Miscellaneous ”English Roses Reviews”

Madonna does one for the girls

By Celia McGee – Daily news feature writer

I am no longer Madonna’s target audience.
I won’t be curling up with my daughter, because she’s 15 now, to read her “The English Roses,” the star’s first children’s book, written for ages 4 to 8.
I wish I were. There’s a lot to like. That doesn’t mean it’s long – 48 pages, all told.
But it’s sweet, funny and, in places, vintage Madonna S&M, the narrator given to such rough commands as “If you say no, you are telling a big, fat fib. … Now, stop interrupting me.”
Fulvimari also uses color to sling around the requisite metaphors, like a group portrait of envy dressed up nicely in shades of green.
Which raises the next consideration in children’s lit: What’s the message?
“The English Roses” is strongly influenced by Madonna’s well-publicized commitment to the Jewish system of Scriptural mysticism called kabbala.
Her book simply and empathetically explores notions of discontent, mistaken impressions, truth, goodness and shared enlightenment. “Binah,” the Hebrew word for wisdom, is a central element in kabbala.
Fairy godmothers, on the other hand, are more the stuff of Disney, or Grimm. Not this one. “Well, don’t just sit there stuffing your faces,’ tutted the fairy, stuffing her face.” The author’s multi-culti persona comes through – or sloppy editing: These girls live in London, where cookies are called biscuits, and chocolate chips are a nouveau American import.
Neither Binah nor the picky posse achieves the quotable stature of an Eloise or Madeline, nor their status as instant classics.
Still, disregard what I said at the beginning.
“Be sure,” my daughter burbled yesterday, “to bring the Madonna book home tonight.”
Fire up MTV. It’s a date

Madonna Turns A New Page

By Peter Terzian – Staff Writer of the NY Newsday

She sings. She dances. She’s rolled around in a wedding dress. She’s sang the praises of pilates and soy lattes. She’s shilled for the Gap with Missy, and she’s kissed Britney. And now Madonna has written children’s books – five of them, to be exact. The first, “The English Roses” (Callaway, $19.95) hit bookstores in more than 100 countries yesterday morning.
In the book, four little London girls – Nicole, Amy, Charlotte and Grace, all 11-year-olds and “practically glued to each other at the hip,” Madonna writes – are envious of a beautiful neighborhood girl named Binah. A pumpernickel bread-loving fairy godmother shows them that Binah’s life isn’t as ideal as they imagine, and teaches them a lesson about jealousy and envy. In an author’s statement, Madonna says she was inspired by her Kabbalah teacher to share her spiritual education with children, and that her daughter, Lola, was the test case for her work-in-progress.( “She told me when the story was boring.”) “The English Roses” is illustrated with bright, busy pictures by fashion artist Jeffrey Fulvimari.
Madonna’s second book, “Mr. Peabody’s Apples,” will be available on Nov. 10.
All proceeds go to charity.

Madonna’s product line grows with children’s book
By Mike Thomas Staff Reporter Chicago Sun-Times
It is, as they say in these parts, a nice package.

Lithe, lovely and chock-full of vibrant illustrations that resemble fashion sketches, Madonna’s new children’s book The English Roses (Callaway, $19.95) went on sale worldwide Monday, the first in a projected series of five titles. Bookstores put it on prominent display, possibly alongside the author’s latest “Explicit Lyrics”-stickered musical effort “American Life.”
Brought to you by the same packagers who produced Madonna’s decidedly non-kiddie tome Sex in 1992, this Kaballah-inspired, England-based story concerns the English Roses, four (ethnically diverse) young girls named Nicole, Amy, Charlotte and Grace. While grumbling about their lives, they also seethe with jealously over what they see as the charmed existence of their schoolmate and neighbor, a beautiful, smart, sterling specimen named Binah. But despite her radiance, Binah, we are told, is lonely and friendless. Madonna, apparently, feels her pain.

“I felt very awkward and out of place in school,” the pop icon, whose mother died at age 5, recently told the Times of London. “Not popular, not attractive, not special in any way and I was longing for love and approval from someone.”
This fable, Madonna has said, is a reaction to the Cinderellas and Sleeping Beauties and Snow Whites–babelicious staples of kids’ lit who always get the guy and live happily ever after without really trying. Also, it mirrors reality somewhat in that her daughter, she said, endures ribbing at school on account of her famous mom.
“Whether it is here in Los Angeles or in London, the kids are constantly bringing in [celebrity gossip] magazines like OK! or Heat and coming up to my daughter and saying ‘Look, Lola. There’s a picture of your mum. And there’s a picture of you’ and I just … I just don’t know why people let their children go to school with that crap,” she groused.

And when Nicole’s mother, one of the book’s less-than-subtle voices of conscience, appeals to the catty gaggle, saying they “never invite [Binah] over or make an effort to be friendly with her,” the gal pals pooh-pooh her verbal wink/elbow nudge. Binah, they decide, is “probably stuck up.”
Then Ma delivers the story’s moral with the finesse of a Medieval battering ram. “How do you know what kind of a person she is? How would you like it if people decided whether they were going to be nice to you based on how you look?”
How indeed. Still, after brief reflection, they shrug that one off too.
Then they fall asleep and a fairy godmother comes to them in a dream. She offers the group a chance to get sprinkled with magic dust and fly over to Binah’s pad, where they’ll observe, invisibly, her day-to-day life with Bilbo Baggins-ish invisibility. If they like what they see, the godmother will perform some hocus pocus, thus enabling them to trade places with the object of their envy.

As the covetous cupcakes discover, Binah does all the household chores and lives with her father, who plays a very minor role but who, from a single portrait, looks to be an upstanding, compassionate, working-class Joe with an uncanny resemblance to Jason Priestley. Mom, the fairy godmother explains, died long ago.
They’ve completely misjudged. The girls are stunned. If only they’d known.

Upon being scolded by the harried and increasingly cranky godmother for, in effect, judging a book by its cover (a practice that might cause one to fritter, say, $19.95), the gang is transported back whence they came, to the safety of their beds. Thereafter, seeing the error of their ways, they embrace Binah like a sister, and eventually the Fab Five grow up to be “incredible women.”
Perhaps one of them even becomes a tongue-kissing, mega-selling pop princess with an affected accent and a talent for making waves.

Thanks to Gugarko