Book Buds Kidlit Reviews

POETRY FRIDAY Ehlert's 'Oodles'

Oodles of Animals
Lois Ehlert
Harcourt, Inc.

Ah, joy of silly joys! What's more fun that curling up with a wiggledy-piggledy toddler and dazzling her with colors and rhymes that zing. She might even sit still for the whole book (I can dream, can't I?)

The wildly popular Ehlert doesn't need my help selling books (though I'm always happy to take a tiny commission should you order via the box above). Her latest features several familiar feathered, finned or furry friends per page, from the ever-popular penguins to a not-too-scary wolf.

Her cut-paper creations in vivid primary colors are a wonder to behold, as bold, geometric shapes come together as various animals, and who knew that hole punches and pinking shears could be put to such artsy uses. The poems also leap out for their cleverness and simplicity that should keep parents as amused as kiddies.

Here's a small sampling:

CHICKEN
If a chicken crossed
the road and rampled,
would the eggs she laid
be scrambled?

CATERPILLAR
A caterpillar's
future plan
includes a
butterfly wingspan

I particularly liked CATERPILLAR, as it forms the end papers, with numerous geometric caterpillars looking like gear parts from a mechanical drawing.

And there are several along the lines of CAT, which use the most obvious rhymes and still manage to sound fresh:

CAT
A cat
is a purr
wrapped up
in fur.

In a word: delightful.

Rating: *\*\*\*\

POETRY FRIDAY Getting a glump in your throat

I'm beginning to feel a personal connection to Don't Bump the Glump!: And Other Fantasies, and not just because I attended the fancy launch party last week.

A quick rewind: it's Shel Silverstein's first poetry collection and the only one with color illustrations, which HarperCollins is reissuing. It's a classic, full of jottings and doodles of a mad menagerie of made-up monsters, and doesn't need a review from me. Just thought you'd like a little sample, is all.

But about that personal connection. I'm on a diet. I empathize with some of these hungry monsters. Though I'd rather have a few cookies or a slice of pizza than a little kid, thanks. Too bony for me. (though I do tell my kids they're scrumptious ...)

The Bibely

The Bibely's habits are rather crude
He shuns all ordinary food
And rather enjoys
Girls and boys.
So when you sense him drawing near
Pour some ketchup in your ear
And pretend you're a roast
Or a poached egg on toast
Or a small piece of blueberry pie--
And maybe he'll walk right by.

POETRY FRIDAY Animal Poems by Valerie Worth

Animal Poems
Written by Valerie Worth; illustrated by Steve Jenkins
Farrar, Strauss & Giroux

reviewed by Ilene Goldman

The multimedia porcupine on the front of Animal Poems is actually cuddly-looking, inviting the reader into this collection of poetry with his direct gaze and slight smile.  Each illustration begs us to turn the page to find the collage Jenkins has concocted for the next poem. A penguin with pitch black feathers waddles on homemade ice-paper; an elephant whose wrinkled skin looks like crumpled, ironed paper trundles across a page; and a fuzzy-legged spider weaves her delicate web.  You’ll look again and again.

The late Valerie Worth’s poems are as deep and resonant as the images, but not as fanciful. This is a collection of free verse, not rhyming poetry; Worth's words evoke the essence of each animal without anthropomorphizing or imparting endearing traits.

We understand the dichotomy between a bear’s sweet looks and fearsome personality: “The bear’s fur / Is gentle but / His eye is not: / It burns our /Way, while / He walks right /” We hear right away that the bear on this page is not our teddy bear, not cuddly, not the bear of countless toddlers’ tales.  We feel the snake slithering,  “Loosed / From / Limbs to / Run like / Water, /”. And we want to fly with the wren “As though a stray / Leaf, fluttering over / The Grass…”

I generally indulge in picture books for the littlest reader, my 2-year old daughter, and I’ve often wondered how a picture book for older readers might fulfill educational needs and yet not feel like it is babying the reader.  Animal Poems answered my questions.  Free verse lacks the meter or rhyme of other kinds of poetry, achieving its lyricism in precise word choice and cadenced word flow.  For a middle school reader, it is hard to access precisely because it is so different from the understood paradigm.  Combined with Jenkins’ unique illustrations, Worth’s sparse yet suggestive poems more than speak for themselves.

I had some minor qualms which may reveal my shallow understanding of the classification of the animal world:  Are snail and spiders animals or insects?  Ultimately, I suppose it doesn’t matter: All Charlotte wants to do is look at the bear and the bat. I think she’ll be trying to make cut-paper collages any minute now!

Rating: *\*\*\

This book was a Cybils finalist. Check the full list here.

POETRY FRIDAY Jack Prelutsky's 'My Dog May Be A Genius'

My Dog May be a Genius
by Jack Prelutsky
Greenwillow

Prelutsky's tenure as the nation's first Children's Poet Laureate ends in May, when the Poetry Foundation announces his successor (no, I have no idea who's in the running). Publishers have been eager to cash in on the foundation's imprimatur and they'd slap a gold sticker on anything with his name on it, which isn't entirely Prelutsky's fault, even if I've chided him on this blog for it.

Fortunately, his career blazes on, and he has another collection of poems out before he goes back to merely being the performer with a thousand funny voices and the creator of rampantly silly stanzas.

As usual, his best verses are those with a punchline or some sort of payoff:

I crossed a lion with a mouse.
Their progeny patrol my house,
and often roar, demanding cheese--
I give them all the cheese they please.

And he's at his worst when trying to sneak a message in, as he does with a plodding paean to schoolwork in "Homework, Sweet Homework":

My friends think I'm loony
to take such delight
in homework, sweet homework--
they're probably right.

He also adds several concrete poems, with an understated assist from illustrator James Stevenson, as in the vertiginous "I am Climbing up a Ladder" that reads from bottom to top.

I'll leave you with one of my favorites, "A Turtle," partly because it's a prime example of how he uses adult words for comic effect, but mostly for its Zen-like resolution:

A turtle never feels the need
to ambulate at breakneck speed.
Of course, unsuited for the deed,
it certainly would not succeed.

Because a turtle takes its time,
its life is quietly sublime.
It's happy in its habitat ...
there's something to be said for that.

Rating: *\*\*\

POETRY FRIDAY A garden of poetic delights

A Poet's Bird Garden
by Laura Nyman Montenegro
Farrar, Strauss & Giroux

I had the pleasure of meeting Laura at our very first kidlitosphere conference back in October, where we had an eye-opening chat about what it's like to be both author and illustrator.

I envied her ability to see a book from the first sparkle of inspiration through the many drafts of verses to the final jot of color, knowing that every comma and brush stroke flows solely and completely from her vision.

I took home a copy of this book but somehow didn't get to review it until now, when its bright cover and amusing premise reminded me of my long-ago promise to review it.

In it, a girl opens the door to her pet bird Chirpie's cage, and it flies into a tree. Whoops. Time to call--well, a bunch of poets. Who else? Poets do seem to inspire loopy logic, as in this book from France.

The Poets try to lure the bird back with yoga poses or bird songs, finally deciding to create a serene, bird-friendly "poet garden"--but will Chirpie take the bait?

We must try to imagine
the mind of the bird,
complex and quick-witted,
quite brilliant, I've heard.

If I were Chirpie
fancy and free,
what beauty would beckon me
down from the tree?

Laura states on the back flap she drew inspiration from Vincent Van Gogh's The Poet's Garden (there's even a character named Vincent), but her palette is mostly subdued and warm, though borrowing perhaps more from Matisse with his tilted picture planes and love of patterns and texture.

The poets are a nice mix of ethnicities, without drawing attention to that fact. She uses rhyme and meter when it suits the narrative, though not always consistently, and most often breaking free when Chirpie remains stubbornly up her tree (perhaps symbolically?).

Rating: *\*\*\

POETRY FRIDAY A step between brothers

Oh, Brother!
By Nikki Grimes; illustrated by Mike Benny

Greenwillow

One of the most powerful poetic storytellers has done it again. With a few keystrokes, a rhyme here and there, she's woven a moving story of how two very different boys become brothers in more than name.

We don't learn the narrator's name--Xavier--until late in this collection, but we do get plenty of his opinions about his mother's remarriage. He loves his new Dad, but not the boy, Chris, who comes as extra baggage, getting in the way, acting all perfect, taking up space, throwing his small family off balance:

STEPS
Everyone in this house
is a step, now.
Stepmom.
Stepdad.
Stepson.
Stepbrother.

In my mind,
I turn them into steps
I can climb
And when I reach the top,
I rule.

Several of the poems are told in rhyme, others are simple, quick dabs of free verse, meant to convey a fleeting emotion. Few kids' poets are as adept as Grimes in exploring their emotions with such range and empathy, and in so few words.

At last, the two boys have their breakthrough, and if you're not crying as their bond strengthens, you're probably dead. And when we do learn the narrator's name, as Chris practices writing it, Grimes creates a magical moment for Xavier to grow. She respects her character enough to know he probably has a tough time expressing emotions, and instead gives us his actions:

I swipe his pen
and write H-E-R-M-A-N-O
"Huh?"Chris can be slow.
"It means brother," I say.
"That's my name now,
one you already know how
to spell."

We know immediately what's going on in Xavier's head, because Grimes respects our intelligence too. 

Benny's illustrations follow through on Grimes' many hints that this is a multiracial family--Latino and African-American--but this could be any boy's blended family today. Kids have a tendency to recover, to patch together a new life and a mended heart. Grimes takes us there, until we want to adopt this new family and make it our own.

Rating: *\*\*\*\

POETRY FRIDAY Checkmate on trouble

Chess Rumble
by G. Neri; illustrated by Jesse Joshua Watson

Lee & Low Books

Is this a poem or a story or a dramatic monologue? I love genre benders, and this gripping, dark look at an urban African-American kid's anger and confusion defies pigeonholing. It's nominated under Middle Grade novels for a Cybils award, where I'm hoping it doesn't get buried by more traditional fare.

The 11-year-old narrator, who goes by Hulk or Fattie, depending on whether you're friend or foe, wields free verse like a blunt stick, now tapping out a rhythm, now beating us freely with rapid images, impressions and raw action from his damaged life. This is one kid on the edge, and the abyss is a single misstep away.

I wanna say
I'm not a angry guy,
that I'm not the one
she gotta worry 'bout.
But I can see
in the way she look at me
that she don't believe
I will turn it around.

When an exasperated teacher sends him to the library, he encounters the mysterious CM, a tattooed warrior who wields a mean chess board. Average game: three moves. When he challenges Hulk to beat him, we sense a temblor building beneath the boy's fragile fault lines.

Where it leads and how we get there is for you to discover. It reads quickly, but this is one story that lingers long after the covers are closed.

Rating: *\*\*\*\

POETRY FRIDAY I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
by William Wordsworth; illustrated by Sami Suomalainen

Lobster Press

This whimsical treatment of Wordsworth's poem by a Finnish illustrator for a Canadian publisher--now making its way to us Yanks--is a testament to the enduring and universal power of the poet's imagery.

Suomalainen dedicates the book to "the power of flowers" and creates a candy-striped robot who wheels out of a gray, oily, surreally mechanized city:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;

The daffodils cavort and lift our robot narrator out of his gloom. Stripes of amber and green on the daffodils' petals and stems echo the robot's patterns, and soon the mechanical becomes organic and vice-versa, with a little of each in the other.

The city's conveyor belt streets come alive with giant, dancing flowers and the other androids take on more vibrant hues, as if showing how flowers can pretty much perk up the gloomiest cityscape.

I agree, and had a lot of fun with this quirky pairing of a Romantic pen with a Modernist brush.

Rating: *\*\*\

Birdsongs take wing as poems

Today at the Bluebird Café: A Branchful of Birds
Written by Deborah Ruddell; Illustrated by Joan Rankin
McElderry Books

Reviewed by Ilene Goldman

From the frontispiece, this book made me smile. Rankin’s whimsical illustrations of laughing children swung by trapeze ropes held by birds foreshadows the imagination and lyricism captured in Ruddell’s poems. Each poem in this collection tells us something about the bird for which it is named. 

“The Loon’s Laugh” focuses on the loon’s unique song while “The Cardinal” finds more “red” words than I can think of quickly.  “The Woodpecker” asks us to put ourselves in his shoes: “If you think that his life is a picnic, / a seesawing day at the park, / I ask you just once to consider/ the aftertaste / of bark.

I’ve tried to pick a favorite poem in this collection, but I just can’t.  How can you choose between a vulture who lectures on table manners and “Blue Jay Blues,” which begins with this startling description: “Blue as a bruise on a swollen knee”?

Beyond the striking juxtaposition of words to elicit movement, sounds, and colors, the strength of these poems lies in the variation of rhythm and meter from poem to poem.  Trilling rhymes echo the loon’s laugh, “No tweedle-dee-dee on your windowsill. / No sunshiny tune from the top of a hill. / No chirp. No coo. No warble or cheep. / No bubbly twitter or sweet little peep.” 

Loftier, gentler rhymes fly with the Eagle: “She rides like she owns the sun, on a sea of air and light— / surfing, skimming, rising high, / then sweeping low and tight.”

Ruddell’s poems are complemented by Rankin’s lovely watercolor paintings, at once whimsical and realistic.  She illustrates the stories told by the poems, adding fancy to flight, if you’ll forgive the backwards pun.

I end with a confession and an aspiration. The confession: I recently had the opportunity to hear Deborah Ruddell and her editor Karen Wojtyla speak about the publication of Today at the Bluebird Café. I was particularly interested to read a book whose editor declared publicly that she’d done very little editing because Ruddell’s poetry was already precise. I was not disappointed.

The aspiration: Ruddell spoke of being “old” for a first children’s book.  I can only aspire to debut, at any age, with such a delightful book.

Rating: *\*\*\*\ 

Getting all Medieval on us

Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!
Voices from a Medieval Village

by Laura Amy Schlitz; illustrated by Robert Byrd

Candlewick Press

Why I didn't order this at first: wrong age group. Too mature for my wee 'uns. Then came a flurry of emails from my colleagues at the Cybils contest: was this non-fiction or fiction? Was it poetry? Middle-grade or young adult?

Nobody knew quite where to put these 19 lyrical monologues of children's voices from the thirteenth century. Schlitz -- last year's Cybils winner in the Middle-Grade fiction genre -- had stumped some of the smartest bloggers in kidlit land.

I developed a serious jones for this genre bender and Candlewick obliged. From the cover illustration on, the tweens and teens who inhabit this fictional village have taken up residence in my imagination, where they continue to flirt and jostle, scrounge out a living, sin and repent and hunger and triumph. I imagine their beatings, their wasted frames and matted hair and share their hard-scrabble existence through 81 brief pages, with smatterings of discreetly placed background notes.

Schlitz wrote this for students at a private school in Baltimore, where she's a librarian and historian. When she offered to write a play that truly depicted life in the Middle Ages, nobody wanted a minor part. She created 21 scenes, all but two of them for a single actor, and most of them in verse. As the characters speak, they offer an unflinching view of their poverty, their superstitions and prejudices and the limited scope of their ambitions.

And, like any kids, they're brightly optimistic, cheerful in their adversity, and full of imagination and daring.

We meet the Lord of the Manor's nephew, who risks his life in a boar hunt; a glassblower's apprentice determined to get it right; a shepherdess struggling to save her "sister" sheep, and many other charming, disarming and (mostly) guileless kids struggling to figure out their place in the local pecking order and how to bridge those awkward years until adulthood.

Even with so many disparate voices, there are no discordant notes. Village life emerges with its rhythms, its simplicity, and narrative threads that weave all the characters into a cohesive whole. Byrd helpfully illustrates with scenes that could've come from a Book of Hours; his approximation of Medieval illuminations are so close that I forgot I'd already seen his name on the cover and searched the extensive bibliography for the pictures' source.

Although the scenes are meant to be performed or at least read aloud by 10-15 year olds, this can also be read silently by one very absorbed kid -- or, ahem, grown-up.

Rating: *\*\*\*\