Tree of Birds

Another great book we've found for this in-between phase is Tree of Birds. Once again, this is out of print, but Amazon has a few reasonably-priced used copies available. I picked this up at a garage sale or something about a year ago, but Charlie wasn't ready for it until now.

This is a delightful story, and one that I like much better than the sappy-sweet Stellaluna. A boy named Harry finds an injured bird and takes her home to nurse her back to health, and names her, amusingly, Sally. But once Sally is all better, Harry still wants to keep her. It's getting cold out, and normally she would fly south for the winter, but he keeps her locked up indoors so she won't leave him. But there are a couple of problems. First, Sally is very lonely, gazing longingly out the window all day. But even more disturbing is that her flock refuses to fly south without her. Instead, they follow Harry around, staying in a tree outside his bedroom window, flying behind him to and from school, and even waiting for him outside the schoolroom window all day.


Harry is very concerned, because it's starting to get cold out and the birds will die if they don't fly south for the winter. He tries to convince them to go away, telling them that he is taking very good care of Sally, but he cannot convince them. Finally, it begins to snow. Harry and Sally stare out the widow, distraught. Harry finally makes the difficult decision to open the window, even though he will miss Sally very much. But in a surprise twist, Sally doesn't leave -- the other birds fly into his house instead!

I love this book because of the concern Harry shows for Sally the whole way through. His emotions are very real. So are those of the birds, who do not talk but express their feelings through very well-drawn facial expressions. I also love how Harry makes his own decisions and takes care of his own problems. His mother shows up here and there with help and advice, but Harry is definitely thinking and acting for himself. This one is highly recommended!

Stellaluna

Charlie is still into his bike and coloring books, but I'm pleased to report that he is finally showing interest in books again. But after a two-month break from most reading, it took me quite a while to figure out what kinds of books he would enjoy and appreciate. His capacity for understanding plot has increased dramatically, and he now loses interest in stories with simple plots or no plot at all. But at the same time, he still needs pictures to hold his attention, so books with very long text passages and few or small pictures, such as the original Winnie the Pooh stories, were not working, either. It can be quite difficult to find something with just the right balance of text and pictures.


Stellaluna is one of the first books I've found that fits the bill perfectly. I bought this at least a year ago, because it is always featured prominently at bookstores. But back then, it was much too wordy for Charlie and he couldn't pay attention through the whole thing. Now, at age three years and three months, it's just perfect.

Stellaluna is a story of a baby fruit bat who is separated from her mother and taken in by a mother bird with three baby birds. She starts to behave like a bird even though it is very difficult for her to do things like eating bugs, standing upright instead of upside-down, and sleeping during the night. Eventually she finds a flock of bats again and learns that she is one of them ... but her bird step-siblings are not! The moral is that even though we are different from each other, we can still be good friends.

The illustrations are also gorgeous. They are very realistic and detailed paintings. Many are in drab colors--white, brown, grey--with just a splash of vibrant color on the page. Others show the brilliant blues of daytime and nighttime skies. Somehow, the emotions shine through on highly realistic bat and bird faces.

There is a second, hidden story in this book, told entirely through small line drawings at the top of each page. The text and main illustrations tell the story of Stellaluna, the baby bat. But the line drawings tell the story of the mother bat after she is separated from Stellaluna. An owl chases her into a cave, but after she escapes she searches and searches for Stellaluna until finally they are reunited and the mother takes her place back in the main story. It's very clever and helps the child understand that there can be several perspectives on the same story, or several things happening at the same time.

This book is not one of my all-time favorites, but Charlie does love it and it has filled a very empty niche for us at the moment.

Birds

I am thoroughly impressed with Birds, a book I picked up at a garage sale last weekend. Have I mentioned how much I love garage sales? Anyway, Birds veers wildly back and forth from straightforward to whimsical, somehow managing to tie the two into a lovely package.

One page points out all the different colors birds can be. Another remarks on their variety of sizes. And another imagines (and illustrates!) what the sky would look like if birds made marks with their tail feathers when they flew through the air. Vibrant colors woosh through the sky. Brilliant!

Other pages are told from a child's first person perspective. One two-page spread is illustrated with seven birds sitting on a telephone wire, copied three times, with the birds in exactly the same positions from picture to picture. "Once I saw seven birds on the telephone wire. They didn't move and they didn't move and they didn't move." I looked away for just a second . . . " (page turn) "and they were gone." A thick black telephone wire slices through the otherwise empty page.

Charlie cannot read this book just once. He's asked for it many times since I brought it home, and each time he has to read it at least twice in a row, sometimes more. He loves to point out all the colors of the birds and says some of the surprising punch lines along with me. This is a real gem!

Wave

Don't attempt to read this book unless your preschooler has been to the beach. Wave is an adorable wordless story about a little girl having a conversation, entirely in body language, with the ocean. What I learned when I bought this book several months ago is that the ocean is an unbelievably difficult concept to explain, and even more so when the person you're explaining it to doesn't have a perfect grasp of the English language yet. Water as far as you can see? That's hard to imagine. Why on earth would huge amounts of water move back and forth like that? None of the water I've ever encountered moves of its own accord that way.  Seashells? What?

But your trip to the beach need not be long and involved. We took a trip to Los Angeles in December and spent an hour or so walking along the beach, piling up sand, watching the waves, and sticking our toes in the water (until that became too cold and scary). When we returned home, suddenly Wave was infinitely more comprehensible and more interesting.

The book shows a little girl at the beach "talking to" or playing a game with the waves of the ocean. She stands on the beach at first, watching. She runs away when the water comes toward her, then turns and threatens it back with her arms up over her head. She sticks her toe in, finds it's fun to splash, and kicks up a storm. But when a very large wave appears, she gets nervous and flees again, stopping at a safe distance to stick out her tongue with a "can't catch me" attitude. But she hasn't run far enough! The wave does catch her with such force that she's knocked off her feet. Drenched and seated on the beach as the wave recedes, she's thrilled to find a treasure trove of perfect seashells left behind. When her mother finally takes her home, she looks back over her shoulder in a visual pun--waving goodbye to the wave.

The author and illustrator has set up quite a challenge for herself in this book. Not only is it wordless, which requires her to tell the story entirely in pictures, the illustrations are limited to three colors: black, white, and blue. The scene is nearly identical page after page. A little girl, an ocean, some sand dunes in the background, and a flock of seagulls. Near the end we see some shells and the girl's mother, but most of the pages have nothing but these four elements. Nonetheless, the challenge is met beautifully, with evocative illustrations that are appreciably different from each other and tell a real story.

Once Charlie understood the concept of the ocean, he fell in love with this book. He loves to tell me the story, making "woosh" noises and waving his arms around to illustrate the waves moving back and forth. He points out the seashells and the starfish, and talks about the animals that live in the ocean (which he knows about from other books and from visiting the aquarium). It's a great way for him to remember his one brief trip to the beach, which probably won't be repeated for another year or so. This book is lots of fun, and very nice to look at.

Have You Seen Birds?

I do a lot of my children's book shopping at garage sales, so I am frequently dismayed to discover that some of my favorite second-hand finds are out of print. Thank goodness for used sales on Amazon, where you can find a copy of just about anything, because Have You Seen Birds? is just awesome. The premise is simple: A cat looks out the window longingly, describing all the different types of birds she likes to watch.

Since so many kids' books are written in rhyme, I've been thinking about when I should use the "poetry" tag on my posts and when not. I've decided it should be reserved for poems with some level of literary merit, and this book fits the bill. The text is a treasure trove of complex and hyphenated adjectives strung into a fun rhythm that reminds me a little bit of The Song of Hiawatha. Let me give you a taste:

Have you seen birds?
Long-legged tall birds,
tiny bug-sized small birds,
brightly breasted,
gaily crested,
meadow tan or fancy fan.
Have you seen birds?

. . .

Have you heard town birds?
Rapping-at-the-bark birds,
Cooing-in-the-park birds,
quarreling-in-a-rage birds,
tweeting-in-a-cage birds,
squealing, squawking,
screeching, talking.
Have you heard birds?

. . .

Look up -- see the sky birds,
flying-way-up-high birds,
racing-up-to-space birds,
wind-wheeling,
freedom-feeling,
diving, dipping, gliding, tipping.
Have you seen birds?

Okay, that was probably too much to quote, but I just love it so much!

The illustrations are also very interesting. They're all done with clay models, like a claymation movie. The detail is amazing, with individual feathers and little texture grooves carved in. Background details appear as well, not just the birds themselves. There are plants with flowers and berries growing, worms, insects, gardening implements, individual twigs in a nest, even snowflakes and flecks of foam on the waves.

There's no moral lesson here or anything, just a catalog of all the detailed variety of this one particular aspect of nature. Nevertheless, it's one of my absolute  favorites.