Book reviewed:  Snow Sisters! – Kerri Kokias and Teagan White, Alfred A. Knopf, 2018

Actually, this is not about two little bears, but two sisters. They don’t actually live in the woods, either, but the theme of the book reminded me of an A.A. Milne poem, “Twice Times,” which makes me think about parenting and siblings:

“There were Two Little Bears who lived in a Wood,
And one of them was Bad and the other was Good.”

The two bears in the poem initially embody opposite qualities, such as the ability to learn multiplication tables vs. the inability to keep one’s clothes and personal articles neat and tidy.  At the end, they switch roles, with the fastidious fan of arithmetic forgetting all the numbers he had learned while his messy brother learns to use a handkerchief.

In Snow Sisters, by Kerri Kokias and Teagan White, the two sisters, unnamed like the bears, have very different attitudes towards winter weather and towards the outdoors in general. Kokias’ brief phrases serve as captions:

“Coat. Scarf. Hat.
Mittens. Boots.
Cocoa. Blankets. Books.

Throwing. Building.
Baking. Making.”

White’s pictures advance the story, and the words are repeated in a slightly different order, as each sister comes to appropriate the other’s responses.  The images have the look of mid-century children’s illustration and a touch of animation, with a color palette based on reds, purples, and mauve.

Continue reading ““There Were Two Little Bears…”” →

Books reviewed:  Tiny Farm – Suzy Ultman, Chronicle Books, 2017
Tiny Town – Suzy Ultman, Chronicle Books, 2017
Masha and Her Sisters – Suzy Ultman, Chronicle Books, 2017

Suzy Ultman is a designer whose creations include books, but also pillows, enamel pins, and stationary items.  She sells her work through bookstores, but also through Etsy, Crate and Barrel, and other retailers.  Recently Chronicle Books, known both for literary excellence and design ingenuity, has published three of her latest items.  Are they books? Yes.  Might critics legitimately question their status as principally books, as opposed to pretty objects or toys? Also, yes. I would like to defend them, if they need a defense, as picture books, to be read, looked at, and admired.

Both Tiny Town and Tiny Farm are small, chunky board books with sturdy, thick “pages.”  The visitor to Tiny Town enters a tiny bakery, tiny toy, pet, and book stores, and ends in a tiny home.

Continue reading “So They May Not Really Be Books…” →

Books referenced:
Mice Skating – Annie Silvestro and Teagan White, Sterling Children’s Books, 2017
The Tale of Two Bad Mice – Beatrix Potter, Warne, 2002 (100^th  anniversary edition)

There was a snowstorm here today, and while Peter, of Ezra Jack Keats’ The Snowy Day, seems the best representation of a child’s elated experience of the snow (recently featured in stamps from the U.S. Post Office), I decided instead to write about mice.  Mice Skating is an optimistic poetic journey with Lucy, a brave and persistent girl mouse who is undaunted by rough weather or practically anything else.  Her wool hat gives her the courage to face winter while her friends huddle inside like, well, scared little mice.

     “It made her brave.
      It made her bold.
     It made her bloom!”

Not content with enjoying the snow alone, she tries to convince Marcello, even though he replies that he won’t leave their dwelling: “Not unless that snow/is made of mozzarella.”  Lucy is not dissuaded by this lack of enthusiasm: “She fashioned skates out of pine needles/and scurried to the pond.” Mice Skating writer Annie Silvestro’s Bunny’s Book Club offers a complementary indoor view of bravery, with a brave bunny who loves to read seeking entrance to a library at night.

Continue reading “Good Mouse, Bad Mouse” →

Book reviewed:  how to – Julie Morstad, Simply Read Books, 2013

In case you have forgotten how to be a child, Julie Morstad can reacquaint you with the “idiomatic logic,” of this stage of life, immortalized by Annie Ross in the lyrics to the vocalese number, “Twisted,” covered by Joni Mitchell on her “Court and Spark” album

The children in Morstad’s loosely connected series of instructions know “how to watch/where you’re going” by observing your shadow, “how to wash your face” by standing in the rain, and “how to make new friends” by drawing pictures of them with sidewalk chalk.  While adults may forget that a child taking a bath is a mermaid and an alternating stack of children and cushions is a sandwich, younger people know that their parents’ inability to distinguish literal from figurative in just the right way can be frustrating.

 

Continue reading “How to…Be a Child” →

Everybody Bonjours! – Leslie Kimmelman and Sarah McMenemy, Alfred A. Knopf, 2008

Everybody Says Shalom – Leslie Kimmelman and Talitha Shipman, Random House Children’s Books, 2015

There are an impressive number of truly high-quality children’s illustrated books about world geography and culture, presenting in colorful, informative, and sometimes humorous formats the world in all its variety to young readers. Even among these rich offerings, two books by Leslie Kimmelman stand out.  Paired with equally inventive illustrations by two different artists, Sarah McMenemy and Talitha Shipman, they introduce readers to the glories of France and Israel respectively, and to the reassuring return home that grounds these works as stories more than travelogues. (McMenemy has produced a series of miniature panoramas of cities for Penguin Random House, so she is experienced in this genre, to use a French word.)  Shipman has illustrated several other books, including the recent Judah Maccabee Goes to the Doctor, which emphasizes the importance of vaccination to frightened kids. (An article about the role of this book in combating anti-vaxers recently appeared in Tablet Magazine.)

 

In Everybody Bonjours!, Kimmelman takes a linguistic risk by converting the French word for “hello” into a cross-lingual verb. Following blue and black illustrated endpapers featuring all the Paris landmarks, the narrator asserts that in Paris, “everybody bonjours.”

Continue reading “Hello, Goodbye, Bonjours” →

Book referenced:  The Complete Adventures of Curious George: 70^th Anniversary Edition – H.A. and Margret Rey, introduction by Leonard Marcus, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books for Young Readers, 2001 (there is also a 75th anniversary edition with other add-ons, but it is hard to beat the Marcus introduction!)

Curious George occupies a distinct role in children’s literature. Although there are other animals who act like risk-taking toddlers, George has special qualities that make him competitive in the arena of experiments, bad consequences, and the reassurance by adults that his actions are not irreversible.

In Curious George Takes a Job from 1947, the little monkey is seemingly inundated with choices in, as my son-in-law has pointed out, the post- World War II economy in which jobs were there for the taking. (To help your kids learn math using fun and effective methods, you might try my son-in-law’s blog, “Teaching with Problems.”)

After busting out of his cage in the joint (zoo) and sleeping under an elephant’s ear (image), George finds gainful employment, first as a window washer in a mid-century high rise.  (He has already worked as a dishwasher, but this was only to pay off his debts after overturning a pot of spaghetti.)

Continue reading “Curious George: Laborer of Love” →

Books cited:
     Daddies – Janet Frank and Tibor Gergely, Golden Books of Random House Children’s Books, 2011 (reprint of 1953 edition)
     What Do People Do All Day? – Richard Scarry, Golden Books of Random House Children’s Books, 2015 (reprint of 1968 edition)

If you have wondered how to explain to your child exactly what adult people, male and otherwise, do, since in the universe of children,  grown-ups may “go to work” to do unspecified “things” before returning home, here are two options, both from Golden Books ( (For a wonderful overview of Golden Books, including author and illustrator biographies, see Leonard Marcus’s Golden Legacy: The Story of Golden Books).

Continue reading “Review Essay– Children Have Wondered: What Do People Do All Day?” →

Book Reviewed:  Tallulah’s Nutcracker – Marilyn Singer and Alexandra Boiger, Clarion Books, 2013

When you pair the highly original talents of an author who can bend words through both poetry and prose, and an illustrator who specializes in creating persistent and confident female characters, the result should be predictably good.

Marilyn Singer and Alexandra Boiger’s Tallulah’s Nutcracker, one in a series of stories about a little girl with ballet dreams and the energy to match them, is not a rendition of Clara and her Nutcracker Prince’s mysterious nighttime adventure.  It is instead an episode in the chronicles of Tallulah’s lessons about balancing ambitions and reality. The text and pictures are realistic, but with a touch of the magical which makes the Nutcracker story appealing in almost any incarnation.

Continue reading “Break a Leg, Tallulah” →

Book Reviewed:  City Moon – Rachael Cole and Blanca Gómez, Schwartz and Wade Books, 2017

Children like to know that the moon will stay right where it is in the night sky, whether viewed during a walk outside, or safely inside their bedroom.  Rachael Cole’s and Blanca Gómez’s City Moon follows a mother and young child on a walk through their city neighborhood at night, as the pair discovers together that the moon will follow them everywhere, and finally rest, along with the boy, at the end of his bedtime routine.

The book both responds and adds to the tradition of childhood moon appropriation in such classics as Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd’s Goodnight Moon, Frank Asch’s Moongame, and Kevin Henkes’s Kitten’s First Full Moon.   What does it add to this genre?  An urban setting and a new conversation between an adult and child who learn that “There is only one moon.”

Continue reading “Good Night, City Moon” →

Book Reviewed:  Happy Hanukkah, Curious George – Emily Flaschner Meyer and Mary O’Keefe Young, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012

Can you remember the world before board books?  Reading to the youngest children, even babies, involved the possibility that they would tear the pages and teethe on bound or paperback volumes supposedly geared for their age.  Now many classics are available in board book format for toddlers. (This will be the subject of a future blog entry.)

It is almost the end of Hanukkah and a week before Christmas. Ramadan will arrive in the spring of 2018. Curious George, the irrepressible and non-verbal symbol of innocent childhood rule bending, celebrates all three holidays.

Continue reading “Happy Hanukkah, Curious George (and Christmas and Ramadan)” →