New Books: Earth to Clunk

There are only a handful of picture-book authors who are capable of making me laugh out loud as I'm reading their work to my sons. Lane Smith comes to mind, as does Mini Grey. And after Earth to Clunk, I'll have to add Pam Smallcomb to the list, mainly thanks to the spread pictured here.

Of course, that would be meaningless if the kids didn't cotton to the book, but that's certainly no problem here. It’s about a boy forced by his teacher to become pen pals with an alien (one of those wild premises from which everything else follows logically); annoyed, he decides to end the relationship with Clunk by sending him unpleasant gifts, from dirty socks to...his big sister. However, Clunk proves well-prepared to respond in kind, escalating the "battle" of weirdly aggressive exchanges until our hero must admit it's kind of fun. There still is the issue of Mom having noticed his sister is missing, though...

The simple story—really a lesson in not prejudging people and situations—is told in a most entertaining fashion by Smallcomb, aided by Joe Berger's appealing illustrations. (In fact, my six-year-old was inspired to re-enact the entire narrative upon finishing it, high praise indeed.) And the boy’s perfectly dry, matter-of-fact tone as he plots his next swap with Clunk, then tries to process whatever disturbing thing he's gotten in return, will have parents smiling—and, yes, laughing—along with the kids. Earth to Clunk is nothing fancy; it's just everything a charming picture book should be.

[Cover image courtesy of Dial Press. Interior photo: Whitney Webster]

2010 Wrap: DVDs

I'll get back to my final toys wrap-up post shortly, but I'm going to insert my video-of-the-year post first. It's not precisely the best movie or video we saw in 2010—that'd be Toy Story 3, predictably enough—but I figure few parents need me to tell them about movies they've probably seen already, and certainly have had ample chance to read reviews of. So other than to say we also liked How to Train Your Dragon quite a bit more than we expected to, I'll leave the big studio DVD releases alone.

Likewise, you know what TV shows your kids like best, and thus what TV-show collections you might want to own on DVD. (And these days, with DVRs and Netflix on-demand and 24-hour programming on Nick Jr. and the Disney Channel, who really needs DVDs of TV shows anyway?)

But there is one category of DVD that isn't as well advertised, or as much talked about, as Pixar movies and PBS Kids shows: the Scholastic Storybook Treasures DVDs. (For those unfamiliar, these are simply-animated versions of picture-book classics old and new, by everyone from Sendak to Willems.) I've sung the collection's praises before in this space—honestly, it's been our main video go-to for years now.

And our favorite of this year’s new releases in the series would have to be The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs!, from Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith's typically clever twist on the original tale. (If you don't know the wonderful book, it's narrated by "Alexander T. Wolf," who attempts to explain how his devastation of the first two pigs' homes and his attacks on the lives of all three were all just a big misunderstanding.) In the animated version—the art, as always in these videos, taken directly from the original illustrations—Paul Giamatti has a great time doing the voice of the seemingly earnest wolf. Our family enjoyed it an awful lot ourselves; it's one of those DVDs where you find yourself sneaking into the room to watch with your kids even when you were supposed to be, I don't know, making dinner or something. Giamatti's performance is irresistible.

Also as usual with these DVDs, the lead story is packaged with a bunch from the Scholastic Storybook back catalog with loosely similar themes. (Wallace's Lists, adapted from a book I didn't know and narrated nicely by Zach Braff, has also been popular with the boys.)

[Image courtesy of Scholastic Storybook Treasures]

2010 Wrap: Books, Part 1

I wrote about most of my favorite kids' books of 2010 in individual posts during the year, of course, and especially in this category, a true "best of" list would for the most part just echo those posts directly. So instead, I'm going to mention some of the trends I saw during the year in my and my kids' reading, which will allow me to give nods to both books I've covered in the blog and ones I've missed or not gotten around to yet.

And since I haven't been posting nearly as often as I'd like of late, and this post will probably get long enough that writing it will put things off another few days otherwise, I'm also going to break it up into multiple posts.

So, first off: As has been common in recent years, many of the most brilliant and revelatory picture books of the year were either nearly or entirely wordless. In some cases, the focus on image and imagination was the explicit point (David Wiesner's Art & Max, Suzy Lee's Shadow); in others, it was just a remarkably effective way of telling the story (Elisha Cooper's Beaver Is Lost and even his somewhat wordier Farm; Bill Thomson's Chalk; Lane Smith's It's a Book). All of them demonstrate one of the lessons Pixar—and Charlie Chaplin, for that matter—have been teaching creators of kids' entertainment for years now: Sometimes, a great idea told entirely through images is the best storytelling there is.

Tomorrow: What Rick Riordan hath wrought.

[Images courtesy of Chronicle Books (Shadow) and Macmillan (It's a Book)]

Security Blanket: Lane Smith

This post is basically an appreciation, since I suspect not too many parents these days are unaware of the Lane Smith oeuvre. Even I, trying desperately before we had kids to remain as ignorant as possible about them, had heard about The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, illustrator Smith's and writer Jon Scieszka's groundbreaking deconstruction of classic fairy tales. I also knew Smith's work from another of his collaborations, this one with George Saunders: the irresistibly wonderful The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, the incredible art for which (see the example here) managed to attracted my wife's attention and interest years before children were in the picture.

So as we embarked on parenthood, we already had more than an inkling that we'd have a family favorite here. But adult appreciation is one thing; bedtime reading quite another. With our first round of Dash's board books, we quickly learned that tedium was a serious threat, first tows, and eventually even to Dash.

Like many parents before us, we turned to the classics to solve this problem—Seuss, Sendak, Silverstein. (They didn't all start with s, I'm certain, but those were the first three names that came to mind. And Smith does too! Freaky.) Before long, we turned to Lane Smith, too, especially since Dash also took to his smart, offbeat humor right away. (Genes or environment? You decide.) Frip was a little wordy for him back then, so we started with Stinky Cheese Man, as well as a Smith solo effort we like even more, if that's possible: Pinocchio, the Boy: Incognito in Collodi. He grounds his version of the classic in his usual wisecracking, modern sensibility, in this case via a little girl who notices all the strange things this poor boy is doing (trying to talk to a cricket, going to dance on a marionette stage). Yet the story still retains the charm and even the beauty of the original.

The super-clever humor would be enough to make an illustrator great, but there's a lot more to Smith as well. He's an imaginative master, both in the structures he devises to tell stories (a storyboard-style spread in the Pinocchio book to get the reader up to speed at the start, for instance) and in his amazingly atmospheric, one-of-a-kind art itself. (The word collage always comes to mind, and then immediately seems insufficient.) There's no question in my mind that familiarity with Smith's books has broadened Dash's view of the ways one can approach storytelling. Heck, they've certainly broadened mine.

We've since made our way through several more of his books, with his typically irreverent take on the history of the American Revolution, John, Paul, George, & Ben, a particular favorite of Dash's. (The title refers to Hancock, Revere, Washington, and Franklin, and Smith's angle is that the very characteristics that made each man a bit annoying as a child—Revere's penchant for yelling, say—ended up serving American history quite well.) And to this day, I'm never more pleased, or more eager to get started, at bedtime reading than when Dash chooses a Lane Smith book. Which, happily, he does quite often.

[Photos: Whitney Webster]