New Music: The Little Red Hen & Other Stories

The Good Ms. Padgett is something of a throwback, in these days of ultrahip, genre-hopping children's music. Her second kids' CD, The Good Ms. Padgett Sings the Little Red Hen and Other Stories, contains four classic children's stories told in a combination of spoken word and song, with acoustic-guitar accompaniment that put me immediately in a retro frame of mind, as if I'd suddenly switched on an old TV set and found myself watching Carole and Paula on The Magic Garden. (I suppose I am forgetting that retro is ultrahip...)

But Padgett, whose real first name is Anna rather than The Good Ms., knows what she's doing. She honed her storytelling skills in front of some of our nation's most demanding audiences—Brooklyn preschoolers—and it shows. (It doesn't hurt, of course, that she has naturally great pacing and a lovely singing voice.)

She's savvy enough to have chosen stories—including one of my own childhood favorites, the Billy Goats Gruff—that fall into repeating patterns, allowing for the kind of musical repetition that hooks preschool-age kids immediately. They learn the simple melody the first time through, and then can sing along themselves each time the pattern comes around again.

Yes, Pete Seeger and hundreds before him have been using this technique for years, but there's a reason for that: It works. As proof, I offer up my three-year-old, Griff, who was mesmerized by The Good Ms. from hello. Since he is not, as a rule, mesmeriz-able at this age by anything, even ice cream, for much more than a minute, that's a pretty serious recommendation right there.

[Cover image courtesy of The Good Ms. Padgett]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Cover image courtesy of First Second Books]

New Books: Other Goose

I always feel like I owe author-illustrator J. Otto Seibold. Back in my Cookie magazine days, his books ended up as the last cut from our Reviews section on a few separate occasions. (My blog is not exactly a fair substitute for coverage in a national print magazine, I know, but I do what I can.) As I recall, it was Seibold's prolific nature—he seems to come out with a new book annually at least—that worked against him: We always figured we'd be able to get one of his books in eventually. Then the magazine was shut down. There's a lesson there somewhere, isn't there?

At any rate, magazine space-limitation minutiae aside, Seibold's work always stands out among the crowd of picture books. It's mostly about his illustrative style, which is all his own: seemingly retro cartoon–inspired but using vivid colors and lots of marvelously offbeat embellishments. That makes sense, because the themes of his books tend to be pretty offbeat themselves; he's probably best known for Olive, the Other Reindeer, a collaboration with writer Vivian Walsh about a dog who becomes confused by the apparent mention of her name in the Rudolph song (get it?) and heads to the North Pole to become Santa's helper. (It even became an animated Christmas movie, made by Matt Groening and starring the voice of Drew Barrymore, among other stars.)

Seibold's latest, Other Goose, joins the growing group of nursery-rhyme mash-ups and takeoffs that seems to have begun with Lane Smith and Jon Scieszka's The Stinky Cheese Man. Less deconstructionist than its now-classic predecessor, Other Goose leans instead toward the purely eccentric, refashioning the old rhyming stories into new poems that...well, change the focus a bit. Humpty Dumpty's tragedy, for instance, is now about a lost shoe.

But the real draw, as always with Seibold, is the art itself; there's not another illustrator like him working today. (I don't think there really ever has been....) And while his manic, colorful, superbusy style probably won't appeal to every kid, or parent, those who embrace it will spend hours dazzled by spread after spread of visual eye candy, as our six-year-old did.

[Photos: Whitney Webster]