Do your eyes roll when you see “Caribbean” spelled with more than one “r” but only one “b”? Do you cringe when faced with a plural noun gone possessively wrong – “two book’s” instead of “two books”?
If you’d secretly love to arm yourself with a fistful of black Sharpies and a gallon of Wite-Out and roam the world correcting errors in spelling and grammar, “The Little Red Pen” is the fable for you.
I discovered this gorgeous children’s picture book recently while browsing through the kids’ bin at the Gurley Public Library. Sisters Janet Stevens, illustrator, and Susan Stevens Crummel, writer, offer a fresh, witty take on the old story of the Little Red Hen who couldn’t get the other farm animals to help her complete her chores until it came time to reap the rewards of her labor.
The sisters move the tale from the barnyard to the classroom, where the Little Red Pen faces mountains of ungraded homework papers with a firm, “Let’s get to work!”
The other office supplies cower in the teacher’s desk drawer: “Oh, no – she’s at it again.” “Don’t move.” “Shhh!” “I’m not helping anymore.” “Yeah, too risky.” “!Silencio!”
Little Red Pen makes a valiant effort to do the work on her own, but she quickly realizes there is too much to do and informs her lazy helpers of the potential consequences of their inaction:
“Stapler, Scissors, Pencil, Eraser, Pushpin, Highlighter! Are you hiding in the drawer? Get up here now! If the papers aren’t graded, the students won’t learn. The school might close. The walls might tumble. The floors might crumble. The sky might fall. It might be the end of the world! Who will help me save the world?”
She receives a chorus of “Not I’s” and a series of excuses cleverly tailored to fit each item: Stapler complains that his back hurts because it’s constantly pounded. Pencil bemoans getting sharpened down to a nub. Scissors hates becoming dull from all the cutting. Eraser has trouble remembering what’s going on because his head is shrinking from use.
With no help, Little Red Pen tries to do all the work herself, but eventually she grows tired and tumbles into the trash can, aka “The Pit of No Return.” That’s when her end-of-the-world warning stirs the others into action, and they discover previously unseen depths of courage and resourcefulness.
“The Little Red Pen” is a fun book for kids, but it’s also sure to delight some adults – especially current and former teachers and newspaper copy editors.
It’s fitting that I found “The Little Red Pen” at the Gurley branch. A book touting the benefits of a community working together is right at home in a library that serves as a gathering place for its community.
I saw the warm, personal welcome librarians Alisa Watson and Tina Wright give to their patrons when I visited the library. They’ve developed several groups to serve the needs of those patrons.
The Gurley Girls Book Club meets on the fourth Thursday of the month at 7 p.m. and includes a range of ages. Despite the name, Wright said, “If a guy came to the meeting, it would be fine.”
Ladies Craft Night on first Mondays is another popular group. “People bring whatever they’re working on, and we just talk,” Wright said. “We have a couple of mothers and daughters who come together.”
Watson and Wright recently launched two new groups for kids. The first meeting of the Elementary Book Club in January celebrated the acclaimed children’s novel “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” by Brian Selznick and the Oscar-nominated Martin Scorsese film “Hugo,” based on the book. There’s also a new anime club that drew 14 kids to its first meeting.
Each year, the community shows its love for the library during the Gurley Library Challenge Race, started in 1999 to raise money to support the library.
The library began an effort to give some of that love back to Gurley during the week of Valentine’s Day. The We Love Gurley Quilt Project asks Gurley families and businesses to decorate quilt squares that will be assembled into a quilt celebrating the town.
For more information on the quilt and other Gurley programs, call 256-776-2102 or email firstname.lastname@example.org.
Ann Marie Martin, former books editor at The Times, is now communications director at the Huntsville-Madison County Public.