unadulterated.us

Apple Pie ABC by Alison Murray - review

Well, I've been on something of a YA kick this summer, as all both of my regular readers could tell. I'm preparing to be a facilitator at Books for the Beast this fall, in the Horror/Suspense category (join us, won't you?), and so there have been a lot of cannibals and nail-biting (do cannibals bite their nails?) around my house lately.

 

Maybe that's why I responded so warmly to this dumpling of an ABC book that I found on the New Picture Books shelf. It has pie! A girl in ponytails! And an extremely winsome dog of the beagle-y terrier-y variety. WHAT could be more wholesome than that?

The beagle's name, I find out from the book's website, is Georgie. And the little girl in the blue jumper is Grace. A is for apple pie, and B C and D are the verbs Grace uses to bake it, cool it, and dish it out. After that, it's all Georgie, finding a crumb on the floor and then obsessing over that fat pie, plotting and pining in a realistically single-minded puppy way. Alison Murray's text is cool and simple and perky, getting around the tricky letters so smartly that I had to go back and look - what did she do about X?

The art features a subtly unusual palette of navy blue, blood red, burnt orange, and the slightly off pastels that are produced when those colors are watered down. This scheme results in contrasts that are graphically strong - the navy blue jumper against a watery blue background, for example - while maintaining color harmony.

This looks to me like good confident ink and brush drawing on top of chunky, forthright shapes done in some kind of print process - silk screen I guess, given the texture. The ink still looks sticky, which is an effect I love for children's books. After watching dozens of kids visually reverse-engineer the illustrations in dozens of picture books so that they can try to duplicate a style or effect, I am partial to art techniques that reveal process or bear the imprint of the materials used.

More of this Scotswoman's art is on her blog, called everything is pattern.

 

Electronic Thursday: The Three Pandas by Valerie Mih and See Here Studios - review

 The Three Pandas by Valerie Mih and See Here Studios

Little Mei Mei goes walking in the forest and smells something yummy. Why, it's the three bowls of bamboo porridge that Mama, Papa, and Baby Panda left on their table while they took a walk! Mmm, that baby panda's porridge is 只是权 (just right)!

Layered photo collage is the medium for the gorgeous but friendly illustrations. Not too flashy, with homey interiors featuring Chinese furnishings and decor, and lovely misty exteriors depicting a sunny clearing in the bamboo forest. Mei Mei is adorable, with a giant toothy smile, and the pandas are just the giant balls of fluffy fur that pandas always are. I like the unobtrusive music, all tinkly piano and clarinet notes, though I confess I might have wished for more Chinese instrumentation.

AND IT'S BILINGUAL. Why does not every single dang iPad app give the user multiple language options? (Note: IT'S EASY.) The Chinese narration is clear and expressive. My picture book app review buddy, four-year-old Baby A, got a big kick out of listening to the app in Chinese and telling me the story, as if she were translating.

 

I'm placing these droids in your care - Star Wars book roundup

Recently, I read a book written for grownups. It happens! Of course, the book I read was Nerd Do Well, the memoir of actor and comedian Simon Pegg, and Simon Pegg (Hot Fuzz, Star Trek) is nothing if not an overgrown eleven-year-old boy, so actually, the book didn't fall that far outside my usual purview.

It was a kind of so-so book, if you want to know. The fanboy confessional can often descend into aching self-importance (see also: Patton Oswalt), but there were some brilliant discussions of pop culture, criticism, and pop culture criticism (also see also: Patton Oswalt). Mostly about Star Wars. Simon Pegg has thought a lot about Star Wars.

As have we all, n'est-ce pas?

In my house, Star Wars is practically a family member. Storm troopers, clone troopers, Jedi, Sith, sand people - their costumes and powers find their way into every mode of imaginative play engaged in by my sons. I have fought my way to a grudging détente over what I still call the second three movies - we own them on DVD, but they cannot be watched while I am in the house.

(I mean, come on. In the second series of Star Wars movies, they named Leia's adoptive father "Bail." If that isn't telegraphing a certain abdication of commitment on the part of the filmmakers, I don't know what.)

Recently, I assembled all the Star Wars gimmick books in our house and got the boys to run 'em down. By 'gimmick books' I mean the engineered books - the DK Readers are not included in this review, nor are the nominally grown-up novels like The Thrawn Trilogy, The X-Wing Series, Jedi Academy Trilogy, The Han Solo Trilogy (I might read that), or The Bounty Hunter Wars.

 

 

Bee & Bird by Craig Frazier - review

If I weren't already fully developed, brain-wise (and probably on the downward slope, a likelihood that is difficult to deny, given how frequently I leave my phone at home and my inability to Tweet with any regularity), I would expect to be about fifteen points smarter by the time I closed this book.

There's a striped bee. On the head of a red bird. In a green-leaved tree. In the bed of a yellow truck. And then our perspective shifts so that the truck appears to be driving across a black and white landscape as the bird flies away. What was that?! Oh. We were looking at the truck across the back of a cow. Hi, cow. The cow is standing in a flat green field next to wavy blue water.

What's next for the bird? What will that big white thing turn out to be? And why would a bee ride on a bird's head?

 

Craig Frazier (Lots of Dots, the Stanley books) gives us a wordless picture book full of large shapes, bold patterns, clear colors, and a surprising amount of personality. Rather than leave his giant color fields plain and flat, often a subtle gradient will indicate contour or volume.

Wordless books are the most wonderful investments. The best ones allow the reader to conjure endless stories, like the protagonist of Still Life With Woodpecker, who meditates on a Camel pack for several years. Or like Jane Eyre, filling the blank endpapers of books with her own thoughts.

Maybe I am not all that far gone after all. I've been through Bee & Bird three or four times now and I'm still finding new things that tickle me. And my husband and I finished the diagramless New York Times crossword puzzle last Sunday. We should just keep exposing ourselves to patterns and shifting perspectives, and maybe watch Powers of Ten every couple months.

Put Bee & Bird on your short list of things that are mind-blowing and fun at the same time. Bubble wands, kaleidoscopes, wordless books.

Knucklehead by Jon Scieszka - audiobook review

 

Jon Scieszka has five brothers. Jon Scieszka is a funny writer. Ergo, Jon Scieszka's stories about growing up with his five brothers = funny. Oh, I laughed out loud, all right. I read bits aloud to the librarians in the workroom who wanted to know just what was so damn funny, and they laughed out loud. But we're moms. Moms of boys. We have to think boys are funny, or else go googoo and end up carted away in a van.

I first reviewed this book two years ago. I read it to myself while our house was undergoing extensive renovation. It was kind of a distracted review, touching on Peruvian hats, Luke Wilson and my great-cousin Margaret's nose.

But such a funny book. I really needed the laughs during those dark days - my kitchen was open to the outside world for about a week, making it less kitchen-y and more like, let's say, a shed.

We have revisited Knucklehead this summer, now that it is available on audio, read by Mr. Scieszka himself. I checked it out of the library specifically for the benefit of my husband and his multitude of siblings, many of whom were going to be in from out of town and spending copious hours in our minivan last week.

Electronic Thursday - Nash Smasher! by Bill Doyle and Crab Hill Press

You know what would make a great picture book app for the iPad?  Bang on the Drum All Day. Yes, the Todd Rundgren song. It speaks of the cathartic power of music, how it can transport us, and testifies to the bliss of creative activity. Plus it is super-hooky and unapologetically stupid.

I don't want to work,
I just want to bang on the drum all day.
I don't want to play,
I just want to bang on the drum all day.

Ever since I was a tiny boy,
I don't want no candy, I don't need no toy.
I took a stick and an old coffee can,
I bang on that drum til I got blisters on my hand!

 

Right? Any kid can play the drum. You could make an iPad app with drum pads of various tones, let a kid tap the screen to make rhythms and hear the difference between a tom and a snare and a bass drum - heck, they could even learn how to play a backbeat or a paradiddle. It would be so fun!

Sigh. Nobody ever asks me.

But the ever-amusing Rundgren is kind of just the guy to do it, so here's hoping he gets an iPad and befriends a couple of youthful fans/software developers. Til then, I will have to content myself with what's actually out there in picture book iPad app-land. To wit:

 

And the green grass grew all around - ecology read-alouds

Sometimes I get a request from a library customer or a friend that is so inspiring, it sticks with me for days. Our friend Doug, who is finishing up a master's in education sometime in the next decade or so, is working up a model English class for middle schoolers who have been studying ecology. He figured he'd read them The Lorax as a discussion starter, but wondered if I had any other suggestions.

 

Now, The Lorax is pretty much on the nose for this purpose, but it's long, and sing-songy, and might already be familiar to middle schoolers as an environmental cautionary tale. So I rubbed my hands together and thought.

Electronic Thursday: The Strange & Wonderful World of Ants by Amos Latteier - review

Inch-long "bullet ant" in the cloud forest, Costa Rica. Photo by Your Neighborhood Librarian.

Ants. Just the word, for me, cues up Sharkey's Day. You know, that dry, surreal, scritchy-scratchy Laurie Anderson song: "Sharkey says: All of life comes from some strange lagoon. It rises up, it bucks up to its full height from a boggy swamp on a foggy night. It creeps into your house. It's life!"

Ants are that kind of strange, that kind of miraculous.

Amos Latteier, a Toronto-based performing and installation artist, seems to see them this way too. Who would not? The facts about ants will blow your mind. 22,000 species! Biomass comparable to humans!

There are ants that function as soft-serve machines, ants that squeeze goo out of their larvae in order to stick leaves together, ants that farm, ants that herd, ants whose sting feels like getting shot (see "bullet ant," above). Ant queens can live decades. Ant sperm can live decades! Heck, the little black ants that live in your yard can dig nests five feet deep!

 

 
Leaf-cutter ants, Arenal, Costa Rica. Photo by Your Neighborhood Librarian.

I could go on half the day about the weirdness of ants. Don't you wish I would? No?

Liveblogging the stash - BEA 2011

Wandering the convention floor and gladhanding the entire kidlit industry at Book Expo is fun and all that, but the best part for me is when my kids arrive, and I get to collect their reactions to the exciting books (and swag!) that I have rounded up for potential review.

 

Notes from the insect world

I suppose it had to happen sooner or later. Most of my friends have gone through it already. Some of them have had to deal with it over and over. I'm just lucky I have boys, and I can shear 'em like sheep.

It's head lice.

Gross.

Nonfiction Monday: Manners Mash-up - review

I'd have had this book reviewed earlier, but there was a manners emergency.

One of Zhou's teachers came into the library with her almost-three-year-old son, who has got to be one of the cutest little guys in the whole world. She was looking for ABC books, truck books, and dinosaur books (I love three-year-old boys!) - and also a manners book that wasn't too heavy-handed.

I kind of pooh-poohed her - at almost three, there's plenty of time to teach him about elbows on the table. At almost three, they're so cute that we still forgive them if they forget to say "excuse me" when they burp. We're programmed that way. But Kayisha had this story to tell:

Forsythia & Me by Vincent X. Kirsch - review

 

Speaking of rabbits. I was admiring this new book from Vincent X. Kirsch (The Two Little Boys from Toolittle Toys) with my friend and colleague Mrs. Rabbit the other day.

"Look!" I said. And also "Awww!"

"This guy has the most delicate etchy line, but his shapes are bold and strong."

"I like the little details. Look at her with her heart-shaped glasses!"

 

Ice by Arthur Geisert - review

Maybe I should save this one for the hot weather that is to come. Because right now I have heard that it's going to snow one last time in our neck of the woods before Spring (and, immediately on its heels, Summer) shows up for good. Sigh. Quit, already!

Meanwhile, I have the sunny skies and sepia tones of a new Arthur Geisert book to keep me warm. Arthur Geisert is an etcher of pigs, a devotee of hot-air sailing ships, a contraptionist if there ever was one, and yes I just made up that word in his honor. Hogwash and Oops and Lights Out delight kids and adults who enjoy cause-and-effect, who dream of a better mousetrap, who can't see a stream of water in a gutter without building a tiny dam.

Press Here by Hervé Tullet - review

 

MAGIC.

When an idea is so simple you can't believe nobody's thought of it before - and to my knowledge, IN the whole history of books, which is a pretty long damn history, nobody has - and when that idea works SO well that everyone who encounters it, from age 3 to, well so far I haven't discovered an upper limit, gasps at its cleverness... well, that's magic.

 

(Contrary to what the tag line of this video avers. Screw you guys, I know magic when I see it!)

Press Here is a book that's been compared to an iPad app. Simple instructions ("Press here." "Rub the dot on the left." "Clap once.") create the illusion that the reader is rearranging a series of dots, causing them to multiply, grow, change color, etc. But I'll tell you - don't worry about the iPad app comparison. I've shown this book to plenty of people who've never touched an iPad, and they are charmed and blown away, just as I was the first time I saw it, at ALA Midwinter in San Diego.

This is the rare picture book that I feel compelled to carry with me wherever I go. Delightful, simple, and everyone who sees it wants to show it to someone else, to share the magic. Best of all, it invites imitation. If it weren't French, I'd expect Hervé Tullet to win the Caldecott Medal for it. Bravo. And thank you to Chronicle Books for sending me a copy.

Bob Staake's Look! A Book! - review

 

Here is a fun exercise in creativity: 

1. Think up a three-item list of rhyming nouns. A screw, bamboo, Anne Hathaway saying "WOO!"
2. Draw a giant complicated colorful scene incorporating these items. NOTE: your scene can include anything you like, but your three rhyming nouns must be on the right-hand side of the page
3. Fold your picture in half like a greeting card
4. This is the tricky part: make holes in the left-hand side of the picture opposite your three rhyming nouns, so that, when closed, your nouns peek out.

Yay! You have made a simple version of the super-cool spreads that populate this masterful visual feast from Bob Staake.

Up and Down by Oliver Jeffers - review

 

I have this friend who really loves film. He's all Day for Night this and Satyajit Ray that, and he thinks I'm the same way, probably because I used to live in New York and I've read some Thomas Pynchon. But it's a lie, what he thinks about me. Just because I can use the word 'Satyricon' in a sentence does not mean I want to go see Synecdoche New York. "I thought Philip Seymour Hoffman was really great in Twister," is how I try to explain things to him, but he never seems to entirely believe me.*

Which brings us to Oliver Jeffers's newest picture book. Yes, it does.

Astro the Steller sea lion by Jeanne Walker Harvey, illustrated by Shennen Bersani - review

What do you want in a nonfiction picture book about an animal? I'll tell you what I want, and you see if that matches up.

• I want a story that will hook kids.
• I want photographs or realistic illustrations.
• I want any animal care professionals in the story depicted with rigor and respect, modeling correct postures and behavior for dealing with wild animals.
• I do not want the author to invent some internal malarkey for the animal. Not even, "Barty the tortoise was lonely." No. Unless it's a pet or some other long-observed individual (the chimps at Gombe for instance), humans may not presume to know the emotional life of an animal.

The Adventures of Sir Gawain the True by Gerald Morris, illustrations by Aaron Renier - review

I never considered manners to be of any real importance until I had kids. Or before I started working the reference desk. Adults tend to be a bit lazy, after all. We say "uh-huh" and we grunt and generally we manage to communicate and not offend too many people regardless. But kids - kids don't know that the "please" is supposed to be there and so they don't apply that deferential vocal inflection or body language or one of the ingratiating facial expressions that adults can use as shortcuts around saying "please." They are unschooled in the "thank you" nod-and-smile.

The Trouble With Chickens by Doreen Cronin, illustrations by Kevin Cornell - review

The trouble with chickens, in the experience of J.J., the hard-boiled, seen-it-all world-weary hound living out his post-glory days in a country farmyard, is that they're flighty. Untrustworthy. Calculating, manipulative, and either a lot smarter than him, or very very dumb.

The trouble with chickens, in my experience, is that everything wants to eat them and they don't run fast. Still kind of mourning our backyard birds.

Print Workshop: Hand-printing techniques + truly original projects by Christine Schmidt - review

I am anti-craft. I don't mind saying it. The thought of gathering a fistful of pipe cleaners, glue, wobbly eyes, and children all in one place and then encouraging them to interact is just... brrrrrr. Sounds scary and sticky and nerve-racking to me. I have friends who are good at that stuff. Also, there is school, and camp, so my children are not craft-deprived in sum. I know my strengths, and I abdicate my areas of weakness.

On the other hand...

I'm Not. Not drawn by Pam Smallcomb, not written by Robert Weinstock - not reviewed by me!

I think I need to be friends with Robert Weinstock and Pam Smallcomb. First of all, they're pals of James Proimos, who lives around here somewheres and is a lot of fun to run into at book festivals and the like. (And whose own books are great, not to mention the animation - NICE animation.)

Secondly, Pam Smallcomb and Robert Weinstock appear to know how to be good friends - if this book is any indication.

But I'm not reviewing this book, so I'm not going to explain that statement.

Nonfiction Monday - Ballet for Martha: Making Appalachian Spring by Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan, illustrated by Brian Floca - review

Last night we took our kids to a concert of choral music, and right in the middle of the program, one of the second grade mommies from our school stepped to the front of the ensemble, opened her mouth, and let loose with some of the purest, most accomplished, happiest music I have ever heard a human being produce. We had no idea.

Such moments are revelatory. To see a person stand at the intersection of discipline and imagination and bring forth something as unexpected as art... well it blew my mind, I can tell you. What could you do, what could any child do, what could any child not do, with an idea and hard work and desire?

Lulu and the Brontosaurus by Judith Viorst, illustrated by Lane Smith - review

Judith Viorst, by virtue of that book she wrote last year when Alexander and his family moved in with her temporarily and made her shiver for the fate of her velvet upholstered parlor chairs (Alexander and the Wonderful, Marvelous, Excellent, Terrific Ninety Days: An Almost Completely Honest Account of What Happened to Our Family When Our Youngest ... Came to Live with Us for Three Months), sticks in my mind as some kind of Joan Didion character. Sharp-eyed, funny, a little uncompromising, extremely self-aware. She lives in D.C., not New York or CT, and D.C. to me implies a certain Nina Totenbergitude.

Or a Mrs. Basil E. Frankweileriness. Like she'd be a person who speaks to children directly and appraisingly, a person who has no patience for the kind of performances that adults sometimes put on in front of children, and who finds the recitations of cuteness or precociousness that children are sometimes expected to roll out in front of adults likewise appalling.

Am I assuming too much about Judith Viorst? Well, clearly. What do I know? Maybe she speaks baby talk to grocery clerks and wears amusement park souvenir sweatshirts every day. But nothing in her new book Lulu and the Brontosaurus would lead me to believe that she is anything but the classy, smart-alecky dame I imagine.

Mirror by Jeannie Baker - review

Two families - one in Sydney, Australia, and one in Morocco. Jeannie Baker takes us through each family's day, showing us warm domestic scenes and sweeping landscapes, making subtle, everyday connections across the seemingly vast gulf of difference separating the two settings.

The Moroccan family gets around by donkey, while the Australians drive a yellow minivan. The Australian kid wears a red t-shirt and jeans, and the Moroccan kid wears his jeans under a red djellaba. Both boys have a baby sibling in a fuzzy yellow sweater. Tea is poured, pets are fed. The Moroccan boy likes to draw: the Australian one writes a story. Maybe they'll write a book together one day.

MORE BEARS! by Kenn Nesbitt, illustrations by Troy Cummings - review

How many times have you been reading a picture book aloud, maybe to your own children, maybe to a classroom full of kids, maybe just to the people waiting on the subway platform or in line at the grocery store (they love that, trust me), only to be interrupted by some goldfish-cracker-eater clamoring for this or that or the other?

"When is the dragon going to eat her?"

"They should not be cooking waffles they should be cooking CANDY."

"You skipped the tizzle-topped Tufted Mazurka!"

Nathan Hale-batross and Jon Agee-lotl*

I crush pretty hard on illustrators sometimes. I love the assured line of a Tom Lichtenheld. The expressive faces drawn by Emily Gravett. Mr. Dan Santat's mastery of movement and composition (which he wrote a post on recently). The deceptively old-fashioned-looking ink drawings of Nancy Carpenter. Patrick O'Brien, who actually paints, and who says his 3rd Captain Raptor book (with Kevin O'Malley) is in the works. David Small for his gestures. Marla Frazee of course. Sigh. Wish I could draw.

Two of my absolute all-time favorites are Jon Agee and Nathan Hale. Agee has this uncluttered, declarative style (lots of white space, authoritative lines) that harks back to Bill Peet or Syd Hoff. Not a bad thing - even after fifty years, Hoff's books still feel fresh and funny, as do Bill Peet's.

Natural History by DK Publishing - review

I am intensely irritated by this book. Yet I cannot keep myself from paging through its marvels. It's like the Anthropologie catalog - you just know the clothes are poorly made and ridiculously overpriced, but ooh! that skirt is cute!

Billed as "A landmark in reference publishing,' it is instead, like many DK books, useless as a guide in any practical sense. "Over 5000" species are pictured, with little captions, grouped in taxonomic order. But the taxa are only explained in the most rudimentary terms - "The plants in this order are genetically similar but physically different." Oh? In what way? Further, there is no indication of scale, no habitat context, and, while 5000 may sound like a lot? It's not.

13 Words by Lemony Snicket, illustrated by Maira Kalman - review

Bird. Despondent. Cake, Convertible. Mezzo-soprano. And eight more. Write a story using these thirteen words. It doesn't have to make sense. Nope. In fact, it might be more fun if it didn't. (If you can wedge a song into your story, do it.)

I would read this book to a class and let them come up with guesses about how it came to be. I myself am guessing. For all I know, Lemony Snicket startled a pigeon one day and it flew up and hit him hard in the head and when he came to, he only knew thirteen words, so this story came about as therapy. Could be. You don't know that guy's life. Neither do I.

Maira Kalman is at her very best here, layering thick pasty paint in ultra-saturated colors, adding lots of interesting details that could be the result of her own random-word assignment. Tambourine. Porcupine. Pocket square. Nap.

I'm going to come right out and call this a classic. If it were published forty years ago, New York Review of Books would be republishing it right now. That kind of classic.

Astroblast! Code Blue by Bob Kolar - review

I always say that Beginning Reader books have the hardest row to hoe. They need to reassure the new reader, they need to give the new reader a lot of achievable challenges, they need to do it in seven words per line or less, and on top of all that, they need to reward this stalwart little reader with a laugh, a surprise, superior art, or hopefully all three! You gots to give that kid SOMETHING that makes her want to keep at it. Learning to read can be hard.

Bob Kolar (how do you know that name? Maybe from Big Kicks, the one about the big bear playing soccer; or AlphaOops!: The Day Z Went First. Love those!) solves this puzzle with... puzzles! Every page of this jazzy little number has a visual puzzle: a what's wrong with this picture, a spot the difference, a maze, etc. Not only does this reward a little guy or girl who has struggled through the lines of text on the page, it keeps that kid's eyes ON the page, developing skills that are useful when learning to read.

There are even more puzzles at the end, encouraging the kid to go back through the book again. Smart. Repeat exposure to the same text is a useful strategy.

The art is bright and clean, but harmonious and rounded, with a strong palette of deep colors that prevents the funny animal characters and their outer-space hijinks from slipping into frenzied Hanna-Barbera-land. Here's a Beginning Reader series that I hope to see about twenty of. Hope you're not busy for the next couple years, Kolar!

Liveblogging the picture books

Aw, yeah... it's ON up here in the room we call the Homework Room... No fact families or sight word lists now, though, the kids are in school, and I've got Ted Leo on the iTunes, the willow tree out the window, and a stack of picture books I haven't had time to get to lately.

This is how I started all this review nonsense, actually - I would take a stack of like TWENTY picture books, read them through, and write two-sentence impressions of each, just so I could remember which ones I should recommend to my library customers.

So this is a ROOTS post:

Monday mashup - New York Comic Con meets the Cybils Awards!

Wow. At one point, as Eerily Similar Paula and her family and I were shuffled through a 20-minute maze of baffles prior to entering the exhibits floor at the New York Comic Con, I looked around at the cosplayers in their itchy wigs (ooh if there isn't a band called The Itchy Wigs, there should be), could not help overhearing the ever-so-slightly Aspy teens talking too loud about extremely qualified and abstruse proper nouns, and reflected to myself that I'm probably not the first person to think that they really could've used some Temple Grandin up in there at the Javits Center.

 

It's a horrible building in the first place, sealed off from the sun like a casino, except in the lobby areas, which heat up like greenhouses. Vast high ceilings fade out of perception and giant distant banks of undirected fluorescents ensure that everything is lit with the same characterless light.

I think it's kind of like being on a space station colony, which totally suits the comic con thing. Temple Grandin should design space stations too, when it comes around to that.

But there were highlights! Highlights there were, and here are they:

J. Otto Seibold presents Other Goose! - review

Since we've been on a singing, storytiming kick lately, I thought I'd offer this Bizarro World Christmas carol my husband Bob made up once:

 

Christmas is going, the goose forgot his hat,
Please throw a penny at the old man's cat.
If he hasn't got a cat, then throw it at his head -
If you throw it at his head then he might be dead.

 

You got that? Have we set the tone, as it were, for this review?

100 Ways to Celebrate 100 Days by Bruce Goldstone - review

100 things I like about this 100th day book:

Ok not. What, come on, do you really need a hundred? Would you even sit still to read a hundred? Yeah one would think not. One would need to have written a book as appealing and clever and also thoughtful as Bruce Goldstone's new book in order to get a reader to actually sit still to read 100 of virtually anything. Or so one might think...

Ergo. A few things I like about this 100th day book:

Monsters Eat Whiny Children by Bruce Eric Kaplan - review

I am not sure I even need to write about this book, given that title. You are either going to think that's the funniest thing that has ever entered your house, or you are going to think that's appalling.

Wait, I have 4 elementary school boys around my dining room table right this second. Lunchtime poll:

YNL: Look at the cover of this book. Would you read this book?

Secondo: No.

YNL: No? Too scary?

Secondo: No. I just won't say yes to anything you ask me ever.

YNL: Always suspected as much. Zhou?

Zhou: Yeah, sure, I would read it!

Prime: Looks good to me!

Mao: Ehhh... I'd rather read LEGO Star Wars.

YNL: Like, not right now... would you read it ever at all?

Mao: I've already read it and it's really funny.

 

Well that wasn't very satisfying. Maybe I'll ask a followup question.

YNL: If you were to eat whiny children, how would you prepare them?

Secondo: With pepper and salsa - a lot of salsa!

Zhou: I would bake them and then I would put them with a little bit of bacon, one egg, and all the materials for making a burrito except the tortilla.

Prime: I would probably chop them up, donate them to a restaurant, go to the restaurant, and order something good.

Zhou: With them in it.

Prime: That's what I mean.

Mao: I'd put them in a burrito with salsa, a lot of cheese, and some beef.

Zhou: But that makes you fart.

Better! Me, I would braise those whiny children. I like a slow braise. But there is no actual cooking in this book, although the oven does get preheated preparatory to baking the whiny children in a cake, which doesn't happen because somebody spills the flour. Sorry if I gave away a plot point. I thought it was maybe important to note that no children are actually consumed in this book. You'd be surprised what parents sometimes don't take for granted. Although, come to think of it, almost anything can happen in a picture book. That one book that I thought was about classroom manners and turned out to be about sexual abuse of a child? I have never gotten over that book. And this book is written and illustrated by a New Yorker cartoonist, and some of those guys have an odd sense of what is funny. There was a whole Seinfeld episode about that. And in fact, the guy who wrote that Seinfeld episode wrote this book. Huh.

Endpaper bonus: funny endpapers.

A flapjack stack of picture books

Here's what can happen when a family gets inspired by picture books, in this case Arthur Geisert's Lights Out (with just a touch of Wayne White I think). Just hit the play button:

Since returning from our vacation (long, excellent, TROPICAL PARADISE did I mention?) (and if you accuse me of gloating, please allow me to mention that my last two vacations were to Lake Erie and DETROIT - we deserved this), I have been feverishly reading picture books, trying to catch up. I consider it a responsibility to try to clap eyes on just about every picture book we get at the library. They're short, you can get through a big stack in half an hour, and the difference between a truly extraordinary picture book and an average everyday picture book is immense.

Click through for my short stack of recent favorites...

The Cat's Pajamas by Wallace Edwards - review

Is it me? Am I finally warming up to Wallace Edwards? Or is he getting steadily more charming?

I read Alphabeasts, published in 2002, and, like many ABC books, I found the word choices to be a bit strained, a bit advanced for the audience. I think it's a common problem with ABC books - are they really for children who are just learning their letters? or is the alphabet framework just a fun thing to hang a clever concept onto?

And then I read Monkey Business, Edwards's book of illustrated idiomatic phrases, and while I marveled and oohed and ahhed at the art (ohh, that cover!), at the same time I kind of shook my head. I felt that the phrases illustrated in that book were likely to zoom over the heads of most young children. Experience bore me out on that one, by the way. It did not circulate in our library system very well, yet every adult that I handed it to loved looking at it.

But now, The Cat's Pajamas - same premise, same masterful artwork - charms me completely. Do his animal characters possess a smidge more expression? Are the compositions a titch less crowded? Are the idioms illustrated just a hair more commonplace? I don't know. I think so. What a treat. On a page captioned, "Wade had never driven a submarine before, so he couldn't wait to get his feet wet," a frog drives a Buck Rogers-y striped minisub past colorful reef fish and a skeptical-looking octopus. The submarine has holes for Wade's legs, so his feet, indeed, are wet. As Camilla the Camel waits for the Oasis Express, she "cools her heels," with each foot plunged into a luscious ice cream cone, a blissed-out expression on her face.

Oh yea, oh verily. If you like Wallace Edwards, you'll love this. If you are lukewarm on Wallace Edwards, this book will bring you up to a merrily rolling boil.

The Big Big Big Book of Tashi by Anna and Barbara Fienberg, and Kim Gamble - review

Zhou, rising 2nd grader, seven years old: So what's up, Mom?

Your Neighborhood Librarian: Tell me about Tashi.

Z: Tashi is a book for boys and girls, and it's kind of a fairy tale. It has fairy-tale creatures and not-fairy-tale creatures in the same book. I love how there's the big actual story, which is this little elf man called Tashi comes to a new country after he's been sold to this really mean warlord by his parents for some reason, and then Tashi meets Jack, his new friend, and this Jack has his own garden and when he goes up the tree he tells stories, at lunch, and he tells Jack stories, and Jack tells stories to his mom and dad, and his dad is all worried about socks in one story. That's why dad is kind of funny.

YNL: So there are multiple stories in one book, and some of them are told by Tashi to Jack and some are told by Jack to his parents.

Z: Yup. It's very common to see parents telling a bedtime story but in this one it's the parents saying, "Tell me a story! Tell me another Tashi story!"

 

The ink garden of Brother Theophane by C.M. Millen, illustrated by Andrea Wisnewski - review

What do you like best about illuminated manuscripts? Do you like following the twiny knotted ornament in the borders, challenging your eye to discover whether it's all one strand? Do you enjoy identifying the flowers and plants, so precisely rendered that botanists have used medieval manuscripts as evidence for geographic occurence? Do you glimpse the freezing monks in their freezing sweatshops, laboriously copying out texts just as if they were handstitching counterfeit Fendi handbags?

Or is it that the pages of 500-year-old manuscripts, so tightly closed for so long that they have forgotten light, still glow with color and life?

Dave the Potter by Laban Carrick Hill, illustrated by Bryan Collier - review

You are going to want this book.

This is a rare story, beautifully told, illustrated with power, and it has ties to things that children can touch and do.

What, you want more?

Heh, just kidding. Of course you do. How about you want a story that will help educate children about the time when slavery was legal in the United States, that does not flinch from the tragic inequities of that period, but which nonetheless is not unremittingly bleak? A story that celebrates a person whose skill and artistry transcended status and transcends time? Now you know. You want this book. I knew you would. 

Kindergarten Diary: as told to Antoinette Portis by me, Annalina - review

Check out this quote from Kindergarten Diary:

We are Room 2K.
We are fine!

Assertive. Clear-eyed. Defiant-like. Almost... anthemic. And, written as it is beneath a drawing of three little kids hanging upside-down, big smiles on their faces and their belly-buttons showing, "fine" begins to assume a whole bunch of meaning:

• First kid (subtext): "Not only are we 'fine,' we are happy and fine!"
• Second kid (subtext): "And we're just going to get fine-r!"
• Third kid (subtext): "Not only did we have nothing to worry about, you parents can quit your hand-wringin' too!"

Subway by Christophe Niemann - review

NOT just for New Yorkers, this swingy rhyming book follows a daddy and his two little kids on a subway adventure on a rainy day. They take the A train from jazzy Harlem all the way to sleepy Far Rockaway. They savor the view as the Q crosses over the East River. They have fun with the map - why take the 1 straight from the southern tip of Manhattan to the southern end of Central Park... when you could take the 3 to the 5 to the N to the B to the C to the 7 to the 6 to the E to the D and end up at the same point?

The Chicken Thief by Beatrice Rodriguez - review

I had to check the copyright date on this suave wordless sliver of an epic tale over and over again. You see, like many French things (and it somehow seems important to point out that when I use the word "French" I always pronounce it "Fronsh" because of an ancient mocking nickname my friend Jaime and I once habitually applied to a perfectly nice person - the nickname now seems absurd and petty, but my inability to say the word "French" without sounding like a spastic drunk lives on, which only proves my point about French things), uhhh, like many French things - Fronsh things - The Chicken Thief, with its timeless one-joke story, well-crafted loosey-goosey pen and ink and watercolor art, and enigmatic title... could have come from any age.

A lot of French pen and ink illustration (and Belgian) has a gestural quality, a breezy confidence that works particularly well with energetic stories. Think Asterix. Spirou & Fantasio. Bob de Groot. And this story, being wordless, is told entirely through action and expression. The arc of a smile is just a tiny line, 5 millimeters, but in that 5-millimeter line, Beatrice Rodriguez tells us whether her character is smiling in triumph or embarrassment, with joy or with anticipation.

I love it when something so brief and easy is treated with respect, and this edition is printed on good paper, in a binding size that is fairly common in Europe but less so here. The Chicken Thief goes on my list of superior wordless books for a child to savor.

Reading on the radio

Everyday I read the book. (Well ok this isn't me, this is Elvis Costello, but still. I wanted to use this picture.)

It was a lot of fun, and very interesting, to record a segment at Baltimore's NPR station, WYPR, about summer reading for kids. I was happy to proselytize a bunch of books that I think will have wide-ranging appeal this summer to a variety of readers.

The audio of my interview with Tom Hall, culture editor of Maryland Morning with Sheilah Kast, is on the WYPR website. After the break is the complete list of books that I mentioned, plus a few we didn't have time to talk about.

Summer Birds: The butterflies of Maria Merian, by Margarita Engle, pictures by Julie Paschkis - review

Oh, here's a picture book that was just WAITING to be written. Maria Sibylla Merian, 1647-1717, was a scientific illustrator who grew up in Germany but did her most famous work in Suriname.

Look at those dates. Then think, "Suriname?" Yes my skeptical friend. In 1693, at the age of 52, Maria Merian went to South America with her sister to draw animals. Just to give some context - what else happened in 1693? Well, Louis the XIV was king. The Amish split from the Anabaptists that year. The last dodo died. And two middle-aged German women hiked up their skirts and went to South America.

Zig and Wikki in Something Ate My Homework by Nadja Spiegelman and Trade Loeffler - review

TOON Books loves them some old-fashioned, well-crafted comic illustration style. I read a lot of graphic novels for kids - basically, I read all of them - and it is always so soothing to open up a TOON book. The color palette is consistent and harmonious, there is contrast between backgrounds and foregrounds, shapes are easy to read. TOON artists deploy standard techniques and visual cues like motion lines, graphic text (ZOOM!), and using selective detail to indicate large areas of foliage or other flora, and they do these things well. This stuff is worth learning, and worth doing. It makes the reader's job easier, and especially when you're drawing for new readers, that should be a major consideration.

All right, that's my lecture for the week. Oh, except call me a fuddy-duddy, but I think using pens and brushes to draw children's comics is the way to go. Unless you are VERY good at digital illustration (Bob Staake), you can end up with a monotony of line value that makes it difficult to distinguish the main subject of a drawing.

God I'm such a geek.

Ok. Shake it off, baby. What's the what with Zig and Wikki? What's with those wacky names? How come there's a raccoon on the cover? Is my kid going to snatch this up or what?

Farm by Elisha Cooper - review

Believe it or not, sometimes I get a little tired of picture books. The tiny little morality plays, the brightly-colored cartoon children and their brightly-colored antics... I only read about twenty of these things a week, you'd get a bit jaded too.

But then Elisha Cooper comes out with a new book (or Marla Frazee or Oliver Jeffers or Linda Smith or Lane Smith or...) and I am starstruck again, savoring every word, staring deep into the witty detail of each drawing, and, in Cooper's case, kind of wondering how the heck he DOES that - that thing with his pencil, how a little wavery line is a cat, or a kid, or a cloud, or a tractor.

Let me back up. This book deserves a little perspective. Lord knows Elisha Cooper has employed it - about half the pages in this yearlong portrait of a family farm are long, lean landscapes, full of sky, with an inch of flat earth at the bottom of the page. Have you ever been out in the true Midwest? It is a marvel to me that such an astringent landscape can be so luxurious in color and texture, as if the sky has to put on a better show to compensate for the lack of earthly features. It suits Cooper's style - in books such as A Good Night Walk and Beach, his large, clean forms kept his little wiggly details from ever looking fussy, and the little wiggly details kept the large volumes from looking too austere.

Barn : bean as Big : little.

Not to slight the text. Cooper is as talented almost as talented a writer as he is an artist, and his narrative choices reflect the same little/big aesthetic as his drawings do.

After a storm, the farm swells with sound. The corn rustles. The cattle bellow. A tractor echoes in and out. Birds quarrel. Bugs hum. Their hum is constant.

This language is plain and calm but never boring. There's too much going on for it to be boring: the boy throws tomatoes at birds, the cattle poop. The imagery - "The rows look like wet hair just after it's combed" - is beautifully apt, domestic and understated, and above all, authentic. Very authentic: the family loses a rooster in September, the farmer uses pesticide and fertilizer, and some of the chipmunks don't make it across the road. You almost expect a little sketch of the farmer meeting with a banker.

To sum up, here are some of the things that I love about this book:

• clouds
• the cats that have names
• skinny wavery green beans
• hay bales like a crumbling ziggurat
• a rooster, seemingly deep in thought but really just standing there
• the girl reading in the barn
• dust

  

Long Tail Kitty by Lark Pien - review

Cute cute, but up-to-date and witty too. Four short chapters introduce us to Long Tail Kitty's home and friends, with lots of playing and silliness. Always domestic in scale, but suffused with little fabulousnesses like talking flowers that like cookies, and a tall mouse in a rasta hat. No surprises except for tiny surprises. Vocabulary perfectly suited to the early chapter book reader.

Lark Pien is an indie comic industry mainstay - prolific and imaginative. She self-publishes, she shows in galleries, she goes to shows. She works in Oakland, like my hero Jason Shiga (Meanwhile). Her unexpected, clear colors have given books like (also Oakland-based) Gene Yang's American Born Chinese a fresh look. Having teetered on the brink of non-obscurity for a while, Long Tail Kitty might actually push her over the edge.



Luxuriously produced by Blue Apple Books (from whom I'm going to look for more great things, but boy is that website hard to navigate), on toothy ivory paper that makes Pien's watercolor and ink drawings look freshly painted just for you. Yummy.

¿Quieres algúnos libros bilingüe?

I've got two, both courtesy the Rayo imprint of HarperCollins, and, honestly, they're both so great that I don't even have much to say about them.

Muu, Moo! Rimas de animales / Animal Nursery Rhymes, selected by Alma Flor Alma and F. Isabel Campoy, English versions by Rosalma Zubizarreta, illustrated by Viví Escrivá.

Once Upon a Time: Traditional Latin American Tales / Había una vez: Cuentos tradicionales latinoamericanos, by Rueben Martínez, illustrated by Raúl Colón.

There is no reason any school or public library should be without these two books. Yeah, I said it. The beautifully textured and colored illustrations are of the highest quality, made in paint and pencil by artists who invest their work with detail and thought. The selected folktales and nursery rhymes - some new, some traditional - are interesting and unusual and have a lyrical quality in both languages, good for reading aloud. My hat is off to Harper Collins for putting this kind of investment into bilingual picture books this year.

Hattie the Bad, by Jane Devlin, pictures by Joe Berger - review

Prediction: (ooh! that made me feel like that guy on that show, you know that show where he cuts everybody off? just for a second I felt like that guy! I'm going to say it again:)

Prediction! This thing is going to be a LOT of kids' new favorite book.

Why? Because Hattie is not just bad like chanting that irritating little chant just one more time after she was specifically told to STOP chanting that little chant bad... nooo. Hattie is bad like tying Daddy's car keys to a bunch of helium balloons bad. INVENTIVE bad. Joyful, anarchic, you-did-WHAT?! bad.

Until all the kids aren't allowed to play with her anymore because she is such a hellion. Hellion. Wouldn't you love it if someone called you a hellion? Just once?

So then she becomes Hattie the Good. And just as she was a first-class hellraiser, she is now an A-number-one angel. Peter Pan collars. In bed without having to be told. GOOD POSTURE.

Until all the kids hate her because she's such a priss.

She becomes SO good at being good that she wins a nationwide prize, and is awarded the Best-Behaved Child Ever - on TV. Hattie is horrified. I'm sure she knows that no normal child would ever befriend The Best-Behaved Child Ever, and her expression as she ascends the long stairway to the stage, drowning in applause, is wide-eyed horror. But the wheels are turning beneath her neatly-combed hair, and when she arrives on stage to accept her award, she shows the world the hellion hiding under her angelic pink party dress.

But that's not the end. The next spread in the book shows the reactions of families watching at home. The parents swallow their tongues in shock, but the kids - the kids jump up and CHEER! YES!

Hattie's happy ending shows her back in her sloppy striped t-shirt, slapping orange paint all over the place... but the text promises that she now possesses "a teensy bit of good."

I could sit here and rumble about examples and ideals, and whether or not I think it's a good idea that "good" Hattie is depicted as un-natural... but we are not in that land, in this book. We are in a funner land, in this book, and I am not such a priss.

Compost Stew: An A to Z Recipe for the Earth by Mary McKenna Siddals, illustrated by Ashley Wolff - review

So engaging and interesting, I didn't realize it was also an ABC book until I reached the letter W! Ashley Wolff's collage and gouache illustrations incorporate so many subject-appropriate scraps - food wrappers, newspaper, pictures of food and flowers - that each page is a treasure hunt. A multicultural cast of children load up the composter with garden waste, kitchen scraps, and all kinds of things that would otherwise go in the garbage. Fun to read and informative to boot.