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| 1250903130
| 9781250903136
| 1250903130
| 4.37
| 753
| Jun 25, 2024
| Jun 25, 2024
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it was amazing
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Picture books are so weird. They’re one of those odd objects that are simultaneously steeped in nostalgia while at the same time appearing as complete
Picture books are so weird. They’re one of those odd objects that are simultaneously steeped in nostalgia while at the same time appearing as completely new to their intended audience. Adults mostly want to introduce their kids to the books they themselves remember. And since the average adult probably doesn’t tend to remember more than five or six picture books from the past, they tend to equate the notion of “classic” with that nostalgic feeling. That’s why, when they have kids of their own and they realize that man does not live on five or six picture books alone, they stumble up to bookstore employees and children’s librarians and ask for picture books that “feel classic”. And for whatever reason, we all know what they mean, right? Put most simply, it’s a picture book that won’t age poorly. It’s not trying to be zany or wacky or wink too broadly at the audience. A “classic” is supposed to be timeless somehow. Adults don’t know how to define that feeling exactly, but they’ll know it when they see it. That’s why a certain subset of new picture books that are produced every year try to tap into that feeling. The cheapo ones go for the easy and unearned I-love-you feels while the more ambitious try something a little bit different. Loren Long? He’s a member of the “different” crowd. Keen to try something new, his The Yellow Bus is a fascinating combination of a kind of book he’s been doing for years and a whole new direction. The end result is subtle but exceedingly clever when you’re paying attention to what he’s accomplished. Is it a future classic? The answer is in the goats. In an aerial view, a yellow bus drives through a town. The town is black and white and the bus the only spot of color. The book reads, “There was once a bright yellow bus who spent her days driving.” As we watch, the children who ride her grow older and time passes. Soon the bus is recommissioned to drive older adults. When it can no longer drive it serves as a place to keep warm by the unhoused. After that it’s dragged off to a pasture and inhabited by goats. In each case, the bus is happy with its lot. But when the goats are removed and it finds itself all alone, things look a bit bleak. You might think that the sudden flooding of the valley where the bus sits would be a problem, but now the bus is filled with wonderful colorful fish. “And they filled her with joy.” Front and back endpapers show the town before and after the man made lake, and extensive backmatter discusses Long’s process. The closest kin to this book is, without a doubt, The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton, and for good reason. Long has always felt like the natural successor to the Burton throne, preferring as he does to anthropomorphize everything from trucks to farm equipment in his stories. In The Little House specifically, there is a similar tale of a human made creation going from use to disuse back to use again. Long’s bus, of course, finds a use completely apart from its original purpose, whereas Burton’s house just repeats its cycle over again. Of the two, I have to admit that Long’s vision feels more satisfying and more authentic. But of course there’s another famous picture book that came to mind when I read this book, and that was the hugely controversial The Giving Tree. Just as Long peppers his book with the phrase, “And they filled her with joy,” Shel Silverstein’s book has the repeated phrase, “And the tree was happy”. But where the tree is used and abused by a single child in the prime of that tree’s life, the bus lives out her days as long as she can, and is used in every possible way, long past her expiration date. The words may be similar, but the tone could not be more different. The trouble with reading a readaloud picture book in your head is that sometimes you miss some of the more pertinent verbal clues. The surprising alliteration of the text was something I didn’t realize was even there until I found myself reading the book to a group of adults. Each time someone enters the bus there’s a slew of onomatopoetic sounds to replicate. Children, “pitter-patter, pitter-patter, giggle, giggle-patter” while goats, “Clip-clop, clip-clop, maaah, maaah-clop.” There’s a pattern to how Long writes out these sounds, but I would recommend practicing a couple times before you try it out on an audience. Still, it really is made for an audience’s ears. Not every picture book can be both a lapsit title and one prepared to enthrall a group. The Yellow Bus appears to have threaded that needle with panache. Now as I mentioned, Loren Long has spent long hours giving transportation human faces. His Otis series about a little tractor comes immediately to mind, as do the Trucktown books he did with David Shannon, Jon Scieszka, and David Gordon. This book is a far more realistic vehicle, but there is at least one moment when Long can’t resist slipping in a single moment of possible anthropomorphizing. After the goats have left the bus and it’s truly alone again, there’s a moment when the bus sits in a snowy field and one icicle falls from her headlight, mimicking a tear. I suppose there is also the fact that the bus is a “she” throughout the book, but you kind of have to do that if you want kids to identify with objects. Pronouns count. And now the confession. The first time I read the book, I thought it was merely okay. I honestly didn’t give it much thought. Loren Long has been in this game for years and years, and the trouble with being a reliable illustrator is that sometimes people take you for granted. Long first rose to prominence when he illustrated Madonna’s Mr. Peabody’s Apples back in 2003. Everyone sort of agreed that his style was keen, even if her writing was crap. He did a lot of book jacket work and other projects before consistently ending up on the best seller lists with Truck Town and Otis. Personally, I like his books best when there’s a touch of realism to them. I had been very taken a couple years ago with his work on Someone Builds the Dream by Lisa Wheeler, where he employed a far more realistic style than I’d seen in a while. With that in mind, you’d think I’d have pored over every possible detail in The Yellow Bus, but on my first read I sort of read/skimmed it and put it aside. It took other people showing me the details and who read it aloud for me to realize how much Long has put into this title, both personally and professionally. We’re a long way from Madonna now. Part of the fun is that Long has packed this thing to the gills with details. To do this, the masochistic fella created a three-dimensional model of the town where it takes place, entirely for his own purposes. But, of course, the town changes over the course of the book, so Long also had to change the model as he created the book to reflect those changes. There are loads of other things to look at as well, though. Pay particular attention to the mom and dog seeing off their kids at the beginning of the book. You can actually see mom’s pregnant belly become a little girl, and the puppy beside her turn into a dog as you flip through. I could also see a kid flipping back and forth between the endpapers (where you get the aerial view of the town) and shots from within the town, figuring out where each scene takes place. It is a book that rewards a close eye. None of that has anything to do with the style or mood of the book’s art, of course. For this book Long has gone above and beyond, using everything from graphite pencils, charcoal pencils, charcoal dust, acrylic paints, and even X-Acto blades to get chain-link fences just right, and Q-tips for accurate smudging. There is also a general feeling that black and white books for children do poorly. In my experience this is certainly true of comics and graphic novels, but maybe less so for picture books. Here, the book is not colorless but it does use its color carefully and sparingly. The cover gives a bit of a hint of that. There you can see how colorful the bus itself is. The most color happens when living creatures are inside in the bus. The world around them may be black and white, but inside there is life and color and vitality. It’s also true for anything touching the bus. So the goats that stand atop it are just as hued as the ones inside. Where this all gets really interesting, of course, is that final scene of the bus under water. It’s almost as if the color of the bus has leeched out into the surrounding lake, making everything colorful that is anywhere near the bus. In this way, Long almost seems to imply that because color is the bus’s way of showing happiness, this last scene is a particularly happy one for it. It offers a bit of subconscious comfort to those kids that might worry about the bus spending the rest of its days rusting on the bottom of a manmade pond. When I was a child I would marry everything. My crayons to one another. The cards in a deck of cards to one another. Every inanimate object in my immediate radius was a living breathing creature with a whole internal romantic life that I was free to exploit. I was a child who would have had no trouble believing a yellow bus to have thoughts, dreams, and feelings of its own. Long’s book, for the record, could have messed up any number of ways. That bus could have been too cutesy or too emotional. It could have had a big goofy grin painted on its grill. Or, maybe worst of all, it could have been the same story, but without all the hundreds of little details that allow it to rise up above the pack. Instead, we lucked out. The book’s a gem. Let’s see if the world figures that fact out or not. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Sep 05, 2024
not set
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Sep 05, 2024
not set
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Sep 05, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 1774882027
| 9781774882023
| 1774882027
| 4.42
| 317
| unknown
| Aug 06, 2024
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it was amazing
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Small town America makes an interesting showing in children’s picture books. Generally by the time you get to novels for kids such places can start to
Small town America makes an interesting showing in children’s picture books. Generally by the time you get to novels for kids such places can start to show signs of, say, Main Street by Sinclair Lewis. Picture books, on the other hand, tend to retain their fondness for such places. Historically, though, what children’s picture books tended to ignore was the diversity of those small towns. I was recently in a town of 700 people (shout out to Burr Oak, Michigan) and was floored by the ethnic and cultural diversity I witnessed while there. You don’t see a lot of that in the press around small towns, though, and you certainly don’t hear about them being all that open to outsiders. That might be justified at times, but it’s such a familiar trope that when you read a book like We Are Definitely Human you come into it knowing that part of the humor of the book is going to be based on the reactions of the small town humans. But rather than slip into the old stereotypes, X. Fang presents a rather caring, incredibly funny, and dare I say touching tribute to culture clashes in the best way. This is a book that tips its hat to kindness in the face of uncertainty. A lesson the 21st century is sorely in need of, that's for sure. When a trio of strangers crashes in the yard of Mr. and Mrs. Li in the country, it’s Mr. Li who goes to investigate. What he finds are three strangers. “Their eyes were very big, their skin was very blue, and their shape was very hard to describe.” After informing him in no uncertain terms that they are DEFINITELY human, he invites them in for the night. The next day, quizzed on their home, they say that they are from Europe (which explains a fair amount). They get supplies to fix their “vehicle” from the general store, where a whole host of other nice humans come along to help. All told, a sweet story of what happens sometimes when someone needs help, no matter who they might be. X. Fang came onto the picture book scene in 2023 with the highly successful Dim Sum Palace. Coming off as nothing so much as a tribute to both In the Night Kitchen and tales of giant food (Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, perhaps), the book’s presentation of baos, dumplings, buns, and other delicious munchables firmly established Fang as an author/illustrator to watch. It was also, and this is no small thing, funny. That she would pivot in her next book and take on aliens from outer space makes a certain amount of sense. Of course, in We Are Definitely Human, Fang is not making any particular direct references to previous works of children’s literature this time around. Instead the book comes off as both a loving tribute to and gentle teasing off rural communities. What sets Fang apart from other author/illustrators, though, is how good she is at sustaining a joke throughout the course of a picture book’s storyline. The aliens in this book are bad at pretending to be human. When questioned about their jobs they might say, “I make business,” or “I play sportsball”, or (worst of all) “I wear hat.” And the joke throughout the book seems to be on the gullible humans who are swallowing these terrible lines. It’s only when you get to the end of the story that you get the feeling that the humans were probably just humoring the aliens all along. It’s a sharp turnaround. One you don’t expect to find in a book of this sort. I was in Europe, actually, a couple years ago at the Bologna Book Festival. Imagine a festival dedicated entirely to international children’s literature. Full of insightful talks, books, and representatives from different countries, there were also multiple art exhibits. One in particular paid homage to the relatively new trend (perhaps due to modern printing techniques) of what they called “Fluorescent Picture Books”. On display was a wide range of titles, each utilizing bright pink or yellow or green or orange colors, for one reason or another. Think Beatrice Alemagna, Shawn Harris, and the other folks willing to experiment with colors that shock and awe. In an interview later, Alemagna mentioned that it is an act of bravery for an artist to use fluorescent colors. Not only is it bold, but it demands that the readers’ eye be drawn to the action on the page. In We Are Definitely Human, X. Fang’s use of a certain shade of hot pink is not only striking but cleverly done. First, you can see it in the outfits of the strangers and their ship. But just after you get past the cover you are hit in the eyeball sockets with endpapers so glaringly pink they’d make Tylenol itself blush. Now read through the book carefully. Notice how the only time you ever see this color is when it appears on the aliens. Hot pink is what separates them physically from the humans around them. Everything else in the book tends towards natural colors and hues. It’s a clever juxtaposition to separate the outsiders from the insiders. The general attitude that the children’s book publishing world has is that science fiction doesn’t sell well. Yet this year alone we have seen this incredible swath of children’s picture books about space aliens. From Randy Cecil’s, The Spaceman to One Giant Leap by Thao Lam to The First Week of School by Drew Beckmeyer, Dalmartian by Lucy Ruth Cummins, and even the jaw-dropping Astro by Manuel Marsol, perhaps publishers are turning around on the whole science fiction thing (or, more likely, they just don’t think it applies to picture books). But space has always been just a great big metaphor hanging over our heads, hasn’t it? It’s a marvelous way to tell a bigger story than just the one on the page. That goes double for We Are Definitely Human. At its heart, what this book is truly about is kind humans helping outsiders. That, for Americans, should seem as natural as apple pie, but in our current state of paranoia and suspicion, such a message can feel downright radical. Radical too are Mr. and Mrs. Li who sport Asian names and features and speak with Southern accents. It’s a common enough occurrence in real life that it really shouldn’t strike you as novel in a book, but of course until folks like X. Fang come along, we just don’t SEE that kind of representation on our storybook pages. Rereading the book a second or third time, I came to realize just how pernicious the Lis' kindness is. They open their hearts and doors to these strange “European” strangers, and it’s not just them. The whole TOWN joins in in helping as well. Honestly, the most cynical and suspicious characters in this book are the dogs. Mr. Li’s dog in particular is giving some impressive side-eye to the visitors, never letting them out of its sight. Years ago my husband and I were living in Minneapolis and he was part of the independent film scene. That meant going to see a lot of your fellow students’ film in film festivals, for good or for ill. Most of those films blend together, but one stands out in my mind. It was a pastiche of various 1950s aliens-infiltrating-earth plotlines and contained a singular joke that my family quotes even to this day, “Us? Aliens? Is this one of your earth jokes?” That vibe is alive and well at the heart of We Are Definitely Human. The kids are going to come here for the kooky aliens, but the whole reason the book works is because at its core this is a picture book about a kind of kindness we should all strive for in our lives. The kind that comes to mind when someone has nothing and needs a little bit of help to get by. That’s a pretty deep sentiment for a silly book about space creatures, but definitely give We Are Definitely Human more than one read. It can only do good in this world. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 31, 2024
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Jul 31, 2024
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Jul 31, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 0593661346
| 9780593661345
| 0593661346
| 4.62
| 270
| unknown
| Jun 11, 2024
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it was amazing
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The lunchroom occupies a very particular location in the pantheon of childhood experiences. It’s one of the few places in an average school day where
The lunchroom occupies a very particular location in the pantheon of childhood experiences. It’s one of the few places in an average school day where a child’s individual choices come into sharp relief. Who to sit with. Who to avoid. Whether you’re there or serving lunchtime detention (that one must have been special to my school district since I’ve yet to see it portrayed in a book). And, of course, the food you buy or bring. If you’re on a free lunch program, there’s that aspect to deal with. If you buy school lunch with your own money then there’s the possibility of a bully stealing that money. And, of course, if you bring your own lunch with you, your food can say loads about you, your life, and your choices. Picture books about children’s lunches have been coming out since Rosemary Wells’ Yoko, and probably long before that as well. A librarian could probably make an entire display of lunch-oriented children’s books without breaking a sweat. We see so many that when you see a cover like Home In a Lunchbox you just naturally assume you’ve seen it all before. Kid moving to new country? Check. Lunch that hails from the country they left? Check. But Cherry Mo, debut picture book author/illustrator, isn’t interested in looking at what other picture book creators are doing. Wholly focused on her own character’s story, she takes a well-loved idea and renders it bright, shiny, and new with sheer talent alone. It’s a vibrant take on a tale as old as lunchtime. Open the book and the first thing you see on the endpapers are two locations. On the left-hand side you see Hong Kong at night, the skyline lit up by fireworks. On the right-hand side we’re in an American suburb (U.S. flag on proud display), with a moving van driving down the street. We meet Jun immediately after. She’s off to her first day of school, a cheat sheet written on her hand. She immediately meets another girl but the language barrier is too tricky to overcome. What follows is frustration and more than a little confusion. Fortunately, once lunchtime rolls around, there’s something familiar waiting for her in that little lunch box. A sea of memories wash over Jun. The days go by and so many things just seem to just go wrong. Then, one day, awash in the happiness that comes with her lunch, the girl who spoke to her on that first day reaches out. Food is exchanged and tried. Introductions are made. What is the name of a picture book that is essentially wordless without, technically, being wordless? Though language does appear in this book, it’s used far more as a prop than a way of communicating directly with the reader. Cherry Mo’s true talents, then, lie in her ability to tell a story almost entirely through images. Facial expressions, the use of color both to include and to exclude, whether a page consists of multiple scenes, a single scene, or a two-page spread of a single scene, all these choices are made with great skill and clarity. This has the dual advantage of not only placing you in its heroine’s shoes, but also makes the book accessible to those kids who might not have a firm grasp on the English language themselves. You don’t even have to know English or written/conversational Cantonese to comprehend what’s going on. This might sound like a no-brainer, but it’s interesting to notice how many books about language barriers are filled with them themselves. The book is good. Heck, the book is great. So what tips a book over the edge from one state to another for me? I mean, there are a LOT of perfectly good picture books out in a given year. Great ones are far more difficult to locate (and finding them requires loads of reading). For me, Cherry Mo’s style is significant. It breaks down in two ways. First, I don’t know her background but this art exudes a certain kind of feel you sometimes get from animators-turned-illustrators that's is hard to define. I think a lot of it has to do with facial expressions. The artist trained in that particular kind of sequential art must spend a lot of time working on the nuances of the human face. Mo’s art isn’t what you’d label as “cartoonish” but it has all the hallmarks of the best kinds of animated films and shows. I should note that some folks automatically associate all things cartoonish with bad, particularly when we talk about picture books. This unfair assessment often doesn’t take into account just how difficult it is to do this kind of art well, and it certainly doesn’t look at the skill needed to transfer from screen to page (many is the animator-turned-illustrator whose books just look like tweaked storyboards and not legitimate stories in their own right). The other way in which this book caught my attention was a little more flashy. When I read it through the first time, I did notice the subtle ways in which Mo was tweaking her artistic style as the story progressed. The moments that become two-page spreads were always emotional, and I love how the book really knows how to drive an emotional beat home for the reader. So out of curiosity I decided to track these moments. There’s no pattern, but when I write down the emotions in order they pretty much dictate the feel of the book. It goes sad, happy, sad, sad, sad, happy, happy, happy. Sometimes a two-page spread will immediately follow another two-page spread. There’s a happy to sad at the beginning and then a sad to happy near the end. If it’s intentional then it’s exceedingly clever since you unconsciously note this shift in the character’s emotions (and, by extension, your own). But I’m burying the lede a bit because the real reason this book won me over wasn’t necessarily because of all of Cherry Mo’s clever visual choices (I can’t pretend to have even noticed them initially). It was a single, solitary picture that did it for me, and when I try to describe it here for you I’m going to run up against a bit of a wall. I don't know that words are equal to what this picture is doing. It’s a two-page spread of Jun eating and happy. More precisely, it’s the moment right before the other kids reach out to her because she just looks so doggone blissful. It was therefore imperative for the artist to make THIS picture the one that sticks. So what she does is make it look almost more like a painting than an illustration in a picture book. I can’t say that it looks realistic, because it doesn’t. It just looks more intentional. It pops off the page. Yes, there are a bunch of cartoon hearts flying around, but honestly you don’t even see them. What you see is Jun’s expression. Her closed eyes. The way the light bounces off of her bangs. And because Mo has shifted her style for just this one single image, you completely understand why the other kids would be curious and reach out. Their reaction doesn’t come out of nowhere because if you saw someone glowing with the inner light of contentment that Jun is sporting here, you’d reach out too! Now if I’m a nitpicker (and picking nits is kinda my raison d’etre) then I’d say that Jun’s lunchtime acceptance into the group of Rose, Juan, and Daniel jumps a bit too quickly from learning their names to bringing them home for a thousand layer pancake. I could buy the instant friendship but going to someone’s house is (I can tell you as a mother) a whole different ballgame. This, however, is not the book creator’s fault. The fault lies in the fact that Mo pretty much has run out of time by the story’s end. Picture books come in 32, 40, or 48 page bundles (usually). And since Mo wanted to include some incredible backmatter as well (more on that in a sec) she had a choice to make. She could have either gone from the lunch scene to two pages of different becoming-friends sequences and THEN ended with coming home with friends to food, thereby eschewing the backmatter, OR she could have included the backmatter, which is cool but does make that narrative leap a little harder to swallow. If I had been the editor of this book, I would have changed the kids’ clothes between the lunchroom and the arrival in the home, if only to suggest that a little more time has passed. But, of course, I’m a nitpicker. That backmatter though! I host a children’s picture book podcast with my sister where we read through picture books that are at least 20 years old and decide whether or not they should be deemed “classics” today. One thing that I’ve noticed while recording this podcast is that books of the past loathed backmatter. And honestly, when you look at books imported from around the world, picture books from other countries (even the nonfiction ones) hate it as well. It’s kind of interesting and hard to fathom. I can only assume that it has something to do with the fact that it requires an extra amount of work, thought, and creativity, and that in the case of fictional stories some adults may feel that it distances the reader from the story. For example, what if Blueberries for Sal ended with a recipe for canning your own blueberries rather than that final iconic spread on the endpapers of Sal and her mom canning in the kitchen? I can see it both ways, but honestly, there’s a simple solution to this. You want to read Home in a Lunchbox and retain the magical experience of reading it? Flip past the backmatter and get to the endpapers. There you go. Problem solved. As for the backmatter itself, it’s split into two different sections. On the left-hand side you have a graph entitled “What are the words on Jun’s hand?” It then provides the English and then the written and conversational Cantonese on the right. “What’s in Jun’s lunchbox?” is on the right, and it was here that I really got excited. Cherry Mo provides an illustration of a typical lunchbox for Jun with each food carefully labeled and described. As a mom who basically just slaps a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, chips, fruit, and cookie in my son’s lunchbox every schoolday, this is the kind of meticulous and delicious fare that puts me to shame. No wonder the kids want what she’s having! There are even descriptions of foods just spotted in Jun’s house throughout the story, illustrated within an inch of their lives. Warning: Do not read on empty stomach. Yeah, I kinda like the book. And to be clear, this isn’t the last cultural-experiences-attained-in-the-lunchroom book for kids we’re going to see. As I mentioned before, there really aren’t a lot of times when a kid’s culture is casually on display for other children to see. The lunchroom is the perfect staging ground for larger issues. Issues like moving to America from Hong Kong and dealing with cultural, social, language changes. Pairing beautifully with Gibberish by Young Vo and Here I Am by Patti Kim, the book’s a standout and a delicious one to boot. It ain’t preachy. It ain’t smarmy. It’s just plain good. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 10, 2024
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Jul 10, 2024
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Jul 10, 2024
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1536226165
| 9781536226164
| 1536226165
| 4.18
| 194
| unknown
| May 07, 2024
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it was amazing
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It is downright alarming to realize that your new favorite picture book author/illustrator has been creating books since at least 1996. It is worse if
It is downright alarming to realize that your new favorite picture book author/illustrator has been creating books since at least 1996. It is worse if you’re a children’s book specialist who prides herself on her picture book memory, and you’ve come to crushing realization that you’ve been reading said “new” author/illustrator for literally years and years and year. Run through the list of Randy Cecil’s books on his website and it’s downright embarrassing how many you’re going to see and coo over. “He did the art for How Do You Wokka-Wokka?” “Oh, HE’S the one who did Lucy!” “ Dusty Locks and the Three Bears was him?!?” But maybe I’m not so totally off. The thing about Randy Cecil is that he has an elastic style and never really does the same book twice. If you compare the first book he ever illustrated to his latest title, The Spaceman you’re going to find them to be enormously different. Charming? Inevitably. But different. For my part, there is no doubt in my mind that Mr. Cecil actually gets better and better with each book he does. His last book, Douglas, was very good, earning itself multiple starred reviews, sure. But for my part, he’ll have a hard time ever topping The Spaceman. Quiet, unassuming, delightful, funny, and with just enough science fiction in there, I’m just gonna say it: I love this book. You know who else is going to love this book? Kids. All of them. Without question. There was nothing about our planet that seemed out of the ordinary to the spaceman. Not at first, anyway. With a job that primarily consists of taking soil samples, he was caught unaware by the beauty of a flower in the midst of his work. Not paying attention, he failed to notice the large black bird that flew off with his spaceship until it was winging its way, away from him. Now he’s marooned on a strange planet and must find the spaceship or all is lost. Still, sometimes when things look their worst, it gives you the excuse you need to stop, look around, put aside your assumptions, and enjoy where you are. I have read The Spaceman multiple times. I can remember scenes from it with a crystal-like clarity I usually only reserve for a very few books in a given year. Yet if you had asked me, point blank, to tell you whether or not the book had text or was wordless, I think my initial instincts would have been to say, “wordless.” I don’t know why. It is NOT wordless by a long shot. And not only does it have text, but the text is actually written in the first person from the point of view of the spaceman himself! What’s more, he has a rather elegant and eloquent method of speech. I don’t encounter sentences like, “But all my thinking came to naught,” or, “A little unrefined perhaps, but charming nonetheless,” in picture books half as often as I should. It’s that little dash of formality that just lifts the entire book above the pack, to my mind. And consider how fun it would be to tell this tale to a child in the style of Richard Attenborough or something along those lines. However you choose to do it, the book’s readaloud capabilities are strong. Even just reading it in my head I knew precisely where to put the cadences when I came to a line like, “But then again … one does have one’s responsibilities.” But perhaps my confusion stems from the fact that visually the book creates multiple iconic images that just stick in the little gray cells of the brain. Mr. Cecil has, in recent years, has pared his books down a smidge and focused much more on the little heroes. A mouse in Douglas. A small dog in Lucy. The titular heroes of Horsefly and Honeybee. When he illustrates the books of other people, that’s when he’ll draw huge things like dragons or dinosaurs, but given his druthers, he seems to feel more comfortable reducing everything down to essentials. This little spaceman is no exception, though there’s something unique about his look. Maybe it’s the fact that he resembles, as one co-worker of mine pointed out to me, a Muppet. It’s something about those ping-pong-like eyes, the shape of the nose, the expression on his face, and maybe the way he rages against his fate, little fists waving in the air, like a tiny King Lear or Job. For my part, what I like best about him, I think, is how his entire face changes when he smiles. For the first half of the book he has a rather somber expression on his face. His mouth may gape in wonder from time to time, but it isn’t until he falls into a pond and just lies there, floating, that Cecil imbues him with this huge grin that stretches from one side of his punim to the other. It’s delightful. Much along these lines the cover of this book, by the way, is far cleverer than you might realize at first glance. If you look at him, you can see that Cecil has drawn the spaceman's mouth so perfectly that like the Mona Lisa you can believe him to feel whatever emotion you want. And yes, that’s right. I just compared The Spaceman to the Mona Lisa. My regrets? They are few. I’d be amiss if I didn’t say a couple words about the color palette too. As I’ve mentioned, Mr. Cecil has spent the last few years making books about little animals and creatures. And while the aforementioned Horsefly and Honeybee was brightly hued, the more recent books like Douglas and Lucy were black and white. It can actually be quite hard, sometimes, for an illustrator to convince their publisher to put out a colorless book, so I commend Mr. Cecil’s ability to do so. Nonetheless, you can’t look at The Spaceman and not think that here we have a book that is destined to be colorful. From the spaceman’s own Oompa-Loompa orange face to the red of the flower that initially entrances him and the butterfly that takes him on a ride, color is key to the storytelling. According to the publication page, Randy Cecil has painted this book in oils. His technique then leaves distinct brush lines on the page, giving everything an almost tactile look and feel. Who knew that oils could be so funny? Mr. Cecil is able to wring a lot of visual humor out the spaceman's eyeballs alone. And later in the book, there’s even a wordless four panel sequence that’s as adept as any Buster Keaton film. Perhaps that explains in part why I remembered the whole book as wordless. Visually, it can be just that strong. When you’re a kid, you sometimes end up with responsibilities. Adults think that this is a good thing. You may disagree from time to time. You’re also rather small, and maybe sometimes you just want to stop for a moment and stare at a flower or play with a dog or swim in a pond. And maybe there’s also something in this little spaceman’s story that is going to appeal to children far beyond the tale itself. After all, many of us may remember when we ourselves were small and the world (including its dogs) seemed massive. A lot of picture books try to show, rather than tell, how we should stop and smell the roses. A lot of picture books fail in this endeavor. The Spaceman in contrast, does not fail. It knows precisely how to tell a droll, funny, charming little story in precisely the right way. Randy Cecil has been holding out on us, folks. A contemporary classic (and I don’t use that term lightly) this is a little bit of interstellar storytelling that is bound to remain in your brain long after you’ve closed its cover. Sublime. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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May 30, 2024
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May 30, 2024
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May 30, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 1984816039
| 9781984816030
| 1984816039
| 4.17
| 297
| unknown
| May 07, 2024
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it was amazing
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Here’s a little insider-y librarian info. You know when you walk into a children’s room in a library and you look around the space? In the libraries w
Here’s a little insider-y librarian info. You know when you walk into a children’s room in a library and you look around the space? In the libraries where things have remained fairly unchanged for decades upon decades, you’ll find the picture book area to be alphabetical by author. That’s fairly standard. If the library is a bit more creative, they may experiment with their cataloging and shelving systems. For example, they might try to shelve books by subject. That way you can find all the pirate picture books in one area, and all the weather or dinosaur or ballerina books in others. Sometimes these areas will focus on big life events. You might find a death/bereavement section or a section on big emotions. You might even find a section on moving to a new home. After all, there are loads of books that cover this very subject every year. They may vary slightly to one degree or another (my personal favorite is Bad Bye, Good Bye by Deborah Underwood, ill. Jonathan Bean) but on the whole they all do the same thing: reassure kids that this move is not the end of the world. You know what kind of book you almost never see in this section? Books where the kids in the picture book aren’t just happy to be moving, they’re thrilled! Delighted! On the back of Being Home by Traci Sorell, do you want to know what it says? “Yay, it’s moving day!” Add in the jaw-dropping art and stellar storytelling, and this book may serve to upend everything you thought you knew about moving day picture books. And you won’t have to go to a fancy children’s room that’s split into subject areas to find it either. “Here, cars rush, crowds collect. Etsi says this is not our rhythm.” Living in a crowded city, a young girl has reasons to rejoice. Though until now they’ve lived far from family and animals, today is moving day! They pack their things, bid farewell to house and swings, and jump in their car. Along the way they, “change our tempo,” back to their ancestors’ land and their people. Finally arrived, family unloads the van and then it’s time to play and explore and romp. “No more busy streets… No more crowded spaces… No more faraway family…”As the girl declares, looking up at the sky (and actually seeing the stars), “I love the rhythm of being home.” Just as happy moving day books are a bit of a rarity on our shelves, so too are books that don’t particularly care for big bustling urban landscapes. I suppose, since the vast majority of our children’s books are siphoned through New York City (a place where a huge host of our children’s book creators also tend to hang/live), that may have something to do with why it’s often seen as the nadir of living. Books that don’t simply eschew that life in favor of rural living exist, but few go as far as to say that it’s better. When I try to conjure them up, I tend to first think of older titles like The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton (the ultimate tale of urban encroachment). Which is sort of funny when you think about it, since the dirty-old-city idea is as old as… well… dirty old cities. Watching the pendulum swing between city and country has as much to do with the state of national attitudes towards those locations as it does personal shifting preferences. I suppose that normally it’s done from an ecological p.o.v. so Sorell’s take is of particular interest since it comes from a distinct family AND nature AND spiritual place. It swerves into the narrative from a place that shouldn’t be, yet feels, new. Sorell, tribally enrolled as a Cherokee Nation citizen, is, as of this writing, best known for her nonfiction titles like We Are Still Here! Native American Truths Everyone Should Know. Still, it’s her fiction that’s been intriguing me more, lately. In 2024 she’s not only produced Being Home (not “Going Home”, which is I think is an interesting distinction and would love to hear her pick that choice apart) but also the singular board book On Powwow Day which I believe to be one of the finest of the year. Her fiction shift works as well as it does, in part, because she has mastered the art of brevity. I cannot stress to you enough the difficulty it takes to tell a complete story well with select, brief wordplay. Being Home is a magnificent example of just precisely that. It isn’t just that the book is set as a denial of cities. If that were the case then it would feel like some kind of negative downer or, worse, like it was sneering at urban living. To avoid that feeling, Sorell in the second half of the book (after the arrival) has to zero in on the aspects of why this move is such a wonderful experience for a kid. Imagine having woods to explore, loads of cousins to play with, and the kind of freedom that comes with all of that. Reading this book I was reminded years ago of trying to read the book A Time to Keep by Tasha Tudor to my daughter. It's also about hanging out with all your cousins in a country setting. We got through it once but when I tried a second time she exclaimed, “Why are you showing me a book of cool stuff that I can never do?” Hopefully Being Home will thread the needle a bit better, making a kid feel like THEY are there doing these things, and not just as an outsider viewing a life they may never have. A couple years ago I was in Bologna, Italy at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair (the world’s largest international children’s literature fair) looking at the different exhibits. One that particularly caught my eye was a selection of books and pictures that contained “fluorescent art”. I was a bit baffled by this terminology, and had to investigate it a little more closely before I discovered what they meant. These books weren’t just from one single country. All over the world, people have been increasingly comfortable with using bright fluorescent colors in their illustrations. Not long ago I asked artist Beatrice Alemagna about when she started using fluorescent pink in her pictures, and she admitted that when she first began using the colors she was afraid of them drawing too much attention to themselves. Yet when used correctly and precisely, they can give a book precisely the kick it needs. I’ve read many a fine Michaela Goade picture book over the years, but Being Home felt like she too was slowly sinking deep into an abiding comfort with the virulent color. And like Alemagna, Goade thinks pink. You can see it in the very letters on the cover and the images at the bottom of the book jacket. In the book itself it becomes the touchstone color for our girl narrator. Indeed, our very first glimpse of her house amidst the jumble of the city depicts her window is glowing bright and pink, drawing the reader’s eye instantly. As she and her move drive away, her sketches populate the landscape, each one of them made of hot pink lines. Indeed, the more you notice the pink, the more you’re unable to look away from it. Even as Sorell is telling one story, Goade is almost telling another one in tandem with the text. The pink is the pink of home. It’s watermelons and picnic blankets, and then, at the very end, the setting sun has turned literally everything into that pink. Goade’s use of the color is no mere trend. It’s a systematic, smartly wrought method of wordless storytelling. For me, the book harkens to older books as well. I got some keen Vera B. Williams vibes (Three Days On a River in a Red Canoe) when I looked at the map that the girl was drawing. Or when the whole family pitches in to help unload the moving van (A Chair for My Mother). The tone too reminded me of Ultra-Violet Catastrophe by Margaret Mahy and Brian Froud. It’s like these books, and also absolutely NOTHING like these books. It is its own. And what makes it ultimately work so well for me is just how fun the whole enterprise is. From the glorious art to the idea of having so many friends/relatives and a wilderness as your playground. Of getting the wrong rhythm out of your heart, and the right rhythm in. This is a celebration of nature, an appreciation of it even, that anyone could understand. An absolute glory of a book. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Apr 27, 2024
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Apr 27, 2024
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Apr 27, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 1662602030
| 9781662602030
| B0C5BWDTXL
| 4.17
| 211
| unknown
| Jan 23, 2024
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it was amazing
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Imagine that I walk around all the time with a faux group of students in my head. As I read through books for kids every day, I find myself coming up
Imagine that I walk around all the time with a faux group of students in my head. As I read through books for kids every day, I find myself coming up with rules about children’s literature. Rules that, if I’m going to be honest, were probably already thought up by someone else long before me. Still, once in a while I sit down and write these thoughts down for my faux students. I tell them stuff, like that a truly great picture book must do three things very well: It must have great art, which matches the writing (if there is any), and it must have great writing (unless it is wordless), and most important of all it must make you feel something. Now there are plenty of fun picture books out there that accomplish two out of these three things, and they’re great! But a book that manages to include all three together at once? That’s a rarity. That’s a once-in-a-blue-moon type of situation. That is, in fact, what you get with the Karen Gray Ruelle/Hadley Hooper picture book, Jump for Joy. There is Joy. She’s a kid who wants a dog. And she firmly believes that, “She’d know her dog when she saw him.” Then there’s Jump. He’s in the same boat and also firmly believes that, “He’d know his kid when he saw her.” Until that happens, however, both Jump and Joy try constructing companions out of natural elements. Firs they both try growing things, like tulips or ferns. When those wilt and fall apart they try seashells and sand. Next it’s sticks and mud, and after that, snow. Though their homemade companions melt away, time after time, there’s a happy ending in this pair’s future, and a definite jump for joy on the horizon. Karen Gray Ruelle’s been in this game a long time. In fact, when I was looking at this book I just kept chanting her name over and over in my head. I KNEW her name. So why couldn’t I mentally conjure up any of her books? It wasn’t until I traveled over to her website that all became clear. Of COURSE I know her name by heart! She wrote the board books, The Book of Breakfasts, The Book of Baths, and The Book of Bedtimes, all of which I read ad nauseum to my kids when they were so very small. On top of that, back when I was still working for New York Public Library, she was the voice behind the magnificent The Grand Mosque of Paris. Right! Karen Gray Ruelle! Here, she brings to life something I like to say all the time about picture books. It doesn’t matter if your idea has been done a million times before. Picture books about kids wanting dogs and/or dogs wanting kids? You can’t throw a dart in a children’s library without hitting one of these (note: please do not throw darts in children’s rooms). But if you’ve an author with the right voice and the right timing, you can write about anything and make it feel new. Jump for Joy travels some familiar territory but it does it in a way I’ve never seen before. Part of the success of the book comes in mirroring. Ruelle uses the format of the picture book to mirror Joy and Jump’s discoveries and attempts together across the book's gutter. For example, in one sequence it reads on Joy’s page, “In the summer, Joy made a dog out of seashells. She called him Shelby. But the waves washed him away, bit by bit.” On the opposite page it reads, “Jump made a kid out of sand. He called her Sandy. But the waves washed her away, bit by bit.” Utilizing gentle repetition like this without it feeling samey can be tricky, and Ruelle manages to keep it up for most of the book. She also manages to stick the landing. Not only does she finally get to say that Jump jumped for Joy, but also that Joy jumped for joy, it finishes with just about the perfect line: “And neither of them wilted or melted or scattered or spattered or washed away.” Your voice naturally moves down in register as you get to the end of that sentence. That's a fine example of an author guiding you on how to read their book. The showy element of Jump for Joy that catches your interest immediately is the mix of art styles. From the publication page we know that, “The art for the characters was creating using brush and ink. Their black and white world is made from found textures and images from the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, collaged together to create something new.” This type of mixed media has been done many times before in entertainment for adults (Monty Python’s animated sequences come immediately to mind) but I can’t think of many examples when it’s happened in a children’s book. There was a book for kids by Donald Barthleme called The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine or The Hithering Thithering Djinn, but for all that it was a picture book, it was a pretty clear-cut example of an adult author having no idea how to write for kids. This art is different. It isn’t there to impress, but to set up a very clear cut contrast. Normally in books for kids, reality will be depicted in black and white and a child’s imagination or fantasy world will be all in color. Here it’s completely the opposite. The dogs and kids that Jump and Joy make are colorless ephemera that melt, blow away, get washed away with the tides, etc. It’s no coincidence that when the two find one another at the end, gone are the pure white pages. Instead the world explodes in color, Hooper cleverly coloring in the flower etchings, mixing the imaginary and the real together. It’s exceedingly smart work. “Brush and ink” is how Hooper describes what Jump and Joy are made of. Both are wonderful strokes of paint that exude so much joy. Jump, for his part, has a very early Snoopy quality about him. The first time you see him, he’s standing, looking at some kid and dog-shaped clouds, standing on his hind feet with his front paws clasped solemnly behind his back. He walks along in that manner on the next page, a serene expression on his face, holding a ball, and if ever an illustrator should teach a masterclass on getting your child audience to fall in love with a character instantly, Hooper should. Then there are the details. For a book that exists primarily against white backgrounds, it’s amazing how much fun gets packed in. For example, a clever reader would do well to keep their eye on a certain red ball that appears periodically throughout the book. Keep your eye on the ball, kids. I’ve been very good this whole review and I haven’t ONCE said that “I don’t instantly like dog books because I’m not really a dog person”, which is sort of my standard line with these sorts of things. I think I should probably retire that caveat anyway, since more and more often we see such a blessed array of magnificent books on every possible subject for kids. This is just one of the latest. It’s a great read aloud to a large group of children and a sweet one-on-one lapsit. It’s perfect for kids who want dogs, kids who don’t want dogs, and kids who are dog neutral. It’s beautiful to the eye, ingenious in both its writing and the accompanying art, and it hits you hard in the heart when you finish. Best of all, Ruelle and Hooper are working in perfect tandem together. Hooper picks up what Ruelle lays down. The end result is maybe the best book either of them have ever worked on before. The dog book that none of us knew we needed, has arrived. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 05, 2024
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Apr 05, 2024
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Apr 05, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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| unknown
| 4.50
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| May 07, 2024
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it was amazing
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“How do you like to go up in a swing, / Up in the air so blue? / Oh, I do think it is the pleasantest thing / Ever a child can do!” - Robert Louis Ste
“How do you like to go up in a swing, / Up in the air so blue? / Oh, I do think it is the pleasantest thing / Ever a child can do!” - Robert Louis Stevenson, The Swing Two opposite things can be true at the same time, when it comes to children’s books. For example, I often tell people that a truly great children’s author can take a subject that’s been done to death a million times before and bring to it something new and striking that’s never been seen before. You can make a truly great book for kids out of the overly familiar. That said, it is also true that sometimes the best titles for children are the ones that suss out a topic or truth about being a kid that has never been captured on the page before. Touch the Sky belongs firmly in the latter category, and for good reason. If you were to approach a children’s librarian, knowledgeable in the field, and ask for the quintessential swing-related picture book on their shelves, what would they hand you? Had you asked me, prior to seeing Ms. Lucianovic’s latest, I would have recommended the board book edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Swing as illustrated by Julie Morstad (long before she became the Kate DiCamillo-illustrating wonder we all know and love today). That book is good, great even, but sedate and serene. Its lyrical read mimics the effects of going up and down on a swing, completely ignoring the complementary thrill and rush. And the difficulty of learning how to pump? Forgettaboutit! For that, you’re going to need Touch the Sky and you’re going to need it stat. A book that truly exemplifies one of those key moments in a child’s life, fated to be forgotten. For Vern, the park is the place he tends to go almost every day. Kids all have their favorite places to go in a playground, but for Vern there's no competition. He's a swing kid through and through. Usually the most he can do is fling himself onto a swing, belly first, or twist it up and then let go until he's dizzy. Why? Because Vern doesn't know how to pump his legs. And unless you know how to do that, you're grounded. Then one day a girl named Gretchen gives Vern a couple pointers. What follows isn't instantaneous success or fast learning. Vern wants to give up more than once, but he keeps at it and slowly, slowly, slowly it all starts to come together. Just Vern, the swing, and the sky. Children are the sole occupants of only a couple spaces in this world, and playgrounds as a rule serve no real purpose aside from existing for kids and kids alone. As a result, they tend to crop up in picture books on a regular basis. Yet for all that, few remain in your brain for very long. I was just sitting here, trying to think up the greatest picture books set in playgrounds, but all I could think of was the aforementioned The Swing and the charming You Go First by Ariel Bernstein, illustrated by Marc Rosenthal. How strange that a place that exerts such a pull on a child’s early life (and occupies their adult caretakers as well) should be so little lauded on the page. Until now. Speaking of those caretakers, it took me a read or two of this book before I realized that there’s one key component to swinging completely obliterated from the narrative. Which is to say, this title is a parent-free zone. You’re not going to find one of those overaged interlopers spoiling the purely kid-centric narrative here. You have to assume they exist, of course. Vern’s love of swinging high but without the requisite knowledge of how to pump is entirely contingent on some big person giving him a push on a regular basis. But for this book to have the right amount of emotional oomph, Vern needs to learn pumping entirely on his own. That means excluding any well-meaning but ultimately unnecessary grown-ups from the book. Don't worry. You don't even miss them. How to make a truly great picture book? Step One: Fill book with great writing. Tall order, that. If every incipient picture book author was able to conjure up words that were both exquisite and chock full of truth, then it would make the lives of reviewers like myself much harder, I can tell you. There is a moment in every book, and it doesn’t matter if I’m talking about titles for babies or the geriatric, when the reader falls in love. It might not be on the first read. It might not even be on the fifth or fiftieth, but when it happens you will defend that book’s honor to the end of your dying days. For me, that moment happened on page ten with the appearance of Gretchen. The book explains that Vern only knew her because of her mom. “Gretchen, stop licking your scab!” “Gretchen, dig up your brother right now!” “Gretchen – do NOT pet that cat with your cheese!” That sequence is doing the duty of making you fall in love with the book, sure, but you’re also now firmly in the pro-Gretchen camp and you would follow her lead wherever she might go. Creative writing teachers should use this sequence with up-and-coming authors to show them how to create an instant rapport with an audience. But clever wordplay is only half the battle. Lucianovic also has to nail home the whole concept of learning something new and hard. In doing so, she has to avoid The Elmo Effect. That’s a term I just made up. You see, once I was watching Sesame Street with my kids and it was a sequence where Elmo wanted to learn to play some kind of an instrument. This being contemporary Sesame Street (i.e. shorter than it was when I was a kid) the sequence plays out like this: Elmo tries and fails. Elmo tries and fails. Elmo tries and succeeds! The Elmo Effect. And I hate this sequence. As anyone will tell you, the odds of learning something new on a third try, while not impossible, is pretty darn low. But picture books, like 21st century Sesame Street sequences, are pressed for time. This book clocks in at a mere 32 pages, so it was enormously gratifying to find Lucianovic not only shows Vern’s frustrations (“Giving up felt easier than trying again”, “He could get off the swing now. Gretchen would never know he gave up”) but also just the sheer amount of work he has to put into the learning. Even when he gets it, it isn't slam-bang-whoopsie-doo-it’s-a-miracle all at once. Competence increases at its own steady rate. Beautifully done. One of these days I’m going to shake up my normal writing format and mention the art right at the start of my reviews rather than near the end. That day, alas, is not today but not for a lack of respect for what illustrator Chris Park is doing here. Glance at the publication page and you read that the art of this book was created with “mixed media”, an all-encompassing term that tells you diddly over squat about Park’s process. That’s actually okay, though, since I’m a lot more interested in how Park managed to take what could have been an average playground book and made it, frankly, gorgeous. His medium resembles that of pastels and crayons (which are probably digital) but it’s his colors that set this whole enterprise apart. Specifically Vern’s hair. It’s long and luscious (still a rarity in books about boys) and filled with all these different blues, purples, and pinks. Gretchen’s hair? It seems to radiate purples and pinks almost from the inside out. Then you start looking at how Park shakes up his angles and the nuances of each page. Look at that shot of Vern on a swing from underneath, his body dark against the blinding light of the sun. Now look at the body language at play. The way Vern’s feet close in on themselves when Gretchen talks to him for the very first time. There’s even this fascinating sequence where the background becomes dark, and the scenes of Vern’s attempts become windows and even blobs. What could have been rote, nay, is almost REQUIRED by some books to BE rote, is made exemplary and magical thanks to one illustrator’s finesse. The premise is good, the art fantastic, and the writing stellar but that could all be said of a lot of books. A truly great picture book needs that one extra added element to be stirred into the mix. That thing that lifts it, just one more step, above the hoard of hundreds of picture books published every year. In short, it needs heart. Real heart, TRUE heart. Touch the Sky has that heart in a single moment near the end of the book. Vern, at long last, has learned to pump and is filled to brimming with that knowledge. Now comes the moment of truth. So many kids (hell, adults too) when they have learned something new, will use that knowledge to lord it over the ones who still don’t know. In some alternate universe there is a version of this book where Vern turns to the envious little kid at the end of the book and rubs his newly acquired pump knowledge in that child’s face. Not this book. When the kid notes how good Vern now is, the response is an immediate, “It feels hard until you get it, and then it’s not . . . Do you want to learn how?” We never get to hear the first child's response, but I feel like Park’s endpapers, filled to the brim with words like “PUMP”, “AGAIN”, “SKY”, “TUCK”, “TIP”, and more, are the actual answer. Yeah, so I like it. Think it’s pretty good. I also think it’s a great example of all these different elements working together in tandem in just the right order and sequence. Humor and heart. Beautiful art and a smart text. A familiar concept but unfamiliar in a picture book until now. Memorable writing. All told, there are loads of picture books coming out every day that are perfectly fine. Completely decent. Downright nice. This book is not one of them. This book is better than those books. It has accessed, by whatever means, the magic required to make a title go from merely good to great. Best that you do a kid a favor and read it to them ASAP. They’ll be glad you did. You’ll be glad you did. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Feb 21, 2024
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Feb 21, 2024
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Feb 21, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 1797202774
| 9781797202778
| 1797202774
| 4.12
| 294
| Apr 23, 2024
| Apr 23, 2024
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it was amazing
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Name me, if you would be so kind, the greatest examples of cat/dog friendships. I’m dating myself here but the first things that come to mind tend to
Name me, if you would be so kind, the greatest examples of cat/dog friendships. I’m dating myself here but the first things that come to mind tend to be Milo and Otis (ask your parents, kids), Rita and Runt (natch), maybe something from Oliver and Company, and that’s it. Essentially my entire frame of reference is stuck in the 80s & 90s. But where television and movies have let me down, surely there are contemporary picture book examples to fill in those gaps, right? I wouldn’t rule it out entirely, but the fact of the matter is that there are precious few to choose from. Maybe that’s why the premise of a book like Two Together strikes me, even now, as so novel. Just a cat and a dog, realistically rendered (they don’t talk) bounding about the countryside together, having adventures. What could be better? But add in a little of that Brendan Wenzel magic and suddenly what started out as merely a novel concept becomes much much more. Gathering together all his skill, all his talent, and all his eye-popping glory, Wenzel brings to this simple little picture book an artistry and talent bound to blow you away. This is the cat/dog narrative we’ve all been waiting for. “Two together headed home. Cat and dog. Bell and Bone. For a moment. For a day.” In the woods a cat and a dog travel together through thick and thin. Together, they see, hear, and smell everything in their path. Almost home, the two get waylaid by an interesting toad, a rocky path, a grumpy bear, and a sudden rainstorm. Fortunately, just as the light is fading, the two rush for the house. “All is dark. Home is bright.” There they find an open door, a roaring fireplace, and a friend to cuddle with while sleeping. But what’s this? They don’t sleep long, these two, before they’re up and out the door once more. “Two together on their way.” Here is what sets Brendan Welzel apart from the competition. Wenzel grows. Wenzel changes. Wenzel tries new things. His experiments sometimes work and sometimes do not, but they are almost always interesting. I admit that I sort of felt he hit his apex with They All Saw a Cat when it was released, but here’s an example of just how good Two Together is: When I first read it, I literally couldn’t remember They All Saw a Cat anymore. I had adored that book so very much back in the day, but now all I could see, all I could remember, was the brilliance of this book. And why? Let me endeavor to explain. At the very beginning, the color in this book is entirely washed out. It’s just colorless endpapers and the barest sketches of the dog and cat. Then you get this little moment where the dog and cat look at their own reflections in the water, and suddenly the entire book shifts. The dog half is painted in these thick acrylic brushstrokes, practically popping off the page. It’s not 3D but it sure approximates it. On the other side of the page, the cat appears in colored pencils, all sketchy lines and scribbles. Now here’s where everything starts to get interesting. Everything that is seen by the dog, reflects its painted style, and everything the cat sees reflects its pencils. I’m sure that there may even be some scientific reasoning behind why the dog looks one way or the cat another, but suffice to say that this tendency to equate their interpretations of the world around them through their own artistic mediums is fascinating. You might get a bird or a toad caught midway between the two of them, the bodies split into two different interpretations. But then look at what happens when the two pets arrive home. Suddenly they’re both more fleshed out, and it’s the cat that’s painted in acrylics and the dog drawn in pencil. When both walk through the door of the house, their separate artistic styles now seem to meld together at last. One cannot separate out the pencil from the paint, or vice versa. It’s all mixed together. Is that because they're now under the watchful eyes of their human? I'll leave that to you to figure out. This is going to strike you as obvious, but it wasn’t until a colleague of mine off-handedly commented that, “This is a companion, or even a continuation, of They All Saw a Cat” that I realized how right he was. Maybe it didn’t occur to me since I always felt that Wenzel’s A Stone Sat Still was the Cat’s natural sequel. Now I begin to wonder if Two Together is the third in the trio. With its kitty co-protagonist, though, the first Cat book does seem like a more fitting accompaniment. Of course, unlike those two aforementioned titles, this book isn’t interested in looking at a range of animals separately. It keeps its focus squarely on the dog and cat. No animal, whether bird or bear, appears on these pages unless seen through the cat or dog’s viewpoint. The entire book is their p.o.v., which is a bit of a novel way of telling any story. I’m reminded of rare books like Chris Raschka’s New Shoes, where everything is seen literally through the eyes of a small child. So often we see the picture book told through a third perspective. Here at least, we have a window in. So I’m taking up a lot of your time using high-falutin’ terms to describe what is, at its heart, a picture book for small children. Around this point you’re probably wondering on some level, “Is she ever going to mention actual kids in her review or is she just going to keep talking about ‘mediums’ and stuff like that?” First, rude. Second, that’s a pretty accurate assessment of a lot of my reviews. Sometimes when I really get going I seem to forget the intended audience along the way. But see, that’s part of what I really enjoyed about Two Together. Some of the artsy picture books that adult librarians like myself go gaga over encourage us to forget the kids. Not this book! This book is, at its heart, a friendship book, an adventure story, and a cozy tale of finding your way back home to where you are warm and safe and loved (and fed!) before setting off again. And Wenzel knows this. He knows to make the dog and cat look uncommonly goofy. I mean, if Wenzel had wanted to, he could have made these animals look hyper-realistic. The man knows how to draw a dog. But the sheer cartoonishness of the two lead animals actually makes the reader identify with them even more (Scott McCloud has an entire theory about precisely this in his book Understanding Comics that I’d quote to you, but my copy of the book is upstairs and I’m feeling a bit lazy, so just take my word for it). The dog in particular is probably the silliest I’ve ever seen Mr. Wenzel draw, and yet you’re with that dog. You root for him. Kids reading this book are going to enjoy the colors and the patterns, the storytelling, and the ending. They may not even notice how the art changes at first, but after a couple rereads, try prompting them. Ask them what they see. Ask them why they think the book looks the way that it does. I guarantee you’ll get some interesting answers if you keep at it. Could you show a kid that reads this book that two different friends can see things, interpret things, even sense things differently, and still get along? I’m not certain that this was Brendan Wenzel’s original intention with this book, which is what makes it all the better. You can literally use it to discuss empathy or simply the concept of how two people never interpret the world around them in the same way. Or, if that’s too much work, you can just read it as a fun book about a cat and a dog frolicking through nature. Really, this story is a perfect mix of stuff that gets grown-ups excited (the different art styles and what they all mean) and stuff that gets a kid reader excited (the adventures, the animals, the comfort of returning home, etc.). Use it any way that you want but never forget that kids are the intended audience here. And if this just happens to be one of the cleverest, best illustrated books out there for them? All the better, I say. A can’t miss title. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Jan 31, 2024
not set
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Jan 31, 2024
not set
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Jan 31, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 166266527X
| 9781662665271
| 166266527X
| 3.54
| 748
| unknown
| Feb 27, 2024
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it was amazing
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If we are to embark on this review together, I think it only right and proper that I be clear with you from the start. And if that means revealing to
If we are to embark on this review together, I think it only right and proper that I be clear with you from the start. And if that means revealing to your my own personal flaws and foibles, well then so be it. The fact of the matter is that sometimes a reviewer can only be candid in a professional review if they are candid with their readers. We are, to be frank, no better than the average reader. Our greatest advantage lies in the sheer quantity (rather than quality) of titles we imbibe. I read, on average, more than a thousand picture books in a given year. Just the act of doing that is bound to give a person opinions. You wouldn’t expect it otherwise. And one of those opinions I’ve acquired, after reading picture books from everyone from Donald Barthelme and Ted Hughes to Margaret Atwood and Jane Smiley, is that adult authors would do well to stay in their own lanes. I don’t care how many National Book Awards you hoist under your belt. The simple fact of the matter is that not everyone is cut out to be a children’s book author. Oh sure, you get the rare exceptions like a Neil Gaiman or a Toni Morrison sometimes, but by and large it’s the exception that proves the rule. So when they handed me a David Sedaris picture book, I was unimpressed. It has art by Ian Falconer? Well, that’s perfectly nice but quite frankly the bigger the illustrator the greater the literary flaws they must smooth over with their fame, that’s my motto. It seemed fairly clear to me that the man that produced Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk wasn’t going to be churning out any children’s literary masterpieces anytime soon. Reader. I was wrong. I hate being wrong. No, literally, I despise it. I really and truly enjoy basking in the delight of my own I Told You Sos, and this book, Pretty Ugly, wasn’t giving me any indication that I’d have to change my proverbial tune. What was the last Ian Falconer picture you read that made you sit up and take notice? As for Sedaris, nothing about him leads you to believe that he’ll be the next Maurice Sendak. Has he studied the history of children’s literature in any capacity? Is he aware of subversive picture books, their long and storied past, or the meaning behind a great number of those Grimm Brothers tales we’re all so very fond of? You can’t look me in the eye and tell me he owns a copy of Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment, you just can’t. And yet after reading Pretty Ugly, does it matter? It’s been a long time since a picture book shocked me. Since it made me wake up and look around frantically and say aloud, “What just happened?!?” My guess is that the book banners won’t even notice this book until it becomes a hit. But whether it does or not relies entirely on you, the gatekeepers, and your children. And please believe me when I tell you that you have never, in all your live long days, experienced anything like this book before. I’m sure you’ve heard the old adage, “Don’t make that face or it’s liable to stick that way.” Anna Van Ogre is every ogre parent's dream. She stomps flowers, throws dirt, in the house, eats with her mouth full, and more. Her family positively dotes on her, but she does have this one habit they’re not crazy about. It turns out that Anna has the ability to make “terrible faces”, like a cute little bunny. Her mom warns her to be careful or her face will stick like that one day and, to her horror, the day comes when it’s true. After making the face of a veritable kewpie doll, Anna is thoroughly stuck. The solution? It’s simpler (and much grosser) than you think. Truly, beauty comes from within. What kind of a picture book creator was Ian Falconer? The trouble is that he was one of those creators (now deceased) that had a lot of irons in a great many fires. A victim of his own talent, he created Olivia and instantly it became a wild success. So much so that for years he would do the other work that he was passionate about (set design, costumes, etc) and simply stoke the Olivia fire with the occasional sequel or two. Really, until he produced the picture book Two Dogs in 2022, I was under the distinct impression that he was bored to death with the whole idea of making picture books altogether. There’d been such a delightfully sly subversion to those early Olivia stories, though. It seemed a shame that he’d never thought to try new things. And while Two Dogs was nice, it certainly wasn’t his best work. So it seems particularly cruel that with the publication of Pretty Ugly we’re getting a glimpse of where he might have gone. This book upsets expectations in such a raw, jaw-dropping way that I find myself daydreaming over what else he might have been capable of. If he could do this much with a text from another author then it’s a crime that this second coming of Falconer was cut quite so short. And what about David Sedaris? Again, I’ve read many an essay from the man and at no point have I ever read his opinions on the random children he sometimes encounters and thought, “Now there’s a guy with his finger pressed firmly to the pulse of the youth of today.” By all rights, this book should be awful. Not that Sedaris has ever been inclined towards the inherent saccharine attitudes his fellow adult authors seem unable to avoid. But by all logic he should have pivoted 180 degrees in the opposite direction and written something that thought it was being subversive but was just nasty. I acknowledge that I am giving voice to the very words that people are bound to lob against Pretty Ugly, but I would also maintain that this book is NOT merely nasty. It is nasty in all the best ways. This is the nastiness we used to get from the best works of Tomi Ungerer and (when he was feeling up to it) Maurice Sendak. This is a book with hints of William Steig and Quentin Blake and Roald Dahl. Sedaris has given us a joke at the end of this book that’s going to make the kids you read this story to (and make sure it’s a group of kids for maximum effective) scream and laugh all at the same time. It’s gonna blow their little freakin’ minds and they will LOVE YOU for grossing them out in this way. But who knew it was Sedaris that would give us that level of emotion? Not I, said the fly. In the great pantheon of children’s literature, where do we set Pretty Ugly? It’s almost an aberration. A book that should have come out during the glorious heyday of Victoria Chess (I’m thinking of her work with David T. Greenberg on 1983’s Slugs). It seems ridiculous to see it arrive at a time when your average Barnes & Nobles is only interested in “classics”, sequels, and picture books with plots the consistency of sparkly goo. My greatest wish is that with its matinee headlining author/illustrator pairing, maybe there will be a Barnes & Nobles somewhere in this great country of ours that doesn’t bother to read through this book and will display it prominently. I can imagine kids flipping vacantly through dull book after dull book until they randomly pick this one up, read it through, and burst into surprised laughter (or, equally possible, horrified tears) at the ending. A picture book that unexpectedly incurs an unexpected emotion! What a notion! The equivalent of what you'd get if Edward Gorey and Tim Burton had a baby together (our heroine does resemble an alien from Mars Attacks at the end, you gotta admit). What will happen if Pretty Ugly becomes a massive hit? I suspect author David Sedaris would be unpleasantly surprised. Perhaps he has not realized what a gamechanger he had on his hands when he submitted this manuscript. Over the years, Ian Falconer designed sets and costumes for some of Sedaris’s theatrical productions. It is the only reason anyone would have thought to pair the two of them together on a book like this. Yet as it turns out, this bit of professional kismet was precisely what this book needed. Sedaris needed Falconer to go to the visual extremes that he did with this text. And Falconer needed a text written by someone else to give him the push he so desperately needed out of his own comfort zone. They fit together, Sedaris and Falconer. We’re lucky we got them together like this when we did. The world would be a poorer place if we didn’t get to see one little girl pull her insides out for us, in all their slimy, gutsy glory. Be grateful that we were all at the right place in the right time for a book like Pretty Ugly to exist. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Jan 08, 2024
Jan 08, 2024
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Jan 08, 2024
Jan 08, 2024
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Jan 08, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 0063237490
| 9780063237490
| 0063237490
| 4.16
| 267
| unknown
| Sep 19, 2023
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it was amazing
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I like so many things about picture books that it would be hard to pin down what precisely I like about them the most. Of course, there is one aspect
I like so many things about picture books that it would be hard to pin down what precisely I like about them the most. Of course, there is one aspect of children’s literature that I forget and rediscover on a regular basis, and that always makes me inordinately happy when that re-discovery takes place. The simple fact of the matter is that children’s books, like much of storytelling in this world, often rehashes old tropes. There’s the I-thought-you-guys-forgot-my-birthday-but-you-were-planning-a-surprise-party trope and the I’m-a-baby-animal-separated-from-my-parents-so-I’ll-ask-a-bunch-of-animals-if-they’re-related-to-me trope. What’s interesting about these repeated beats is that quality rarely has to do with a plot’s originality. A great children’s author can take the familiar and write it into something that feels completely new. Take Lian Cho, for example. She’s making her authorial debut with Oh, Olive and if I were to describe the plot to you, you’d say it had been done before. You’d be right, but you’d also be wrong. Sure, the story in this book is the artistic-kid’s-parents-bemoan-artistic-kid trope, but it’s HOW Cho puts all her elements together that makes this book feel more than original. It feels special. Probably because it is. Olive's parents despair. They are "serious artists", you see. Her father specializes in painting squares and her mother rectangles. From day one they've attempted to teach their daughter shapes, but Olive's art is very different from their own. While they find joy in the black and white purity of a single shape on a canvas, Olive delights in color concoctions. Her paintings look like what you'd get if Jackson Pollock occasionally fell onto this paintings and smeared the splatter. When she goes to school, her teacher tries to correct her and get her to do shapes too, but the other kids recognize Olive's potential. And when they ask her to teach them, no one has any idea how far that teaching will go. I started out by saying that one of my favorite types of picture books is the kind where the premise is familiar but the final product wholly new. Another type of picture book I like? Cheery agent of chaos books PARTICULARLY if the agent of chaos in question identifies as female. And just look at that grin on the cover. It just instantly makes you like Olive. Something about her little rectangular head and the degree to which that smile just FILLS her face right up. All throughout the book, she has a perpetual smile or grin sitting there. She’s unflappable, which is part of her charm, I think. Kids love a good unflappable protagonist. Someone who can just shrug off the well meant but utterly unhelpful advice of adults. This imperviousness to criticism could be called unrealistic, but I prefer to see it as aspirational. Haven’t we all wished, at some point in our lives, that we could just ignore the jabs and put downs of the people that don’t really “get” us? Looking at Olive, I kept trying to think of other perpetually upbeat chaotic characters. The Cat in the Hat gets a bit down in his first book, but stays pretty consistently high as a kite in his second. Olive also sort of reminded me of The Roadrunner in those old Looney Tunes cartoons, but she’s no trickster. She just has this self-confidence that radiates off of her, no matter the situation. Now usually I’m not a fan of books where a kid is an instant prodigy and can’t learn anything from the adult world around them. It sort of goes against that age old advice to learn the rules so that you can break them. But in its way, I think that Oh, Olive actually adheres to that rule. The ending of this book (to spoil it for you) sticks the landing completely. Olive’s parents finally accept that while her style of art might not conform to their own, it’s still art. They present her with one of their paintings and ask her to do her magic on it. Of course what she does that shocks them (and you get this stellar image of their flabbergasted faces right before the reveal, which I appreciated) is create an absolutely perfect circle. In her own style, of course, but it’s still a shape. Up until that moment, they’ve assumed that their instructions went unheeded, but this is very much a children-will-listen moment. To be honest, I was rather touched by how these seemingly snooty parents spent a LOT of time introducing their toddler daughter to art. So while the book does seem to advise kids to ignore the teachings of their elders, the ending proves that Olive was learning all along. She just wanted to put her own spin on things. Which, when you think of it, is really the point of art itself, wouldn’t you say? The part of this book that you could easily miss in the midst of all this fun storytelling is Olive’s art itself. I’m no art critic, but when I look at her creations, I’m struck by just how . . . well . . . inarguably GOOD they are. They literally make me happy when I see them. So, naturally, I turned to the publication page to figure out how they were done. There I found that Lian Cho used “sumi ink, graphite, gouache, acrylic, and colored pencils to create the illustrations for this book.” Not, to my surprise, Procreate or some other digital program. This was particularly astounding when I looked at the three-dimensional quality of Olive’s canvases. Lest you believe that my admiration for the book stops at the art its protagonist creates, there’s actually quite a lot that Lian Cho is doing here above and beyond the colors. Her black and white linework on the front endpapers and how she integrates shapes into the design is entrancing. The facial expressions (which I alluded to earlier) are sublime, most notably on our small heroine. It’s funny (any book where someone has to be told not to lick their own art is on the right track), and after several reads you begin to notice additional details. For example, when Olive and her classmates go into the community to paint everything, notice that together they make up a little running rainbow (albeit not in order). I just spent the better part of ten minutes just now flipping between the front and back endpapers so that I could see which characters are repeated. Also, keep an eye on the geese. They’re in there too and they have their own thing going on. I dunno, man, this just sort of feels like what a new picture book for kids should be. Fun and funny, filled to the brim with beautiful art and with a bit of a message to boot. I was wishing for a moment there that there was more foreshadowing of Olive liking circles (a kind of rebellion against her parents in and of itself) but then I reread the book and found a moment when she’s secretly making one without her parents even noticing, early on. This is a difficult book to resist. It just overwhelms you with its good-natured love of the joy of artistic expression. From tip to toe it’s a book you want to read to a group of kids repeatedly, or just one kid in your lap whenever you get a chance. Amusing, sweet, and strange. A wondrous mix of the familiar with the utterly original. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 05, 2023
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Oct 05, 2023
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Oct 05, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 0316566233
| 9780316566230
| B0BZCQ6NHQ
| 4.66
| 3,604
| May 02, 2023
| May 02, 2023
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it was amazing
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When I was a kid and there was a problem with something I watched or read, half the time I ignored it and the other half I probably didn’t even notice
When I was a kid and there was a problem with something I watched or read, half the time I ignored it and the other half I probably didn’t even notice it. And when I look at kids today, one of the reasons I’m so delighted by this new generation is that they are unafraid to call out problematic content when they see it. Still, it is also interesting to see what does and does not get their attention in our books and movies. I was discussing Fantasia with my kids the other day, talking about the original version and the instances where content had been expunged. I explained that in the original Fantasia there had been some incredibly racist content in the centaur sequence. “What about the mushrooms?” my daughter was quick to ask. She meant the Asian-stereotyped mushrooms in the Nutcracker section and I realized that she was absolutely right. Somehow that racism had been deemed okay and remained intact, but the other racism wasn’t. I was grateful to her for noticing that, but later it occurred to me what none of us had also pointed out: the fat hippo sequence a little later. The weight of the large hippos is played entirely for laughs, the idea of them dancing in tutus seen as inherently amusing, particularly when they crush the crocodiles with their weight. My daughter, kid though she is, hadn’t remembered that sequence as also typifying certain people as a certain way and that says something to me. We’ve got kids going around with an increasing awareness on a lot of things, but when it comes to weight, that’s one issue that almost never comes up for them. They’ll sit through entire curriculums in school about the history of racism in America, but no one talks about fatphobia. Literally no one. And when it shows up in our children’s books, where does it end up? In the middle grade fiction for 9-12 year-olds, of course. Mind you, by that point they’ve been so inculcated in anti-fat bias that you might begin to wonder why we’ve never had a really excellent picture book address this issue before. There are plenty of paltry picture books filled to the brim with didacticism, sure, but until I read Big by Vashti Harrison I really had never seen one that tackled the issue head on with style, skill, and creativity. More of this please! “Once there was a girl with a big laugh and a big heart and very big dreams.” She was happy with herself, but around second grade we see this begin to change. One day, she and the other kids are playing on the swings for younger children and she gets stuck. After suffering through all kinds of insults and getting yelled at by adults, things change. “She began to feel not herself, out of place, exposed, judged, yet invisible.” It all culminates in a sequence where she grows larger on the pages, filling them entirely. Eventually, she’s able to cry out the awful words and then separate the good from bad. The good, she keeps. The bad, she hands off. And when folks offer to help her change, she politely declines. “…she was just a girl. And she was good.” Daunting. That’s the first word that comes to mind when I think about trying to deal with how fat people have typically been portrayed in the world of children’s picture books. I’m not even talking about the novels at this point (Roald Dahl and J.K. Rowling would earn themselves an entire thesis on the subject, after all). Let’s just stop a second and try to think about fat adults in picture books. Who comes immediately to mind? Anyone? And if you can think of anyone, are they nice or mean? Now think of the most positive fat character in the whole of children’s literature who’s a kid. If you’re struggling then you see the issue. Children’s books were created at the start as a way of inculcating morality in kids. For the most part, and for many of them, including this book, that hasn’t changed. The problem is that sometimes we don’t realize that on our way to teaching one lesson we’ve inadvertently taught a terrible one as well. A book of anti-racism or economic disparity can throw in a couple fat jokes or insults and few will blink. So imagine being one of the few books to face that head on. Like I say. Daunting. Before I get any more into this, though, can we stop for a moment and take into account what Big doesn’t do? First off, it doesn’t make the insult of the main character the book’s title (you’d be amazed how often that happens in picture books). Second, it doesn’t start the main character off by feeling bad about herself. Many is the book where the protagonist begins the story by feeling awful from page one onward. Here, our heroine has had a loving and supportive family and feels great about herself until a veritable mosquito swarm of microaggressions start to bring her down. Finally, what else doesn't it do? I call this the RRNR situation (Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer). In a lot of picture books the main character is an outsider until the moment whatever it is that makes them different saves the day for the mean people. Then, out of some perverted sense of obligation (I guess?) they decide to accept that person. Here, there is a climactic moment but it’s internal and entirely for the main character herself. I also appreciated how real the ending was on this book. As I’ve mentioned before, loads of picture books don’t deal realistically with how people act when someone is unlike them. Scads of them end with everyone having had their hearts and minds changed by the final page. It sort of sets up a false set of expectations for child readers. Here, our heroine stands up for herself and when she confronts the people who hurt her, a lot of them make excuses for their actions (“It’s just a joke,” “It’s not that serious,” “You’re too sensitive”) or offer some not-apology (“I didn’t mean to hurt you…”). But even more insidious is the person seen only has a hand who reaches out in a friendly way and says, “I can help you change if you want …?” Notice that Ms. Harrison has systematically made sure that only her hero is visible on that last two-page spread. At the moment, there’s no one else there. Hopefully someday someone will join her, but for now she needs that separation. It’s a little psychological break from the rest of the book, and indicative of a lot of how the author/artist uses visual design to back up her story. When you think of a book character pressing against the confines of a space, what immediately comes to mind? If you’re like me, that would have to be Alice from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. At once point Alice bites into a mushroom and grows huge in the White Rabbit’s home. John Tenniel would depict Alice grumpy, propped on one elbow, pressed against the walls. Alice’s confines are uncomfortable and unpleasant, all the more so because they’re accidental and self-inflicted. When Vashti Harrison has her heroine grow and grow in this book, there are echoes of Alice, but for almost opposite reasons. Alice grew because of her own actions. Here, our heroine takes up several two-page spreads because of how others have made her feel. Harrison takes the chance of making several of these sequences wordless, which was a smart move on her part (and a smarter move on the part of her publisher, since too often publishing companies get nervous when words disappear in books for kids). The answer to her situation comes in the form of crying out the painful words that have earlier been imprinted on her, and again we get an echo of Alice, filling a room with her tears. But instead of drowning in her own misery ala Alice, this girl is able to look down at the words and make out good ones as well. Then she literally pushes the gatefolds of the book wide, turning the image into a four-page spread, which again I’ve never really seen a character in a picture book do before (and if you think publishers get nervous about wordless sequences, how do you think they feel about gatefolds?). Consistently this book’s design works in service to the story, rendering what could have been didactic instead expansive and creative. So what does this book hope to do? Whenever you have a marginalized community, the earliest picture books that come out are usually going to be about the problems that they face, either in a contemporary setting or a historical one. Finding a main character who is fat in a picture book and the book isn’t about their size happens from time to time, but is still relatively rare. It’s possible that we need books like Big to come out first, and then pave the way for a more inclusive set of characters. In the meantime, the reader is very much placed in the main character’s shoes. That moment when she gets caught in the swings for little kids? That rang so true that it was painful. In her Author’s Note at the end, Vashti mentions that something similar happened to her when she was a kid. She also notes, and I thought that this was key, that because she was a larger child, adults thought that she was older than she was and treated her like a big kid that should know better. That happens a lot to our kids as well. Hopefully when read to kids, a book like Big can encourage a bit of empathy in its readers. It cannot exist in a vacuum, however, so we’re going to need more books with fat protagonists to help. I’ve gotten this far into the review with no mention of race, so that’s not great. The main character of this book is Black, and historically fatphobia and anti-Blackness have been tightly interlinked. White people who would go out of their way to avoid discussing a child’s race often have no difficulty discussing the size of their bodies instead. In Big, our heroine faces white authority figures that continually puncture her self-image with small, needling little comments (Santa saying, “You’re a big girl, aren’t you?” really got to me). Also, the title of this book is “Big”. It is not “Fat”. That didn’t strike me as a problem. Like a lot of marginalized communities, there’s not always a consensus on terminology. So some people are very comfortable with the word “fat” while others shy away from it. Big is a picture book. It’s not here to end that discussion. It’s here to give kids a shot in the arm of empathy. This isn’t a book where the world changes itself for our heroine. It’s not a book where everything is magically okay at the end. That’s not its point. It’s not pretending that she won’t be facing more of these problems in her future. All it can do is say that if she’s happy with herself and who she is, that’s going to go a long way. There’s an honesty here that I really admired. Now add in the fact that the art isn’t just lovely, but also evocative and creative (that gatefold is really a delight) and that the writing itself is great and you have yourself one of the best books of the year. Most excellent! One little book isn’t going to change everyone’s mind about something, but one little book is where you have to start. A superb idea, wrought large. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 14, 2023
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Sep 14, 2023
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Sep 14, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| 1250317177
| 9781250317179
| 1250317177
| 4.29
| 1,011
| Feb 07, 2023
| Feb 07, 2023
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it was amazing
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Years ago, Kate DiCamillo wrote a Newbery Award winning book by the name of Flora & Ulysses. I was quite fond of that chapter book for young readers (
Years ago, Kate DiCamillo wrote a Newbery Award winning book by the name of Flora & Ulysses. I was quite fond of that chapter book for young readers (and considering the awards it won, I wasn’t alone). In it, a squirrel is unexpectedly sucked into a vacuum and ends up with some superpowers (like ya do). At the time, I commented how strange it was that we have so few squirrel heroes in our children’s books. Consider how common the little critters are. It doesn’t matter if you’re a kid in the country or the city (unless you live in a desert or in Hawaii), you probably know what a squirrel looks like. Aside from sparrows (another oddly infrequent species in our kidlit) can you think of any other animal in nature quite so ubiquitous in the United States of America? All this is to say that we’ve been waiting far too long for a book like Evergreen. A squirrel heroine. An epic adventure. Delicious hints of familiar fairy tales (Little Red Riding Hood, naturally), and tasty treats. For the anxious child, Evergreen may well be the hero they’ve always needed. Evergreen is a small squirrel who lives with her mother in a tall oak tree in the Buckthorn Forest. She is also, and I mean this kindly, a bit of a scaredy-cat, so you can imagine her terror when one day her mother tells her that she would like her to deliver some of her special soup to Granny Oak, who has a terrible flu. Terrified, Evergreen sets out and, along the way, encounters several situations where she could either flee in fear or do the right thing. Consistently, Evergreen’s better nature wins out over her worries, and in the course of things she discovers that she’s even having a little bit of fun. But when she returns home, what will her mother have her do next? Long ago, in another lifetime honestly, I lived in New York City and in 2009 I attended a Macmillan preview of upcoming children’s books. It was presented to the librarians in the NYC area and once in a while they’d bring in an author or illustrator. On this particular occasion they brought in a new guy by the name of Matthew Cordell. His new picture book was called Trouble Gum and involved two piglets and a lotta gum. The book wasn’t a blockbuster but it was pretty funny and Kirkus said it, “Packs plenty of pop”. For my own part, I was intrigued by Cordell’s artistic style. It seemed like what you’d get if you combined the cartoonist George Booth with the work of Quentin Blake. What I didn’t know was that I’d be seeing a lot more of Cordell’s art over the years. Moreover, the man has the ability to shift his style when he has half a mind to do so. That’s partly why his book Wolf in the Snow was so shocking. Here you had his familiar spiky familiarity, but then it was combined with a vastly real and realistically rendered wolf, face to face. Which brings us to the art of Evergreen. In the same year that Evergreen is being released, Cordell has done art for the middle grade novel Leeva at Last by Sara Pennypacker, and a new installment in his Cornbread & Poppy series ( Cornbread and Poppy at the Museum). The first two books are very much in the classic Cordellian style we’ve all grown to know and love. Evergreen, however, looks different from the start. It’s bigger, for one thing, clocking in at a rare eleven inches in height and nine inches in width. Its color palette is distinctly subdued, the natural hues and tones (generally brownish) broken up most distinctly by Evergreen’s red cape. Even so, it’s not a bright red but more of a brownish rose. Most striking, of course, is the style Cordell is employing here. A close observer of nature, he combining his natural inclinations to anthropomorphize his animal protagonists alongside his desire to render some animals as realistically as possible. And having learned a thing or two from the visceral thrill of the wolf’s face staring straight at the viewer in Wolf in the Snow, there’s a similar moment in Evergreen when our heroine and a ungrateful bunny by the name of Briar are set upon by a red-tailed hawk. You hear it before you see it, and with a single turn of the page Cordell fills the spread up with the hawk’s full wingspan and terrifying talons. This shock is echoed later in the book with a bear roaring at full blast, so that I finally came to realize that I don’t know that I’ve ever seen an artist quite do what Cordell does with these books. Evergreen is about punctuating storytelling with the shock of reality. It makes for a wonderfully original way to keep (and maintain!) a reader’s attention. That storytelling, by the way, is a testament to Cordell’s talents. Many is the illustrator who can bring an author’s words to life. Cordell, for his part, proves himself to be talented with his own gentle wordplay when his heart is in a project. Of this book he has said, “I’d written and illustrated picture books that have tackled heavy subjects, like prejudice, sadness, and alienation, even death… But after making a number of such difficult books… I was ready to take a break and go deep into the forest for a good, long yarn, ripe with adventure, surprises, and colorful characters.” And true, this book is distinctly lacking in oppressively serious subject matter, but don’t go believing that just because the story is enjoyable it doesn’t have its own weight and depth. This is a tale about facing, not just one fear, but a series of fears. The delight comes every time Evergreen comes to the realization that she’s truly enjoying her adventures. It helps, I’m sure, that her greatest fear waits in the wings for most of the book, and so she’s able to make it a kind of worst-case-scenario in her head. I was having a conversation with someone the other day about my favorite kinds of humor and they asked what makes me laugh. After thinking about it, I said that it really depended on the medium. For example, if I’m reading a picture book and it surprises a laugh out of me, I’m going to feel a kind of gratitude towards it, especially if I didn’t know it was funny from the outset. Cordell’s no stranger to humor, but he employs it strategically. There was no way, just looking at the cover of “Evergreen” to know if it has anything funny in it or not. Considering the creator, the odds are good, but I’ve never been a betting woman. My first hint that maybe this was a book for me came about ten pages in. I’d already been enjoying Cordell’s Beatrix Potter-esque method of rendering clothed animals with the musculature of their real life counterparts. Evergreen’s fearful peeping around her mother feels at once as familiar in the behavior of small children as it did the behavior of squirrels. But it was on pages ten and eleven that I was most delighted. On the left-hand page stands Evergreen at her doorway, facing a world that we cannot see yet. All we can see of her expression is her oversized left eye, its vertical pupil staring straight out, like there wasn’t an eyelid in the world that could cover this anxious staring. On the right-hand side of the page is a new character, a bunny named Briar. Something about Briar feels off, and that off-feeling is also very funny. It’s hard to explain but Cordell’s visual humor in this book is remarkable. It goes hand in hand with his verbal jokes, sometimes working in tandem, and sometimes standing alone, individually. Maybe Evergreen is the squirrel heroine we all need. Thanks to the state of the world today (to say nothing of the 24-hour news cycle) there’s a lot out there to be legitimately anxious about. So for those kids for whom staying inside isn’t just enticing but feels downright necessary, maybe they can take a drop of courage from a little tree rodent that knows the difference between doing the right thing and the easy thing. Gorgeous in writing and art, I won’t sully this review by lofting the words “future classic” in Evergreen’s direction (but I won’t argue if YOU happen to say it instead). Delightful from tip to tail. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 23, 2023
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Aug 23, 2023
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Aug 23, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 0063003953
| 9780063003958
| 0063003953
| 4.21
| 834
| unknown
| Jun 13, 2023
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it was amazing
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We’re far beyond The Kissing Hand now, my friends. Time was that when a parent came strolling into a bookstore or library in search of First Day of Sc
We’re far beyond The Kissing Hand now, my friends. Time was that when a parent came strolling into a bookstore or library in search of First Day of School Books for their incipient Kindergartners, there was really only one game in town to try. I cast no aspersions upon that raccoon-laden tale. There truly are children for whom the first day of school is a fraught affair, and the more comfort you can ladle on them, the better. But what about the kids that are just raring to go? The ones that have watched cousins or siblings go to school for years and have just been itching, YEARNING, to go themselves? A Kissing Hand title isn’t going to cut it for those particular kiddos. No, they’re going to want something strange. Something funny. Something wholly original, never seen before, extraordinary that also (for some reason) contains raccoons. They’re going to want . . . Mr. S by Monica Arnaldo. It’s a book that takes a pretty basic concept and strings it along to its impossible, illogically logical, end. For some kids, this is going to be the book they remember for the rest of their lives. It's the first day of school and the kids in room 2B are a bit baffled. They’re in their classroom, it’s time for the day to begin, but where’s their teacher? Slowly, oh so slowly, they come to realize that there’s an impressive looking sandwich on the table. On the blackboard are the words “Mr. S.” Could it be? Without wasting a second, the children come to the only logical explanation: The sandwich is clearly their teacher (and never mind the grown man outside battling the elements as he tries to rescue his car from a series of natural disasters). The kids learn their letters, do art, and even get in a bit of music and singing. But can a sandwich really be a teacher? And who’s that man outside the window? What does he have to do with any of this? The answer… may surprise you. On the back of this book sits the following quotation from Adam Rex, “This might be the funniest first-day-of-school book I’ve ever read.” No small praise. Rex is, after all, the author behind the 2016 Best First Day of School picture book School’s First Day of School. I like to credit that book with alerting me to the fact that each and every year there tends to be ONE first day of school book that stands apart from the pack. One year it was King of Kindergarten by Derrick Barnes (2019). Another it was Hurry, Little Tortoise, Time for School! (2022). But Rex’s claim that this is THE funniest is cause for some debate. Generally speaking, first day of school books aren’t normally all that laugh-out-loud funny. They might be droll like First Day Jitters or funny in an understated Wes Anderson kind of way, like the aforementioned School’s First Day of School but there is at least one other book out there that is outright hilarious. We Don’t Eat Our Classmates by Ryan Higgins is probably the strongest contender for the Funniest First Day of School Picture Book throne. I would have a hard time deciding between these two, so in lieu of a decision I call it a draw. Teachers – pair the two together. Do so, and I guarantee the greatest First Day of School storytime read of all time. Your students won’t know what hit them. If you are a reader of a certain age, you may have a question. You may have read the premise of this book and thought to yourself, “Wait a minute. This sounds familiar. Is this entire picture book a reference to the burrito on the judge’s desk on the TV show The Good Place?” I assure you, my friend, that I had the same thought. Fortunately, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, I was able to locate a conversation on Twitter dating back to 2022 when Ms. Arnaldo first introduced the concept of this book to the Twittersphere. It was fellow author/illustrator Julia Kuo who thought to ask, “Is this a reference at all to the burrito in the Good Place??” to which Ms. Arnaldo responded, “LOL omggggg it never occurred to me, but now that you mention it these two would be very powerful bros.” So there you have it. From the author herself. Not a direct reference by any means, but a half of a powerful pair. For me, it was the moment when the lightning hit the car and set it on fire. I'll explain. It is not a requirement that every picture book include content for both small children and the adults that will be forced to read and reread the book 100 times. It’s just a nice plus when it happens to fall out that way. In the case of Mr. S, there are two plots going on simultaneously. On the one hand you’ve the titular story involving the Kindergartners and their edible educator. On the other, there’s this whole background storyline (literally) happening out the window to a man seen only briefly in the room at the beginning. Just after he wrote the words “Mr. S” on the chalkboard (and isn’t it cute to see something as retro as a chalkboard in a picture book these days?) he spotted a tree falling over onto his car. As we watch the students in their classroom, things get worse and worse for this fellow. Hijinks? Oh, they ensue, my friends. Raccoons, pizza delivery guys, and the aforementioned lightning? They all take part. So what's your favorite moment of high chaos to take place outside? For me, it's going to have to be lightning. Every time. I’m talking about what’s appealing to me, the adult reader, but let’s take kids into account here. The book’s written for them, after all. The premise is great, but I’ve seen plenty a fine premise fall flat when it comes to the final presentation. Fortunately, Ms. Arnaldo has honed her skills. The art pops. You can see it across the room, making it ideal for a storytime readaloud. And those little details I alluded to earlier? Perfect for a lapsit reading. But while illustrations are key, if the writing is not carrying its weight then it doesn’t matter. A truly great picture book is one where there is a balance between words and text (if there is any). Happily (and much to my own personal relief) that is the case here. Fairly early on I was hooked by the fact that when it appears that there is no teacher coming into the room, half the kids cheer, “No teacher means no rules!” This is swiftly countered by the other half of the class. “Absolutely not!” If you know kids, you know that this rings true. But it’s more than just truisms. It’s sandwich-related puns, excellently parceled out information, and, of course, that marvelous ending. A co-worker of mine who does storytimes on the regular told me that he recently made this part of his Funny 2023 Picture Books program and then had the kids vote on their favorite. Their choice? Ham’s down, this was the winner. A word on the back endpapers. Illustrators sometimes think that we can’t tell when they illustrate real people into their books. I get that, I do, but let’s be real. Your average reader can tell. So when I got to the Yearbook-esque back pages of this book and saw the array of “teachers” there, I knew for a fact that they were people the author/illustrator knew. Who are they? Thank Uncle Google for answering that question. With very little searching I was able to identify Ms. Arnaldo’s agent Alexandra Levick, Sebastien Porco, and fellow artist Lian Cho. I’ll give a cookie to anyone who can identify more. This sort of thing is just catnip to librarians like myself. We simply must identify them all! But what’s particularly interesting about the endpapers of THIS particular book is the fact that the plot actually extends into that section. I’m not kidding! The last page of the book (which I will not spoil) makes you turn the page to try and figure out a big reveal and then BAM! You’re on the endpapers (with a mystery that is no clearer than before). It goes further than that, though. If you’re lucky enough to get a copy of this book where the book jacket has not been taped down, remove it and you’ll find something amazing on both the front and back covers. An endless source of delights, this book! Getting back to my original point about first day of school picture books, it’s probably a good thing that we have so many different kinds in different styles out there. Some kids would probably appreciate those of the more touching variety. But even so, I know for a fact that there are small children out there for whom books, where they not only get the central joke but are surprised by the plot twists, reign supreme. So all hail, Mr. S! A finer sandwich in a finer picture book I have yet to see (take THAT Giant Jam Sandwich!). ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Aug 03, 2023
not set
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Aug 03, 2023
not set
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Aug 03, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 166265104X
| 9781662651045
| 166265104X
| 4.23
| 359
| unknown
| Jun 06, 2023
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it was amazing
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Rules for Creating Great Picture Books: You don’t need unicorns. Not really. You don’t need magic at all. I mean, if you want to include magic then go
Rules for Creating Great Picture Books: You don’t need unicorns. Not really. You don’t need magic at all. I mean, if you want to include magic then go for it! It’s all yours! But it’s not an ingredient to storytelling that’s 100% necessary. When I look at some of the great picture books of all time, often the ones starring humans are of a realistic bent. Your Madeline or Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day tales. And certainly, when the right combination of art and text is brought together, almost any plot has the potential for brilliance. Even a story as simple as a kid helping out his dad with his lawncare job can be fun if you know how to spin it. And spinning, apparently, is something Jesús Trejo excels at. An expert combination of kid-logic and hilarious art in the book Papá's Magical Water-jug Clock takes something as mundane as gardening and turns it into full-on wacky hijinks. Hijinks that trump magic every time. Woohoo! Jesús is up at the crack of dawn because today’s the day he’s been waiting for. It’s Saturday! The day he gets to help Papá in his work as a gardener! And as he fills the water jug, Papá informs Jesús that that is no ordinary container. Nope! It’s like a magical clock. When the water runs out inside, that’ll mean it’s time to go home. Even better, Jesús is put in charge of the jug. It’s a big responsibility but the kid is up for the challenge. Which is to say, he’s up for speeding that clock up as fast as possible. At the first house he gives drinks to all the elderly kitties. At the second house, water is going to the tiny dog that lives there. At the third house? Note the thirsty peacocks. You can imagine Papá's surprise to see the water almost completely gone already. Is it time to go home yet? No, but it is time for Jesús to learn a hard lesson about trying to trick time when there are jobs to do. If you look at a lot of Best Children’s Books of the Year lists coming out of library systems like NYPL or CPL, you’ll notice that in recent years they’ve taken a great deal of care to include bilingual and entirely Spanish language children’s book titles. Simultaneously, a fair number of publishers have been careful to create bilingual books in both English and Spanish, or to incorporate Spanish words and phrases into the English text. Of course not every book that uses Spanish words in the story does it well. Sometimes it can feel out-of-place or oddly incorporated. There’s an art to such inclusion and that art is employed perfectly by Jesús Trejo here. Not too long ago every time a picture book would include a Spanish word or phrase it would italicize that word and make a great big deal about it. These days the words are effortlessly included and the end result makes for a smoother read. And I should say that of all the picture books I’ve seen this year, few are quite as smooth as Papá's Magical Water-jug Clock. Much of the book’s charm hinges on its application of kid-logic. You know exactly what Papá was thinking when he told Jesús that the water-jug was magic. Jesús is still young enough that hanging out with his dad on his job all day is fun. Giving the kid a little responsibility with something as simultaneously important and unimportant as a water-jug (and extra points if you can make it sound magical) is awesome. But who could blame Jesús for extrapolating a little and taking the magic water-jug idea to its logical conclusion? Work is done when the water-jug is empty? It’s a miracle he doesn’t just tip it all into the gutter somewhere, honestly. The best part of all this is when Papá has to fess up and Jesús has this marvelous moment where the part of all this that makes him the angriest is, “YOU MADE ME THE BOSS OF A REGULAR, NON-MAGICAL, PLAIN OLD WATER JUG?!!!” That’s worth a full-page tantrum right there (though I should note that the boy quickly recants, afraid that he’ll be fired from the family business). What makes this plot work so well is that the tension in the story comes from the common kind of miscommunication that happens every day between parents and their children. They want to keep things interesting for their kids, these parents. They just sometimes forget what literalists little children are. According to his bio on the bookflap, author Jesús Trejo is a bit of a celebrity with his acting, stand-up, and executive producing. You’d never know it from reading this book, and I mean that in the best possible way. Under normal circumstances a celebrity picture book is a lamentable creation. Well-meaning, placid, and dull. They are inevitably preachy, incalculably boring, and saved only by the brilliance of their underpaid illustrators. This book, in contrast, is peppy, fun, funny, and contains a storyline and tone that I’ve never seen done in a story for kids before. The sole similarity this book has to other celebrity picture books is that it was blessed by the brilliance of a great illustrator. Eliza Kinkz apparently did a book before this called Goldie’s Guide to Grandchilding which I may have to seek out and read on my own. Here she brings her signature whopping big time joy to the page and I am here for it! Read the publication page and you’ll see that the art in this book was created with pencil, ink, watercolor, gouache, crayons, “and a few drops of queso.” Nothing wrong with that. The end result, of course, is that you step away from these pages with the understanding that the book is a wild combination of pitch perfect visual gags with flourishes to the art that make it feel like an actual kid had a hand in its creation somewhere along the line. But the true star of the show is clearly Jesús. The energy coming off this kid! He doesn’t run, he springs. Anyone who has ever parented (or babysat) a small child will get where he’s coming from. Add in the fact that Eliza is capable of bringing personality to everything from tall scary trees to elderly cats (perhaps the best old felines I’ve ever seen depicted in a picture book before) and you begin to understand why this book seems to thrum with energy on every page. I’d also like to give some credit to how well Eliza creates backgrounds to her scenes. The house? It’s thoroughly lived in, covered in the detritus of having a young kid (toys and action figures and school supplies cast about merrily on the ground). The van? You know this van. This is a working van. And the rope with a written description as “Van Security” reminded me of how ropes are used similarly in this year’s graphic novel Mexikid by Pedro Martín. Ropes in vehicles are having a moment, man. The outdoor settings don’t have the liberty of establishing personality through mess, but Ms. Kinkz does what she can by showing a wide array of different kinds of houses, all in need of gardening work. I was reading another picture book this year called Yenebi’s Drive to School (by Sendy Santamaria) and in that book the authors had to acknowledge why the child characters in the book were in a car without seatbelts for long periods of time. I suppose they figured it might nip any objections to the book in the bud. Papá's Magical Water-jug Clock does not suffer this fate (seatbelts are tightly fashioned on everyone) but little Jesús does ride in the front seat in at least one scene. I know some folks might raise an eyebrow at this, but considering the state of the back of the work van, I think it makes a fair amount of sense. One element I would have loved to have seen in this book would have been an Author’s Note, even a short one. This is a story about a kid named Jesús and the author of the book is named (ready for it?) Jesús. So is this based on a true story? Are there any autobiographical elements to the tale? Not long ago I read a very different helping-my-dad-out-with-yard-work book called Growing an Artist: The Story of a Landscaper and His Son by John Parra. That book was sort of the serious, meaningful version of this one. As such, it would have been cool if this story had included some personal details, even if they were just on the bookflap. Then again, you could still pair Growing an Artist with Papá's Magical Water-jug Clock if you wanted to. I suspect that if you read both books to kids, you could get a really good discussion going about the similarities and differences between the two. For a brief, shining moment in a child’s life, they’re thrilled to be helping their parents out with work. Any kind of work, really. It doesn’t last, of course. In a couple years Jesús may be trying to purposefully get himself fired from the family business (and failing). So this is a picture book that has zeroed in on just the right age for just the right readership. The art and writing pair together with absolute perfection, and aside from the odd failure to include any personal information on the part of the author, I’d say it’s just about as perfect a summertime book as you’re likely to find for a while. Clocks and cats, water and magic, and at its heart a father-son storyline. Nab it for your next storytime, whenever you get the chance. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Jun 07, 2023
not set
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Jun 07, 2023
not set
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Jun 07, 2023
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Hardcover
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| unknown
| 4.12
| 303
| unknown
| 2023
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it was amazing
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The superhero picture book is not a new idea. It's been around for a couple decades at least. Right off the top of my head I can conjure up titles lik
The superhero picture book is not a new idea. It's been around for a couple decades at least. Right off the top of my head I can conjure up titles like The Adventures of Sparrowboy by Brian Pinkney (2000) or Superhero ABC by Bob McLeod (2006). Google “superhero picture books” sometime and you’ll get hit in the face by a plethora of them. Some of them just have superhero characters but maintain the format of your average bedtime book. Others go whole hog and put in panels and speech balloons and everything. And to this day each and every last one of those books is . . . well . . . perfectly fine. Not extraordinary. Not trying anything particularly new. The format, in many cases, is the hook. Kids like comics, right? So just put a picture book into a comic book format. The increased respect for comics these days plus the acknowledgement that kids younger and younger read them (the TOON Books imprint predicates its entire existence on that idea) PLUS the popularity of the Marvel films equals an immediate cash cow for any picture book that tries its hand at the form, right? Wrong. Look, when I say “perfectly fine” I’m basically saying that superhero/comic book-styled picture books are never all that interesting. And the only way to even attempt to make them interesting would be to have a really good writer pair their name to such a project. So far, in spite of the pedigree (remember Michael Chabon’s The Astonishing Secret of Awesome Man?) nobody’s ever really managed to bring great writing to the form. Until now. The name “Derrick Barnes” should, by all rights, be accompanied by angel choirs and a John Williams score. This is the man that managed to turn a poem like Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut into one of the most highly decorated picture book award winners of our age. He's dabbled with some follow-ups, some early chapter books, and some first day of school books, but now he’s started flexing his muscles again. You get the sense that he understands that it’s time to try something both new and familiar. In Like Lava in My Veins you’ve a perfect melding of superhero tropes and topical contemporary issues. It’s a tricky balance, but by gum the man pulls it off in the end. You know that kid that’s just full of so much fire he has a hard time controlling himself? Some injustice will happen and before you know it he’s lit up like a torch. Well, that’s Bobby Beacon (because “Beacons lead people and show them the way”) and he’s headed for AKWAA a.k.a. The Academy of Kids with Awesome Abilities. Once there, Bobby notices another new student named Pause getting kicked out after just a week for her behavior. Unfortunately, Bobby’s having some troubles as well. When his teacher continues to make him feel invisible in class, he just can’t control himself and ends up melting a chair. It looks like he might be on the road to joining The Institute of Supervillains, but then a change is made. Suddenly he’s in a class with a new teacher named Miss Brooklyn. She makes Bobby feel wanted, loves Langston Hughes as much as he does, and teaches him calming techniques to deal with the fire inside. Good thing too because before long Headmaster Chaos of the Institute has come to take Bobby away to his school, and it’ll take all our hero’s control and intelligence to keep his head and stand up for what’s right. As I mentioned before, Barnes is a good writer. And when he’s on, he’s on. I don’t know why he wanted to write this book in particular, but I can speculate. Superheroes, by and large, are usually big wish fulfillment fantasies/metaphors (and that’s when they’re done right). Other picture books about kids that Barnes has done recently usually star kids with an already rock solid strong sense of self, appreciated by their family and community. In this respect, Bobby’s a bit of a departure for Barnes. He’s named himself “Bobby Beacon”, which indicates that he knows his own worth, but time after time there are people telling him who he is or what he can’t do. It’s only because he finds a strong supportive mentor in the school that Bobby’s able to tap back into that sense of self-worth (and just in time too). Barnes expertly weaves this familiar tale of a kid dismissed by the adults in his life alongside the more superpowered elements. As a result, the real and familiar elements root the fantasy, while the superhero stuff keeps the book from degrading into forgettable but well-intentioned moralizing. One would not stand well without the other. Not that this is the only work Barnes is doing. There’s a lot more to pick apart here. For example, a significant moment in the text (and I missed this on a first read) is when Bobby defends his own name. At one point in the story the headmaster of the supervillain school has invaded AKWAA. As the students and teachers remain frozen, the headmaster call Bobby out, using the name “Lava Boy”. Yet Bobby chose that particular name, “Beacon”, for a reason and remembering that fact grounds him enough to stand up for it. The lesson that you take away from this book isn’t to just lie down and let people walk all over you. Rather, it’s that anger can be controlled and used to defend yourself when you’re under some kind of a threat. Anger isn’t wrong, a total loss of control is wrong. As Miss Brooklyn says, “Peace, be still.” If this sounds like a lot of plot, backstory, and underlying messaging for a picture book, you’re not wrong. And you know what kids who read picture books also like to be read? Comics. It’s not like they distinguish between the two at first. They may not understand everything they read in comics but that mixing and melding of text and image is so enticing, isn’t it about time they had a book of their own that could match? I’ve always said that our kids deserve the rarest kind of best, and that goes double for comic-infused picture book fare. Plus, there are little moments in this book that I know parent and adult readers will appreciate. For example, I know it probably wasn’t a direct reference, but that moment when Bobby plugs his ears with paper so he can’t hear Pause’s voice? Suddenly I was reminded of Get Out and the moment when our hero plugs his ears with cotton so he won’t be knocked out too. And now I’m going to tell you why folks are going to ban this book. Not everyone. Not almost anyone, even. But we live in an era where a book in which any plot that involves a Black kid tackling issues of built-in racist assumptions within a school setting is going to raise the hackles of certain ban-happy parents, right from the start. That’s not specifically why they’re going to ban it, though. They won’t even ban it because of the comic book elements or the fighting montages. No, they’re going to zero in on one particular character in the narrative. In the story, Bobby befriends a kid named Sincere. He’s this Run-DMC era cool kid with the power to make you tell the truth no matter what. He’s also featured sporting a golden inhaler as he sits in “The Chill Zone”. It is quite clearly an inhaler, and when I saw it I was impressed. I don’t know if it was Derrick or Shawn’s idea to add it to his character, but just the very act of not just normalizing an inhaler but making it look incredibly cool as well, that breaks down those age-old stereotypes of kids with asthma. I just know someone is going to appreciate its inclusion. Now how long, I ask you, will it be before someone looks at those images of Sincere and thinks the asthma inhaler is some kind of mini bong? I give complete credit to the creators of this book and the publisher for sticking to their guns and keeping that inhaler in there, knowing, as they must, that someone somewhere is going to clutch their pearls and misinterpret it according to their own prejudices. And now, let us hope with all our hearts, that I’m wrong about this. Speaking of Sincere, there was one sequence involving his character that caught my eye, so we need to talk about the art on these pages. Artist Shawn Martinbrough makes a series of choices with the panels of this book that overall really pleased me. Paired alongside Adriano Lucas’s killer coloring, the pictures here just pop off the page. They feel centered, and not like they were retrofitted from a comic book to fit a picture book format. What I found particularly curious, though, were the moments when Martinbrough would duplicate a panel completely. This happens a couple times in the book. The first time I noticed it, it was during that initial discussion between Bobby and Sincere. The two pages are split into six panels. Two of the panels are almost identical close-ups of Sincere’s face (albeit with the lollipop in his mouth moving from one side to another). Two other panels involve his fist. The first panel shows him raising it to use his power against someone lying to him. The second shows that fist meeting up with Bobby’s in a fistbump. I liked this repetition since I thought it did a good job of showing a progression in the two kids’ friendship. Later, however, there’s a repetition of two panels that’s kind of baffling. It’s when Bobby asks the principal if Pause could be given another chance and added to Miss Brooklyn’s class. On two different pages the same panel is repeated of Miss Brooklyn, Pause, and Bobby, the only significant difference being the mask in Pause’s hands in the first panel and the speech balloons in the second. It really took me out of the read and was the only moment where I felt like the book just assumed the reader wouldn’t notice. But if a 45-year-old woman can notice that sort of thing then you can BET a five-year-old will. Those kids are merciless. All told, the book’s a successful bit of experimentation. It’s got the meaningful storyline with real life antecedents. It also has a kid that can melt pavement to revenge himself against jerk bus drivers. I mean, what else do you need other than that? I mentioned before that superhero picture books are nothing new. I’ll stand by that statement, but here’s the truth of the matter. Good superhero picture books? As rare as sunflowers in May. This book stands out as one of the best of the best. And the kicker? Kids will actually love it too. How’s that for a notion? ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 17, 2023
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May 17, 2023
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May 17, 2023
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| 0063073161
| 9780063073166
| 0063073161
| 4.30
| 327
| unknown
| Mar 14, 2023
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it was amazing
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I don’t know how this book got made. I mean, I know the rudimentary basics behind it. I know how an author would write out a proposal and, if they wer
I don’t know how this book got made. I mean, I know the rudimentary basics behind it. I know how an author would write out a proposal and, if they were also an artist, draw some sketches. What I don’t know is how a person can look at a topic as impossible to encapsulate as child migrants moving across the U.S.-Mexico border and then know how to write a picture book on the subject. It dwarfs you, this subject matter. It engulfs. It’s too big to wrap your mind around, and yet, time after time, I watch as picture book creators work as hard as they can to find ways to tell stories that children will understand. Between Us and Abuela by Mitali Perkins took a stab at it. And there was My Journey With Papa by Deborah Mills and Alfredo Alva, sure. Still it feels too big to me. Too scary. And so when I read To the Other Side by Erika Meza, I was floored. With care and invention, she’s actually managed to tell a migrant story that is both literal and figurative, realistic and metaphorical, and do so with honesty and more than a bit of cleverness. As I said, I don’t know how this book got made, not because it shouldn’t have been made, but because I don’t know how you would even begin to put these pieces together. Pick your own favorites, but Meza’s latest is a beyond smart telling of a difficult (to say the least) topic. It's a game. You wear a mask. You avoid the monsters. You don’t get caught. And you keep moving as much as you can. Those are the rules. A young boy and his older sister, on their own, are traveling together. Sometimes they’re with other children. Sometimes they’re alone. They might travel by bus or by foot, over rivers or on the tops of trains. Sometimes they wait for long periods and sometimes they have to run for their lives. But always, always, they are together. And when they get to the end, long after the boy has realized that this journey is not actually a game, the future they find isn’t perfect, but there are things to love there. I’ve only recently become a big fan of Erika Meza, though I’d vaguely registered her picture books over the years (As Brave as a Lion, My Two Border Towns, Mystery of the Monarchs, etc.). For me personally, though, it was her work on the 2022 title Mariana and Her Familia by Mónica Mancillas that particularly caught my eye. When I did read it, I was struck by Meza’s talent with faces. She has a gift for eyes and eyebrows as well as the positions of bodies and other ways of depicting emotion through physicality that is impossible to ignore. So I’m not dead to the irony of the fact that in To the Other Side, Meza hides most of the characters’ faces, for most of the book, behind brightly colored masks. If I was initially drawn by one aspect of her work, this book proves that Meza is more than just drawing pretty faces. I’ve read this book multiple times. Over and over again. Each time, I notice new details. New elements I hadn’t before. One person I keep coming back to, over and over again, is the big sister in this book. Meza has carefully chosen the younger brother to be the narrator. His youth and optimism make him ideal for the job, but it’s the sister who's the person you need to keep an eye on. She’s given the arduous task of not simply traveling across borders without a reliable adult, but also of doing so with a realistically rendered younger child. After a couple reads I noticed that her mask, which is of a rabbit, always has its eyes wide open. Even when her brother’s mask closes in his sleep, her eyes stay alert. At the end of the story, they’ve found safety and the boy is making a new friend. He’s happily tossed his mask to the ground, but his sister, who is never far from him, isn’t smiling yet. She keeps her mask in her hands, keeping it close so that if she had to, she could put it on again in a second. It’s the only time in the entire book when you see her face and you wonder how long it’ll be until she’s able to relinquish that mask entirely. Getting away from the people a bit, I also noticed that Meza very subtly incorporates bars and gates into almost all the art here. The houses of the roofs where our main characters start, the wings of the birds (and the monsters), the slats of a raft, fronds on a palm, bridges, cactuses, railroad tracks, train cars, and more all replicate this same bar-like pattern. Even after the kids are in a safe space, a playground, the bars are in the see-saw, the seats of the swing, the monkey bars, and the steps of the slide. It’s so subtle, but what a clever way of making it clear that even when you’re running on the top of a train or sitting with marbles on the sidewalk, there are images and thoughts that will always remain on the periphery of your mind. Whether you want them to or not. With all this being said, you might be under the understandable impression that with subject matter this dark, the book itself might come across as too scary or impenetrable for small children. And while I don’t think I’d be handing this to a preschooler anytime soon, for the most part I’d have to disagree. This is perfect for elementary school aged kids. Meza has taken several steps to balance the scary with the necessary, and it’s a wonder to watch her work. Our narrator sees much of the book as an adventure and a game, and even after he realizes that it isn’t, at the end of this story he’s teaching it to another child. And as I mentioned earlier, the colorful masks that the migrants wear cover up those incredible faces that Meza’s so good at drawing. It also covers up emotions that would wring your heart out if you could see them. Meza also has clues dropped in the corners that indicate difficulties, even when you don’t see them firsthand. Smoke rising from houses in the distance. Children’s shoes and backpacks abandoned in the desert without explanation. A single child with the only unpainted skull mask, indicating something deep and sad and unknowable. The end result is that you can read this on a child’s level, not really getting everything that’s going on here, as well as on an adult level, seeing everything but only if you really stop and look. Since the press surrounding the U.S. separation policy came to light in 2018, I’ve paid closer attention to immigrant picture books that focus on migrants and refugees coming from the southern border. We’ve seen a number of different techniques over the years. Two White Rabbits by Jairo Buitrago, Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote by Duncan Tonatiuh, and Hear My Voice compiled by Warren Binford. Each book has a style and feel entirely different from its fellows but they all have in common a demand that we acknowledge people to be people. Meza writes in her Author’s Note at the end of the book, “Migrants and refugees are often portrayed as either heroes or villains; and yet, the children I was lucky to meet when working on this book were simply that: children.” Meza gives those children a voice in her backmatter, where she illustrates their words. And she gives them a voice in the picture book itself, where empathy is built and grown. I started off this review by saying I didn’t know how this book got made. Not when its subject matter is so huge and terrifying. But maybe I’ve something to learn from the older sister of this book. Maybe change can only come when someone tells us the right story. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Apr 19, 2023
not set
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Apr 19, 2023
not set
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Apr 19, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 1778400612
| 9781778400612
| B0B6MYTB1Q
| 4.06
| 160
| 2022
| May 09, 2023
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it was amazing
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Maybe there was a moment during the early days of the pandemic when a whole slew of picture book creators thought to themselves, “Boy. Things are roug
Maybe there was a moment during the early days of the pandemic when a whole slew of picture book creators thought to themselves, “Boy. Things are rough now. When has it been rougher than this? I know! The Pleistocene!” How else to explain the slew of books for kids I’m seeing out right now that explore this very notion? Maybe there’s a comfort in turning not merely to the past, but the ancient past. And how interesting that no matter how well you think you know a picture book creative duo, you can never really predict where they’ll go with their next project. I’ve read everything Yockteng and Buitrago have done together that’s been brought to the American market, but nothing they’ve done could have prepared me for Afterward, Everything Was Different. Years and years ago I adored their collaboration on Jimmy the Greatest but this is heads and tails different from that. Here they’ve decided to produce an epic bit of storytelling, all in black and white, following a clan of early people and the one member who will help to change the world. Sometimes, it’s nice to sink into the past and get away from your troubles. Particularly when the characters’ troubles are so so so much worse than your own. Our story opens on a field of what look to be stampeding buffalo (or some kind of buffalo ancestor). The world is wild, full of volcanoes and valleys. While a giant sloth feeds on a tree, five men attack the buffalo with their spears. When the attack goes poorly, the title page appears. “Afterward, Everything Was Different.” The men rejoin the rest of their tribe, including a man-like creature, a dog, two women, two naked boys, and a girl who notices the natural world around them. Over time they lose members to animal attacks and falling rocks. They defeat wild beasts and at last find themselves in a warm cave. Here, the girl that has paid so much attention to everything, constructs beautiful cave drawing on the walls. And when her family returns she is able to tell them their own stories. “The marks she made were never erased,” we read at the end. And afterward, you know why, everything was different. This isn’t the first wordless caveman picture book I’ve ever seen, by the way. Just last year we saw Finding Fire by Logan S. Kline. Still, that book pretty much said everything it needed to say in its title. This book relies heavily on cinematic imagery, particularly right at the start. The opening takes place for about twelve pages before you get to the title page. Naturally I was reminded of Brian Selznick’s work on The Invention of Hugo Cabret (particularly as both are done entirely in black and white graphite). The author and artist then riddle the storyline with context clues, allowing kids to understand the story maybe with the first read, maybe over the course of several rereads, all depending on when they come to it. And this sequential art is marvelous, but it’s the ending that brings everything together. You’ve seen this clan survive, losing members along the way. You’ve seen them fight beasts, become cold and hungry, and ultimately find a place to call home. The girl is able to tell them their stories, and then, in a final shot, she gets a huge hug from her father. I don’t even need the fairly superfluous written page after that saying she’d rule the clan someday. That shot of a girl with her daddy in a hug, of him approving of what she is doing and encouraging her, is all the ending that I need. We may as well infer the rest. When you reread this book, you tend to notice something new every time. Just now I gave it another look and discovered that it’s the girl, the one who is always noticing nature, that points out animal threats long before anyone else, whether it’s vicious sea creatures or saber tooth tigers. I had already noticed that in each scene she’s the one scoping out the giant footprints or investigating the stars. When she creates the cave art for the first time the reader can have a wonderful time looking through her drawings and aligning them to the different adventures the troop has experienced over time (my favorite, of course, being the man in the belly of the sea monster). Of course, something that the book doesn’t mention, but that’s been reported over the years by the Smithsonian, National Geographic, etc. is that after examining the handprints in ancient art (and you’ll find some of that on the back endpapers) it is now understood that around three quarters of cave art was created by women. And yet this is the first picture book I’ve ever seen to allude to that in any way. A little mention of this at the end wouldn’t have been out of place. Hopefully some folks will be able to inform their kids as they read them this book. The mix of science and fiction is original as well. The animals depicted in this book are fun to track, though I doubt anyone would turn to this bok for strict scientific accuracy. I could buy the giant sloth the humans encounter at the beginning, but the giant ancestors to the horse walking with their heads above the treetops felt a little (forgive me) over the top. In contrast, I was completely on board with the human-like compatriot who accompanies this ragtag little crew. We know that there were many other ancient ancestors that were not Homo Sapiens, and these early humans often intermingled. This fella isn’t a Neanderthal, but he has distinct human-like qualities. Considering the fact that there were probably a slew of species that went extinct, it’s not hard to imagine a storyline for this fella. He's significantly taller than the homo sapiens and they accept him without question. Honestly, I’m much more enamored of a book for kids when it has weird little details like this one in it. I was also deeply amused to discover on the publication page of this book that this translated title isn’t the original. Apparently in Spanish this book is called, “Ugh! Un relato del pleistoceno”. I was no Spanish major, but even I can tell that “Afterward, Everything Was Different” is a much better title. It’s funny, but with its wordless storytelling and epic view of history, I can’t help but think that this would pair beautifully alongside the equally ambitious and wordless (if visually very different) The Tree and the River by Aaron Becker. That book is all about the cyclical nature of human struggles. This book is about how those struggles began and how we found one, powerful way out. If you read Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Harari, you’ll learn that one theory of what distinguishes humans from other animals is our ability to tell stories. Tell stories and you can construct cities, religions, monetary systems, philosophies, and more. And sometimes, all it takes, is an observant child. It’s not nonfiction, but this is one of the smartest little books you’ll ever hand a kid on where it all comes from. Beautiful. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 23, 2023
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Feb 23, 2023
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Feb 23, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 1536223298
| 9781536223293
| 1536223298
| 4.31
| 842
| unknown
| Mar 14, 2023
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it was amazing
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Entropy! Not a lot of picture books out there on the subject. Not a lot of picture books out there covering the rise and fall of whole civilizations e Entropy! Not a lot of picture books out there on the subject. Not a lot of picture books out there covering the rise and fall of whole civilizations either, but here we are. Or, rather, here Aaron Becker is. In the world of 21st century picture book creators, it can be hard to stand out from the crowd. Never before have more people created more picture books for the American market. The sheer number of them coming out every month just boggles the mind. How do you stand out from the crowd? It’s probably a good idea to have a niche. An area where you excel above and beyond your fellow compatriots. And from the start, Aaron Becker decided that that niche would be to go big or go home. Sweeping vistas. Epic storylines. Quests. Deep dives into ancient history. Proving that picture books are for more than preschoolers, Becker’s challenge his readers. Much like picture books of the past (like those created by Mark Alan Stamaty or, to certain extent, Anno) Becker’s titles invite the readers to take the deepest of deep dives into his books. And while I adore his Journey trilogy, there is still no better example of this than the equally wordless The Tree and the River. It’s going to strike a lot of adult readers as an environmental tale, and that’s not wholly wrong. But on beyond that, the book is a recording of a human history, not unlike our own, where choices, good and bad, lead to irrevocable changes and, ultimately, a bit of hope. When this book begins, a young tree is growing on a small peninsula at the side of a river. People populate the banks and with every turn of the page more and more time goes by. Their villages grow. Rival villages sprout up. There are hints that battles occur in the space between the page turns, but soon things become industrial. Technology increases as does the sophistication of the wider world. Even so, change will have its way with these people, and by the time the tree drops its final acorn, the old one will have passed away, and new life will be in the making. A smartly drawn, creative take on our cyclical world. It shouldn’t have to be notable, but is just the same, that what separates The Tree and the River from a lot of other books for young readers covering broad, sweeping amounts of time is Becker’s disinclination to moralize. American picture books, by their very design, are written to instruct children in how to think, feel, and interpret the world around them. In some alternate universe, a version of The Tree and the River that engages in overt didacticism must exist. Happily this particular book lives by the creed of showing rather than telling. If you want to come to the conclusion that global warming is responsible for the flooding late in this title, you are absolutely able to do so, but Becker’s not going to spell that one out for you. In a way, his ability to step back and let the pictures do the talking, results in a story that is more comforting than one might expect. Yes, civilizations topple over time, but there is life and hope and birth and change. When you get to the end of this book you are free to take the gloomy view that this storyline is cyclical and will happen over and over to the human race, or you can opt for the lighter view that maybe this time they’re gonna get it right. Now let’s take the fact that the book doesn’t hit you over the head with any clear-cut messaging as one of Becker’s central tenets. He has others, of course. The choice to make his books wordless is tied directly to that avoidance of moral instruction. It is also, in many ways, the key to these images’ success. Without words, children are forced to make sense of the pictures on these pages themselves. One of the great gifts of The Tree and the River, therefore, is this capacity to feed into the brains of children. For example, they might look at that page where the world has been flooded and notice that on some of these boats there are still people wearing those tall top hats made popular by the blue army. But, go a little earlier, and did you notice that in the sequence that takes place during a time period that looks a lot like today, there’s a statue commemorating one of the heroes of the war, and it’s wearing the clothes of the red army. I mean, I haven’t read any interviews with Mr. Becker about the book, but if I were to make an educated guess I’d suspect that he probably also doesn’t necessarily know what went down in this world he created. Imagine tapping into that well of imagination. Where you can literally conjure up worlds so vast that you create them knowing that they will, in turn, lead others to extrapolate far beyond anything you could have dreamed. All the more so if your preferred readership hasn’t even hit puberty yet. Even as his storytelling grows wider and more vast, the actual human figures in this book are much smaller and sketched out than in Becker’s previous books. I’ve already mentioned the works of Mitsumasa Anno earlier in this review but honestly there is no better, comparable artist. In books like Anno’s Journey the figures were kept small even as the book transported you through fields and towns and even time itself. Another artist Becker reminded me of here is Elisha Cooper. Some of Cooper’s books, like Train create tiny human figures that somehow, through the barest flick of ink here or there, convey humanity’s physical range. Becker’s people, similarly, are simplified but his is a looser style. Facial features are, for the most part, nonexistent (you’re lucky if you get eyes). And yet, I am continually amazed by how people can look at lines that bear even the slightest resemblance to a fellow human being and identify with them. You want to give these tiny people stories. There’s a scene in this book where it’s raining and a single figure in pink is standing by the tree under an umbrella. Are they waiting for someone? Watching? Why are they the only person in pink? Questions without answers. You know what kills me? Every single time I look through this book, no matter how many times I’ve looked before, I find something new. Look, Becker’s included a kind of lens flare technique on the page where the sun is setting to the left! Look, there’s a rainbow on the page after the baby tree has started to grow! Look, on the page before the flooding has happened, there’s a bit of foreshadowing with the rain! Look (and when I saw this I got ridiculously excited), if you go way way back to the very beginning of the book, you notice that further up the bank is a dead tree that mimics the way that this tree, at the end of the book, looks. Now look beyond that old tree, half hidden in the shadows. What’s that rusting away? Leave it Aaron Becker to hide something on the publication page that, if you spot it, will change your entire perspective of this book. Becker keeps the book's focus fairly fixed on a single spit of land. That means that no one person ever takes precedence. There is no stand-in for the child reader, excepting the tree. And without an avatar on the page, the child turns detective, sniffing out clues, making up stories. The kids are now holding up a lens to a civilization that cannot speak to them, but begs to be understood. But that’s Becker for you. He’ll make budding anthropologists and archaeologists out of the lot of them. The Tree and the River. A book unafraid to assume that your kids are smart enough to figure out what it all means. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 25, 2023
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Jan 25, 2023
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Jan 25, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 1760762954
| 9781760762957
| 1760762954
| 4.53
| 268
| unknown
| Jan 10, 2023
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it was amazing
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I don’t think that anyone would contest the idea that your occupation has an impact on the way in which your brain works on a day-to-day basis. Work t
I don’t think that anyone would contest the idea that your occupation has an impact on the way in which your brain works on a day-to-day basis. Work trains our minds into certain patterns. My job, for example, for many years was to be a children’s librarian. Part of what that means is that any time a person, be they a small child or an adult, came up to my desk, I had to be prepared to make connections. For example, if an adorable 3-year-old begged for “scary books” I needed to have a roster of titles in my brain to pull from in order to meet that need. In the children’s librarian world, the better you are at this kind of association, the better you are at your job. What I didn’t realize for a long time was how this would affect not simply my friendship with children’s authors (anytime one told me an idea for a book I’d inevitably try to come up with similar already existing ideas, which is not always consider a polite response), but also with the act of reviewing. I’ve reviewed children’s books almost as long as I’ve worked as a librarian and normally drawing associations between books is a good thing. There are times, however, when you wish you could see a book just for itself, on its own merits, without constantly comparing it to everything else out there. My Strange Shrinking Parents is a marvelous example of this. Reading Zeno Sworder’s haunting and magical metaphor for immigration, but with all the rules of a fairy tale intact, I wanted desperately to compare the book to Shaun Tan’s The Arrival. It was only after a little consideration that I realized how unfair that was to both Tan and Sworder. The fact of the matter is that My Strange Shrinking Parents is entirely its own creation, standing on its own two feet, with its own internal logic and rules. It is, in fact, one of the best takes on the experiences of children of immigrant parents I’ve ever seen in a picture book form. It stands, as I say, tall. Before he was born, a boy’s parents left their countries and moved to a new place. “They had old shoes and empty pockets”. The two determined to give their child everything he would want, and to keep their daily problems from him. So when the time came for them to buy him a birthday cake, get him some schooling, or buy him books and shoes, they would barter. Just a couple inches of their height, and they could help their child. As time went by the boy was teased for being different and blamed his parents, begging them to stop shrinking. But the parents loved their son, and by the time he was able to get a job of his own, they were quite small indeed. So when he had a family of his own, he built his parents a beautiful house and made it so they would never have to work again. As the lullaby from his babyhood said, “Though our lives may be humble, / We are giants within.” Inspired by the works of Oscar Wilde, Shel Silverstein, and Stan Sakai comes a story of truly enduring love. Where do your eyes go when you look at the cover of this book? For me, the image is split, almost immediately, between two parts. On the one hand my instinct is to read the title first. Sworder places it dead center on the page, on a square with beveled edges, as if to make it resemble a stamp or the sides of an old photograph. Then, immediately, you look at the woman seated just off-center to the left. Knees together, she’s perched, almost delicately, on what you later realize is her son’s left foot. Clad in a red dress, it’s a supremely dignified position, as if she’s posing for a professional photograph. To her right is her husband, one hand on her shoulder looking not at the viewer/camera lens, but right at her. Then, visible only up until the bottoms of the pockets of his shorts, is their son. You know these are the parents being referred to in the title, but again and again your eye goes back to that mother. The title itself feels like it should be goofy, but you can’t separate yourself from her poise. And you may wish, if only for a moment, to have a little of that poise yourself, whatever your size. What the cover also does, I should mention, is make you keenly aware of Sworder’s illustration style. It’s a gentle surreal realism. Something you might get if Chris Van Allsburg were influenced by the Japanese woodblock prints of Hokusai and Hiroshinge. And, yes, there’s a hint of Shaun Tan in there as well. This realism is part of the reason the book works as well as it does. This is a world where it is perfectly normal to demand height for labor. Indeed, none of the adults in this book see anything wrong with the transaction of taking something from someone who has nothing else to trade for the things a child might need to grow up. Rereading the book several times also rewards sharp-eyed readers. I am convinced that there is a special place in the firmament above for illustrators that give parents more to see with every read and reread they perform on a book. It took me many times of going over this story before I realized that the shot at the beginning of the parents lifting up their son (while the viewer peers over a shelf containing bonsai plants and cracked tea cups) is repeated later with a similar shot of that same son lifting up HIS child. Only now his parents are standing on that shelf, not in front of it. There are also small details in addition to these larger, more obvious references, that could elude you if you weren’t careful. For example, there is a small gift for sharp eyes located at the end of this book. It’s on the back bookflap, but also on the endpapers. Look there and you’ll see an array of beautifully rendered teapots of all kinds of colors and shapes. Some are intricate and ancient while others are rough and contemporary. And under the bookflap, red as the dress on the cover of the book, is an incredibly tiny teapot. No larger, you might think, than a pebble on a beach. Look close now. There it is (with two tiny cups) on the back of the book. Is it in the story? At first you might not think so and then . . . yes! Yes indeed, it’s beside the parents on that shelf I mentioned earlier. The one where they watch their son lifting his own new baby. And did you notice too that the other red object in the story, the red of the mother’s dress (which so entranced me on the cover), is consistent throughout the pages? The only time it fades is in that last image, where the parents stand outside in the fading light. In his note at the end Sworder writes that, “while this story is imagined, its foundations are the milestones of my journey from child to parent. It is a fairytale woven together with memory.” I could tell you about all the ways Sworder’s storytelling choices went right. I could wax eloquent upon the wordless two-page spread that just shows two blossoms floating free of a tree against a blue sky. Or I could go another route. I could tell you all the ways that Sworder’s storytelling could have gone desperately, horribly wrong. For example, fairytale that this is, Sworder could have gone the Hans Christian Andersen route with his telling and traipsed it into tragic territory. Instead, he knew that a picture book must sometimes be all about balance. There are heartrending scenes, as when the boy kneels before his small mother, crying, arms wrapped around her, begging her to stop shrinking. Promising nothing she just says, “Those children think we’re different but we’re not. Our hearts are just as big. Our love is just as good.” And it’s the succinct rendering of those lines that make it work. Even without the gorgeous imagery, if you read this book and just read the words alone, you’d tear up at that moment just like I do. Every single time. There is a dedication written at the beginning of this book. It reads, “To my immigrant parents. And to all parents who burden and narrow their own lives in the hope that their children will be free to go further.” I started this review by mentioning that I sometimes cannot read a new work for children without immediately trying to pair it with a similar title or titles. But if we really get into the metaphor and the meat of the story, what other picture book out there even talks half as plainly about the debt children owe to their parents? There are lots and lots of picture books about immigration. Often they are about the children that travel to new locations with their parents. Where, then, is the story about second generation kids like Sworder? Kids that may never fully understand the debt they owe these parents? And as I wrack my brain I realize that really, I don’t have to do that. My Strange Shrinking Parents is unique. It shouldn’t have to be. We should have reams of stories that cover similar territory. But if I had to have just one (not like I have a choice, but still) I would want it to be this book. Tone, image, story, and metaphor. Each piece of this book fits snugly together with every other piece, like a well-constructed puzzle. Simple enough for children to understand. Layered enough for adult readers to appreciate. Strangely perfect. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Jan 04, 2023
not set
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Jan 04, 2023
not set
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Jan 04, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 0593308433
| 9780593308431
| 0593308433
| 4.30
| 2,850
| May 24, 2022
| May 24, 2022
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it was amazing
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I feel like I owe you the truth, right at the start of this review. So let’s get down to brass tacks. Me? Not a dog person myself. Like ‘em fine. My s
I feel like I owe you the truth, right at the start of this review. So let’s get down to brass tacks. Me? Not a dog person myself. Like ‘em fine. My sister owns one and I’m more than happy to visit when I come over, but own one? No interest. Likewise, when I encounter a picture book that contains a dog I am not an immediate fan. I don’t dislike such books, but if a book is leaning too heavily on a reader’s already existing love of canines rather its own writing/art, I want no part of it. Basically, I’m just trying to make it clear that dogs are great but they don’t automatically make a picture book good. In fact, because I work with so many people in my workplace (which happens to be a library) that automatically love any book containing a dog or dogs, I’m naturally wary. My bar is set fairly high. And cresting that bar this year is none other than Doug Salati. A former Sendak Fellow, Salati has several picture books under his belt already, but I think it fair to say that in many ways his latest, Hot Dog is perhaps the best example he’s provided thus far of how he can exemplify his myriad talents. Practically a wordless book, the storyline delves deep into the mindset of an average dog, an average owner, and the cool seaside breezes that can pivot a day from miserable to marvelous. “City summer / steamy sidewalks / concrete crumbles / sirens screech.” A small wiener dog and its owner trudge down those streets. As she runs indoors to get chores done, the dog is exposed to the loud sounds, smells, and sheer waves of heat emanating off the pavement. Finally as the crowds close in on them both it just can’t take it. “… too close! too loud! too much! THAT’S IT!” And right then and there it stages a sit-in in the center of a crosswalk. Fortunately, its owner recognizes what is happening here. Without another thought they leap from taxi to train to ferry. They walk boardwalks on an island “wild and long and low” and the little dog is allowed to run as much as it likes in the sand by the shore. Finally the two return home to a city that has cooled off after the long day, and back in their apartment they fall asleep and dream of seals and sea. One could argue that all books are uniquely designed to give their readers special insight into the thoughts and feelings of folks unlike themselves. But it’s picture books that do this especially, particularly well. It isn’t just the fact that they are built to appeal to the youngest of readers. Much of the credit has to be given over to the fact that when combined correctly, the mix of image and text is uniquely capable of producing empathetic reactions in readers, young OR old. In the case of Hot Dog you can almost feel your own internal temperature rising. At the beginning of the book Salati illustrates his pages with bright sunlight and a combination of summertime reds, oranges, yellows, and browns. The panels on the pages are packed tight with other people or loud raucous sounds. It just builds and builds until you come to the magnificent image of a hot sun blazing on a city street between two rows of buildings. Everything at this point is a bleached orange, and one little dog in the middle of the street has had Enough with a capital “E”. This dog has been pushed past the limits of canine endurance and by refusing to budge it almost single-handedly cools the very colors of the pages down a notch. I felt everything this dog felt, and much of that was due to the images. It is notable, then, that when the scenery starts to change to the seaside, I started paying more attention to the cooling affect of the words. Sure the picture were now awash in blues and greens but listen to this text: “unfolding sky, a salty breeze / a welcome whiff of someplace new / an island … wild and long and low.” You don’t even have to see the pictures to understand that things are different here. And that reliance on words continues when the duo return to the city, so that by the time you reach the text that says, “everyone cools down” you truly believe it. But there’s another aspect of this book that I want to highlight and it has nothing to do with invoking nature’s breezes. At no point does Salati ever identify the city that the woman and her dog live in. I suppose it could be anywhere since it doesn’t feature any grandiose landmarks. Even so, I lived in Manhattan for eleven years and it wasn’t hard for me to figure out that what we had here was a NYC landscape, pure and simple. I can’t really explain why I felt this way. It was something about how Salati rendered his town. To live in NYC is to take all its problems and blessings at once. Only a resident could understand that a crowded subway ride home after a long day can feel uniquely wonderful. Or that a stroll through a park at night is beautiful in and of itself. The woman who owns the dog doesn’t even have an elevator, as far as I can tell. But when she walks up the steps and has her supper in her tiny apartment, every part of that place from the design of the range to the style of the radiator felt 100% authentic. For my part, the thing that struck me about the book right from the get go was the way in which you empathize with this little dog. You feel the heat that it’s experiencing. The loud sounds. The crowded streets. Is it possible to convey sensory overload through the printed page? If so, Salati has mastered it. By the time the dog has had enough and has checked out, you are 100% on board with it. All you want is to be picked up and taken somewhere cool with fresh air and very few people. This may explain why I actually had the physical sensation of feeling the temperature drop as I continued on with the story. If Salati can make you feel the overwhelming heat of steaming city streets, he’s just as clever at invoking seaside calm and that cool that can only come from wind that has traveled a far distance over miles and miles of sea. On top of all that, however, this book acts as an elegant paean to animal care. No one can read this and not wish to do everything in their power to help this little dog. Which may explain some of the reactions my co-workers had to it. If you’ll recall, I mentioned earlier that there are a fair number of dog lovers at my workplace. Well, some of them saw Hot Dog firsthand and to my surprise their reactions were not that of love and adoration. Whyever not? Well, much of it has to do with the earliest parts of this book. There is a moment on page four when the dog’s owner ties it up outside a post office so that she can drop off her mail and, later, on page six she does the same thing while dropping off her dry cleaning. Now, I would point out that the entire reason Salati has done this is (a) realism (people really and truly do tie their dogs up outside of shops, especially in busy cities where you might not have someone at home to watch your pup while you’re out) and (b) to build up the stress and heat in the poor pooch that will, inevitably, lead to its nervous collapse and need for cool winds and dipping temperatures. Even so, I sympathize with dog owners who find these kinds of scenes painful. There is this idea that to depict something in a picture book is to promote it. I’d argue that this book is a brilliant example of arguing the opposite. What the owner in this book does is wrong, and it takes the rest of the title to show how one might go about making things right. I’ll finally also note that another objection I’ve heard to the title is that it features characters that are uniquely privileged. Once the owner realizes that her doggie is hot, she takes at least three different modes of travel to get out of the city and to a distant island. Lovely, but not something we can all do when we want to treat someone we love. And so, I acknowledge here and now that while the book has lovely aspects, it does see the world through a very specific kind of lens. I’m not a dog person. But I don’t have to be to enjoy this book. All I have to be is the kind of person who is capable of feeling for another living creature when the world is hard. The joy of Hot Dog is that at its heart it’s a story about listening to the voiceless when they’re trying to tell you something. We all need an escape sometimes. Some of us are lucky enough to acquire one and, when we do, that becomes worthy of telling in a story. Call it aspirational or just plain decent. Whatever you call it, Hot Dog is its spokesperson. A tale of making things right with the small furry ones you love. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 27, 2022
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Oct 27, 2022
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Oct 27, 2022
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Hardcover
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my rating |
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| 4.37
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it was amazing
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Sep 05, 2024
not set
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Sep 05, 2024
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| 4.42
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it was amazing
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Jul 31, 2024
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Jul 31, 2024
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| 4.62
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it was amazing
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Jul 10, 2024
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Jul 10, 2024
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| 4.18
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it was amazing
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May 30, 2024
not set
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May 30, 2024
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| 4.17
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it was amazing
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Apr 27, 2024
not set
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Apr 27, 2024
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| 4.17
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it was amazing
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Apr 05, 2024
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Apr 05, 2024
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| 4.50
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it was amazing
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Feb 21, 2024
not set
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Feb 21, 2024
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| 4.12
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it was amazing
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Jan 31, 2024
not set
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Jan 31, 2024
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| 3.54
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it was amazing
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Jan 08, 2024
Jan 08, 2024
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Jan 08, 2024
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| 4.16
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it was amazing
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Oct 05, 2023
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Oct 05, 2023
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| 4.66
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it was amazing
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Sep 14, 2023
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Sep 14, 2023
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| 4.29
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it was amazing
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Aug 23, 2023
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Aug 23, 2023
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| 4.21
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it was amazing
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Aug 03, 2023
not set
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Aug 03, 2023
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| 4.23
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it was amazing
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Jun 07, 2023
not set
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Jun 07, 2023
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| 4.12
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it was amazing
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May 17, 2023
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May 17, 2023
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| 4.30
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it was amazing
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Apr 19, 2023
not set
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Apr 19, 2023
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| 4.06
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it was amazing
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Feb 23, 2023
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Feb 23, 2023
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| 4.31
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it was amazing
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Jan 25, 2023
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Jan 25, 2023
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| 4.53
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it was amazing
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Jan 04, 2023
not set
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Jan 04, 2023
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| 4.30
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it was amazing
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Oct 27, 2022
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Oct 27, 2022
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