A Carnival of Animals - Hardcover

Fleischman, Sid

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688169481 ISBN 13: 9780688169480

Publisher: Greenwillow Books, 2000

Synopsis

A Newbery Medalist spins six yarns about the fantastic adventures of some of the animals that live around Barefoot Mountain.

About this title

About the Author:

Newbery Award-winning author of The Whipping Boy, Sid Fleischman is surprised that he grew up to be a writer. "I had a childhood much like everyone else's," he writes in his newly published autobiography, The Abracadabra Kid: A Writer's Life. "What went wrong?"

But his childhood was not so typical after all. Born in Brooklyn, he grew up in San Diego during the Great Depression and decided in the fifth grade to become a magician. Just out of high school, he traveled widely in vaudeville and with a midnight ghost-and-goblin show. "I was on the way to becoming a writer. I just didn't know it."

After wartime service with the U.S. Naval Reserve, he finished college and worked as a reporter on the San Diego Daily Journal. When the paper folded in 1950, he turned to fiction writing. One of Fleischman's novels was bought for a major motion picture, and he was offered a contract to write the screenplay.

"My young children led me into writing children's books. They didn't understand what I did for a living. Other fathers, they learned, left home in the morning and returned at the end of the day. I was always around the house. I decided to clear up the mystery and wrote a book just for them." Today he divides his time between writing films and children's books.

Fleischman says that when he knew very little about writing, he wrote very fast. Now it takes him longer: three months to a year to complete a short book, and sometimes much longer if he can't figure out how to get his characters out of the jams he has put them in. "I write my books in the dark. I don't like to know what's going to happen next until I get there. It sustains my interest. I'm anxious to get to my desk each morning to find out what is going to happen."

Fleischman finds ideas lurking everywhere. His novel The Thirteenth Floor began with the superstition that there is something evil and magical in the number thirteen. The Ghost in the Noonday Sun arose from the folk belief that anyone born at the stroke of midnight has the power to see ghosts. The problem for the writer, he says, is not so much in finding an idea as in figuring out what to do with it. That may take years.

As a children's book author Sid Fleischman feels a special obligation to his readers. "The books we enjoy as children stay with us forever -- they have a special impact. Paragraph after paragraph and page after page, the author must deliver his or her best work." With more than 35 books to his credit, some of which have been made into motion pictures, Sid Fleischman can be assured that his work will make a special impact.

Sid Fleischman writes his books at a huge table cluttered with projects: story ideas, library books, research, letters, notes, pens, pencils, and a computer. He lives in an old-fashioned, two-story house full of creaks and character, and enjoys hearing the sound of the nearby Pacific Ocean. He has always lived by the ocean and now lives in Santa Monica, California.

From Publishers Weekly:

A half dozen newly minted tall tales chronicle the merry havoc wreaked by a "no-account little tornado" that touches down on Barefoot Mountain. In the opening story ("The Windblown Child"), a group of friendly woodland animals rally round an odd, pink, hairlessDor featherless, they can't tellDcreature ("It could be a newborn pig" one observes) who blows in from the nearby mountain. She turns out to be a rare "Sidehill Clinger" (her disproportionate legs, ideal for climbing steep slopes, are the giveaway). In a neat little coda, her missing fleece turns up in the final story atop the head of a bald farmer. Other memorable characters include the star of "Emperor Floyd," a rooster, who develops insomnia and a taste for fireflies in the storm's aftermath and ends up a porch light, and "Stumblefrog," a clumsy frog who finds a torn sack of Mexican jumping beans, swallows them, then leaps and soars with the best of them. Fleischman (Bandit's Moon) displays his nimble wit with descriptions of a gale that shakes trucks "like dice" and a sly hawk named Thump Oswald who is "slick as bear grease." The glee with which he relates his outrageous yarns is infectious, and Hafner (the Lunch Bunnies books) seems to have caught it, too. Overflowing with the critters and varmints the stories conjure up, her jaunty watercolor and pen-and-ink vignettes create a jaunty counterpoint. Ages 7-up. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Greenwillow Books
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0688169481
• ISBN 13: 9780688169480
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 48
• Illustrator: Hafner Marylin