The Button Book – Sally Nicholls and Bethan Woollvin, Tundra, 2020

As soon as you open The Button Book to read with a young child, you will probably be reminded of Hervé Tullet’s innovative Press Here.

Certainly, Sally Nicholls and Bethan Woollvin have created an homage to that modern classic, but their new book stands on its own. The Button Book is an invitation to participate in a funny and tactile experience where words and images allow kids to create meaning.  While the book shares a basic premise with Tullet’s, its crazy and colorful sequences of instructions and results is also quite independent, a kind of Rube Goldberg mechanism of momentum ending in a soothing wind-down of sleep.

The premise of the book is the unpredictability of what will happen when you “press” a particular button.  For example, what will be the result of pushing a blue pentagon? You probably won’t be asked to clap, because that action has already been connected with a triangle of a different color.  Will children figure out that each button has its own consequence, and, if so, how long will it take for that reasoning to kick in?  One thing you will predict is the entertainment value, especially as the whole journey takes place among an endearing group of animals drawn in simple shapes and heavy black outlines, each with its own distinctive splash of color.

They are all curious; just look at that fox, an animal known for craftiness. He seems rather tentative poking that red button.  Children will identify with the sense of mild insecurity, and then relief and laughter.  The purple-induced tickle attack involves turning a turtle upside down, but everyone seems to be having a great time. Adults may find themselves becoming as drawn into this world of cause and effect as much as the kids.  What might pushing a green button produce? The answer might surprise you about this soothing color!

The Button Book is not a mere novelty. Parents and other caregivers will share with their children a sense of reassurance that one button calls for hugs. (image) The very human interactions among the book’s animal friends lends it a different dimension from Tullet’s inspired visual game.  The book is about actions and their results, but also about the social meanings of play.  Even children realize that games have to end; they, along with their parents, find this fact reassuring.  The Button Book includes this happy transition  in a picture where white has become the calm darkness of bedtime, but the animals’ pink feathers and red fur remind readers that the cycle of activity will begin again.  The Button Book will bear reading again and again.

Story Boat – Kyo Maclear and Rashin Kheiriyeh, Tundra, 2020

The story of refugees, of their vulnerability and courage, of the injustice of often-chaotic journey from peril to freedom, is an endless one.  While young picture book readers cannot assimilate the particulars of each group’s experience in its search for a stable home, they can understand the fears of being uprooted and the joy and finding safety.  In Story Boat, author Kyo Maclear and illustrator Rashin Kheiriyeh do not reduce the lives of immigrants to an easy object lesson in tolerance. Instead, they create together an incredible poetic and visual metaphor of strong and determined people, without losing sight of their individuality or the immediacy of their need for freedom.  Children will identify with the book’s resilient characters on their journey towards a haven through space and time. (For more on the brilliant work of Kyo Maclear, who often teams with Julie Morstad, see here and here and here and here.)

The book opens with a line of pilgrims against a background of bare trees and flying birds.  They are old and young, dressed for a harsh winter, but their origin could be a number of different locations in a globe full of the dispossessed.  Maclear’s poem begins, “Here we are./ What’s that?/Well, here is…/Here is just here.”

To children, these words are not a surrealist evocation of life’s impermanence; they are just the way their world is.  They have no control of their destination, and the adults with them have little more. But they do have tangible objects and sturdy dreams.  An oversized teacup becomes a central image of the book. It is a homely domestic object which the children use to keep warm, “Every morning,/As things keep changing,/We sit wherever we are/And sip, sip, sip.” But an enormous version of the humble cup becomes a paradox, both a home and a vehicle, a magic carpet that alludes to both Middle Eastern and universal traditions of the fairy tale.

The children’s lives alternate between the need for some continuity and their longing for a place of safety and welcome.  Both the pictures and the text reinforce this delicate tension.  Their blanket is the familiar “color of apricots,” although the people surrounding them are “weary/From hoping and hurrying.” Somehow, the steady gaze of their mother feeding an infant, and the permanence of important objects, need to be enough to sustain them.  Some of those objects are pencils and notebooks, implements which help them to dream and to tell a story. Dreaming is important, but so is recording their upheaval and turning it into a tale which makes sense.  The transience of their tent city is transformed into meaning in a sentence, “Sometimes it’s here/just for a moment,” and the image of a community interacting as if their setting were normal.  Then, just as their cup was elevated to a magic carpet, a lamp becomes a lighthouse leading them through rough seas. Fantasy and beauty take the form of flowers as ladders, allowing the children to literally rise above the chaos which surrounds them.

By the time the refugees reach a village where they are helped across a dock by caring hands, readers know that both the kindness of strangers and the children’s own determination have played a role in their lives.  Helpless to change the facts of their existence, they have nonetheless learned how to respond with their own narrative:

Every week,
We dream and draw,
Make and play,
Search for treasure,
Find our way
And grow,
And wait
And wait
And wait
Adding words to this story.

In Story Boat, finding refugee is not easy and life is governed by the kind of contingencies that are incomprehensible to children.  Words can’t save their lives, but they do allow their authors to impose a kind of structure on their experience.  Dreaming, drawing, searching, and waiting, are central to children’s lives, whether they are forced to leave their homes and hope for freedom, or whether they are young readers learning empathy.  The unforgettable beauty and strength of Story Boat’s story make it a journey for everyone.

The Queen Bee and Me – Gillian McDunn, Bloomsbury, 2020

If you think that the queen bee metaphor for mean girls has been exhausted for middle grade readers, Gillian McDunn’s new novel may change your mind.  Meg Garrison is a kind, nerdy, and sometimes anxious preteen, in thrall to her best friend, Beatrix Bailey.  Meg is in a constant state of trying to maintain her equilibrium by anticipating which of her preferences or her momentary impulses at independence may upset their relationship, one which, to the reader, seems to be less than rewarding.  Yes, Beatrix is wonderfully accomplished and her family is wealthy and influential in their small town, yet, like the queen of the hive, her controlling nature never allows for truly reciprocal affection.  McDunn avoids simplistic moralizing and the reassuring message that, in the end, the worker bees will thrive. Instead, she presents nuanced characters who struggle with finding their place in the ecosystem of family and friends.

Meg is smart and inquisitive, the kind of girl who likes learning about the mechanics of things; she has “a jumpy kind of brain.” Her mom has devised a rule for making sure that this positive quality doesn’t wreak havoc on their home: “You have to ask first. You can never touch anything that is still plugged in. And anything you take apart, you have to put back together.”  Beatrix is a graceful dancer and an all-around model of perfection, the kind of girl who organizes other girls in watching the boys play.  Then Hazel, a new girl, moves to their community. She has a single mom, and singular sense of style, and a proud defiance of conformity in all its menacing forms.  When Meg decides to take a science elective along with Hazel, leaving dance class to Beatrix, the queen bee goes to any length to ensure that Meg learns a lesson about obeying the queen.

Beatrix’s behavior is chilling, but McDunn conveys her deep insecurity not through exaggerated examples, but everyday consistent proof of her callousness. (One incident involving embarrassing Hazel with a gift of acne medicine is truly awful, but completely within her character’s norms.)  Meg’s parents are a counter example to the values which Beatrix has assimilated at home; they support her unconditionally, although her understanding mother at times projects her own childhood traumas on Meg, even failing to trust her daughter’s judgment.  No one in this novel is perfect, and emotional growth, just like in real life, is more possible for some than for others.

McDunn expertly weaves the bee theme into the narrative without belaboring the similarities between drones and insecure kids, queens and rich girls.  Hazel’s obsession with bees leads to a science class partnership with Meg, who needs to confront her own fears of the insect, but also to negotiate the ups and downs a more mutual relationship.  Secondary characters match the subtleties of the main ones: Ms. Dupart, the empathic science teacher; Hazel’s practical and independent mom, Astrid; Mr. Thornton, the kindly literacy teacher who is sometimes overpowered by the determination of his students to turn on one another.  By the book’s conclusion, Meg has succeeded in putting things back together, but there are still loose pieces for readers to contemplate. Returning to the bee hive model and Meg’s project, “they beat their wings to cool the hive….they flex their muscles to create warmth…They need one another to survive.”

Lately Lily: The Adventures of a Travelling Girl – Micah Player, Chronicle Books, 2014

Books about geography, broadly speaking, for kids, are a lot of fun. They may include maps, and specific information about places in the wide world with which young readers are unfamiliar. They may inculcate both enthusiasm for and knowledge about different cultures and languages.  Often, they rely on colorful pictures to make the different manageable and appealing.

Micah Player’s lately lily (the title on the cover has lower case, script letters), mainly presents the idea of venturing out as intrinsically fun.  The endpapers feature luggage in several shapes and colors, including a pet carrier. On one valise, Lily’s stylish monogram introduces her. By the end of the book, preschoolers will not have learned much about the different countries which Lily has visited, which are not always named in the text. Instead, they will have met a cute little girl open to new experiences, but also happy to return home.

So who is Lily? She has the exaggerated big eyes so popular in commercial illustrations and toys, the spunk of Eloise without the malice, and the familiarity of a figure from Disney’s It’s a Small World ride.  For children too young to focus on specifics about the countries Lily visits, her jaunt around the world is undeniably appealing.  Player’s pictures have bright colors, geometric shapes, and lots of other children.  The adults are generic; even Lily’s parents, who she informs us “travel all over the world for work” in a moment of rare insight into her life, are depicted from the neck down only.

Lily smiles in every picture, and she totes along her “best friend,” a stuffed animal (donkey?) named Zeborah.  This transitional object no doubt helps her to feel secure as she boards canoes, hot air balloons, trains, and bumper cars.

When Lily visits London, we infer where she is by the double-decker bus and other landmarks.  Paris and Mexico are similarly cinematic, and if the costumes of some of the locals tend towards the stereotypical, Lilly herself is a broadly drawn caricature of a cosmopolitan, urban child.  One lovely scene in the metro has Lily holding on to the pole, earbuds and Mp3 player at hand, while her friend, Zeborah, is seated, reading an ad for pizza.  The other passengers are casually multicultural; Player emphasizes diversity in a natural and unaffected way throughout the book.

If you’re a purist, you might object to the fact that the Mona Lisa has Lily’ face, although the same page shows Lily as a chef and a mountain climber. She is just trying on possibilities, from playing guitar to ice fishing, to brushing a llama’s fur.  One intriguing picture has her writing a letter to “Dearest Audrey.” Is this an allusion to the beautiful world citizen Audrey Hepburn, and if, to which movie? Either Roman Holiday or Sabrina would fit the theme of trying on new identities in the most glamorous locales.

Children will also enjoy the book’s comforting end because, after all, there’s no place like home.  Lily and Zeborah take a well-deserved nap, having arranged the tchotchkes from her trip on a shelf.  The book’s title pops up from a retro typewriter, promising that Lily won’t forget to write up an account of her trip.  You are your children will enjoy reading it, if it is this innocent and playful invitation to look explore and return.

What’s Up, Maloo? – Geneviève Godbout, Tundra Books, 2020

Geneviève Godbout’s new picture book, her first as both author and illustrator, is about a problem both typical and rare. Maloo is a joey who can’t seem to master the art of hopping, not a problem encountered every day in the natural world.  With few words and many pictures in her inimitable cinematic style, the author and artist also tells another and more common story, about young members of any species struggling to achieve an elusive goal.  With the encouragement of friends, Maloo joyously succeeds in learning what every young kangaroo must.

When we first meet Maloo, he is able to hop with impressive ease, rising above a field of pink flowers as if in flight. Suddenly, something goes wrong, his disorientation expressed in one word, “Hop?”  His friends’ untiring support reassures him that they will try everything to help him become himself again.

When Maloo visits his wombat friend in the fellow-marsupial’s cozy burrow, the joey looks bereft but the wombat is full of empathy, as he puts aside domestic tasks to help Maloo. Along with a koala and a versatile crocodile, the wombat seeks unfamiliar environments and activities to promote hopping: playing ball in the water, and even blowing air in his face with an outdated electric fan.  Nothing works.

After a low point, when the four friends appear as sad silhouettes dwarfed by a giant tree, the turning point arrives. The reward for his friends’ perseverance is the opportunity to briefly feel like a kangaroo.

Looking at Maloo in his bright yellow overalls, I was reminded of another children’s classic about a kangaroo with a frustrating limitation.  In Emmy Payne and H.A. Rey’s Katy No Pocket, the issue isn’t jumping, but rather the lack of a pouch without which a kangaroo is unable to carry her young.  In Katy’s case, the kindness of a human friend, who equips her with a giant apron, allows her to transport not only her own joey, but every baby animal in need of a ride.  While I don’t know if the homage to Payne and Rey is deliberate,  Geneviève Godbout’s work reflects a tradition of illustration in which the common experiences of childhood become visual (see my reviews of her other illustrations here and here). The energetic appeal of Maloo’s story will be welcomed by every child who has tried, faltered, and tried again.

I Love My Glam-Ma – Samantha Berger and Sujean Rim, Orchard Books, 2019

This is a bright and fashionable ode to grandmas, but it is also tender and reassuring.  The grandmas lovingly described and jauntily portrayed by Samantha Berger and Sujean Rim are one hundred percent supportive of the grandchildren who love them.  Whether pulling the children in wagons, or rolling along with them in a wheelchair, these women are in charge where it counts: making blankets into reading forts, cooking without a recipe, emptying an enormous purse full of treasures.  I have added it to my list of favorite picture books about grandparents, along with Vanessa Brantley-Newton’s Grandma’s Purse, and Drawn Together, by Minh Lê and Dan Santat.

Maybe you are worried, if you are a grandma, or perhaps go by one of the other titles listed in a two-page spread of portraits: Yaya, Abuela, Mom-Mom, Oma, or Bubbe (me). Maybe you would prefer to be more understated, less flashy, not the glam-ma who chooses not to just arrive, but to “make a grand entrance.” Maybe you don’t wear a lot of makeup or perfume. Don’t worry. Those are only the external attributes of grandmotherhood extolled in this book.

The more important qualities are making your grandchildren feel like unique individuals worthy of every moment of your time. Some of that time might involve activities like sipping juice from a coconut while wearing a flower in your hair and a lei, but others are as simple as letting your granddaughter apply lipstick to your lips and the general area of your face. (Both the grandma and the granddaughter wear glasses, and the grandma has stylish gray hair.) My favorite image is the serenely quiet one of a child asleep on her grandmother’s lap in a rocking chair.  It doesn’t get better than that.

The text is simple, repeating to children on each page how they are the “guest of honor” in their grandmothers’ life. The pictures are colorful and bright, alluding to older images of femininity but updating them with a broad range of roles, and multicultural characters.  Whether or not the grandmothers you know build sandcastles at the beach, or keep a bottle of classic scent with them at all times (GM No. 75), they, and the grandchildren who are at the center of their lives, might recognize themselves in the pages of this lovely book.

It Began With a Page: How Gyo Fujikawa Drew the Way – Kyo Maclear and Julie Morstad, Harper, 2019

Just like the beautiful and energetic children in her books, Gyo Fujikawa became absorbed in her tasks before she was even conscious of doing so.  In Kyo Maclear and Julie Morstad’s homage to an artistic and literary pathfinder, Fujikawa begins with a page, seated at a table with her poet mother.  (Maclear and Morstad are each brilliant in their own right with many great books to their names; for reviews of their other work together, see here and here.) The following two pages show the preternaturally gifted Gyo doing ordinary kid stuff: eating noodles, playing with a younger sibling, getting dressed.  With the elegant humor typical of this author and illustrator, we also see her reading Goethe’s Theory of Colour, a volume nearly as big as she is. This is the Gyo Fujikawa whom readers come to know in the book, an exceptional figure dedicated to depicting the ordinary with subtlety and compassion.

Women were important influences in Fujikawa’s development as an artist.  Seated under a table, she looks up at her mother discussing with other Japanese-American women why their rights should not be curtailed.  It is impossible to separate the impact of the book’s illustrations and design from its text: “Mama’s friends had come and they were full of talk.”  The “talk” is given form in larger font, like chalk letters teaching a lesson: “We sailed to America with our best kimono to see what we could be…such disappointment…we need the vote.  We need rights.”  Their boldly demanding tone contrasts with their elegant long skirts and pointed-toe boots, as they turn to one another around a table decorated with flowers and painted china.  Gyo is learning, to listen, absorb, and draw what she sees around her.

As a student, Fujikawa is ignored by her haughty white schoolmates, and in her college art classes, male students ignore her.  Still, her female teachers had recognized her as “this girl whose eyes missed nothing.”

She travels to Japan, immersing herself in the work of traditional masters.  A successful beginning working for Disney is interrupted by the trauma of her family’s internment, along with thousands of other citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.  She is grief-stricken, but “When the world felt gray, color lifted her.”  Throughout the book, Morstad alternates black, white, and gray with full-color images, linking Fujikawa’s heightened perception of color to her insistence on portraying children of every color in her books.  Resistance from publishers who remind her that this could not happen in America of the 1960s, “a country with laws that separated people by skin color,” Fujikawa refuses to take no for an answer.

In Morstad’s idiosyncratic art, delicate beauty pairs with powerful drama.  There are black and white drawings of families forced to leave their homes for prison camps, as well as watercolor and pencil drawings of Fujikawa leading a parade of her own creations, multiracial children enjoying life.  The accuracy of her images balances their interiority, as people’s feelings become as real and accessible as the details of their clothing.  The book consistently resists any artificial separation of medium or message.  There is a sense of triumph in Fujikawa’s success in spite of initial setbacks, but a detailed timeline with photos, as well as an author and illustrator’s note and list of sources, provide further information about Fujikawa’s life and career.

Fox and Raccoon – Lesley-Anne Green, Tundra Books, 2018

Fox and Raccoon live in the beautifully created world of Juniper Hollow, a fictional village where animals delicately crafted out of felt, balsa wood, and fabric support one another through friendship based on empathy.  Raccoon is perhaps a little over-zealous, so eager to help his friend that he almost undermines the surprise she has planned.  It’s difficult to overemphasize the appeal of this book.

For one thing, to quote the narrator about Raccoon, “Crafting is one of his specialties, and he was happy to help!”  Green’s meticulous approach to physically building her models matches her text based on verbal detail supporting the book’s theme. “That’s how things are in Juniper Hollow —friends like to help friends out” states the story’s purpose, which is made tangible by observations such as “Raccoon chose a beautiful green yarn because that’s Fox’s favorite color.”

Reading the book is like entering a dollhouse, where each room or outside environment is primed for imaginative play.  In her kitchen, Fox wears a neat white apron, napkins are carefully folded, and the food cannisters are in pastel colors or polka dots.  The post office is logically staffed by an efficient beaver, in charge of compartments filled with letters. The scenes are anything but artificial, and each warm encounter between Raccoon and other members of his community reinforces the patience and commitment which they feel towards one another.

The two-page spread of Raccoon looking for juniper berries reminds you of your favorite community-supported agriculture co-op, where you sometimes collect unusual produce and then need to think of something to prepare with it: “We’ve got blueberries, blackberries, gooseberries, huckleberries –”  Raccoon doesn’t have that problem. He knows he needs juniper berries for Fox’s recipe and he is determined to find them.

Adults will marvel at the process of illustrating a picture book with these original figures, the products of both imagination and incredible skill.  For children, the pictures are simply as real as the toys they play with and project into pretend scenarios.  The story line is not preachy.  Raccoon is motivated by love for his friend, Fox, and Beaver, Hedgehog, Badger, and Cat all share this quality with him.  The book enters the canon of animal coexistence in such classics as Winne the Pooh, Rabbit Hill and Elephant and Piggie.  (Fans of felting will also like Tundra’s Great Job, Mom and Great Job, Dad by Holman Wang.) Further visits to Juniper Hollow by Lesley-Anne Green would be welcome.

Sholom’s Treasure – Erica Silverman and Mordicai Gerstein,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005

The Sholom of Sholom’s Treasure is the great Yiddish writer Sholom Aleichem (1859-1916), best known in the English-speaking world as the author of stories about Tevye the Dairyman that would become the basis for Fiddler on the Roof. Gerstein both wrote and illustrated many books, on both Jewish and non-Jewish themes, including his Caldecott-winning The Man Who Walked Between the Towers. In celebrating his life and career, I would like to focus on his biography of Sholom Aleichem as a young boy who used his fertile imagination to interpret the world, much as Gerstein would grow up to do.

Erica Silverman describes the adversities of Sholom Rabinovitch‘s (Sholom Aleichem) childhood in a poor Jewish community in Ukraine.  He reveres his father, and recognizes how reading, singing, and religious observance elevate him over the cares of his difficult life: “And when Father was happy, Sholom was happy.”  Gerstein portrays the boy holding on to the balustrade of a staircase, looking down at his father, full of hope.  When he begins kheyder, school, his idealism crashes into reality, in a typical experience for a sensitive and creative child. We see him looking into the door of the schoolroom and observing the chaos within, as a frowning teacher twists one boy’s ear, while other students mock one another and cause as much disruption as possible within the severe confines of their “learning” environment. Gerstein’s image of Jewish life in late nineteenth century Europe is not romanticized.

Sholom adapts; what choice does he have?  He and a friend hear about a secret treasure allegedly buried in their village. Sholom is convinced he can end his family’s poverty and anguish, but the treasure never materializes and the family moves to another town.

Gerstein’s rendition of their trip in a horse-pulled wagon, in shades of grey and black, captures the bleakness of their existence, but his pictures soon return to the antic humor, tinged with desperation, as Sholom tries to survive a new class in a new but equally dismal school. A series of pictures show his facial expressions as he entertains the class, with the darkness of Goya or Hogarth. The beautiful full-page picture of Sholom’s bar mitzva adds deep red to the earth colors; it is a moment of pride and accomplishment for him, although his grandmother has warned him that he is now a man and “it was time to stop his clowning.”

Like Sholom Aleichem himself, that moment never came for Gerstein.  The young author learns over time that his intelligence, wit, and literary talent will become the treasure which he never found hidden under the hills.  Gerstein’s pictures in Sholom’s Treasure show people who are kind, determined, demonic, and cruel. All of his books confront the full complexities of the world in a way which is accessible to both young readers and adults.  Silverman’s “Author’s Note” characterizes the Yiddish author as “a cultural hero.”  Mordicai Gerstein will certainly be remembered the same way.

Where’s Baby? – Anne Hunter, Tundra Books, 2020

Toddlers love books about babies, whom they recognize from their own not-so-distant past.  Anne Hunter’s Where’s Baby? recognizes this fact, as well as the its corollary, that animal babies can also represent little humans.  In a warm and witty homage to such children’s book classics as P.D. Eastman’s Are You My Mother?, Hunter reverses the story of an anxious child seeking its mother, to one of a worried parent looking for a playful baby who seems to know that she is driving him crazy!

In the tradition of picture book excellence for this age group, a predictable outcome is questioned on every page, as young readers watch the baby fox elude his determined father.

The quest to find a “missing” baby unfolds in simple text and soft pictures where black, white, and grey depict an unthreatening natural world, where no animals reacts with anything worse than annoyance or mild fear.

The baby herself stands out in every picture as she hides in plain sight, her light red fur not bright enough to be obtrusive, but different enough to allow for easy identification.  The father looks everywhere, following a toddler’s logic of possible places: inside other animals’ homes.

While up in a tree or underwater might not seem likely locations for a missing fox, the father never gives up, nor does he succumb to panic.  There are plenty of visual and verbal reminders about the persistence of parental love in the words bubbles and pictures. Caregivers reading with children will enjoy the inside of the family’s cave, leftovers from lunch on the floor, and a framed family portrait on the wall.

An homage is not an imitation, and Hunter alludes to P.D. Eastman’s classic in a clever and original way.  In one two-page spread, the fox parent calls hopefully, “Ba-by! Are you up in the tree?” only to receive the clear response from an owl, “I am up in the tree, but I am not your baby.”

Contrast this to Are You My Mother, where the baby bird encounters a baffled kitten who says nothing, a sadly baffled dog, and a cow who challenges his very intelligence with the question, “How could I be your mother?…I am a cow.” And don’t forget the terrifying snort! Even though he turns out to be the hero of the story, he terrifies the motherless bird by picking him up with his fire-breathing power.

When parent and child are reunited, as in Are You My Mother? the child has the last word. Both books feature a warm embrace and reassurance of parental love, but the fox in Hunter’s new classic seems joyfully emboldened to continue testing boundaries.  Read the books together or separately, but don’t miss this new interpretation of the resilient bond between loving parents and their persistent children.