unadulterated.us

Spells by Emily Gravett - review

Spells by Emily Gravett

The frog was bored. All he had to play with was an old book, shredded. He couldn't make it into a pirate ship, and he couldn't make it into a castle full of princesses. But... he could read it, and, as it was a book of spells, he could make interesting things happen with it. Emily Gravett's new book is clever on so many levels.

The story, first of all, is cute. The language is cute. The chimerical outcomes (Fabbit, Snewt, Bince), once the frog starts experimenting with fragments of spell text, are funny. And the split-page construction used to illustrate those chimeras not only squares the number of possible combinations, but also gives kids practice with word parts.

The art, done in Gravett's usual pencil and watercolor (plus glitter!), is characteristically winsome. Even cheeky, with the rabbits from Wolves showing up in some places as well as other attention-worthy details. And the princess wears pants!

Spot it! Find the hidden creatures by Delphine Chedru - review

Spot it! Find the hidden creatures by Delphine Chedru

Here's one for those mod parents who view having a baby as a novel opportunity to explore new applications of their beloved bright colors and bold shapes - the parents who search out stroller that looks like sculpture, who spring for the Vernor Panton kid-size chairs, and the French Bull juice cups. People who buy the Maharam fabric sample memory game, the one my six-year-old and his dad are playing at this very moment, each pattern designed by a GOD of 20th century design. You can play it online, but you can buy the cards too - I just can't remember where we found them. We can't afford those chairs, but love that game. And love this book!

Just look at this spread:

Is that not Marimekko fabric? Ok, it is not. But it could be. It also looks like a Central Asia embroidery pattern, and it is hiding a peacock. Every page has a pattern just as covetable. And, in my extensive field-testing with children, I have found those children to be very excited about finding the hidden critters on each page.

Rounded corners and soft, stiff paper reinforce the impression that this is not your everyday little kid book. Good for three year olds and up, up, up.

Cromwell Dixon's Sky-Cycle by John Abbott Nez - review

Cromwell Dixon's Sky-Cycle by John Abbott Nez

I have an embarrassing confession to make. When I first heard about the balloon boy two weeks ago - the lad who was supposedly floating away in a homemade balloon - I assumed that the kid had made a flying machine, and he was taking it out for a test drive. I didn't think he was imperiled by anything more than official and parental disapproval, and that not 'til he came down.

I think I read too much juvenile fiction. Most kids don't build flying machines, and, as it turns out, such was not the case.

So imagine how happy I was to learn about Cromwell Dixon! Kid was fourteen when he started work on a homemade airship. From 1907 to 1910 he built and flew bicycle- and motor-powered flying devices, borne aloft by hydrogen-filled gasbags that his mother helped him make, winning competitions and at one point making the New York Times. Ha! Some kids build flying machines after all!

It's a great story, and I'll bet John Abbott Nez was thrilled when he ran across it. A genuine kid inventor - a boy who reached for the sky and attained it! And Nez does a great job with it. The text is energetic, with just enough technical detail to be interesting and not so much as to be a barrier. Pencils and watercolors give the art an old-timey delicacy, but a strong color palette and animated expressions keep it lively.

I especially love Cromwell's mom - she looks confident, supportive, proud, and not even an ounce worried, even when her baby boy rises into the blue yonder riding on a frame of sticks with a giant silk bag of volatile gas inches above his head. Tell you what, no son of mine's gonna try a stunt like that! Especially since, as it turns out (and as Nez doesn't mention in his book because, well, why would you) Dixon died at the age of 19, in a plane crash at a stunt flying exhibition.

To sum up: there are two kinds of moms I cannot see myself becoming - Mrs. Dixon, who stood proudly by as her son risked his life to prove that his machine worked; and Mrs. Heene, who... yeah just ugh.

My thanks to Tim Travaglini at Penguin for hooking me up with this book.

Fade by Lisa McMann - review

Fade by Lisa McMann

I was with this fun, rather slight piece of YA suspense right up to the 21 Jump Street ending. I think it's a first novel, and for that reason I'm going to forgive the author for cramming as much adolescent wish fulfillment in as possible. "I wish I had a magic power! And... and a boy who pines for me and is secretly hot! And... and... and I wanna FIGHT CRIME!!"

The premise - a girl is unwillingly pulled into observing the dreams of anyone who falls asleep near her - is pretty original; the characters are good. There's a little minor horror and boy-girl smoochies. The slumber party politics are particularly well written, especially an amusing subplot in which the school queen bee is in love with our protagonist's best friend. I don't know if I'll read the rest in this series (Fade, Gone), but I'd read something else by Lisa McMann.

A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah - review

AvLong Way Gone by Ishmael Beah

Just a quick review. Ishmael Beah's memoir of his time as a boy soldier in Sierra Leone, A Long Way Gone is somewhat outside my usual scope for Pink Me. It's not terribly new, and it's usually shelved as adult nonfiction. I'm including it only because I read it recently, and it frequently appears on summer reading lists for middle and high school students.

I know there's some controversy about whether or not Ishmael Beah has been entirely truthful in this memoir - but I do not care. There's some controversy about whether or not lots of people are truthful in their autobiographies. I once read Zsa Zsa Gabor's autobiography (get it on audio if you can, it's a scream), and she claimed to have been deflowered by Kemal Ataturk.

Ok I know there's a difference. Zsa Zsa Gabor did not, as far as I know, grow up to work for the U.N. But what I'm saying is, unreliable narrator or no, A Long Way Gone is the clearest window into the terrible experience of being a boy soldier that I've read, and for that reason I recommend it for classroom use in high school. I believe that teens should read books that are inspiring and show what good exists in the world, but I believe that without contrast, without an appreciation of exactly how bad we can be, noble actions cannot be appreciated either.

I would also argue - loudly - that this book be paired with one of Alexander McCall Smith's Botswana books. It becomes easy to perceive Africa as full of horrific violence and abysmal poverty, because middle-class, stable Africa rarely makes the news, and McCall Smith accurately depicts Botswana in all its rather boring beauty. Unless we can see the people in Beah's book as people just like us, what happens to Beah and his friends and his family retains an air of fiction, whether it be true or not.

Listing to the right

Hello all you heartbreakers! I've spent the day fixing a few things on Pink Me and let me tell you - I've got the ache in my shoulder and the nerveless legs to prove it!

First - Linky love! "Pink Me reads" is over there on the right - scroll down a little, we'll wait. I don't have a million links yet but more are coming. Frankly, I don't read a whole lot of kidlit blogs every day. I read Go Fug Yourself and dooce just like you do. Is that new baby just sooo cute or what?

Next - I have greatly refined and expanded my "Best books" lists. And made them dynamic! Woo! I'm using Goodreads to keep them, so when I add a new book to Goodreads that qualifies as a "Great graphic novel for kids," for example, I'll add it to that list. Probably worth checking back with those lists from time to time. If you're too lazy to scroll down to see them, these are the lists I've made:

• Great audio books for the whole family
• Great books for Kindergarten
• Great books for preK
• Great books for teens
• Great graphic novels for kids
• Great nonfiction - general
• Great nonfiction - subject lists
• If you liked Diary of a Wimpy Kid
• If you liked Twilight

And by "great," you know I mean "MY FAVORITE." Purely subjective. But you can trust me.

Reality is for grown-ups! A few recent kid graphic novels

Man, I missed signing up to be a judge or panelist for the Cybils (The Children's and Young Adult Bloggers Literary Awards) this year. Every year, committed bloggers nominate, discuss, and judge the best in kid and YA lit. The short lists that they come up with in each category are pretty excellent shopping lists for anyone stocking a library, buying for a classroom, or just looking for something good to read. 

Last year I was a panelist for the graphic novels category. I have, I blush to say, A LOT of experience reading graphic novels. I blame my friend Sean, who gave me a taste of The Dark Knight Returns and Love & Rockets twenty years ago, and who gradually introduced me to the hard stuff: Sandman, Tank Girl, V for Vendetta.

The Cybils panelists last year nominated eleven books, each of which I endorse with my whole being. This year, in lieu of being a panelist, I'll just offer up my own graphic novel winners:

Magic Trixie continues to charm: the first in the series was nominated last year and I knew it was going to be strong. Jill Thompson's bright beautiful colors and exuberant characters, her fun and funky details make Magic Trixie one of my favorites to sit back and savor.

Binky the Space Cat by Ashley Spires. Hm. I had this book, I loved this book, I'm sure I wrote the review, but now I can't find it. Weird. Anyway. Binky, the intrepid space explorer? Is really Binky, the fat house cat who's never been outside. But Binky has the heart and soul of a ninja astronaut superhero beating inside that flabby, gluttonous exterior, and his sincere efforts to ready himself for his great adventure are both funny and witty. There's a difference, and the difference is fart jokes vs. visual puns, and both are in evidence here and damn if I could find that original review you'd certainly read this book.

Dragonbreath by Ursula Vernon. I reviewed this earlier on Pink Me, and I stand by my enthusiastic endorsement.

Lunch Lady and the League of Librarians by Jarrett Kro-whatever. Kidding. Jarrett J. Krosoczka. (And JJK, whatever happened to your awesome Who's Who in Kidlit Illustration / Karate Kid video? I was trying to describe Tomie De Paolo's performance in it the other day and I couldn't find it!)

It was the Holm siblings, who, with Babymouse, popularized this black-and-white-and-one-color style of graphic novel illustration. It's a good method. Keeps costs down but injects color. You cannot underestimate the importance of color when you're talking kid appeal. Ursula Vernon uses it in Dragonbreath, with green (a good choice) and I had to confess, when I first saw the yellow in the Lunch Lady books, I kind of winced. Pee-colored accents? Really? In a book with 'lunch' in the title? Well here is me being wrong. The yellow is bright and lemony, and I asked my 8-year-old, and he said that pee never crossed his mind when he was reading the books. Which has got to be some kind of record.

The books are funny, and make sense, and the art, while satisfyingly cartoony and goofy, doesn't get so loopy as to be incoherent or icky. Lots of people can't manage that, you'd be surprised. And the librarians are the bad guys, but I'm not taking it personally.

T-Minus: The Race to the Moon by Jim Ottaviani, illustrated by Zander Cannon and Kevin Cannon. On the other hand, Jim Ottaviani, who still is an actual librarian, knows who's buttering his bread. (I am still kidding!) He has been writing comics about science and scientists for a while now, and this is his contribution to this year's explosive blast of books commemorating our first trip to "that giant glowing rock in the sky".

Frankie Pickle and the Closet of Doom by Eric Wight

Frankie Pickle. He's an average kid, with predictable crises - a messy room, a broken toy. But his imagination takes his everyday problems to unpredictable and exciting places. This book is a mixture of text narrative and graphic passages; the change in format more or less signaling the switch between reality and imagination. It's like Skippyjon Jones for third graders, without the Spanglish. What busts this book to a higher level is Eric Wight's extremely confident pen and ink art. You can tell that he never has to stop and think before jetting Frankie off to a new setting - "Can I draw stalactites? Oops, how am I on trucks?" Gives the whole book a sort of... muscular vibe.

The Secret Science Alliance and the Copycat Crook by Eleanor Davis.

Ok now see Eleanor Davis has been my secret girlfriend since I read Stinky last year (Pink Me review here). That book was pretty simple, but the art was... deceptive. No fancy-tricky panel shapes, no show-offy splash pages, but extremely self-assured line, keep-you-on-your-toes perspectives, and very thoughtful, unexpected, harmonious color choices.

Her new series, The Secret Science Alliance, follows through on that promise. It's for middle grade readers, with a higher page count, more complex characters, and, you know, more words. But not a ton of words. It's still a quick read, and there's more going on in the art than in the dialogue. The detail is luxurious and funny. The style is retro-ish (in a Jimmy Corrigan kind of way). The layout is readable but less programmed than in Stinky - kids can find their own path through some of these pages. And I'm going to stop gushing about the color. I am. After this: A rainbow of mid-tones! Underappreciated purples and browns! Excellent green accents! Somebody give this book an award.

And, I would be remiss in not mentioning Fiona Robinson's The 3-2-3 Detective Agency. Sigh. I did not like this book. I thought the deployment of color was gratuitous and overwhelming. Every area of every frame was bright and solid, with no distinctions between foreground and background. I thought the adolescent drawing style made animals who were supposed to look fuzzy appear to be melting, and I could not figure out what that was on the side of every character's face - until I realized that the artist was placing each animal's mouth in the middle of his or her right cheek. I also thought that there was too much text per page, too much text per word balloon, and that the text was printed in too tiny a typeface.

And then my son got ahold of the book. Read it straight through, bouncing in his seat and cackling aloud. And then his friend Nature Girl, who can sometimes be described as a reluctant reader, got ahold of it. She read it straight through, and rushes to find it whenever she comes over so she can read it again.

I give up. Sometimes I think I'm pretty good at all this - finding, evaluating, and passing along books to children. I like to think that I'm not too snobby, and that I spend enough actual time with kids to see things from their perspective. Other times I just have to realize - they like Capri Sun, I like a nice hoppy I.P.A. And that's how it should be.

How do you wokka-wokka? by Elizabeth Bluemle, illustrated by Randy Cecil - review

How do you wokka-wokka? by Elizabeth Bluemle, illustrated by Randy Cecil

It is mid-October. I am in the depths of reading a ton of Teen Horror for a YA fiction extravaganza event, my kids and husband are off having fun while I'm stuck working, and the weather just turned... well, it's a two-syllable word that rhymes with "witty". As in cold and raw and rainy.

And then, what comes duck-walking into my day, but a scat-filled, funkified, trip-trop-tongued picture book that I cannot WAIT to share with a roomful of kindergartners! It's a mood-changer! It's a crowd-pleaser! It is fun to read and fun to hear and encourages movement.

How do you wokka-wokka?
I wokka-wokka like a mariachi with maracas -
chipi-chipi
chaba-cha-cha
shake-a-the-maracas

In fact, when I took it in to the beloved Kindergarten teacher at my kids' school, she started jiving and posing while she read it to herself, and I could see her wheels turning. You can wokka-wokka like an animal, you can wokka-wokka like a dancer or an athlete, you could bring musical instruments into it, extend it any way you'd like.

WE wokka-wokka like a party on the blocka!
Shacka-racka daddly-acka
cotton-candy
snacka-snacka.

The children in the book come in all shades and shapes, and Randy Cecil's oils manage to be both somewhat minimalist and terrifically expressive at the same time. Browns and grays never looked so warm. A terrific book to jazz up a rainy day!

Cake Girl by David Lucas - review

Cake Girl by David Lucas
The witch is alone on her birthday, again. So she bakes a cake girl, a multilayered, bonbon-studded, iced and sugar-sparkled confection. And because she is a witch, her cake girl comes to life. Cake Girl sings and dances for the witch, she does the housework, but when she is told that afterwards she shall be eaten, she starts to think for herself.

The cake girl, who looks a lot like one of the painted wooden figurines in a German crib mobile that used to hang in my bedroom, becomes the witch's first friend, and, I am guessing, first therapist. The witch, who looks a lot like my grandma, except green, and wearing pink pointy high heels with a buckle (witches always have the best shoes), learns that fun is not a spectator sport.

It's lighthearted, it's a treat visually, and it has a lovely, satisfying happy ending that, despite Cake Girl's confectionery provenance, is healthy-sweet, not sugary-sweet.

David Lucas's pen and ink and watercolor art is decidedly old-school here - perfectly consonant with his tale of a straight-out-of-the-forest warty green witch. The witch is the sweetest, squattest magical lady since Strega Nona, and even the title on the front cover looks like James Marshall's Cinderella. His curves are round and strong, and his angles are open: every object and figure in this book feels balanced and solid, a nice counterpoint to the sparkles and stars and puffs of magic smoke that Lucas sprinkles in to his edges and backgrounds. The wealth of detail will reward the individual reader, but the art is not too eensy for a small storytime. Fun for Halloween, fun for birthdays, fun in general!

Boats: Speeding! Sailing! Cruising! by Patricia Hubbell, illustrated by Megan Halsey and Sean Addy - review

Boats: Speeding! Sailing! Cruising! by Patricia Hubbell, illustrated by Megan Halsey and Sean Addy

I have somehow missed this series, Things that Go! by Hubbell and her two illustrator accomplices. I LIKE IT.

Short, punchy, rhyming text means that you can chug through reading this aloud to a little kid. Extra illustrations and captions on almost every page will capture the attention of older kids. And grownups will groove on the collage art - cuts from old children's books are juxtaposed with nineteenth- and twentieth-century etchings of boats, people, animals, and equipment, and it's all colored and layered over textured backgrounds that look like wallpaper, like peeling paint, fabric or wood grain.

My Rotten Life: Nathan Abercrombie, Accidental Zombie by David Lubar - review

My Rotten Life: Nathan Abercrombie, Accidental Zombie by David Lubar
Nathan's in 5th grade and he's not doing so hot. Not-so-athletic and not-so-popular, not the skinniest, not the best dresser, he seems to be stuck forever at the Second Bester table, which is, for the avid reader of fiction intended for fourth-grade boys, familiar territory indeed.

Well. At least Nathan's not sitting at the Table of the Doomed, which is where Abigail sits, with Snail Girl, Feardinand, and the rest of the socially hopeless. And Abigail, as it turns out, can help Nathan withstand the heartbreaks and disappointments of his not-so-hot 5th grade life. Pretty girls hurting his feelings just for fun. Getting picked last in gym. Ouch. Those first couple of chapters are righteously painful to read.

To make a long story short ("TOO LATE!" hollers the cast of Clue), Nathan is turned into a zombie, which is bad, but at least it means he can do a zillion chin-ups on field day and doesn't get nervous when he plays DS. Luckily for the reader, Nathan has no interest in eating brains. Unluckily, it takes him a while to realize that he's not digesting anything else either, and there's a particularly gross upchuck sequence that many 9 year olds will love very much. My kid felt compelled to read it out loud to me, even after I assured him I had already read it, and there was no need. "Really! Shut up, son! You are grossing me out AGAIN!"

I have to admit, I kept looking for the metaphor. We start out with a rather sensitive boy, who gets doused with a magic scientific potion and can subsequently no longer feel a thing. He begins to excel in areas that were previously difficult for him, but he finds that in some cases, these achievements are not particularly important. In the end, he must make a choice between regaining his humanity and saving a friend's life.

But... ehh, I shrug my shoulders. If there's a metaphor in there it's not exactly written in flaming letters across the sky. If there's some lesson to be learned, it is, thankfully, well hidden.

I mean, the book is (a little bit) about pain. I am glad that my sensitive boy, who also chokes at video games, read it, if only so that he can see he's not the only one. But... what did he get out of it? Did he learn that it's better to feel bad than it is to feel nothing? No, that wasn't exactly the message. Did he learn that being good at video games is overrated? No again, because even I cheered when Nathan showed those other meanie boys his newfound skills, and heck, I'm the whole reason my son sucks at video games.

No. What my son loved about this book, and what other kids will enjoy, are these things: likeable kids facing ridiculous problems; pratfalls, fart jokes, and parents who can't cook; well-written action and familiar cafeteria politics. And a pinkie finger floating in a cup of orange soda.

Little Devils by Robert J. Blake - review

Little Devils by Robert J. Blake

Edward Lear, in addition to being a poet, humorist and a miserable, sickly, lonely man, was an illustrator. He drew and painted animals for scientific publications. It's true! He would sit for hours watching the caged animals at the London Zoo in order to faithfully reproduce the details of their anatomy and posture. He did this, notably, with parrots, and his Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots is one of the most beautiful books I've ever had the good fortune to hold in my hands.

Some critics at the time charged that his parrot illustrations were not good scientific illustration - that Lear's pictures  failed to exemplify the species, and were, rather, portraits of the individual birds he studied. They are. But they also do. Anyone who's ever known a parrot knows that parrots have personality. Artists who have the talent and the sensitivity to recognize and capture an animal's individuality - especially realistic artists - are few and far between. Vicky White is one. Mick Ellison, who manages to do it for animals that nobody has ever observed, is another.

Also on this very short list is Robert J. Blake (ugly website though, dude - ouch). In the Author's Note for Little Devils, he describes the weeks that he spent in Tasmania, living in a shack and observing Tasmanian devils. I've never written about animals. I've written about art, though, and the only way to write about art is to sit in front of and look at and think about that art for a long time. Mr. Blake lived and breathed Tasmanian wildlife for a good long stretch. He sat and watched the devils that prowled around his shack and lived in the hills.

 

And in his story about a family of devils, each little devil has his or her own way of approaching new things. Each devil is distinguishable from the other. There is no anthropomorphizing, there's no dialogue (unless you count "Argh!" which is what devils say), and there's no ascribing complex feelings to the animals beyond what can be observed. Yet, it is a gripping, exciting story. Maybe a little scary for super-little kids - seeing Mum devil trapped in a cage might be too upsetting for some.

Blake's oils here are especially nice. He also wrote Akiak, my go-to book at Iditarod time, and so I knew he could do landscape and, well, fur, which is not as easy as it sounds. But the colors in Little Devils make me want to go to Tasmania. The faces of the animals are alive and expressive. And, unlike some accomplished realistic painters (Ted Lewin, love ya but - getting the wife to do some sketches was a stroke of genius on Balarama), there's real movement to these paintings.

I love a book that respects the animal.

Eat me! Cookbooks for a K-5 library

When I was a little girl, I yearned for an Easy Bake Oven. Pined for one. Asked every year at Christmas when the big Sears book came to the house. And every year, my mom would reply, "But we already have an easy-bake oven! It's downstairs! In the kitchen!"

At the time I was all like, "Yeah just because YOU can't make a piecrust, grumble grumble boo!" but now that I have my own kids - and more importantly, now that I am familiar with some of the great great children's cookbooks available, I see her point. Why bake two mingy little cupcakes from a crappy mix under a light bulb when you can make your very own Lickable Wallpaper, like in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Or actual Stone Soup (recipe in Jane Yolen's Fairy Tale Feasts)?

These are the cookbooks I recommend most strongly. Some of them I have field-tested. I have checked all of them for clarity and easiness and appeal. If a book can lay flat on the kitchen counter, that's a plus. If it includes actual photos of actual children actually preparing food, that's a BIG plus. 

Vegetarian Kid's Cookbook. Denny, Roz.

After my family's experiment with Vegetarian Summer, I am more than ever convinced that intermittent vegetarianism expands kids' edible horizons, increases their awareness of what they eat and where it comes from, and is an interesting topic of dinner table conversation. The recipes also tend to be pretty foolproof, and noted vegetarian chef Roz Denny is an excellent guide. Unfortunately, this pup is out of print in the U.S.

Disgusting Food. Miller, Connie Colwell.

This one is for all you young men out there. Snails, grasshoppers, grubs... there are tons of protein-rich invertebrates here to use as perfect fast fact grossout material. Be warned - you will hear about these at the dinner table!
 

What The World Eats. Menzel, Peter & D'Aluisio, Faith.

Not a cookbook, but a phenomenal addition for anyone interested in food. From the team who brought us the eye-opening grownup book Material World: A Global Family Portrait, What the World Eats surveys families around the world, showing us how they eat, what they eat, where they buy it, and who prepares it. Big, colorful, beautifully printed photographs and easy to understand graphics, including maps, make this not only an important resource for establishing global awareness, but also a damn entertaining, browsable read. I hope none of my libraries will ever be without this book.

Green Eggs And Ham Cookbook. Brennan, Georgeanne.

Some of the recipes in this book are easy.
Some of them are not.
Some of them call for things like a shallot.
My rhymes are awful, but the book is cute.
Kids will eat anything if the name is like 'Smoot'.

Betty Crocker's Cookbook For Boys And Girls. Crocker, Betty.

This is the cookbook to which my mother was referring when she suggested I hie my little heinie into the kitchen and try cooking for real. I have made most of the recipes in this book - some of which are a little disgusting, to today's eyes - I remember mini meatloafs with a well of ketchup in the middle? Is that right? Anyway, there's an updated version, but I think the pen and ink drawings in this one are easier to follow (think America's Test Kitchen) And it is still good advice to suggest that a child wear an apron in the kitchen!

Roald Dahl's Revolting Recipes. Dahl, Roald.

This cookbook, illustrated with attractive phood photos and Quentin Blake's acrobatic, jivey illustrations, provides recipes for some of the wacktastic, bananagrammatical foods mentioned in Monsignor Dahl's books. Yup, most of it looks entirely gross when you're done, but that is certainly part of the appeal. Best to do with a grownup as some of the steps are a little fiddly. There's a sequel, just as good.

Salad People And More Real Recipes: A New Cookbook For Preschoolers And Up. Katzen, Mollie

Every one of the recipes in this book and its sequels has been prepared by preschoolers in my house. The instructions are extremely easy to follow, and emphasize skills like counting and measuring. There's a strong emphasize on healthy food - yogurt and tofu are frequent ingredients - and a minimum of recipes that require a stove, making them good possibilities for classroom cooking too. Tips to minimize mess (put the mixing bowl on a cookie sheet so that spills are localized) are included - and if you're like me, that takes a lot of stress out of the prospect of letting little kids prepare food themselves.

Fairy Tale Feasts: A Literary Cookbook For Young Readers And Eaters. Yolen, Jane.

 

Spatulatta Cookbook. Gerasole, Olivia and Isabella Gerasole.

This one has it all. The photos are bright and appealing and lively and make the food look fantastic. The spine is spiral, so it lays flat. The steps are pretty easy, but best of all, Olivia and Isabella Gerasole, the authors, are pictured doing all the work, and they make the work look like play. The Spatulatta website is pretty great too, with lots of video instruction.

Kids' Multicultural Cookbook: Food & Fun Around The World. Cook, Deanna F.

There are a few of these out there - multicultural cookbooks for kids. I found this one to have instructions that are easy to follow and a nice variety of foods. I am going to keep looking though - this one didn't rock my world.

World Religions Cookbook. Schmidt, Arno.

I love this book. It's a grownup cookbook, but what the heck - some kids want to stretch in the kitchen, and I am happy to provide them that opportunity. I myself don't subscribe to any religion, but I believe in food with meaning. This book teaches kids to not only make the traditional foods that may be favorites in their house, but also explains the reasons and the meaning behind the ingredients and processes involved. Plus, when you're teaching kids about cultures not their own, you want to explore as many sensory avenues as possible. Music is good, but I'm going to argue that food is better.

Chocolate: A Sweet History. Markle, Sandra.

And come on - you have to have a chocolate book! This one has a few recipes, a little history, and nice pictures.

Hey, I can't make a piecrust either. But my kids can make muffins, soup, salad, and pretty soon I'm going to train the big one to run the rice cooker. Then, I'll sit back on my butt and laugh like a king! Aaah ha ha haaa! Fix me some rice!