New Books: The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth

I wrote last year (have I really been doing this that long already?) about my premature attempt to read The Phantom Tollbooth with my then-five-year-old, so it's safe to say that Norton Juster's classic is one of my own favorites. (It even made the cut on a list of personal picks I had to come up with for a publishing course when I was 21, alongside Homer, Hammett, and Ford Madox Ford. Looking back, I simultaneously smile at pretentious youth and realize with some surprise that I might still pick the same authors.)

The brand-new Annotated Phantom Tollbooth is aimed directly at parents like me. It's exactly what it says it is: An extra-wide edition of the book, so designed to leave room for "annotations" in the margins (by historian and critic Leonard S. Marcus) about the ideas and inspirations behind Juster's characters and situations, as well as illustrator Jules Feiffer's eternally memorable rendering of them.

Marcus has combed interviews with and notes by both author and illustrator for these nuggets (which include the fact that Feiffer's illustration of the eccentric Whether Man, one of the first of the many unusual characters Milo meets on his journey, is pretty much a drawing of Juster himself). In an extended introduction, Marcus also relates the story of the book's origin as an especially close collaboration between two men sharing not merely a project, but a house in Brooklyn Heights. (Since Juster did the cooking for the housemates, Feiffer has joked that had he not agreed to illustrate The Phantom Tollbooth, he would literally not have been able to eat.)

Now, I don't think this is necessarily the best edition of the classic to use to introduce the book to one's own kids, full of distractions—and fairly serious-minded distractions at that—as it is. But it's almost a must-have for any adult (or teen, or maybe even tween) for whom this book holds a special place. And since it seems to have had that effect on many of us, chances aren't bad that our own kids will, in due time, come to enjoy leafing through the pages of this edition to find out where these two visionaries got their brilliant ideas.

Oh, and a year later, Dash asked to revisit The Phantom Tollbooth—and this time, everything clicked; he was drawn right in. Maybe a parent's (unpressured) dreams can come true after all, sometimes....

[Cover image courtesy of Knopf Books for Young Readers]

New DVDs: Teeny Tiny and the Witch Woman...and More Spooky Halloween Stories

I've written a few times before about the wonderful Scholastic Storybook Treasures series of DVDs, which created animated shorts out of kid-lit classics past and present. For Halloween, they've got a new one out: Teeny Tiny and the Witch Woman . . . and More Spooky Halloween Stories, aimed at kids ages 4 to 9. It packages together five shorts, including the old-school-scary title story (this video was originally made way back in 1980) by Barbara K. Walker, and narrated with panache by Marie Rosulková.

We're big fans of just about every video in this series, but since (as I think I've mentioned before) our older son is a mini Tim Burton, obsessed with all things spooky and creepy, this DVD happens to be one of his all-time favorites. If you have a little one with similar leanings, or just need a good Halloween-themed video for the kids this year, you can't go wrong with this one.

Update: New Kideo, the company that puts out these Scholastic DVDs, is having a giveaway of this very one (plus another one) on Facebook currently! 

[Image courtesy of Scholastic Storybook Treasures]

New Music: Things That Roar

As I've mentioned before, it's always especially thrilling to get a great new children's CD from an artist I don't already know. Don't get me wrong: Our family eagerly looks forward to every new release from our favorite established artists, of course. But there's something special about happening on a gem without those prior expectations.

So I'm happy to report that the debut CD from Papa Crow (the recording moniker of Michigan-based singer-songwriter Jeff Krebs) belongs right up there with the latest Dan Zanes release. Things That Roar is quality indie folk-rock for kids, largely acoustic guitar (with some mandolin, ukelele, and steel guitar thrown in) in the vein of Zanes as well as James Taylor, Nick Drake, and the softer sides of Neil Young and R.E.M. (There's even a nod to Leonard Cohen, appropriately enough in the childhood fear–themed "I'm Not Afraid Anymore.") The 14 well-crafted songs cover basic kid themes (animals, balloons, growing families) in remarkably unsappy, satisfying ways; Krebs has the knack of letting a simple theme express itself without excess embellishment.

Papa Crow also capitalizes on simplicity's advantages in the music itself: His proficient but unflashy playing, and his and Kerry Yost's warm vocals, have had a soothing effect on parents and kids alike in our home. (This is all the more impressive when you read in the liner notes how the album was recorded: "at home late at night downstairs while the wee ones slept"—astounding, given how good these tracks sound. Technology, you continue to amaze me.)

Things That Roar feels like the ideal album to listen to with a toddler or infant—though my six-year-old loves it, too!—on a sleepy, snowy winter afternoon. It's nothing fancy, just (quietly) one of the year's best kids' CDs. I'm really glad I've had the chance to hear it.

[Cover image courtesy of Papa Crow]

New Music: Songs from the Baobab

World music—a term no one really likes but no one has come up with a fully utilitarian replacement for, either—has always been a big part of children's music, going at least as far back as Pete Seeger's interpretations of folk songs from foreign lands. Today it's pretty much its own subgenre; Putumayo alone puts out several excellent world music (or world-music inspired) albums a year.

But I've never heard anything quite like the lovely Songs from the Baobab, a new book-CD combo from The Secret Mountain. It features 29 tracks of lullabyes and nursery rhymes in 11 different languages from Central and West Africa, sung by adults and children and played on indigenous instruments. The lullabyes, some essentially chants, are hypnotically soothing, perfect for lulling newborns and infants to sleep (as some have presumably done for generations). The more upbeat tracks, meanwhile, tend to be irresistible attention-grabbers, whose lyrics (translated for us in the accompanying book, which also features gorgeous illustrations by Elodie Nouhen, themed to the songs) are funny and moving and often profound.

Many parents will want to know more about these songs, and that informations is provided in the book—nation and language of origin, and in many cases interesting facts about the genesis of the songs themselves. Kids, meanwhile—and this is one of those albums that will appeal to a particularly broad age range of them, literally from newborns on up—will just love listening to them.



[Images courtesy of The Secret Mountain]

New(ish) Books: Hera: The Goddess and Her Glory

I wrote my very first post on this blog about the first two volumes in George O'Connor's Olympians series of graphic novels about the ancient Greek gods, so I'm a little ashmaed that it took me this long to get around to the third installment. (I mean, the fourth is just around the corner.) I spent much of that previous post marveling over O'Connor's ability to create compelling, action-packed, illustration-driven narratives while remaining remarkably true to both the letter and the tone of the ancient mythology. And if anything, he trumps himself in Hera: The Goddess and Her Glory.

As the author points out himself in the book's end notes, the queen of Olympus is a tricky subject, portrayed in most of the best-known myths as a shrewish wife and a vindictive punisher of both the various mortal women who are seduced by her husband, Zeus, and their progeny by him. Yet O'Connor has found a way to add a feminist slant to Hera's story—one that doesn't feel the least bit forced—by smartly mining some of the lesser-known variants on these stories, particularly the ones surrounding Herakles. (His very name—which translates as "the glory of Hera"—gives an author a lot to work with, and as his subtitle indicates, O'Connor doesn't disappoint.). This may be the former classics major in me speaking here, but I'm blown away by the extent of the author's research, and even more by what he's able to do with it.

Mind you, Hera is also every bit the engrossing page-turner that O'Connor's previous two Olympians books were; our six-year-old was difficult to separate from Zeus: King of the Gods and Athena: Grey-Eyed Goddess for the better part of a year, and this situation looks no different. (If anyone doubts my word, here's some direct-source backup for Hera's immense kid appeal.) All the Olympians books are in classic comic-book style (by which I mean the comic-book style of my childhood, naturally!), and it once again suits these tales perfectly. While I believe I have seen the labors-of-Herakles/Hercules stories executed in a comic-book format before somewhere or other before, the difference here is that O'Connor's is a really good graphic novel, one you—I mean, a kid—can read happily alongside the top entries in the genre. There's a reason these myths have had such staying power through the millennia—and O'Connor has captured it in these pages.

Can't wait for Hades....

P.S.: I just discovered that O'Connor also has a truly awesome Olympians website as well, with background on the mythology and the cast of characters, activities for kids, even resources for teachers! It will clearly be a challenge to keep Dash off the computer this month.

[Cover image courtesy of First Second Books.]

New Music: Little Nut Tree

Back in the anxious days before the arrival of my first son, I remember a work colleague who was already a parent asking me if I had any Dan Zanes albums yet. I didn't know the name, and she looked at me a little incredulously across the divide that is parenting before smiling and saying, "You're probably going to playing him a lot. And you'll be happy about that."

She was right. Maybe I'm partially biased for having lived in his home turf of Brooklyn for two of those early parenting years, but I think of Zanes as the quintessential modern children's musician, the archetype who encapsulates everything that sets the genre apart today from years past. Indie cred from a band popular with the generation that's now knee-deep in parenting? Check. (Zanes was the frontman for the Del Fuegos.) Eclectic guitar-based musical style featuring a dizzying array of guest stars, some of the celebrity variety (Deborah Harry, Natalie Merchant), others simply great musicians? Check. Known for putting on irresistibly charming and audience-friendly stage shows, no matter how large his popularity and the associated venue size grows? Check.

Zanes was one of the first musicians to nail the sweet spot of music for kids that their parents also actually enjoyed listening to. By this time, it's easy to take him almost for granted among the panoply of artists creating kid tunes with adult-music sounds, from rock to punk to hip-hop. But all along, Zanes and his band of "Friends," as he labels his band and guest artists each time out, have been putting out CD after CD of great music, expertly mixing traditional songs from the U.S. and around the globe with inspired original compositions.

On his latest, Little Nut Tree,  Zanes and company maintain his high standard, with seeming (though surely not actual) effortlessness. In his accustomed laid-back, breezy style, he and his guests—this time including the likes of Sharon Jones and Andrew Bird as well as old Friends Rankin Don/Father Goose and the wonderful Barbara Brousal—offer up sweet songs from Jamaica, Haiti, Tunisia, and the American Populist movement of the 1890s, as well as a number of Zanes's own original compositions. As always, the arrangements and the playing are top-notch, the mood is upbeat and celebratory, and the overall effect is one big smile.

For me, Little Nut Tree is almost musical comfort food—sort of a continuing representation of the core of my existence as a parent—and I see it has a similar effect on my kids, especially my older son, who's been listening to Zanes's music (thanks to that colleague) from the very beginning. And for parents as unfamiliar with the artist as I was way back when: You're probably going to be playing him a lot. Go ahead and start with this one. In the meantime, feel ancient with me via this old Del Fuegos track, featuring some shots of the artist before the bright-colored jackets:



[Cover image courtesy of Dan Zanes & Friends]

New Books: Learning to Play the Piano for the Very Young

Shortly after we moved to the suburbs, we had the insane luck of acquiring a baby grand piano for just the cost of moving it about five blocks. (I remain in your eternal debt, Craigslist.) I don't play myself, but my wife does, and she remembers learning as one of her warmest childhood memories. To this day,  even a few uninterrupted minutes at the piano is one of her favorite ways to relax and unwind.

This, as I know from friends' anecdotes about martinet teachers, is not everyone's experience of learning to play an instrument. So while we both would love our sons to make use of this gift from the suburban gods, we haven't pushed the issue; we decided to let the piano come to them, as it were. Both are showing interest in music in general, and the piano in particular, but the three-year-old doesn't have the attention span for any actual instruction yet, in our opinion. And to be honest, neither does the six-year-old, Dash, for whom the required focus remains something of a weak point.

So thus far, the piano has been more a lark for the kids than anything else. My wife has made some basic attempts at showing Dash how to read music, but not much more. We were still in this holding pattern when we came across the new book Learning to Play Piano for the Very Young, by Debbie Cavalier and Marty Gold. (I knew of Cavalier already from her Debbie and Friends children's-music albums, but she also happens to be dean of continuing education at Berklee College of Music; Gold, her grandfather, is a former orchestra leader who was also an A&R man for RCA in the 1950s and '60s.)

It's a 24-page primer aimed at preschoolers, but it works well even for an early grade-schooler without any training like Dash at getting the basic concepts across—the association of notes with letters, say. It's helpfully interactive--asking kids to write in finger numbers and note names—and just organized enough to help a child in a playful, not overly task-driven, manner. It slowly works up to getting kids to play simple, familiar songs ("Twinkle, Twinkle" and the like) with their right hand. At least for a book-obsessed kid like Dash, just seeing these basic concepts on paper was immensely helpful. At a time in his life when he wasn't ready for more formal methods of instruction, he dove into Cavalier and Gold's book and seemed to grasp its lessons—some of which my wife had been trying to get across for months—almost instantly.

Now, the jury is still out—still being selected, really—on whether Dash will take to the piano, or get beyond the initial stages at all. But in terms of teaching him the building blocks of piano in a low-key, undemanding way, and thus setting him up to take the next steps if he so desires down the road, Learning to Play Piano for the Very Young is just what we didn't even know we were looking for.

[Images courtesy of Debbie Cavalier Music]

New...Blogs!: Kid Pop and Beyond

When I started working at Cookie magazine and took over editing its children's-entertainment section, I didn't know that I was among the most fortunate magazine editors of all time. But I was, because Christopher Healy wrote the section, and his immense knowledge of children's literature, music, movies, and games, combined with his superb writing and insights, made my job incredibly, absurdly easy. Along the way, he also taught me just about everything I know about covering the subject; there is no question that if I'd never met Chris, You Know, for Kids would not exist.

So I'm thrilled to announce that Chris has launched his own blog, Kid Pop … and Beyond. He explains its mission fully over there, so I won't step on that too much, but in a nutshell he's aiming to cover a subject close to my heart, and I suspect those of most readers of this blog as well: kids' entertainment with crossover adult appeal. I encourage anyone who reads this blog to check it out—in fact, since I'll be frequenting his posts regularly as a reader myself, maybe I'll see you over there!

New Books: I Want My Hat Back

Every now and then, you run into a book that establishes its author—someone whose work you weren't familiar with—as a force to be reckoned with. It happens with books for adults, and it certainly happens with kid lit; we've all heard the stories of Maurice Sendak's meteoric entry into the pantheon with Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen, while Brian Selznick's about-to-be-a-Scorsese-film The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a more recent example.

Well, allow me to nominate Jon Klassen as another entry in the ledger. His first picture book, I Want My Hat Back, has such a strong, whimsical yet black-humor-laden voice to go with its striking, lovely illustrations that it immediately places Klassen among the leading lights of his field.

It's all the more remarkable for its plot's simplicity: An exceedingly deadpan bear has lost his hat, and goes from animal to animal asking if any of them has seen it. They are, in various ways, of little help—one has seen a hat but not the bear's hat; another has seen no hats at all—but one rabbit's manic response that he's seen nothing, nothing at all, strikes our protagonist in retrospect as suspicious. His reaction to this realization leads to the book's delightful, unexpectedly dark punch line, which will fill the wicked minds of kids and parents alike with glee. (Lemony Snicket is a fan, which may be all you need to know.) Klassen has created an instant classic, and I can't wait to see what he comes up with next.

[Photo: Whitney Webster.]

New Games: Quallop

My children are only six and three, and my wife is not much of a game-player. So until recently, when it came to research on board games of any kind, I was kinda on my own. (Video games, of course, are another story—even the three-year-old loves them already. Scary. But I digress...)

Happily for my continuing attempts to relive my own board game–laden childhood, though, Dash has now reached an age and attention span that allows for options more advanced than Hi Ho Cherry-O. We just introduced him to Clue, for instance, and that was a great success, once I got over my horror that they've changed the rules a bit in the 25-plus years since I played it last. (I'm still trying to find my old version in the attic.)

What's really fun to find, though, is a new game that's simple enough for kids this age, but also smart enough to engage not only kids' minds, but those of the adults who'll inevitably be playing with them. Even better, at least for my family's current needs, is one that's made for just two players, not four-but-you-can-sort-of-play-lamely-with-fewer—and such games are very hard to find.

Quallop, which melds dominoes with a 2-D version of Connect Four to invent a novel strategic challenge of its own, qualifies. The goal is to get four of your shape in a row on the board, horizonally, vertically, or diagonally, before the other player does; the trick is that the game is played with two-sided, domino-style cards—which can be played on top of existing ones (according to specific rules). So your brilliant strategy to get your four-in-a-row going in the lower left corner of the board can be demolished with one card play from your youthful opponent. The strategy is both easy enough for a six-year-old to get his head around, and complex enough to allow for reasonably long games.

As if that weren't enough, the design and packaging are excellent as well—this is a Chronicle Books product, after all: The board folds into a nifty little colorful case that encompasses all the cards and the rule sheet, then holds itself closed thanks to a hidden magnet. Obviously, this makes Quallop a pretty fabulous travel game; I think it's going to be come a stand-by on our trips this fall and winter.

[Photos: Whitney Webster]

New Books: The Iron Giant

I completely missed Ted Hughes's 1968 children's fable The Iron Giant in my own childhood; I don't know if it had fallen out of vogue in late-1970s New York, or if it simply hadn't made significant inroads in America yet at that point, or if it was just a random omission. But my first exposure to the story of the metal-consuming colossus who befriends a young English boy named Hogarth came when Pete Townshend wrote a musical based on it in the late ’80s. That adaptation in turn led, through the typical Hollywood twists and turns, to Brad Bird's loosely based animated version in 1999, which we discovered once we'd had kids of our own several years later.

But for some reason, despite these cues (it's always a pretty good sign when multiple  artists I admire express admiration for the same work of art), I'd never gone back to Hughes's original text. Apparently that discovery required this new edition, which features suitably expansive, wondrous illustrations by Laura Carlin; at any rate, I now can't believe I put it off so long. The Iron Giant (or, as it's known in its native U.K., The Iron Man, the change on our shores having been caused by the pre-existing Marvel Comics hero now portrayed by Robert Downey) is really an epic for children—Hughes has endowed it with the power of stories like those of Odysseus and Gilgamesh while keeping it simple and accessible to kids. His day job as a prominent poet is in full evidence; you have the sense that every word has been considered and then chosen. There's nothing quite like it in kid lit, to this day.

It’s also engrossing: Our six-year-old was riveted from the opening page, and even our three-year-old's short attention span was held in thrall. Some of that can surely be traced to their prior familiarity with the Brad Bird version—but that adaptation smooths out much of the grand strangeness of the original for modern movie audiences. Yet it’s these elements that aren't in the film—the entire space-bat-angel-dragon storyline, for example—that our boys find most compelling and fascinating.

Carlin's art is a large part of the spell, too; her renderings suit the otherworldliness of the text and the storytelling style perfectly. In particular, she does a remarkable job of capturing the book’s scale, managing to combine a big rough-hewn look with carefully considered details that fill out the background of the story.

It's a proper edition of a classic I'd never known, and I think it'll be beloved equally by those who are already fans and those like me, who didn't know it well previously. It now holds a place of honor on our shelf of children’s-book classics.

[Images: Whitney Webster]

New Books: Farmy Farm

It's not easy to find board books that stand out from the (huge!) crowd—it's another of those subgenres that has many good options but few great ones in it. But Chris Raschka's new Farmy Farm is most definitely an exception, for several reasons. First of all, it's called "Farmy Farm." I mean, really, I could just stop there.

Second, it's a felt board book. Yes, the entire thing is made of and designed in felt, making it not only pleasantly soft for little hands, but also unexpectedly and unusually lovely to look at. Third, parents and grandparents will be pleased by the author-illustrator's nod to 1950s children's books, in both the art and the simple rhymed couplets about cow, duck, pig, sheep, etc.

And finally, it's by Raschka, and so it introduced toddlers to an author who'll be delighting them for the rest of their from the can't-recommend-it-highly-enough Charlie Parker Played Be Bop to the Caldecott-winning Yo! Yes? to this year's wordless A Ball for Daisy. So if you're looking for a truly irresistible and special little board book, look no further.

[Cover image courtesy of Scholastic]

New Books: Let's Make Some Great Art

Every parent knows and loves art workbooks; they're sometimes the only nonscreen ways to keep the kids occupied long enough for us to complete a monumental task (like, you know, cooking dinner). And there are a lot of perfectly good ones to choose from, but as with kids' nonfiction, beyond certain obvious distinctions—Pixar or Dreamworks theme, or no?—there aren't too many reasons to pick one over another.

Until now, that is: I'd choose Marion Deuchars's Let's Make Some Great Art over any of the others. The British illustrator originally created these hand-drawn, real-art-inspired projects for her own kids, and it shows; this is a kid-directed interactive art primer with a sweet, personal touch. Its 224 pages include quick focuses on established art, from cave paintings to Damien Hirst—each offering children a chance to take their own crack at the style, reproducing Mona Lisa's smile, Hirst's shark, Jackson Pollock's action drips, and many more. Others feature concise lessons in technique—shading, form, perspective—often in the form of games or projects that feel like play rather than learning. Another bunch deal with content, presenting, for example, a small figure of a frightened person, and instructing the child/artist to create in this page's large blank space the reason for the fear.

It goes on and on like that, each page as simple and brilliant as the last. Deuchars has created the holy grail of activity books as far as culturally minded parents are concerned: deeply engrossing to kids, yet delivering far more than a mere distraction. The only trouble with Let's Make Some Great Art, really, is you may have to resist an urge to do some of the projects and exercises yourself—or, if you can't, get an additional copy so you can … as my wife is quite seriously considering doing.

[Photos: Whitney Webster]

Security Blanket: Some Things Are Scary

Good picture books—all books, really, I suppose—are usually equal parts brilliant concept and brilliant execution, but most lean more heavily on one or the other. The concept of Some Things Are Scary, a book originally released in 1969 but recently reissued, is simple enough: It's a book about scary things (real-life ones; this is not, as I misunderstood from the title at first, a Halloween book!). But it has a leg up on most of its subgenre: it was written by Florence Parry Heide, veteran author of classics like the Treehorn trilogy, and illustrated by Jules Feiffer, whose work on The Phantom Tollbooth and many other children's books is just one portion of an iconic career.

What this means in practice is that a seemingly straightforward idea is surprisingly clever, imaginative, and expressive. Each sentence of the book is simply something a kid would find scary—say, discovering the hand you're holding isn't Mommy's after all—but Heide keeps the throughline unpredictable, jumping smartly from personal, concrete fears (strange food on the dinner plate) to social anxieties (worry over being the last kid picked in pickup team sports) to kid existential angst (finding out your best friend has...another best friend) and then back to the concrete again.

Meanwhile, Feiffer visualizes every one of these fears in his inimitable fashion, capturing the feeling behind each with uncanny precision. (Click on the image below to see better what I mean.) He also imparts his usual wry humor, somehow without ever undercutting the validity of the feelings he's portraying. He's laughing with, not at, the situations, which allows parents to smile in recognition (and even personal remembrance in many cases), while kids can see that they're not the only ones who feel the way they feel.

It's nothing fancy—just a breath of fresh air in what could have been just another stale go at a common picture-book subject. And it's a testament to what kid-lit royalty is capable of. Indeed, it's evidence of why and how they became royalty in the first place.

[Photos: Whitney Webster]

New Music: Hey, Pepito!

It's not every artist—even in the famously diverse kids'-music field—who can move genre to genre and sound good in every one of them. But then, Key Wilde and Mr Clarke proved with their eclectic, energetic debut album, Rise and Shine, that they're not your everyday kids' musicians. (In fact, "artists" might be the term to stick with, since Wilde has also made a name for himself as an illustrator.)

On their follow-up EP, the download-only release Hey Pepito!, the duo swing from the (truly!) punk sound of the title track (about a frenetic squirrel, suitably enough) to the happy indie pop of "Don Mario's Song" to the folk homage to Seeger and early Dylan "Talking Big Pet Pig"—and as always, all of it sounds fantastic. "Hey Pepito" itself (the song, I mean) is probably the highest-energy kids' song I've ever heard—in a good way; I used to try to drag myself into consciousness back in my college years with the Pixies' "Debaser," and this might be that kid-friendly replacement I so desperately need.

It's a short but sweet set of songs that kids will love (let them wear themselves out dancing to the first two tracks!) and parents will be happy to play as well.

[Image courtesy of Key Wilde and Mr Clarke]

New Books: Drawing from Memory

In my spotty posting of late amid vacations and hurricanes, I've been focusing on children's nonfiction, slowly chipping away at my initial statement that it's hard to find good books in the genre. Allen Say's Drawing from Memory, though, is a particular standout, and particularly unusual: an autobiographical memoir in the form of a picture book.

Say is a revered veteran children's book author, responsible for dozens of charming and always very beautiful picture books whose art bears the influence of his Japanese origins; several have become family favorites in recent years. In Drawing from Memory, he turns his immense talent upon his own life—and specifically on his road to his lifelong career as a cartoonist, artist, and author.

It's a tale with some familiar tropes—aspiring artist is told by his father that art is not a suitable profession, then pursues it anyway thanks to a mentor/substitute-father figure. But the specifics are powerful. (For instance: Say's parents and grandparents sent him to Tokyo to live by himself at age 13 so that he could attend a prestigious school there, with predictable and not-so-predictable effects on his relationship with them, and particularly with his mother.)

And the author's means of conveying his story is breathtaking: He expertly blends words, real family and historical photographs, and his own illustrations of memories of places, people, and situations (along with wistful and occasionally heartbreaking confessions of lapses in that memory, as when he cannot recall the name of a favorite schoolteacher). The resulting combination of media is more or less unique, and makes the already personal tale Say is telling almost impossibly so. You feel at times as if you're right there alongside the author as he journeys through his life.

This is not, clearly, your typical picture-book fare, especially as Say's childhood coincided with World War II, and as such, the intended audience is certainly a little older than one expects a book of this size and shape to be. But his treatment, while it doesn't shy away from the facts of his life and the history going on during it, is never overly grim, and our six-year-old (who's starting to show some interest in cartooning himself) was fascinated by the true story. Kids older than that, particularly if they have any interest in drawing and/or storytelling themselves, will be rapt, I think. As will most adults with such interests—or who have childhoods of their own to remember.

[UPDATE: Though Amazon seems to say you can purchase this book now, I've been told by the publisher that it's not officially out till October, so if you're having problems picking it up immediately, my apologies! (You should at least be able to preorder till then, though, I should think.) I'll update further with any new information.]

[Cover image courtesy of Scholastic]

New Books: Charting the World

It figures that as soon as I write about how difficult it can be to find standout children's nonfiction, a slew of books come along to prove me wrong. The latest discovery is Richard Panchyk's Charting the World,  and where Winter's Tail played its real-life subject matter into a children's-book format, this is more an adult-style book made interesting for and accessible to children. (As a result, we're also talking slightly older children here—the book itself says ages nine and up, but its sweet spot really feels like tweens and even teens to me.)

Simply put, this is a book about maps, and Panchyk covers all the bases, starting with the history of geography itself and then moving on to that of mapmaking, from, as the subtitle says, "cave painting to GPS." It's true history, too, not dumbed down in an attempt to appeal to its younger audience in the slightest, which I know kids who are truly interested in the subject will appreciate.

But what keeps Charting the World from being nothing more than a good middle-school textbook—and mind you, it would be an excellent base for teaching classes on geography, cartography, or even certain aspects of history, I think—is the 21 activities Panchyk has interspersed through the tour. Kids are given the chance to put the skills they're reading about into direct action—using a contour map to build a 3D island model, say, or surveying their own backyard, or making a nautical map of a playground puddle.

This hands-on approach to learning is, of course, a time-tested tool of kids' science books, but it's novel and refreshing to see it applied to a nonfiction children's book that's as much about history as science. And it works like a charm in making a book that could, despite its many vivid images and illustrations of maps past and present, have seemed dry at first glance more appealing and inviting to kids.

[Images courtesy of Independent Publishers Group]

New Music: The Golden State

In covering kids' music, I've found quality of all kinds and genres, but I have to admit that I gravitate toward the stuff that, even while catering to childhood interests in its subject matter, sounds like music my wife and I might have listened to before our boys were born. (I never turn down a good opportunity for denial, basically.)

The Hipwaders are a band with such a sound. As the title of their fifth CD, The Golden State, implies, this is a California group, and their music nods to a wide, eclectic range of home-state icons, from the Beach Boys to Camper Van Beethoven. Lead singer/guitarist Tito Uquillas adds his own thumbprint to the mix with his college-radio-style vocals, sort of a mix of Michael Stipe, Fred Strickland, and Cracker's David Lowery. The tunes are catchy, daring in their use of unusual harmonies and vocal lines, and altogether enjoyable to kids and parents alike.

That alone makes the Hipwaders a good choice to listen to, but this group also draws parents—who are usually, let's face it, happy when kid bands are good enough to be mere toe-tapping background music—into the lyrics more than usual. That's not because they don't cover kid subject matter; The Golden State features pet dogs, bullies, toy trains, and the like. It's more that the Hipwaders...approach everything a little differently. "Hey, Josie," for instance, is a song about a new baby on the way, but its anthemic chorus—simply "Hey, Josie, baby come on"—funnels the anticipation into power pop from some lost summer beach hit of the '80s or '90s.

They follow this offbeat way of tackling typical topics throughout the album—"Stand Up to the Bully" savvily uses a ska sound (think the English Beat by way of Vampire Weekend) to give its message proper grounding rather than the expected parental naivete; the laid-back, Cars-esque "Slow Children at Play" addresses why kids gather to play on pavement rather than in their backyards. Every song nails the perfect tone in its writing, speaking to kids the way they want to be spoken to: as an audience worthy of respect and direct discourse.

The Golden State is that rare kids' album that the whole family will listen to all the way through—and even be a little disappointed when its 16 tracks are done.

[Image courtesy of the Hipwaders]

New Books: Winter's Tail

I've become, in my time-pressed adult life, a big nonfiction reader, for many reasons. But I've always found children's nonfiction—at least beyond the work of giants of the genre like David Macaulay—to be difficult territory.

It's not that there's a lack of good nonfiction kids' books out there, especially in the science-and-nature genre, which offers tons of books about all sorts of animals and bugs and plants. It's more that there's not a lot that separates any one of these titles from the rest—most are driven by gorgeous, vivid photography and feature fairly basic writing. I always find myself at a loss to find reasons to recommend any particular one.

The dolphin saga Winter's Tail, from documentary-film and nature-book veterans Juliana, Isabella, and Craig Hatkoff, however, is an exception. While it also has its share of nature photography, this book is driven by its storytelling—so much so, in fact, that its tale is the basis for a major (fictionalized) family film that's coming out this fall. The saga of a dolphin that loses its tail in a crab trap and eventually learns to survive and thrive with a prosthetic one designed by a company that makes artificial human limbs, it grabbed the imagination of our six-year-old from the start and didn't let go.

Of course, we've also added the movie to our agenda later in the year (we’ll see how the true story mixes with Hollywood screenwriters and Harry Connick), but for now, I'm just grateful to have discovered a kids' nonfiction book I can say truly is several notches above the rest.

[Photo: Whitney Webster]

New Books: Spin

The technology of paper crafting in publishing seems to have undergone a revolution in recent years, with the results perhaps most evident in the realm of pop-up books. No longer the simple, somewhat cheesy little books of our generation's childhood, these are now dazzling works of paper engineering, led by the amazing work of Matthew Reinhart and Robert Sabuda.

But until now, the intricate folds and designs themselves were the wonder in these books. Ido Vaginsky's Spin takes the genre in another new direction, one of artistic double entendres. Pull the tab, and the cow head does a series of (surprisingly speedy) twirls before settling upside-down—at which point you realize that viewed this way, it's an owl. And so on with a series of cleverly designed illustrations that change form depending on how they're viewed.

The combination of paper mechanics—again, like old-fashioned tabs and pop-ups on steroids—and visual magic is dazzling and, in fact, somewhat thrilling. All of which makes Spin a whole lot of fun.

[Photo: Whitney Webster]