June 12, 2012
Great City Picture Books
My love of city picture books continues, and these are some we’ve been enjoying lately, in particular for how they show the modern city in all its international multi-cultural richness.
Out of the Way! Out of the Way! by Uma Krishnaswami, illustrated by Uma Krishnaswamy (who are two different people! Really!). This wonderful, colourful book is Silverstein’s The Giving Tree meets Burton’s The Little House, but without the depressing saccharine of the former and the weird ending of the latter. A little tree sprouts in the middle of a path in an Indian town, and as a little boy kneels down to protect it, to admire it, passerbys in a hurry shout: “Out of the way! Out of the way!” The tree grows, the path bends to wind around it, and people come to sit under its branches, birds nest in the leaves, and a city grows up too around them as the path is steamrolled into a road whose traffic includes bicycles with dinging bells, bullock carts, and mango sellers shouting, “Out of the way! Out of the way!” The book gets bonus points for including fabulous pictures of the cars and trucks that crowd the streets, guaranteed to delight small readers (even a cement mixer!), and also for leaving the tree standing, a place for quiet and contemplation in the middle of the bustling city space.
Madelenka by Peter Sis: Not a new book, but new to us, about a little girl who lives “in the universe, on a planet, on a continent, in a country, in a city, on a block, in a house, in a window, ” and she is Madlenka and her tooth is loose. Sis’s drawings give us a bird’s eye view of the block as Madlenka goes through the neighbourhood sharing her news. Each of the shopkeepers she encounters comes from a different place– the baker from France, the newsagent from India, the Italian ice-cream man, the German neighbour Mrs. Grimm who knows so many stories. In some cases, we’re granted a tour of the shops in questions, and also a visual representation of the stories Madlenka has told to her: the South American grocer’s jaguar legends, her Asian neighbours stories of dragons, and even the fantasy world that she’s invented with her school friend Cleopatra which transforms their courtyard into the African savanna. The tooth gets lost and Madlenka goes home to report that in connecting with her neighbours she has been around the world. (You can take a virtual tour of the book on Peter Sis’s website).
A Bus Called Heaven by Bob Graham: We love Bob Graham and his heartwarming stories of community in urban places (though they’re often more inner-suburban, run-down homes, shuttered shops and factories next to grassy yards). His books are also just a little bit strange, poetic and surprising. They’re edgy in the softest way, and Harriet is entranced with this latest one, the story of an abandoned bus that transforms a city street. With no idea where the bus arrived from, neighbours haul it off the road and into Stella’s driveway. Shy Stella is transformed herself as the bus is turned into a community hub, everybody doing their part to make it beautiful. Now there is a place for people to gather and connect, Graham’s illustrations showing neighbours of all different cultures and backgrounds together. And when regulations about busses protruding into the sidewalk threaten to spoil the show, it is Stella who saves the day (and the snails. And the sparrows). We love this book.
June 7, 2012
Picture books are the most wild, innovative, untethered, experimental literary genre I know
From an excellent post by Laurel Snyder on the dangers of turning on to chapter books too soon:
“Picture books are the most wild, innovative, untethered, experimental literary genre I know.
The marriage of images and text is partly to blame for this, I think. Something about the collaborative process too, perhaps—an artist and a writer challenging each other, with a common purpose but different modes. But I want to believe that the main reason picture books can be so different is that kids are so different.
At the tender age when kids first encounter picture books they are open, accepting, free-thinking. A two year old doesn’t really expect anything when she picks up a book, and so a book for a two year old can be anything. Physical comedy. Visual art. A puzzle. Books for kids can pop-up or scratch-and-sniff. They can be meta-fiction. They can speak multiple languages or intertwine multiple distinct storylines. There are almost no rules to picture books. Kids scribble in them, build forts with them. Picture books are experiential on every level you can imagine, and some you can’t.
They’re awesome.”
May 31, 2012
Franklin Stamps
There is not much we love at our house more than we love mail and books (except perhaps for bunting, tea, and train journeys) and it’s always a joy when worlds collide. Yesterday, we picked up a set of Franklin the Turtle stamps at the post office, and we’re in love with them. But they confuse us too, because Harriet thinks they’re stickers and wants to stick them all over her hands and legs, and as for me, I can’t see myself using them anytime soon because then we wouldn’t have them anymore!
More about postal goodness: the joy of postcards.
May 25, 2012
New book by Sheree Fitch: Night Sky Wheel Ride
A new book by Sheree Fitch is a very important event in our house, and so we were overjoyed to get our copy of Night Sky Wheel Ride yesterday. It’s the story of a Ferris wheel ride against a night sky and the dark sea, a brother and sister ecstatic at finally being big enough to ride. “Are we big enough this year, Mama?/ Are we brave enough, Brother?/ Sister, are you ready to fly?” Fitch’s free verse is delicious to recite, full of twists and turns that melt “sticky quick on the tips of our tongues.” Rhymes and repetition replicate the Ferris wheel’s momentum, and apart from the people down below who are “dancing jelly beans”, the poem’s imagery stays pretty literal because when you’re dealing with a Ferris wheel, metaphors aren’t entirely necessary. The illustrations, however, tell an altogether different story, Yayo taking cues from the language and pushing the story even further with a furious whimsy, turning everything into absolutely nothing like it seems. His Ferris wheel is an apple tree, a rowboat, a washing machine’s spin cycle, a bird perch.”Can you hear the mermaids murmur/beluga whales sing/ feel the whirling stir/ of every little humming phosphorescent thing?”
The story takes on a special poignancy when you learn the story behind it.
May 21, 2012
Show Me a Story: Why Picture Books Matter
Last Sunday, I had a the rare pleasure of walking into a bookshop, browsing awhile, and buying a book I had only just discovered. That book was Leonard Marcus’s Show Me a Story: Why Picture Books Matter, 21 Conversations with 21 of the World’s Most Celebrated Illustrators, which I bought not just for its cover art (a Mo Willems book for me!), but because the illustrators interviewed included Quentin Blake, John Burningham, Eric Carle, James Marshall, Robert McCloskey, Lois Ehlert, Helen Oxenbury, Maurice Sendak, Peter Sis, Rosemary Well, William Steig, and Willems himself, among others. The book was wonderful. I was amazed to learn that Oxenbury and Burningham are married, that Tana Hoban and Russell were siblings, Steig was incredibly grumpy, Blake said he could only draw automobiles that were falling apart, that George and Martha were inspired by Frog and Toad (but of course!). That Sendak was a mentor to so many others, and that picture book illustration was such an old boys’ network. I loved learning about how many illustrators had a background in graphic design, reading their ideas about fonts in picture books, how much of a role technology had– being able to do books in full colour changed everything. And now it’s a big deal when an illustrator wants to hold back a bit, do some pages in black and white. I also love that as I’m still a picture book novice, I can read a book like this and discover so many new authors and illustrators– the book is in alphabetical order, and first up was Mitsumasa Anno with whom I fell in love as soon as I hit the library.
“One of the most important things is to laugh with your children and to let them see you think they’re being funny when they’re trying to be. It gives children enormous pleasure to think they’ve made you laugh. They feel they’ve reached one of the nicest parts of you.” –Helen Oxenbury
May 17, 2012
Picture books in which animals are put in jail
This is something I’ve been thinking about for some time. It is by no means a comprehensive list.
Curious George by Margret and HA Rey: Early Curious George was not only an avid cigar smoker, but ends up in jail for making prank calls to the fire department. Being a monkey, he is able to escape from jail with relative ease when a prison guard stands on one end of George’s cot whilst chasing him and lifts the other end up to the window. He floats away in a balloon. Later, he stars in a movie. 
Veronica by Roger Duvoisin: Veronica is a hippo who hates to blend into her herd (whose collective noun is actually “bloat”, but this isn’t part of the text). She gets around her camoflage by escaping to the city, but the gets hauled away for holding up traffic. The jail, unfortunately, barely contains her (speaking of bloat), and they have to bust down the doors to get her out of the place after a sympathetic little old lady comes to her aid and wins her freedom.
Chouchou by Francoise: Chouchou is a little French donkey who leads a simple but pleasant life having tourists pose with her for photographs. One day while provoked, however, she bites a young customer and is thrown in jail. She is only freed once the local children attest to her gentleness, demonstrating to officials that she’s indeed a harmless creature. She is freed in time to officiate at her photographer-owner’s wedding.
May 14, 2012
Oh come over here, kid we’ve got all these books to read
“Oh come over here, kid we’ve got all these books to read,
With the turtles and frogs, cats and dogs who civilize the centuries,
And in a world that’s angry, cruel and furious,
There’s this monkey who’s just curious,
Floating high above a park with bright balloons.”
From “I am the one who will remember everything” by Dar Williams, from her very wonderful new album In the Time of the Gods which I received for Mother’s Day, along with a new guitar tuner.
May 8, 2012
On Maurice Sendak
The other day I was talking about friends of ours and said, “They didn’t have a party when he turned one,” to which Harriet responded, “His immediately family frowned on fun.” Which isn’t technically true, but is a testament to how our favourite books reside so centrally in our consciousnesses, even after the books are closed,that she could so reference Maurice Sendak’s Bumble Ardy off the cuff.
Maurice Sendak died today at the age of 82. I didn’t read a lot of him when I was little, apart from Where the Wild Things Are, but I didn’t even read that one enough to properly probe its depths. Truth be told, I still don’t properly get Maurice Sendak, which sometimes annoys me, and certainly makes me uncomfortable, but it’s also the reason why his work fascinates me so much. His stories are either everything or nothing, and depending upon what mood I’m in, my perspective changes all the time.
When I first read Outside Over There though, I started to get a sense of how much is going on in his work underneath the surface, even if the action itself is not altogether accessible to me. That book is so weird, and I’ve read it a million times, and I still don’t really understand it, but I suspect that the text is as detailed and full of allusions as the illustrations are. It’s a mystery that I’ll be unravelling forever. It’s much easier to out-and-out love The Night Kitchen, though in some ways that book is even weirder, but I love the almost rhymes and the box cityscape. I want to always have cake in the morning too. Cock a doodle doo. And then yes, Wild Things, the most graspable of the three and I love its run-on sentences, and I love the wild rumpus just like everyone. I also love the line, “Please don’t go. We’ll eat you up. We love you so.” Life is complicated. 
More straightforward is how much we love Maurice Sendak’s illustrations– Little Bear is so absolutely wonderful. I also really love Chicken Soup With Rice, which dares to boil a pot at the bottom of the sea. And his latest book, Bumble Ardy, which we bought last Fall and whose weirdness Harriet has never even raised an eyebrow at yet. Because she’s still little enough to take the world as she finds it, and how much richer is she (and all of us) for Maurice Sendak’s work being in it.
May 3, 2012
Our Best Book of the Library Haul: Katy the Caboose Who Got Loose by Bill Peet
I’m sure I’m not the only person who has read this book at least twice daily all week long, but still, the experience has granted me a certain authority to say that it’s one of the finest train books out there– even better than Virginia Lee Burton’s Choo Choo and Don Freeman’s Chuggy. The Caboose Who Got Loose by Bill Peet is about a delightful red caboose called Katy who longs for quiet and stability, for the end of a life of rumbling, smoke, and dark tunnels. Her wish comes true in the most surprising way, but not until the very end of the story. Before it does, there is plenty of train track adventures, rumbling through field and town, passing houses with faces as charming as Katy’s own, and perilous pulls around mountain ledges. Our resident train fiend loved this one, and I did too, mostly because I’m a sucker for rhyming couplets every time. If there is a book I have to read twice daily for a week, it always goes down so much better in verse.
April 29, 2012
Morstad, Nadeau and Arsenault: 3 Great Illustrators
I realize that I’m not telling you anything you don’t know already, because it’s not that these illustrators are up-and-coming, but that they’re everywhere. Behind the books we love and books we’re still discovering, and perhaps it’s incidental that all the books they illustrate are brilliant, but I suspect it isn’t. In fact, I think that at least half of the brilliance these illustrators can totally take credit for.
Julie Morstad: I first bought a child one of Julie Morstad’s Henry books (written by Sara O’Leary) back in 2008, and have been doing so regularly ever since, as recently as last weekend. (It was When I Was Small. Went over a charm). She’s also the pictorial force behind the award-winning Singing Away the Dark by Caroline Woodward, which I adore, and also the art book Milk Teeth by Drawn & Quarterly, which I’m currently winding my little head around. And now I hear she’s got a new book, an illustrated version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem The Swing and I am so very excited. 
Janice Nadeau: Nadeau is the illustrator of Cinnamon Baby, which is one of our family’s favourite books ever (and I gave a copy of this book to somebody as recently as yesterday). Like Morstad and Arsenault, her illustrations have a vintage feel, an irresistible prettiness, but are also a bit cheeky and whimsical. She is also the illustrator of the award-winning graphic novel Harvey, and she’s the creator of the poster for 2012 TD Children’s Book Week (which is currently hanging on Harriet’s bedroom door).
Isabelle Arsenault: We discovered Isabelle Arsenault via Kyo Maclear’s wonderful first picture book Spork: never has cutlery appeared so full of vitality (and so shiny!). Harriet was still little but found the illustrations, of the baby in particular, very appealing. And then along came Arsenault next with Maxine Trottier’s award-winning Migrant, the beautiful story of a little girl from Mexico whose family comes north to Canada to work as farmers every summer. Her latest is Virginia Wolf, also with Maclear, and I’ve already written about how much I adore it. Though I haven’t bought a copy yet for any library except our own, but I suspect it’s going to make a good gift one of these days soon.
