I’m having an author crush on Cynthia Rylant. More so than any other author right now, she is making a difference in my life. (Sorry Anna Levine but I do still love you!)
The issue is carpool. I carpool 5 kids between the ages of 4 and 9. They are a mix of boys and girls with different interests and ideas of what is appropriate carpool talk and different feelings about carpool with no Disney radio. They are lovely children but they sit in my car for about 30+ minutes three times a week and sometimes I think seriously about dropping them off at the nearest school rather than the school they actually go to.
Enter Cynthia.
The High-Rise Private Eyes
Last year I started going to the library and borrowing books on tape to listen in the car. They were successful, but I also had fewer kids and a narrower age range in the car. I’ve reintroduced the stories this year but I started them off with The High-Rise Private Eyes, a mystery series that Rylant (trying to be professional here) wrote for young readers. So far, I believe there are about 9 books in the series but our library only has 2 of them. The kids are addicted. There is no difference between the older ones and the younger ones, they are all really into the (inane) mysteries that detectives and best friends Bunny Brown and raccoon Jack Jones try to solve. (Bunny is the brains, Rylant says, Jack is the snoop…)
Yes, the mysteries are inane. The dialogue is often silly. But it’s cute and the kids love it and they listen to it over and over again and they are quiet for the 30 minutes it takes me to drive them to school. And my son and his best friend often play the High-Rise Private Eyes where they make up little mysteries and try to solve them. And because of all this, I love Cynthia Rylant.
Here are some of the books in the series. I actually really like the audio version, there’s a great narrator:
Reading Kids Are Dreaming Kids 