Bouncing Back
‘My Happy Life,’ by Rose Lagercrantz
From "My Happy Life"
By PAMELA PAUL
Published: April 24, 2013
Certain phrases cycle in and out of child-rearing vogue, with “executive
function” and “emotional intelligence” and “kinetic learning” zooming
before parental headlights and then passing into oblivion until the next
generation comes along. At our current moment, “resilience” is front
and center, in large part courtesy of Paul Tough’s excellent book on
education, “How Children Succeed.” And to this parent, at least, it
seems as good a concept as any to cling to and to encourage.
MY HAPPY LIFE
By Rose Lagercrantz
Illustrated by Eva Eriksson
134 pp. Gecko Press. $16.95. (Chapter book; ages 6 to 10)
From "My Happy Life"
But the parenting books can be left to the parents. For young middle
grade readers, a new chapter book, “My Happy Life,” takes up the subject
of resilience in such a natural and powerful way, children won’t
remotely feel like they’re reading a manual. Instead, “My Happy Life,”
written by Rose Lagercrantz and illustrated by Eva Eriksson, is one of
those joyous rarities: a book about girls who are neither infallible nor
pratfall-prone, but who are instead very real — both admirable and
relatable.
While chapter-book shelves teem with girl protagonists in the Ramona
mode (well-meaning but irrepressible, and often misbehaving), it’s much
harder to find stories about “good girls” — a term that too often feels
like a pejorative. But Dani, a towheaded girl with an oversize backpack
who is just starting school (the book follows her through the academic
year), is exactly that. Dani is the kind of bright, optimistic child who
lies awake at night counting “all the times she’d been happy.” This
includes the time her cousin Sven gave her a frog and “the first time
she managed to swim three strokes without drowning.”
Like many other girls, Dani has a penchant for drama and for melodrama.
She has lots of feelings and doesn’t always know how to process them.
She’s excited about starting kindergarten but scared about making
friends. She raises her hand “even though she thought she might faint.”
Lagercrantz gets the timbre of these conflicting emotions just right.
Not once does the reader pause to wonder, “Would a 6-year-old girl
really say that?”
Eriksson’s very fine pen-and-ink drawings, full of crosshatched detail,
are spread generously throughout the short book, in both full-page and
spot illustrations. She is particularly adept at capturing the myriad
facial expressions of the kindergarten set — the furious intransigence
of a boy who must be bribed to go to class, the grim acceptance of a
doctor’s stitches, the dread boredom of childhood insomnia.
Though the book is called “My Happy Life,” not everything in Dani’s life
is happy. She makes a new best friend, but Ella moves away in the
middle of the year, just when they’ve made up after a typical
kindergarten-level fight. Dani soon succumbs to a serious case of the
blues. Moreover, and this is revealed only in a flashback, well into the
book, Dani’s mother is dead.
“One day her father called from the hospital and said that her mother
had passed away. Dani was so little, she didn’t understand what that
meant. Then her grandma explained that it was just something people say.
Her mother hadn’t passed away. She’d gotten wings and flown.”
“My Happy Life” isn’t about death but about how children process
negative experiences, whether it’s a friend moving away or a classroom
spat that ends in a bloody mouth (not Dani’s). It’s about children’s
natural and learned resilience, the incredible bouncing back that never
ceases to surprise their worn-down parents. The book’s intended readers
may not realize they are reading about anything unusually prized, but
they will recognize they’re on to something quite splendid. If only all
early chapter books were this beautifully conceived.