May
- June
2004
Celebrate Cricket: 30 Years of Stories and Art
Edited by Marianne Carus
(Cricket Books, 270 pages, ISBN 0-8126-2695-8, $24.95)
Reviewed by Tanya Brown
I have a confession to make. Never in my childhood did I read Cricket magazine. Only amid recent years, when my adult interests developed to include writing for children, did I learn of its existence. Curling up one afternoon with tea and Celebrate Cricket: 30 Years of Stories and Art, a charming assemblage of favorite Cricket covers, essays, stories, anecdotes, and birthday wishes, I found my drink did chill, so unable was I to set the volume down. In short, I became your typical Cricket reader.
Marianne Carus, the magazine’s founder and Editor-In-Chief, recounts for us Cricket’s inception. With this literary children’s magazine, she aspired to nurture in readers “not only a feeling for good content and style, but also a rudimentary aesthetic sense or taste for fine graphics.” She writes, “Exposed to good writing and good illustrations we believed that children would eventually develop a taste and appreciation for good literature and art.”
The September 1973 inaugural issue, for instance, featured authors Isaac Bashevis Singer, Lloyd Alexander, Sid Fleischman, and T.S. Eliot, among others. Trina Schart Hyman, the magazine’s first artistic director, introduced readers to Cricket and friends, and crowned many covers with her luscious illustrations. I’ll refer you to the Newbery and Caldecott lists of winners for a sampling of other Cricket contributors.
But there’s something else here besides a great read. The present circulation of several hundred thousand Cricket and spawn, Babybug, Ladybug, Spider and Cicada, magazines indicates young readers’ unquenched thirst for intelligent, provocative, and culturally-diverse literature. That’s where we come in.
Excuse me, I think I’ll subscribe now.
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