Animalium

When entering a museum, visitors decide which galleries to visit first. Opening this large (11" x 14.75") book, readers are faced with similar choices. Should they go to the galleries in numerical or evolutionary class? Should they look for the most unique animals or their favorites? In Katie Scott's and Jenny Broom's new book Animalium, a Welcome to Animalium message invites readers to "wander through the pages of the museum...to see the story of life on Earth unfold." A double-page evolutionary family tree follows that invitation, making clear the categories: invertebrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals.

In the museum's pages, readers find a habitat diorama for each animal class, an ecosystem of the inhabitants, some examples of related animals, and sometimes a dissection of skeletons. "This is the only museum to house animals ancient and modern, enormous and tiny, vicious and vulnerable, between two covers." (p. 1) The book feels like what the creators/curators attempted to assemble: a museum within a book. Its hefty size makes it easy to imagine being a museum as one takes in the creatures and descriptions. 

Familiar creatures like Luna moths, red-eyed tree frogs, and emperor penguins are displayed next to animals new to my vocabulary, like the blue button jelly (not really a jelly but a zooid, another word new to me), the stoplight parrotfish, and the secretary bird. Fascinated is the best word to describe my reaction! Enchanted is how my 14-month-old neighbor might describe her reaction to it. She loved the cover, pointing to birds when asked and quickly pulling her finger away when she touched the snake! 

Though it might not fit in a backpack, readers will long to take this book home for an in-depth visit.

Making Their Way

Living in Stalin's Soviet Union is almost unfathomable for me. I cannot imagine how people could treat neighbors and colleagues with vicious cruelty, seemingly unconcerned for the hurt caused by their actions or words. But I was there last night with Arcady, a young boy who loves soccer, and a man called Ivan Ivanych who comes to the children's home to adopt him. Arcady's life would be unbearable for most children: rationed food (dispensed by a rotund guard nicknamed Butterball), horrible conditions, and no affection. Underlying the horrors of the home is the knowledge that he and the other children living there are children of enemies of the state. Still, Arcady notes, "Ask what our parents have done, and each one of us would say our mom and dad were good." (p. 17)

Despite the awful circumstances, Eugene Yelchin's book is filled with love and understanding, and his artwork adds strong emotion to the powerful text. Arcady yearns for a chance to belong. Ivan Ivanych exudes patience and compassion. These two come together in an unlikely manner, each with his own expectations and hopes. In time, each begins to understand their lives and options differently, accepting how they can fit into each other's lives.  Arcady observed this after just a short while with Ivan: "I never looked at a bird longer than it took to aim a rock at it. But now with my belly more than full I'm thinking what's the harm in birds? I bet it's good to be one. To know someone is making you a home." (p. 70)

Gallery du Fridge

"I love art! It's my imagination on the outside." So says Louise, the red-bespectacled narrator of Kelly Light's first picture book, Louise Loves Art. Louise's love of art is evident on the first spread where she, with an adoring smile, lies atop many or her masterpieces, arms wide across them. Her little brother, appropriately named Art, gazes at her in fondness, as does their cat, a model for her best work. Art clearly longs to emulate his sister, but she is so consumed with displaying her work that she misses some important action. 

Though the cat tries to get her attention, Louise focuses on the Gallery du Fridge, the best place for hanging her piece de resistance, oblivious to how that piece is being transformed by Art. She is crushed, disappointed, crestfallen. What can a young artiste do to make things better? The Gallery du Fridge helps the reader understand the resolution and the title perfectly. 

I love this art book for its art advice, for how it models quiet forgiveness and alternative thinking, and for the art itself, made from black Prismacolor pencils and Photoshop. 

Back on Deckawoo Drive

The neighbor kids wanted to read the Mercy Watson books this summer. Sitting in our sunny library, we traveled to Deckawoo Drive, revisiting Mr. and Mrs. Watson, Baby and Eugenia Lincoln, their neighbors Stella and Frank, and of course, Leroy Ninker, that popcorn-selling former night-time visitor to the Watson's home. Kate DiCamillo set her latest book - Leroy Ninker Saddles Up - back on Deckawoo Drive. I was glad to travel back to that friendly street, and my young reader friends will be delighted when they open this book.

Leroy Ninker longed for a horse. He shared his wish to be a cowboy with Beatrice Leapaleoni, ticket seller at th Bijo Drive-In Theater where he sold soda and buttered popcorn (and where Mercy and her parents went in Something Wonky This Way Comes). Wise Beatrice pointed out that in order to be a cowboy, Leroy would need - besides a cowboy hat, boots, and a lasso - a horse. And so, with a "Yippie-I-oh!" he begins the search. "Take fate in your hands," Beatrice tells him. He does. He acquires Maybelline. Not quite the horse he dreamed about, but just the right horse for him. All he has to do is remember the three items Maybelline's former owner told him: talk sweet to her, feed her A Lot Of Grub, and keep her company. 

Filled with humorous lines, more than a few interesting words, and quite an adventure, the book brought me back to that street I enjoy visiting. This time, Chris Van Dusen's illustrations are in monochrome, but they still perfectly capture the tone of the story. A story that ends with hot buttered toast on Deckawoo Drive is bound to be good.

Unexpected Friendship

In Jennifer K. Mann's book Two Speckled Eggs, Ginger is a girl looking forward to her birthday party. "But Ginger's mom said she had a to invite all of the girls in her class - or none of them." A party with no one did not seem like a good idea, so Ginger is forced to invite the girl everyone thinks is weird: Lyla Browning. While the other girls wreck the games and behave inappropriately, Lyla wanders around, enjoys Ginger's favorite silver-and-gold cake (coconut and pineapple), and laughs at the ladybug that lands on Ginger's nose. And, she brings the most amazing gift: a handmade bird nest with two malted milk eggs nestled in it. She becomes the friend Ginger did not expect, the one she most loved. It is one of my favorite picture books about friendship.

Though top-ten lists are popular, I choose only five others as my favorites:

Enemy Pie by Derek Munson

Farfallina and Marcel by Holly Keller

Frog and Toad Are Friends by Arnold Lobel

Toot & Puddle by Holly Hobbie

Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge by Mem Fox

"My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me." - Henry Ford

Nuts to You Times Two

Since the early days of our relationship (while attending a university with a high squirrel population), my husband has believed he can speak squirrel. He makes a sort of Tsch Tsch noise with his tongue, and much of the time, the squirrels at least cock their heads in curiosity. Sometimes, they actually turn to look at him. He is certain they understand him...at least the gray squirrels.

So, when I started reading NUTS TO YOU by Lynne Rae Perkins, I immediately read aloud to him the tidbits that made speaking squirrel language not so far-fetched (albeit in a fiction book). There is even a pronunciation explanation for certain squirrel sounds, as well as numerous footnotes to explain behaviors and provide inside information. Beyond the language connection, I found the book captivating and enchanting. The story is being told to a human on a park bench by a wonderfully verbose squirrel who speaks human quite well. This squirrel conveys its greatest adventure: when a badly played "squirrel cried wolf" game ended in the capture of a squirrel named Jed by a hawk...and later a further adventure when his friends Chai and TsTs travel across the buzzpaths to frozen spiderwebs (power lines and towers = evidence of the creative language) to rescue Jed. What results is a series of adventures, contact with human tree surgeons, and a game named MOVE to get other squirrels to a safe place. Accompanied by the authors's artwork, the text is witty and filled with nutty ideas.

Lois Ehlert's NUTS TO YOU! (2004) shares the title with the chapter book and also features an adventurous squirrel. Told in rhymed text, it is the story of a brave and wily  squirrel who climbs the bricks of an apartment building and miraculously discovers s tear in the screen, allowing him to enter the narrator's apartment. Lois Ehlert's cut-paper illustrations are bright and textured. Her "Squirrel Talk" notes explain about identification, teeth, feet, tail, nest/home, and food. The book was inspired by something that happened to her!

"Nuts to us all." - Jed in NUTS TO YOU by Lynne Rae Perkins

Silhouettes and Night Vision

In 1945, artist Dahlov Ipcar illustrated her first book...and began a career in children's publishing that lasted decades. Though many of her books are out of print, several have been reissued over the past years (and many more will be reprinted in 2015). My dear friend told me about some this summer, and my teaching partner discovered them a few weeks later.

This week we shared THE CAT AT NIGHT (originally published in 1969 and reissued in 2008) with first and second graders. They were mesmerized by the double-page spreads that alternate between silhouettes of things we would see at night and bright double-page spreads of what those same scenes would look like for a cat with excellent night visions. Their engagement with the cat's actions and the text was so intense they answered the unseen narrator's questions repeatedly. 

"And what does the cat see now?"

Voices on the story steps described what they imagined the silhouettes to reveal. And at the end, when the cat is curled up asleep by the stove, chuckles arose as the farmer commented about the cat's laziness, sleeping all night and then all day, too. Cat comments flowed from their own experiences. Most interesting, though, was one from a second grade teacher about my age who was astonished that I read the book she checked out so often when she was in second grade was the one I read to her class today! She always loved it and assumed it could never be had again. How happy she was to take it back to her classroom - and her own cats - this weekend.