Book Buds Kidlit Reviews

Don't tell the folks at Crayola ...

A Day with No Crayons
by Elizabeth Rusch; illustrated by Chad Cameron

Rising Moon

First, a lesson on how to remove crayons from walls. And another. Importantly, you get your budding Picasso to do this greasy work. I say the punishment's gotta clean up the crime.

If the Mommy in this story did that, however, we wouldn't get to see daughter Liza's eyes open to the color around her after her precious crayons are taken away. Her world turns gray, thanks to Cameron's deft interpretation of the text.

Liza starts to see jolts of color--first toothpaste, then mud on a playground, and finally flowers in the park. Soon, she's off creating again, mushing leaves of different hues into an improvised tree drawing, or scraping a brick against the sidewalk.

We learn her favorite crayon colors, note a few homages to artists like Jackson Pollock, root for her to keep exploring--and wonder who she thinks is going to get the stains off her clothes.

Rush has written a sweet testament to the irrepressible creativity in children, tossing in a dash of rebelliousness for added fun.

Rating: *\*\*\

A good start for great art

Touch the Art!

Brush Mona Lisa's Hair
Make Van Gogh's Bed
Feed Matisse's Fish
Pop Warhol's Top

by Julie Appel and Amy Guglielmo

My mother will tell you her favorite way to wear out a pair of shoes is at the Met. My favorite game as a kid? Why, Masterpiece, of course. And I took Art History at arguably the best college for it.

So when these fat little volumes landed in my lap, I was pretty happy. Kids' books on great art are a trend these days. Whether it's a biography or a famous painting or a museum trip, publishers seem eager to serve up extra helpings of the stuff. Not sure why, except perhaps it's appealing to the same parents who are snatching up all those Baby Mozart CDs.

You scoff. Maybe you don't think my daughter will be able to discern Van Gogh from Vermeer by the time she potty trains, but it won't be for my lack of trying. Familiarity breeds, uh, well, more familiarity. And that's good, right?

These four sturdy board books are organized by genre: Great Masters, Impressionists, Modern Art and Pop Art, and add ribbons, bits of lace or texture for kids to touch, spindle or mutilate. Product testing in our state-of-the-art laboratory reveals the books hold up well under extreme conditions, such as stomping, gnawing and being dropped from bunk beds.

Each masterpiece gets its own little verse. Here's this for one of Degas' dancers:

Twirling tutus, 1,2,3!
The girls are waiting by the sea.

The verses are airy bits of whimsy, or they encourage the kids to play with what they see. Biographical tidbits and explainers are in the back, labeled “artifacts”, though how well a toddler will sit through it is, ah, still under study here.

Rating: *\*\*\

Rhapsody in blues

So Sleepy Story
by Uri Shulevitz

Uri Shulevitz has racked up more awards than I can name, and his Benjamin of Tudela is my personal gold standard for mind-boggling achievements in kidlit. This is a less ambitious effort, but intriguing in its own way as he experiments with composition and color.

The spare text is just a few dreamy dabs of "sleepy sleepy" this and that, as a household is jarred into wakefulness by sudden music outside. The real story is the changing illustrations. I've noticed Shulevitz likes to shift styles as the mood or story suits him, and to my untrained eye, it looks much like Picasso's blue period, with its seeping ceruleans and indigos for a drowsy feel.

As the dishes and toys awaken, we get a dose of late Cubism, with its fractured picture plane, boxy shapes and sparse dabs of color. For the most part, though, his palette is still subdued and shadowy, as if the room were only faintly illuminated by a nightlight.

The book's dedication mentions Lyonel Feininger, a member of the  Blaue Reiter group of Expressionists who also taught at the Bauhaus, a famous center for art and architecture in pre-fascist Germany. I only know that because I Wikipedia'd him, but it provoked several "ahas!" as it recalled long-ago art history lectures.

So there you have it: an ode to Expressionism, but with a Minimalist story. Its somnolent feel is  just right for a quiet night's reading.

Rating: *\*\*\*\

POETRY FRIDAY Smallest voices of the Holocaust

Terezin was the concentration camp gussied up for Red Cross inspectors and propaganda films about "relocated" Jews in their "model ghetto." Children attended school, where teachers encouraged art and poetry. More than 4,000 drawings and 42 poems survived, becoming the property of the State Jewish Museum in Prague.

The children didn't fare as well: of the 15,000 who passed through Terezin, fewer than 100 came back. The rest perished from famine or disease or were shipped to Auschwitz.

The following is from a collection of the children's poems and drawings, "I Never Saw Another Butterfly" originally translated into English in 1971, then expanded in 1993; it appears to be out of print now.

Terezin

by Mif, 1944

The heaviest wheel rolls across our foreheads
To bury itself deep somewhere inside our memories.

We've suffered here more than enough,
Here in this clot of grief and shame,
Wanting a badge of blindness
To be a proof for their own children.

A fourth year of waiting, like standing above a swamp
From which any moment might gush forth a spring.

Meanwhile, the rivers flow another way,
Another way,
Not letting you die, not letting you live.

And the cannons don't scream and the guns don't bark
And you don't see the blood here. Nothing, only silent hunger.
Children steal the bread here and ask and ask and ask
And all would wish to sleep, keep silent and just to go to sleep again ...

The heaviest wheel rolls across our foreheads
To bury itself deep somewhere inside our memories.

POETRY FRIDAY Empire State Building

Poet J. Patrick Lewis teamed with National Geographic to pay homage to the world's great architecture in Monumental Verses. Some, like odes to the Great Wall and Pyramids, are in concrete poetry that take their subject's shape. This one struck me for the way it captured my favorite city, both its geography and busy rhythm.

Empire State Building

I am an American boy, standing up to the world.
I sleep the city sleeps. We dream
     the riveter's dream, held island-fast.
I wake to taxi alarms.
I am a 102-stop elevator ride to heaven.
I am ten million bricks of unshakable faith.
I capture imagination at its peak.
I hugged King Kong, he hugged me back.
I look down on Broadway for a work of art,
     the Fulton Fish Market for a slice of life,
     United Nations Headquarters for a little peace.
It's lonely up here without my twin brothers,
     the World Trade Center Towers.
Wait here on my doorstep, Central Park,
     while I look over Harlem.
I am an American boy, face to face with the world.

Update: As usual, Kelly at Big A little a is kind enough to compile links to all the other Poetry Friday contributors.

Guided tour

Museum Trip

by Barbara Lehman

It's no secret that kidlets "read" illustrations, mostly by puzzling out the visual clues and piecing together a narrative, even if makes sense only to them.

There aren't any words in this book, so it's up to parent and child to decide what goes on as a boy in a red hoodie makes his way through a museum  on a school trip. You follow that red hoodie off the bus and into a gallery with its sprinkling of recognizable masterpieces by Van Gogh, Matisse and many others.

The boy looks up after tying his shoe and his classmates have vanished. He wanders alone into a side exhibit of mazes and is suddenly transported into the meandering constructs. Here's where it gets murky -- is he imagining this, or is this a fantasy device?

Keep your eye on the hoody. The splash of crimson creates a visual trail of crumbs for readers, pulling our eyes along as the boy makes his way through the inky sketches on faded sienna parchents to a tower in the middle of the final maze.

Lehman brings us closer, closer, as we zoom in on the tower and the streaked, stained paper, until we peer through a keyhole to see a gold medal placed around his neck.

The perspective lurches back to reveal him standing over the exhibit, so the mystery remains intact. Did he really get a gold medal? Where is it? Keep your eye on ... well, you know.

And as the museum director waves all the kids goodbye, what's that around his neck?

Now go back and reread the thing, looking again at the director early on. And scout for other clues -- every new reading will yield ones you missed, but they're often in the how and not the what.

The figures are flatly drawn, and when the boy appears alone on an otherwise blank, white page, you're drawn to his expressions of surprise, confusion or happiness. The keyhole page is especially brilliant, as if we're peeking through our own world into the mysterious one of the maze.

When he's in the landscape, he becomes a small, lost figure as wings of the museum lurch out of view or staircases lead away from us, creating a labyrinthian space that echoes the mazes. Lehman uses perspective sparingly and with a handful of straight lines and angles, creating a sense of movement that keeps pages turning without bogging us down in detail.

Yet the story that Lehman draws is pleasantly complex and visually exciting, aiming at both adult and kid so that each one reads at their respective level.

Rating: *\*\*\

Painting with words

Through Georgia's Eyes

by Rachel Rodriguez; illustrated by Julie Paschkis

You went to the exhibit, you bought the poster. Maybe you saw the biopic on PBS or have read other biographies about her.

This one's better.

Georgia O'Keeffe changed the way we look at contemporary art; not just American art or women artists. We expect what we see to be larger than life but intimate, to reveal what we overlook every day, but what cannot be captured on film; she came down firmly on the side of timeless images versus what's merely frozen in time, like a snapshot.

So it makes sense that a children's picture book should slip off the constraints of dates and timelines in favor of a poetic pastiche of images. We follow Georgia from birth to old age, from Wisconsin to New York to her beloved New Mexico, but instead of her glory fading into infirmity, she gains vigor as her artistic vision matures and her talent ripens.

And this is how her many fans -- myself included -- remember her; more graceful, commanding and revered with every beloved wrinkle. 

Paschkis captures what she can in paper collages, but its Rodriguez' prose that brings the artist to life:

Georgia expresses feelings in her own way. Words work. But for her, the color blue says it better.
Or red. Or a seashell.
A pale bone.
Sunset.

Rating: *\*\*\*\