In Annette LeBlanc Cate's new picture book, two best friends share many interests, including a passion for popcorn.
("The Magic Rabbit")
Shelf Life
Sometimes a story stays with a writer for decades before making its way into print. That's the case with two recent children's books well worth the wait.
Twenty years ago, as a student at the Art Institute of Boston, Annette LeBlanc Cate wrote and illustrated a story about a rabbit that gets separated from the magician who is his best friend. Cate, who now lives in Pepperell, set the story in Harvard Square. This year what began as a class assignment was published as "The Magic Rabbit" (Candlewick).
"The Luck of the Loch Ness Monster: A Tale of Picky Eating," by A. W. Flaherty (Houghton Mifflin), grew out of a story Flaherty's father told his young daughter to get her to eat her oatmeal. In "Luck," the Loch Ness monster starts out as a tiny sea worm that eats the oatmeal cast overboard each day by a young girl on an ocean liner bound for Scotland, growing astronomically larger with each helping.
At the back of the book, Flaherty, a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital who now has children of her own, explains the genetics of picky eaters. As for scientific evidence of the Loch Ness monster, that's another story.
Green party
Two decades ago Melissa Green emerged on the literary scene with her first book of poetry, "The Squanicook Eclogues." That was followed by her memoir, "Color Is the Suffering of Light," in 1995. The intervening years have been difficult. "I fell off the map but people didn't forget me," said Green in a phone interview from her home in Winthrop.
Now Seamus Heaney, Robert Pinsky, and Derek Walcott are among more than 20 poets paying tribute to Green and offering a helping hand. Each poet has contributed a new poem for a limited-edition collection, "A Sheaf for Melissa," with a pre-publication price of $1,000. The proceeds will be deposited in a special fund for Green.
More than a dozen poets will recite their new poems and Green will read from her newly published book of poetry, "Fifty-Two," at 7 p.m. Wednesday at BU's College of General Studies, 871 Commonwealth Ave., Boston.
Eat, drink, and be scary
The tree will be trimmed with black-cat ornaments and miniature skulls that light up when Kate's Mystery Books hosts its annual holiday party on Friday from 5:30 to 8 p.m. Robert B. Parker, Hank Phillippi Ryan, and other mystery writers will stop by to chat and sign books. The party is also an opportunity to salute Kate Mattes, who opened the shop, at 2211 Massachusetts Ave., on a Friday the 13th 24 years ago. Last week the Mystery Writers of America announced it will honor Mattes's enduring support for crime fiction with a 2008 Raven Award.
Coming out
"How to Spell Chanukah . . . and Other Holiday Dilemmas," edited by Emily Franklin (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill)
"Antony and Cleopatra," by Colleen McCullough (Simon & Schuster)
"T Is for Trespass," by Sue Grafton (Putnam)
Pick of the week
Nat Herold of Amherst Books recommends "The Border of Truth," by Victoria Redel (Counterpoint): "This novel is set variously in the present - with Sara, whose father fled the Nazis - and in the past - through letters Sara's father wrote, mostly to Eleanor Roosevelt, while he was on a ship filled with Holocaust refugees that was time and time again refused haven in the US. 'Border' is about identity, a multigenerational search for one's parents, and about what's told and what's not told."
Jan Gardner can be reached at JanLGardner@yahoo.com.
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.
