Book Buds Kidlit Reviews

When some bunny loves you

Rabbit's Gift: A Fable from China
by George Shannon; illustrated by Laura Dronzek

Harcourt, Inc.

The rabbit in this story starts out with an extra turnip, and winds up with a lot of friends. He passes along the extra turnip to Donkey, who he imagines is lonely. Donkey--not knowing it came from Rabbit--passes the surprise treat along to another animal friend he thinks might need it more. And so on, until it comes full circle.

An end note states that variations of the story have turned up in places as different as Germany and Jordan, and likely exist "among and beyond these cultures."

The understated acrylics cover a lot of ground emotionally, from the animals' kindly nature to the frosty landscape. You can almost feel a chill in the air (though maybe I have the heat turned too low) in Dronzek's expressionistic blending of blues, grays and whites. A dab of yellow in rabbit's white fur tells us something about his disposition--a ray of warmth in the harsh winter.

Rating: *\*\*\

One savvy chick

Out of the Egg
by Tina Matthews

It's hard to be vindictive. You want so much to get back at the rude slobs who make your life miserable, the friends who leave you in the lurch. But is revenge really sweet?

Matthews updates the Little Red Hen and in a few lines plunges her into our modern ethical conundrums, where leaving cat, pig and rat in the cold won't do. Yet she doesn't let those bums off the hook, either.

Y'see, Little Red Hen not only tends her seed, then seedling, and then the tree, she hatches an egg. And the chick wants to play with the cat, pig and rat's offspring, only Mom's still sore about all the work the parent animals refused to do.

And isn't life like that? You don't want your kid playing with X because his parents are jerks. But how do you say no?

"Mum, that's MEAN!" says the little chick, and I felt sheepish right along with her. But how she gets back at the others -- and pulls the story full circle -- I'll leave for you to discover. It's clever and witty, and not mean at all.

Matthews pairs the story's simplicity with bare-bones woodcuts; heavy black outlines and splotches of red or green keep the eye riveted to the key figures. Even so, we get the clear idea that Pig's a trailer trash slut, Cat's a status-obsessed yuppie and Rat's, well, a rat.

Rating: *\*\*\

No cages for these Cajuns

In honor of a legendary place, I'm taking on three reviews at once. Think I can do it?

All take place in rural Loozyanna, where my mother lived briefly in her 20s, and where locals used to feel the top of her head for horns.

They're a bold, brash, bigger-than-life people, alright, and not afraid to embrace myths, superstitions and the like--though, as in the above example, maybe not always so charmingly.

Still, three new picture books capture the best of the Bayou, from the bouncy, punctuated rhythms of their speech, their love of fast music and sloooow cooking, and the outlandish, outsized similes and metaphors that pepper their conversation.

Those dirty rats!

A Celebration: The Year of the Boar starts Feb. 18th.

The Great Race: The Story of the Chinese Zodiac
Written by Dawn Casey; illustrated by Anne Wilson

I knew the Chinese had a thing about cats. Hey, cat lovers, don't blame me, okay? I'm just telling you how it is. The Chinese and cats? No way!

So I knew Cat was in trouble from the moment this story opened.  The Jade Emperor, who rules the sky, sets all the animals against each other in a great race. Finish first, and he'll name the first year of his new calendar after you.

I won't tell you what wiles Cat and his best buddy Rat use to sneak ahead of the others. Let's just say there's a reason they're no longer on speaking terms.

The story is surprisingly suspenseful (though not scary) and Casey has fun with animals' personalities. Don't miss the end notes; lots of great stuff on other Chinese holidays and a full spread about all the animals, their traits and which years they fall on.

I'm noticing some similarities between the illustrations in Barefoot Books; most use the same warm, enticing colors and childlike renderings, even across different media. Wilson uses paper collage with acrylic and printed backgrounds, but I found myself wishing for more of an overtly Eastern feel to it.

Rating: *\*\*\

POETRY FRIDAY A fabulous translation

The Hare and the Tortoise and other Fables of La Fontaine
Translated by Ranjit Bolt; illustrated by Giselle Potter

Please don't snort, but I never heard of La Fontaine. I took only a single semester of college French and nearly flunked. Kelly of Big A little a is super-smart on the topic, and I briefly thought, hey, I'll just put up a link to her review and be done with it.

But that's not why they ply me with free books, is it? It's so I can dazzle you in my own unique way about the utter fabulousness of these fables. Get, fabulous fables? They have the same Latin root word, and ... oh, never mind.

La Fontaine was a French writer in the 1600s who translated ancient fables into French verse. Only one of his sources was Aesop, as I learned in the introduction. Don't I feel smart!

Now this fellow Bolt's taken La Fontaine's work and translated a passel into plain English, a feat that required updating the syntax, flogging the rhymes until they obeyed, and making a decent stab at meter. English is a scrappier language for rhymes and rhythms compared to those slick Latinate tongues, and nobody since John Donne has managed to make it sound like it just popped out of your mouth that way, unless you are a rap star.

Dishing it out

The Adventures of Dish and Spoon
by Mini Grey

Wanna see me dish out some tableware puns? Sure, you say, fork 'em over! But this story goes all to pot, so I have to pan it. Hah! I'm bowled over. Even my knife jokes are cutting edge.

Hahahaha! I'm so forking funny.

But I'm mad at Grey. Traction Man was so off-the-wall hilarious, probably anything she tried next would fail to live up to my inflated expectations. But this melancholy take on the “Cat and the Fiddle” nursery rhyme had me seriously confused about her intentions. Is it a love-conquers-all fable or a satire of the American Dream?

Let me back up. The story picks up where the rhyme ends; Dish and Spoon run off on a warm June evening and leap into the ocean, a Liberty Dollar moon glows as they drift off:

I didn't know
where we were going,
and I didn't care.
I knew Dish
would take us there.

They wind up in New York in what appears to be the Depression era, where they strike it rich with a Vaudeville act. You know they're rich because dollar bills float down like confetti and there are still more shiny coins around to drive home the point that money suddenly matters. A lot.

Not to mention the expensive look to the book itself: full bleeds on every page for Grey's signature mixed-media creations, with their gleefully warped perspectives and exaggerated characters. Very nice. But I digress.

So money, being the root of guess-what, leads them into all kinds of trouble. They borrow from loan sharks, portrayed as knives, and then rob a bank. Dish gets broken; Spoon does hard time in Alcatraz.

When they reunite in what appears to be London 25 years later, they resume their Vaudeville career, though admission is free – in case you missed the whole point about, you know, money.

First, some nits to pick:

1. Vaudeville's days were pretty much waning by then. Radio or movies, yes. Broadway, definitely;
2. The steering wheel is on the right side, which would be the wrong side in America, no?
3. A hatbox says Tiffany's. Not only is it beige instead of blue, but Tiffany's doesn't make hats;
4. A Macy's hatbox is all wrong. Macy's only went upscale in the '80s. In the '30s it would've been too lowbrow for the ritzy pair;
5. From New York, Dish is suddenly tied to railroad tracks in what appears to be Arizona (tip-off: a saguaro), and by the next frame they're back in the city to rob a bank;
6. The Spoon does 25 years in Alcatraz, the notorious maximum-security prison (!) in San Francisco. Never mind the first-time-offender thing. San Francisco? Alcatraz?

In short, just about every idiotic cliché about America is somehow squeezed in here, and none of it's funny. This is a Brit's-eye view of life in America, grasping at some larger truth about that outsized country across the pond.

The one message my persnickety son does get from it, to be fair, is that Spoon loves Dish even if she's been smashed and glued back together. For a kid who screams whenever ink smudges or a page crinkles, it's good to see that broken things -- including hearts -- can be mended and cherished.

Even so, I'm vowing revenge on Grey's unsympathetic depiction of Depression-era America. Maybe I should counter with one about selfish teacups who hoard sugar during London's Blitz.

Okay, it's a kid's book. I should lighten up, right? There's something wrong with me that I deconstruct a picture book. I guess I like my verisimilitude straight up, thank you very much.

Rating: *\

A dog's life

No Room for Napoleon

by Adria Meserve

Napoleon's a bossy dachsund who beaches his rowboat on the sweet, green isle of his dreams and befriends the natives: a bunny, a bear and a crab. They start off hospitably, but he then expects their treats. And play becomes work -- as in, build my castle!

This canine conquistador even keeps an eye on them through his telescope. Bad doggy.

After the whole isle's nothing but a waste heap, the oppressed trio flees to a sunnier spot, only to be pursued by a remorseful Napoleon, who makes amends with environmental remediation and a few games of fetch.

Sure, you can substitute bossy white folks landing on [fill in name of land mass here] and assuming it was uninhabited because the locals dressed funny or prayed to an unfamiliar deity.

Me, I saw crab, bear and bunny as total suckers for not seeing what's coming. And doubly so for scampering off instead of staging a rebellion and sticking a skewer through that hot dog.

Longtime readers (there must be two of you by now) will know I'm once again reading too much into a children's book. Not all of them are thinly veiled metaphors for everything that goes wrong in the adult world. But pretty close.

Rating: *\*\

Understanding Aesop

Aesop's Fables

Selected and illustrated by Lisbeth Zwerger

I don't remember why I was telling my son "The Tortoise and The Hare" recently, but I do recall a bell dinging that I had an Aesop book around here someplace.

Sure enough, the book languished in a pile in my office. Once in our grubby paws, however, there was no stopping us and we leafed through them all.

I don't know if this compilation is the most complete or not, but the main ones seem to be here: the city mouse and his country cousin, the milkmaid counting her unhatched chicks, the fox and his sour grapes, plus a few less familiar ones, like a satyr and a man dining together.

Zwerger distills the stories down to their barest bones, allowing Aesop's folk wisdom to shine through without the fancy footwork that bogs down some of the Grimms brothers' tales. Zwerger, who lives in Switzerland, peoples her watercolors with Alpine-looking peasants with ruddy cheeks and round bellies, but her landscapes have a subdued Eastern feel to them.

Each tale is typeset on a soothing white background with its illustration on a facing page for an uncluttered layout. Flap copy states this is a reissue of an 1989 classic translated from the German, but it's one of those timeless books that belongs on every shelf.

After all, you never know when some little person might ask about that pokey ol' Tortoise.

Rating: *\*\*\*\

Airborne at last

Learning to Fly

by Sebastian Meschenmoser

All you need to make a penguin fly is a sharp pencil and a sharper wit. In absolute deadpan, Meschenmoser explains how he took in a penguin who'd crash landed one wintry day after other birds convinced it that it couldn't fly.

The two bond over fish sticks and the penguin snuggles in his sink, and they team up to re-take the skies. Meschenmoser sketches himself in full slouch, scruffy beard and all, timing the penguin in a stress test in the dryer or launching it like an arrow.

The book was originally published in German, and in translation it keeps its Teutonic sensibility in the way it takes its absurdity seriously. Even the happy ending -- a colony of penguins flies overhead -- has a degree of fatalism about it.

Meschenmoser added only spot color to certain sketches, aiming for an expressionistic touch, and the spare layout underscores the story's stark realism.

Here's Meschenmoser in real life, with a real penguin, taking himself way too seriously -- but in a mocking way. Perfect. While marketed to kids, I'm betting adults will more readily relish this fable about not letting the turkeys get you down.

Note: Kelly at Big A little a also reviewed this book, and points out penguins are the "it" animal these days.

Rating: *\*\*\*\

Chicken soup for the canine soul

Three French Hens

by Margie Palatini; illustrated by Richard Egielski

Colette, Poulette and Fifi are supposed to be on their way to a certain mademoiselle's true love in Paris, but somehow wind up in New York. Mon dieu!

These hens, decked out in heels and chapeaus, search for their mistress' beloved Philippe Renard. They settle for the friendless Phil Fox in his decrepit tenement, who's amazed when three free dinners strut into his humble home.

Hilarity ensues. Okay, just had to say that. But that's pretty much what happens as they take over his life and give him and his abode an extreme makeover to, um, not die for.

You know Phil's not going to eat them -- this is a Christmas story, after all. And it had me smiling all the way up until they refused gifts from him. Ugh, I thought, here comes some corny message about giving, right? Wrong! The birds celebrate Hanukkah -- they're kosher! Hahahaha!

Ohmigawd, I'm still laughing. Sorry for the spoiler. This one's funny.

Rating: *\*\*\