This is about the time of year when, one year ago, the Cranesbill Books toy department was launched. We were working on instinct and sheer nerve,
trying to provide things that parents and kids would love. This led us to a conversation about what we did not want to stock: expensive toys with little redeeming value, guns, and toys that could pose some difficulties in staying in stock. Over the year, we have seen how we did, and our marks are pretty good
In a previous blog, I told you that Webkinz would be coming to Cranesbill. After meeting with the manufacturer’s representative, we decided that the Webkinz, while certainly popular, were not a good fit with our space, even if they were inciting riots elsewhere, We also were concerned that even though the little animal figures were compelling, the problems very much concerned us. As I traveled around this summer, talking to other bookstore owners, I realized that the equation might not turn out as well as we had hoped. Webkinz are still available in many places, including Dayspring Gifts in Chelsea, and I apologize to anyone who had expected them to be in our possession by now.
We are getting ready to have what we hope will be a great Christmas, and here are some of the things we have in store already or that are coming soon:
Toddler toys are always about giving young children their first practice at skills they need to master for kindergarten. Those that train hand-eye coordination include lacing shoes, peg pounding toys, simple puzzles, build a buddy sets, and art supplies designed for little hands. For mental development, we have word cards, games like Ravensburger’s Mix and Match and First Nature Game, Gamewright’s Feed the Kitty, and magnetic letter and number sets, to be used on the fridge or on a plastic magnetic board. Bathtime toys include floating boats, bath squirters, crayons and even plastic books that can withstand the bath without getting waterlogged. For babies, too, we have a sealed water mat that allows them to push submerged items around in an underwater world. Finally, we are continuing to stock a few soft toys for babies, although stuffed animals are not our bestsellers. And a few young children will enjoy the large cars designed to please the youngest vehicle enthusiasts.
School aged children certainly have a lot to learn, but as any child development specialist, or for that matter any parent, will tell you, play is the best way to accomplish learning. Art materials are always a good way to encourage creativity and individual expression, and here we have you well covered.
There are many new kits by Alex, Bead Shop, Melissa and Doug, and 4M that allow both boys and girls to experience the reward of completing a project that they can keep. We have brought back the learning games, such as Number Race, Pizza Fraction Fun, and Silly Story Laboratory. There are also new kits to build wooden toys for boys: fire engines, jet fighter planes, tractors, and so forth. We have games that promote learning without being directly related to skills: Gamewright and Ravensburger make excellent card games; Ravensburger’s Enchanted Forest and Rivers, Roads and Railroads are the kind of board game that your kids will want to hold onto for their own kids.
There are some excellent pretend boxes for all ages, including Pretend and Play Supermarket, Design and Drill, Car Designer, Costume Designer, and Cartoonist. Once again, we have wonderful cooking sets from Toysmith, and boxes for Movie Star Magic, Mermaid Treasures, and Beads. Those who enjoy fabric arts can take advantage of Knot A Quilt and Knot a Poncho sets. Anyone who has worked with polymer clay will know Sculpey, a mainstay in my parenting experience that is available in small color sets, and that will be stocked in small squares in many colors for the coming holidays. Origami books, kits, and papers
Science stuff is here in the form of kits to experiment with that are centered on making items, demonstrating aspects of scientific inquiry, mining gold and crystals out of provided materials, and learning about forces like magnetism, weather, ecological phenomena, and even things like forensics, fingerprints, and secret codes.
At some point in elementary school, kids are ready to join in family games, and we have a selection on hand. Out of the Box makes Apples to Apples, and we have both the adult version and the expansion sets for it, as well as the Apples to Plles Junior 9+. There is Blokus, a strategy game, as well as No Stress Chess, that helps beginners to develop strategy in an easy format. An intriguing new form of Scrabble has a raised grid to keep letters in place and a built-in turntable to facilitate multiple players. We also have the Thinkfun solo games of Rush Hour, Tipover, and Rush Hour Railroad, with demostration sets left out for kids to enjoy in the store.
The final category of toys is probably an offshoot of Harry Potter, that is, toys that enable children to perform magic and to experience other fantastic worlds.
We have two sizes of Melissa and Doug Magic sets, plus some individual tricks for those who are not just starting out but who want to expand their repertory of performance. There are wandmaking kits in the form of a book that is also a kit. There are Pirate Chests to be decorated. We have large plastic sticker sets (like Colorforms) in both castle and pirate formats. There is the game of Dragonology, which is a companion to the Dragonology book that has been very popular with customers of all ages.
If there are any toys that you have knowledge of that we should consider stocking, please call the store and request them. We will be listening and hoping that you will find our selection good enough to skip a trip to Ann Arbor.
September 26, 2007
September 23, 2007
Chick Lit, or How Fiction Fits Us
The point of writing about a type of fiction is usually to define a category, but if that’s what you expect to read here, you will be disappointed. Chick Lit is one of those slippery categories: you could argue that it’s just a recent phenomenon, that relates only to younger women of the nineties and the first decade of the 21st century. But having read authors writing about women’s lives from the earliest periods of literature (Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders comes to mind, along with the Brontes and Jane Austen) I would say that the term is both a commercial category: it’s worth noting the similar girly designs on the covers and the graphic content of the stories. In my mind it is also a general all-purpose term: reading aimed at women. What I have been reading lately is an extension of the reading that I did as a much younger woman, but the types of stories have changed as much as my life is different from my mother’s.
The type of Chick Lit that gets all the hype is mostly recent, and most of the women reflect real lives that I see around me. But my taste runs to fewer wedding dramas and fashion victims and more to serious considerations of women in changing circumstances. For example, Diane Hammond’s Going To Bend is a wonderful story about two women who run a small soup business while dealing with the ordinary things that fill women’s lives in 2007: divorce, dating, surviving and overcoming financial obstacles, and making places for themselves in the life of a small town. Chelsea author Laura Kasischke’s Be Mine takes on the topic of a woman given the freedom to act at will, who discovers the perils of intimacy both with spouse and friends, with a plot that brings you to an unexpected finish. I like Kasischke’s novel much better than Katrina Kittle’s The Kindness of Strangers, which covers similar ground but with less subtlety and more need for accepting its grim view of parenting and female friendship. Another novel that uncovers the pitfalls of living in a world where marriages fall apart and kids are damaged is Ayelet Waldman’s Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, a story told by a woman who is having a hard time adjusting to stepmothering and ultimately sees her own missteps very clearly as she tries to rectify the problems of the past and make a good bond with her stepson. While none of these authors might wish to be assigned the Chick Lit tiara, these books bring readers into the minds of women who are perhaps a bit older, who have gotten beyond the rituals of younger years and who know what they know about romance, child rearing, and the vicissitudes of friendship.
Another category of Chick Lit covers female angst using broad humor to seduce the world-weary reader. For example, Kris Radish’s hilarious book, Annie Freedman’s Fabulous Traveling Funeral, takes a group of women who have been called together by the death of a friend. Lost to them now, Annie has arranged a trip to various places that she found significant and plots that they will become a gang that fills the void left by her with a celebration of all the stages of a woman’s life. It’s a wonderful read that is cheerful, and reminds us of the joy of women friends, despite the obvious loss and grief they share. Radish was introduced to me by my pal Ilah, and I’m glad she brought it to my attention. I plan to read her other novels on the basis of AFFTF. Another wonderful read is Melanie Lynne Hauser’s Confessions of A Super Mom, whose heroine Birdie shuffles along the divorce trail while dealing with life’s troubles with an impressive inventory of superpowers that would make any mother smile appreciatively. Finally, though the characters of Martina Lewycka’s A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian are British, the sisters who are trying to keep their father, an author who is writing the book of the title, while falling prey to a Ukranian woman whose character is, well, questionable. This is a great read for anyone who has reached the stage in life where parents are more like children, and children have to become parents to their elders.
Another sub-category of women’s books is historical fiction, and there are many examples, too many for discussion here, though the novels of Phillipa Gregory, Ellen Cooney, and others seem to fit a particular kind of reader. I will address them in time, but for now, lets just say that some historical accounts seem particularly designed for women. Then there is the cozy mystery, more like chick lit in that its particulars seem addressed to female sensibilities, with practitioners like Janet Evanovich, Rita Mae Brown, and many others.
One final note: those customers who have been at Cranesbill have noticed that for about the last year, current chick books have been located with the romance novels apart from the other literary fiction. Sometimes this dividing gets a bit murky. Undaunted, this continues as a conscious effort on my part to make a section where women’s stories could be corralled in one set of shelves. I have emphatically moved books that I felt belonged with a adult woman-friendly type of storytelling. Now you may think of romances as bodice rippers, featuring fabulously handsome heroes who are pursued and pursuing. And here’s where the “fiction fits us” part comes in: women read everything these days, and there is no intent on my part to suggest that we should prioritize serious fiction and let go of that other embarrassing stuff. What stories do is to pull us in and get us to become a part of the story world. What unites reading writing by women is a point of view that comes with the territory.
The value, as always with reading, is sensing the familiar and learning more about human beings, who are fallible and crazy at times, but for whom we develop an affection because of all that.
The type of Chick Lit that gets all the hype is mostly recent, and most of the women reflect real lives that I see around me. But my taste runs to fewer wedding dramas and fashion victims and more to serious considerations of women in changing circumstances. For example, Diane Hammond’s Going To Bend is a wonderful story about two women who run a small soup business while dealing with the ordinary things that fill women’s lives in 2007: divorce, dating, surviving and overcoming financial obstacles, and making places for themselves in the life of a small town. Chelsea author Laura Kasischke’s Be Mine takes on the topic of a woman given the freedom to act at will, who discovers the perils of intimacy both with spouse and friends, with a plot that brings you to an unexpected finish. I like Kasischke’s novel much better than Katrina Kittle’s The Kindness of Strangers, which covers similar ground but with less subtlety and more need for accepting its grim view of parenting and female friendship. Another novel that uncovers the pitfalls of living in a world where marriages fall apart and kids are damaged is Ayelet Waldman’s Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, a story told by a woman who is having a hard time adjusting to stepmothering and ultimately sees her own missteps very clearly as she tries to rectify the problems of the past and make a good bond with her stepson. While none of these authors might wish to be assigned the Chick Lit tiara, these books bring readers into the minds of women who are perhaps a bit older, who have gotten beyond the rituals of younger years and who know what they know about romance, child rearing, and the vicissitudes of friendship.
Another category of Chick Lit covers female angst using broad humor to seduce the world-weary reader. For example, Kris Radish’s hilarious book, Annie Freedman’s Fabulous Traveling Funeral, takes a group of women who have been called together by the death of a friend. Lost to them now, Annie has arranged a trip to various places that she found significant and plots that they will become a gang that fills the void left by her with a celebration of all the stages of a woman’s life. It’s a wonderful read that is cheerful, and reminds us of the joy of women friends, despite the obvious loss and grief they share. Radish was introduced to me by my pal Ilah, and I’m glad she brought it to my attention. I plan to read her other novels on the basis of AFFTF. Another wonderful read is Melanie Lynne Hauser’s Confessions of A Super Mom, whose heroine Birdie shuffles along the divorce trail while dealing with life’s troubles with an impressive inventory of superpowers that would make any mother smile appreciatively. Finally, though the characters of Martina Lewycka’s A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian are British, the sisters who are trying to keep their father, an author who is writing the book of the title, while falling prey to a Ukranian woman whose character is, well, questionable. This is a great read for anyone who has reached the stage in life where parents are more like children, and children have to become parents to their elders.
Another sub-category of women’s books is historical fiction, and there are many examples, too many for discussion here, though the novels of Phillipa Gregory, Ellen Cooney, and others seem to fit a particular kind of reader. I will address them in time, but for now, lets just say that some historical accounts seem particularly designed for women. Then there is the cozy mystery, more like chick lit in that its particulars seem addressed to female sensibilities, with practitioners like Janet Evanovich, Rita Mae Brown, and many others.
One final note: those customers who have been at Cranesbill have noticed that for about the last year, current chick books have been located with the romance novels apart from the other literary fiction. Sometimes this dividing gets a bit murky. Undaunted, this continues as a conscious effort on my part to make a section where women’s stories could be corralled in one set of shelves. I have emphatically moved books that I felt belonged with a adult woman-friendly type of storytelling. Now you may think of romances as bodice rippers, featuring fabulously handsome heroes who are pursued and pursuing. And here’s where the “fiction fits us” part comes in: women read everything these days, and there is no intent on my part to suggest that we should prioritize serious fiction and let go of that other embarrassing stuff. What stories do is to pull us in and get us to become a part of the story world. What unites reading writing by women is a point of view that comes with the territory.
The value, as always with reading, is sensing the familiar and learning more about human beings, who are fallible and crazy at times, but for whom we develop an affection because of all that.
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