Every once in a while there is a perfect book for children. The Story of Ping is perfect, and Ferdinand the Bull. And Peter Rabbit. And Where the Wild Things Are. The way I came to judge a perfect book when I was a young mom with young children was how little I had to change or embellish the words on the page.

We’re talking very young children here. And there seemed to be a lot of books that my kids liked the idea (pictures) of, but in which the text was over their heads, or just silly. It’s very tiring to rewrite the words to a book over and over, and I vividly remember one evening choosing Peter Rabbit, and then marveling at what a total pleasure it was to read out loud. There was not one single word that I wanted or needed to change.

And of course, a perfect book needs to be perfect for the children, and not just for me, so it also has to be a book that gets read and reread a hundred times. Word for word.

All right, there can be sound-effects. When I read Where the Wild Things Are there were always sound effects. But that’s it. No changing anything else.

It was perfect.


I’ve found another one. It’s called Waiting for Mama by Lee Tae-Jun, and it was published in 1938 in a Korean newspaper. This edition by NorthSouth (978-0-7358-2143-9) was illustrated with graceful lines and suspenseful color treatments by Kim Dong-Seong.

The story is simple: a little boy goes down to a streetcar stop to wait for his mother. There are probably less than fifty words in the entire tale, but there’s a beginning, a middle -- there’s tension and characterization -- and there’s an end. It’s a classic in Korea, and although the dress and street scenes are foreign to most Americans, the theme is universal. The little boy and his experience is universal. And encouraging.

Don’t miss the very interesting paragraphs at the end of the book about the Korean language either.