Book Buds Kidlit Reviews

When Frogs Fly

A Frog Thing
by Eric Drachman; illustrated by James Muscarello

by Deb Clark

Children are literal creatures, and evidently so are young frogs, or at least the one in this book. Little Frank has been told by his parents he can do anything he sets his mind to. What Frank wants to do most is fly, which leaves mom and dad frog the unenviable task of scaling back on their initial encouragement. Flying, they explain, is not a frog thing. Swimming and hopping, those are frog things. But flying, that’s more of a bird thing.

Frank, refusing to let his dream be shattered by the crushing weight of reality, becomes even more determined to fly. He keeps trying, leaping and flapping and flapping and leaping. But it’s some courageous swimming by Frank that leads a grateful bird to help him soar through the sky. In the end, Frank accepts his limitations and devotes himself to becoming a great swimmer.

The soft yet vividly colored illustrations, rendered in gouache paint (a type of watercolor – I had to look it up), colored pencil and pastel, are charming. I especially enjoyed how skillfully and humorously the characters’ expressions and body language conveyed their emotions – a real advantage for young children who don’t yet read.

The book comes with a well-executed CD containing a dramatic reading of the story accompanied by sound effects and music. Drachman is the author of three other books, including the award-winning Leo the Lightning Bug and Ellison the Elephant.

A Frog Thing is a sweet story and a good one for kids. It’s a lesson that all children must eventually learn, while also a tough one for parents to impart. I want my daughters to believe, at least for a few, charmed years, that they can do anything they set their minds to, including becoming mermaids or finding fairies in the lawn or having their favorite superhero come to live with us so they can save the world together.

Rating: *\*\

From Arabic to Zulu

Can You Greet the Whole Wide World?: 12 Common Phrases in 12 Different Languages

by Lezlie Evans; illustrated by Denis Roche

Bonjour! Guten Tag! Shalom! Ciao!

I'm on a multi-culti roll lately. At least there can be peace on the pages of kiddie books, if not elsewhere. This is a short, sweet book on how to greet your friends and get your day started in 12 different languages, including Hindi, Chinese and Spanish.

Each page has a rhyming quatrain to introduce a phrase or word such as "How are you?" or "please" followed by a list of translations. On the opposite page, an orange cat dressed up as a boy does all the waving and greeting and asking and thanking to his multi-culti friends and grown-ups.

An orange cat, of course, keeps things racially neutral, in keeping with the text's theme of inclusion.

Everybody gets their turn being #1, so while the cat says "hello" in Hebrew (shalom), he asks, "What's your name?" in Arabic (ma ismok). Sounds fair to me.

The flat, faux naive illustrations in straight-off-the-palette primary colors keep things simple and cheerful.

Rating: *\*\

That Toddlin' Town

Wow, I can finally blog about our Big Move to Chicago. Here's the hubby's version of his mid-life epiphany. Me, I'm just along for the ride.

And, oh yeah, to do all that packing/unpacking stuff.

So postings are reduced to M-W-F while we get the household boxed up and hauled away. Most publishers were already alerted to hold shipments, so I've been extra lonely the last few weeks as even the UPS man says his sayonaras.

Once in the Windy City, I have some big plans for my little blog. I'll let you know all my surprises as soon as I think of them.

Thanks for hanging in there with me.

To market, to market

A Day at the Market

by Sara Anderson

Sometimes you know a place so well, you memorize it like a song in your heart. Such is Anderson's obvious feel for Seattle's Pike Place Market, where she's lived and shopped and created for 25 years.

Open this dazzling book and plunge into the bustling farmer's market, where vendors hawk and customers scurry and even a hobo dumpster dives. Color explodes off pages of cut paper, with windows that offer peeps into other pages and crowded new vistas.

It's a joy to discover so worthwhile a book from a smaller publisher (Handprint Books), particularly when this came to me once again via the L.A. Times' slush pile. I've been trying to convince those smart, sensible folks to let me review kidlit for the Book Review, but, alas, they lack space in their storied pages. Their loss!

I've visited this national treasure only once, as a special treat for my 40th birthday. Our pixelated photos can't do justice to what Anderson captures with rhyming text that rips along in a syncopated approximation of street noises and market chatter:

Bakers baking,
heaven lingers ...
Plain or frosted?
Cinnamon fingers.

In a word: Yummy.

Rating: *\*\*\

Today's malevolent chortle

Ellen's 11-Star Spectacular Superdeluxe Hotel

by Larry Schwarz; illustrated by Kelly Denato

What's funnier, taking swipes at celebrities or white trash? Gosh, that's a tough one.

I consider ridiculing either to be art forms, one of life's churlish pleasures right up there with not coming to a complete stop or ruining the punchlines to dirty jokes. It's also one of my core parenting values that no child is too young to be inculcated in the proper way to snicker.

I therefore embraced Ellen, an imaginative and wistful lass who revels at a resort and its exotic visitors and then, with a guilty shrug, admits it's really a seedy, nearly lifeless motel her parents own in Carson City, Nevada.

Of course, if she merely lived there -- implying she was homeless -- that would be tragic. But owning? Heh. That gives us permission to chortle malevolently at the dual illustrations; Denato's chartreuse-hued, starry fantasy world that Ellen dreamily conjures versus the "well, actually" pages done in dusty browns with a splash of institutional green.

We meet the preening glitterati who populate Ellen's imagination; really the usual goofy layabouts and fat, dowdy locals. Again, which is funnier? You decide.

This diminutive Walter Mitty makes the most of a radial tire and feather duster, which undergo transformations to make Cinderella's pumpkin jealous. Then someone steals the crown jewels of Sedelbania (Mrs. Sedelberg loses her luggage) and Ellen dons detective garb. Voila! A gumshoe is born.

Schwarz is a former child actor and a writer/producer type; you can read his impressive bio here or take a peek at his kiddie TV shows here and here. Why someone who makes big bucks in animation should stoop to a humble picture book is beyond me; the same can be said of Denato, with a similar portfolio of animation and even album covers. This is a first for both.

What is it about kidlit that screams "validation" to people like this?

Back to the review: Funny or not to worldly wise grown-ups, I'm not sure how much kids get it. The "it" being the toxic cocktail of socioeconomics, geography and even the red/blue dichotomy that make the pictorial snarkiness work, with digs at how both halves live. Because this isn't one of those books that celebrates human foible or loves us despite our flaws.

This is just plain wicked. Heheheh.

I love it.

Rating: *\*\*\

Busy. Sigh.

I wish I were on vacation or had some excuse for so few posts.

Truth is, the baby's decided she needs to nurse every 30 seconds around the clock. Until I figure out a way to have my boob in one room and the rest of me in another, I'm trapped.

The good news: tomorrow is her first birthday and I'm celebrating by going to lunch -- childless -- with my Mommy friends. That's one way to kick off the weaning process.

Suck on that, girlie.

See ya'll Monday. 

Making connections

Celebrate! Connections Among Cultures

by Jan Reynolds

Much digital ink has already been spilled about this fascinating collection of multi-culti photos of indiginous groups in such far-flung locales as the Himalayas, the Arctic, the Outback and the Sahara desert. Some of my favorite bloggers, Liz and Kelly and Camille, have lauded the way Reynolds links Americans to other peoples through our celebrations: the way we all play music of some sort, or decorate ourselves or prepare a special meal.

I'll let you read their thoughtful takes.

I pulled this book off the shelf last night because I like the way it makes the world a little smaller and brings us a little closer at a time when far-away troubles are making headlines and causing worries the world over. Okay, so nobody from any of the globe's hot zones are featured here, but it still got me kinda misty-eyed.

Reynolds, who lived among all the peoples she photographed, has a knack for bridging our differences and pulls together such disparate threads as Halloween costumes and Inuit hunting rituals. Her journalistic pics are what former colleagues of mine would've called storytellers, rather than the stylized, artsy-fartsy compositions you might find in coffee table tomes.

But mostly I just like it because, while people's celebrations are timeless and universal, the book struck me as topical too.

Sometimes we all need reminding that while big things -- religion, politics, economics -- separate us, it's the small things that really matter, like how we gather to give thanks or greet people we haven't seen in a while or mark the amazing journey from boy to man or pass along our hard-won lore to our children.

Here's wishing everyone a smaller, closer world. We certainly need it.

Rating: *\*\*\

Top of the heap

Mia's Story

by Michael Foreman

Let's say you were to open an artist's sketchbook to see what he's scribbled there. You'd expect to see a few pen-and-ink doodles, some messy notes, perhaps a few fuller pictures that have been fleshed out and colored in.

You might feel a thrill peering in on a work in progress, hoping to glimpse the whirring gears of a creative mind. That's what I felt reading this journal of Foreman's encounter with a young girl who lives in a garbage dump outside Santiago, Chile.

Upbeat, redemptive stories about girls living in garbage dumps surely don't come along every day, but Foreman shows us what captivated him about the family. As he writes on the back flap:

"For Manuel and his fellow villagers, the trash was a crop to be harvested, recycled, and made useful once more."

Mia is Manuel's only daughter, whom Foreman encounters when his bus to the Andes mountains breaks down in her village. A few cross-hatchings here, a wash of blue or beige there is enough to conjure up the splay of rickety hovels that pass for a village or Manuel's rusting truck. The story is scrawled on the scraps of paper:

"Sometimes Papa comes home happy with money in his pockets, and sometimes he comes home sad with none."

Foreman is the master of small gestures, as Manuel hugs his daughter or pulls a puppy out of his jacket for her, his thin face a gaunt landscape of hardship despite his grin. The puppy soon runs off, and Mia's pursuit into the mountains leads her to a white flower that she brings home and cultivates, until after a couple years it covers the dingy village in snowy blooms and offers a chance at another source of income.

The flower is probably some sort of lily, an appropriate metaphor for redemption and purity. Because the chance encounter isn't just between the artist and an innocent, ever-hopeful Mia, but between her world and ours, where our assumptions about what it takes to be happy seem startlingly provincial.

Each scrap of paper in the artist's notebook becomes a passport into another culture, where wealth is measured by how well you enjoy what you have.

Rating: *\*\*\*\

Value added? Depends on your values

The “value added” books have been moving in, and there goes the neighborhood.

You know the kind. They’re from publishers gone astray, who’ve led authors and illustrators down the garden path of gimmickry. These books can dress up like a skank ho, with doodads pouring out of their shrink wrapping like muffin tops over low-rise jeans.

The hubby’s been bringing them home by the boxload, these floosies of the kidlit world, with their puzzles, blocks, charms, chalk and – lest we not forget – stacks of CDs. They tumble onto the kitchen table, bright and loud and clashing, clamoring for my children’s attention, whispering sour nothings with their awkward meter, near-miss rhymes or “activities” that occupy some time but few brain cells.

Apparently, reading isn’t enough. You have to distract kids from learning actual words with stuff that has little or no writing, because we all know the only symbol that really matters is the capital S with a vertical line through it, $ee?

Oh, sure, I come across many quaint, traditional stories with such outmoded “features” as character arcs, plots, metaphor, subtext and even big words. They’re the Bohemian literary types renting a fifth-floor walk-up and subsisting on Ramen Supreme while the Value Addeds make all the money and fret about being properly accessorized.

POETRY FRIDAY Psalm 121

Okay, maybe a Bible verse turns some people off.  But we're in need of some spiritual uplift this week. Can't get into details, but some depressing news in the extended family these days.

This has long been the most comforting prayer for me, even before a chassidic rabbi at the local Chabad told me it was rich in kabbalistic meaning. His wife gave me a copy to place under Lael's isolette in the maternity ward, which the nurses were careful not to discard.

Among observant Jews, it's traditional for women in labor, new mothers and anyone seriously sick or hospitalized to keep a copy under their pillow or post it on their door.

After my father died, I'd recite this while hiking in the Santa Monica mountains. I later learned the ancient mystics would chant it from the peaks of the hills of Judea, believing it brought them closer to G-d.

Psalm 121: A Song of Ascents*

I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains;
From whence shall my help come?
My help cometh from the Lord,
Who made heaven and earth.

He will not suffer thy foot to be moved;
He that keepeth thee will not slumber.
Behold, He that keepeth Israel
Doth neither slumber nor sleep.

The Lord is thy keeper;
The Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand.
The sun shall not smite thee by day,
Nor the moon by night.

The Lord shall keep thee from all evil;
He shall keep thy soul.
The Lord shall guard thy going out and thy coming in,
From this time forth and forever.

Wishing you all a peaceful weekend.

*The translation is from the Jewish Publication Society of America.