New Books: Taka-chan and I

I'd mostly seen chapter books thus far from the New York Review Children's Collection, those masters of reissuing forgotten classics of children's lit. Not that this was a bad thing, mind you—we've discovered many of our favorite kids' books from the collection, from the infinitely charming "cookbook" Mud Pies and Other Recipes to the irresistible Terrible, Horrible Edie (part of a series I still can't believe isn't better known to modern audiences).

But while everything the NYRCC puts out is marvelous, I hadn't seen much in the way of your typical big, square children's picture book from them (perhaps because the classic picture books tend to stay in print in the first place far longer than the chapter books do?). I should have known it was only a matter of time: Taka-chan and I: A Dog's Journey to Japan, by Betty Jean Lifton and illustrated with photographs by Eikoh Hosoe, originally published in 1967, has arrived—and is equally marvelous.

The book tells the fable of Runcible, a Weimaraner from Massachusetts who gets especially forceful with his beach digging one day and tunnels through the earth to emerge in Japan. (Or rather, I should say, the fable is told by Runcible in first-person narration.) There he meets a little girl named Taka-chan, who has been taken captive by a sea dragon. When Runcible meets the dragon, it explains that it is angry because the girl's father and other local fishermen no longer pay their respects to him, but that it will let Taka-chan go if Runcible can find the most loyal creature in Japan. He accepts this quest, which leads dog and girl deep into the teeming crowds of Tokyo.

Each page is illustrated with a black-and-white photograph by Hosoe, a renowned Japanese artistic photographer and filmmaker who's worked with the likes of Yukio Mishima. While each obviously had to have been carefully staged and directed to fit the narrative, there's an inherent naturalism to Hosoe's images that clicks perfectly with this book's conceit. If Taka-chan and I feels at all dated, it's simply because there aren't many children's books using this kind of framework anymore—and even that effect is only noticeable to parents, I think. Both my sons took to the book, and its typically expressive Weimaraner (photographed some years before Wegman!), right off, much as they take to any other picture book.

In other words, the NYRCC has done it again. May it continue forever!

[Cover image courtesy of NYRCC]

New Books: Outside Your Window/Step Gently Out

Spring is here (we'll ignore the fact that winter never really came to speak of, at least in the Northeast), and as always, with the season come nature-oriented children's books. Two from Candlewick Press stand out, both celebrating the arrival of new creatures and plants, both using simple poetry as their text, and both featuring astonishing and very, very beautiful images.

The first, Outside Your Window: A First Book of Nature, is a set of nature poems for toddlers by writer (and biologist) Nicola Davies. Each page or spread offers a few lines of simple free verse on one aspect of nature a child might encounter (in any season, not just spring)—a feather on the ground, say, or tadpoles in a pond, or a formation of geese in the sky. And each subject is illustrated by Mark Hearld with big, vivid strokes of brush, pen, and collage—a style reminiscent of old Golden Books editions I remember from my childhood. If that's any indication, Hearld's illustrations, and this book, will have a lasting impression on the young kids reading it now.

The second, Step Gently Out, has a similar theme of new creatures in springtime, but with two main differences. First, its text is one poem by Helen Frost that stretches through the entire book, just a few words on each page or spread. And second, its poetry is illustrated by often mind-blowing photography by Rick Lieder. It's the kind of imagery you usually see in science books for kids these days, or on video in nature documentaries—incredibly detailed and precise close-ups of bees gathering pollen from a flower, or butterflies drinking drops off a leaf. Using these photographs as the illustration for a poetry book, however, was a stroke of brilliance: It removes the clinical scientific aspect that nonfiction biology books for kids often find hard to shake, and replaces it with a reinforcement of the sense of wonder that's always been my first impression of images of this kind.

Each book is marvelous and even gasp-inducing at times on is own, but they also complement each other particularly well as a matching pair.

[Cover images courtesy of Candlewick Press]

New Books: How Animals Work

There are a lot of science and nature books for kids out there—nearly every publishing house, large and small, seems to have its own line. Unlike with most other genres with this kind of volume, though, most of them are pretty good, covering their chosen subject (bats, say, or animals of the jungle habitat) with the right depth for the age level they’re aimed at and, of course, lots of great full-color photography. We probably own 10 or 15 of these little volumes, all told, all from different series but nonetheless quite similar, and entirely satisfying to our five-year-old.

But I haven’t written about them much, mainly because there’s often so little to distinguish one line of books from another. All of them are good, but it’s rare to find one that stands out. DK’s How Animals Work does, and not solely because it’s a much larger volume than the rest. It’s kind of a coffee-table book for kids, really, 192 pages long with a hard cover, and featuring enough really big full-color photos  to keep a kid happy for months.

But as the title suggests, there’s another reason this book will be especially appealing to the science-minded youngster. It uses all that extra space not only to load up on more amazing images, but also to go beyond the basic factoids you usually find in kiddie science books, and delve into how and why animals do the things they do. So alongside that amazing closeup of a snake, you find out exactly how snakes slither. (No spoilers here.) To Dash’s delight, there are in-depth diagrams of the bodies of those bats, too, demonstrating how each anatomical feature that’s vital to the creature’s survival functions.

It goes on and on like that for pages, in something of a parent’s dream: a long, attractive-to-behold book that even a slightly science-minded child can get lost in for stretches of time, learning all the while. The book’s official age range from the publisher is 8 to 12, and some of the biology discussed will be over the heads of children younger than that, but at five, Dash adores this book. Better still, I think he’s going to treasure it for years.

[Cover image courtesy of DK Publishing.]