New Books: Night Knight

It's long been a reliable trope of picture book to switch back and forth between the reality of a child's world and how that child's imagination is perceiving and transforming that reality. Where the Wild Things Are leaps to mind, of course, but the most gifted of our modern illustrators are also doing great things with the concept, from the stripped-down simplicity of Antonia Portis's Not a Stick to the fabulous controlled chaos of Suzy Lee's Shadow.

British illustrator Owen Davey's Night Knight, like Sendak's classic, leads off with reality but soon (in fact, sooner, in this case) lets imagination take over. A boy in pajamas with a colander on his head informs us that his nightly bedtime ritual is "a great adventure"—and then, on the next page, transforms into a boy knight, complete with chain mail and helmet. The boy is right: His trip down the hallway on a white horse takes him past an inconspicuous telephone table and umbrella stand and through a leafy forest; his bath explodes with colorful fish and crabs (and a giant bath plug); his "climb into bed" involves a tall tower and a ladder.

The author cleverly slips an element or two of the boy's reality--the mundane hallway furniture, the bath plug, the dog collar on the boy's pet three-headed dragon to whom he says good night—into each step of the process. But to concentrate too much on that would be to make too little of the book's most truly wondrous aspect: Davey's resplendent, vivacious illustrations of the imaginary stuff. This is an illustrator whose panels will make adults gasp. They'll also keep young children coming back to Night Knight night after, well, night.

[Cover image courtesy of Candlewick Press]

New Feature: In the Moment

You'll notice at the right here a new feature on this blog—one I've essentially ripped off wholesale from my friend and former colleague and blogging role model Jenny Rosenstrach of Dinner, A Love Story. (I am giving it a different name here, though; I have some pride/shame.) 

"In the Moment" will be a short running list of each of my sons' favorites of the moment—books, songs, toys, movies, what have you, their passions of the day. I was playing with silly names for each of their lists, but when I started seriously thinking about using the horrible Harry Potter pun "Griff Adores" for his list, I backed away from the language games slowly.

Like so many kids, Dash and Griff are alternately obsessive and fickle, and in unpredictable ways, so I expect that certain items may stay on the lists for months, while others flit on and back off within days. I'll certainly write full posts about many or most of the items (or will have done so already, in some cases), but the lists will provide a fuller, more comprehensive view of the stuff our family likes most than I ever have time to cover in posts.


[Photo: Whitney Webster]

New Books: George Washington's Birthday & Looking at Lincoln

Most holiday-themed children's books, let's face it, aren't very good. Most are conceived and created mainly to be promoted at their respective times of the year, and accordingly aren't terribly inspired. And Presidents' Day would seem, if anything, an even worse holiday than usual for kids' books; the preponderance of those pegged to it that I've seen through the years have been dutifully dull marches through the cherry trees and log cabins.

But two new books—one for each president, each illustrated by an artist known (among other things) for New Yorker covers—are out to change that. George Washington's Birthday: A Mostly True Tale, by Margaret McNamara and illustrated by Barry Blitt, is a whimsical tale of George's own seventh birthday. The authors don't exactly shy away from the hagiographic details by any means—but, borrowing a page from Blitt's sublime 2006 solo outing The 39 Apartments of Ludwig Van Beethoven, drop in little "fact" and "myth" boxes here and there to set the record straight.

The book makes young George refreshingly human; as he becomes more and more frustrated that his entire family appears to have forgotten his birthday, he quite naturally, well, acts out a bit. Early on it's muted—muttering "I'll be the boss of you someday" under his breath to his older half-brother (who's also his teacher)—but of course it all culminates in big-time vented frustrations on that poor cherry tree.

McNamara's tone is delightful throughout, just breezy enough without losing its grounding in the parts of its narrative that are based in fact, and she makes our first president more approachable and sympathetic than he appears in just about any other children's book I can think of—even the ones in which he's a child. And Blitt's trademark warped-realistic watercolors complement her text wonderfully, adding an additional and quite funny level of expressiveness to our hero. This is one of those books that slowly turns up the corners of your mouth as you read.

Maira Kalman's Looking at Lincoln is similarly imaginative, and even similarly whimsical, but also (as befits its subject) more pensive. In it, a child narrator takes the reader through her own investigation of the guy on the five-dollar bill (as she initially thinks of him). She hits the big historical points, of course, but it's the Kalman-ian flights of fancy that really make this book special: the girl's picturing Lincoln loving apples and vanilla cake, for instance.

Actually, Kalman even lends the historical stuff this extra dimension—when it comes time to recount the president's tragic murder, she opens the scene by noting that after the horrors of war, Lincoln felt the need to laugh at something and thus went to see the fateful performance of the comedic play at Ford's Theatre. It's all presented in a somber, matter-of-fact voice that feels very true and right, both for the young narrator herself and for the children who'll be reading this book. Kalman is masterful at capturing the wonder of discovery that's at the heart of all the best history—and she somehow allows even an adult reader who knows a lot about Lincoln to partake in rediscovery.

[Cover images, from left: Courtesy of Random House; Courtesy of Penguin USA]

New Books: Zero the Hero

Much like the book I last posted about, Zero the Hero (about to be released later this month) is a math-lesson picture book that doesn't feel anything like a lesson, because it actually tells a story. Author Joan Holub and illustrator Tom Lichtenheld (who clearly has a talent for this sort of thing, having also illustrated the similarly clever letter book E-mergency last year) make the titular digit a sympathetic outcast among the other numbers. At first he's looked down upon because he has no effect whatsoever on addition and subtraction—and then he's feared and cast out because he makes the other numbers disappear in multiplication.

But, as tends to happen in these sorts of stories, they soon find they miss the lovable donut-shaped guy—not just because he's amiable, but also because they've completely lost the ability to do important things, like multiply themselves by 10, without him. And that's before they're taken prisoner by a group of suitably martial Roman numerals—at which point Zero comes to the rescue with an ability only he has. (I won't spoil the, um, surprise.)

Golub weaves the math—basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, and of course the key concept of zero itself—seamlessly into the storyline, and Lichtenheld's whimsical, cartoon-y art draws kids right in. It's one of those picture books our seven-year-old and our three-year-old like to read together. (And what's more heart-warming than that, especially when the seven-year-old is reading it to the three-year-old?)

It's become a particular favorite of the younger one, and while I can't say how deeply the math lessons are penetrating his brain as he reads the book again and again, the exposure can't hurt. Even at this age, a lesson that doesn't feel like a lesson? Parental nirvana.

[Cover image courtesy of Henry Holt/Christy Ottaviano Books]

Security Blanket: 365 Penguins

Three-year-old Griffin is at the stage with books where I can hardly keep up with his current favorites—they literally seem to change every day. But there are a handful I can always rely on his continuing to ask to be read to him at bedtime. One is the oversize 2006 instant classic 365 Penguins, by the French team of Jean-Luc Fromental and Joelle Jolivet.

I remember being struck by the book when it first came out—it was a favorite of Griff's older brother, Dash, back then—and thinking that it has a lot going for it. First, there's the design: huge spreads of graphic black, white, and orange, depicting an ever-growing population of penguins sent, day by day over the course of a year, to an unsuspecting nuclear family's home. There's the learning aspect: The whole book is in fact a beautifully designed series of multiplication lessons, as the family uses math to figure out the best way to efficiently house, feed, and just plain deal with their new avian companions. There's the surprise environmentalist ending, featuring the eccentric ecologist Uncle Victor and a polar bear. There's even the Where's Waldo?-esque game the author and illustrator subtly slip in, involving a single blue-footed penguin named Chilly.

Thanks to all of that, 365 Penguins grabbed us from the start, and it's never let go. Dash still enjoys leafing through it at seven, and by the time Griff got to it, it was already on the hallowed Sendak-Dr. Seuss shelf. Which is exactly where it belongs, I think.

[Cover image courtesy of Abrams Books for Young Readers]

New Books: Under the Hood

A genre children's book that immediately sets itself apart is always pretty exciting—as I've written here before, there are plenty of decent ABC and flap books, but very few great ones. Under the Hood, by French author-illustrator Christophe Merlin, is one of the great ones; it's also the current favorite of my three-year-old, Griffin. (Naturally, it has a vehicular theme.)

It's not that the story is anything fancy—Mr. Bear, a mechanic, has his car break down, and must organize his rather lazy assistants, a crocodile and a mouse, to fix it. But the execution, which is usually where one finds the action in great genre books, is both clever and very aesthetically pleasing.

Merlin's retro-style art is reminiscent of that of classic 20th-century European illustrators, and the flaps and pulls are designed in a slightly different way than those of the average U.S. flap book—at different angles, and incorporating the art in different, often surprising ways. Even the book's paper stock is a little heavier than usual, a little more textured, providing a touch of sophistication not usually associated with flap books featuring Mr. Bear. It's more than enough to set Under the Hood apart, as Griffin would be the first to tell you. (Though his way of telling you would be to tell you to read it to him at bedtime for the 20th consecutive night.)

[Cover image courtesy of Candlewick Press]

New Movies: The Adventures of Tintin

There were two movie adaptations in the latter part of 2011 that our family was particularly excited about. The first, Hugo, based on Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret, was a lot of fun and has just garnered a bunch of well-deserved Oscar nominations. But we finally saw the second—the Steven Spielberg–Peter Jackson collaboration to bring Hergé's boy reporter Tintin to the screen—and it’s even more fun, and captures the feel of its source material better, too.

The film takes its plot mainly from two sequential Tintin books from the 1940s, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure, in which our hero helps his comrade Captain Haddock discover and recover a bountiful inheritance from a 17th-century ancestor. It also takes bits and pieces from other books in the series, most notably swiping the extended first encounter between Tintin and Haddock from The Crab with the Golden Claws (in the books, the pair are old chums by the time of The Secret of the Unicorn). Some characters who aren't in the Unicorn storyline at all show up here (Bianca Castafiore), while others who are in these books are kept up the filmmakers' sleeves, presumably for further cinematic adventures (Professor Calculus).

By now it's probably clear that I was obsessed with the Tintin canon as a child, reading the whole series over and over endlessly; it's been heartwarming to see my older son have much the same reaction. But naturally, this lent a bit of anxiety to our anticipation of the film—would they screw it up? Hollywood's track record on top children's books is mixed at best, after all. (Exhibit A: The Golden Compass.) And even in today's age of technical wizardry, adapting graphic novels of any kind well seems to be particularly tricky. (Exhibit B: Any Alan Moore adaptation.)

Then again, this project was produced by Jackson, whose creation of the onscreen Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies via motion-capture with the actor Andy Serkis (who plays Haddock in Tintin) was nothing short of revelatory. Plus, that same motion-capture technology was used for all the characters in the Tintin film, with the surroundings computer-generated around them. And the film's director was Spielberg, whose career has obviously cut a much broader swath in the years since, but who first made his name as one of the greatest action-adventure moviemakers of all time. So the adaptation was in good hands, at least.

It shows. My first impression was that the filmmakers are long-standing Tintin fans who get, deep-down, what the books' fans love about them. Like them, the movie is an old-fashioned adventure story, in which we follow a likable, determinedly optimistic hero through a series of thrilling perils. (Hitchcock's The 39 Steps isn't a bad comparison, if you're looking for live-action ones, but it's a type they definitely don't make much anymore.) Also like the books, Tintin moves fast, from exotic locale to exotic locale and from action sequence to frenetic action sequence.

Here, you can almost feel Spielberg's joy at the chance to satisfy with technology any lingering cravings he didn't get out of his system in the Indiana Jones movies (for fear of killing Harrison Ford's stunt doubles). The extended sequences are as breathtaking, somehow, as any live-action ones I can remember, perhaps because Spielberg keeps pushing the envelope on how outlandish they can be. They are also, I must say, by far the best use of the faddish 3-D technology I've seen yet. (I found the 3-D in Hugo mostly either distracting or forgettable; here it adds to every action sequence, in an entirely integrated way.)

Surprisingly, the many alterations from the plot of the two books didn't bother me at all, even though many are significant—Tintin and Haddock's not knowing each other at the start; the transposition of the antagonist's role from the nefarious Bird brothers (nowhere to be seen in the film) to the collector Sakharine (a completely innocent fellow victim of the Birds in the books). I think it's because Spielberg and the screenwriters establish so well that they get the source material that you're willing to go with the changes. Also, the changes work structurally; in some cases even I had to go back to the books to figure out exactly what they were.

Before seeing it, I read some reviews of The Adventures of Tintin that complained about its impersonal nature and lack of depth (of the metaphorical, not 3-D, variety). Now, I find myself bewildered by those criticisms. There is a separation from the hyper-real in the film, certainly, but it's not as if the books' illustrations were exactly Gray's Anatomy either—just look at Tintin's iconic cowlick, for starters. And while there remains, even amid the increasingly lifelike qualities of cutting-edge CGI, an occasionally creepy sense that the "people" onscreen are, simply put, not living beings, I forgot about it pretty quickly once the story got going and pulled me in.

Another complaint I read was from critics who wanted to know more of what these characters are about, what Tintin wants. Yes, Tintin is something of a cipher, on the page and onscreen as well, despite Jamie Bell's strong motion-capture and voice work. He's completely asexual—credit or blame the times of his creation if you like>—and his only "drive" seems to be to do good deeds and seek exciting new adventures. But certain kinds of stories aren't really about character, and I'm downright grateful that Spielberg didn't try to add new layers to the boy reporter. Backstory for Tintin would be as absurd as it would be for Rufus T. Firefly in Duck Soup.

It's the supporting characters that have always been the lifeblood of the Tintin books, in terms of added dimension. And here they're fleshed out quite well by their creators, especially Serkis as Haddock (whom I'd never thought of as a Scot, but it works) and Daniel Craig, who portrays the bad guy with a versatility—there's an effete quality I certainly never associate with Craig's physical presence—I didn't know he was capable of.

I can certainly see why someone who has always been able to take or leave the Tintin books might feel much the same way about the movie. But I think fans of the books will grin wildly all the way through it, as Dash and I did, and less partisan moviegoers (if my wife and our three-year-old are any indication) will have a pretty exhilarating time, too.

And it is one of those movies to see on the big screen if you can—try to catch it while it's still on one!)

[Image courtesy of Paramount Pictures]

2011 Wrap: Music

I'd say 2011 was a great year for kids' music, but really every year has been that recently, thanks to the explosion of the kindie movement nationwide. (Speaking of which, this year's Kindiefest is coming up, for any parents who'll be anywhere near Brooklyn in late April.) There's so much good stuff out there nowadays that I think every family's personal highlight reel will be different, but these were the albums that got the heaviest airplay (mostly, yes, via Airplay) from ours:

Old Favorites Division

•   Great new albums from longtime favorites both superfamous (Dan Zanes) and more under the radar (Recess Monkey) have gotten almost daily requests since being acquired. And while veterans Brady Rymer, Key Wilde & Mr. Clarke, and the Hipwaders were already on our radar, each of their 2011 releases may have been their best yet in each case.

•   Missed Coverage Subcategory: Somehow I missed writing about it at the time, but the latest from kid-hop pioneer Secret Agent 23 Skidoo, Monkey Wrench, maintains his dazzlingly high standard in an album for slightly older kids (and grownups...but aren't they all, really?). I always worry that it seems like faint praise when I say he's the only kiddie rapper we ever listen to; it's not. 23 Skidoo is in the stratosphere of his industry—one of the top four or five kids' musicians currently recording, in my opinion—and it's not his fault no one else to speak of has managed to produce even decent hip-hop for a children's audience yet. (Give it time.) 

Crossover Division

•   As usual, several artists known for their adult-oriented tunes delved into the kid genre last year. Our favorites were the sublime Songs from a Zulu Farm from Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and the (marvelously) ridiculous Down at the Zoo from Too Many Cookes (a.k.a. Mick Cooke of Belle and Sebastian).

New Horizons Division

•   Maybe best of all, we got to add a few bands and musicians we'd never heard before to our watch-for list in 2011. From Monty Harper's lyrical skill and factual accuracy (the only comparable kids' songs about science are from stratosphere-dwellers They Might Be Giants) to Papa Crow's gentle, soothing indie-folk sound, we were glad to meet them.

•   Missed Coverage Subcategory: They got a vote from me in the Fids & Kamily Awards voting, but I never managed to actually post about Always Saturday’s excellent debut album, the double CD (one with stories, the other with individually corresponding songs) Love Is Plural. The 10 tracks of reggae- and calypso-tinged feelgood pop, reminiscent of the likes of Jack Johnson and Dave Matthews Band, are expertly produced to generate warm, calm feelings in kids and adults alike. And the stories (with the corresponding instrumental tracks playing underneath) match the music's tone exactly—good-humored, fun, smile-inducing. 

Status Report

Just to explain the sudden complete lack of posting (as opposed to the slow posting of the last couple of months): I wanted to be sure the existence of this blog was OK with a new boss at the day job. Permission has now been reissued, and posts of a more prolific nature should be forthcoming, starting later today.

Photo: Whitney Webster

2011 Wrap: Books, Part II (Graphic Novels & Comic Books)

My seven-year-old, Dash, spent a little less of his time reading graphic novels in 2011 than he had in 2010 (and a little more trying to create his own, thrillingly enough—more on that another time). But a few of them made enough of an impression to reach the top of his, and therefore this, list.

It's no surprise that George O'Connor's Hera was first on the list; the initial book in his wonderful Olympians series of graphic novels was the subject of this blog's very first post ever. Even with our expectations sky-high for volume three, O'Connor managed to surpass them, taking a challenging and difficult mythological character and finding a way to spin her sympathetically. Like the first two volumes, Zeus and Athena, these get read over and over and over again. We're both really looking forward to seeing what he'll do with Hades, which comes out later this month.

Dash's other favorite this year was a rare nonfiction graphic novel: Matt Phelan's Around the World, which tells the tales of three amazing 19th-century solo circumnavigations. I think the biggest challenge for Dash is differentiating it from the fiction—sometimes it's hard to believe that Nellie Bly, Thomas Stevens, and especially Joshua Slocum really, truly made these journeys. Regardless, Phelan makes it all a vivid, unforgettable read.

But there's a third graphic novel, sort of, that I neglected to mention on the blog this year, though I meant to, and even thought I had. (That's kind of indicative of what 2011 was like overall, I'm afraid.) Nursery Rhyme Comics: 50 Timeless Rhymes from 50 Celebrated Cartoonists seems topical only for younger kids, by nature of its text. But its appeal is much broader, in fact, because each of these rhymes (some classic, some obscure) is illustrated—and really, more than that, its story told—by a different prominent artist, from Jules Feiffer ("Girls and Boys Come Out to Play") to the aforementioned George O'Connor ("For Want of a Nail") to David Macaulay ("London Bridge Is Falling Down," appropriately enough) to Gahan Wilson ("Itsy Bitsy Spider," again appropriately, and not so itsy bitsy) to Roz Chast ("There Was a Crooked Man"). Needless to say, the artists' takes on their respective rhymes are endlessly imaginative, and the book as a whole serves as a great example of how stories can be interpreted in an infinite number of ways. It's also a treasure as a sampler of so many of today's best active cartoonists, and neither Dash nor my three-year-old can get enough of it.

Next wrap post: Our family's favorite chapter books of the year.

[Cover image courtesy of First Second Books]

New Books: Trains Go/I'm Fast!

 We have two young boys, so trains have been a major theme of our home for quite some time. The three-year-old grows more fascinated with them daily, his interest waxing conveniently apace with his older brother's moving on to other things, like the new Wii that Santa brought this year. (This has all worked out particularly well in regard to all the Thomas paraphernalia we bought for Dash when he was this age. Something is working out according to plan, for once!)

And while it's merely days old, 2012 has already been a banner year for train books. Griff has two new bedside standbys, both actually the latest in larger, um, vehicular series. The first is the board book Trains Go, by Steve Light, whose vivid illustrations and suitably onomatopoeic text lead us through various train types—freight, old steam, new steam, diesel, the beloved caboose. Trains Go stands out among the many train-related board books on the market, and it instantly became a favorite.

Griff has been asking for it in combination, of late, with Kate and Jim McMullan's I'm Fast!, the latest in their oeuvre that began with the garbage-truck saga I Stink! (another of Griff's faves, incidentally, especially in its Scholastic video version). This one recounts a race to Chicago between a freight train and a red sports car, both personified in the usual brightly aggressive McMullan manner.

Jim McMullan's illustrations just leap off the page—before I ever saw these books, I knew him best for his series of now-classic Lincoln Center Theater posters—and his talent for still images that shimmer with motion is in evidence here. And the tone of Kate McMullan's text, which combines the usual train sounds (why would any children's author resist them?) with short, snappy lines of train monologue that quickly establish the train's confident but benign character. I'm pretty sure Griff identifies with it. (Should that alarm me?)

[Cover images courtesy of Chronicle Books (Trains Go) and HarperCollins (I'm Fast!)]

2011 Wrap: Books, Part I (Picture & Board Books)

I'm generally of the opinion that blogging, like love for Harvard undergrads, means never having to say you're sorry, but I feel I really ought to apologize for the even-lighter-than-usual posting over the November and December holidays. The regular winter-holiday excuses apply, but are as always no real excuse, since it's not as if I didn't know they were coming.

Anyway, it's time for my second annual belated best-of-last-year posts. This time, so as not to get bogged down with stuff I've already written about for a month, I'll alternate them with brand, spanking new-material posts. (And now that I've made that promise, I will endeavor to keep it.)

As I look over my favorite picture books and board books of last year, I see that they fall, sensibly enough, into two categories: the clever and the gorgeous. (OK, there's some overlap.)

THE CLEVER
This category is led by one of my finalists for best children's book of the year overall (admittedly, I haven't gone beyond finalists yet), Jon Klassen's marvelous, ever-so-slightly shocking I Want My Hat Back, about a bear who really, really wants his lost hat back. Though come to think of it, I was no less enthusiastic about the brilliant concept and execution of Hervé Tullet's remarkable meta-interactive print book, Press Here, while Ido Vaginsky's Spin displayed actual interactivity of the clever paper-engineering kind.

Rounding out the category were three sweet-clever titles. Both I and my three-year-old vacillate daily on which of them we love most, so I'll list them in alphabetical order to avoid false momentary favoritism. (And truly, we love them all equally.) Edwin Speaks Up, by April Stevens and the beloved-of-this blog Sophie Blackall, struck a chord with all toddlers who know they're the only sensible people in the family. In her Hopper and Wilson, Maria Van Lieshout channeled the warmth and poignance of A. A. Milne. And Diane Kredensor's Ollie & Moon combined illustrations with Sandra Kress's photography in a charming, evocative, and, yes, clever way.

THE GORGEOUS
This list is shorter, encompassing just two titles: Laura Carlin's stunning illustrative interpretation of the Ted Hughes classic The Iron Giant, and Sylvia Long's breathtaking nature illustrations accompanying Diana Hutts Aston's text in A Butterfly Is Patient. What it lacks in length, though, it makes up for in beauty. (And heck, the Hughes story is rather clever as well. So much for categorization?)

In my next 2011 wrap-up post (i.e., my post after next), I'll look at the year's top graphic-novels for kids, including a fantastic compilation I forgot to write about first time around.

[Cover image courtesy of Random House]

New (free) (e)Books: Yellow Submarine

Like so many people my age, I was raised on the Beatles—I think I took either my mother or father's copy of Magical Mystery Tour to my preschool show-and-tell once. (What precisely I said about it is, rather fortunately, lost to my memory.)

But while the Fab Four's music had become a fairly natural background to my own early parenting years as well, I hadn't given the animated film Yellow Submarine a lot of thought. (I seem to recall that my snobbish elementary-school self largely dismissed the movie after my first viewing, upon realizing that the real Beatles hadn't done their own voices.)

Until, that is, a trip to London when our oldest was three, and happened to be obsessed with "All You Need Is Love"—having run through the picture books we had brought with us, we grabbed an edition of the book version of Yellow Submarine, which features all the colorful Heinz Edelmann graphics of the film, if none of the actual music. It was a huge hit with Dash, and has been a favorite book of his and his younger brother's ever since.

And now, I discover, iTunes is offering an iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch edition of Yellow Submarine—completely free of charge! (OK, the iPad's not free by any means, I grant you.) It makes smart, efficient use of the opportunities for interactivity—at a touch, the butterflies flutter, the Blue Meanies laugh evilly, and the Beatles themselves pop up and down in the Sea of Holes. Plus, there's a whole slew of video clips from the movie on just about every page, which means that in this edition, you do get some of the original songs. (Naturally, there's a page at the end where you can buy any or all of them on iTunes.)

Maybe it's just the relative newness, still, of interactive books on tablets, but when I unveiled this surprise for Dash and Griff, they were mesmerized and delighted (and—fair warning—wouldn't let me have my iPad back). Kinda wishing now that I'd saved it as a (free!) Christmas present...

[Image © Apple Corps Ltd., courtesy of PR Newswire]

Security Blanket: The Lump of Coal

I'm generally not much for holiday-themed children's books, which are often as uninspired and gimmicky as the impulse-buy specials for adults that you find by the Barnes & Noble cashiers this time of year. But if there were going to be an exception, it should come as no surprise that it would be a holiday-themed children's book by Lemony Snicket, perhaps the author best suited to taking the treacle out of traditionally tacky subject matter.

The title itself hints at this, but The Lump of Coal is more than just a one-liner—in it, Snicket manages to eat his cake and have it, doubling back on his seeming cynicism. Its protagonist is, yes, the titular lump, who wears a tuxedo and wants to be an artist, but is dismayed to find that the art gallery displaying coal art is not seeking works by actual anthropomorphic coal chunks.

He is similarly unsuccessful when trying to find a position fueling a Korean barbecue, and about to despair when he runs across a man dressed as Santa—who has a naughty son, and, accordingly, a fitting job for a piece of coal like our hero. Then, just when you think the book is merely a breezy, witty take on bad kids' getting their comeuppance, Snicket takes a sharp turn to a happy and most unexpected ending, which I won't spoil here.

The Lump of Coal, which also features expressive illustrations by Brett Helquist, has been a favorite of mine and my wife's for a few years now, but this Christmas season our three-year-old, Griffin, has taken a strong shine to it as well—an indication that Snicket’s sophisticated humor is by no means beyond the understanding of those just learning to read. Truly, then, a Christmas book for all ages, in the best sense.

[Cover image courtesy of HarperCollins]

New Music: Celtic Christmas

Putumayo's compilations of children's music are such reliable standbys in the genre, so consistently good, that I end up never writing about them. I realize that doesn't sound as if it makes any sense, but it does: It's not because I take them for granted, exactly, but because I have this feeling everyone knows about them already. So in my mind, it's as if I were recommending this really great toy called Legos.

This, however, is not only not fair, it's not true. As I can still recall (when I try) from the days before I began covering kids' entertainment, it's entirely possible in the whirlwind that is being a parent to know about precisely nothing that came out after one's own childhood.

So let me take advantage of the approaching Christmas season to point out Putumayo's latest output, Celtic Christmas, a collection of 11 traditional Yuletide carols in, yes, Celtic renditions that range from peppy and energetic (David Huntsinger's take on "Angels We Have Heard on High") to dreamy and pensive (the French carol "Noel Nouvelet," beautifully performed by the only-seemingly-named-by-Jack-Black group DruidStone; my three-year-old insists on putting this track on repeat every time he hears it). There's even a Gaelic rendition of "White Christmas," aptly enough sung by Lasaidfhíona Ní Chonaola. Like just about every Putumayo kids' collection I've heard, Celtic Christmas is suitably atmospheric—in this case setting the perfect seasonal tone—while also featuring top-notch musicians throughout.

[Cover image courtesy of Putumayo]

New Books: E-mergency

When you talk about letter books, you usually mean ABC books, a genre for very young kids that could probably keep the board-book publishing industry in business all by itself. E-mergency!, however, is a letter book for somewhat older children, with a plot and a lesson beyond the basics of what in the alphabet goes where.

Its premise is that all the letters, from A to Z, live together in a big house. When E trips on the stairs one day and is injured, it's determined that she needs a bit of R&R to recover, so O steps in for her in all her words—with confusing results that will be particularly funny to elementary-school kids with the alphabet firmly under their belts. (Part of the fun—as well as the book's educational point—is that this couldn't have happened to a more important letter, since, as a nifty chart on the book's last page shows, E is by far the most frequently used letter in the English language, as well as many others.)

The book, full of clever wordplay (letter-play?) in multiple asides on every page, is all the more astounding for being the brainchild of 14-year-old Ezra Fields-Meyer, whose was diagnosed with high-functioning autism as a toddler. His short animated video "Alphabet House" (shown below) came to the attention of veteran children's-book illustrator Tom Lichtenheld, who loved the concept and adapted it. The end product does stand out among the work of writers many mulitiples of Fields-Meyer's age—for being better than a good portion of it.





[Cover image courtesy of Chronicle Books]

New Books: Around the World

Graphic novels have gained a great deal of respectability since I was a kid. With the possible exception of Herge's Tintin books—and those had European cred!—back then, the genre was linked more with its cousin, the comic book, than with other children's books. And comic books were distinctly not respectable in a literary sense: Even the brilliant, complex 1980s and '90s work of Neil Gaiman, Frank Miller, and Alan Moore (most of which is by no means for children, I hasten to say) had a bit of a discriminatory hurdle to get over before being taken seriously by the mainstream.

Today, major publishers have full graphic-novel (and even comic-book!) divisions, turning out excellent work for both kids and adults that covers nearly every genre and field. To my delight, there are even nonfiction graphic novels, whose leading practitioner would now have to be Matt Phelan. His latest book, Around the World, tells the story of three amazing, adventurous, and absolutely real 19th-century solo global circumnavigations: Thomas Stevens's 1884 journey via large-wheel bicycle, Nellie Bly's 1889 newspaper-sponsored race to surpass Jules Verne's fictional 80-day achievement, and Joshua Slocum's 1895 small-boat trip.

These are the sorts of stories that have long turned up in nonfiction children's books, and I remember reading about Bly's race against time in one myself as a child—which makes it all the more remarkable that Phelan has turned up the relatively undiscovered of Stevens and Slocum, neither of whose names were the least bit familiar to me. All three stories are remarkable, the kind that feel incredibly improbable for their time (especially Slocum's, which seems downright impossible).

And as he proved in the historical-fiction work The Storm in the Barn, Phelan knows what to do with a good story. His accounts of the three journeys move from panel to panel like a well-edited film, and he has the ability able to capture and denote his protagonists' characteristics with a lightly illustrated expression, much as a great film actor can express an emotion in a glance.

The author is also thoughtful enough to move past the actions of the three adventurers to the question of why each is pursuing his or her goal—a question that goes a long way to establishing character and, not coincidentally, to making Phelan's book a lot more interesting than most children's nonfiction, including the similarly themed books I read as a kid. Maybe it's redundant to call a graphic novel a page-turner, but that's the term that comes to mind when I think about how eagerly my seven-year-old reads it.

[Cover image courtesy of Candlewick Press]

Fids & Kamily Music Awards

I'm a little late to the party, but in case anyone missed it, I wanted to point out the winners of the 2011 Fids & Kamily Music Awards, which were announced back on November 19th. Many of my own favorite albums of the past year made the list. (I'm flattered to be among the voters, so that's not entirely a coincidence—though it's nice to see I'm not alone in my appreciation of Recess Monkey, Frances England, Lunch Money, and the rest!)

Anyway, if you're looking for some good kids' music for year's end—whether you're after the latest from a big name like Dan Zanes or a gem from an artist you didn't know before—this list is an excellent place to start.

New Movies: Hugo

As huge fans of Brian Selznick's book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, our family was very interested in the film version. Its director, Martin Scorsese, seemed a great fit for a story so steeped in the early days of moviemaking, so my usual low expectations for adaptations of beloved books were not quite so tempered. We rushed out to see it the day after Thanksgiving. (The boys, of course, were thrilled beyond belief, as they continue to be every time we actually go to a movie theater. It's one of those lovely things to watch that I know won't last forever, or perhaps even much longer.)

The film version of Hugo Cabret, as its shortened title—just Hugo—might imply, has had its story pared down and streamlined. Lovers of the book should be prepared for less depth, complexity, and just plain time given to its main storyline of a orphaned boy who lives in the walls of a Paris train station between the world wars, continuing his vanished uncle's job of keeping the station's many clocks running, and meanwhile trying to repair a complicated mechanical toy that represents, to him, his deceased father.

The movie zips through most of this—Jude Law, as Hugo's father, and Ray Winstone, as the uncle, have essentially just a scene apiece, though both manage to make remarkably strong impressions—to get to the part that, I imagine, is what drew Scorsese to direct the film: Hugo's interactions with the proprietor of a toy shop in the train station. This man turns out to be Georges Méliès, one of the first great directors of movies that told stories (as opposed to merely capturing true-life events on film).

And while it's fair to say that Hugo, perhaps inevitably, falls a bit short of its source material in terms of its main character's own story, when it comes to the Méliès stuff, it is able to exceed it. What were just images in Selznick's book—a still from Harold Lloyd's classic Safety Last!, as well as many from Méliès' own charmingly trippy films—come to life in the film as the full-blown cinema they are. And we couldn't be in better hands for this kind of thing. Scorsese has always been fond of magically capturing real historical events and references in his films—his re-creation of a famous Jacob Riis photograph in Gangs of New York comes to mind—and in Hugo, with the history of film itself to draw on, his excitement is contagious; when Scorsese portrays the excitement and the energy of Méliès's original shoots, we share in Scorsese's (and Méliès's) delight.

Of course, such excitement requires knowledge of the history itself, which means this aspect of the film—probably its best—is more or less lost on the kids. (Though I think Dash, our seven-year-old, got some of the wonder—Méliès' films are pretty magical, after all, outside of any historical context, or they wouldn't have been as popular as they were in their own time.) Happily, even the cut-down version of Selznick's story is engaging enough to keep most youngsters fully engaged; I’d say any child who’s able to fully process the book should have a great time. (In other words, as we should have realized it would be, the two-hour length was a bit much for our three-year-old.)

A great deal of the credit must be given to the actors, who fill out a screenplay that occasionally feels thin—particularly the two leads. Ben Kingsley is ideal as Méliès, able to convey the emotion of this wounded old man with a glance, and Asa Butterfield is a revelation (at least to those, like me, who didn't see him in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, I guess), capturing Hugo's desperation movingly. We found the rest of the cast equally admirable, mostly in roles that the film has built up significantly from the book, presumably in an attempt to lighten things up a bit. (The lone exception, surprisingly, was the ubiquitous Chloë Moretz in the key role of Méliès's niece, Isabelle, whose performance we found forced and even irritating at times.)

So no, Hugo doesn't deliver all the same joys the book did, falling well short of it in some ways. But it also manages to exceed its source in others, and that makes it a very enjoyable family movie. (I think many adults without young children will even find it so; I’m also very curious to know what those without prior exposure to Selznick's book think of the film.)

One last thing: 3D. Like so many movies these days, Hugo was shot in it. While I can see Scorsese figuring that Georges Méliès himself would have found modern 3D film technology pretty damn cool, I have to say that in the end, I didn't really see the point. The effect is certainly remarkable, a vast improvement on earlier, more primitive attempts at 3D moviemaking. But after the first five or ten minutes of "OK, that's pretty amazing," I found that I alternated between forgetting about it and, worse, finding it a distraction from the story. Maybe it’s yet another sign I’m getting old, but I think I'd opt for the 2D version—in fact, I’m seriously considering going back for a second screening in less-distracting 2D.

[Image © 2011 Paramount Pictures. All rights reserved.]

New Books: A Dog Is a Dog

Picture books for the youngest readers can be many things—beautiful, moving, offbeat. But sometimes children (and their parents, too) are just looking for something, well, silly. Satisfying this common craving is Stephen Shaskan's new A Dog Is a Dog, a series of rhyming couplets illustrated in a pleasantly upbeat faux-retro style.

The book begins as if it's going to be merely about the various canine attributes. Until, that is, we get to the end of the first set of couplets—"A dog is a dog, unless it's...a cat!"—at which point the dog who'd been romping around the previous pages unzips himself to reveal that he's really a cat in a dog suit. (If you keep the premise from them, young kids will find this moment both truly shocking and hilariously funny; they may even need to pause before proceeding.)

From there, of course, we get more sets of couplets followed by more costume unzippings, which my little ones met with mounting hysteria. I won't give away the full menagerie here, but suffice it to say that a squid is involved at one point, before Shaskan neatly wraps things up by bringing back where we started. There's nothing terribly deep going on in A Dog Is a Dog—it's just very successful at being very silly indeed, in a novel way. And when that's what you and your kids are after, there's nothing more you could need from a picture book.

[Photo: Whitney Webster]