Families: A Writer Who's 13 At Heart

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Sharon Creech has long been exquisitely attuned to the comings and goings of the junior set. But when she returned to the U.S. in 1998, after 18 years in Europe, the children's author was caught flat-footed. The life of the American child, she discovered, had lurched into a higher gear during her absence. "There were all these frazzled parents who spent their lives in car pools, getting their kids to ballet lessons and gymnastics," recalls Creech. "And I was thinking, Goodness, don't the kids ever get time just to climb a tree or lie in the grass? There doesn't seem to be that kind of time for kids anymore."

That sentiment permeates A Fine, Fine School (HarperCollins), her slyly subversive new book for children four to eight years old. A second new work has also just been published: Love That Dog (HarperCollins), an innovative novel in free verse for kids ages 8 to 12. Creech has been dazzling critics since 1995, when Walk Two Moons, her first children's book to be published in the U.S., won the prestigious Newbery Medal, the Academy Award of children's books. "To win the Newbery Medal on your first book is an astounding feat," says Diane Roback, the children's editor at Publishers Weekly. "She is one of these writers whose subsequent books have very much lived up to the accolades she got on her first book."

Creech manages to write about serious themes in a way that engages kids and is never heavy-handed. A Fine, Fine School revolves around a principal who loves his work so much that he decides to keep his school open longer and longer, until the students are attending classes on weekends and holidays. It takes Tillie, a little girl, to make the principal come to his senses. "I haven't learned how to climb very high in my tree," she protests. "And I haven't learned how to sit in my tree for a whole hour." Creech's prose is accompanied by the witty illustrations of Harry Bliss, a New Yorker cover artist and cartoonist. On one page, a lunchroom wall is adorned with a sign that implores, WHY NOT STUDY WHILE YOU CHEW?

Love That Dog, for older children, is appealing to adult readers as well. Jack, a reluctant student, resists poetry assignments from his teacher, Miss Stretchberry. "I don't want to because boys don't write poetry," he pouts. But slowly Jack comes to savor poems, through the subtle persuasion of Miss Stretchberry, who is never heard from or described on the page. Through poetry, Jack comes to grips with the death of his beloved yellow dog, Sky: "He was such a funny dog/that dog Sky/that straggly furry smiling dog Sky." The book, deceptively simple and never preachy, is studded with work by acclaimed poets such as Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams and Walter Dean Myers.