New Books: Get Dressed

Illustrator Seymour Chwast is renowned for his long career of, well, illustrious commercial design work. Chwast's style, once you've seen it, is instantly recognizable, both for its cultured-cartoon look and for its ever-present twinkle of humor (often dark humor, since he never shrank from topical subject matter).

So it's not surprising that a picture book by Chwast would be smart and pretty much irresistible—but just to be absolutely sure, he gave Get Dressed! flaps, too! It's a simple book for the very youngest readers—minimal text, lots of manipulation and variety of illustrations—addressing the command in the title in various situations and various times of day. In each situation, Chwast lays out all the options, presenting the reader with a sort of virtual walk-in closet, each item labeled Richard Scarry–style.

Young kids will adore Get Dressed!, and like all of Chwast's work, it'll tend to bring a smile of admiration to parents' faces as well.

[Cover image courtesy of Abrams Appleseed]

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New Books: Hippopposites

Griffin, our three-year-old, is having a little trouble with opposites; he transposes them. On a cold night, when he wants another blanket, he'll say, "I'm so hot! I need to cool down." And now that spring is here and he doesn't need so many blankets, he'll push them off, complaining that he's cold. It's not just temperature, either--high and low, up and down—you name the pair of opposites, and he consistently switches 'em.

To the rescue comes Hippopposites, a new board book by Janik Coat in which an iconographic  hippopotamus goes through variations illustrating opposites of all sorts, from the simple (small and large, thick and thin) to the more ambitious (opaque and transparent—for which even our seven-year-old poked his head in for an explanation). Like most themed board books, it's simple in aim and execution, but it covers a remarkably wide range of examples, even moving beyond the strictly visual to the tactile (soft and rough).

The mod, colorful hippo icon makes it a quick favorite with the three-year-old set. While I don't know if it will put an end Griff's transpositions, it can't hurt, and in the meantime he's certainly having a lot of fun.

Plus, the book's title put me in mind of this Flight of the Conchords classic, always a bonus. (And while this song isn't, in fact, for kids, I never need much excuse to embed a video. If I did, I'd just reference Bret McKenzie's Oscar-winning song in The Muppets and the use of the Conchords' hysterical "I'm Not Crying" in the currently playing The Pirates: Band of Misfits—more about which soon....)



[Cover image courtesy of Abrams Books for Young Readers]

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 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]

Old School: Richard Scarry

As parents we tend, when looking back at classic children's books, to concentrate on the ones we loved ourselves, rejoicing in the chance to revisit them with our own kids. Or sometimes it's the undiscovered gems we somehow missed back then but got a second, parental shot at. But there's a third category: the books we knew but didn't care for that much—but now gain the favor of our children.

Which brings me to Richard Scarry. I don't recall having much of his massive oeuvre myself when I was a toddler; I think I encountered his books mostly at friends' and relatives' houses. I was more puzzled than engaged by them; it may be that I didn’t discover their existence until I was a little past the fairly young age level most of them are for. As an only child determined to impress my parents with my reading ability by any means necessary, I'd have tackled Dostoyevsky without blinking despite a nearly complete lack of understanding—and as such, I was self-important enough at four to find Scarry's serious-faced cats and dogs a little silly.

That was unfair, of course, in a very four-year-old sort of way. My son Dash, now six, received Richard Scarry's Biggest Word Book Ever! as a gift some years back, and spent a good deal of the following year with it. This book—at two feet high, as tall as most toddlers reading it—is not one you “read,” exactly; there's no narrative, and it consists mainly of a town full of those dedicated Scarry animals going about their lives in the rather Dutch-looking Busytown. Each spread is devoted to a general theme—construction and building, say, or transportation (all subjects dear to a young boy’s heart), and identifies every item or person briefly. (There are a few throughlines from spread to spread, such as the misadventures of Mr. Frumble, a pig who should definitely have his driver's license revoked.)

And finally, from my adult perspective, I can see what Scarry was up to. Recently two-year-old Griffin has discovered the book, and he treats it almost like a big life-reference manual: There's the fire engine, and that's what their tools are called and what they do with them. That kind of boat is called a tugboat, and that other one is a ferry, and this is what they each do. (Scarry does like to toss some wild cards into the mix, but hopefully Griff won't be too disappointed not to ever see any bananamobiles in real life.)

Griff loves it, and I can see that he's learning from it, just as Dash did. Clearly, my four-year-old self didn't know what he was missing.

[Cover image courtesy of Random House]

Security Blanket: Charlie Parker Played Be Bop

I have to admit it: I’m favoring my eldest. At least, in terms of writing about (and, OK, thinking about) his books and DVDs and such. While five-year-old Dash’s horizons are expanding and exploding, 21-month-old Griffin is still in the board-book phase. Worse still, Griff also suffers from the usual second-child “been there, done that” syndrome: Most of his current books are hand-me downs from Dash. Let’s just say I’m having a tough time summoning the proper tone of wonder for “Goodnight nobody” these days.

Happily, there are exceptions. Most are long-established classics that just never get old, the Sendaks and such. But we’re fortunate that Griff’s absolute favorite book, the one he asks for every single night, happens to...well, also never get old: the board-book version of Chris Raschka’s Charlie Parker Played Be Bop.

We first discovered the wonders of this book (originally written in 1992) when Dash was about this age, and a quick troll of the Internet shows we were by no means alone. It’s wonderfully nonlinear, managing to capture the feel of jazz in its illustrations and the pacing of its minimal text. Raschka plays off real words and context-less phrases against scat sounds in a fashion that wouldn’t feel out of place in actual jazz vocals, and the effect is marvelous: “Be-bop/Fisk, fisk/Lollipop/Boomba, boomba/Bus stop/Znnn Znnn/Boppity, bippity, bop. Bang!” (All right, I suppose it’s a little more marvelous next to Raschka’s suitably fuzzy drawings.)

Charlie Parker Played Be Bop essentially forces parents to perform it—the book doesn’t work nearly as well when read “straight.” I’m among those awkward souls for whom even this minimal level of performance doesn’t come naturally, and I often find myself resenting children’s books that require it. But Raschka makes it all so organic that I never resisted; in short order, Whitney and I had created our own sung version of the book, one that’s survived through all our readings with Dash into Griff’s current obsession with it.

This is another of the book’s charms: As with so many children’s classics (the wordless “wild rumpus” pages of Where the Wild Things Are come to mind), every family can have its own unique interpretation. Ours begins with a little hi-hat riff, which Griff (who still has only a few real words at this point) now uses to indicate he wants us to read this book. And I’m sure it’s largely because he’s my toddler, but there’s something especially radiant about a beaming toddler doing a hi-hat riff: “Tssss ts-ts tssss ts-ts tssss...”

I’m sometimes surprised even now that we never tire of Charlie Parker, given how relentlessly Griff requires us to read it (and how relentlessly Dash did for years before him). It’s hard to put my finger on exactly why. But I think it’s that Raschka didn’t write a children’s book about Charlie Parker; he wrote a jazz book for kids, a fact as remarkable as it sounds. It’s a delight to read, and by all appearances a delight to listen to.

[Photo: Courtesy of Orchard Books.]