Rightly you might say that The Wizard of Oz doesn’t quite fit into the “picture book” world we’ve got going here. Yes, it does have pictures, and yes, it is for kids. But the words vastly outweigh the pictures, and the witch is too scary for a wee child (she was my first recurrent nightmare … Continue reading
Jim Aylesworth’s story and Stephem Gammels illustrations make Old Black Fly one of the better themed abecedarian books I’ve seen. It’s a straightforward story: Old Black Fly has been having a very busy day being bad; he does all sorts of badness; then, justice comes, he gets swatted, and “he won’t be bad no more.” Written in a song-like, rhythmic kind of way, complete with rhyme and the oft repeated “Shoo fly, shoo fly, shoo”, it begs to be read aloud in that slow way of an old man sitting on a hot porch, listlessly waving his hand at a fly buzzing round his head. The tone makes the SWAT! at the end particularly effective. But then, it’s right back to the slow tone that eclipses the messy undoing of an evil, dirty fly. Continue reading
If academics had a hard time with the naked Mickey yelling Cock-a-doodle-doo in In the Night Kitchen, what would they say to a kid’s book where all the adults get into the bathtub together? What exactly would they conclude from a big, hairy, naked king jovially commanding all of his subjects to conduct their business with him–fishing, eating lunch, having masquerade balls, planning battles– in the bubbly waters of his bath? Continue reading
To add to the list of personal favorites: Julian Scheer and Marvin Blick’s Rain Makes Applesauce. Simply put: without any direction, tangible plot, or identifiable characters, Rain Makes Applesauce explodes in a carnivalesque orgy of nonsense, hordes of patched dolls, giant clouds of collaged landscapes, and fragmented colorful lines splaying all about. Continue reading
Heckedy Peg is a story about a witch who turns seven kids, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc, into food and brings them to her lair where she plans to eat them. Their brave mother tracks them down and must guess which kid is which food in order to save them. With Heckedy Peg, Audrey Wood wrote a proper fairy tale. It’s dark and frightening, but in the end, the magic and terror are all dismissed through ingenuity, a moral is conveyed, and we are left with the black and white triumph of maternal good over a barren evil. Proper. Continue reading
1903… it’s an old one, and one that has obviously appealed to reader’s for a very long time. Published over and over again for over 70 years, Johnny Crow’s Garden doesn’t seem to be enjoying quite the popularity it once had. Perhaps now thought to be somewhat archaic (for the style of the drawings?), this awesome little picture book brings back a time of yore, both in style and in sentiment. What goes beyond the illustrations, however, is an act of pure, indulgent nonsense masking a fairly straight-forward social commentary. Continue reading
How better to begin this blog than with one of my all-time favorite picture books. Not only are the drawings themselves straight out of the 30s, the golden age of illustration (and I’m a sucker for simple, black, line drawings), but the story itself is told in such a deceptively black and white style. It … Continue reading
Little Book Review 