Daily children’s book recommendations and events from Anita Silvey.
Discover the stories behind the children’s book classics . . .
The new books on their way to becoming classics . . .
And events from the world of children’s books—and the world at large.
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On March 13, 1928, Ellen Raskin was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. At first she pursued a career in fine arts, graduating from the University of Wisconsin. After she moved to New York, she began designing book jackets and created over one thousand of them.
Raskin was lured into the field of children’s books to serve as an illustrator for other people’s text. However, her first solo venture, Nothing Ever Happens on My Block—filled with stylized drawings and her quirky, off-beat humor—received rave reviews and encouraged Raskin to do more. In this book a young boy fails to see all of the amazing events going on around him—an artistic reversal of Dr. Seuss’s And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.
Having made one great shift in her career, Raskin decided to make another: writing novels. Raskin’s ingenious books—The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel), Figgs and Phantoms, and The Tattooed Potato and Other Clues—ideal for third through sixth grade rely on zany characters, slapstick humor, and clever puzzles created from letters and words.
In 1976, the bicentennial year, Raskin began drafting a novel with a historical background, a mystery, and the death of a millionaire, originally called Eight Imperfect Pairs of Heirs. In The Westing Game an eccentric millionaire draws up a will that sends his heirs on a search for his murderer. This simple idea grows amazingly complex in Raskin’s hands—aliases, disguises, word games, and trickery create a book much more fun and complex than it seems at the beginning. Although Raskin admitted she had always hoped to win a Caldecott Medal, The Westing Game received both the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award and the Newbery Medal. In her acceptance speech she talked about her detailed approach to her books: “I write and design my books to look accessible to the young reader….there will be no endless seas of gray type. I plan for margins wide enough for hands to hold, typographic variations for the eyes to rest, decorative breaks for the mind to breathe. I want my children’s books to look like a wonderful place to be.”
Although many adults thought the book was too much fun to win the Newbery, children have disagreed—it is just what they need. Fortunately all of Raskin’s drafts, and an audio of her talking about the book, can be found online. From these drafts, adults and young people can see just how much work Raskin put into creating this elegant and incredibly inventive mystery.
Happy birthday Ellen Raskin. I hope adults and children today will pick up one of your great books in your honor.
Here’s a passage from The Westing Game:
Sunset Towers faced east and had no towers. This glittery, glassy apartment house stood alone on the Lake Michigan shore five stories high. Five empty stories high.
Then one day (it happened to be the Fourth of July), a most uncommon-looking delivery boy rode around town slipping letters under the doors of the chosen tenants-to-be. The letters were signed Barney Northrup.
The delivery boy was sixty-two years old, and there was no such person as Barney Northrup.
Also recommended:
- The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel) by Ellen Raskin
Additional Information
A few other events for
- Happy birthday Diane Dillon (Why Mosquitoes Buzz In People’s Ears), Thomas Rockwell (How to Eat Fried Worms), Gail Owens (Encyclopedia Brown series), Lisa Campbell Ernst (Little Red Riding Hood: A Newfangled Prairie Tale).
- It’s the birth date of Dorothy Keeley Aldis (1896–1966), Hiding, Eleanor B. Heady (1917–1979), Sage Smoke.
- On this day in 1639, Harvard College (now Harvard University) is named after clergyman John Harvard. Read Of Beetles and Angels: A Boy’s Remarkable Journey From a Refugee Camp to Harvard by Mawi Asgedom and Judy Moody Goes to College by Megan McDonald, illustrated by Peter Reynolds.
- In 1781, William Herschel discovers the planet Uranus. Read Zombie Butts from Uranus by Andy Griffiths (if you dare, and/or if you know a certain kind of reluctant reader age nine through twelve who would go wild for butt jokes).