Sam, Bangs and Moonshine by Evaline Ness

Moonshine is flummadiddle. Real is the opposite.

Don't you just love that word flummadiddle.  Sam (Samantha) has a wild imagination. 

"Sam said her mother was a mermaid, when everyone knew she was dead. Sam said she had a fierce lion, and a baby kangaroo. (Actually, what she really had was an old wise cat called Bangs.) ... She said the ragged old rug on the doorstep was a chariot drawn by dragons."

So now you have the three ingredients of the title - Sam, Bangs, her cat, and the word moonshine. Perhaps there is no problem with using your imagination but there are times when this talk can lead to trouble. Thomas is also a young boy. He believes Sam. He believes everything she tells him and he is especially desperate to see her baby kangaroo. Sam enjoys the attention and so she sends Thomas off a series of wild goose chases hunting for the elusive little kangaroo. This could be harmless fun until the day a wild storm suddenly whips up and Thomas is stranded by the high tide. 

How funny that this American book contains a kangaroo. I guess to Evaline Ness this was an especially exotic and curious creature. I wonder if she ever saw one?

Evelyn Ness was an illustrator in the 1960s along side famous names such as Brian Wildsmith; John Burningham; Charles Keeping; Ezra Jack Keats; and Raymond Briggs. Evelyn Ness (April 24, 1911 – August 12, 1986) trained as a fashion illustrator in Chicago. She was runner-up three times (A pocketful of Cricket and All in the Morning Early are two of these) before being awarded the Caldecott for Sam, Bangs and Moonshine in 1967. In 1972 she was the U.S. nominee for the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Award for children's illustrators.

As way to inform my CBCA judging I have been reading Children's Picture Books: The art of visual storytelling; 2nd edition by Martin Salisbury and Morag Styles.  This wonderful book was a recent very welcome birthday gift.

In this book, many famous older picture books are mentioned along with some very recent titles. Sam, Bangs and Moonshine is one of the very old titles. It was published in 1966. I had a very old copy of this book in my former library but reading it properly this week I have discovered it is such a treasure. I think I may need to add a copy of this book to my own, already full, shelves. And YES it does contain a lighthouse!  Luckily I have been able to borrow a copy from a well stocked school library.

Sam, Bangs and Moonshine celebrates imagination, friendship and understanding the importance of truth (and that there is a time for storytelling too). 

Here is a video of the whole book.

Evaline illustrated more than thirty books for young readers and wrote several of her own. She is noted for using a great variety of artistic media and methods. She did covers for famous books too such as Island of the Blue Dolphins.  

I imagine I may never see any of the books I am sharing here but perhaps some are still held in libraries in schools in America.

You can view pages from Favourite Fairy Tales told in Italy here. Here is an illustration for a poem by Walter de la Mare - The Warmit.

Here is one more scrumptious illustration by Evaline Ness:

You may have noticed I have been away from my blog for a few days. We were told heaps of books entered for the CBCA Book of the Year Awards would arrive late in the year - and YES this has proved true. I had a box of 24 to read and discuss in early November; a box of 36 which arrived last week and another box of 35 or more are due any day. I do like to take my time over each book, reading and then composing comments for the other judges. With so many books to explore I set myself a few goals. I have now completed the set of 24 and a further 20 from the box of 36. Now I can return to my blog. The books I want to share here are piling up (sadly not the CBCA entries because these are confidential) and of course I have Christmas book plans too! This year I am planning to share Aussie Christmas titles.