New Books: Ribbit Rabbit

I find that picture books generally have you at hello or they don't. For the most part, you can tell at a glance when you have a standout on your hands, whether it's the transcendent art or the clever concept. Since authors have to get that appeal across to young kids' barely-there attention spans, it's usually right out front, impossible to miss.

But there are exceptions, the books whose brilliance parents may not fully realize until they see them in action with their children. Such a book is Ribbit Rabbit, which at first glance looks like nothing more than a modestly charming addition to the "sharing is good" subgenre. It's about a frog and a rabbit (naturally), two best friends who do everything together. Understandably, now and then they have some disagreements over sharing toys and such, but in the end they value the friendship too much not to make up and solve the problems. And that's it, really: a sweet little tale, accompanied by Mike Lowery's ebullient, childlike-in-a-good-way illustrations.

But it wasn't until I read the book with our two-year-old that I saw what author Candace Ryan is really up to. She punctuates each sentence of her simple story with a linguistic twist on the title: "Dip it, dab it" when the friends are playing together in a pool, "nip it, nab it" when they start their fight over a treasured toy robot, and so on. And while that may seem merely cute to an adult, turns out it's right in the wheelhouse of kids in the process of picking up language. The rhyming wordplay of Ribbit Rabbit delights Griffin as no other picture book of this kind has; he took to it immediately and intensely, and it continues to make him laugh many multiple reads later. In fact, it's among the first books he's ever sought out to read by himself—and what higher praise is there than that?

[Image courtesy of Walker Books]

New Books: Where's Walrus?

 
Yes, once again I'm a sucker for a wordless picture book. And as usual, it's not just the sheer beauty of the art I'm enamored of—though the retro-style illustrations by its author, graphic designer Stephen Savage, are plenty appealing—but also the whimsy and the charming execution of its concept.

The title nod to Waldo notwithstanding, Where's Walrus? isn't a true visual-puzzle book, which will probably be a relief to the young toddlers that are its audience. (Nor, as far as I can tell, is it an Alan Parsons Project reference.) It's really part of the crafty-animal-escapes genre to which classics like Good Night, Gorilla and even Curious George belong. And its plot is disarmingly simple: A walrus takes a powder from the zoo, and a mustachioed zookeeper then chases him around as he blends in with a series of absurd city scenes, including a lunch counter out of a Hopper painting, a line of can-can dancers, and a row of shop-window mannequins.

It's all pretty silly—Walrus is in ridiculously plain sight on every spread—but that's precisely what will delight young readers. Our two-year-old is pleased as punch to have it both ways, triumphant that he can quickly answer the title question with every turn of the page--there he is, right there!—yet also giggling more and more with each one of those turns. I dare say parents won't be able to resist a smile now and then themselves.

[Images courtesy of Scholastic]

2010 Wrap: Books, Part 5

 

  

The last of my trends relating to books I encountered last year builds on a discovery from my Cookie magazine years: Australian author Martine Murray's Henrietta: There's No One Better. (Say it with an Australian accent and it rhymes!) In a first-person-narrated stream of consciousness without any real plot, Murray crystalizes perfectly the energy, the randomly logical thought patterns, of a certain type of preschool girl we've all run across. Her accompanying illustrations, best described as "childlike with attitude," are equally spot-on. Often laugh-out-loud funny, with dazzling wordplay that always remains true to its protagonist's age and personality, the book remains among the best I've seen at capturing the essence of a child's character. (It shares something with Lauren Child's Charlie & Lola and Clarice Bean series in this regard.)

So I was thrilled to see two sequels from Murray arriving on these shores last year. And while the surprise factor—just at the author's amazing ability to pull this voice off so well—may be a thing of the past, both Henrietta the Great Go-Getter and Henrietta Gets a Letter are otherwise as delightful as the original, giving readers craving more of Henrietta exactly that.

Now, while I did notice that Henrietta shares certain of the more effusive, enthusiastic aspects of her personality with my Australian friends (there's one in particular I'm thinking of; she probably knows who she is on the off chance she's reading this), I had not at first thought of the qualities that set Murray's books apart as quintessentially Australian. Until, that is, a bit later last year, when I ran across Chris McKimmie's Two Peas in a Pod, on the surface a very different book from the Henrietta ones. For one thing, it has a plot—it's an entry in the classic "best friend moves away" genre. But it features an undeniably similar energy, and it likewise captures the mindset and point of view of a child marvelously through McKimmie's writing and vivid, expressive, often page-packing illustrations.

Combine this revelation with my previously expressed regard for Australian illustrators like Sophie Blackall and Freya Blackwood (whose lovely Half a World Away even covers the same subject as McKimmie's book; I guess friends' moving far away is a particularly common issue for Australian kids?), and I'm fully expecting a full-scale Australian invasion in kid lit any day now.

And that does it for my meandering path through my favorite new kids' books of 2010!

[Images: Courtesy of Independent Publishers Group]

New Books: Lots of Dots

With the latest book he’s chosen to obsess about at bedtime, our two-year-old, Griffin, seems to have an eye for design. In Lots of Dots, graphic designer Craig Frazier uses a vivid pop-art style to explore all the different dots, circles, and spheres we encounter in everyday life, from little ladybugs to skateboard wheels to scoops of ice cream to bubbles. It’s a common theme in picture books for young kids, but Frazier puts his own individual stamp on it, making each bright circle seem to jump out from the page.

And it may be because it’s fitting perfectly into his current developmental stage—as an all-too-typical dad of a second child, I haven’t stayed quite as on top of that stuff lately, so I’m not certain—but Griff was captured by Frazier’s illustrations right away. He returns to the book again and again, pointing at the dots on each page as we go through. He’s even initiated a little game on the last spread (on which Frazier has given us a collection of all the dots we’ve just seen in the book), pointing to each item in turn and asking, “What’s that?” with a little smile—because by now, he really knows all the answers perfectly well.

That, to me, is the sign of a really good basic-genre picture book—it does the same thing many others do, but in a way that’s magically irresistible to your child. Lots of Dots most certainly qualifies.

[Photos: Whitney Webster]

Security Blanket: Jumpy Jack & Googily

Many picture books are what I call “concept” books, in which the author spins a tale around a specific childhood issue—say, anger over a sense of powerlessness (Where the Wild Things Are, and many others), or the anxiety of the first day of school (The Teacher From the Black Lagoon…and many others). The very best ones use the concept as an imaginative jumping-off point, successfully treating their subjects without harping on them too much.

Well, allow me to nominate a newish classic in the well-established “monsters under the bed” category: Jumpy Jack & Googily, written by Meg Rosoff and illustrated by the marvelous Sophie Blackall. (I clearly have a thing for illustrators who come from Australia.) Jumpy Jack is a snail, and his name suits him—he’s a nervous type, constantly worried that fearsome things may be lurking behind and under such ominous things as doors, tables, and beds.

But Jack doesn’t freak out about his fears—he simply asks his best friend, an agreeable large, pointy-toothed fellow named Googily, to investigate these potentially dangerous places for him and reassure him his worries are unwarranted. When Googily inevitably responds that his friend is very silly to worry about these things, Jack sheepishly agrees, but says he’ll feel better if Googily checks them out anyway. And he’s right; it works every time ("Phew!"), despite the reader’s growing realization that the monster Jack describes as the object of his terror has a close resemblance to Googily himself. (This sounds like it might lead to a scary moment of realization for poor Jack, but the ending goes in a different direction, turning the tables by revealing what Googily is afraid of.)

Rosoff’s clever path through each iteration is truly endearing, mainly due to the polite respect the two friends have for each other; in just a few pages, she establishes a fully fleshed-out relationship reminiscent of classic children’s-book pairs like Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad. (Googily: “That is simply too far-fetched.” Jack: “No doubt.... Still, if you would only check, I’m sure I would sleep better.”) And Blackall’s beautiful, eccentric art matches the text’s kindly whimsical tone precisely—this is the kind of picture book where you’re surprised to find that the author and illustrator are not the same person.

Upon arrival in our home, Jumpy Jack & Googily immediately joined the short list of Dash’s very favorite picture books, and it’s also among those that Whitney and I love to read aloud to him—the voices of the characters are so strong, and the light humor makes it so much fun to read. I would place it among our favorite five or six books that have been published during our kids’ lifetimes. (Hmm…I feel a future list post coming on....) In fact, I’m earnestly hoping our two-year-old soon likes it just as much as Dash did, so we get to read it regularly for years to come!

[Photos: Whitney Webster]

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]

Security Blanket: Music Over Manhattan

Some of my friends call them “loveys”—the especially beloved items that can calm young children when nothing else can. Traditionally, they’re stuffed animals of one kind or another—those endearingly well-worn ones whose dilapidation is almost unbearably cute to all parents. (We know what it signifies, after all.)

Dash, our five-year-old, had (and even still has) traditional loveys, of course, but back in the day, the go-to was a picture book. It was one of his first books, actually, a gift from my sister-in-law: Music Over Manhattan, by Mark Karlins, with illustrations by Jack E. Davis. This was the book he insisted we read him at bedtime when he’d had a particularly rough day, or perhaps a particularly great one he wanted to cap off well, even before he could use real words to do so.

It’s about a Brooklyn kid, Bernie, who feels he can’t do anything right, and certainly not as well as his irritatingly perfect cousin Herbert. But he’s taken under the wing of his Uncle Louis, a professional musician who plays Bernie’s favorite song, “Moonlight Over Manhattan,” so beautifully that the music lifts people into the air. Louis sees talent in Bernie, and over time teaches him to play the trumpet, and before a family wedding he’s playing for, he asks Bernie to fill in for a sick trumpeter—including the solo on the magical song. Bernie is nervous, but in the end, he doesn’t disappoint.

It’s a charming little book, and Davis’s exaggerated style of illustration fits the modern New York caricatures in the tale wonderfully. But the story itself can’t have been much of a touchstone for an 18-month-old who didn’t really have perfect cousins or peers to be frustrated by. It seems to be that magical idea of music making people actually lift off the ground and fly that captured Dash’s imagination early.

That concept has lasted, too—while he’s since moved on to other reading favorites, he still pulls out Music Over Manhattan from time to time for a look. The other day, I noticed him reading it to his little brother, who’s just a little older now than he was when he first fell in love with it. Two-time lovey, perhaps?

[Photos by Whitney Webster]

Old School: Alice in Wonderland

I think I must have read Lewis Carroll’s classics at some point in my early childhood, but I honestly don’t remember doing so. In many ways, I feel like my knowledge of them is more piecemeal, picked up from the many references to them in other literature and art. So I never really expected Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass to become major players in bedtime reading with my kids.

But my five-year-old, Dash, saw some of those amazing original John Tenniel illustrations from the book on some wallpaper or something, and took to them immediately. (I think it was the Cheshire cat that initially drew him in.) That led to our picking up a copy, and eventually the book made its way to his nightstand.

And he loves it. The delightfully light tone; the surreal...well, lack of plot; the offbeat characters—all of it’s very much his cup of tea. (Sorry.) He enjoys the way the narrative just abruptly breaks off into a random, probably nonsensical poem from time to time. Some of the puns and wordplay are a little over his head right now, but there’s not enough of that to bother him. Having recently also seen the old Disney adaptation of the story, Dash has gone back to the original and is having a lot of fun seeing what was changed for the movie and what was not.

It’s also been an education to me, since my memories of the book were so hazy; seeing it through Dash’s eyes as we read it together has been a great experience. I’ve had two separate revelations. First, just how very weird these books are! I’d forgotten how boldly Carroll takes the story every which way he pleases, disregarding tropes of linear narrative and story structure entirely when he wants to. It’s still a breath of fresh air, frankly, even all these years after it was written.

Second—and this shouldn’t really have been a revelation, since there had to be a reason his books have been so beloved for so long—I was taken aback by, simply, how well-written these stories are. In what must be no surprise to many parents who were more familiar with Carroll than I’d been, they are truly a great pleasure to read. I’m really glad Dash saw the Cheshire cat on that wallpaper.

As a side note, another nice thing about Carroll’s work, for the busy and/or vacationing parent, is that it’s  completely out of copyright. In practical terms, this means you can download a copy onto your laptop or phone right now for free, or pay less than the cost of one printed book to get a more aesthetically pleasing version of the text of this book (with many other classics) for your iPhone.

[Image: Public domain, from Wikimedia Commons.]

Reading Comprehension: My Two-Year-Old's Yogi Berra Fetish

Normally, when I write about a favorite book of one of my sons, it’s a children’s book—perhaps a picture book, perhaps a chapter book, perhaps a classic that even has adult appeal, but definitely a children’s book. Casting my mind back, I can think of a few temporary picks of theirs that you couldn’t honestly describe with that term, but those were almost always image-heavy coffee-table books, generally science- and/or art-oriented.

But recently, Griffin, my almost-two-year-old, has developed a fascination with a sports autobiography—a 200-page hardcover with very few photographs. I suppose the fact that it’s Yogi Berra’s autobiography could theoretically be part of the explanation—the man is pretty irresistible as sports legends go—but while my Yankee fandom does run pretty deep, I have not, I swear, been coaching my toddler on the names behind all those retired numbers (yet). I’m fairly certain Griff cannot have any real idea who Yogi is.

So when he first plucked the book off my bookshelf, I figured it was just one of those random things: He liked the yellow on the cover, maybe. Or the admittedly winning vintage photo of Yogi there. I figured he’d leaf through it a bit, discover nothing but pages and pages of words, and move on.

He didn’t. He insisted, in fact, on taking it upstairs to join his bedtime reading pile, the rest of which is made up of more usual fare for his age: In the Night Kitchen, a Charlie & Lola book, Mama, Is It Summer Yet?. And, yes, he insists on having it read to him—not much, just a page or so a night before moving to one of the other books, but it’s become part of the ritual. He doesn’t have the attention span for much more than that, even assuming he’s truly interested in the childhood of Lawrence Peter Berra in St. Louis. But he also keeps coming back to the book again and again, and we’ve now made it in this page-by-page fashion through the minor leagues and Yogi’s World War II service to his first games with the Yankees.

About a week ago, Griff hadn’t asked to be read to from the Yogi book for a while. I figured perhaps this mystery had run its course, and brought it back downstairs and reshelved it on my bookshelf, in a slightly different place from where it had been before. The next day, it was out on the floor of the family room with Griffin’s other books. No other books from my shelf were there, or even on the floor next to it; he had gone looking for it, found it, and reappropriated it.

Somehow, I remain unconvinced that the life and times of a professional baseball player who retired a half-century ago can be this compelling to someone who’s not two years old yet. I’m sure Griff will have lost all memory of the Berra book by the time I can really ask him to explain, and will just give me one of those blank looks you get from kids when you talk about their first years. But you can bet I’m going to ask anyway, just in case.  

[Photograph by R at the English language Wikipedia, via Wikimedia Commons.]