September 22, 2011
Our Best Book from the library haul: Me… Jane by Patrick McDonnell
Patrick McDonnell’s Me… Jane is the story of an ordinary little girl with a stuffed chimpanzee who just happens to grow up to be Jane Goodall. Significant for being the first biography Harriet’s ever encountered, it also stands up on its own merits as a picture book with delightful illustrations of little Jane getting up to adventures ordinary (sneaking into the hen house to watch hens laying eggs) and extraordinary (Jane imagining herself like Jane from the Tarzan stories swinging on vines through the jungles of Africa). The story awakes its reader to the “magical world full of joy and wonder”, and also tells tells the inspiring story of a little who dared to dream big and whose dreams came true.
In addition to McDonnell’s sweet cartoon rendering of Jane and all the animals, the text pages are enhanced by gorgeous scientific drawings of plants, insects, and other animals. Most remarkable are the samples of Jane Goodall’s own juvenilia, including official documents from a childhood club called “The Aligator Society”.
The end of the book contains a detailed “About Jane Goodall” section and even “A Message from Jane”, which urges that “the life of each one of us matters in the scheme of things”. From even the littlest stories come great things. Or maybe the message is more that even great things have little stories at the heart of them.
September 8, 2011
Our Best Book from this week's library haul: Has Anyone Seen My Emily Greene?
We immediately knew that Norma Fox Mazer’s Has Anyone Seen My Emily Greene? would be our best book from this week’s library haul (and there were a lot of contenders). First, because it’s in verse. Maybe it’s just because half of our audience is a two year old, but verse really appeals. It’s also a lot of fun if you’re the one reading aloud. And then there’s Emily herself: “She’s my barefoot dancer, my brown-eyed prancer; my girl who loves the colour red, and roses and rhymes and ribbons and bread.” Don’t you just love her already? We love that the story gives Daddy the spotlight for once, as he walks around the house looking for his Emily who is perhaps not as well hid as she imagines she is. SPOILERS AHEAD: He finds her just in time for lunch. I also like this book because it’s by Norma Fox Mazer, whose paperback novels I devoured as an adolescent.
BONUS: Last week’s Best Book from the Library Haul was Andrew Larsen’s much-acclaimed The Imaginary Garden, but I didn’t get a chance to post about it. The story is about a little girl called Theo whose grandfather leaves behind his beautiful garden when he relocates to an apartment whose only outdoor space is a rather bleak balcony. That her grandfather is also a painter, however, brings forth a rather inspired solution to the bleak balcony problem as Theo and Poppa begin to create a new garden on a blank sheet of canvas, beginning with the soil and growing the imaginary garden as you would an actual one.
Harriet liked the pictures, and the lines about the colours. What I like best about this book is that the considerable back story implied– that perhaps Grandma has died, that Poppa is no longer able to maintain his old garden, that he’s getting older and his life has just become a whole lot smaller– is really hardly implied at all. The imaginary garden is the story, and it’s a lovely one, made richer for the poignancy at its outlying edges. But that Larsen avoided making the life lessons the story, those old preachy predictable plot-lines that are so familiar, is a credit to him as a writer, that he gives his readers credit enough to discover the story for themselves.
Anyway, so you can imagine why I felt very honoured to be publishing a guest post by Larsen at Canadian Bookshelf today. You should check it out– it’s wonderful.
August 26, 2011
Our Best Books from this week's library haul: Big Wolf & Little Wolf and You're Finally Here
I do like my picture books to have a message, but one curled up so tiny in the core of the story that you don’t even notice it until you think about it. We don’t like our picture books to patronize, of course, and a little silliness is always welcome, but as a student of literature, I am accustomed to deconstructing the best books and coming up with something, something greater than the whole.
In Nadine Brun-Cosme and Oliver Tallec’s Big Wolf & Little Wolf, I suppose that something is a message about an older sibling’s fear of his place being usurped by a younger. I think a child who’s experiencing such fears could be led to some good conversations by discussing this book, but this is not the reason this is one of our favourite books this week. No, we like it because Brun-Cosme has named her two wolves Big Wolf and Little Wolf, and when you’re two years old, the big/little 
dichotomy is endlessly fascinating. Also, because when you’re two, you feel an affinity with “little” things. When Little Wolf (who’s moved into Big Wolf’s territory in a way that’s quite presumptuous) disappears, Harriet becomes very concerned. “Where is Little Wolf?” she asks on every page, and then when we finally catch a glimpse of Little Wolf way off on the horizon, she feels as though she’s done something heroic in locating him. It’s a story about friendship, love and sharing: “For the first time he said to himself that a little one, indeed a very little one, had taken up space in his heart. A lot of space.” And let’s face it, we all know what that’s like…
Bonus: Our bonus book of the week is You’re Finally Here by Melanie Watt, which we can’t take any credit for discovering because the librarian handed it to us. It’s a bit of a metafictional riff of Mo Willems’ We Are In a Book, except that the bunny rabbit here has no qualms about being a storybook character. He’s just bored, waiting for the reader to finally arrive, and then when we do, he can’t quite hold his tongue– What took us so long? Because he hates waiting, and it’s rude to keep someone waiting, and he so harangues us in a most amusing fashion with blazing text and fury that Harriet finds funny. And then his cell-phone rings, and we discover who’s the rude one after all…
August 12, 2011
Our Best Book from this week's library haul: A Flock of Shoes by Sarah Tsaing
This week’s best book from the library was A Flock of Shoes by Sarah Tsaing, illustrated by Qin Leng. It’s the story of a little girl called Abby whose beloved summer sandals fly south in the fall, and send her postcards from tropical islands (“We miss you to the bottom of our soles”). While the shoes are away, she falls in love with a pair of boots that navigate the snow and ice so well, but when spring finally comes, the boots are compelled to jump aboard a northbound train (postcard: “Early nights and gorgeous lights, but we still miss the warm wiggle of your toes.” [Tsaing is also a poet, and it shows].) But the sandals fly back again, fattened up from their time abroad, and they’re big enough to fit Abby’s growing feet.
At first, I wasn’t sure about the book because the story doesn’t completely make sense, and I didn’t understand what the story was a metaphor for, and what the message was. And then I understand that there really wasn’t one, actually, and that this is an old fashioned fairy tale whose message is in its lyricism and magic. It’s immediately appealing to the shoe-mad, which most little girls I know are, and Harriet has asked me to read it to her over and over again.
July 29, 2011
Best Book from this week's library haul: If I Were a Lion by Sarah Weeks and Heather Solomon
Our best book this week was If I Were a Lion by Sarah Weeks and illustrated by Heather M. Solomon. It’s the story of a little girl (who look like a kewpie doll. Some people find such illustrations creepy, but I love their weirdness) who has been making some trouble. She never owns up to exactly what kind of trouble, but there is evidence of scribbling on the wall and cereal poured all over the kitchen floor. Her mother has just called her wild, and banished her to the Time-Out chair, and though the girl will admit that the Time-Out is probably necessary, she takes serious offence to “wild” slur. Because she doesn’t roar, she doesn’t have scales or feathers, she doesn’t swing through the trees etc. etc. And she proceeds to go through a catalogue of amazing wildness and imagines the animals she speaks of wreaking havoc on the house. She’s not ferocious, she says, just precocious. When her mother finally calms down she’ll see, “that the opposite of wild is me.”
Naturally, it’s written in verse. Most of our Best Books are. It also taught Harriet the word “opposite”, which is the most abstract term she’s comprehended yet, and I’m glad she’s smart enough to understand the opposite of coffee is tea.
July 25, 2011
Best Book from this week's library haul: Cats' Night Out by Stutson/Klassen
There was no sticker on the cover, so it was only just now that I learned that our Best Book from this week’s library haul was awarded the 2010 Governor General’s Award for Illustration. The book is Cats’ Night Out by Caroline Stutson and illustrated by J. Klassen, which we love for its verse: “Two cats samba, dressed in white/ on the rooftop Saturday night.” It counts up by twos to, “Twenty conga left and right/ in splashy florals, plaids and stripes”, and I am especially partial to the twelve town tabbies doing the twist. Anyway, the neighbours start complaining and the show gets shut down, but the illustrations of the nighttime cityscape are marvellous fun, it’s cats after all, and the verse has a jazzy rhythm even we like, and we hate jazz. We were happy to find this book, though we had plenty of gems this week– Harriet has discovered Corduroy and is in love, and we’re also reading Katie-Morag based on Melanie’s recommendation.
July 7, 2011
Our Best Book from this week's library haul: The Terrible Plop by Ursula Dubosarsky/Andrew Joyner
The Terrible Plop is The Gruffalo meets Chicken Little, the story of a strange sound that sends a whole forest running until one tiny bunny is brave enough face a scary reality, and find it not so scary at all. With its bouncy verse and tiny outsmarting creature, the story is a bit too Gruffalo derivative, but in the end manages its own particular charm. It’s got bunnies, rhymes, and chocolate cake, so what more could we ask for? And we’re still having fun reading it over and over again.
June 30, 2011
Our Best Book from this week's library haul: Cinnamon Baby by Nicola Winstanley
We had very good luck at the library this week, and so to determine a Best Book was difficult. We were delighted with Robert McCloskey’s One Morning in Maine, which was so lovely that Harriet sat through the whole thing even though it was looong. We liked The House Book by Keith DuQuette, Dog in Boots by Greg Gormley, and An Evening at Alfie’s (but then we love all the Alfie books). Our favourite of all of them, however, has been Cinnamon Baby by Nicola Winstanley, about a brand new baby who cries and cries, until her mother (who is a baker) finally soothes her with the smell of cinnamon bread baking in the oven. A very good book for those in our family who remember a certain baby who once cried, and cried, and also for those of us who are absolutely obsessed with babies (hint: not the parents). And Janice Nadeau’s illustrations are as lovely as the prose, whimsical and yet grounded with familiar objects its readers will know. We particularly like the cat who is holding an umbrella…
June 22, 2011
Our Best Book from this week's library haul: Goldie and the Three Bears
Diane Stanley’s Goldie and the Three Bears gets this week’s nod mostly because while I think it’s a pretty good picture book, Harriet is absolutely obsessed with it. (This also makes 2/3 weeks where our best book has been one Harriet has randomly pulled off the shelf with no regard for anything except chaos.) I love the detailed illustrations, and that this twist on an old story stands up perfectly fine all on its own. Goldie is a very picky little girl (the swing is “too high”, the movie is “too scary”, her peanut butter sandwich is only “just right” when it’s on white bread, no jelly, with the crusts cut off), which makes it hard for her to make friends (because Penny is too boring, and Jenny is too rough). When one day she gets off the bus at the wrong stop, however, she stumbles into an empty house, and tries a few sandwiches, sits in a few chairs, falls asleep in somebody’s bed, and in the process, makes a friend–one she can love with all her heart. Which sounds cheesy, but it isn’t, and we like the pictures of the friends climbing trees, building block towers, and have an elaborate tea party. If there has to be a story I read 10 times a day for a week, I am awfully glad it is this one.
June 15, 2011
Our Best Book from this week's library haul: Oscar's Half Birthday by Bob Graham
This week, we asked our librarian to recommend books about “alternative” families, because Harriet is obsessed with the construction of family units and we thought now would be a good time to broaden her little mind a bit, so we took out And Tango Makes Three. The librarian also suggested Oscar’s Half-Birthday, whose family construction is fairly standard, but whose urban, hipster, inter-racial parents will help acclimatize Harriet to families way cooler than her own. And happily, these details (along with the urban scenery of abandoned shopping carts and graffiti) are pretty incidental to a lovely story celebrating baby Oscar’s half-birthday, which climaxes with the picnicking population of an entire hillside erupting into song. (The song is also “Happy Birthday”, which is currently Harriet’s favourite, so we liked that too.) My favourite part of the book is big sister Millie, however, with her coat-hanger fairy-wings and green dinosaur puppet– if my daughter is going to have a role model from a book, I’d hope it could be one like this.
Also, the writing is so good. Like this, “…the half-birthday boy, OSCAR, sits tilted at an angle, his fingers curled into Millie’s tuna sandwich. His shoulders are hunched, his head nods, and the light shines through his ears, illuminating them like little lanterns.” Exactly!
