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Geoffrey Gatza

The Albatross Around the Neck of Albert Ross

ISBN: 978-1-944884-73-4 (pbk.)

Children’s Fiction, Short Stories

(February, 2020)

Ebook available at Amazon.

The Albatross Around the Neck of Albert Ross: Strange Stories for Wild Children is a riveting and profoundly moving story collection uncannily in tune with the joys, heartbreaks, and absurdity of everyday life. Through the main theme of flight, transformation, and recognition these insightful and stunning stories plumb the soaring struggle of relationships in pivotal moments.

A boy on the edge of adolescence fears his next-door neighbor might be a witch; Emory Bennett and Henry Albright confront death, recovery and a friends ghost on their way to a Halloween spectacle; a ferociously independent rabbit takes charge and rewrites his easily led nephew’s homework; a sister and her little brother disappear into invisibility on Christmas Eve, only to see themselves for the first time.

Ranging from lush spice forests to a backyard garden, from a flight over the ocean in the grip of an albatross to a mother and son transforming into butterflies, The Albatross Around the Neck of Albert Ross, revolves around the endlessly complex, frequently surreal experience that is growing up.

Stories included:

The Albatross Around the Neck of Albert Ross
The Butterflies of Cranberry Chase
Emory Bennett’s Halloween
A Rocket Full of Pie
The Appearance of Astra Eleanor Sprigg
Edwin and the Nightingale, a modern imagining of Hans Christian Andersen’s Nattergalen

What invisible force rocks the empty cradle in the attic? How is it that a simple line of poetry can make a young rabbit shiver? And will seven-year-old Albert’s mother ever look up from her phone? These questions (and more), are resolved in this charming series of fairy tales. The stories descend on readers like the magic albatross in the title piece, swooping us up and carrying us into fantastical, funny and vividly imagined worlds that rhyme perfectly with our everyday world. Language play, puns, and gorgeous mixed-media illustrations help weave the spell that carries the reader into witches’ kitchens, princes’ gardens, and stories that feel strange and familiar at the same time. —Emily Anderson

Following his delightful Housecat Kung Fu: Strange Poems for Wild Children, Geoffrey Gatza returns with more in store for the wild children, this time in the form of six strange stories. In these wildly imaginative tales, we follow such characters as Albert Ross and his soaring adventures with an albatross, Emory Bennett investigating a ghost in his friend’s attic, and a rabbit who has to write a poem. This beautifully illustrated collection also includes a rich adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s Nattergalen. —Erica Buist

A story that can be read aloud by a parent to a kindergartner, then read back to a parent by a 10-year-old, The Albatross Around the Neck of Albert Ross, with its bold, enchanting artwork, has the power to appeal, astonish and entertain for years. Here, danger becomes breathtaking, daily life an exploration, and growing up is changed from mystery to magic. —Cris Mazza

These tales, often fantastical, always inventive and warm-hearted, are fables for grown-ups and children alike. “A Rocket Full of Pie,” to pick but one, is flavored with a dash of genius. If Geoffrey Gatza’s aim with this collection is to delight, he has achieved it marvelously. Read and be enchanted. —Patrick Chapman

At once tender, funny, woolly, and wild, Geoffrey Gatza’s lyrical stories evoke the eternal childhood of the imagination, making myths out of the tedium, heartbreak, and joy of growing up. Each one brings me right back to a moment in my own life that I thought I’d forgotten, allowing me to see things in a way I hadn’t thought of before. —Michael Kelleher

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Looks like mighty little Meritage Press has plucked forth another winner, this one with a nursery edge that will have your infants gripping the bars of their cribs and swatting those cut-out animals that dangle, like indents, above their faces on showy Kid Calder mobiles. Buffalo-based Geoffrey Gatza has long been a man of the animals, and now he has put together a complete collection of animal poems that invites comparison to similar efforts by Marianne Moore and Hilaire Belloc. The poems are illustrated with period woodcuts from a variety of children's literature texts of bygone eras, so the glamour of the antique falls gently here and there over what might otherwise be rather a sharp menu to feed baby with.

In fact I have a feeling that kids aren't the primary audience for Housecat Kung Fu, though there is nothing that would scare or offend any redblooded kid. Well, there is a Bambi like transition from two giraffes necking, to one of them being taken away and hanged by the neck. But children seem to adore violence and they might well laugh at the surreal practice of hanging anyhow: with a giraffe in the noose Gatza provides an indelible image of the wrong. Elsewhere the poems depict "befuiddled" heroes trying to obey strange customs that keep them caged, but, as we learn, "one cat's incarceration is another cat's contented cradle." Gatza's poetic invention never flags, and half the fun is seeing how he takes you from one line down to the next--no two poems are alike, except that here an accent on the quirky and mutable can always be heard, an onomatopoetic replicating the mind of the poet meeting the greater minds of the animal kingdom.

An attractive and illuminating book of wisdom.

— Kevin Killian

Housecat Kung Fu is available on Amazon

Albert & Albatross: The home for Geoffrey Gatza's children's writing.