This story starts long ago. Back in the late 70s, when I was in grade school, we had this thing called the Scholastic Book Club. I have no idea if it’s still going on and if it is, what resemblance it has to what I had experienced, but for me, in 4thand 5th grade, it was glorious.
The idea was this: Every couple of months, we would get a single sheet of paper, 11×17 or so, folded in half to give us 4 pages. On these pages were a selection of books and magazines and inspirational posters (“Hang in There, Friday’s Coming” over a cute picture of a kitten hanging on to a tree limb) all incredibly reasonable priced. Nothing more than a couple of bucks, if that. Books were never more than $1. You would check off the ones you wanted, bring the order form and the money to the teacher and a few weeks later, you’d get your treasure.
There was even a cool deal, that for every 5 books you ordered, you’d get 1 free. I took advantage of this offer, let me tell you. Then, at some point, I volunteered to take over the paperwork for the teacher, to count the number of books ordered and place it on the big order sheets and make sure the money all lined up. Didn’t take long for me to realize that if one kid ordered 2 books and another ordered 3, this mean 5 books were being ordered and a free book was going begging. Needless to say, I took full advantage of this loophole*.
The thing about these books, is they were all actual, real books. These weren’t slap-dash affairs thrown together by house authors merely to satisfy the capitalistic whims of the publisher. Nope, these were books you could find in actual bookstores! So, for me, being the avid reader I was, this was like heaven.
All of which leads me to The Shark in Charlie’s Window by Keo Felker Lazarus.
This is a book about an 11-year-old named Charlie who finds a shark egg case on the beach, takes it home and tosses it into his aquarium. It hatches a few days later and, not knowing what to feed it, takes the advice of his older brother Irving and gives it horsemeat laced with vitamin E. Low and behold, this odd combination causes the shark to mutate, allowing it to take oxygen from the air instead of the water and giving it the ability to fly.
Reading this at an age just younger than the protagonist probably goes a long way to explaining my adolescent fascination with sharks and science fiction. Amongst all the books I’ve owned in my life, this is one which has stayed with me. This is one that, when I was packing to move to Europe for a year or maybe two and playing the thought experiment of “what do I need in a living space to make it feel comfortable and like home,” made the cut to come with me. So it’s been on my shelf for almost 50 years. Of course, I probably haven’t read it nearly 45 years but I remember it fondly.
And so when Monki was born, I thought I finally had someone to share the book with. In the last couple of years, she’s gotten big enough to start understanding chapter books, which, ultimately, is what this is. It’s 122 pages, but there’s a full page illustration in each of the ten chapters and the print is decent size. But then again, she bounces back and forth between Harry Potter and Paw Patrol (with a bit of The Bad Guys and Dogman thrown in for good, graphic novel mention), so there’s no telling exactly what she’s into. There’s also no telling what she wants to read herself and what she wants read to her.
When we redid the rooms of the house last year, I put Charlie on her shelf, trying to get her interested. No luck. She had no plans to ever partake of this particular story. I tried a different tack—reverse psychology. I told her she wasn’t allowed to read it. When I went away I made it very clear she wasn’t to touch this book. It was mine and under no circumstances was she allowed to take it off the shelf.
Her resolve started to crack. “But what if I want to read it?” she asked.
“We’ll see,” I said.
Finally, last week, she asked if I would read it to her before bed. I silently did a fist pump in my mind. We started the book.
This was certainly written in 1972. The family owns a station wagon and our hero Charlie meets a hippie couple who are scrounging on the beach to get food for their “family,” a commune-type collection of barefoot twenty-somethings living in the nearby woods. The writing is also a bit stilted and the science makes no sense.
But you know what? It still works. Each chapter ends with a proper cliff-hanger leading Monki to beg and plead each night to read “just one more chapter.” When we got to a point that it looked like Nipper, the shark in question, might come to harm, I had to convince Monki it would be okay in order to delay the next chapter until the following night.
Ultimately, when we finished it this morning (she opted to have me read the final three chapters to her on a Sunday morning rather than watching TV), she loved it. She wanted to know if there was another book about Nipper.
Sure, most of the books she’s reading are much more modern, involving unicorns and cartoon figures, but every now and again I get to slip in a blast from the past. We’ve read several Roald Dahl books, and of course The Monster at the End of This Book, but this one meant something to me in a way none of the others had, and didn’t have a media tie-in to initially attract her attention. So, yeah, I definitely chalk this one up into the win column.
*It wasn’t until much later I realized this was a great way for the teacher to stock their classroom libraries at little to no cost, or to help disadvantaged kids get books, but I was 9 or 10, what do you expect?
Getting the Hang of Thursdays 