Book Buds Kidlit Reviews

BookFest Mania!

Look who attended the Los Angeles Times annual Festival of Books today:

Me. Yes, me. I actually left the house and ventured further than the grocery store for once.

Only there are no books in this picture. Just a slightly battered but greatly coveted red balloon.

What you also can't see is the magic bracelet (okay, wristband) bestowed by a powerful wizard (uh, editor) so I could whisk past the lines into a secret chamber for a panel discussion.

There, I learned all kinds of enchantments for writing successful kiddie books. But I shall reveal those later ...

First, you must endure author photos! And personal anecdotes! Because you can never have enough of those, especially from me. Because this is my blog.

So there.

Look, look how close I got to Lauren Child, without a zoom lens even. Doesn't she look like someone you'd want your daughter to spend a whole lot of time with?

She's the writer and illustrator of the Charlie and Lola books and cartoon, in case you were wondering. Big stuff.

But this woman is who I want to be in my next life:

Robin Preiss Glasser, illustrator of "Fancy Nancy" and many other cool books in her distinctive hand. She complimented my glasses, but I admitted I really long for ones with rhinestones in a funkier color. Ah well.

Ms. Preiss Glasser has a request. Can someone please put a nice review on Amazon for her? There's a nasty one there now, apparently. Horrors!

Actually, Amazon was the word of the day. I've been a dummy and haven't put too many of my reviews there. That's all anybody seemed to care about. Are your reviews on Amazon?

Um, well, they sure will be.

But never mind all that. Here's Marc Kompaneyets, of "The Squishiness of Things," which I reviewed here and here.

Pity this poor man. I come running up to him screaming "You're Marc Kompaneyets!" since he might've forgotten that. It's never a bad thing to remind someone of their own name, I always say.

And then I, a 42-year-old, reasonably composed woman, began to leak more blubber than a decomposing whale. After rambling about my blog, wandering off and returning for his photo, I left the man in peace. I hope he's recovered.

This fine fellow is Jim Weiss, a storyteller whose tapes we've been buying since before we had kids.  Good stuff, but the sound system was so loud it made the baby cry. Missed the rest.

But he had at least one rapt fan in the family.

But the real reason you're still reading is to learn the great secret of writing/illustrating books. I attended a panel with four writers and illustrators, but ... alas ... the time is late, the spell is unraveling, and my tap-tapping on this keyboard is keeping the household awake.

Tune in on Monday ...

POETRY FRIDAY Picture a poem

By Joyce Sidman; illustrated by Michelle Berg

Okay, I'm joining the "Poetry Friday" meme. Finding poetry that breaks free of the monotony of rhyming couplets or Seuss rip-offs is hard to do, so I feel obligated to highlight anything that holds up to repeated scrutiny.

I can't promise every Friday will bring such a review, and certainly none will be quite like this multi-layered story about a cat and a dog making friends during a rain shower.

Sidman wrote it as concrete poetry, where the lines take shape as pictures.  Watch for free verses buried in the grass or woven among leaves and branches or circling the cat and dog.

She found a fortuitous partner in Berg, who used simple shapes and flat colors to keep our focus on the words. But the best feat is with the typography, a favorite trick of graphic designers even when it's not so central to the storytelling.

A cloud starts out  with a few pale, wispy words:

just
a tiny puff
a swirl of frosting-
cloud

and builds to a bold-faced, fat crescendo:

THUNDER-PLUMPED SEETHING MASS OF GLOOMY FUMING
BLACK BOTTOMED STORM BREWING

This one's kept my son busy hunting threads of the story and he can't even read.

Rating: *\*\*\

Pardon my dust

I apologize for some tweaking going on with pics of the book covers. I was doing it a weird way, creating my own copy of each cover and then linking to Amazon. It was time consuming, but prettier, I thought.

But the hubby freaked when he saw how much bandwidth that was using. Whoops! What I don't know about the Web will kill me one of these days.

So I started using the Amazon sales boxes, which they service (i.e., it's their bandwidth, not mine) but I hated the aesthetics.

So now I've joined Barnes and Noble's affiliates program. It appears to my untrained eye that the graphics are identical to what I'd been doing, just without the text wrapping. Good enough.

I have no brand loyalty here. Both online retailers are excellent and the kickbacks commissions are so teeny, it makes no difference to me where people shop.

Back tomorrow with Poetry Friday. If you have a moment, stop by my other site and bid it farewell.

What's in a name?

Art

by Patrick McDonnell

The creator of the beloved Mutts comic is back with a book about a mischevious boy and his paintbrush, with a wink at Harold and the Purple Crayon. Alas, I made the terrible error of reading the Website hyperbole:

Patrick was delighted to escape his normal once-a-week color limitations and made sure he used every color he had on hand.

Oh, hello, I saw only primary colors. Maybe Pearl Paint had a shortage of watercolor pigments that week.

Okay, setting aside my anal retentiveness, this is a spirited, quick read that feels like McDonnell dashed it off in a light moment. Art and his art dribble, dash, swirl and streak whereever his imagination takes him:

He Zigs
He Zags
He really gets wired
There's no stopping Art ...
When Art is inspired

The verses rise like popcorn; airy and quick, zinging to a happy ending when curator Mom puts his opus on the fridge, because she "Loves Art." Aww.

Mutts fans will recognize McDonnell's signature simplicity and brilliant use of white space as the whole book becomes Art's canvas. Even the end papers bear his splashes and lines.

But while the ending endears, there's no getsya-right-here feeling as with his Christmas book, The Gift of Nothing, but I guess you can't expect perfection every time.

Rating: *\*\*\

Girl Power!

Marvelous Mattie: How Margaret E. Knight Became an Inventor

by Emily Arnold McCully 

As a child, I loved stories about iconoclastic women who accomplished extraordinary things. I sought out and devoured every juvenile biography I could find on Amelia Earhart, Harriet Tubman, Hellen Keller. If I’d come across Margaret E. Knight in my childhood readings, I would have pursued her too.

Born in 1838, precocious Mattie Knight began inventing things at a young age using the tools she inherited from her father, including toys for herself and her brothers and an innovative foot warmer for her mother. Because Mattie’s family was poor, at 12 she joined her mother and brothers in New Hampshire’s textile mills. While working there, she created a safer loom that saved lives, but didn’t patent it because she thought no one would give a patent to a young girl.

The design for her most celebrated invention, a machine that made paper bags, originally was stolen and patented by someone else. The story ends with Mattie waging a successful court battle to prove she was the rightful creator of the device, establishing her own company and working as “a professional inventor for the rest of her life.”

Detailed watercolor-and-ink images in muted tones illustrate the story, accompanied on several pages by black-and-white line drawings of Mattie’s inventions, including actual sketches from Mattie’s patent application for her paper-bag machine.

The story reflects misogynistic 19^th-century views (“A girl couldn’t make that!”), even as Mattie proves them wrong. It’s a great lesson for kids that no one should be discounted for reasons like gender. Heck, why limit it to kids – this should be required reading for grown-ups out there who need a refresher course.

Note: reviewed by Deb Clark

Rating: *\*\*\*\

Spring Has Sprung

By George Shannon; illustrated by Sam Williams

Now that spring is here, my daughters are thrilled by the flowers blooming in our yard. My one-year-old picks every dandelion she sees. My older girl, who’s 4, chooses flowers to arrange in a vase. The highlight for me is the day we made flower crowns out of irises, camellias and those pretty red and yellow blooms from a bulb my husband filched out of the neighbor’s yard.

Busy in the Garden shares that delight in growing things with 24 infectious poems that celebrate gardens and garden-related activities. The best selections have a cadence so catchy the beat is palpable. Some of the poems contain puns (Celery dance?) and others are riddles that might be a little complex for younger kids:

A Riddle Garden
Mama planted summer hats.
Papa planted thread.
Sister planted ink stamps.
Brother planted bread.

(Answers: straw, cotton, potato, wheat)

Simplistic, watercolor illustrations of gleeful gardeners, festive flora and frolicking fauna fill the white space around many of the poems, with a handful of full-page paintings providing a pleasant contrast.

Share this book with your favorite growing things.

Note: Reviewed by Deb Clark

Rating: *\*\*\

April in the Forest

The new issue of The Edge of the Forest is up and running and features some new contributors. Just thought I'd let ya'll know, in case you missed all the other bloggers who write for it or link to it. I know I'm a day late with this, but my brain's still on the East Coast while my tired bod's back in CA.

And so are the kids, who, despite their compact size, are not particularly portable.

Back tomorrow with a review from Deb Clark, which I managed to delete first thing this morning in one of my less lucid states.

Hope everyone had a Happy Passover/Easter/Spring Break/Whatever. I didn't have nearly enough chocolate-dipped macaroons to make mine worthwhile.

-- Anne Levy

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: *\*\

Flocking to mocking birds

Mocking Birdies

by Annette Simon

There's a deceptive simplicity about this back-and-forth between two birds. One's red, the other's blue, and the idea is that you read one color and your kid reads the other as they mimic each other.

Or, in my case, I read both, but in different voices. But before I could stop myself, I took on a cadence, and began to notice the story's singsong quality:

be a good egg
be a good egg
change your tune.
change your tune.
stop singing my song!
stop singing my song!

In the book, the lines are also staggered, so the colors and layout work in harmony with its jazzy meter. Eventually, the two birds join up, chirping purple lyrics, until a purple bird joins them as their songs spread this way and that across the page. Even the wires where they perch become bars of music.

Simon, who worked in advertising, channels Milton Glaser, the guru of modern design with his "I [heart] NY" and "LOVE" logos. Her minimalist style makes the most of a few simple shapes and primary colors surrounded by ample white space. The way the figures appear on the page is part of the book's musicality, with their own visual rhythm.

That's just to say there's more than meets the eye here, and more to the ear as well.

Rating: *\*\*\

A crow gets catty

The Wishing Ball

by Elisa Kleven

Somewhere out in the big, bad world is a fickle tabby named Nellie, who kept me under her paw for 13 years before she got fed up and ran off last May. So when I picked up this book about a stray cat named Nellie, my lower lip started that whole quivering thing I really hate.

My Nellie probably got nabbed by a neighbor who moved, or gobbled by coyotes. This Nellie nestles in an old peach box and wishes for a happy home. A mean ol' crow decides to trick her into believing a brightly painted ball is a star to wish upon, if only she could catch it. Off she dashes, in search of that star and her wishes come true.

Nellie makes a friend -- a crocodile named Ernst, from other Kleven books -- and gets even with crow, just so y'know. Which kinda got me right here (pounds heart). Sniff.

Kleven's watercolor and collage illustrations have that childlike, done-by-a-10-year-old look, with a palette borrowed from Crayola and teeming landscapes that twist and recede into the distance, as Nellie scampers off into the big, busy world.

Or, you know, into the croc's supper dish. Oh wait, that's my version. Maybe it's a good thing I've never written kiddie stories.

Other books by this author:
The Whole Green World

Rating: *\*\