Archive for the ‘Picture Book Spotlight’ Category
“Mommy,” says Rilla, “I’m in a bad mood.”
“You’re in a bad mood? Why?”
“No, not a bad mood. A bat mood!”
She holds up her wrist, clinging to which is a small furry brown bat with tiny magnets in its wingtips. We were digging through a box of toys in the garage this morning, looking for my old Smurf collection; Rose found the mushroom house in the girls’ closet and wanted to populate it for Rilla. The garage search produced only the baker Smurf—and, it seems, the stuffed bat. For today, at least, Smurfs have been forgotten.
Well, a bat mood. I can accommodate that. I went hunting for our copy of Stellaluna but didn’t find it. (You may detect a pattern here.) However, there on the shelf was Randall Jarrell’s lovely fairy-story, The Bat-Poet. Even better. Rilla propped her wrist on the arm of my rocking chair so her little bat could see the pictures—such delectable ones, drawn by Maurice Sendak.
Once upon a time there was a bat—a little light brown bat, the color of coffee with cream in it.
We didn’t get far, for after only a few pages, Rose and Huck returned from a walk around the block, and he had treasures to bestow. A rose petal for Rilla, a large smooth stone for Wonderboy, and a yellowed magnolia leaf for me. He could hardly hand them over fast enough: he needed his hands free to sign cat whiskers. My children measure their walks in number of cats encountered. This was a three-cat morning, a very good day.
Rilla’s bat had things to tell Rose, who is extremely receptive to the confidences of small animals in the hands of small children. Rilla showed her The Bat-Poet, and the opening line reminded Rose of the Little Brown Bat entry in the Handbook of Nature Study. The three of them—big girl, little girl, stuffed bat—looked at the pictures in that book for a while, and then it was cast aside and Rose began to spin a story: the first installment, I’m told, of The Bat Chronicles, about a little girl named Batty (inspired by The Penderwicks, of course) who rescues a lost bat named Bitty. I was eavesdropping like crazy, but then Wonderboy wanted his daily Signing Time, and the Bat Chroniclers moved to their bedroom.
And now the boys are watching Zoo Train, and Jane is running her lines for our upcoming Twelfth Night performance, and Beanie is lying on her bed listening to Suzanne Vega.
And in case that all sounds too idyllic, I should mention that my sink is full of breakfast dishes, and my floor is carpeted with cracker crumbs. There is a mountain of paperwork on the table behind me. I should be doing housework but sat down to write this post instead.
P.S. Thank you for your questions and comments on the open thread. I am so enjoying them and should have a chance to answer some of this afternoon. And I have a question of my own for another post. I’m really stealing these minutes right now—it isn’t my usual blogging time—but I wanted to capture the morning before it slipped away. Signing Time is almost over, so writing time is too!
Related post: “He imitates the world he drove away…”
I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen. Published by Candlewick.
I think the best way to tell you about I Want My Hat Back is to describe my family’s reaction to it. I was sent a review copy by the publisher (the official pub date is Sept. 27), and I began reading it right out of the package, standing in the living room. A bear has lost his hat, and he wants it back. He asks a fox; the fox hasn’t seen it. He asks a frog; no luck there either. He asks a rabbit—a rabbit who happens to be wearing a pointy red hat.
“No. Why are you asking me,” replies the rabbit. “I haven’t seen it. I haven’t seen any hats anywhere. I would not steal a hat. Don’t ask me any more questions.”
By this point I’m laughing out loud and I have to go right away and show the book to the rest of my family. This book is begging to be read aloud by a daddy like Scott.
They’re in the kitchen, Scott and my three older girls, ages ten, twelve, and sixteen. I thrust the book before their faces, you’ve got to read this, and we stand there turning the pages together. At the rabbit’s remarks, the girls burst out laughing. The animals’ deadpan expressions and terse, uninflected dialogue make this exchange viciously funny.
We’re huddled around the book, reading on silently. The bear asks many more animals, with no success, and finally flops down in the grass and stares at the sky. My poor hat. I miss it so much.
And then the bear remembers where he’s seen it. I’m not going to say what happens after that, but it made my daughters shriek with laughter and shock, even the teenager. My husband gasped. I howled. Rilla, when we read it to her later, chortled wickedly.
I don’t think everyone will approve of the ending. I’ve had three-year-olds who would be very upset by the turn of events. Most six-year-olds I’ve known would, I think, embrace it with glee.
Today I tweeted, “I really want to write about a certain book but various children keep spiriting it away from my stack.”
And my husband replied: “I have not seen that book. I would not take that book. I don’t know what a book is. Stop asking me questions about a book.”
Better watch out, rabbit.
Updated: How Rilla was inspired by the art.
Who’s Hiding by Satoru Onishi. Published by Kane/Miller.
I’m filing this under Rillabooks but it could easily be tagged Huckbooks as well. They are equally attached to it—the five-year-old and the two-year-old, if you’ve lost track of their ages.
It’s an appealingly simple concept book: a page full of animals, illustrated in a clean and colorful style, as you can see from the cover. On the first spread, the animals are labeled: dog, tiger, hippopotamus, zebra. On the next spread, the animals are the same, but the background color has changed from white to blue. “Who’s hiding?” asks the text. The blue animal has disappeared against the background and the child has to figure out who is missing (helped along by the bunny’s eyes, ears, and nose showing up against the blue).
As the book progresses, more and more animals are hiding on each page. My littles absolutely love this game of hide and seek.
The “Who’s hiding?” spreads are interspersed with emotion and action spreads. Who’s angry? Who’s sleeping? Who’s crying? (My little goddaughter was distressed by the crying page, so watch out.)
Rilla seems to enjoy the hiding pages the most—the book turns into a game for her, a game involving my looking very intently at the book as I ask who’s hiding, so intently that I, ahem, don’t notice a certain someone has gone missing beside me. “Who’s hiding?” “I AM!” cries a triumphant voice from under the bed.
Huck likes the emotion pages best, or just plain naming the animals. I’m a big fan of Satoru Onishi’s art. I’d love a poster of these animals for the kids’ bedroom wall.
Over at the RIF blog, Carol Rasco reminds us that it’s cherry-blossom season, rather a bittersweet time this year with all Japan is suffering. There’s a new book out by Andrea Zimmerman I’m keen to read, about Eliza Scidmore, the woman responsible for bringing the cherry trees to Washington, DC: Eliza’s Cherry Trees: Japan’s Gift to America (illustrated by Ju-Hong Chen). I spent quite a bit of time in DC during my college years and I have marveled at those lovely pink avenues in spring.
Your comments on last week’s Rillabooks posts have greatly informed our library list this week: thanks to you, we’ve enjoyed Not a Stick, Mr. Bear Squash-You-All-Flat (a whimsical retro delight), and Cowboy & Octopus. About that latter: Rilla and I read it together curled up in my bed. When I got to the bit where Cowboy tells Octopus what he truly thinks of Octopus’s hat—his opinion is a wee bit scatological, you understand—I heard a peal of laughter from down the hall. Seems Rose and Beanie had been listening in all the way from their room. I think you know a book’s a success when it sucks in an audience from rooms away.
(Thank you to Joann, Cate, and Ellie for the suggestions!)
Other Rilla-reading:
• My Naughty Little Sister, chapter 1 (thanks, Kathryn)
• Scott finished reading her My Father’s Dragon
• Grumpy Bird several more times
Today: My Very First Mother Goose, the Iona Opie/Rosemary Wells collaboration. A gift from my sister when Jane was tiny, so thoroughly loved by all six children overlappingly and in succession that the binding is cracked and peeling. Huck carts this one (and its companion, the red one, called something like “More Mother Goose” or “My Very Second Mother Goose” and yes, I’m being lazy) all around the house, loving on it, talking to the bunnies and cats, naming the nice big initial letters. Today Rilla chose it for our “quiet reading time” (it is seldom very quiet) and she basically read/recited the whole darn book to me, bearing out Charlotte Mason’s theories about using nursery rhymes to teach reading without actually teaching.
Also: selected poems from Milne’s When We Were Very Young.
Yesterday: Dinosaur vs. Bedtime at least a dozen times. And then three or four more rounds with Huck. This was one of my favorites from the Cybils nominees two years ago, and it is enjoying renewed popularity now that Huck is prime dinosaur material.
I can’t remember if we read anything but Dino v. Bed yesterday, but then again it kind of dominated the whole day, didn’t it? ROAR! DINOSAUR WINS!
The day before that: Diary of a Fly, another repeat request, and I know everyone already loves Doreen Cronin’s hilarious insect diaries so I won’t say much beyond: Cronin’s a riot and Harry Bliss’s art is a delight. I especially love the way this book and its mates (Diary of a Worm, Diary of a Spider) suck my older kids in too and engender such animated discussion afterward. Same goes for Click Clack Moo, which, as someone pointed out on my Goodreads page recently, provides a most excellent jumping-off point for talking about collective bargaining rights.
And finally, two books I pretty much need to mark down for every day this past week: Grumpy Bird and Boo Hoo Bird, both by Jeremy Tankard of Me Hungry fame. I was so enchanted with Tankard’s art in Me Hungry that I absolutely had to track down more of his work. The two bird books do not disappoint. The crabby-face of Grumpy Bird—who wakes up one day too grumpy to fly—actually makes us laugh out loud. We’ve seen that face around here before. Great twist at the end, too. I probably can’t say anything that tops Huck’s endorsement, though. I snuck some video of him ‘reading’ these books after dinner the other night and if I get my act together I’ll try and post it. Made me laugh.
Neither a bird, nor grumpy.
If I really had it together, I’d have pulled some of these books out last week in anticipation of the Supermoon. Truth is, I didn’t even think of these in connection with Saturday’s moon until, well, just now. I did think, sometime Sunday afternoon, Ooh, we should read Owl Moon to Rilla and Wonderboy, but I forgot about thinking that until just now.
What did happen is I was hunting for a package of address labels I thought I’d stashed on a shelf in Wonderboy’s room (which doubles as Scott’s office), and although I didn’t find the labels, I found half a dozen picture books I really love and don’t remember reading in the past year. I gave up my label hunt, addressed the darn package by hand, and snagged Rilla for a readaloud.
That accounts for the first two books in this post. The third one is a quiet marvel of a book and we met it for the first time the weekend before last, when my perfectly scrumptious wee goddaughter came for a visit.
But first:
This, along with its companion, Alphonse, Where Are You?, has enchanted each one of my children in turn. I actually kind of squealed when I found it yesterday because I hadn’t seen it in a while and I knew Rilla wouldn’t remember it and it’s such a delight to share it for another first time. Alphonse the goose is the friend and protector of Little Bird. They gaze at the great round moon together, and Alphonse remarks that it’s made of swiss cheese, and Little Bird would like to eat it but alas, it’s glued to the sky. Except—they round a bend and there’s the big swiss-cheese moon floating in the pond. All the geese crowd around, commencing a frenzy of splashing and diving, and though their efforts don’t capture the moon, they do dredge up a swiss cheese sandwich—and if it weren’t for Alphonse, Little Bird would be left without so much as a nibble. I love the gentle interplay between the big goose and the little one, and I wish I had a record of Rilla’s deep chuckle the first time she heard the words “moon sandwich.”
When Moon Fell Down by Linda Smith, illustrated by Kathryn Brown.
It’s funny how you connect books with the people who introduced them to you. Just as I always think of my friend Joan when I read one of the Alphonse and Little Bird books—I think she was the editor of them, and I know they were, like Brave Georgie Goat, gifts from her—my original Little House editor, the great Alix Reid, comes to mind every time I pick up When Moon Fell Down. “You’re going to love this one, Lissa,” she told me. “It’s one of my favorite books I ever worked on.”
“Moon
fell
down
one
night…
fell upon a farmer’s lawn,
rolled about in sheer delight
on fields he’d only shined upon.”
Before long he encounters—who else?—a cow, and the two of them take off for a stroll through town. Moon has never seen the world from this vantage point before; until now, he “didn’t know a horse had knees.” There’s a lush, hushed, magical quality to this book—and thinking over past Rillabooks entries, I think that’s something I’m often drawn to in a picture book, partly because the magic holds my little ones rapt. This art is, well, luminous, and the combination of whimsy and wonder seems to appeal to the children just as much as it does to me.
I’m a big Kevin Henkes fan but somehow I’d missed this book until my pal Kristen pulled it out of her bag last weekend! It’s a great favorite of my little goddaughter, who is just eighteen months old, and Huck and Rilla swooped in upon it immediately. The black-and-white art is magnificent. Like Little Bird above, Kitten spies the big white moon and wants a taste. It looks, after all, just like a gigantic saucer of milk. Kitten climbs a tree, splashes in a pond, tries everything to get to that bowl, to no avail…We were almost as sad to say goodbye to Kitten as we were to Vivi and her parents. This is a book I might just have to add to our collection.
(Which is funny because as godmother, I consider it one of my responsibilities to help curate Vivi’s collection. But on this visit, it was Vivi who introduced us to two keepers. The other was Not a Box by Antoinette Portis, which I keep wanting to rave about here. I fell madly in love with that book. I mean like A Visitor for Bear level, The Maggie B. level, Christina Katerina level—that last is a particularly apt comparison, as you’ll see if you check it out. It’s the kind of deceptively simple artistry that really takes massive talent to pull off, and it speaks so exactly to a child’s sensibility. “What are you doing in that box?” asks the narrator. “It’s NOT a box!” replies the bunny, blasting off in its spaceship.)
(Here, I was going to save it for another post, but now that I’ve gushed about it this much I might as well show you the cover. Only you’ve all seen it already, I bet. I don’t know how I missed it. I mean, look, it’s got the Geisel honor medal! Where’ve I been?)
Now I’ve gone and blown my whole moon theme. This is what happens, though; one book leads to another. I suppose the common thread for all the books in this post is that they came to us by way of dear friends. We can pretend that’s what I was going for the whole time.
Oh but I was going to mention two other moon books we love but haven’t read in a while…I mentioned Jane Yolen’s Owl Moon at the top of this post, and When Moon Fell Down reminded me of The Moon Jumpers, a strange and lyrical little book by Janice May Udry, gorgeously illustrated by Maurice Sendak. I remember Rilla going through a Moon Jumpers attachment about six months ago, but I haven’t seen it in a while. This might be the week to pull it back off the shelf.
I don’t know who gave us those two books. I think I bought Owl Moon when I worked at a children’s bookstore, or if not I bought it because it was part of Before Five in a Row or something. The Moon Jumpers, I must have just picked up myself because I loved the art. I really am crazy about all that early Sendak work.
Tags: books I adore, books my five-year-old loves, books my three-year-old loves, Kevin Henkes, Kitten's First Full Moon, Linda Berkowitz, Linda Smith, Maurice Sendak, moon, Moon Jumpers, Not a Box, Owl Moon, Rillabooks, When Moon Fell Down
These are books Rilla has wanted to hear over and over this week. One of them was written by a beloved friend of mine, but honestly that’s a coincidence—Rilla (alas) has never actually met Ellen in person, and I don’t know that she remembers her Lola book was written by Mommy’s pal.
The Taming of Lola by Ellen Weiss, illustrated by Jerry Smath
You may recall that I wrote about Lola when I interviewed Ellen Weiss last year. Rilla rediscovered the book recently and is completely enchanted with this bratty little shrew. I mean:
“If Lola was given mayflies for breakfast when she wanted slugs, she had conniptions.”
Mayflies for breakfast? Conniptions? Prose like this, my friends, is how to win Rilla’s literary affections. She relishes the furious battles between Lola and her equally bratty cousin Lester (especially the name-calling); she is fascinated by the insect-dominant cuisine portrayed so charmingly by artist Jerry Smath; and she is downright crazy about the interjections of a certain crotchety grandmother shrew who is the narrator of this five-act tale about the summer Lola met her match.
(I don’t know what I was thinking, though, the day I launched into a spontaneous Barry Manilow parody out the outset of this book. I am now required to begin each reading with a performance of that timeless song, “Her name was Lola,/ she was a shrew-girl/ with stripey ribbons in her hair/ and a super-grumpy glare…”)
This is my favorite of the Carl books. I think it’s the only one Rilla’s read—it’s the only one we own, I guess. I need to remember to put the others on our library list. I love the conversations we have when we’re reading wordless stories like this.
This particular Carl story, in which Good Dog Carl is left in charge of a rambunctious baby, is especially sweet because of the impish puppy who has also been left in Carl’s care. Our favorite bit is where the dogs and baby find themselves surrounded by half a dozen earnest artists, and we can see on the easels all the different art styles with which the various painters are portraying our friends. (My older kids enjoy that part too.) Rilla is also fond of the part where they look through binoculars, one gazing up, one down at the ground, and one off to the side, and then on the facing page you see the three views and can figure out who is viewing what.
The park itself looks an awful lot like our own favorite stomping grounds, Balboa Park! Anyone know if that’s what Alexandra Day had in mind?
Big Bad Bunny by Franny Billingsley, art by G. Brian Karas
I wrote about this book in what I now realize must have been the very first Rillabooks post. Here’s what I said then, in February 2010:
This was one of the books I received for review as a Cybils panelist in 2008, and it was a hit with my family. Big Bad Bunny is on the loose, and Mama Mouse has just discovered her littlest mouse-baby is missing. She’ll brave any peril to find her baby—even Big Bad Bunny’s long sharp claws and fierce yellow teeth. Rilla loves the repetitive text and watches each page for the chance to shout “No!” when I ask if something will stop Mama Mouse. It’s very comforting, when you’re three, to know that Mama will face danger to find you and bring you safely home.
And here’s what I wrote today (somewhat ungrammatically) in my notes on Diigo: “I don’t know who is crazier about this book—me or Rilla. It’s a tie, I guess. She just loves it to pieces. Such suspense: will Mama Mouse find Baby Boo before Big Bad Bunny attacks with those sharp, scritchy claws? Hey wait, who IS Big Bad Bunny anyway? Rilla likes to do the sound effects (stomp, splash, skritch, pitter-pat) and she is positively in love with the page that reveals the truth about those bunny ears…”
My big bad boys are crazy about this one too.
Something new I’m going to try: I’m really enjoying the way these Rillabooks posts serve as a journal of my four-year-old’s literary experiences, but the record is somewhat incomplete because of the role of repetition in a small child’s romance with books. If we read, say, four picture books on a given day, odds are that two or three of them are repeats from earlier in the week. Me Hungry has been requested almost daily for weeks, for example. Also, in a house with this many big sisters and a work-at-home daddy, I’m far from the only person reading picture books aloud. So, in order to keep a complete record of Rilla’s reading, I’m going to start adding unannotated lists at the bottom of these Rillabooks posts, recording the titles of all the books we read that day—many of which will undoubtedly be repeats from the days and weeks before.
Books I read to Rilla today:
• The Little Rabbit by Jody Dunn
• Cherry the Pig by Utako Yamada
• The Poky Little Puppy by Janette Sebring Lowery
• Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans
• Madeline and the Bad Hat, ditto
• and the aforementioned Big Bad Bunny
Scott is reading her the ever-popular My Father’s Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett—our family’s favorite choice for that first jump from picture books to a longer read-aloud with chapters (first mentioned on this blog in January 2007).
(Y’all keep writing to ask me to include affiliate links, which is incredibly sweet of you. Here are portal links, if you’re inclined to use them, but you know you’ll just be feeding my habit. My overstuffed shelves would appreciate it if you shopped at your local bookstores.)
A Week of Raccoons by Gloria Whelan, illustrated by Lynn Munsinger.
Earlier this week Rilla was making a list of things that make her happy and she wrote this book down as number three. (To give you an idea of scale: #1) Daisies. #2) Daisy, presumably from Wow Wow Wubzy. #4) Grandma and Grandpa.) I concur; A Week of Raccoons makes me happy too.
A nice old farmer and his nice old wife keep discovering evidence of raccoon mischief: broken petunia pots, a toppled humming- bird feeder, trampled and devoured corn. Each night the farmer baits a trap and when, every morning, he finds a new raccoon licking peanut butter off its whiskers in the cage, he loads the cage into his truck and drives to the piney woods (past the tumbled-down log house, around the apple tree, across the stream, etc) to set the critter loose.
All week, the growing community of raccoons is trying to recall the route back to the farm. The Monday raccoon only remembers the last bit, but the Tuesday raccoon knows what came before that, and the Wednesday raccoon can retrace the route as far as the stream…by the end of the week, the critters are ready to depart the piney woods and make the backward journey. Luckily for the elderly couple, there are some tasty treats to lure the hungry raccoons off the path along the way.
Rilla loves the repetition, the whimsy, and the appearance of some very large grubs near the end of the story. She also greatly enjoys Lynn Munsinger’s art; these are some mighty cute and expressive raccoons. Matter of fact, somewhere around here I have a notebook full of my attempts to copy them, circa 1997.
I wish I could remember who gave us this book years ago! It was published by Henry Holt, so it can’t have been any of my Harper or Penguin buddies…However it came to us, it’s a book we treasure.
Mordant is a mole who lives on the lonely top of a green hill. One day he sees a cloud shaped like a turtle and wishes (on a dandelion) that the turtle were real so they could become friends. The dandelion wisps sail off on the wind and swirl past the eyes of a bicycle rider, making him think of snow, which puts him in the mood for a snow cone from the little handcart not far away. His snow cone drips out the bottom, forming a puddle shaped a bit like a hat that belongs to the aunt of a bird perched nearby, and off he flies to visit her. This domino chain of events continues in a funny, fresh, and deeply satisfying manner. Rilla was enchanted, just as her sisters were in years past.
Like A Week of Raccoons, Mordant’s Wish is (alas) out of print, but both are well worth tracking down in a library or used bookstore.
A reader was curious: Why just “Rillabooks“? Don’t you read picture books to your little boys, too?
Yup, loads of them. But my three youngest children are experiencing books differently from each other, right now. Huck is, well, a two-year-old. He loves books, loves especially to point out 1) trucks, 2) cars, 3) tow trucks that awesomely pull cars, and 4) trucks and cars actually existing in close proximity to one another on those supercalifragilistic miracles of creation called roads, upon which, if one is extremely lucky, one might also find a bus.
So while he’ll clamber up beside me when I’m reading to Rilla and listening to a few pages, mostly he’s at the talk-about-pictures stage, not the listen-to-a-story stage. All in good time.
As for my sweet Wonderboy, he too comes at a story from a different angle. He’ll listen happily to a read-aloud, but he isn’t really into nuances. He likes good, solid, concrete facts. That’s a boat. That’s a girl. That’s a baby. The girl and the baby are getting in the boat. They’re catching a fish. They’re eating fish soup. Whoa, that was a really great story! Layers, rich language, subtleties, tensions (of which the book I’m referring to has many examples)—these are not what Wonderboy is looking for in a story right now. And that’s fine. What he IS looking for are words he recognizes (very exciting) and special time with mom (delightful), and if you want to throw in some monkeys wearing hats, so much the better.
Rilla, at five-next-month, is relishing the whole package. Plot, characters, setting, language, emotions, sensory details, suspense, conflict, humor, flights of fancy—these are the things she’s reacting to when she listens to (and looks at; the poring-over is such an important part of the experience) a picture book. Often she’ll request the same book two, three, four times in a row, honing in on different aspects each time. Sometimes it’s about the reading—she wants to be the one to read the names, or the repeated phrases, or the punchlines, or a certain character’s dialogue. Sometimes it’s about the art: finger on the page, Look, Mommy, there’s a tiny mouse under the bed. Sometimes it’s about the deep mysteries of Life, the Universe, and Everything: Why did Fats Watson do that? Why is he jealous? Why did Christina Katerina’s mom keep wanting to get rid of that clearly fabulous box?
Sometimes, frankly, it’s all about fashion. Look at what Lilly is wearing on THIS page! I wish I had a dress like that. Can I have a dress like that? And those boots! And a purse.
Her tastes are wide-ranging these days; she’s wanting to go both broad and deep. As in: she’s happiest if we have beside us a stack of half a dozen books, some new to her, some of them books she’s heard a zillion times before. Her huge appetite makes for a lively and varied reading list, which, let’s face it, is a lot easier to blog about than Caps for Sale Fifty-Seven Days in a Row.
So that’s why I’ve been focusing on the Rillabooks. And I have to say I’ve been loving the way these posts have encouraged me to take advantage of our picture-book collection. I really learned a lesson from the egregious Miss Rumphius oversight. It’s been a joy to rediscover some of these gems and to watch Rilla—and her brothers, too, though their reasons are different—fall in love with them for the first time.
Goats are nice, but where are the trucks?
