Every Book I Use

This is a place where I review children's books and offer uses and extension activities. It's not every book that passes through my hands in the course of being a Children's Librarian, but it's every book that I would use in any way. This includes for storytimes, programs, read-alikes and readers' advisory. Also, pretty much any new book. Often I'll discuss using Caldecott criteria as well.

[everybook]

Being Frog - Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library

Being Frog (Book) : Sayre, April Pulley : An up-close look at the behavior and habits of frogs.

Being Frog by April Pulley Sayre It’s no secret I love photography and I love April Pulley Sayre. I think this is one of her best works. It really finds a sweet middle between the breakneck cadence of Rah Rah Radishes or Go Go Grapes and the meandering free verse of Bloom Boom or Best in Snow.  The photography is some of the most stellar frog-tography I’ve ever seen. This one would probably pair well with Toad Weather for a really good amphibian storytime.

[everybook]

Smashy Town - Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library

Smashy Town (Picture Book) : Zimmerman, Andrea Griffing : "With a turn of his crane and a swing of his wrecking ball, Mr. Gilly knocks down the old buildings. He smashes through brick and wood. He crashes through stone and glass. Then, with a push from his bulldozer, Mr. Gilly cleans it all up to make room for something brand-new!" -- Amazon.

Smashy Town by Andrea Zimmerman and David Clemesha Illustrated by Dan Yaccarino I’m so happy Trashy Town got a sequel! It has always been a standby if I need to entertain toddlers and I think this one is no different. The repetition is even more engaging this go round. While construction books are always popular, a good demolition book takes the cake. I can only imagine what fun we can do with our hands as we ‘swing the ball’ and ‘hit the wall’. 

[everybook]

I Dream of A Journey - Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library

I Dream of A Journey (Picture Book) : Miyakoshi, Akiko : "Day in and day out, an innkeeper graciously tends to the guests at his little hotel, but finds himself daydreaming of what it would be like to travel to new and wonderful places ..."-- Provided by publisher.

Beautiful palette that screams classic, but feels updated. It has so much depth and shade. This quiet story of a yearning bear is lovely, but won’t be interesting for everyone. 

[everybook]

Rita and Ralph's Rotten Day (eBook) : Deedy, Carmen Agra : * This well-crafted story is an excellent choice for those seeking books featuring conflict-resolution. — Booklist, starred reviewIn two little houses,on two little hills,lived two best friends...So begins the story of Rita and Ralph. Every day they meet to play beneath the apple tree. It's always fun and games — until one roundly rotten day when a new game means someone ends up crying. Who knew it could be so hard to say I'm sorry?Just when it seems nothing will ever be right again, a surprising thing happens. The old friends try something new, that isn't new at all. Something they've done a hundred times...Carmen Agra Deedy's brilliant storytelling combined with Pete Oswald's spirited illustrations make for a comforting tale of healing and true friendship.

Rita & Ralph’s Rotten Day by Carmen Agra Deedy and Pete Oswald

Digitally rendered using watercolor gouache textures.  I love this book so much. Based on the classic hand rhyme Mr Wiggle and Mr Waggle, this repetitive picture book featuring an accidental hurt is simple enough for kids to understand and take to heart, but definitely not oversimplified. The friendship is heartfelt, goofy and the appearance of differing genders doesn’t offer any conflict.  Perfect for a storytime about Emotions or Friends. The hand rhymes to go with the story will be perfect for storytime, even virtually.

[everybook]

An Ordinary Day - Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library

An Ordinary Day (eBook) : Arnold, Elana K. : "An ordinary day in an ordinary neighborhood turns out to be extraordinary in this story about new life, death, and family"-- Provided by publisher.

An Ordinary Day Written by Elana K Arnold and Illustrated by Elizabet Vukovic.  Subtle, understated, beautiful. Charcoal, soft pastel, watercolor, ink, graphite and Adobe Photoshop.  I think this book shines most in its soft approach to death. It gives it so much context that the world goes on, that good things happen the same time as bad. That people continue to live their lives. It’s a beautifully illustrated dichotomy.  This would be a good exercise for students to write the stories of their own neighborhood. Could base them on fact, interviews/narration or completely creative. 

[everybook]

I cannot wait to use this with some kids who are working on their phonemic awareness/sounding out words. 

This wild romp through some spelling/spelling puns is perfectly matched by Paschkis’ curlicue, stylistic and flowing illustrations. Paschkis’ use of line takes readers’ eyes through the different transformations, along the way offering embellishment and structure to the gouache colors. I think a prime example of this is the spread where Aziz turns a bug to a rug, to a rag, to a rat, to a cat. The line never finds reason to end and takes the reader along with it. 

The use of white space is well-used through the story as normally only a piece of the curtains are visible to suggest the stage. If an actual backdrop and floor had been included, the whole would have been far too cluttered to be parsed. The only times we see the entire stage is when the audience are brought in to get the whole picture of the big scenes (fire, bears, ta-da). 

I love that Paschkis also stuck with a mainly primary color palette. Again, this restraint keeps things from getting too muddled which my tired eyes appreciate. 

[everybook]

This work is a collaboration between Laura McGee Kvasnosky and Kate Harvey McGee. The author blurb states Kvasnosky "wrote the text and painted the black line for the artwork using gouache resist" while McGee "did all the color work in Photoshop with a digital palette and brushes". I think this one is particularly strong in the 'excellence of execution in the artistic technique employed' field. I've never seen anything quite like this and the style fits the moonlit story so well. The colors and textures work wonderfully together in this artistic marriage. The black being the foreground adds so much shadow and detail to the scenery while letting the colors be background adds depth and light. The colors deepen and lighten realistically as the sun sets and the moon rises. I also appreciate the design of this book, with the end papers showing the steep sides of mountains to make readers feel as if they're really in the setting. The text is also beautifully placed in each spread. I think the choices of placement are really smart to make the text clear, and I love that the howls always are going up to the moon.

The preschool kiddos I used as my guinea pigs loved howling along and thought the little wolf’s additions were hilarious. I think if I direct them more, I can get them to howl along with me for big wolf and listen for little wolf’s improv. 

[everybook]

I was arrested by the cover and the concept and requested to review immediately.

The art remains arresting. The stylized figures and the thick texture of the paint add so much while not requiring a lot of detail. The style fits the jazz feeling very well. The palate is dark, as is most of the story: This isn't a happy, jumping jazz tale. The art delineates the theme and plot exactly as it's written.

That being said, the plot feels a bit disjointed. The story of Billie Holiday is one we need in picture books. The story of Strange Fruit is one we need in picture books. This is two stories glued together, neither finished. The story itself is accurate, as far as I can tell, but the narrative doesn't flow. It feels as if the art is the only thing connecting these two pieces of the story. We are led through all of Billie's life in a timeline that is engaging. Starting at the Blue Room and Billie's rage is smart. Then backtracking and following her path through clubs she could be in freely is a smart path. But the story doesn't really keep the thread of her activism or anger, and feels like she's just going along with Strange Fruit and then using it as a 'since it's there, I might as well'.

I want more from both parts. I want to know where Billie went from there, not just negotiating the song into her contracts. I want more emotion in the inception of Strange Fruit. I want the two things to be intertwined.

The world is starved for diverse books that challenge kids and show real life. This will get used by teachers for discussing civil rights, jazz, segretation and racism. But they deserve a bit more.

[everybook]

The All Saw a Cat by Brendan Wenzel

This book is the most interesting use of perspective I have ever seen. Not perspective, like looking down a long road, but individual perspective. This title really reinforces the fact that though we are all seeing the same thing, our backgrounds and contexts really change what that is. The art is stunning and the style is so perfect for the different animals. The layout, the repetition, the pieces of the story are wonderful.

This is definitely on our Mock Caldecott discussion list, and among our committee we are pretty unanimously agreed on its magic. 

[everybook]

The Sound of Silence by Katrina Goldsaito, illustrated by Julia Kuo

I’ll start by saying I’m not sure if this is elligible for the Caldecott or not, but I really hope it is. Kuo uses a beautiful, clean and really intricate style to bring a busy feeling to this book. It reflects the loud idea of the story really well, and nicely conveys the idea of bustle and peace side by side. 

In most spreads, there is a busy part and a part almost free of any distractions. In the bamboo grove, the bamboo is loud and very hectic while the path and sky show the tiny bits of nothing that surround. In the marketplace area where Yoshio finds the koto player, the pillars of her building remain flat colored and still while the movement of the rest of the city sweeps the background characters around. The quieter an image is, the more blank space there tends to be until the last spread is entirely blank space around Yoshio at his desk. 

Kuo also masterfully uses perspective to give us peace or immerse us in noise. Though Yoshio swears everything is noisy through the book, the scenes which show the really soft noises Yoshio is hearing tend to remove the reader from the picture a bit. You can see this in the dinner/bathtub images where we’re given an omnipotent, god’s eye point of view versus the marketplace or train spreads where we’re right on the level. 

This one would fit right in to a storytime about sounds, or quietness and would pair really well with actually letting kids hear the sounds via youtube videos, especially the koto sounds. 

[everybook]

On Bird Hill  by Jane Yolen, illustrated by Bob Marstall

There’s something calming about this story that I really love. It feels like There’s a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea or Rattlin’ Bog, that type of breaking things down into smaller and smaller pieces. The book jacket informs us it’s a new version of The Green Grass Grew All Around, which of course it is. 

Marstall’s illustrations are simple and lovely. They remind me a bit of the German/Polish/Amish type art you can find where I grew up, but the vegetation is the tiniest bit Where the Wild Things Are. All of this hits perfect chords with me. Everything is sophisticated and highbrow until we get to what I consider the best spread in the book. The hatched egg containing the boy’s home and the most ridiculous squawking, stretching chick. The reoccurring theme that everything contains everything is conveyed really well by the art, not doing too much and making it hard to discern. 

I’m really excited that this will be a series of books to benefit the Cornell Lab for Ornithology. I very much look forward to more. 

[everybook]

City Shapes by Diana Murray, illustrated by Bryan Collier

When I went to write the above, I almost wrote ‘by Bryan Collier’ because man, is it ever. That’s not at all to downplay Murray’s writing or concept, but these illustrations are so Collier. 

Beginning with endpapers that make you want to build, audiences are given motion in so many forms. The bubbles on the jacket/boards, the girl looking out a bus window on the title page, the pigeons on the first spread all give the sense that we are traveling, not slow I might add. We’re floating, flying, soaring through the city. 

Collier’s style doesn’t really come through in the spreads until the first shape spread though. That pigeon intro gives movement, but it’s just beautiful watercolor. Turning the page, we’re greeted with Collier’s watercolor collage that arrests the eye but works amazingly well for subtly hinting at squares. A lot of shape books tend to be really obvious, but this one invites audiences to really look while being aided by the collage’s clean lines. The patchwork of the squares reveal page is fascinating to me. Many of the squares are just watercolor parts of the image, but others are actual cutout watercolor pieces that match up perfectly with the rest of the image, just in a different color scheme. He uses this effect in multiple spreads to create movement and variety and reinforce the shapes. 

Murray’s rhymes and word choices are beautiful and will lead to some really nice vocabulary discussions and enhancement. These two have paired together wonderfully and I look forward to a continuation if such a thing is to be had. With the right group, this book would work really well with Dreaming Up which I reviewed a while back. 

[everybook]

Me and Annie McPhee by Olivier Dunrea, illustrated by Will Hillenbrand

These monkeys are cute. That’s all I got. 

That’s not true, but that’s all my brain is telling me to write.

The truth is that this is a really silly, building, rhyming story about a tiny island where there is nothing to see but sea. 

The endpapers are grey, the boards match the jacket. The fun holds off for a few pages, but that title page with the very first illustration of that island? It’s beautiful. It’s subtle but lush, it’s small enough to make you interested and the reflection shows you that it’s not just a floating image, but an actual island in water. Upon closer inspection, you see itty bitty, barely there waves! It’s an actual island! 

The rhyming and repetition begins with a look through binoculars and continues on our first closeup view of the island. The sunset is idyllic. The island is small. But in this first lush page, things start to pop out. Is that a dog? That’s a dog. This island is deserted! Why is there a dog?! Each page continues in this way and kids can definitely start to guess what is going to happen. The actions of each building/counting animal are so silly that kids will have a heyday guessing what the next bit will be. 

This is just another in a long line of books this year that is finally proving digital art is worth its salt to me. There is a truly beautiful melange of textures that you could almost swear is colored pencil and pastel. But from the book jacket, you can see pieces that are too neat for such a messy form. The whale’s spout is much more identifiable as digital, but the style there is a lot more fitting for the movement of the water. 

Do I think it’ll win a Caldecott this year? Probably not. But man, I really really like it. It was fun in a storytime and it crossed the kids’ eyes a bit. It’s really rhymey and repetitive. But in the same way kids will listen to Fox in Socks just to hear adults work really hard, they’ll listen to this with wide eyes. 

[everybook]

One Day in the Eucalyptus, Eucalyptus Tree by Daniel Bernstrom, illustrated by Brendan Wenzel

I missed this one and one of my coworkers had to show it to me. I’m really glad he did. It’s got a lilting rhyme scheme that doesn’t require a fast pace to keep the flow, so kids have time to make observations, ask questions and give their thoughts.

I think the illustrations are a real shining star, thoug. Wenzel’s digital illustrations have so much texture you could swear they were collage. The pattern on the snake is an excellent, dynamic pattern instead of looking like a cutout. It grows as the snake’s belly does, and it twists and turns with him. The snake is definitely the star of this one. 

One of my only graphic problems with this one is the placement of some panels. A few times throughout the book, panels end just an inch or less onto the opposite page. It doesn’t feel quite enough to bridge the gate, so why cross at all? The ones that go further or just to the middle are a lot more visually pleasing. The two I have the most issue with are the bird spread and the orangutan spread. The bird spread at least has leaves across the gate, and I kind of get the sense they were going for the snake coming out of the gate, but the leaves left over on the side seem strange since they’re bordered on a straight edge. The orangutan’s poor goofy-eyed face is barely able to be seen. 

Those are nitpicky pieces of an otherwise visually striking and great book. My storytimes really liked it even when they seemed like they might be too young to follow. Good voices go a long way. 

[everybook]

Tell Me a Tattoo Story by Alison McGhee. Illustrated by Eliza Wheeler

Everyone who looks at this book goes ‘Really?’ and then they read it and cry. My 60 year old coworker said it almost made her want to get a tattoo. It makes me want to be covered. It’s a pitch perfect book about bonds with dad, with the places you’ve been, with the people you call family. 

The endpapers are all of the tattoos mentioned in the story as well as a couple others that we see peeking around corners of dad. They’re truly lovely, almost flash but with a lot of creativity. The Ferris Wheel image is just gorgeous, and I truly love both the image of the desert where the father was deployed and the tone with which it is spoken. There is a really beautiful amount of detail in the images, from the honey pot in the first spread with the toys on the floor, to the flowers at the cafe where he meets his wife which eventually form the border on his tattoo, the Ferris Wheel in the distance. 

I also love that perspective, where Wheeler allows the Ferris Wheel to be faded in the background, but in the tattoo it’s very much the forefront because of the ride they take later. Another instance of perspective, on the ‘Have you met her? You sure have.’ spread, we aren’t focused on one of the story tattoos, but instead can see most of the sailing ship tattoo, which is then mirrored in the child’s bathtub toys. The ending spread gives us the cutaway house and the outside world, with all the focus shifted right inside the child’s bedroom. It feels so close and loving. 

The whole dang book feels so close and loving. 

[everybook]

More-igami by Dori Kleber. Illustrated by G. Brian Karas.

From the beautiful origami paper endpapers to the spreads made on folded paper, the design of this book is impressive. The title page where Joey is folding the giant green background paper is just stunning. The fact that all of the pages containing smaller images have folds as well is perfect. In some places, the folds are used to separate images which blends seemlessly. The folds in the background paper stop when we see the first crane and don’t reappear until Joey rediscovers his folding mojo on the napkins. I can’t get over that folding detail. 

The story champions persistence (practice and patience!) but maybe oversimplifies the concept of origami a bit. Origami is hard and sometimes very frustrating for kiddos. A lot of spacial reasoning is required to simply execute the instructions, let alone well. This is a good supplement for an origami unit, but the intended audience for the simple story is likely too young to even be able to figure out the simple ladybug in the back. 

[everybook]

The Airport Book by Lisa Brown

Filled with detailed, cartoon-like images, Lisa Brown has thought of just about everything that could come along in an airport experience. A lot of images are cross sections or combinations of things happening in different areas, like the baggage conveyor with monkey’s tail peeking out traveling on the bottom of many pages. The characters’s emotions get named and recognized but are not dwelled upon. No one apologizes for what they cannot fix. It’s a really nice walk through for nervous kiddos. 

The detail of the images almost reminds me of David Macauley’s Castle. There are so many characters to watch and predict. Those characters appear on the boards against white space. I prefer that to the jacket cover of the two children watching the plane out the window. The jacket cover makes it seem like the children are going to see somebody off at the airport instead of leaving themselves. I like that the end-papers are the two destinations, home and away. 

I would definitely recommend this for a kiddo who’s about to travel for the first time, but I’m not sure it has a lot of interest for the storytime crowd. It’s a list of parts more than an actual story. It has its place.