leave_me_light

anuna_81 's comment to the "James, I Owe You My Life" story mad me really happy (as do all the other nice comments, of course) and got me thinking about where I get my inspiration when I write and imagine kids and the ridiculous funny things that happen with them. I didn't have to think too hard about this, of course, because the answer is rather glaringly obvious.

There are, admittedly, several great children's authors in the world, but I think that if you ask any Nordic child who their favorite author is, at least in my parents' generation and mine (and, if I should ever get around to having children, I'll do my damnedest to carry the flame on), 3/4 of them will answer without blinking an eye that it is the Swedish author Astrid Lindgren (the rest will think about it for a sec and come to the same conclusion).

I have read all her books several times even though some of them weren't translated into Estonian until I was an adult. She has amazing range, she has written to all ages of children from toddlers (the Maddie and June Hill Kid stories and Lotta stories) to primary school kids (almost everything else, from Peppi to Karlsson to Emil to...) to young teens (the Kalle Blomqvist detective stories) and I think her amazing talent is to talk to kids like they would like to talk to each other. There's no baby-talk in her books, it's all sharp and impossibly funny and sometimes downright heartbreaking (the two dead brothers in "Brothers Lionheart" or the neglected orphan Mio who suddenly finds out that his real father is the king of a fairy tale kingdom in "Mio, My Mio" -- as much a predecessor of Harry Potter as anything can be). The first time I read the stories of the children in the village of Bullerby I was seven and the children in the book are 7-9 and I felt like I could be one of them. And the only thing that has been able to produce even comparable fits of laughter to the ones I got when reading the Emil stories (and by the time I got to read those I was a full grown adult) is the very best of what Jon Stewart and "The Daily Show" have to offer.

I tried to find out what of her creation has been translated to English and was disappointed to see that it's basically just the Peppi Longstocking and Emil stories (which I also heartily recommend -- Peppi was the book my mother read to me when I was really small, before I learned to read myself when I was 4), there are some others but they are rare and some that I didn't even see mentioned anywhere.

But I think that the most perfect example of just stuff that can happen to little children the moment the routine that they are used to living in is broken (which basically is what happened in that phone conversation story of mine) comes from the "Maddie and the June Hill Kid" book. So I took the liberty of translating that particular chapter from the excellent Estonian translation of the book (my Swedish, unfortunately, is not quite up to par) into English.