New(ish) Books: Wolf Story

You'd think that at some point the New York Review Children's Collection would just run out of obscure, unknown and out-of-print kid lit that's astonishingly brilliant to reissue. But they don't. It's really a testament to both their editorial and archival skills, as well as to the vast amount of great forgotten work out there to be found and reissued for our benefit.

The latest from NYRCC might be my personal favorite of their entire canon: Wolf Story, from 1947, by William McCleery, who was a reporter, a magazine editor, and a playwright. (It also contains excellent illustrations by Warren Chappell.) It's part of—maybe even a forerunner of?—what is now a burgeoning "meta" kid-book genre, i.e., the story that makes the telling of the story part of the story, with The Princess Bride as a good example.

Here, the focus is completely flipped, so that we're mostly in the "real" world of the father who's telling the story of the book's title and his six-year-old son, Michael. (Michael's best friend, Stefan, also makes an appearance.) That story itself—about a wolf trying to steal (and, naturally, eat) a farmer's prize chicken, only to be foiled by the brave, smart, and coincidentally six-year-old son of the farmer—is really less plot than background.

Because what McCleery is really doing is describing the affectionate, sometimes frustrating, often hilarious negotiations that go on between parent and child in the storytelling process. And I've never seen an author capture it better—from the early demands, and attempts at parental resistance to those demands (the father desperately wishes to avoid yet another story about a wolf, but Michael relentlessly drives him to adapt the tale so that his favorite fearsome creature will be included), to the shared joy between parent and child of continuing and finishing a story that's become a collaboration.

Kids of the boy's age and a little older are likely to find the storytelling-about-storytelling aspect fascinating (even if it's no longer as novel as it probably was in 1947). And parents will find plenty to smile sentimentally about in the accurate depictions of how we get wrapped around our kids' fingers in such situations.

But even better, both kids and especially parents will also find plenty to laugh about, thanks to McCleery's dry, charming writing style. The father—one of those dads who seems to speak to children as he does to adults, with no condescension—is both aware of and constantly bemused by his son's fierce knowledge of exactly what he wants from his story (one gets the sense that Dad also knows resistance is ultimately futile). His matter-of-fact way of establishing guidelines for the wolf tale (or trying to, anyway) is both appealing and very funny:

And the man continued: "Once upon a time there was a hen. She was called Rainbow because her feathers were of many different colors: red and pink and purple and lavender and magenta—" The boy yawned. "—and violet and yellow and orange."

"That will be enough colors," said the boy.

"And green and dark green and light green..."

 "Daddy! Stop!" cried the boy. "Stop saying so many colors. You're putting me to sleep."

"Why not?" said the man. "This is bedtime."

"But I want some story first!" said the boy. "Not just colors."

"All right, all right," said the man. "Well, Rainbow lived with many other hens in a house on a farm at the edge of a deep dark forest and in the deep dark forest lived a guess what."

"A wolf," said the boy, sitting up in bed.

"No, sir!" cried the man.

"Make it that a wolf lived in the deep dark forest," said the boy.

"Please," said the man. "Anything but a wolf. A weasel, a ferret, a lion, and elephant."

 "A wolf," said the boy.

Isn't that just frighteningly familiar and on-the-nose?

There's one more reason I found Wolf Story particularly thrilling, though, and it's one that I have to admit has little to do with any appeal to young kids. The father tells his tale in episodic fashion, mostly (after this initial bedtime scene) during a series of weekend outings with the two boys. Since the family live in downtown Manhattan, we therefore get a wonderful, personal, day-to-day view of what a dad would do with two young boys in New York City in 1947. (The whole thing is clearly pretty autobiographical—the book is even dedicated to McCreery's son, Mike!) The field trips include Fort Tryon Park, as well as Jones Beach for some autumn kite-flying (via the FDR Drive and the Triborough Bridge, oddly enough—I guess McCreery didn't like tunnels?). To someone who grew up in the city like me, this glimpse of your basic weekend jaunt of an earlier era is irresistible.

All of which is to say that, while Wolf Story works marvelously as a book to read with children, as intended—the meta magic works for them just fine—it's as much or perhaps even more a book that will delight parents, making us laugh and smile and marvel, especially those of us with attachment to New York City.

In other words, in the long run, this book is likely to end up not on my son's bookshelf, but on mine. I admit it. And I'm so pleased—and grateful to the NYRCC—to have discovered it.

[Cover image courtesy of the New York Review Children's Collection]

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New Books: The High-Skies Adventures of Blue Jay the Pirate

Sometimes I find myself wondering what it must have been like to read a true classic—kids' or adults' variety—right as it first came out, when no one knew, for sure, that it was a classic yet. When parents and kids cracked the binding on the first copies of Where the Wild Things Are back in 1963, or Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in 1998 (okay, okay, Philosopher's Stone in 1997 in the U.K., I know), was there a dawning awareness that this was something special, not just for that year's crop of books, but for a long, long time to come—forever, really?

I think there must have been, because I recently had that feeling myself upon reading The High-Skies Adventures of Blue Jay the Pirate, a new book by Scott Nash, with my elder son. It's a pirate book, with our protagonist, Blue Jay, a good pirate captain—but the twist is, all of the pirates (and indeed, most of the book's characters) are birds, and their ship, the Grosbeak, rides not the high seas, but the winds and currents of the air.

And Nash—whose background before he got into children's books was in design and branding, including the original Nickelodeon logo—is one of those authors with the talent and imagination to create his own expansive, fully thought-out fictional universe. So the birds of Blue Jay's crew are each different types of birds, each with characteristics and abilities appropriate to its species: the hulking Chuck-Will's-Widow, for example, is one of the burly heavies of the crew, while Junco, small but fierce and scrappy, makes herself useful as the ship's navigator, and so on.

As I mentioned, Blue Jay and his crew are "good" pirates, chaotic and antiauthoritarian to be sure (the empire of the distant, unseen Thrushians is referred to as an authority of which they're particularly unfond), but essentially Robin Hood types. Their adventure begins when the captain himself decides they should rescue a particularly colorful egg from a raccoon—Blue Jay is fond of bright eggs—which eventually hatches to reveal a gosling, Gabriel.

Most of the crew is not pleased—Gabriel consumes far more food than any of the other birds, and everyone knows he'll soon grow far too large even to remain on the ship—but Jay insists that he's good luck and must remain. Which sets into motion a sequence of events that include the "sinking" of the Grosbeak; its crew's falling into the hands of a gang of, well, bad pirates led by Jay's cousin, a crow named Teach; and our heroes' taking refuge in a village of lowly sparrows (the peasants of this bird society), whom they rally to rebel against their common crow oppressors, with help from a friendly neighbor mole.

The book's characters and its language—particularly the marvelously colorful dialogue, which is grounded in classic pirate-y saltiness yet also has a bird-specific panache of its own (e.g., Jay's favorite expletive: "Crayee!")—draw the reader in from the first page, and the story flows along at just the right pace to make the book something of a page-turner. Nash's own illustrations, which resemble woodcuts, do what the best chapter-book illustrations always accomplish, filling out the characters even further, and making readers feel we really know them. In the illustrations, Jay and Teach and Gabriel come fully to life, much as Chester Cricket, Tucker Mouse, and Harry Cat will always be those Garth Williams drawings.

But it's really the whole world Nash has created that makes The High-Skies Adventures of Blue Jay the Pirate irresistible from the get-go. You get the feeling throughout that you're in good hands with this author—that he's imagined and invented a whole world of bird pirates here, well beyond the frame of this particular book and story. (And while I don't know Nash's intentions, it certainly feels like the opening book in a series—for one thing, we need to find out more about those Thrushians!) It's that, more than anything, that gives Nash's book the imprimatur of an instant classic. We loved it, and hope for a sequel soon.

[Cover image courtesy of Candlewick Press]

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New Books: Super Grammar

Okay, before I start, full disclosure: I make my living largely as a copy editor. And I've occasionally been accused by certain close friends and family members of being a bit, shall we say, overzealous when it comes to enforcing proper grammar. (I will spare you my thoughts on gerunds here, however. You're grateful, trust me.)

That said, even my wife—who may or may not be one of the family members mentioned above—has been disturbed at the rumors that English grammar is no longer taught in any structured manner in many or most grade schools. Our oldest is only in second grade this year, which as far as I can recall would be kinda early for discussions of dangling participles anyway, so I'm not really sure how true that rumor is. (The limited investigation I've done leads me to think there's at least something to it.)

Either way, given that Dash is a fairly advanced reader for his age, and given my profession, I had been vaguely wishing there might be a way of giving him an understanding of the basic building blocks of sentence structure and the like. Ideally, one that didn't involve my teaching him on weekends out of old, dry grammar textbooks from the 1980s. (That would not go well, I fear.)

So when I first laid eyes on Tony Preciado and Rhode Montijo's Super Grammar, a comic-book approach to basic grammar, I had high hopes. Which I then immediately tempered. After all, most attempts at making potentially dull subjects "fun," I have found, fail by leaning too far one way or the other: They're either so concerned with getting the educational points across that they aren't much fun at all, or they're lots of fun...without any real educational takeaway to speak of.

Still, I figured, leafing through the pages about superheroes (like The Proper Noun and The Preposition) and supervillains (like Comma Splice and The Fragment), it was worth a shot.
And turns out: Preciado and Montijo got the balance exactly right, at least for our kid. Dash is very much into graphic novels and comic books of all kinds nowadays (he's even starting to create his own), so Super Grammar was right in his wheelhouse thematically from the start. He saw it, picked it up, and consumed it in a day, without any exhortation from any pesky adults.

Now, Super Grammar is by no means the most complex of comics—there's no narrative as such, just a series of introductions of the "characters" and examples of their exploits (each of which serves as a grammatical example). The illustrations themselves are what I'd term "classic comic-book style," quite well executed but nothing fancy or especially artsy, either.

But the combination gets the job done marvelously. Dash liked Super Grammar so much from the get-go that it's become one of what I call his "lingering" books—it stays out on his desk or nightstand so he can read it again, and again (and again), over a period of weeks. It's even accompanied us on a couple of trips already.

And the book does have educational impact, it would appear—Dash appears to have a better conception of what an action verb is, or what purpose a pronoun serves, than he did before, and we've noticed his use of punctuation in particular improving since the book arrived in our home.

So while I don't expect that Super Grammar will—or should!—be the end of his education on the subject (one way or another), it's serving exactly the role I'd hoped it might: an easy, low-effort primer on the basics of grammar. And that—well, that's a pretty heroic accomplishment.

[Cover image courtesy of Scholastic]

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Old School: A Wizard of Earthsea

As I grew older and out of children's chapter books, all those years ago, I kept only a handful of favorites on my bookshelf. I'm not sure I knew why, exactly, even back then—because I thought even as a high school student I might want to refer back to them? Or (deep down) because I wanted to hang on to them for my own kids someday? The reason was certainly sentimental in some way, and at a certain point I stopped winnowing entirely; what survived high school stayed on my shelves into adulthood.

These were mostly venerable classics of the kid genre, even at the time—the Narnia series, The Phantom Tollbooth, A Wrinkle in Time—with a few relative newcomers like Ellen Raskin's The Westing Game and Walter Wangerin Jr.'s The Book of the Dun Cow. I didn't care if they were classics, though—these were the books that were in some way or another important to my childhood. I don't always remember exactly why. But these were my books—I remember the surge of feeling I had about each of them very clearly, which must have been at the root of why I kept them.

One of the series I kept about which my memory was cloudy was Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books. Another classic series, of course—being reissued in handsome new hardcover editions this month by Houghton Mifflin, in fact. The feelings I associated with these particular books years later, having mostly forgotten the plotlines, were less of warmth and affection, as I recalled Phantom Tollbooth, say. It was more like a vague sort of awe and reverence.

And those aren't feelings that drive nostalgic re-readings. So it had been many years since the Le Guin books had come down off the shelves when my seven-year-old, Dash, started showing interest in books with magical themes beyond Harry Potter. (Not, I should hasten to add, that he finds anything at all lacking in Harry Potter.) I remembered Earthsea, my memory perhaps jogged by the news of the reissues, and we took my dusty old copy of A Wizard of Earthsea down (both noticing right away that it's sure a lot shorter than a Harry Potter book).

It only took a page or two for the vague memories to firm up. And I don't mean just the storyline, though that certainly came back, too: the journey to wisdom of a young, brilliant but arrogant sorcerer-in-training. I don't even mean just the amazing world Le Guin has created as the setting for this series, a land of hundreds of small islands and a full, rich culture that's as vivid and fully imagined as any of the best fantasy worlds of children's literature.

I mean the language itself. The Earthsea books are written in a flowing, almost Homeric style that's simply mesmerizing to read (or read aloud). Words and their power are the lifeblood of this series—the source of the most powerful magic its wizards have, in fact. In Earthsea, to know someone's or something's true name is to have power over that person or thing, and everyone accordingly has both a name they go by in the world, and a secret "true" name that they reveal only to those they trust most—the book's hero, Ged, always introduces himself as Sparrowhawk, for example. It's an old conceit that words and names hold magical power, but Le Guin weaves her whole world around it, giving it weight and even a feeling of importance, or reality. (It's one of the things that has always stuck with me from the book.)

Le Guin's is almost certainly the finest writing Dash has encountered since graduating to chapter books, and I could see the effect on him immediately—he was quietly fascinated (unusual, since his enthusiasm about books is usually more amped-up and vocal), with a sort of reverent awe that was very familiar. I think the Earthsea books may have similarly awakened me to a level of writing I'd previously been unaware of, when I first encountered them, which would more than explain their staying power on my shelves all these years. Maybe Dash will feel the same way about them someday.

[Cover image courtesy of Houghton Mifflin]

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Security Blanket: Mad at Mommy

I don't know if Komako Sakai's 2010 picture book Mad at Mommy will be considered a classic or not, but as far as we're concerned, it oughta be. Our four-year-old has recently rediscovered it and taken it very much to heart.

In a way, the title (along with one's expectations that a picture book for young kids will generally have a happy ending) reveals all you need to know about the plot: Our protagonist, a young bunny, is angry at his mommy bunny for...well, all sorts of terribly unjust things. She sleeps late sometimes and makes him wait for breakfast. She hogs the TV for boring adult programs so he can't watch cartoons. She even says he can't marry her when he grows up. In fact, he's so mad at her that he decides to leave home. Which he does. For a minute, anyway.

This is, of course, well-travelled territory for kids' picture books, with Where the Wild Things Are

the most famous example. As always in such cases, it's the author's execution that makes a take on the standard exceptional; Sakai is particularly talented at imbuing her bunny characters with emotion via their facial expressions—the slow burn of the seething kid bunny, the sympathetic-but-not-without-effort mommy bunny. The effect is to give Mad at Mommy a realistic feel—since we've all, parents and kids, been there many, many times—that brings a smile to recognition to all and, thanks to the expected turn at the end, still delivers on the warm fuzzies.

As for why Griff has suddenly taken hard to Sakai's book...well, we're just going to leave that one alone as long as we can.

[Cover image courtesy of Arthur A. Levine Books]

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: A Home for Bird

Philip C. Stead established himself as an author with a talent for channeling the charm of classic children's books last year with his and his wife, Erin's, breakout hit A Sick Day for Amos McGee. His follow-up, A Home for Bird, which came out earlier this summer—and which he not only wrote, but illustrated as well—more than upholds the standard, capturing the sweet, slightly wistful quality of a certain brand of kid lit (with roots that go back at least as far as Winnie-the-Pooh) in both his narrative and his exquisite crayon-and-gouache illustrations.

A Home for Bird is really about Vernon, an almost painfully earnest toad, who one day encounters a colorful but silent and motionless bird while he's out "foraging for interesting things." (We know Bird is silent and motionless because he's made out of wood, but Vernon merely takes him for the quiet type.) He takes Bird to meet his friends Skunk and Porcupine, explaining to them that Bird is "shy, but also a very good listener," but the continued silence leads him to suspect that his new friend is sad about something.

The three animals decide that perhaps Bird is missing his home, and so Vernon resolves to get him back to it—something of a challenge, given that he has no idea where or (even what) that home might be, and of course Bird can't tell him. Undaunted, Vernon sets sail downriver with Bird (in a teacup he's found) and finds several possible places of Bird's origin—but his friend's silence tells him he hasn't discovered the right place.

So Vernon ties their boat to a helium balloon to explore further; wondering aloud, in a moment of fear and doubt as they take off, whether this was a wise move, he takes Bird's silence in response as impressively stoic bravery. They eventually touch down near a farmhouse, where a surprising yet remarkably uncontrived happy ending awaits both adventurers.

Stead's touch is perfect throughout, his crayon- and brushstrokes lending a loose, laid-back feeling to the proceedings while also being full of wonderful details, right down to the foraged bottle-cap sun hat Vernon wears in the boat. The tone of the text matches that feel precisely; Vernon becomes pretty difficult not to love within a couple of pages, and I doubt much of this book's intended audience—or even those well outside it age-wise—will resist. (Our four-year-old certainly hasn't.)

It's a neat trick to write a fully original picture book that has all the best qualities of a classic of the genre. I think it's safe to say at this point that this author has the knack.

[Cover image courtesy of Macmillan USA]

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New Books: King Arthur's Very Great Grandson

Our three-but-almost-four-year-old, Griffin, is showing some trends in the picture books he takes most interest in these days: adventure, and friendship. Kenneth Kraegel's King Arthur's Very Great Grandson hits the sweet spot, and has accordingly earned a place of honor next to Griff's bed over the last month.

The book's charmingly colorful illustrations tell the story of Henry Alfred Grummorson, who (much like Griff this week) is having a birthday: He's turning six. He also happens to be, as the title hints, the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson of King Arthur, and so he heads out on his trusty donkey for some suitable adventure.

Adventure, however, isn't cooperating on this day, for everyone seems to misunderstand his challenge to do battle: The dragon he encounters just wants to see who can blow the best smoke rings; the cyclops wants to have a staring contest, and the griffin (clearly another reason Griff loves this book!) suggests a game of chess.

At first Henry is, naturally, very frustrated about all this, and keeps marching off to find another fearsome creature who will accept his more martial challenge. Eventually, though, after an accidentally frightening encounter with the Leviathan of the deep (who just wants to be friends too, of course), he realizes he's been offered something much better by all of them, and at the end we see all of them puzzling over a chessboard together.

To be honest, I'm a little surprised that Griffin, who can be on the feisty side, and doubtless shared Henry's frustrations earlier in the book, has found the book's conclusion so satisfying.

But I'm not complaining.

[Cover image courtesy of Candlewick Press]

Old School: The Bear That Wasn't

It's one of those precious delights of parenthood to share a book we loved as kids ourselves to our own children, and to relive that thrill of discovery through their eyes. But it's a completely different kind of pleasure, and one nearly as great, to discover a classic with your kids, one you somehow missed yourself in your own childhood.

I mainly knew of Frank Tashlin as a famous animator (of Looney Tunes fame) and Hollywood screenwriter and director (of Jerry Lewis movies), and hadn't been aware that he'd dabbled in children's books. Then Dash's grandmother gave him a copy of the author's 1946 The Bear That Wasn't. It's a wonderful allegorical tale of a bear who is awakened from a long sleep by humans who are convinced he is not in fact a bear, but a very hairy man in a fur coat, and that therefore he should get to work on the large factory project that's sprung up around him as he slept.

The bear calmly tries to tell the men otherwise, but is lectured over and over again, as he moves up to the highest levels of the corporate chain, that he must stop being silly and accept that he is not a bear. He heads to the zoo, aiming to get support from his fellow bears for his true identity, but even here he's out of luck: The zoo bears point out that if he were a real bear, he'd be behind bars like they are.

Worn down, he figures that maybe they're all right after all and he's not a bear, and proceeds to live life as a human, working hard in a factory every day. And it's not until circumstances lead him to solve the problem of a cold winter as a bear would that he concludes that he was right and all the bureaucrats were wrong after all, with Tashlin's sublime final sentence: "No indeed, he knew he wasn't a silly man, and he wasn't a silly Bear either."

The message of individuality, of knowing who you are and not letting anyone tell you otherwise, is certainly loud and clear in this tale—as is the criticism of those who insist that anything repeated often enough must be true. But it's Tashlin's tone throughout that really makes the book a classic, mesmerizing to readers of all ages: The bear's quiet sense of puzzlement in the face of a series of humans who are arrogantly confident in their mistakenness is both sympathetic and very funny; you have the sense that the bear is never exactly convinced of his humanity himself, but just decides it's no use arguing anymore. (And there's a lesson there, too, of course.) The humans themselves are an amusing (though not harmless) parody of wrongheadness, becoming angrier and angrier when the bear stubbornly keeps insisting he's ursine.

Dash adores this book (and I can only hope he takes its message to heart as he grows up); it's quickly become one of his enduring favorites. And I'm really glad to have discovered it myself, even at the advanced age of 42!

P.S.: When posting this, I stumbled across an animated version of The Bear That Wasn't. Apparently Tashlin didn't feel it conveyed the message of the book quite as he desired, but it's still worth a look:



[Cover image courtesy of the New York Review Children's Collection]

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New Books: No Bears

I've said it before, but I keep finding new evidence: There's something special about Australian-born picture-book authors and illustrators. (For anyone who hasn't read my prior encomiums on this subject, the short version: Check out the work of Martine Murray, Sophie Blackall, and Freya Blackwood for starters.)

The most recent example is a new favorite of our three-year-old's, No Bears, written by Meg McKinlay and illustrated by Leila Rudge, in which a girl named Ella—one of those matter-of-fact, feisty girls Australia is apparently full of, given how perfectly the nation's authors capture the type—tells us about the book she's writing. It's an adventure story about a princess, but this narrator wants to make things clear from the start: There will be no bears in this tale, because "I'm tired of bears. Every time you read a book, it's just BEARS BEARS BEARS—horrible furry bears slurping honey in awful little caves. You don't need BEARS for a book."

And she goes on to prove the point: Her princess is kidnapped by a terrible monster, then rescued by a fairy godmother, without a bear to be seen. Well, except for that one outside the "frame" of the illustrations, who seems to be helping Ella create both the story and the art. And who also seems to step into the story herself momentarily to save the day when that fairy godmother has misplaced her wand. And who can be seen at the end telling all Ella's characters what really happened. But other than that, nope, no bears here at all.

No Bears is sweet, it's funny, it's clever, and it's visually imaginative. In other words, it's everything I've come to expect from a picture book from Australians!

[Cover image courtesy of Candlewick Press]

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New Books: Awesome Snake Science!

OK, I know not every kid likes snakes. A lot of adults don't like snakes, not even a little bit. But our older son does, and so when—just a few days after he'd proudly finished his first-grade year-end report on snakes—we came across Cindy Blobaum's new book Awesome Snake Science, well, it just felt like it was meant to be. (Luckily, he's not quite old enough yet to have felt cheated at not having encountered this book before he had to write his report....)

Because if Dash were to describe the perfect nonfiction snake book for a kid his age, he'd come up with this one. It's not merely full of snake facts and figures—though it certainly has enough of those to be suitably comprehensive for even the most obsessed child—but it also includes 40 fun snake-themed activities, from making a set of foldable fangs that demonstrate how the real things work with snakes' malleable jaws, to (safely) simulating cytotoxic venom. (Most parents will be pleased to know that no actual snakes are required for any of these activities.)

It's exactly the kind of hands-on learning book that takes what could be dry subject matter and makes it nearly irresistible to children—really a great achievement by Blobaum. Not that Dash cares about that; after we take this book on vacation to Canada with us, I expect he'll be mimicking rattlesnake noises all month long. (Let's hope he doesn't get too good at it.)


[Cover image courtesy of IPG]

New Books: Oh No, George!

Many great picture books for young children are existential at root. (The works of the late Maurice Sendak are merely one notable example.) Of course, it's the point at which that existentialism meets the characteristics of your actual kid that's most joyful—and, when the kid himself seems to recognize the concurrence, interesting as well.

A new favorite of our three-year-old's is a title that came out a couple of months ago: U.K.-based illustrator Chris Haughton's Oh No, George! It's as simple as is it expressive: Before going out for a while, the owner of George the dog tells him to be good. And George determines that he will be good. He so wants to be good, after all.

But with that tasty-looking cake on the table and the cat to be chased and all, temptation ends up winning out again and again—and before long, George has trashed the place. But he feels terrible about it—Haughton's rendering of ashamed George is particularly evocative—and after promising his owner to do better next time, he does manage to proudly resist temptation...for a while, anyway...

Now, the previous two paragraphs would also serve, more or less, as a description of a day with three-year-old Griffin this spring. (Even some of the specifics are awfully similar.) So it's been fascinating to watch Griff slowly but surely fall in love with Oh No, George!, to the point where it's currently his favorite bedtime read. I suppose it's really the same throughout our reading lives: We look to find ourselves in the literature we love.

And sure, I'm allowing myself to hope he takes the lesson of the book to heart at some point. (Another part of me fears I'm missing the point and figures perhaps I should be the one learning a lesson here.) But either way, Oh No, George is a delight to both of us.

[Cover image courtesy of Candlewick Press]

New Books: House Held Up by Trees

I do try, in children's books as in life, not to judge books by their covers. But it is a fact that with picture books, you often can pick out the ones that at least could be great before you ever crack the spine—since the illustrations are so vital, and you can usually get a sense of exceptional art from the cover.

Still, the cliché holds: Just looking great from the outside doesn't mean what's inside is going to live up to that promise. Sometimes the writing or even the overall concept is dull or lackluster, and even the most brilliant illustrations can't overcome that. And then there are what I've come to think of as "picture books for parents"—children's books that we find irresistible but that don't speak to our children in the slightest. (I know there are a few of these gathering dust as de facto bookends on our shelves.)

The worst of these kinds of books is that once you've encountered a couple, they make you doubt your own judgment: If it's this appealing to me, you think, does that mean it's going to bore my three-year-old silly? It was with such worries that I started reading a book I had gotten very excited about—House Held Up by Trees, by Ted Kooser and illustrated by Jon Klassen—to my younger son.

On the one hand, Kooser is a Pulitzer Prize–winning former U.S. poet laureate, and Klassen is responsible for one of the very, very best picture books of the last few years, the delightful best seller I Want My Hat Back. And this book certainly passed the cover test with flying colors, thanks to Klassen's evocative, leafy rendition of the titular structure on it. On the other, well, Kooser is a Pulitzer Prize–winning former U.S. poet laureate, and this is a children's picture book, and those sorts of factors do sometimes combine to create bookends.

Kooser's text was a little alarming at first, for being set in passages that are unusually long for a picture book of this type. But the simple, somewhat wistful tale of a house that, over many years, goes from being a beloved family home to an abandoned, delapidated one before being "rescued" by a ring of wild trees that sprout up around it—well, it mesmerized Griffin from the start. Kooser's placid style, matched wonderfully by Klassen's gorgeous illustrations, put Griff in a similarly peaceful place, a reflective one he reaches when we read bittersweet stories like The Giving Tree and The Birthday Tree—books House Held Up by Trees is quite reminiscent of. (Say, what is it about trees, anyway?)

So for the moment, I can trust my cover judgment again. House Held Up by Trees looks, at first glance, like a special book, maybe an instant classic. And, in fact, I think that's just what it is.

[Cover image courtesy of Candlewick Press]

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]

Chris Healy's Great New Book Hits Stores Today

Christopher Healy's The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom—which I was unable to resist posting about several weeks ago, so enthusiastic was I about it—officially comes out today. I'd been planning to put up a quick post today with a link to my original review anyway, but then I got some great news about the book that makes the perfect peg: Fox Animation has optioned the movie rights. 

It'll make a wonderful film, and I can't wait to see it. In the meantime, go and get your copy now, so your family can be part of the knowing crowd that "read the book first"! You and your kids will be so glad you did.

[Cover image courtesy of HarperCollins]

New Books: Arthur's Dream Boat

A quick post about a book I meant to write about back in March but that somehow got lost in the shuffle back then: Arthur's Dream Boat, another marvelous product of British author-illustrator Polly Dunbar's imagination. We've been fans ever since she came out with the quietly hilarious Penguin, which has long held a treasured place on the bookshelf of first our older son, and now our younger one (with an occasional revisit from the seven-year-old, even now).

This time, though, Dunbar is dealing in dreams, with all their surrealism infused with perfectly sensible internal logic. The title character, a young boy, wakes up one morning and tells his family about a remarkable dream he's just had, about a "pink-and-green boat with a striped mast." He adds detail after detail as he describes the boat to various members of his family, but no one pays much attention, not even to the fact that the very ship he's describing is growing on Arthur's head as he speaks!

Finally, Arthur shouts "Listen to me!"—and a huge wave breaks over the whole family, which finds itself suddenly all at sea in the boat with Arthur, sailing off into the setting sun. As is usually the case in Dunbar's work, the text is simple and spare, but the subtext could hardly be thicker or richer.

The idea for the book, the author explains in a note, came from a trick of visual perspective: Her view from a beach of a far-off sailboat seemingly perched atop the head of a young boy sitting near her on the shore. Illustrated in pencil and vivid watercolor, and pleasingly reminiscent of, without being imitative of, the best work of Maurice Sendak, Arthur's Dream Boat is an unusual, special picture book.

[Cover image courtesy of Candlewick Press]

New Books: Robot Zombie Frankenstein!

It's finally arrived: the picture book that has everything! This new arrival from author-illustrator Annette Simon not only features not only the three kid favorites mentioned in the title, but also pirates, superheroes...even, yes, pie. Basically, I thought my three-year-old son was going to explode the moment I read him the title.

But lest you think Robot Zombie Frankenstein! is merely something your kids will see as you stroll by it at Barnes & Noble and require that you purchase, let me assure you: This is actually a clever little story about two best-friend robots in a friendly game of costume one-upmanship. It effortlessly incorporates a whole series of different colored shapes, to address that whole child-development thing. It even has a truly sweet ending.

Which means that what's on its face simply an irresistible book for your kids will also turn out to be kinda irresistible to you, too.

P.S.: At the author's own website, there's a free PDF of RZF-related activity sheets fans of the book can download...

[Cover image courtesy of Candlewick Press]

New Books: Taka-chan and I

I'd mostly seen chapter books thus far from the New York Review Children's Collection, those masters of reissuing forgotten classics of children's lit. Not that this was a bad thing, mind you—we've discovered many of our favorite kids' books from the collection, from the infinitely charming "cookbook" Mud Pies and Other Recipes to the irresistible Terrible, Horrible Edie (part of a series I still can't believe isn't better known to modern audiences).

But while everything the NYRCC puts out is marvelous, I hadn't seen much in the way of your typical big, square children's picture book from them (perhaps because the classic picture books tend to stay in print in the first place far longer than the chapter books do?). I should have known it was only a matter of time: Taka-chan and I: A Dog's Journey to Japan, by Betty Jean Lifton and illustrated with photographs by Eikoh Hosoe, originally published in 1967, has arrived—and is equally marvelous.

The book tells the fable of Runcible, a Weimaraner from Massachusetts who gets especially forceful with his beach digging one day and tunnels through the earth to emerge in Japan. (Or rather, I should say, the fable is told by Runcible in first-person narration.) There he meets a little girl named Taka-chan, who has been taken captive by a sea dragon. When Runcible meets the dragon, it explains that it is angry because the girl's father and other local fishermen no longer pay their respects to him, but that it will let Taka-chan go if Runcible can find the most loyal creature in Japan. He accepts this quest, which leads dog and girl deep into the teeming crowds of Tokyo.

Each page is illustrated with a black-and-white photograph by Hosoe, a renowned Japanese artistic photographer and filmmaker who's worked with the likes of Yukio Mishima. While each obviously had to have been carefully staged and directed to fit the narrative, there's an inherent naturalism to Hosoe's images that clicks perfectly with this book's conceit. If Taka-chan and I feels at all dated, it's simply because there aren't many children's books using this kind of framework anymore—and even that effect is only noticeable to parents, I think. Both my sons took to the book, and its typically expressive Weimaraner (photographed some years before Wegman!), right off, much as they take to any other picture book.

In other words, the NYRCC has done it again. May it continue forever!

[Cover image courtesy of NYRCC]

New Books: Outside Your Window/Step Gently Out

Spring is here (we'll ignore the fact that winter never really came to speak of, at least in the Northeast), and as always, with the season come nature-oriented children's books. Two from Candlewick Press stand out, both celebrating the arrival of new creatures and plants, both using simple poetry as their text, and both featuring astonishing and very, very beautiful images.

The first, Outside Your Window: A First Book of Nature, is a set of nature poems for toddlers by writer (and biologist) Nicola Davies. Each page or spread offers a few lines of simple free verse on one aspect of nature a child might encounter (in any season, not just spring)—a feather on the ground, say, or tadpoles in a pond, or a formation of geese in the sky. And each subject is illustrated by Mark Hearld with big, vivid strokes of brush, pen, and collage—a style reminiscent of old Golden Books editions I remember from my childhood. If that's any indication, Hearld's illustrations, and this book, will have a lasting impression on the young kids reading it now.

The second, Step Gently Out, has a similar theme of new creatures in springtime, but with two main differences. First, its text is one poem by Helen Frost that stretches through the entire book, just a few words on each page or spread. And second, its poetry is illustrated by often mind-blowing photography by Rick Lieder. It's the kind of imagery you usually see in science books for kids these days, or on video in nature documentaries—incredibly detailed and precise close-ups of bees gathering pollen from a flower, or butterflies drinking drops off a leaf. Using these photographs as the illustration for a poetry book, however, was a stroke of brilliance: It removes the clinical scientific aspect that nonfiction biology books for kids often find hard to shake, and replaces it with a reinforcement of the sense of wonder that's always been my first impression of images of this kind.

Each book is marvelous and even gasp-inducing at times on is own, but they also complement each other particularly well as a matching pair.

[Cover images courtesy of Candlewick Press]

New Books: The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom

As I've written before, it's always a thrill to discover a great new voice in kid lit. It's even more exciting when the new voice is someone you know. My former colleague Christopher Healy—who taught me all I know about children's entertainment, and is really the one who inspired me to take up writing this blog after the magazine closed—has written his first children's book. Which would be enough of an achievement on its own to congratulate him for, but I'm going to breeze right by that. Because The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom is easily the best kids' chapter book from a new author I've encountered since I started covering them. (It doesn't actually arrive in stores till May 1, but I can't hold back from writing about it any longer. And hey, you can preorder!)

As the title suggests, Healy (it feels odd to refer to him this way, but I may as well stick to blog precedent) has selected the world of classic fairy tales as the setting for his debut. And he's found a clever twist that none of the other great fractured-fairy-tale authors, from Scieszka and Smith to Goldman to Sondheim and Lapine, ever hit upon, to my knowledge: telling the stories of the various anonymous princes lumped under the name "Charming."

As the author explains, the bards who tell these tales tend to focus on the princesses and the witches and giants and such, and some of the facts—like the individual names and characteristics of the heroes involved, say—generally get lost. And so four princes as wildly different as Prince Frederick (Cinderella's prince, dashing and elegant but with no adventuring experience whatsoever), Prince Gustav (Rapunzel's, big and gruff and always ready to fight—and lose to—anyone or anything), Prince Liam (Sleeping Beauty's, a doer of deeds, and the only classic hero of the lot, really), and Prince Duncan (Snow White's, sweet but…a bit eccentric, let's say) all find themselves marginalized in their own stories under a single name that's not even theirs. Naturally, they're a bit resentful.

They also find themselves not as happily-ever-after as the bard tales would have people think. Liam, for instance, discovers that when she's awake, Sleeping Beauty is a remarkably unpleasant princess, and not the sort of woman he wants to marry at all; for his part, Frederick finds that Cinderella, after her years of toil, wants an adventurous life and is terribly bored by the cushy, luxurious one he's accustomed to. Trying to solve their personal problems—and eventually noticing that the bards they each loathe so much have all mysteriously vanished—the four princes wind up meeting and joining forces. At which point they realize two things: First, with the exception of Liam, they are not the most competent of heroic teammates. Second, they're up against a much more fearsome foe than any of them had suspected, one who threatens all their kingdoms.

Healy keeps the pace quick and the tone wonderfully light throughout—if you imagine a combination of The Princess Bride and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you'll have a sense of how funny this book is. He also proves expert at sharp characterization, from the four princes themselves to ingenious supporting characters like a bratty ten-year-old boy who's so evil and so devious that he's become the Bandit King and now runs the whole region's criminal element; a benign and pleasant giant who, unfortunately, has to work for an evil witch because he needs the job; and the land's best bounty hunter, who also happens to have a severe case of clinical depression.

The result is a true page-turner of an adventure story that also has its readers—young and old, but especially young—constantly in stitches. When I was reading the book to my seven-year-old at bedtime, I had to take lengthy pauses many times to allow Dash to recover from paroxysms of laughter. At the same time, he was always pushing to read more chapters than we had time for in a given evening, eager to find out what happened next.

Frankly, if I'd known he was going to be this good at this back when I was editing his section at Cookie magazine, I'd have encouraged Chris to miss a few deadlines and start writing his book sooner! I suspect this is the beginning of a long and ever more fruitful career for him, and as with all the other leading lights of the genre, I can't wait to see what he comes up with next. I also, of course, couldn't be more pleased to give The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom my highest recommendation.

[Cover image courtesy of HarperCollins]