Some picture books of note:

The Animals' Merry Christmas (Western Publishing Company; 1950): I stumbled across some examples of art from this Big Little Golden Book in Diane Muldrow's recent Everything I Need to Know About Christmas I Learned From a Little Golden Book, a seasonal sequel to Muldrow's Everything I Need To Know I Learned From a Little Golden Book that was apparently published as a gift to give this past Christmas season. I didn't read her first book, but the second is basically a semi-random sampling of pages of art from Little Golden Books, repurposed and re-contextualized, with new prose by Muldrow dolloped out over the images, describing her innocuous understanding of Christmas, some of which I'm not entirely sure she did learn from Little Golden Books.

Each page of art is labeled in fine print, as to where it came from and who the artist was. And several pages were of course labeled The Animals' Merry Christmas and the artist was Richard Scarry. Scarry was a childhood favorite of mine, to the point that I can remember my aunt saying aloud, "Oh no, not Richard Scarry again!" when I was too small to read to myself (and didn't even know who Richard Scarry was yet, but his name struck me, as I knew what the word "scary" meant and certainly didn't associate it with his dog and pig people).

This particular book, which Scarry illustrated but was actually written by Kathryn B. Jackson, is from rather early in his career, from before he point where his artwork became so unmistakably his, back when he was still perfecting and refining his anthropomorphic animal people, but they hadn't yet come to take their final form.

Such instantly recognizabley Scarry animal-people populate many of these stories, but so too do normal animals...and there are even a few human beings, subject matter hardly associated with Scarry.

The slim book contains a half-dozen distinct pieces, ranging in length from two to six pages and all, of course, dealing with the subject matter of Christmas and animals.

There are a pair of poems, written in rhyming couplets. The first, "Green Christmas," contrasts the reactions of "the woodland creatures" to a lack of snow at Christmas time (a good thing, letting them leave their homes and search for food longer) with that of the reactions of "the townsfolk" to that same lack of snow (a bad thing, as they prefer the aesthetics of a white Christmas).  The second, "A Very Small Christmas," wonders hypothetically if or how a family of chipmunks might celebrate Christmas, while Scarry's illustrations render the hypothetical real.

The remaining four pieces are prose ones, two featuring anthropomorphic animals—"Mr. Hedgehog's Christmas Present" and "The Cold Little Squirrel"—and two featuring regular animals, albeit ones who can still talk to one another.

It's these latter two that are the longest, the strongest and the best opportunity to see Scarry drawing the sorts of things he's least known for drawing. Of these, the first is "The Singing Christmas Tree," in which a fawn excitedly tells his mother about a Christmas tree he saw in the human town. When she tries to help him make their own deer version with a live pine tree in the woods—decorating it with berries and such—it doesn't quite achieve the desired effect. But then, a Christmas miracle of a sort transforms it into a beautiful singing Christmas tree with live ornaments. Take that, humans!

The second is "The Long-ago Donkey," in which a little donkey complains how he doesn't like the cold winter, and his mother responds by saying "Winter is beautiful...Winter is the best of all for donkeys, because of what happened to a little donkey long ago."

She tells her progeny about this "long-ago donkey," who is the donkey point-of-view character in a brief retelling of the nativity story, in which the barn Mary and Joseph took shelter in was the long-ago donkey's, the manger the infant was laid in was the little donkey's and the little donkey nuzzled against Mary to keep her warm and laid his head at the feet of the baby Jesus, no longer feeling as lonely as he did at the start of the story.

It's just a few paragraphs long, but it's a nice, gentle retelling of the high points of the nativity story from the Gospel of Luke, and Jackson manages some very evocative turns of phrase (I particularly liked the contrast between "the first Christmas" and the current one, in which "No angels sang, but there was a wonderful singing silence").

There were apparently various editions of this title published over the years, because some of the art Muldrow's art credits to this title—and some of the art I've seen online that comes from a book with the same title and also illustrated by Scarry—did not appear in the stories in this particular volume.

Bluebird (Random House; 2013): The strikingly airy cover, with the rich, bold blue of its title and title character standing-out sharply against the lighter sky-blue, gray and white of a city scape, is what drew my attention to this book, but it was the name in the lower left corner that made me bring it  home with me: Bob Staake, a favorite illustrator of mine who has produced many great picture books (most of which I've probably discussed in previous installments of this column).

This is by far Staake's most sophisticated, most mature and most heartbreaking work. It's completely silent, with no dialogue or narration, the only words in the story appearing on signage. It's told in comics form, with almost every page broken into panels. And the palette is the same as the cover: The world is a place of white and gray, under a light-blue sky, with the biggest, boldest, brightest color coming in the form of a little bluebird (This rule will be broken at the climax).

The story is that of a quiet, sad, lonely little school boy, picked on by his classmates. He, like all of the characters (and objects and settings) is rendered in Staake's familiar cartoonish-by-way-of-geometry style, everything reduced as close to basic shapes as possible without sacrificing their representational powers. One day after school, as he begins what seems like a very, very long walk through a pristinely clean, safe and uncrowded New York City, he's befriended by the little bluebird of the title. Finally, there's a little more color in the boy's life, and he is happy.

And then things go wrong...a little shockingly so, if I'm being honest to my initial reaction. The boy and bird meet the bullying classmates in a particularly dark, gray section of the park, and, when one of the bullies throws a stick at our protagonist, the bluebird heroically intercepts it, taking the blow meant for his friend.

He probably shouldn't have though, as human beings—even little ones—are in much less danger of being killed by sticks than birds are, and the bluebird dies. Frightened, the bullies run away. And then a red bird appears. And then a yellow. And then a green. Soon, a whole flock of little birds, each identical to the bluebird save for their color, arrive and, picking the boy up, they fly him high into the sky, carrying him just as he carries the dead bluebird in his hands. When they near a cloud, the bluebird flies from the boys hand to disappear into the cloud.

So this is the story of a lonely, bullied little boy who makes a friend, sees his friend get murdered and go to heaven. I called it heart-breaking earlier, by which I mean it's also...what's the word?...depressing. But beautifully so, so do read it. Just make sure you do so in a place you feel okay crying while you do.

Hug Machine (Atheneum; 2014): First, I'd just like to point out that the hug machine mentioned in the title is not the metallic object on the right being hugged; that's just a mailbox, painted a little lighter and more gray than your typical real-world mailbox. The hug machine is the little boy on the left, doing the actual hugging. This will be made quite clear on the first page, in which the boy appears crowning a hill, eyes and mouth wide, shouting "Whoa! Here I come! I am the Hug Machine!" But upon first seeing the cover, I just sort of assumed that the thing that most resembled a machine was, in fact, the machine mentioned in the title.

This is the latest picture book from artist Scott Campbell, who sometimes goes by Scott C. (Probably so fewer people mistake him for the Danger Girl guy who seems to have settled into a career of just drawing variant covers). If you haven't read his collaboration with Robyn Eversole East Dragon, West Dragon (although I did recommend that you do so), then you've likely seen his work in his "Great Showdowns" series, which has appeared online and in two book collections now (The Great Showdowns and Great Showdowns: The Return) or his contributions to comics anthologies like Flight and Project: Superior.

This book is all his, meaning he both wrote and illustrated it. The Hug Machine doesn't like to brag, but...well, that's not true. He loves to brag, almost as much as he loves hugging. The third and fourth pages feature him hugging various members of his family, narrating:

I am very good at hugging. The best at hugging. No one can resist my unbelievable hugging. I am the Hug Machine. 

From there, he's out on the town, hugging everyone he sees—most of whom respond by ignoring him or awkwardly staring straight ahead while he closes his eyes and very earnestly hugs them—and then, everything he sees:  The balloon of a little girl he's hugged, a fire hydrant, a park bench, a tree, a mailbox (see the cover).

A great deal of humor in the book—and there is a lot of humor in the book—involves the Hug Machine's hugging, and the contrast of his emotion with that of the hugees and/or onlookers, who stare blankly at him, with deadpan expressions similar to the "combatants" in the Great Showdowns. Campbell varies the formula pretty quickly though, presenting The Hug Machine with some serious challenges.

For example, right after claiming, "There's nothing the Hug Machine will not hug," he's faced with a porcupine ("I am so spiky"), and then a whale ("Surely I am too big for you to hug"). But the Hug Machine is nothing if not resourceful, and finds ways to pull off these extremely difficult hugs with ease and aplomb.

I guess they don't call him The Hug Machine for nothing. And by "they" I mean, of course, "he himself."

Hug Me (Flying Eye Books; 2014): Speaking of hugging...

This darling picture book by Simona Ciraolo is of the sort that perfectly conveys its premise and its charming qualities on its cover, with just the title and the cover image telling one everything they need to know about the book, as well as enticing them to read it to see how it ends.

The imperative title, Hug Me, is apparently being spoken by the little cactus on the front, who seems as blissfully and it is completely unaware of the fact that no one will want to hug it, nor why that might be the case.

It also demonstrates Ciraolo’s great art, rendered in the child-like medium of crayon (or something quite similar), and the style of the book. There’s quite representational drawings, which appear abstracted and somewhat sketchy, due in part to the medium, and a darling, cartoon of a design as the hero.

And the cactus is a hero, rather than a heroine. I assumed he was a she when looking at the cover myself, given the rosy cheeks and what looked like either a bow or a flower in his hair, but he is actually a he—or as much a he as a cactus can be, I guess. That is a flower atop his head but, well, he is a cactus, and we really shouldn’t enforce our gender stereotypes on plant-life, anthropomorphic or otherwise.

Felipe, for that’s the little cactus’ name, comes from “an old and famous family who liked to look good and always behaved properly…and they believed no one should never trespass into another’s personal space.”

They are all cactuses, you see.

Felipe was raised to be cactus-like, but was starved for affection. No one in his family realized that all he wanted was a hug.

His life take a turn for the worse when he makes a new friend—a balloon—and hugs him, with predictable results.

Planting himself in a pot, Felipe leaves his family—who are of course embarrassed and outrage by what his hugging has done—to wander in search of a friend, a friend he never finds.

Felipe learned to live on his own, as a grumpy Caleb of a cactus…

…and was terribly lonely, until one day he meets someone else who was lonely, and, the last line of narration, appearing opposite of a page revealing Felipe’s new, uniquely huggable friend in Felipe’s embrace, says, “Felipe knew just what to do.”

The back, inside cover shows a series of framed photos of Felipe and his new friend, apparently named Camilla, as they enjoy various activities together, apparently hanging on Felipe’s wall. They contrast the framed family photos that fill the inside front cover, hung on the prickles of a cactus.

It’s a quick read, but it’s as fun and funny as it is fast, and chances are adults in the reading audience will release an audible “aw” when they reach the end.

Laika: Astronaut Dog (Templar Books; 2013): There are few graphic novels as heart-breaking as Nick Abadzis' 2007 Laika, which told the story of the first Earth animal to make it into space, and a pivotal character in the 20th century space race between the rival superpowers. Of course, one of the reasons Abadzis' book was so heartbreaking was that it was based on a true story: There really was a little dog named Laika, they really did shoot her into space aboard Sputnik 2 and she really did die in space.

Owen Davey's picture book Laika: The Astronaut Dog tells the same basic story in its 17 illustrations, most of which spread across both pages to form a large, horizontal image. And all of the basic facts of the matter are truthfully reported and elegantly conveyed within Davey's sparse prose, with the only real departures for much of the book coming from his desire to tell the story from Laika's unknowable persepctive.

Where his telling departs sharply from fact into fancy is at its conclusion, and its a departure made for the best of reasons: To give Laika a happy ending. That makes this a pretty good chaser to Abadzis' book. It doesn't make that story of Laika, or the real story of the real Laika, any less sad, but it at least imagines the possibility of a happy ending, an ending that a reader can't prove didn't happen.

While the real Laika died within hours of the launch due to overheating, Davey depicts that pivotal moment as more mysterious. One spread features a map of the world, presented as a flattened globe, with large animals from every continent casting their eyes towards Laika's rocket. The text reads, "Then her rocket started making funny noises. Something had gone wrong." The very next image shows the men and one woman at mission control looking sad, the big monitor upon which they were just watching Lakia a few pages back now a solid black square dominating the pages: "Back at mission control, the screens went bank. Laika's rocket no longer showed any signs of life."

"Everyone thought Lika was lost," the text reads on the next page, and Davey explains and depicts many of the ways in which Laika has been honored, but then he provides the new ending of his own:

But Laika was not lost at all. Laika had been found. She had been rescued from the broken spaceship and taken far away fromt he lonely life she had known...by a loving family that she had always dreamed of finding.

That loiving family is an alien one of some sort, and the very last pages show a happy Laika sitting next to a little green-skinned, red-haired girl in the lap of a green-skinned, red-haired man with pointy ears and an usual suit, while a woman of the same race stands next to them. Bright but strange foliage is all around them, an unusual house is in the background, and there's a three-eyed scarlet pigeon in the corner, paralleling the pigeon that watched over several of the important moments in Laika's life, as she went from a lonely, unwanted street dog to  an "astronaut dog."

Davey's artwork, created digitally, is gorgeous. His Laika is incredibly cute—too cute to suffer the fate the real Lakia did!—and wonderfully expressive. There are several images of Laika in this book—depressed on a gray Soviet street, happily running on a treadmill, placing a single paw on the porthole of her rocket as it lifts off, looking away from the reader as she enters space ("Now everyone knew Laika's name, but as her spaceship circled the earth, she felt more alone than ever")—that are really quite remarkable in the wide range of emotion wrung from a relatively simple design.

Davey's  use of space—as in page-space, not outer-space—is pretty brilliant, and he repeatedly shows Laika's extreme isolation, either emotionally as a resident of Earth or physically as an explorer of what was beyond Earth's atmosphere–by dialing down the details, or dropping them all together. The effect is all the more striking because of how crowded his artwork can be, particularly of the crowded, people-filled streets of Moscow, where buildings and figures pile atop one another in what is practically a collage.

It's also very simple in design, with the characters—human and animal alike—reduced to basic shapes, almost as much as the buildings and vehicles. It's a virtuoso demonstration of representational art being, at its core, no more than the quite precise arrangement of particular shapes. Davey's Laika: Astronaut Dog achieve its highly-stylized representation, but it's so stylized that a reader can see how his art works.

It's a wonderful introduction to the title character and a wonderfully constructed book, with an admirable application of fiction and art's ability to fulfill wishes...at least within the little world that the author or artist creates.

...

Wait, shouldn't it be Laika: Cosmonaut Dog, rather than Laika: Astronaut Dog...?

Lily The Unicorn (Harper; 2014): There’s a lot to like about Dallas Clayton’s book, in which the titular unicorn—a vaguely dog-shaped pink and blue unicorn with a Lavern De Fazio-like letter L on her chest—befriends a dour gray-and-white penguin…against the penguin’s will.

I can’t say that I personally count Clayton’s particular drawing style among those things, though. It gets the job done, and its highly doodle-esque style fits the spirit of the book and even the personality of the heroine, but it’s just not my aesthetic cup of tea.

The style the story is told in, however, is pretty engaging. On just about every page or every spread of two pages, big letters of text will make a statement of some kind. For example, the first two pages read:

My name is Lily! I’m a unicorn. I like to make things.

There will be a large-ish illustration of the character, here Lily, knitting, and then the rest of the page or spread is filled to the borders with examples of some sort. So on this first spread of pages, Clayton draws about 25 different things that Lily has made, each of them labeled (butterfly meter, magic bugcycle, battle telescope, etc).

Through these next few pages, we learn quite a bit about Lily, and outgoing, imaginative and adventurous unicorn, and her hobbies, foremost of which is making friends (the spread showing the friends names them all, and Clayton creatively names them; while some are alliterative, like Jessica Giraffe or Cortez The Cat, some are not, like Alligator Bill, and others aren’t identified by their species at all, like the snake Wilfredo or the monkey named Jeremy Joe).

Then she meets the aforementioned penguin, Roger, who is the polar opposite of Lily (South Polar, I would imagine), and Clayton’s list talking about Roger is particularly funny (“His favorite dance is sitting down,” “His favorite sport is resting,” “His favorite time of day is ‘Not right now.’”…Guys, I have a lot in common with this Roger character).

After several pages of Lily trying to draw Roger out and Roger not biting, she eventually asks what’s wrong and tries to diagnose it; he responds with two pages of saying “The problem?” over and over again before telling Lily off and, in the book’s climax, Clayton drops the drawing cluttered pages to a sequence of four practically empty spreads, where the pair exchange relationship defining bits of dialogue with one another in an empty white vacuum.

It’s a pretty great story, told in a pretty great way, and one I wish I would have read 10, 20, and 29 years ago.

Penguin and Pumpkin (Walker Books; 2014): The latest entry in artist Salina Yoon’s Penguin series of books—which began with the perfect Penguin and Pinecone: A Story of Friendship—is also probably the weakest.

It’s fall “on the ice,” and everything is very white, “as always.” Penguin and Bootsy, his soulmate from Penguin In Love, decide to go to “the farm” (?) to see what fall is really like, and Penguin’s little brother, coincidentally named Pumpkin (presumably because his orange knit cap with a green tassel atop it looks pumpkin-like, in the same way that Bootsy is named after her clothing of choice) wants to go with.

Penguin forbids him, however, as it’s too far for a fledgling. Every other penguin save Pumpkin and Grandpa seem to go, however, as Penguin, Bootsy and five other penguins—a few of which have Smurf-like one-quality characterizations—mount an ice floe and head for the farm, swimming the rest of the way in.

They see colorful leaves and lots of pumpkins, and bring as much “fall” back as they can for Pumpkin.

And, um, that’s it. That’s the whole story.

Please, Mr. Panda (Scholastic; 2014): I love this cover so much that I felt fairly certain that I could judge the book by it: A grumpy-looking, particularly fat and fuzzy looking panda bear holding a box of brilliantly-colored, almost gem-like doughnuts, and wearing a little hat that reads "Doughnuts," suggesting this highly-endangered, bamboo-eating animal works at a dougnut shop...? What's not to love about it?

Author/artist Steve Antony's story has a lovely rhythm of weird behavior to it, as Mr. Panda confronts animal after animal, each of which has the same basic black-and-white coloration that he does (a penguin, a skunk, an orca, an ostrich and a lemur). With his deadpan expression, he approaches an animal, asks if the animal would like a doughnut and, when the animal responds (generally in the affirmative), Mr. Panda walks away without giving the animal a doughnut, saying only that he's changed his mind.

What's wrong with Mr. Panda? Is he insane? (The fact that he and his doughnuts get in a rowboat to go out to the ocean just to ask an orca if it would like a doughnut, only to then deny the orca a doughnut and row all the way back to shore makes me think yes, yes Mr. Panda is indeed quite insane).

Finally, the lemur responds to the offer correctly, and gets not just one, but all of the the doughnuts.

I'm not sure I agree with Mr. Panda's behavior, although his rationale for who gets doughnuts and who does not is clearly evident by book's end. It might have worked better if the other animals approached him, but then it wouldn't have been funny, nor would there have been quite so much suspense. Oh, and not only does Mr. Panda give the lemur the entire box of doughnuts, he even gives him his little doughnut hat, saying that he himself does not even like doughnuts.

I'm guessing the back-story here involves a panda who just quit his job at a doughnut shop, which he hated for a variety of reasons, but mostly because he was sick of rude customers demanding things of him, and walking out of work for the last day, with his uniform hat, his last box of complimentary doughnuts and a dead-eyed, angry expression, he sought to rid himself of his last vestiges of his past life in the bakery before going off to fulfill his panda dreams of sleeping and eating bamboo.

And hopefully knocking up some panda ladies; reproduce faster, you damn endangered pandas!

Waiting Is Not Easy! (Hyperion; 2014): I’m beginning to find it quite troubling that every single time I do one of these columns, there’s a new entry in Mo Willems’ long-running Elephant & Piggie series of books to cover. That means either Willems is incredibly prolific, pumping these masterfully-cartooned books out quickly in addition to his other work—or I’m really slow and wasting my life. Like, in the time it takes me to put together a half-dozen or so reviews of picture books, Willems releases a new picture book.

In this one, Piggie (the pig) cartwheels up to Gerald (the elephant) to tell him that she has a surprise for him. He’s very excited about this, but much less excited about the fact that he will have to wait for the surprise. Waiting is, after all, not easy (as you may have heard).

Gerald expresses his displeasure through groans big enough to fill most of the two pages devoted to each image, groans that get bigger each time until they bury Piggie.

The surprise—which I won’t tell you, given that it is a surprise—turns out to be well worth the wait, and is rendered particularly spectacular by Willems' choice to render it in a completely different style than the simple drawings that precede it and, when it arrives, contrast with it sharply.

What There Is Before There Is Anything There (Groundwood Books; 2014): Parenthetically sub-titled “A Scary Story” on the cover and title page, the publishers aren’t kidding—this is one hell of a scary story, probably too scary for a kids book. At least, it would have scared the hell out of me as a kid, although I guess I was a pretty easily frightened child.

This book is the work of “world-famous cartoonist Liniers,” an Argentinian artist whose work I am wholly unfamiliar with. It was in his home country that this was originally published eight years ago prior to this translated English release, under the title “Lo que hay antes de que haya algo.”

The story is simple, but scary. Every night, a little boy's parents wish him good night and turn out his light, his ceiling disappearing, only to be replaced by nothingness. “He could see the ceiling with his very own eyes,” the narration appears in a cloud of empty page space carved out from the cross-hatched darkness, “Now there’s only a black hole…black and infinite.”

That’s a pretty accurate description of what happens when the lights go out at first. Then a little, scary something comes out of that black hole, and perches on the foot of the boy’s bed, staring silently at him.

Again, a pretty good description of what happens during the phenomenon of waking dreams, as is what happens next: More and more creatures drift down like snow, and surround his bed. They don’t say or do anything, they just stand all around it, and stare at him.

Some of the scariness of this sequence is alleviated by how cute and funny most of the nightmares or monsters are. In addition to that first little guy, for example, one is just a kitty cat that looks like a stuffed tiger; another’s only a few inches high. The most monstrous of them looks like a background character from Monsters, Inc. A few of them seem to reflect genuine fears, like a large-headed humanoid mole in a lab coat of the sort a doctor or dentist might wear, or one character who wears a mask like a burglar.

And then comes the most terrifying thing of all:

The thing from which the book takes it’s title, a cloud of crosshatching with pupil-liess white eyes, and empty white mouth, and reaching, searching, branching tendrils of darkness.

At this point, the little boy bolts for his parents room, where they assure him it was all in his imagination, and that he can sleep with them…but only for the night. And then the little guy with the umbrella floats down, presumably restarting the cycle, and contradicting his parents.

As a metaphor, it seems to be a solid one about the mounting of fear that one might experience, as it escalates from disturbing to scary, to scarier to too much to handle, but the way the cycle repeats once he’s in his parents room—or, at least, that Liniers indicates that it may be about to repeat—is the scariest bit of all. That even his parents can’t protect him from that fear…which isn’t usually the case with childhood fears of the dark, or any other type, does it?

There’s a hopeless note in that ending. It’s a clever twist, yes, but a scary one for an impressionable youngster, I would have to imagine. Hell, I’m pushing 40, and I’m kinda wishing I hadn’t read this so close to bedtime…

Some picture books of note:

Bronto Eats Meat (Dial Books; 2003): Writer Peter Maloney and artist Felicia Zekauskas construct a joke so ponderously complicated and over-the-heads of the suggested reading level for their book that it can only be admired.

When Bronto, the young brontosaurus the title refers to, complains of a terrible stomach ache to his parents, he is put in "a special dinosaur ambulance" (a flatbed truck with a red siren on its hood) and rushed to the hospital, where he is examined by a doctor "so pale, you could see right through his skin":

"He must be a Paleontologist," whispered his mother.

A paleontologist is, of course, a person who studies dinosaur bones, but an "ontologist" is a philosopher who studies existence and reality.

Is that what they were going for here? The doctor is a pale ontologist...? (I woulda had Bronto's dad shoot back, "Don't be silly, honey; he's obviously a pale oncologist." Ha ha ha ha ha ha!)

I don't know; it leads to a not particularly funny segue—"since you can see through my skin, I'd like to look through yours," the doctor says before taking an X-Ray of Bronto—so perhaps not.

What the doctor finds is a little boy in Bronto's stomach; dinosaurs and modern humans live side by side in this story and, apparently, when Bronto was eating a tree, he accidentally swallowed the boy climbing it and that much "meat" upsets his herbivore belly.

After running through their options, they choose the least dangerous and disgusting one, and the boy ends up with quite a story to tell...although no one believes him, since dinosaurs are supposed to be extinct, dinosaurs ambulances and hospitals notwithstanding.

Maloney and Zekauskas have a pretty grabby title, including an obviously, curiosity-stoking contradiction and, paired with the cover, it was more than enough to inspire me to give the book a look.

It's not a great book, although it does contain images and scenes I imagine a lot of children will find amusing—the one of Bronto sitting on a toilet springs immediately to mind—and is probably a good one to read with a kid.

The most striking image, for me, was that of a carnivore atop a heap of femurs and skeletons, holding a severed arm in one hand and chewing on a human being, it's contorted limbs sticking out of the sides of its jaws.

They're cute, child-like drawings of skeletons and bones, of course, but holy crap, there's a dinosaur straight up eating kids! And not in the easily reversible way that Bronto at that dude!

What I found most alarming, however, is that Bronto is specifically identified as a "Brontosaurus" rather than an "Apataosaurus,", but we've already got human beings and dinosaurs living side by side, and the latter with their own medical system, so perhaps that's not such a big deal in context.

Don't Squish The Sasquatch (Dinsey/Hyperion; 2012):

I know that descriptions of Bigfoots and other big, hairy humanoids range in size, shape, color, toe-number and any of many other details, but the Sasquatch in writer Kent Redeker and artist Bob Staake's book bears no resemblance to any 'squatch I've ever heard of...and not simply because he wears a suit and rides the bus.

He's also green, and has serrated forearms, not unlike the claws of a praying mantis, although that could just be the cut of his suit. He does have long, somewhat ape-like arms, huge feet and a long stride, and a compact, neckless head that seems to sit directly between his shoulders.

It's the word "sasquatch" that the book is most interested in, however, and the way it sounds when juxtaposed against "squished" and another "s" word that comes at the climax. Senor Sasquatch wants to ride Mr. Bloblue's bus, but he doesn't like being squished on a crowded bus. Unfortunately for him, Blobule picks up a series of commuter monsters who are composite creatures with at least one large animal in the mix (Mr. Octo-Rhino, Miss Goat-Whale, and so on). (The cryptozoologically inclined might like to know one of these commuters is named Miss Loch-NEss-Monster-Space Alien, and she looks more-or-less like a sea serpent, albeit one with a flying saucer around her neck and a pair of antennae on her head).

Staake's expected flat, simple art rendered in jaunty, occasionally irregular shapes and brilliant colors power the book forward, and make even the repetitive nature of the story a joy for grown-up eyes to glide through; in addition to the crazy character designs, he fills the backgrounds with wonderful drawings of random buildings (the bus passes barns, haunted houses, department stores and so on) and, in at least one image, bus ads). The end pages featuring icon-like images of Staake's green Squatch wearing variously Crayola-colored suits as a sort of wall-paper or wrapping-paper pattern is beautiful too. Like, I actually woulnd't mind wall-papering a room with that exact pattern.

I imagine this is one kids would like being read, shouting along to—if I've learned anything from Mo Willems, it's that kids like shouting instructions regarding buses—but me, I came for Staake's art, which is always worth a look.

Dragons Love Tacos (Dial Books; 2012): Well, I'm certainly not going to argue with that. Pretty much everyone loves tacos, right?

Adam Rubin and Daniel Salmieri's fun, funny books about dragons and their love of tacos opens with a kid who is a little more skeptical on the subject than I, however. Judging from his bedroom, full of dragon toys and books and what not, he is apparently something of a dragon expert, but, based on the look on his face (and his dog's face), he doesn't quite buy it:

He is quickly convinced by the narrator, however, whose story is broken into a pattern that repeats itself, but more like a song than an advertising jingle. The book has a definite structure: Declaration of a dragon fact, explanation of that fact, question about it, list of possible answers, question thrown out to a dragon.

Among these facts are that, as much as dragons love tacos, they don't like spicy tacos, as it sets off their flame breath, and, naturally, can ruin a good taco party, like the one the kid on the first page throws in order to make friends with some dragons.

Salmieri is a great taco artist and a great dragon artist. While his tacos are uniform in appearance, his dragons are not, and they vary widely and wildly, from your more-or-less standard fantasy dragon seen on the cover (red, horns, bat wings, tail) to some much more idiosyncratic dragons with unusual head shapes and other features.

His lines are super-thin, and his characters have spindly-limbs and tiny eyes, but, despite the relatively alien appearances of most of the characters in the book (there's one boy, one dog and a bunch of dragons), he communicates emotion quite effectively with the few lines he uses.

East Dragon, West Dragon (Atheneum Books; 2012): Most of you will recognize the work of artist Scott Campbell, often referred to simply as Scott C., who illustrates Robyn Eversole's funny little story about the culture clash between Asian dragons and European dragons, or, more precisely, the story traditions around each type of dragon. Campbell is responsible for comics like Hickee Comics, the weird "Igloo Head and Tree Head" series form the Flight anthologies and the "Great Showdowns" online images that have since been collected into a book.

After a few pages introducing us to the two types of dragons and their differences—a prime one being that East Dragon and his family were pals with the Emperor, whereas West Dragon had to deal with the knights of a king—Eversole sets in motion the plot which brings the two dragons together.

Seeking to rid himself of the king's knights—which, according to Campbell's delightful illustrations, are something between infesting mice and unruly neighbor kids, all poking him with their tiny lances, jumping on his bed and breaking vases—by giving them a big map that takes them on a very, very long adventure that terminates in the East.

After befriending the Emperor in a big, two-page illustrations crowded with funny little details of medieval knights struggling with chopsticks and seafood at a dinner table set on the floor, they meet the dragons, and attack. It takes East Dragon an West dragon to sort everything out, and they naturally learn they are not so different after all, and a huge dragon and people party commences, complete with karaoke, videogames, soccer, rock and roll, stories and badminton.

The story is charming, and has a nice little lesson in it, but Campbell's artwork offers plenty of pleasures to the most casual readers as well. The majority of the images are big, long ones, with each two-page spread of pages being filled with an illustration. Campbell's artwork is obviously quite abstracted, and light on certain types of details—dot eyes, little line mouths, if there are mouths, no noses, etc.—but each picture is packed with rich details and little, suggestive mini-stories to find and digest, thanks to how thoroughly he fills the big spaces with small drawings of the giant dragons, and tiny drawings of the much smaller humans.

The dragon party, for example, features some 70 characters engaged in nine different group activities. If you check out only one of the books in this post, it should probably be this one. Well, this one, or maybe the next one...

By the way, wile I've recently learned that dragons love tacos, it turns out they also love pizza:

Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs (Balzer and Bray; 2012): Maybe the best part of Mo Willems' Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs are the end pages, which feature various titles for Goldilocks stories, each with a red X through it: Goldilocks and the Three Wisemen, Goldilocks and the Three Musketeers, Goldilocks and the Three Mastodons, Goldilocks and the Three Wall Street Types, Goldilocks and the Three-Mile Island and on and on.

But then, just about every part of this book is the best part.

Once upon a time, Willems re-tells us (as this is a story "re-told" by Willems), there were three dinosaurs who "for no particular reason...made up their beds, poisitoned their chairs just so, and cooked thre bowls of delicious chocolate pudding at varying temperatures."

Why chocolate pudding instead of porridge? Well, who would you rather eat, someone full of porridge or someone full of chocolate?

"OH BOY!" said Papa Dinosaur in his loud, booming voice. "IT IS FINALLY TIME TO LEAVE AND GO TO THE...uhhh...SOMEPLACE ELSE!"

The dinosaurs, having apparently read, or at least heard, the story of Goldilocks and the three bears before, have set a trap, hoping she'll come to their house, so they can eat her.

Eventually, Goldilocsk, a little girl who "never listened t warning about the dangers of barging into strange, enormous houses," sees the dinosaurs' strange, enormous house and barges right in, acting out the familiar elements of the story as best she can, given the circumstances (Dinosaurs, remember, are a lot bigger than bears).

Everything works out for the best...or for the worst, depending on whether we're talking about the Goldilocks or the Three Dinosaurs, and a Willems offers a very valuable moral...and a very valuable moral for dinosaurs.

Having called attention to Maloney and Zekauskas' use of the word "brontosaurus" earlier, I feel compelled to note that one of these three dinosaurs is not your typical Theropod, but looks like a weird composite, with the head of a Styracosaurus, a Stegosaurus-like spiked tail, sharp carnivore teeth and a bipedal gait. It's possible it's meant to be a Dracorex, but some of the details don't quite match up.

Of course, the third dinosaur is referred to as "some other Dinosaur who happened to be visiting from Norway," and while I do watch dinosaur documentaries in my free time a lot, I don't think I've ever seen one specific to the dinosaurs of Norway, nor do I feel like googling Norwegian dinosaurs at the moment, as I still have a half-dozen more picture books to discuss.

Let's Go for a Drive! (Hyperion; 2012): New entries in Mo Willems' "Elephant & Piggie" series are always worth noting. This one isn't the funniest, nor is the most profound, and the joke the climactic joke it spends the majority of its length building up to is a pretty obvious one (um, for a 35-year-old), and not a terribly funny one. (The gag that follows is pretty clever though, and was subtly set-up while the primary gag was being set up).

That said, Willems is a great artist with amazing cartooning chops, and these particular characters continue to offer him the venue through which he does his most dynamic and expressive character work.

My First Ghost (Hyperion; 2012): I'm a fan of Stephanie Buscema's artwork, and I particularly enjoy the painted-looking texture of it—I rarely see an images of hers that doesn't look like I should be able to rub my fingertips over it and feel the grit of paint or the tiny little ant head-sized bumps of high-quality paper, but I've yet to find a picture book featuring her illustrations that I liked as a whole, rather than just as a vehicle for her art.

This one, written by Maggie Miler and Michael Leviton, comes closest.

The premise is teased on the cover, and thoroughly delineated on the first page:

(I borrowed it from my library, and I wonder if it is as effective when borrowed from a library as it would be if the book were purchased for you; after all, if there was a ghost to claim on the next page, wouldn't whoever had the book first have already released the ghost? Or, coming with a library book as it does, would that ghost return to it's spot beneath the first page when whatever child had the book checked out prepares to return it to the library...?)

"CONGRATULATIONS! Your house is now officially haunted!" the text on the next page reads, above a two-page image of a friendly-looking ghost flowing out of an open book in the hands of a surprised and delighted little boy. The ghost is of the eyes, mouth and sheet variety, although it has a purple ball-cap and red and orange-striped arms and hands on the sides of it's white, comma-shaped body.

Different children appear throughout the story, as do different ghosts; there's a boy ghost, which we see first, and a girl ghost, who accompanies little girls. The girl ghost has a bow instead of a ball-cap. Both genders wear what look like red Converse All-Stars (or a generic knock off) on their invisible feet; the boy ghost wears high-tops, the girl ghost wears, um, the other kind.

Because ghosts are invisible, silent and intangible, there's no way for a reader to prove that a ghost didn't come with the book, and the narrators do offer a few types of ghostly interaction:

If you shiver even though it's not cold, it means you bumped into your ghost...When you get the hiccups, it means your ghost is tickling you. When you yawan, it means your ghost is hugging you.

The text offers a few facts about ghosts, their virtues and their drawbacks, and suggestions on how to care for and play with your ghost, while Buscema's artwork draws various children going about their days with their variously ghostly friends.

Sad Santa (Sterling; 2012): In Tad Carpenter's gorgeous Christmas book, Santa Claus suffers from a combination of seasonal affective disorder and post-holiday blues: After another successful Christmas, Santa Claus feels sad: "There were no toys to make, no cookies to eat, and no presents to wrap..."

Presumably feeling a bit empty and deflated after the biggest day of the year, Santa feels down, and while his wife, his elves and his reindeer all try to reason with him and cheer him up, nothing they say or do, no matter how true or how well-intentioned, seems to be able to shake him out of his funk. He just doesn't enjoy the things he used to enjoy as much as he used to enjoy them. It's a pretty good picture of what depression feels like, honestly, but Depressed Santa probably isn't that great a title.

And Carptenter's illustrations of a despondent Santa, his circle of friends and family all casting concerned looks his way, is heartbreaking enough as it is (The spread on page seven and eight, for example, shows Santa wearing the same expression he has on the cover, holding his head in his hands as he sits at a table littered with boxed-up Christmas decorations. A gingerbread man on his plate and a little snowman in a snowglobe look up at him with similarly worried looking face, and, off in the corner, unseen by Santa, an elf and a cat similarly sadly regard the once jolly old elf.

Santa gets his groove back eventually, without benefit of medication or therapy, and I won't spoil it, should you want to check the book out. What sold me on it was how powerfully Carpenter captured the two words of the title in the image he put on the cover. The art inside is fantastic.

Carpenter has a very cute design style, and his characters and art are all quite flat, with little depth or dimensionality. They look something like cookies, homemade Christmas card character or grade school craft projects, only with a professional polish. The art work is done atop a very grainy paper that looks like a particularly pulpy brown paper bag or, perhaps, cardboard, and there's an extremeley limited color pallette of white, dark brown, red and turquoise employed quite creatively to render the various familiar characters in striking and unusual ways (choosing red for Santa and the elves skin color, for example, which marks them as different from regular human beings, three of whom are seen on the first page with white, light brown and dark brown skin, without assigning these magical, shared-by-everyone characters a particular race or ethnicity).

It's really fine work, and now is perhaps the second-most perfect time to read it. The most perfect time would, of course, be somewhere between December 26 and January 6 or so.

Socksquatch (Henry Holt;2010): The big, shaggy, horned monster known only as Socksquatch lumbers through the night, searching, searching, searching for a sock to cover his left foot, which has grown cold without a sock (His right foot, which has a sock, remains toasty).

He talks to some various monsters with prosaic names like Wayne and Martin, asking if he can borrow a sock, in broken, monster English:

"What need?"

"Got Sock?"

"No sock. Just toes."

And so on.

There's not a whole lot to Frank W. Dormer's short, simple, sweet story of a Socksquatch looking for a sock, but what is there is golden.

Trick Or Treat (Houghton Mifflin; 2012): Leo Landry draws the cutest goddam ghost in Oliver, a little ghost who is planning a Halloween party for all of his spooky friends: Witches, skeletons, spiders, black cats and other ghosts, mostly. On Halloween day, when he's flying around passing out invitations, he drops one that falls into the hands of two little boys.

After greeting "Skully and Jake! The Spooky Bones band!" and the bats the two skeleton brought with them, Oliver hears another knock on the door and who should arrive but...

...a little cow and a little jack-o'-lantern...?

I love that image; how happy the kids look, how uncomfortable the pumpkins look and, especially, Oliver's blank, stunned expression. (I also love that one of the kids dressed up as a cow for some reason, instead of a more traditional generic Halloween costume).

Well, Oliver and his friends let the cow and jack-o'-lantern come in and dance and go for broom rides and a good time is had by all. So good, in fact, that he is invited to one of the kids' birthday parties!

Again, this is a very simple story, and there's not a whole lot to it, but the artwork and designs are just darling, and the expressions Landry draws on many of the characters cracked me up repeatedly.

Who's Afraid of Godzilla? (Random House; 1998): The cover says this book children's book is written by someone with the high-suspicious name of Di Kaiju, and illustrated by someone with the much less suspicious name of Bob Eggleton. It is a children's story book about Godzilla's difficulty making friends with the other Toho kaiju, drawn in a very realistic style with a dark palate that looks like a Saturday afternoon movie in the early 1980s.

There's a weird, but fun, disconnect between the nature of the story and they style in which it's illustrated, between the presumed audience and the stars.

"Monster Island was the home of all the Earth's giant monsters, and every day the monsters played on the island's sunny beach," the book begins, before describing the playful activities of Gigan, Megalon, Anguirus, Varan, Manda and Rodan (Only about half of whom I could match the name to the image of; say, IDW should put out a Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe style comic featuring all the Godzilla monsters).

"But not all the monsters played together," we are told, "One monster sat alone..."

A turn of the page reveals poor Godzilla, looking sad and despondent atop a mountain, brooding over the fact that the other monsters shunned him. You see:

Godzilla was the biggest, strongest, and toughest of all the monsters. Because he was so powerful, the others were afraid of him.

Yes, I had the same problem in school.

Godzilla finally decides to leave Monster Island to make some new friends somewhere else, but every time he surfaces from the ocean and roars and screams "Will you be my friend?" people shriek in terror. Humans, elephants, sea creatures—everyone's scared of the Big G, and when he tries making friends in a city, he gets missiles shot at him, leading to this rare instance of Godzilla face-palm:

When he gives up and returns to Monster Island, he finds that those a-holes Megalon and Gigan, who, in G-zilla's absence were the de facto toughest monsters, had begun to bully the others. They throw Anguirus in a volcano, but Godzilla comes back just in time to scare the bullies away—without even breathing his radioactive breath on them, punching, kicking, clawing or biting them—and uses his long, strong tail to pull Anguirus to safety.

Then the monsters realize Godzilla may be big and powerful, but he's a stand-up guy, and all these goofy looking bastards crowd around the King of the Monsters.

That's where the story ends, so I don't know what happened next. I assume they all fight, kill and eat one another at some point.

Some picture books of note:

The Composer Is Dead (Harper Collins; 2009)

This is a children’s picture book by writer Lemony Snicket, the author of The Lump of Coal (and probably some other books too) and artist Carson Ellis, but it’s not just a picture book—it’s also an audiobook, the CD coming along with the book-book, on which the text is performed, with music composed by a Nathaniel Stookey adding a bit of demonstration of the various instruments one might hear in an orchestra.

“The Composer is dead,” is not only the title, but the first four words of the story, which takes the form of a murder mystery. An inspector, referred to as The Inspector, is called in to investigate, and the handsome, vain inspector has quite a large pool of potential suspects, consisting of all of the instruments in the orchestra.

He interrogates them section by section, instrument by instrument, and while each has a good excuse or a good alibi, each also casts aspersions on another instrument, and so the inspector moves on to the next.

It’s essentially a very clever introduction to and overview of orchestral and classical music; it’s an “educational” book that’s actually quite fun and funny. And that’s where the audiobook portion comes in; while Snicket describes the various instruments and their uses, it’s better to actually hear those instruments, as one does in relatively long stretches between interrogations on the CD version of The Composer Is Dead.

There’s an exceedingly clever couple of twists, jokes really, at the end of the book, so it has a nice punchline ending (It’s actually bookended by jokes; when the composer is first found dead, Snicket’s matter-of-fact narration declares “This is called decomposing,” above a big illustration of a fat, red-eyed fly).

I’m reluctant of sharing, or even hinting at, the joke, for fear of spoiling it, but after the talk of the instruments, there’s a nice litany naming a score or so f famous composers, as The Inspector suddenly realizes orchestras are littered with dead composers:

Beethoven—dead!
Bach—dead!
Brahms—dead!

And so on for two text-heavy pages, while gray-ish, light brown and white men with beards, wigs or messy hair in formal wear are shown, eyes closed, floating like balloons above gray clouds.

I wonder about the suggested age group for the book, as I liked it quite a bit, but Niece #1 wasn't that interested. Reading the title aloud, she asked me what a composer was, and when I told her to read the first page to find out, she encountered a typical Snicket joke:

“Composer” is a word which here means “a person who sits in a room, muttering and humming and figuring out what notes the orchestra is to play.”

She wasn’t amused, and instead shut the book, re-read the cover and then asked me why the writer was named “Lemony,” if Lemony was a boy or girl, if it was a stage name, if Snicket was really his last name and so on.

She didn’t seem all that interested, but I think you, dear reader, will like it.


The First Pup: The Real Story of How Bo Got to the White House (Feiwel and Friends; 2010)

It’s been a couple of years since I had checked out the children’s books of Bob Staake, so one day at the library I punched his name into the catalog to see if I could track down any books he might have published, or that I might have missed, since the original post I wrote on him.

I found a handful, including the beautifully illustrated but otherwise hardly worthwhile We Planted a Tree, with writer Diane Muldrow, and Look! A Book!, a big, huge Where’s Waldo-like search and find book, in which Staake creates sprawling, Bosch-like images in which kids are encouraged to find various things (Niece #1 thoroughly enjoyed it; I didn’t take quite as much pleasure in finding things, but I did drool over the art).

The one I figured was most worth sharing, and easier to scan than Look! A Book!, was Staake’s First Pup, on what has proven to be a rather popular subject among children’s book artists.

Staake’s story isn’t told in rhyme, but in straightforward, fairly simple—but not too simple—narration.

“Once upon a time, a man named Barack Obama decided to run for president of the United States,” the book begins, “and the most amazing thing happened… he won!”There’s a wonderful picture of a Staake-ified Obama, a brown, skull-shaped head with big ears atop a tightfitting suit, striding down a red carpet toward a podium on Eledction Night, an extremely abstracted Michelle Obama and two doll-like daughters in the background and, behind them, a magical-looking Chicago skyline constructed of Staake’s simple shapes, the skyscrapers emerging from the cloudy white night sky.

“He then made another big announcement,” the text continues below this image, “Once his family had moved to their new home in Washington, D.C., his daughters, Sasha and Malia, would get…a puppy!!!”

Those last two words appear on page three, so that the first two-page spread ends with the elispis, and the readers turns the page to see a closeup image of Staake’s Obama behind a podium, his hands outstretched above his head, with the words “a puppy!!! floating above him. (It’s an interesting contrast to the way Jules Feiffer drew the same moment in Which Puppy? .

From there, the book is devoted to explaining how the Obamas moved into the White House, the events of the night of inauguration balls, and the family’s research for the perfect dog, with a “Meanwhile” cutaway to a farm in Texas, a poor puppy who needed a home and didn’t get along in the first one he was sent to.

Naturally, that’s Bo, and you probably know how it all works out.

It’s a nice enough story, if not exactly full of suspense or surprises. What mainly attracted me to the book was seeing how an artist with as accomplished and singular a style as Staake might approach the cute little dog’s family, and I was not disappointed.

I have a fascination with seeing multiple artists render the same subjects in their own styles, which is a large part of what I find so attractive about comic books (Like, everyone has their own Batman, you know?), and that’s an aspect of political cartooning I really enjoy, even if I rarely find political cartoons that I find engaging in their politics or humor.

Anyway, here’s Staake’s Obama family, including Bo's late Uncle Ted:

The art in general is quite nice though, from the inside covers in which we see Bo and a couple dozen other dogs of all shapes, sizes and colors running in a wrapping-paper/wallpaper like pattern, to Staake’s children’s book illustrator version of a few historical moments and life in and around the White House and Washington DC, to an extremely well-constructed page lay-out about Bo’s farm life, in which the block of text is neatly fenced in by a rolling hill, a perfectly straight field of corn, and the illustration on the pages.


The Cat Who Wouldn’t Come Inside (Houghton Mifflin; 2006)

This is one of those book that I picked up simply because of how unusual and how beautiful it looked. It’s a bit taller and a bit skinnier than your average children’s picture book, and designed to resemble an old-fashioned, leather bound book.

Open the cover, and the end-pages look like wallpaper in a very old home, with cat scratches in them. Turn another page and you see the paper, painted to look like ancient, yellowed paper, so much so that it’s a surprise to touch it and feel that its smooth and glossy rather than dry and rough on the fingertips, and that when one turns the pages they don’t creak and the edges don’t atomize a bit and give off little clouds of pungent dust.

And the art!

Writer/artist Cynthia von Buhler is an accomplished visual artist turning to children’s books, which is reflected not only in the packaging and aesthetic of the book, but in the illustrations as well, although the image are actually incredible photographs of incredible sculptures.

There’s a little dollhouse-like house, with a little doll-like woman who lives in it, and a little cat who visits her snowy porch.

The work is difficult to describe really, much more difficult than it is to simply show you——although even then, I’m not sure a single image gives an accurate depiction.

The book looks and reads a bit like it was made from stills from a stop-motion animated film, the sets lovingly created out of dollhouse furniture, hours and obsessive attention to detail.

The story, based on a true one, is charming in its believability and universality, and more charming still in the romantic lead into slight exaggeration and the punch of an ending, although as a grown-up I should note the repeating formula of the narration was a bit tiresome to me personally; it works quite well, but I found my eyes tempted to skim the repeating list-like elements to get to the new information.

If you have some time to kill, I’d highly recommend spending some time clicking around Von Buhler’s beautiful website and checking out her other kids books, her paintings and sculptures.


Here Comes Jack Frost (Roaring Press Books; 2009)

This is the other book from Kazuno Kohara, whose Ghosts In the House! we discussed the other day.

It’s done in the same style as the other book, and, like it, it’s a rather seasonal work, this time focusing on winter instead of fall.

The color scheme is a little more complex, beginning with “ a boy who lived in a house in the woods,” who is sad and lonely because its winter and “all his friends were hibernating” (all of ‘em except his dog, who, like the cat in Ghosts in the House, is the human protagonists constant, silent companion).

Here the colors are a rather dull light blue and black, but then, one morning strange patterns appeared on the window, and when the boy (and his dog), go outside to investigate, the colors change to a bright, bright white and a rich blue, which is dark at the top of the page, but then gets gradually lighter the closer to the bottom of the page it gets.

There waiting for them is “a white figure covering his house with frost and ice.” He has spindly limbs, the legs terminating in a curly-toed shoes, a long pointy nose and super-simple face of two round-eyes and a smile, and the rest of him is covered in a hood and robe that sticks out in all directions, evoking a snowflake.

The two become friends, and the little boy learns how fun winter can be.

The story isn’t quite as strong as that of Ghosts, but the art is quite lovely, and it’s a nice companion book.


Nothing At All (Smithmark; 1991)

That’s the publication date of the edition I read, but this picture book by Wanda Gág was first published way back in 1941, and was a Caldecott Honor Book in 1942. That’s how old a book it is, but it’s worth noting that of all of the books in this post, it was the one Niece #1 was most interested in—she read it repeatedly, and asked to borrow it to bring home and read a few more times, including once with her mom.

(Now that I live in the same corner of Ohio as my nieces, when I get children’s books from the library, I set them up like Christmas presents, leaning face out against the bottom of the entertainment center when I’m done reading them, so they can pick and choose which ones they like and give them a read—I usually pick ones that I want to read, as well as a few pertaining to their interests in puppies, sea mammals, gargoyles, holidays, skunks and so on).

Gág’s is an interesting name, instilling me some curiosity about her, which was one of the things that attracted me to the book (She and I share a birthday, although she was born in 1893, and her ethnicity is "Bohemian," according to the Internet. I've since gotten a few other books about her and a biography of her aimed at kids, so I'll be talking a bit more about G'ag at greater length later on).

I also liked the old-looking artwork, which had a whimsical, drawn-from-imagination-rather-than-life sense of design and was rendered in a rather ornate, illustrative style, although the colors were all soft and warm.

And I also liked the old-looking font of the text, which looks hand-lettered, and appears in tight little paragraphs in the middle of pages, each with big, wide white speaces all around the border.

But the subject matter most of all, was what attracted me: Nothing-At-All is the name of a puppy who was born invisible.

As for the story, “Once upon a time there were three little orphan dogs. They were brothers. They lived in a far forgotten corner of an old forgotten farm in three forgotten kennels which stood there in a row.”

One day two little children find the puppies, and they take the curly-eared dog and the pointy-eared dog home with them to raise, ignoring the kennel that appeared empty.

Nothing-At-All tried to follow them, but his little puppy legs got tired, and when he stopped to rest, the kids outpaced him and he was left behind and lost, unable to find his way back to his kennel or where the children went with his brothers.

Eventually a proud Jackdaw discovers the crying Nothing-At-All, and tells him that as a jackdaw it is his “task to carry home everything I see.” One thing he carried home was a Book of Magic, and in there was a spell called “Nothingness and Somethingness,” explaining how “he who is Nothingy, yet wishes to be Somethingy” can do so.

It’s a daily ritual, and each time Nothing-at-all performs it he gains a little more shape.

G’ag depicts the Nothing-At-All as real nothingness, a space of un-illustrated paper in the midst of the illustrations, in the shape of a rough sphere. To the characters, he is invisible, but to the readers he is a white ball of air. After each ritual though, he takes on more and more dog-like characteristics.

First the shape of a dog, so that he is nothing with the outline of a dog...Then he gets a spot, then a few more spots, then some eyes and eventually he’s a whole dog, with each of the parts drawn in by Gág upon the white, dog-shaped space left in each illustration one at a time and, after the final day, he’s shaded in and given texture like the other characters.

Gág’s pages are big, but the drawing are all rather small and intimate, often appearing just above the paragraphs of text, and in tight little shapes with strict borders, framed and surrounded by plenty of white space.

I'm sort of in love with Gág's work right now, and delving into it as deep as I can as fast as I can. Expect another, longer post on her soon-ish.