Fuse 8 n’ Kate: The Maggie B. by Irene Haas

Kate gave me a challenge and I…. kinda met it? We’ve somehow managed to do two picture books in a row on the podcast that involved tidal waves. I was charged with finding a third. To my utter amazement, today’s book was not one that we’d done before. Time to buckle up, folks! Kate and I haven’t disagreed about a book so much in quite a while. We talk His and Her Preciousses, whether or not apple trees are “insufficiently whimsical”, and the degree to which Margaret here is off the grid.

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Show Notes:

That’s right. If you Google “Irene Haas interviews” you’ll find these odd transcripts online. They seem pretty clearly her, but their contents are a bit oblique.

I don’t mention this on the podcast, but this book showed up as #99 on my 2012 Top 100 Picture Books Poll.

It’s been so long! I haven’t had a clown in a picture book that I handed Kate in a long long time. Kate, of course, points out that this is clearly a fantasy because of how clean it is under Margaret’s bed.

Kate was really weirded out by the fact that Margaret loves pretending to be a grown-up who cleans. She feels like this is reinforcing poor domestication tropes.

And I’m just happy that Kate counted this as a tidal wave.

Kate Recommends: The podcast Spare Parts

Betsy Recommends: The pilot episodes of Shrinking on AppleTV and Severance on AppleTV

Filed under: Fuse 8 n' Kate