Fuse 8 n’ Kate: Do Not Open by Brinton Turkle
We are in the thick of spooky season! I came a hair’s breath from trying to do The Vanishing Pumpkin again (you can listen to our previous episode here) but at the last possible second I did a hard right turn and decided to go with yet another Brinton Turkle title (the previous Turkle was The Boy Who Didn’t Believe in Spring, which he illustrated). Not to spoil anything but Kate was unexpectedly charmed by this tale of orange cats, incredible interior design, and banjo clocks. It’s hard to think of a “cozy” Halloween picture book, but this might well fit the bill. Let’s hear it for competent middle-aged women heroes! Woohoo!
Listen to the whole show here on Soundcloud or download it through iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play, PlayerFM, Audible, Amazon Music, or your preferred method of podcast selection.
Show Notes:
Yep. I really did call Brinton Turkle a “purveyor of terror” on this blog back in 2011. Don’t believe me? You can read it here.
I’m not dead yet! I’m merely resting!
“She looks like a 70-year-old version of Janet from The Good Place.” Yeah. I needed Kate to qualify that one and doggone it. She did:
How cool is this house?!? Banjo clock (broken) over the fireplace. Barrel chair. Figurehead just hanging out doing nuthin’. The design elements here? *chef’s kiss*
Kate has found her soulmate. “I am cat. Cat is me.”
We know it’s a bottle buried in the sand, but it sure looks like a mouse in this shot.
We’re getting some strong Night on Bald Mountain energy here.
Imagine encountering this. This is a legit scary face. But we love Miss Moody’s response to this face. “Getting bigger and uglier doesn’t scare me.”
The book isn’t lying. There really is something called a “banjo clock“. Try going down that rabbit hole sometime!
Kate Recommends: Agatha All Along
Betsy Recommends: Story and Pictures By. The film trailer can be seen here:
Filed under: Fuse 8 n' Kate, Uncategorized
About Betsy Bird
Betsy Bird is currently the Collection Development Manager of the Evanston Public Library system and a former Materials Specialist for New York Public Library. She has served on Newbery, written for Kirkus, and has done other lovely little things that she'd love to tell you about but that she's sure you'd find more interesting to hear of in person. Her opinions are her own and do not reflect those of EPL, SLJ, or any of the other acronyms you might be able to name. Follow her on BlueSky at: @fuse8.bsky.social
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When I first came to NYC (1965!) lived in a Quaker boarding house called The Pennington on East 15th Street. Brinton Turkle lived there, and I had wonderful times sharing breakfast and dinner with him. His studio was on West 55th Street, a glamorous block for a children’s book illustrator to be on, next to a Rockefeller building. Brinton was a sly, gentle man, and I’m so happy I knew him.
Fran you always, ALWAYS, have the best stories. I will be reading this in the letters section of my next recording of the podcast. Count on it!
Do Not Open! Yay! I was so happy to listen to your podcast this week featuring one of my most favorite read- alouds over decades, as an elementary school librarian.
I was also so happy you both rated it as a classic. Currently out of print I have hung onto the battered copy I bought (I think?) when my daughters were young, through Scholastic Books.
The art is definitely much more scary than usual for youngest readers. I waited til the very end of the school year to read it to the kindergarteners, to be sure I knew them well. I did the scary pages as a slow reveal and they loved screaming, although one year the principal came in to see what was happening!
Aside from all the positive reasons Kate listed, it’s a perfect way to review character, setting, plot, sequence and inference.
I look forward to your podcast every week despite having retired 🙂 Thank you!
I have my own chonky, truculent orangie asleep right next to me this moment, so I had to put this book on hold ASAP. I can’t wait to read it, especially after seeing those Night on Bald Mountain similarities on Instagram! I also am half a mind to suggest Chris Van Allsburg’s book THE WIDOW’S BROOM as a Halloween tale. And if you run out of October weeks, there’s a subtext in there that could easily lend itself as an Election Day tale. At least in my Mylanta-coated opinion.
To the considerate writer who wrote anonymously because they were concerned about my feelings, re: YOU’VE GOT MAIL: Thank you, but I’ve been too battle-scarred by the likes of the publishing industry and Kirkus for you to worry overmuch about said feelings. I have never lived in NYC, so I can’t speak to what is or isn’t a love letter to it — I have no quibble that WHEN HARRY MET SALLY might be more so than YOU’VE GOT MAIL — but I do think that YOU’VE GOT MAIL is, for me at least, a love letter to books and to publishing. And lord knows publishing could use all the love letters in the world these days!
Well put! And thus we shall read you on the show yet again!
Alas, we already did The Widow’s Broom back in 2021. We are rapidly running out of Van Allsburgs!
I’ll have to re-listen to that one! My memory, she is short.
Twas I who suggested Do Not Open to you last year when you were considering scary picture books for kids. It has,in my opinion, the scariest monster ever to appear in a picture book, tied perhaps with KY Craft’s rendition of Baba Yaga.
Ah ha! Full credit shall be rendered in our next recording. I commend you, sir. Of course now I’m curious about that Craft Baba Yaga (which I have never seen).