Book Reviews Of Note
Hank Finds an Egg A wordless picture book speaks volumes.
Fallen Forests: Emotion, Embodiment, and Ethics in American Women’s Environmental Writing, 1781– 1924 by Karen L. Kilcup ’77G, The University of Georgia Press, 2013.
Field Notes by Charles Butterfield ’54, Encircle Publications, 2013.
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hat is the use of a book without pictures or conversation?” Alice asks in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Looking at the recent bounty of wordless picture books, you might instead wonder: What’s the use of a book without words? Rebecca Dudley ’85 offers a wonderfully imaginative answer in Hank Finds an Egg (Peter Pauper, 2013), a wordless picture book that tells a captivating story so clearly that even very young children will have little trouble understanding it. Hank Finds an Egg depicts the adventures of a furry woodland creature in a way that makes guessing his unspecified species part of the fun. The New York Times describes Hank as “a small, hand-sewn stuffed monkey.” Elizabeth Bird sees it differently on the School Library Journal website: “I think he’s a bear, though his tail is admittedly a bit long.” No one could mistake Hank for a dog. But part
of his charm lies in the lovably canine mannerisms he displays upon finding a white egg that has fallen from a hummingbird’s nest in a tree high above him. Hank tries a clever but unsuccessful strategy for returning the egg to its perch with a homemade ladder. Then he comes up with a tactic that enables the mother bird to hoist the egg and hatch her full brood, whom Hank treats in the last pages as potential friends. Drawing on her background as an architect, Dudley has created by hand all the flora and fauna, skies, and ponds that appear in the beautifully composed dioramas of a forested realm at once real and magical. Her pictures capture the enchantment of everyday sights and eloquently reaffirm what we instinctively know: Sometimes the beauty of nature transcends words. Hank Finds an Egg is also a quietly subversive entry in a field in which nurturing animals still tend to be overwhelming female. Dudley’s forest scenes may look timeless, but their theme couldn’t be more timely: Men and boys, too, find deep joy in caring for others. —Janice Harayda ’70
Catherine Like Heathcliff, Hence lost his Catherine to a man who could offer her a more stable life, but he remains so obsessed with her that ovelists have set retellings of he buys the Underground after Jim Eversole’s Wuthering Heights at a school in death, in case she returns. The story takes Maine, on the island of Guadeloupe, off when Catherine’s 17-year-old daughter, and in other places far from the Chelsea—whose father had told her that her Yorkshire moors of Emily Brontë’s classic tale of mother was dead—shows up at the club after doomed love. But April Lindner ’84 is almost finding a letter suggesting she may be alive. Hence’s certainly the first to move the action to a rock volatility makes for a fast-paced plot as Chelsea risks club in downtown Manhattan, where her stand-in her life trying to learn what happened to her mother. for Catherine Earnshaw once had a tumultuous An award-winning poet who updated another romance with a brooding young musician. Brontë classic in Jane, Lindner writes here from That premise—if it sounds improbable—makes the alternating perspectives of Chelsea and, via an perfect sense when you consider the surly, defiant old diary, her vanished mother. Lindner follows hero of Wuthering Heights. And in her young- the broad contours of Brontë’s plot, but for many adult novel Catherine (Poppy/Little, Brown, 2013), teenagers—and for the many adults who read young Lindner finds a natural counterpart for Brontë’s adult fiction—the true pleasure of this book may Heathcliff in Hence, the former frontman for a band lie in its sympathetic portrayal of punk. Catherine called Riptide. Hence fell in love with Catherine shows why, at a certain stage of life, it’s normal to Eversole when she and her family lived above the rebel. And that may comfort not just teens but parUnderground, a storied punk-rock club owned by ents who, decades later, still cringe at the memory of her father, Jim. their own youthful excesses. ~ —J.H.
This modern Wuthering Heights has a punk rock beat.
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Navigating Through Teen Challenges by Mary Murphy Gryczka ’65, Mill City Press, 2013. Web Extra For more books by alumni and faculty members, see unhmagazine. unh.edu.
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