author reading and autograph session at Powell's next month and I'd love to go, but it's while I'm going to be in Hawaii. Curses!



I'm not familiar with Annie Dalton at all, and this seems to be one of the more obscure retellings. It got very high reviews online, however, and those were enough for me to track down a battered, used paperback from Powell's. I'll give it a try as soon as I've finished the eighteen hundred other books I'm right in the middle of.

By no means have I exhausted every retelling of this ballad. The website I linked to above lists dozens more, but most are either out of print or else they don't appeal to me for one reason or another (i.e., I can't read a picture book if I don't like the art, no way no how). So for the moment, I've come to an impasse in my quest to explore Tam Lin.

A Strange Enchantment

It is a particular weakness of mine that I'll read a fictional book which will suddenly send me off on a nonfiction spending spree. Case in point: while reading Laurie R. King's O Jerusalem, a mystery novel starring the crimefighting duo of Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell and set in post-WWI Israel, I was so fascinated by the political backdrop of the setting that I hightailed it to Powells and came home with a handful of books about British Palestine and the Balfour Agreement.

While researching fictional children's books set in boarding schools (a favorite genre of mine), I came across an author named Mabel Esther Allan. She was an incredibly prolific writer of children's stories in England, though relatively unknown in America, and out of curiousity, I requested a few of her books through the library. Last night, I picked up one of them, thinking I'd give it a halfhearted try. Before I knew it, it was four hours later (and half an hour past my bedtime). I had finished the book and was itching with the desire to jump in my car and drive to Powells for some nonfiction to satisfy my sudden, blinding curiosity. The only thing stopping me was that it was 11:30 pm and Powells had been closed for half an hour.

A Strange Enchantment
by Mabel Esther Allan



This fictional book for young adults (and ever-young adults) is set during WWII in England. The heroine, a 16 year old girl named Primrose (Prim, for short), is a city girl who longs to live in the countryside. As patriotic fervor sweeps the country just after the declaration of war, Prim decides to leave school, lie about her age, and join the Women's Land Army. The novel follows her experience with the organization, as well as what it teaches her about life and herself.

I was only peripherally aware of the Women's Land Army (WLA) before reading this book, and that awareness was thanks to another Sherlock Holmes/Mary Russell book. In a nutshell, when the men of England went to Europe to fight during WWI and WWII, the women of England left their homes to work in the factories and on the farms. The WLA educated them in agricultural fields and placed them with farms around the kingdom, giving them work in a time of need and keeping the land from suffering a food shortage.

I was fascinated by Prim's story and by her thirst for adventure and for the peace of the countryside. Her love of the land and of her job, difficult and occasionally tedious as it was, was imbued in every sentence of the book. I was sorry when it ended, and am now eager to learn more about the WLA.

Unfortunately, there is somewhat of a dearth of information on the topic. Powells boasts several titles, the most interesting-sounding one being:



Unfortunately, NONE of the books on the WLA that it has in stock are under $40. That's about $25 more than I'm willing to spend on a book. At the moment, I'm at an impasse, unable to quickly and cheaply satisfy my curiosity on this topic. Financially, it's probably just as well. Mentally, it's frustrating as heck.

What fictional books have fired your intellectual curiosity on a topic?

An Update.

I know I haven't posted here in two weeks, and I apologize for that. I really blogged myself out, as I've mentioned in my personal blog, and I needed to take some time off from posting so often. Anyway, here is an update of sorts, as well as my current thoughts about books.

Picture Books
I'm still planning on posting the rest of the picture books from my list. Unfortunately, I can't find that list, and my memory is such that I can't even remember a single book that I've been meaning to post about. I know the list is tucked into a notebook that's somewhere in my bedroom, so as soon as I find it, I'll do a couple of multi-book posts to catch up. After that, I think I'll try to post at least once a week about books. I'll start in on Intermediate Books next.

Weeding Out
Last weekend, I went through my three bookshelves and did some major clearing out. I managed to make a significant pile of books to get rid of. I'll try my luck selling some back to Powells, and the rest will go towards my office's book sale this week, which supports the Oregon Food Bank and the Oregon Humane Society. As well, I made an even larger second pile of the books I own that I haven't read yet. These are books I've been collecting for years, but between new books and library books and work and school and my sporadic social life, I haven't gotten around to reading them yet. My current resolution is that until I read these books, they do not get to go back on the bookshelves. I'll try and work my way through them, and then they'll only get to go back on the bookshelves if I like them so much that I'm positive that I'll want to reread them multiple times. Otherwise, they'll go in box for Powells and the next book sale. I feel really good about this resolution.

Part of the reason I was so determined to do this---weeding out books is HARD for me---is that I still have many, many, MANY boxes of books at my parents' house in Iowa. I'll get those books back sooner or later, and when I do, I'll need room on my bookshelves for them. So it's better to try and clear space for them now, rather than when I've got 15 boxes of books scattered throughout my living room.

Book Ban
For the forseeable future, I have instituted a personal book ban. By this I mean that with a few exceptions, I will not be buying books for the rest of the year. Some of you may be thinking, "Well, how hard is that?" Trust me, people quit smoking with more ease than it takes me to refrain from buying books. There are a few exceptions to this ban: there are some books coming out in paperback that I've been waiting for for some time, so I'll pick those up with coupons from my Borders Rewards membership; also, there are out of print books that I've been wanting for years that I have on a "notify me" list on Powells' website. If any of those come in, those are "allowed", but only if they're under ten dollars. Other than that, any book that I feel tempted to buy or read must first be checked out from my library. If it then passes the "Do I want to reread this multiple times?" standard, it'll go on my Christmas/Birthday list.

I suppose there's a third exception to my personal book ban. In September I'll be going to the Seattle Public Library book sale. I adore book sales, and the larger they are, the more fun I have. By the time of this sale, I'll have several months of the book ban under my belt, and hopefully it will lead to me being a little more choosy about what I end up buying. I make no promises, though.

In Conclusion
So those are the things I've been thinking, regarding books, lately. I've had a nice few weeks off from blogging here and I'd like to pick it up again. I can't promise a post a day, or even every other day, but I'll try to keep this blog from getting cobwebby again.

Catching Up

Here are the picture books for the four days I missed.

The Serpent Slayer, and Other Stories of Strong Women,
by Trina Schart Hyman and Katrin Tchana



Here's another Trina Schart Hyman book that I just adore. Here, she collaborates with her daughter, Katrin Tchana, who collected a variety of world folktales that feature women in strong, capable roles. The illustrations are, of course, gorgeous, and very respectful of the different cultures and races portrayed. I have a copy of this set aside to read to my children one day.

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
by Judi and Ron Barrett



I remember just loving the whimsy of this book as a small child. What's more fun than food raining from the sky? I loved poring over the illustrations as a child, and frankly, I wouldn't mind a shower of cupcakes every once in awhile.

Chester's Way
by Kevin Henkes



Kevin Henkes' picture books about anthropomorphic mice are just plain adorable. He captures the spirits of children very well and makes his mice both appealing and realistic. This particular book is about two boys learning to be friends with the new mouse in the neighborhood, a girl.

Katy and the Big Snow
by Virginia Lee Burton



This is another early favorite of mine, at first because I had the same name. But the story of the little Snowplow that could still warms my heart every time I read it, and this is my favorite of Virginia Lee Burton's many incredible books for children.

Tikki Tikki Tembo

Today's Picture Book of the Day is:

Tikki Tikki Tembo,
by Arlene Mosel and Blair Lent



I don't remember if this was a book my parents ever read me, or if I was already old enough to read it to myself when I discovered it. At any rate, this would be a fun book to read to children.

Tikki Tikki Tembo is a fable-like story (no idea if there's any basis in reality) that tries to explain why Chinese names are very short compared to Western names. As the story goes, two young brothers, the elder of whom is named Tikki Tikki Tembo No Sa Rembo Chari Bari Buchi Pi Peri Pembo (I just typed that from memory, aren't you impressed?), are out for a walk. The elder brother falls into a well, and the younger boy, whose name is probably Ping (all Western books about Chinese boys seem to have a Ping in them), goes running for help. He meets a variety of people, and to each one he has to say "Help! My brother, Tikki Tikki Tembo No Sa Rembo Chari Bari Buchi Pi Peri Pembo, has fallen into a well!" By the time the poor boy has reached his mother, he's so out of breath that he can't speak.

There are definitely imperialist overtones to this book, so that's worth taking into consideration when reading it to your children. But all in all it's just a fun story, and it's so memorable that 20 years later I still remember Tikki Tikki Tembo's name.