Tag: family

Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered

The Witching Hour – written by Jennifer Harris, illustrated by Adelina Lirius
Tundra Books, 2025

My mother used to refer to “the witching hour,” that time late in the day when babies, toddlers, and young children seem to act a bit possessed. Whether because they have managed their impulses as best as they can for many hours, or need limits and reassurance, or are just exhausted, this can be a difficult moment for parents. The “hour” may seem like multiple hours.  Jennifer Harris and Adelina Lirius (I reviewed another of her works here) have captured the phenomenon so perfectly in their new picture book that you and your children will be under their spell. Indeed, as Harris solemnly states, “Anything can happen in the witching hour.”

The two mothers in the book are paragons of patience, trying every inventive solution you might imagine, and then some.  First, the acknowledge that anything, “or even nothing at all,” can set the chaos in motion.  A baby overturns a cup of liquid on a table enclosed in a lovely tree trunk. Yes, we all recognize that scene.  An older child wearing an acorn cap looks on, clearly worried about the next phase.  The author is honest in calling it “chaos.” It takes both moms to extricate the screaming toddler from her highchair. An adult chair is overturned, a black cat arches its back, and the sibling covers her ears in terror.

One of the most frustrating features of the witching hour, when it happens, is escalation. “Coos can become cries.  Cries can become caterwauls. Caterwauls can become crescendos.”  Harris uses every figure of speech at her disposal: alliteration, onomatopoeia, literary allusions, rhythm.  Perhaps your child can be calmed by a favorite stuffed animal. The moms try a variety of real wildlife, finally settling on the owl. You know the feeling of relief: “Definitely the owl. Thank goodness for the owl.”

If you were hoping for fairies, you won’t be disappointed.  They arrive and join in the music and dancing, in a kinetic scene of joy mixed with desperation. Lirius’s fabulous pictures evoke an entire universe where the fantastic and the familiar are effortlessly blended. Earth colors predominate and the domestic interiors are as welcoming as those in Dutch still paintings. One mom holds the baby, who looks momentarily transfixed. The other mom is dancing upside down, her feet fixed to a magical broom.  Fairies usually command attention, but here they are a great audience. When the show ends (who could sustain that level of energy), the moms come down to earth. 

There are still many comforting possibilities to try: “this bottle, this banana, this bat.” The moms are creative and full of hope, waiting for the moon to signal that at least for today, it’s time to sleep. Suspension of disbelief sets in for this lovely family of nurturing witches. Tomorrow they we ready to start again, with all the resources at their disposal. For readers, this home of friendly spider webs, baskets of knitting yarn, and a quaint wood stove, seems uncannily real. For the duration of the story, you will be living among friends, and the supernatural is just, natural.

Picking Out Plants and Turning Bad Moods Around

Everyday Bean (Tiny Bean’s Big Adventures, Book #1) – written and illustrated by Stephanie Graegin
Tundra Books, 2025

There are many book series chronicling the adventures of best friends, some human and some animals. Frog and Toad, Ivy and Bean, Stella and Marigold, Mouse and Mole, Elephant and Piggie, are only some of the best-known and loved. The relationship between grandparents and their grandchildren also constitutes the core of picture and chapter books, as well as middle-grade novels (see a list of examples at the opening of this review). In Everyday Bean, Stephanie Graegin has given a little hedgehog and her grandma the same kind of symmetry as peer friendships, but simultaneously the unique empathy and protectiveness of a grandparent, and the loving trust of a grandchild. There is continuity with other books celebrating both friendship and family (such as the books by Lore Segal) but Graegin also offers a new verbal and visual picture of a unique connection.

A key element of Everyday Bean is balance. Each short chapter is an independent story, linking together in a thematic whole. Bean is tiny. Grandma is bigger, from Bean’s perspective, but still small from the viewpoint of the reader. We meet each one of them against a background of white space, emphasizing the scale of these personified animals. As they toast marshmallows together, Bean invents a story about “tiny ghosts,’ while Grandma prefers one about “giant marshmallows.” Bean reminisces about the blanket her grandmother had created for her when she was a baby. Somewhat mysteriously, the blanket kept shrinking, and ultimately became a bandana (another common kidlit theme). The reduction in size is not translated into reduced importance. While in Goldilocks and the Three Bears, each diminishing bowl of porridge, chair, or bed, is fraught with tension, the disparities in size between Bean and her grandma, blanket and bandana, all give a sense of security.

A visit to the plant nursery is one example of Graegin’s understated method. Mr. Green, the store owner, is a rabbit who is carefully attending his lush assortment of plants in the store window. The balcony of his brick shop is also densely filled with plants, in contrast to the following page, where white space allows Bean and Grandma to examine each possible plant without distraction. The exchange between the two is brief; they can intuit each other’s thoughts in this situation. The round, prickly cactus that Bean selects is perfect, because it embodies the qualities of both Bean and Grandma in each other’s eyes.

In “A Box for Bean,” Graegin revisits the cliché about a child preferring to play with an empty box to an elaborate toy. Grandma helps Bean construct a house out of the box, but then respects the child’s imagination, as Bean experiments with the box as a spaceship, pirate ship, and ice cream truck. There is a quiet image of parallel enjoyment, as Bean colors in the box while Grandma sits outside, in her own space, reading. This picture gives further evidence of the pair’s smallness, as flowers dwarf the box and Grandma’s teacup rests on a mushroom.

“Bean’s Bad Mood,” presents the difficult test of how a parent or grandparent responds to a child’s intense emotions. I was reminded of Little Bear, where the mother’s tenderness serves as a gentle test of reality, as in an imagined trip to the moon. Sophie’s patient grandma in Rosemary Wells’s Time Out for Sophie also came to mind. As Bean lies prone on the floor, enclosed in her “dramatic moping mood,” Grandma calmly assures her that bad moods are inevitable. In fact, she has anticipated this event: “I knew this would happen someday…Just be back by next Thursday. I’ll make you a sandwich.” Unhappiness cannot be avoided, but something simple to eat might mitigate its effects. Her well-stocked kitchen is neat and orderly. A portrait of Bean hangs on the wall. Grandmother and granddaughter wear matching boots, with only the older hedgehog using eyeglasses. Bean’s posture of mild defiance, with hand on hip, faces Grandma’s slight stoop, and her use of both hands to hold a cup. Each note in Everyday Bean resonates.

Turning Over a New Leaf

How to Talk to Your Succulent – written and illustrated by Zoe Persico
Tundra Books, 2025

In Zoe Persico’s incredibly inventive graphic novel, Adara’s mother has recently died. She and her father leave California to move in with her grandmother in Michigan. The potential subjects of graphic novels are unlimited, and How to Talk to Your Succulent is not the first one to deal with grief, or strained relationships of parents and children. It is, however, outstanding in its sensitivity, bold graphics, and experimentation with fantasy and reality as equal components of a young girl’s search for the truth. Persico quietly presents a scenario that defies reality, and then proceeds to immerse the reader in a world where it is utterly plausible.

If you are skeptical about human communication with plants, this book will demonstrate the irrelevance of that reservation. Adara is sad and uprooted, even though her grandmother is a pillar of flexible strength. Her father is trying, somewhat helplessly, to cope with his own desolation and anger, which he approaches by inadvertently discouraging his daughter from expressing her feelings. What could be worse than this agonizing moment in all their lives? As it turns out, Adara’s mother had quietly used a special power. Not only did she have the proverbial green thumb at growing plants, she could actually communicate with them: “Like, you know, actual conversations.”

Adara’s grandmother, who resembles a child’s ideal image of a non-judgmental old person as both youthful and wise, also keeps a garden and greenhouse. When Adara’s father realizes that she has taken to wearing her mother’s earrings, which resemble tiny plants, he takes her to visit a nursery where she can select an actual plant of her own. This gesture is the closest he can come to acknowledging her feelings of isolation. At the greenhouse she meets Perle, short for Perle von Nurnberg, a delicately beautiful succulent who, for a devastatingly brief second Adara believes to be speaking in her mother’s voice. Then comes the epiphany: “I can talk to plants just like Mom! I knew it! I knew it!”

There is nothing affected about this unusual series of circumstances. Readers are not asked to suspend disbelief, but to enter Adara’s emotional state without preconceptions. Broadening her narrow circle of relatives, she also meets a new best friend, Winnie, a frustrated artist whose own mother is demanding and unappreciative of her daughter’s talents. Still, she has a living mother and Adara does not. But other people, as Adara learns, have their own problems and also need to be protected in order to thrive. Perle, the plant who demonstrates Adara’s maternal inheritance, is threatened with extinction if Adara cannot learn that same lesson as it applies to her.

The artwork of How to Talk to Your Succulent is inseparable from the text. Persico uses earth colors, jewel tones, and gradations of light in a setting that combines the spaciousness of nature with the enclosed scale of a greenhouse. People’s emotions register with expressive brush strokes, as do the fantastic plants who interact with each other and intersect with humans. The author’s note reaffirms her commitment, both artistic and emotional, to connecting with the reader. She includes mixed media photographic images, a visual and textual demonstration of her method, and even a guide to the plants at the root of her story. Equally innovative for its graphics and its exploration of emotional vulnerability, this book will bloom with every re-reading.

What Makes Us Happy

I Would Give You My Tail – written by Tanya Tagaq, illustrated by Qavavau Manumie
Tundra Books, 2025

This tender, subtle, book, about a boy awaiting the birth of a sibling, is set among the Indigenous people of Nunavut, northern Canada. It is both unique to their culture and universal in its expression of gratitude, both to people and the environment in which they live. The title refers to a conversation between two hares, echoed by other animals, and finally by the brother welcoming his new sister to the world they will share. The language seamlessly weaves together the language of the physical world and metaphor. The pictures, created in colored pencil, draw from Inuit folklore, as well as the specific qualities of the characters.  Sharing is a concept central to the book, part of the overall vision of happiness passed from one generation to the next.

Assuming a child’s perspective in a book for children may seem natural, but it’s not so easily accomplished. Here, from the first page, readers will empathize with the boy, Kalluk’s, feelings of expectation and some anxiety, as he awaits a profound event in his life.  Tanya Tagaq is straightforward in presenting the situation: “Kalluk’s mother is in labor and about to have a baby.” Even the repetition of seemingly redundant terms, “labor,” and “about to have a baby,” reflects the way that children incorporate reality. Qavavau Manumie’s illustration shows the pregnant mother touching her kneeling son in a gesture of reassurance, before he sets out to bring his grandmother to help.

Unhappiness is, realistically, part of Kalluk’s range of feelings at this moment. He asks two hares why they are happy, and learns how the qualities that they need to survive, speed and cleverness, are fulfilling ones. A brook is happy because of the fish who inhabit it. Mothers, animals or human, are happy with the offspring to their care. Explanations are kept to a minimum. Kalluk can sense the sincerity of all the responses.

A picture of Kalluk seated with his back against a giant mitten embodies his feelings of gratitude tinged with sadness. He clearly misses his mother, thinks of the warm mittens she has created for him, and sends her “all the love in his heart.” The way in which that message is convened does not need to be articulated.

Meeting his grandparents, Kalluk has reached the confirmation of all the previous lessons about gratitude and love. His grandmother, Anaanattiaq in their North Qikiqtaaluk dialect, is unapologetically depicted as old; she “stands up slowly, bones creaking and cane shaking.”  Any diminished physical strength is no obstacle, as she states purposefully, “Let’s go greet the new one.” Walking home, the boy asks her about her source of happiness. When she answers “peace,” he requests an elaboration. This dialogue is different from those with the animals. She tells him in the most direct language that peace grows inside each person, as he or she makes a series of choices in life. The right choices will make you proud, and grant “lots of peace,” the kind that is meant to be shared.

When Kalluk and Anaanattiaq come upon “a conspiracy of ravens,” the squawking, lively birds are friendly towards them.  Their requirement for happiness is “knowledge,” a slight variation of the other animals’ answers. Their grandmother, the ravens assure Kalluk, is full of knowledge. That knowledge is put to the most important use when she arrives at Kalluk’s home, where his mother has already given birth and his breastfeeding the baby whom he is now prepared to teach everything he has learned.  Gratitude for food, water, family, and the ability to choose well, are the gifts he brings to her, as well along with a declaration of love.  I Would Give You My Tail is like a perfect circle, enclosing the reader in the complete circle of Kalluk’s journey.

Miigiwe – Giving Away is Good

An Anishinaabe Christmas – written by Wab Kinew, illustrated by Erin Hill
Tundra Books, 2024

Finding a children’s book that may be identified as an instant classic is not to be taken for granted. One book that fits that category is An Anishinaabe Christmas. It brings to mind Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales, the versions illustrated by both Edward Ardizzone and Chris Raschka, not because of any direct similarity, because the books are very different. Both classics evoke a particular, but also universal, immersion in childhood. You leave the book, and return to it, with a feeling of peacefulness without sentimentality.

A young child from an Indigenous community is going with his parents to visit their extended family on the reservation.  It is winter solstice, an inseparable element of their culture’s celebration of Christmas. Baby, as he is called in the book, looks serious, even puzzled, as his mother and father bundle him up and get ready for their car trip. Their evident excitement is in contrast to his hesitation; this experience is typical of childhood. He is concerned that Santa will not find him away from their home. The cultural signifier of this gift-giving figure so common in the West then transitions to the specific deep roots on the Anishinaabe people.

As they drive from the city to the country, the family passes a sign warning not to feed the bears. This prompts a memory that connects Baby to her heritage, and to the natural world that is part of it. Her father repeats the story of how he and other adults had formed a protective circle so that a lost bear cub could find its home. The idea of communalities between humans and animals is organic to the picture, without any ideological explanations. “The bear has a family?” Baby asks. Of course it does, and the father not only answers, but uses the opportunity to introduce words in their native language. (Wab Kinew includes these terms in a glossary at the end of the book, along with an explanation of the cultural syncretism combining Christmas with Indigenous traditions.) The bear also has makwa, family, although it is distinct from the human one.  The bears’ makwa  will “snuggle up in their dens with their babies for Christmas.”

One thing the bear cub will not do is craft a gift for his grandparents, Kookom and Mooshom. The picture of this project is composed of carefully spaced elements, each one of which represents something important: creativity, love, simplicity, focus. Glue, scissors, a red paper heart, become a concrete expression of miigiwe, that Baby’s father has explained: “That means ‘giving away.’ And it’s good.”

The pictures by Erin Hill alternate outdoor panoramas, domestic interiors, and framed scenes of specific activities. A view of the family seated around a wood stove is set an angle and viewed from a slight elevation. Relatives embrace, but there is empty space between different sections of the picture.  Kookom and Mooshom are thrilled to see their grandchild, but they listen carefully to his narration of the car trip. He has processed the truths his father communicated and his repeats them, with understanding, to the older generation. Do you have grandparents? Are you a grandparent? Do you remember your grandparents? You will never forget these scenes.  The family goes outdoors, where they sing about the poetry of winter while playing drums. Whatever winter holiday you celebrate, An Anishinaabe Christmas will resonate as strongly as that chorus.

A Sesame Street Hanukkah Classic

The Count’s Hanukkah Countdown (Shalom Sesame) – written by Tilda Balsley and Ellen Fischer, illustrated by Tom Leigh
Kar-Ben Publishing, 2012

Sesame Street Hanukkah classic books are, admittedly, a somewhat narrow category.  If you know Count Count, you probably realize that Hanukkah is a terrific holiday for him, since it allows him to obsessively enumerate the festival’s eight days and everything associated with them. 

The book opens with Grover grasping a chanukiah (Hanukkah menorah) clutching a dreidel, and welcoming you to the celebration of the Festival of Lights.  Numerals in the text are in bold, making it fun for young children learning to count, but there is also an extended narrative. Grover begins by presenting a shopping list of ingredients to the Count, and modestly asks if that expert at counting had not realized that “furry blue monsters are excellent shoppers.”  The list comprises all the ingredients to make potato latkes (pancakes).

The scene moves to the kitchen of their Israeli friends and extended family.  Sesame Street monsters all have different color skin. Uncle Joe is purple and Aunt Sara is green.  The whole mishpacha (family) are busily engaged peeling potatoes and measuring oil. The Count enters. He is thrilled to see the multi-branch chanukiah, but confused that, on the first night, only one candle plus the shamash (helper candle) is lit. Even though he is the title character, everyone plays an important role in this family-centered holiday. Uncle Joe, seated in his easy chair, relates the historical events commemorated by Hanukkah. His language is so vivid that the children imagine the Greek soldiers riding on their elephants, depicted in a word-bubble-like cloud. They desecrate the Temple, but Uncle Joe quickly advances to the counting element, fortified by heroism. There was only enough oil for 1 night, but it miraculously lasted for 8.

Then comes the consumption of latkes. Count Count evens out the number by eating one, and everyone follows his zany example by taking 8 bites of every food item. These include not only latkes, but the equally traditional sufganiyot (jelly doughnuts).  The game of dreidel, fortunately, also involves the counting of chocolate gelt (coins). The dreidel game scene shows everyone seated in a circle on the floor. The Count is viewed from the back, with his triangular green cape pointing upward.  Even among Muppets, he looks distinctive. Presents also lend themselves to counting. We see only their colorful gift bags, so we can use our imagination about what the bags may contain.

Readers will agree with Grover that Hanukkah, to use his favorite adjective, is “totally awesome,” and to the Count, the “8 is the perfect Hanukkah number.” It’s hard to disagree with him.