The Cat and the Devil is an Irish tale explaining the existence of a French bridge across the Loire. The devil builds the bridge for the people of Beaugency under the condition that the first to soul walk across it will be his. And who walks across it first? A cat. Who doesn’t walk. He runs. Because the townspeople pour cold water over him. That’s one way to outwit the devil. Continue reading
Here’s another little book by a big-name author. Ray Bradbury’s Switch on the Night was published in 1955 and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon. There is a little nameless boy who doesn’t like the night. He keeps it away by blazing lights around him at all times until a little moon-girl named Dark introduces him to the night. Continue reading
If you like literature. If you respect the world of literature. If you respect and maybe even adore authors, those dark figures lurking in the shadows, those puppeteers in the world of words. If all of these ifs, and if you also happen to like picture books, could you think of a more compelling object … Continue reading
So, what’s great about Sendak’s next best known book? His second little dark haired hero, Mickey, falls into a surreal bakers’ world and saves the day by flying a dough plane to a giant milk bottle and getting the bakers the milk they need for the morning cake. Again, as in Where the Wild Things Are, imagination takes a boy to a world outside of his own. But this one’s got a slightly different kind of ending… Continue reading
When you read criticism on Maurice Sendak’s first hugely successful book (and there are academic essays, I assure you), you realize, holy shit, people have applied phrases like “colonialist or Freudian prism” and “the psychoanalytic story of anger” to this tail of an angry boy who sails to where the wild things are. This isn’t the first place that Where the Wild Things Are has been treated as a book whose readership has no age limits. Continue reading
So, in my intention to initially look at some of the “classics” of the illustrated world, I had wanted to bring Corduroy into the mix. But sadly, in revisiting the little bear many years later, the truth of the matter is that Corduroy ain’t what I remembered him to be. Now, no need to totally rip Corduroy apart, he obviously can have his positive effect on kids. We can say he belongs to a time and a place– but that time and that place does not jibe with my adult sensibilities. 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
When I said that illustrated books aren’t necessarily just for kids, this isn’t really what I had in mind. And as for literary value, I’m not going to be the one to call Mansbach’s picture book a quality book, except perhaps in the way that it may always be a classically and universally applicable moment in humor. This book doesn’t really belong on this blog. But the other weekend… Continue reading
The Giving Tree deals with that issue that no one can or really wants to avoid, not even Poe or monster robots: the inexhaustible conundrum that love can hurt. And here, with his simple, sweet, yet somehow mildly grotesque little line drawings, Silverstein looks at the pure side of that pain, and lets his reader do the hurting. 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 