Some picture books of note:

A Big Guy Took My Ball! (Hyperion; 2013): Either I don't do these posts often enough, or Mo Willems is just too prolific, because it seems like every time I do one of these, there's at least one of Willems' books included. Wait, what am I saying—Willems? Too prolific? Impossible! I could probably read Willems books all day every day, especially entries in his Elephant & Piggie series of starter reading books, which feature some of the all-around best cartooning you'll find pretty much anywhere you look for high-quality cartooning. I mean, just look at the cover, and the way the illustration tells so much of the story that the title does and doesn't; Gerald and Piggie's postures and expressions tell you their exact reactions to the incident and how they intend to cope with the conflict, and the whole thing looks like it was drawn with a well-sharpened black Crayola crayon!

The fine-print summary on the first page sort spoils the entire story, which I will strive not to do, as the species and specific identity of that "big guy" are quite a surprise, and the main narrative pleasure of this entry in Willems' long-running series. Suffice it to say that the big guy isn't just big in comparison to the rather diminutive Piggie, he's also big in comparison to Gerald who is, remember, an elephant ("That is a BIG guy," Gerald tells Piggie, "You did not say how big he was. He is very BIG").

So what kind of animal is that much bigger than an elephant? Well, the options are limited, and it's neat to see Willems draw this new animal in his series, and to see it sharing page space with Gerald and Piggie, who Willems must render very, very small. I also like the way the big guy's dialogue is all in large font, all-caps.

There's likely a lesson in here about getting along with others who are different from you, not judging books by their covers (metaphorically; you can literally judge this very good book by its very good cover) and sharing and playing together. If you're still young enough to need those lessons. For the rest of us, its instructive in the same way most Willems books are—as an example of world-class cartooning, a demonstration of how one can tell a great story for an audience of any age and for a lesson on the effectiveness of timing in comedy.

The Boy Who Cried Bigfoot (Simon & Schuster; 2013): This book written and illustrated by artist Scott Magoon (Whose name you may recall from reviews of his excellent Spoon and its sorta sequel Chopsticks, both with writer Amy Krouse Rosenthal, which I've reviewed here before; or maybe from the many other books he's written and/or illustrated that I have not reviewed here before).

Its inspiration comes, of course, from the story of the boy who cries wolf, only this boy, Ben, cries the name of a much a more exotic mammal than that of wolf.

Magoon sets most of the story at the edge of a little wood, where Ben and his little dog set up shop. Ben repeatedly cries "Bigfoot!" (sometimes in big, hairy lettering) and his family and neighbors and passersby come to the edge of the wood to see the imaginary Bigfoot, and Ben continues to do things to drum up interest and belief in his tales of Bigfoot, including hoaxing footprints.

As with the boy who cried wolf, Bigfoot eventually does show up, but at a point at which no one believes Ben. Rather than eating all his sheep or killing the boy like the wolf did—the wolf did kill and eat the boy too, right? It's been a while since I've read or had that story read to me—he just steals Ben's bike and dog (Naturally "Bigfoot is stealing My Bike! And my dog!" didn't bring anyone running).

It imparts pretty much the same story as its inspiration, with the same lesson, only with less violence, less aspersions cast toward any poor wolves and with the added benefit of Bigfoot, whose inclusion in pretty much any story of any kind generally improves it. I really like Magoon's artwork, and it's nice to see it applied to some human characters, the natural world and, of course, to the title character, who fits a nice, cartoony, child-friendly version of the most popular descriptions of the legendary beast.

I'd be really interested to hear what a real Bigfooter or enthusiast or believer thought of the book, and if they found the parallels between them and Ben that Magoon suggests as innocent, amusing coincidences, or as jibes (I'm assuming it's the former, as Magoon seems to have a place in his heart for such cryptid creatures; he's previously illustrated a book about the Loch Ness Monster too).

Cat Secrets (HarperCollins; 2011): Like Jon Stone's classic Grover-starring The Monster at the End of This Book or the aformentioned Mo Willems' Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, Jef Czekaj (of Grampa and Julie: Shark Hunters fame, comics people) has his protagonist directly address the reader in a story that is almost purely participatory and which is about the conversation between character and reader more than anything else.

Here, a trio of cats are about to open up and read or discuss the contents of a big, red, locked book entitled Cat Secrets, but before they do, they have to make sure no one other than cats are reading the book the reader is holding in their hands. To do this, they present a small battery of tests to prove that they are actually cats, the surprise final test being "taking a cat nap."

Apparently, then, this book is really one meant to be read to a small child right before they (probably reluctantly) go to take a nap. That's kind of brilliant, actually, and I do wonder if it would work. Probably the first time, but I wonder how many kids will request the book they know leads directly to a nap the second time.

Cheetah Can't Lose (HarperCollins; 2013): This book by EDILW favorite Bob Shea stars an arrogant cheetah and his two little kitten friends, who have organized a very special series of competitions for the day of "The Big Race."

"Which big race?" Cheetah asks the little orange and blue kittens, whose dialogue appears in blue and orange type, or when they both say the same thing at the same time, in words that alternate blue and orange capital letters, "The one I always win because I am big and fast and you always lose because you are little and cats? That big race?"

The cats have "lots of races so everyone can win," but Cheetah sees it as an opportunity for him to win them all...and he does! But some of them are pie-eating and ice-cream eating races, and some have prizes like "special winner shoes"/cardboard boxes, so by the time comes for the actual big race, the good old-fashioned who-can-run-the-fastest race, Cheetah's not really in any shape or dressed properly to beat anyone, whether he's the fastest land animal on earth or not.

Luckily, absolutely no lessons are learned—well, other than maybe an implied lesson about brains being as important as size and speed, or to not be too arrogant or too much of braggart—and Cheetah remains Cheetah throughout, suffering no real comeuppance that he's even aware of. There's a twist following the twist, making it a doubly charming story.

Chu's Day (HarperCollins; 2013): Neil Gaiman is another writer who apparently writes a lot faster than I can read, and while a decade or two ago I read every word he wrote for public consumption, now I'll quite often come across a book of his that I had no idea even existed until I found it in my hands.

Such is the case with Chu's Day, which Gaiman wrote and artist Adam Rex (responsible for the incredibly illustrated Frankenstein Takes the Cake and Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich, among a bunch of other stuff) illustrated. Chu is the name of a little panda in a world of gorgeously-rendered anthropomorphic animal.

While the title is a kinda clever play on Tuesday, I'm afraid the joke of Chu's name is of much older, less amusing and potentially even offensive vintage. See, Chu is quite a prodigious sneezer, to the extent that he wears a little old-fashioned aviator's helmet and goggles, which he securely places over his little eyes when he begins to "aah- aaah-" before a sneeze.

That's right: He's named Chu, as in "Ah Chu"...although the "Ah" is never assigned to him explicitly in the book.

The story is, as the title says, of his day, which includes going to a series of three places with his parents, being exposed to a potential sneeze-trigger, and managing to stifle two of the three sneezes, the third of which meets the promise of the first line of the story: "When Chu sneezed, bad things happened."

It is, of course, beautifully illustrated, and, as a guy who works in a library, I really appreciated the two-page spread of what the library looks like...

...right down to the little details like the animal ears and snout on the figure in the "library" pictogram and the fact that while the card catalog cabinet is still there, it is now manned—moused?—by mice with computers.

I particularly liked the ladder on wheels though. My dream library job entails one where I get to climb up and down such a ladder.

The lame old Asian stereotype gag of Chu's name aside, the story is a decent one, but is rather disappointing, knowing it's source. Gaiman is a great writer, one of the best, in more than one medium, and this is, from him, a rather pedestrian effort.

Cookie The Walker (Carolrhoda Books; 2012): Another new book from another favorite maker of children's books, this one's from writer/artist Chris Monroe (Sneaky Sheep, the Monkey With a Toolbelt series), and is one of her better books (Of interest to comics readers perhaps is the fact that this, like her previous works, are told in large part in comics, with panels and dialogue balloons and everything).

Our star is Cookie, a dog who walks, but not on all four legs. As she explains to her friend Kevin on page two, it is not uncomfortable at all, "And it's very handy!" On her hind legs, Cookie can reach the candy dish, look out the window, get herself ice cubes from the ice maker on the fridge door, and more.

What's more, people really seem to like looking at her walking on two legs ("It is pretty cute I guess...")

Soon, her walking on two legs draws the attention of a famous dog trainer, and Cookie gets a job, which brings with it fame and treats. One gig leads to another—a dog show, the circus, reality TV—and the more famous she gets, the more treats she gets, but all that fame and all those treats come at a great price, as she misses aspects of her life before she became Cookie The Walker, something Kevin reminds her of whenever he comes to visit.

Will Cookie throw it all away to walk on all four-legs again? That's the drama of the story, which is wonderfully illustrated with thin, slightly wiggly lines and delicate water-colors. Monroe excels at montages, and filling them either with a great deal or detail, or simply funny little riffs. Here's a page in which we see Cookie as "a big TV star," appearing in various generic reality TV roles:

I particularly like the ghost-hunting one.

Cookie The Walker is another great book from a great maker of great books. If you're only going to read one book discussed in this post, well, that's a silly and arbitrary rule to follow, but this might be the one you should choose to read.

Well this one, more maybe this next one...

The Dark (Little, Brown and Company; 2013): Writer Lemony Snicket teams with artist Jon Klassen (I Want My Hat Back) for a dream-team collaboration. The subject matter? One close to the heart of all children everywhere, as close to their little hearts as that which chills them. One of Snicket's better (and probably most serious) children's books, he writes about the relationship between a little boy named Laszlo and the dark, which lives in Laszlo's basement (although it is often nearby, in corners and closets and, of course, at night, it leaves the basement to spread itself all over the house).

Snicket quite elegantly writes every single, simple line, and he does so in such a way that most of them can have two meanings, so that what he writes is, in one way, quite literally true, but also sounds semi-mythological (like everything does in childhood).

Klassen's art pulls off a very neat trick, depicting Laszlo and the dark's house as "a big place with a creaky roof...and several sets of stairs" as a place unmoored from a particular temporal or geographical setting (this could be your house, and probably is), and of depicting the same locations within the house during the day and during the night, in the dark, in the light, and the dimness in between, transforming them as the dark transforms things, usually for the worse when you're a child. The words are arranged just so on many of the pages, the lettering itself shifting from black to white (depending on whether the page is light or dark, for a sort of perfection of impact (the line "it did," for example).

It's rare to read a book as an adult that speaks so directly and eloquently to the little kid you used to be. It's rarer still for me to read a book, wish I would have read it when I was a little kid and spend very much time at all wondering how that book and that act of reading it might have changed me for the better.

Hen Hears Gossip (Greenwillow Books; 2008): This picture book written by Megan McDonald is essentially a game of telephone framed as gossip being spread across the barnyard. Hen, who loves gossip, hears Cow and Pig talking, and tries to overhear their news. When she (mis)hears it, she runs to her fellow barnyard birds (apparently, the birds all gossip and hear worse than the mammals; I guess the latter may be because they lack exterior ears?), and the news is changed to something increasingly ridiculous, until it comes back as something insulting to Hen herself. The birds then trace the gossip back to its source, investigating each spurious claim (like the cat grew a horn, for example), until they find the truth.

It's a cute "gossip is bad" sort of story, one that offers a lesson that's probably as important to folks that work at libraries as it will prove amusing to little kids who visit libraries for picture books, elevated further by artist Joung Un Kim's delightful artwork, which seems to be assembled of mostly-painted over, re-used papers and cut-up shapes of wallpaper, so type-written words or the music from sheet music will appear along the edges or show through the art. Here are some examples, clipped from the pages and thus, unfortunately, alienated from their context.

I like it a lot. I also like the way she draws some the bipedal characters, like Duck's posture in this image:

The Kindhearted Crocodile (Holiday House; 2008): Writer Lucia Panzieri and artist AntonGionata Ferrari collaborate on a large, sharp-toothed, ferocious-looking crocodile who had a very kind heart (as is noted in the title) and whose dream in life was to become a family pet, like a goldfish or a puppy. Unfortunately for the crocodile, families tended to prefer goldfish and puppies to keeping one of the world's largest and most dangerous predators around the house, so he had to hatch a plan so weird it kinda blew my mind, and I'm still trying to figure out exactly how it worked.

The crocodile snuck into a family's house at night through the pages of an innocent-looking picture book called The Kindhearted Crocodile (Hey! That's this book!) and proved how helpful he would be by picking up, washing the dishes and suchlike. Curious to see who the mysterious, night-time housemaid was, exactly, the family hid, and were surprised when rather than the expected elf or goblin, a crocodile crawled out of a book to do the housework again.

The kids were immediately cool with the croc, as they knew him from his book, The Kindhearted Crocodile, but what was the story of that book, if it deviated so much from the story of the story book, which features the book itself in a pivotal role so very early on? And is the premise that there's only one such book, rather than a bunch? Because, otherwise, would the crocodile be able to crawl out of any copy of The Kindhearted Crocodile? If so, why didn't he crawl out of my copy? While I don't have any toys lying around that need picked up, I pretty much always have dirty dishes that need doing and laundry in need of folding, and I sure wouldn't object to a large reptile bringing me toast and jam and a cup of coffee every morning. What's the deal, crocodile? (And did he aks Panzieri and Ferrari to put him in this book, as a means of sneaking into the family or familes' homes...?

So many questions!

No question it's a great looking book though. Ferrari has a slightly sketchy style and composes figures with sharp, bold, energetic lines. The coloring isn't exactly haphazard, but it's not exact, either, and the crocodile's skin color changes like that of a chameleon, usually some form of speckled green, but sometimes he adopts very un-crocodilian colors, particularly when doing something domestic.

There are a few night scenes which are colored almost all black (the only color being the characters), while the lines the make up the house and furniture are drawn in white (and the color of type is white as well). It's a great-looking book.

The Little Matador (Hyperion; 2008): Writer/artist Julian Hector tells a simple tale of a little boy from a proud family of matadors (boo!), who had a secret passion for drawing that he hid from his parents, who expected him to grow up and carry on in the family business (so much so that they dressed him up like he was in the ring, like, every day; his dad similarly dressed like a matador dresses for work in every image, while his mom just dresses like a fancy Spanish lady—are ladies not allowed to fight bulls? Not that anyone should fight bulls, really). What he likes to draw best is, of course, animals.

I hesitate to say anything more about the plot, but it is, in one way, an echo to Munro Leaf's The Story of Ferdinand, only from the perspective of a bullfighter who doesn't want to fight bulls, rather than that of a bull who doesn't want to fight bullfighters.

Hector's artwork doesn't look much like that in the story of Ferdinand, of course, being much simpler and more abstract, and with very warm colors.

Otter and Odder: A Love Story (Candlewick Press; 2012) How's this for a Romeo and Juliet story? One day Otter, an otter, is looking for food and seems to find it when he finds a fish, but when he looks into the fish's eyes, he begins to fall in love, and asks the fish her name; she says "Gurgle," which he takes to be "Myrtle," and while she was simply looking not to be food, when she looked into Otter's eyes, she fell in love, too.

"Impossible," Otter tells himself, "I am in love with my food source."

Naturally, complications arise, although they mostly consist of otter society gossip and Myrtle's pleading with her otter not to eat her friends and family. Despondent, he swims off until he meets a wise beaver, who offers him an apple, which Otter refuses, asking Beaver if he's ever eaten a fish: "No," said Beaver, "but I suppose I might if I ever fell in love with an apple."

I suppose you can guess where writer James Howe's story goes from there, the writing is simple, but also clever and rather elegant, with almost every word chosen for usage being a word that really counts. After a few complications, it does finally reach a "happily ever after," presumably because neither Otter nor Myrtle want children.

The most striking aspect of the book is artist Chris Raschka's artwork, which is of a very studied, child-like look, in which the fish are triangle-on-oval simple, and the otter's head and body are a figure eight, his tail another, smaller figure eight. The entire thing looks done in crayon, as as if by a child (although the consistency of the imagery and design from page-to-page would make that fairly impossible. Even more simple shapes are used for backgrounds and animals without speaking parts.

That Is Not a Good Idea! (Balzer and Bray; 2013): Hey, it's Mo Willems again!

This non-Gerald & Piggie, pigeon-free* book from Willems is told in a form inspired by a silent movie, a particularly odd choice for a children's book, but then, getting that particular reference isn't necessarily necessary when it comes to enjoying the plot of the book, which revolves around a big, shocking (no seriously; I was genuinely shocked) ending.

A page of art, starring a well-dressed fox and a goose, will be followed by dialogue in an old-timey font, the white text atop a black, silent movie-style title card. The artwork featuring the goose and fox is in full-color, deviating somewhat from the illusion of a silent movie.

As the male fox courts the female goose, inviting her back for a walk in the woods, and then back to his place, and then for soup, a group of goslings, which Willems draws like yellow tennis balls with beaks, dot eyes and triangle wings, yell back at the movie, variations of the title.

For example, when the fox asks the goose, "Would you care to continue our walk into the deep, dark woods?" and the goose replies, "Sounds fun!", Willems will shows us a two-page spread of the goslings, one of them shouting "That is REALLY not a good idea!" at the "screen," as if they're watching the movie the fox and goose are starring in. Kinda like people watching a horror movie and yelling to the protagonist not to go into the basement alone.

The ending is something of a surprise, although there are actually a couple of surprises all braided together into it, none of which I should even think about spoiling here.

Suffice it to say that this is a new Mo Willems picture book, and it's hard to imagine anyone needing much more information than that to know if this is a book for them or not.

This Is Not My Hat (Candlewick Press; 2012): I Want My Hat Back's Jon Klassen further establishes himself as the number one creator of picture books about small animals stealing hats from larger animals. The differences between this book about hat theft in the animal kingdom are many.

First, it's told from the perspective of the thief, rather than the victim. Second, it takes place under water, the cast including only the thief (a fish), the victim (a much bigger fish) and a witness (a crab). And third, the hat is a little, blue derby rather than a little red, conical hat.

Like, I Want, it is very funny, and Klassen does an incredible job of showing big or slight shifts in emotion with slight variations of the drawings of the characters, as when the large fish, for example, wakes up, realizes his hat is missing and we see his immediate reaction.

I'm glad Klassen won the Caldecott for this, because he's a great artist and a funny writer and desrves all the medals he can get, but boy does it's placement really transform that cover, as not it looks like the hat-thieving fish is fleeing not the scene of the crime, somewhere in the deep, black, mysterious ocean, but is instead fleeing the Caldecott medal. Did he steal the Caldecott's hat...?!


*Save for the now customary, half-hidden cameo, of course

Some more children's books of note:

The Boy Who Cried Ninja (Peachtree Publishers; 2011)

The cover of Alex Latimer’s debut children’s book tells you pretty much everything you need to know, and a glance at the back cover hints that it’s not simply a modern, hyperbolic update on “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” with the wolf swapped out for a ninja (As other, even more fantastic personages than a ninja are shown peering around the corner).

“Once there was a boy named Tim who no one believed,” the story begins, and when his mother asks him what happened to the last slice of cake, he truthfully told her it was a ninja who ate it.

When his father asks where his hammer was and his grandfather asks if he’s done his homework, Tim tells similar outrageous truths, and, since telling the truth only gets him in trouble, he decides to start taking the blame for the fantastical visitors who cause so many problems around his house—but that only gets him in the same amount of trouble, not less trouble.

Finally, Tim hatches a plan to prove to his family that a ninja really did eat the cake…and that he was actually innocent of all the other stuff he was blamed for, as the acts were committed by unbelievable characters and creatures (None of which I really want to reveal, given that the revelation of the increasingly silly responsible parties is one of the great joys of Latimer’s book).

Latimer’s artwork is extremely simple, consisting of large, roundish shapes for heads and bodies and spindly limbs terminating in tiny hands and feet. (According to the fine print, Latimer created the art using pencil, then digitizing and coloring it. That certainly explains the super-thin lines)

He leaves the images a lot of room to breathe, with a great deal of space surrounding them—sometimes it's all white space, sometime there are planes of color creating a comparatively complicated background, but the drawings always give the illusion of a small person in a big world.

The designs for the various creatures are all incredibly delightful, especially in the little details and idiosyncratic touches to their designs and their behaviors (how the ninja eats cake, or rakes leaves, for example).

Latimer makes great use of comics dialogue bubbles throughout. The dialogue and narration appear in lines or blocks of texts floating above or nestled below the pictures, but Latimer will fill dialogue bubbles with images, and occasionally give Tim gigantic, page-sized bubbles in which pictures and text appear, illustrating the story Tim is in the act of telling (For example, when his grandfather asks him about his homework, there’s a dialogue bubble near his grandpa’s head, and within it we see an open text book with addition and subtraction equations in it. When Tim responds, there’s a giant bubble that dominates the entire right page, featuring a one-sentence explanation, and two big drawings of what went down that prevented him from doing his homework).

I’d highly recommend this to any comics fan with a library card.


But Who Will Bell the Cats? ( Houghton Mifflin; 2009)

This is another cat-centric book from Cynthia von Buhler (whose lovely The Cat Who Wouldn’t Come Inside was discussed in this previous post on picture books).

It takes its title from the fable attributed to Aesop, in which a group of mice decide the best way to deal with a cat would be for one of them to take the great personal risk of attaching a bell to the cat. They all agree, although one old mouse points out a flaw in the plan: “That is all very well, but who will bell the cat?”

In Von Buhler’s story, Mouse will bell the cats…all eight of the pampered cats who live in great comfort in a castle with a doting princess, while he and his friend Brown Bat live in relative squalor in the basement.

Mouse may be braver than Aesop’s mice, but he is braver than he is smart, and his first attempt to bell the cats ends in dismal failure. As does his second. And third. And the fourth? Well, I hope I’m not spoiling things by noting that the story does indeed end rather happily, although not simply because Mouse meets his perhaps unrealistic and unnecessary goal.

The princess who owns the cats is kindhearted, and though the cats are quite rough with Mouse, they don’t kill or eat him or even seem to pose him too terrible a threat—they just play really, really, really roughly with him.

As with The Cat Who Wouldn’t Come Inside, the story is clever, but it’s the images that make the story truly exceptional.

Rather than the miniature models she used in that previous book, here Von Buhler has created a three-dimensional, dollhouse/diorama world—one evenly split between the ornate castle with its warm lighting and baroque decoration and elaborate outfits for the cats and the dark, scavenged and makeshift junkyard chic basement of Mouse and Bat—in which the characters themselves are all made of two-dimensional drawings that are then inserted into the “sets.” This allows for a great range of expressiveness in the characters, who are as free as those drawn to illustrate books in a more “normal” (“traditional”…?) style, but to allow von Buhler’s setting to remain spectacularly unique. The difference in rendering even helps the characters pop more, as there are differing levels of verisimilitude between them and their surroundings.

It also makes the book look different than von Buhler’s other picture book for children, which is quite a feat—producing two such extraordinarily individual looking books, and having them look so different form one another as well.


Cats’ Night Out (Simon & Schuster; 2010)

The verbal component of this delightful picture book written by Caroline Stutson is told in rhyming couplets, which is something that my grown-up ears are naturally resistant to, although it’s worth pointing out that Stutson does a pretty good job on the rhymes, which never feel forced or artificial, even if they naturally never feel quite natural either.

It’s J. Kalssen’s art work that caught my eye though, and which I enjoyed the most, although as with any good writer and artist collaboration, both components compliment one another to the point it’s hard to imagine enjoying the final work without one or the other.

The story begins:

From the alley, music drifts.
Shadows sawy to a trumpet riff…

Two cats samba, dressed in white,
On the rooftop Saturday night.

After several verses of such lines, there will be a full-page image of a window lighting up, and the words:

In the city,
Windows light.
How many cats
Will dance tonight?

That’s the basic structure of the piece, with increasing numbers of cats doing various types of dances in various urban locations (“Six cats tango in red capes/ up and down the fire escapes”; “Fourteen fox-trot nose to nose, dancing swiftly in evening clothes”), with a light going on and the chorus-like question being repeated (When reading this with my niece, she took the question as a prompt to hunt, find and count the cats).

Klassen’s vision of a city at night borders on the magical. The palette is limited…or at least seems to be, with a lot of soft grays and browns and charcols and bits of black here and there, but the cats themselves and their clothes especially contrast with the setting enough to announce their presence (the cats are all various cat colors, but “purer” than the other colors, which tend to have ink dribblings and smudges left on them, so the cats seem almost luminescent; their clothes are dancing costumes, so the line-dancers wear cowboy boots and vests, the boogie-ing cats wear poodle skirts and saddle shoes, etc).

I’m noticing much of this the second and fourth time through, though. What really killed me was the looks on the cats faces when they danced. They are all so…serious about dancing, whatever style of dance they might be doing.That all builds up to the climax, in which the people behind those lighted windows appear and tell the cats to knock it off, leading to a sharp contrast between serious, eyes closed, mouths frowning cats and these cats:After which point, the cats return to “normal”…At least until night falls again.


I’m A Shark (Balzer and Bray; 2011)

This is one of the latest from Bob Shea, an incredible artist whose drawings I love, although being 34-years-old, I sometimes don’t enjoy some of his stories (Like New Socks or Dinosaur Vs. The Potty or Dinosaur Vs. The Library) as much as I enjoy some of his other stories (Like Race You To Bed and Dinosaur Vs. Bedtime, both of which are pretty great).

I really dig this one, though, from the picture of the smiling shark—his smile so big it splits his whole head—waving a fin at the reader while the title and byline bob in the child-like hand-drawn water to the author photo on the back of the jacket, in which Shea and a little boy (presumably the Ryan the book is dedicated to, and who provides a sweet drawing on one of the early pages) run screaming out of the water while the same Shea-drawn shark waves at them from where it was inserted in the background. I’m A Shark stars a shark, who introduces himself thusly: “I’m a shark! Aren’t I awesome?”

(Yes, sharks are awesome, and I particularly like Shea’s bullet-shaped, all teeth and eyes version of a shark, with the thick, crayon-like lines).

The shark extols his own awesomeness, mostly pertaining to his fearlessness, throughout the book to two little friends, a crab and a yellow fish…although its clear very early on that the shark might be slightly less fearless than he advertises. Especially when the subject of spiders comes up. There’s a neat little lesson in here, even if the shark never quite seems to learn it, or at least admit that he’s learned it, but the crab and the first seem to get it as, I imagine, will young readers. And old readers.

Old readers will also get that Shea is a fantastic artist, his ability to wring emotions both huge and somewhat subtle out of a handful of lines and shapes per page reminding me of Mo Willems’ best work.


The Lonely Beast (Andersen Press; 2011)

At no point in Chris Judge’s debut book for children does he refer to the Beast as a Bigfoot, Yeti, Sasquatch or hairy humanoid, but that’s immediately what I thought of when I saw the cover…and the title page (depicting a huge, hairy beast hiding among a stand of pine trees)…and the opening two-page spread, in which Judge draws the globe as seen from space, with a bunch of pictures of identical beasts in pink circles, dotted lines connected these images to parts of the globe.

“The Beasts are very rare. Not many people have heard of them. In fact, they are so rare that there is only one Beast in each country…and they don’t even know one another.”

That sounds pretty Bigfoot-like, right? Kinda like how every place on earth seems to have their own version of one, right?

The description of the Beast and his daily activities, however, made me begin to doubt a bit…

As did his eventual integration into human life, and his search for other Beasts…I really like the way Judge draws the Beast though, which looks like a perfect Bigfoot drawing to me, in that it suggests one without offering any real details of it.

Judge’s art is incredible, with each and every image a perfectly smooth, uniform and brilliantly bright piece of art. Several times the images break into panels and the pages themselves into comics-like grids, as in the images above, but also in examples like thisor thisThis is Judge’s first picture book. I eagerly await his second.


The Lump of Coal ( Harper Collins; 2008) This is the aforementioned other Christmas book by Lemony Snicket, this one illustrated by Brett Helquist, who provided illustrations for Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events series.

Snicket’s familiar voice of a sardonic, cynical downer disguising an ultimately optimistic and bright tone tells this tale of miracles: “The holiday season is a time for storytelling, and whether you are hearing the story of a candleabra staying lit for more than a week, or a baby born in a barn without proper medical supervision, these stories often feature miracles.”

So does this one, although, as the narrator points out by the end, life is full of miracles, if you stop and think about them, and your everyday life is full of miracles too.

The fact that this story stars a lump of coal that can “think, talk, and move itself around”—and, in Helquist’s drawings if not in the text itself, also has arms and legs, a face and a pretty natty suit—is not the miracle. Rather, these facts are presented “for the sake of argument,” so that the story can be told.

“Like many people who dress in black, the lump of coal was interested in becoming an artist,” we’re told, and he dreams of someday drawing lines on canvas, “or, more likely, on a breast of chicken or salmon filet by participating in a barbeque.”

This is the story of that lump of coal pursuing that dream during the holiday season. It’s a rather good story, with several moving parts that synch up quite nicely by the stories end, and a pleasantly circular narrative that concludes with a somewhat touching callback. Helquist’s art is fine, but seems a bit at odds with details in the story, and, of the two Snicket-written Christmas picture books, I think I preferred the Christmas card-aesthetic of ‘s Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming art.


Where Are You Bear? (Owl Kids: 2010)

I had pretty high hopes for this book, billed as “A Canadian Alphabet Adventure,” based mostly on Sean L. Moore’s incredible cover, in which a shurging little black girl shares a tiny boat with a Mountie and a bunch of North American animals (throw a lumberjack and cartoonist in there, and you have a cross-section of My Understanding of Canada).

I love the Cartoon Network-style designs on it, and the broad but somewhat individualized expressions on their faces. What’s up with that moose, exactly?

So Sophie (the girl) is going to visit her grandmother in Vancouver. However, when packing, she can’t find Bear, drawn at first with button eyes and a stitched up mouth. Unable to find him, her dad makes her leave without him (What a terrible father!) Once left alone, the bear becomes “real,” the button eyes becoming just like Sophie’s eyes, the stitched mouth becoming one full of teeth, and everything able to move.

After the set up, each page features a letter, a vocabulary word, and some sort of commentary, while either Sophie or Bear frolic about doing something sort of Canadian, I guess, just missing one another as they adventure through Canada.

That’s the first word, by the way, for the letter A—Adventure. As in, “What a big adventure!”

B is Beluga whale. C is Chowder. And so on.

The artwork remains very impressive, but Frieda Wishinsky’s story didn’t do a whole lot for me. Probably because I learned the alphabet so long ago.


Where’s Walrus? (Scholastic Press; 2011)

Stephen Savage’s picture book Where’s Walrus? is about as pure as a pitcture book can get: It’s a book, and it’s all pictures, not a single word to be found.

The story is fairly simple, although Savage still adds some slowly increasing tension, a climax and an unexpected twist that changes the characters and their world from their status quo on page one.

So there’s this zoo, and one day while everyone there—including the zookeeper—is napping, Walrus hops out of little pool and makes a break for it.

The zookeeper gives chase, but the Walrus seems to be exceptionally adept at blending in with this surroundings, no doubt helped quite a bit by the prevalence of the color gray in the city, and Savage’s super-simple, icon-like character design.

Because each two-page spread features Walrus in a different disguise, it can be assumed that the zookeeper recognizes him in each and Walrus thus has to move on to the next one, although maybe Walrus is simply trying to stay one stop ahead, and is constantly on the move.

One can see how Walrus is able to lend in with people in a few places, like blending in with the gray-coated fireman, but if the keeper can’t find Walrus hiding in a line of can-can dancers, then I think he needs to spend a little less time at his zoo.

Two more picture books written by Lemony Snicket

The sub-title of writer Lemony Snicket’s The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming (McSweeney’s Books; 2007) is A Christmas Story but, as the title itself implies, it is as much a Hanukah story as it is a Christmas one. Perhaps more of one. I’m not sure, not having a proper tool with which to measure Christmasness versus Haunkahishness. It’s certainly about both, and the fact that the two overlap.

The latke can’t stop screaming because, after being “fashioned from grated potatoes, chopped onion, beaten eggs, and a dash or two of salt,” he was “slapped into a pan full of olive oil heated to a very high temperature.”

As in the story of the Gingerbread man, the latke suddenly springs to life and goes running out of the house and into the world, only instead of taunting others with how fast he is, the latke is simply screaming in pain.

Artist Lisa Brown provides sharp, simple classy-looking illustrations, with lots of white space around them. Many of the images look as if they might have been re-purposed from nice, expensive Christmas cards. Her latke is a round-ish, golden brown smudge, with a big oval mouth wide open in screaming, arms, legs, eyes, eyebrows and a nose.

His scream is presented as a bit of a break in the narrative which, prior to his first “AAAHHHHHHHH!!!”, consists of blocks of text from Snicket, in his usual voice and using his usual jokes. (The format too is rather Christmas card-like, with images on the left-hand pages and text on the right-hand pages, always separated).

Snicket and Brown repeat the image of the latke and the scream over and over, usually twice. So a two-page of the latke screaming will be followed by an identical two-page spread, only the scream will be lower.I imagine, then, that is a very fun book to read to children.

On the latke’s loud journey, he runs across several almost-as-animated holiday totems—Christmas lights, a candy cane, a pine tree—and stops to talk to each of them (They lack limbs and faces and the ability to move, but they can converse). They introduce and explain themselves, and the latke has to explain a bit about himself—what he is, why he’s screaming—and in the process explains Hanukah.

After each conversation, he runs screaming on to the next one, which, if you ask me, doesn’t seem very realistic. Does the pain really subside so badly that he can stop running and talk normally, only to resume with such intensity he has to run screaming into the night again?

Well, Snicket does write early on that the latke’s screaming and running “may seem like unusual behavior for a potato pancake, but this is a Christmas story, in which things tend to happen that would never occur in real life.”

I’ll take that as an explanation of the coming and going of the pain as well, then.

Snicket wrote another Christmas story book, which is similar in tone, shape and size to this one, called The Lump of Coal. I read it in 2008, but didn’t review it here, and now can’t remember it very well. So I think I’ll reread it.

His book 13 Words (Harper; 2010) is quite a different sort of work all together, with far fewer words, a more dream-like, almost random in conception story (albeit one that is so well edited later as to be elegant) and bigger, brighter, more powerful and prominent art than his other picture books.

While I’ve no knowledge of how exactly the book came about, it reads a bit like a sort of creative writing class exercise, in which a student might pull a number of words from a hat (here, 13 words), and then build a story around them.

This has the look of a children’s book, but the words aren’t exactly the sort that would appear on a second grade spelling test, placing this in that Lemony Snickety realm of kids books for adults, or books for smart parents to read their smart kids.

The 13 words include, among the more simple “bird,” “dog,” “cake,” and “busy,” more highly-syllabic words, like “despondent,” “convertible,” “mezzo-soprano” and, my personal favorite, “haberdashery.”

The story is told through these words, each introduced as “WORD NUMBER (Whatever number it is):”…followed by a brief, declarative sentence that leads to a longer sentence from which an incredibly elaborate, nuanced happy-but-ultimately-sad story emerges.

For example, it begins like this:

WORD NUMBER 1: Bird

The bird sits on the table.

WORD NUMBER 2: Despondent

The bird is despondent.

In fact, she is so sad that she hops off the table to look for something to cheer her up.

And on it goes, for 13 words.

Snicket’s collaborator here is Maira Kalman (more of her work can be seen here; you may recognize her work from many New Yorker covers and some very distinctive-looking children’s books).

Kalman paints, and her paintings are big ones. There is no white space, as in Snicket’s other picture books, as even the blank spaces in the backgrounds of pages are painted, and a warm beige with clearly visible brushstrokes seems to be the closest thing to white space in the book, but most pages have bright colors.

The images are flat, with a rough, almost fauve-like application of paint, but I’m afraid I lack the exact vocabulary to properly to describe it very accurately, being too far removed now from the few art history and aesthetics courses I took on my way to securing a BA in English at the end of the last century.

You know Henri Matisse’s paintings of rooms inside houses, like the one of the red studio or this one? Almost all of the pages look a little like that. Like, maybe the bird’s rooms aren’t in the same house as the one containing Matisse’s red-walled rooms, but perhaps the bird leaves on the same street as Matisse’s house.

The basic story is this: The bird is despondent, and can’t be cheered up with cake, so her friend the dog concocts a plan to help cheer up the bird. And a mezzo-soprano comes over. To give any more detail is to ruin the fun of the book, although it’s worth noting that every page is pretty amazing……particularly the ones in which the dog and the goat (words 4 and 7, respectively) drive the convertible (word 6) to and from the haberdashery, and Kalman depicts the winding road they travel upon in a two-page spread, and shows us the strange sites that one sees on either side of the road.(Above is the right half of one such spread).

Of the handful of picture books of Snicket’s I’ve read, I don’t think this is the best-written, but it may be the overall best, in that its told through a fusion of the words and pictures, and they seem equally important in the delivery of the story and its jokes and charm.

For example, I could imagine The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming or The Lump of Coal or The Composer Is Dead with a different artist providing different art in a different style to accompany the text.

I can’t do that with 13 Words.

Wait, let me take a stab at being clever, and review 13 Words in a manner similar to that in which it is written…

WORD NUMBER 1: Masterpiece.

Lemony Snicket and Maira Kalman’s 13 Words is a masterpiece.

There.