In Gary D. Schmidt’s Okay for Now, Doug finds himself babysitting the local police officer’s five children. Before they go to bed, he has to read a book to each of them. Since Doug has only just learned to read, though he is in the eighth grade, the children’s books most of us recognize aren’t familiar to him, so he describes them rather than giving us titles. “Phronsie had a new book, I don’t care what anyone says: elephants don’t wear clothes.” Or, “Polly had a book about a house in a forest where Laura lives with Pa and Ma and her sisters.” You can probably identify Babar and Little House in the Big Woods, but here’s one that may be less familiar:

“Joel had a book about Ben that he thought was great because he had a brother Ben and this Ben could figure out how to jump to the top of the castle and could I guess how he did it? ‘You can’t jump to the top of a castle,’ I said, and Joel started to laugh and laugh and laugh because you can too, you can too, so go ahead and read it!”

That book is The Big Jump. A few years ago, someone gave me several boxes of books, and this was in one of them. When I saw it, I realized that I had read it when I was in grade school but had forgotten about it until I saw the illustrations. So it was fun for me when it showed up in Okay for Now. 

Though I had forgotten about it, Gary D. Schmidt never did. In an interview he gave after Okay for Now  was published, he said The Big Jump is about “a boy who, without any help . . . has to get by in a world that can be kind of malicious, sort of random, and he gets by by his own wits and his own guts, and even as I’m saying that, the second voice behind me says, ‘Wow, that’s all that you’ve been writing about your whole life. You’ve just been rewriting The Big Jump by Benjamin Elkin your whole dang life.’” 

Schmidt says this book was written for the Beginner Books series after the success of The Cat in the Hat and The Cat in the Hat Comes Back. Isn’t it amazing how this simple book could make that kind of impression on one person while another barely remembered anything but the cover? It goes to show that you never can tell what might influence the course of a child’s life. Which ought to be a caution when we’re deciding which books our children may read. 

“In the old days, no one but a King could have a dog for a pet.” One day one of the King’s dogs runs to a boy named Ben and doesn’t want to go back to the King. Ben wants to keep the dog, but he knows only a King can have a dog, so he asks what he would have to do to become a King. 

The King tells him that all Kings can do the Big Jump. If Ben could jump to the top of the palace, he couldn’t be a King, but he could have a dog.

He lets Ben take the dog home for one day while Ben practices jumping. Sadly, he can only jump to the top of four boxes.

But then the pup shows him a different way to think about the jump. 

I won’t tell you how he does it, but “that is how Ben came to have a dog in the days when no one but a King could have one.”

The full title of the book is The Big Jump and Other Stories. The next story is called “Something New.” One day, Ben comes upon the King searching for something. He tells Ben that he is looking for something so new that no one has ever seen it before. If he doesn’t find it before noon, the bad King will come and take all his gold. Ben, who has learned to look at things in a different way than what is expected, saves the day.

 

The third story is called “The Wish Sack.” One day, Ben meets a funny old man in the woods who wants to give him a Wish Sack. When he says, “ABBA, DABBA!” whatever he wishes for will appear in the Sack.

Unfortunately, the bad King happens to see the little man give the Sack to Ben. He says he will have his men get it for him. He does. This time, Ben’s friend, the King, helps him figure out how to get the Sack back. 

“After that, the King let Ben keep the Sack at the palace. And Ben let all the boys and girls come and make wishes.”

These are fun stories about a boy who is learning to think and to do difficult things to help others. But he is also willing to listen to the advice of adults rather than being smarter and wiser than they are.  

It is said that Dr. Seuss wrote The Cat in the Hat with the restriction of a certain number of words young children (first graders) were expected to recognize. He wrote the story using under 250 different words. The Cat in the Hat was the first of Random House’s Beginner Books imprint, in 1957. Five more Beginner Books were published in 1958, and The Big Jump was among them. 

The vocabulary in this book is not as limited by age level as that of The Cat in the Hat or A Fly Went By, another of the ones published in 1958. But, by my count, the first story is told using fewer than 130 different words. All but about 23 of them are found on standard lists of the first 500 high-frequency words. That doesn’t mean they are necessarily more difficult, but that words like laughed, palace, bent and paw aren’t used as often as another, know, two, and would.