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Everything I Need to Know Before I'm Five by Valorie Fisher - review

 

If I owned as many plastic bugs, letters, numbers, dice, marbles, dolls, blocks, dollhouse furniture, and Matchbox cars that Valorie Fisher does - and at times it feels like I do - those objects would be broken, tangled, mangled, and covered in dust, not bright and sweet and clean like the hundreds (thousands?) of little treasures in this book.

Not that this is important or will contribute to your enjoyment of Everything I Need to Know Before I'm Five, it's just an extra image to conjure. Valorie Fisher's living room, I bet, isn't carpeted with this toy mulch; nor are her plastic roosters living with their plastic kin in the bottom of a plastic bin that has not been excavated SINCE THESE KIDS WERE THREE I mean come on can't we get rid of SOME of this stuff?!

Hrm.

On the other hand, I will bet her house isn't some hyper-organized scrapbooker's heaven, either. I bet it's adorable. I used to know a couple who had decorated the rooms in their house in themes: there was the Maya Room, with frescoes and faux Pre-Columbian statues; and the Fresnel Room, papered in plastic Fresnel lenses. The fireplace in their kitchen was a mosaic of bottle caps, and the mantel was a parade of hundreds of salt and pepper shakers.

I'm a little distracted. We had an earthquake yesterday, it's possible you heard about it. Nobody was hurt, power and water stayed on, looks like we're going to have to have our chimney rebuilt la la la I'm not thinking about that right now... and as I walked around the house picking up framed photographs and art from the floor where they had fallen, I thought of my friends and their house full of knicknacks. What a mess I bet it is over there. My office is floor-to-ceiling books, and when the house started shaking I remember making a very specific wish that I not be buried under them. If Valorie Fisher keeps her doodad collections in her studio on shelves, she might have been buried under half a ton of particulated kitsch.

That's no way to go.

Feeding the Sheep by Leda Schubert, pictures by Andrea U'ren - review

You know what I love for first and second graders? I love a good process book. Whether it's baking a cake or sculpting a clay pot, any book that starts with raw materials and ends with a manufactured item, and shows us the steps in between already has a leg up in my esteem.

Unfortunately, some process books can be - how do I say this - boring.

Not Feeding the Sheep (and not either of the other two books I linked to).

SEASONS by Blexbolex - review

You are familiar with this creature Blexbolex, non? This French illustrator who works in line and silk screen?

Me neither, and Oh My God how have I missed this guy? But wait - I see that he did the illustrations for the recent edition of I Know How to Cook, and that was one big honkin doorstop of a cookbook (and it is French) but I almost had to have it anyway, because of those illustrations.

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

  

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.

The Robin Makes a Laughing Sound: A Birder's Journal by Sallie Wolf - review

Do you have a journal? A place to make lists, sketch things, glue in a clipping or a feather or a scrap of cloth? This is a book that asks, "If not, why not?"

This extremely first-person book of poetry, prose and sketches is ostensibly about birds. But, like many books that are ostensibly about birds, it is really about being alive to the world around you. Sallie Wolf watches the birds around her house for a year, making lists of species, doing little sketches, making poems. And - I don't mean this the wrong way - Sallie Wolf, a talented artist, includes many sketches here that are not intimidatingly well-executed. Gestural, instinctive little drawings. Her poetry is also notable for its humility: grounded in the everyday, she refers to sewing machines and middle school in her imagery. Drafts are included, complete with crossed-out lines. Nothing in this book is overthought or overworked.

I adore this. If you want to show a kid that anyone can make a poem, don't ask them to read Song of Hiawatha. I shared this book with an older friend last week, a hospice patient who peacefully spends a lot of time looking out the window. She's never drawn before, and to my knowledge has never written poetry, but I took her a little stash of art supplies and a sketchbook.

Modest in size, with a design palette as muted as a winter day, with glowing accents like holly berries, this accessible little book will inspire readers to look around and listen, and to record the small events they witness.

When the Shadbush blooms, by Carla Messinger, illustrated by David Kanietakeron Fadden - review

When the Shadbush Blooms, by Carla Messinger, with Susan Katz, illustrated by David Kanietakeron Fadden

"My grandparents' grandparents walked beside the same stream where I walk with my brother, and we can see what they saw."

Clever. Not to mention interesting, cadenced, and grounded. This book takes us through the cycles of the year as defined by the Lenni Lenape people, Native people who originally lived along the eastern seaboard of North America. Each page spread shows the sights and activities of the season - on the left, as experienced by "my grandparents' grandparents" and on the right as experienced by a modern-day Native girl and her family.

Carla Messinger, an educator and museum professional, links the past with the present in a homely, happy, and extremely skillful way. Much of the American landscape has been altered in the six generations expressed by "my grandparents' grandparents," but this book encourages families to look beyond the built environment to discern what has persisted, and to think about how that landscape might have been experienced by those who lived here before. There's a place outside of Cleveland, quite near the nuclear power plant, actually, where you can see lush green forests and Lake Erie in the distance. Every time I passed by Perry, Ohio, I would think, "If I were a hunter-gatherer, I would take one look at this spot and call it home."

There's more information about the Lenni Lenape in the back. "American Girl," indeed!

Labels: age: PreK - Grade3, diverse cultures, diversity, picture books