PETUNIA GOES WILD
By Paul Schmid
(Harper, 2012)
WILD FEELINGS
By David Milgrim
(Henry Holt and
Company, 2015)
Kids easily connect
to wild animals. Running around, roaring and growling, is incredibly
freeing. (Why did we ever stop?)
I’m a big fan of
Paul Schmid’s Petunia. I first discovered her in the delightful A
Pet for Petunia when she begged
and begged her parents for a pet skunk. As a teacher and principal, I
often carried the book from classroom to classroom, one of my Stack
of Five. (I do a quick book talk about five picture books and then
let the audience vote to determine which one I read aloud during the
visit.) Sadly, the book was rarely chosen no matter how much I talked
it up.
It
seems Petunia is an in-between character. On the cover of each book,
she wears a purple and white striped dress. Sadly, I suspect that the
color and her gender caused many of the boys in class to withhold
their vote. They say boys are less inclined to warm up to books with
girls as the main character; I’m intent on changing that. I think
many of the girls don’t vote to hear about Petunia because she’s
not stereotypically girlish. She’s more Olivia (the pig) than Belle
(the princess).
I
often read A Pet for Petunia as
a “bonus read” after the top vote getter. (“But it didn’t
even come in second,” someone always says. Ah, let’s expand our
horizons.)
Like
it’s predecessor, Petunia Goes Wild
works best as a read-aloud when you’ve read it to yourself a couple
of times. You want to nail the part of Petunia. There are stereotypes
to be broken, after all. Petunia has a stuffed animal that’s a lion
and—no, she doesn’t want a pet lion this time around. Rather,
Petunia is a lion. She
roars at passersby from the front yard, she crawls and eats from the
floor, she even bathes in a mud puddle. So very lion-ly.
For
a parent, all this feral, feline behavior can be problematic. As in A
Pet for Petunia our feisty,
persistent main character eventually drives her parents to utter
exasperation. There
is an incredibly wordy page that is the most fun to read out loud.
It’s a classic parental rant.
And,
as a read-aloud, at least, kids love it. They
all have parents who’ve succumbed to a rant.
Petunia
is both genuinely funny and wildly imaginative.
The
cover photo of David Milgrim’s Wild Feelings shows
the main character—a boy this time—dressed as a lion, mouth agape
in full roar. Milgrim goes through a series of familiar similes,
comparing feelings to animals.
Do
you ever feel...
as stubborn as
a mule?
Or as chicken
as a chicken?
This
is a book for kids—especially boys—to connect with a range of
often negatively viewed feelings. It’s a springboard for talking
about them and normalizing them.
So
what’s an acceptable thing to do when you’re “rrrrrreally mad”?
How do you recover when it’s all over, when perhaps things didn’t
go so smoothly while
you were in the midst of the mood?
Picture
books like this not only entertain, but they open the door for
talking about more difficult things. They can be reference points
after the fact as well. (Remember that book we read
about...?) If kids can name
their feelings and talk about them, the “bad” feelings won’t go
away but they’ll learn how to work through them (more appropriately
over a period of time). They’ll also give their temperamental
friends some support and/or
space when they’re in such a mood.
I’m
wild about both these books. Track them down and have a roaring good
time sharing them with the kids closest to you.
